Last day of April

I got two slips from the same fortune cookie when I dined in Royal Buffet last Saturday. They are still on my desk now.

One of them reads: life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.

――對於感受生活的人，生活是個悲劇；對於思考生活的人，生活是個喜劇。

My experience in the whole week after that dinner became a foot note of this fortune cookie slip.

The petition against Jeff's eligibility, of course, continued. I am quite amused by the fact that after so many years working in GSS, these people still don't know how the system works. Or perhaps I was wrong -- their reluctance to appeal to the general membership is exactly because they know they couldn’t win the battle.

Then the undercurrent of campaign became visible at the day of election. This is the time that Indian students really get involved in campus politics, as a community. The sad truth is, they are betrayed by the very candidates they have supported. Every single time! It was disheartening to notice in the past years, that when they were called to the senate meeting to vote on a disputed issue, no one of them was informed of their eligibility or non-eligibility of voting in such meetings.

Ahmed must really felt the fear this time, Never before, in my tenure years in this school, was the traditional stalement and cronyism of gss so much threatened by a determinate group backed up by a much larger range of supporters. Even Chinese students, who have always been believed to be the only (potential) balancing force against Indian students in such elections, only occupied less than 10 percent of the voters.

Everyone should joy on the (possible) ending of the gss tradition of dependence upon one particular group to win in elections, including the Indian students.

The second day of election witnessed even more tension and drama at the balloting table. I simply could not afford to leave the table for the entire day, not because of the streaming in of voters, but because of the emotional fighting at the table, among the elections committee members, among the gss officers, and between certain election committee members and certain voters. I was quite surprised, and somewhat amused, to see people so easily get involved in violent verbal attacks at each other, and to make it worse, at the balloting table. Guess it was the time of the year when people's hormone is high.

Still, I am very glad that I was there, and be 100 percent sure that there was no cheating no dirty campaigning around the ballot box. Little did I know, of course, that Ahmed and his team were hasselling passersby out of campus center.

It is certainly NOT over. After a break during the weekend, we will receive another petition about Jeff's eligibility. I simply don't believe that they will so easily accept the failure. We are fighting for principle, and they are fighting for funding and survival. That's the hard truth of politics. It always hurts.

Jeff and his slate's win will solve a lot of existing problems in gss, but will cause some other big ones at the same time. Jeff's eligibility and its consequence, i.e., that not all eligible candidates (e.g. admitted grad students from out of state and country) are informed of their eligibility to run and to vote. This problem still has the potential to destroy what is achieved this time in the next election.

For me, it was a stupid idea to involve Jeff in the election in the first place. Uri should have found some qualified candidate from the graduate students and then hire Jeff as staff member, who can run next year with full eligibility and are capable of ensuring the continuity of achievement this year. But what can I say, Uri even ran in the same slate with Ahmed last year. With that kind of vision, we have this kind of problem. A progressive agenda dose not necessarily make one a good president.

Well, at least I did my job.

I sometimes say I am a summer person. In the long winter period of both my home town and New England, I feel like hibernating everyday. When May comes, I naturally wake up and come back to life.

And life is good.

The second fortune cookie slip reads: the weather is wonderful!