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Easter is always a weird time for me. In New Zealand, where I grew up, it’s a holiday that’s as big as Christmas, regardless of whether you’re religious or not. It’s also not as commercialized as it is in the US. I’d never seen a plastic egg before I came here. For me, Easter was always a really big family gathering, and as such, it’s generally when I miss my big extended family most of all.
This year, however, was one of the best Easters I’ve had since moving here.
I went to a church service with a McDaniel friend who graduated last year first thing. He’d told me some pretty crazy stories about his church friends, so I was a little hesitant, but the service was a nice traditional Presbyterian service. I was raised Roman Catholic, so I have that bone of me that actually really enjoys going to a service of some kind on Easter and Christmas. I haven’t seen him as much since he graduated, so it was good to spend some time with him as well.
 Post-Holi Later, I went with another two McDaniel students to Holi at the University of Maryland, College Park. Holi is the traditional Hindu festival of colours and love, and I’ve always had friends who have gone but had never had a chance to go myself, so I was really excited. We met up with a friend and got soaked in colours, though we came to the tail end of the celebration.
 This is the picture my friend’s 4-year-old niece drew for us. After, we went to my friend’s grandparents house for Easter dinner. Quite a few members of her extended family were there. I’d met a lot of them at Thanksgiving so I was excited to see them again. They’re so welcoming and make me feel completely at home, which is something I really needed for Easter.
On the way back to McDaniel, we got caught in traffic–there had been a fire that had closed the one road going out of the peninsula my friend lives on. Instead of getting back at 9PM, it was almost 1AM when we arrived, unfortunately. But it was all worth it and I wouldn’t have changed a thing. I feel so incredibly lucky to have friends that are like family.
Today, I was decorating my bulletin board in the dorm when two of my residents volunteered to help me add more color to the board. It was a Captain Planet themed board about Impacting Local and Global Communities. When I first put it up, I was unsure how to make it look more lively. My resident suggested adding a boarder, but I had already stapled them up, so I got out markers, and we had a mini decorating party!
 Monica and Lindsay, and the decorated bulletin board It took us about 20 minutes, but now the board is covered in suns and trees and other things that go along with the theme. It was nice de-stresser and break from all the homework we have to do tonight. I love my residents, and I am going to miss them next year!
 Since freshman year, I’ve only ever lived in dorms. I was in Whiteford freshman year because there weren’t enough spaces in DMC, spent last year on the third floor of McDaniel Hall, and currently reside in the lovely Blanche Ward Hall.
For next year, I was determined to have a kitchen in which I could cook myself breakfast and any other meals I might want to have in small servings fresh out of the oven or off the stove instead of from the mass-produced (but still good) Glar.
I had three other people for an apartment just from looking at my little friend group, and it was not so hard to find two more girls looking for an apartment. Of course, as true college students, we met up as a group only the day before our lottery time to discuss living together next year.
The next day four of us armed with our paper and IDs made our way to Big Baker, where we waited for 45 minutes to get a lottery number and get our paper in to be considered for an apartment in North Village.
Later that night, when I received the email stating we got our apartment, I officially declared that the wait was worth the future kitchen.
 Last week, the Writing for Nonprofits class that I’m taking through the English department held not one but two fundraisers to benefit Rape Crisis Intervention Service of Carroll County’s Walk a Mile in Her Shoes event. Our 12-student class divided up into two groups to plan the two fundraisers. My group hosted a Panera Bread fundraiser, which was on a Monday evening, and the other group hosted an open mic night on Friday evening.
Prior to choosing Panera as the restaurant where we’d hold our fundraiser, the five other people in my group and I called up a variety of area restaurants to inquire about their availability and how much money we would receive. Panera became our choice because they were available and because when they have fundraisers, 10% of all sales go towards the fundraiser — so no flyers or mentioning the fundraiser at the cash register were necessary. My role in the project was to submit campus announcements about the fundraiser and create a Facebook event to advertise it.
The Panera fundraiser ended up being a lot of fun. My group members and I did a solid job promoting the event, and at least a dozen of my friends — along with lots of familiar McDaniel faces — came to support us and enjoy some delicious food.
The more than $200 we raised at Panera will go toward our class’s Walk a Mile in Her Shoes Team, and all of that money goes to Rape Crisis. I’m so proud that we were able to raise so much money — it’s going to make a big impact!
 NYU’s Bambi Schieffelin speaking at the Phi Beta Kappa lecture on Monday evening. The after being inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, my fun with PBK continued. On Monday night, Dr. Bambi Schieffelin, a linguistic anthropologist from NYU gave a lecture about linguistics as part of the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program. Through this program, a scholar spends two days at a college with a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Schieffelin actually spent three days at McDaniel; she came to our PBK induction on Sunday, she gave a lecture on Monday night, and she answered student-generated questions on Tuesday during a luncheon for Honors Program students.
Schieffelin’s Monday night lecture was divided into two parts. In the first half, she talked about her time studying the Bosavi people in Papua New Guinea. In the Bosavi tribe, people are socially conditioned not to speak about others’ internal states of being, unless they heard about that state of being directly from the person or someone else who heard it directly from that person. So, for example, someone in the Bosavi culture who saw me laughing and smiling wouldn’t say, “Annie’s happy.” He would say, “Annie is smiling,” or confirm via me that I am in fact happy before making a claim to someone else about my internal state of being.
This may sound crazy to us, since in Western culture, we make surmises about people’s states of being all the time, nor are we linguistically required to cite our sources of information. This plays into how the “be + like” way to introduce someone else’s speech is something that we can even have in our language. What is mean by this is that I can say, for example, “He was like, ‘Woah! Slow down!'” The hypothetical person quoted in my example might have actually said that, or I might be exaggerating or performing what he said. Regardless of the words he actually said, the way I perform his speech conveys a certain type of information about the utterance. Schieffelin noted how astonishing that this “be + like” way of introducing someone’s language, either real or hypothetical, has become a part of everyday speech so quickly and has even migrated to text-based online interactions (her 2006 study focused on Instant Messaging, which also included a variety of ways to alter fonts and text color and size).
I got to talk to Schieffelin a bit after her lecture and I also asked her a question during Tuesday’s luncheon. I enjoyed the opportunity to “pick her brain,” so to speak, since she has a wealth of knowledge about linguistics, anthropology, and more. I love it when academic speakers come to campus and I love it even more when they are able to speak enthusiastically and accessibly about their areas of expertise with curious students like me!
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