The Art of the Real Hustle by Victoria Wetmore

Author Victoria Wetmore with Hammad Imran

Imagine yourself as a fish thrown into a new pond for the first time. You’re unfamiliar with your surroundings, things begin to feel uncomfortable, and you’re not sure where you can and cannot swim. College is the same type of atmosphere, Hofstra included. Starting a new life at college is difficult, but it is that type of ablution that exposes us to unusual places and opportunities, both academically and recreationally. When Hofstra University’s academics become demanding, it isn’t a bad idea to seek recreational activities, such as club billiards, to lessen one’s stress, create new friendships and offer unexpected opportunities that once seemed impossible.

No matter what major that one declares, there is a certain workload that comes along with each one. When work becomes difficult and our brains become exhausted, there is this period of time where relaxation is required in order to function properly again. Some individuals will choose to watch television shows or a movie, and others choose food as a way to reboot after working hard. Personally, I take a trip out of my dorm room, into the Student Center, and down the stairs to the game room. In this space, I am able to play pool with my friends and fellow classmates. There is something about the sound produced from the contact of each ball, and the sound of breaking the rack up that is soothing and satisfying to me. This environment is a little loud, but nothing to be scared of diving into. Kelsey Picciano states, “Homeostasis, the tendency of a system or a person to maintain internal stability and resist change, can get easily upset, especially in the change from high school to college” (Picciano, par. 1). Being in the game room may be something different and scary, but doing something with others tends to make someone happier. If that happens to be playing games, then this is the place to be. Not into billiards? Take a look around the rest of the room and one will find a wide variety of gaming consoles, air hockey, ping pong, pinball, and even foosball. No matter what one’s preference is, I would still recommend billiards to anyone that walks through the automatic doors. Everybody downstairs is cordial and willing to help teach someone the basics, like the concept of angles or lining up different shots, in order to keep playing. Most of the time, members from the Hofstra Billiards Club are playing games and honing their skills for competitions, so do not hesitate to ask them to teach you something. This beneficial relaxation activity is how I get through assignments that prove to be stressful, while creating new bonds at the same time.

When I first came to Hofstra, I knew that I was having issues making new friends and didn’t feel as though I fit in with the rest of my peers. However, the moment I was approached in the game room by one of the players from the billiards club, I was introduced to a whole new world of friendship. Immediately, I felt uncomfortable being the only female in the room. Then I realized that I had to drop my protective walls and comprehend the opportunity I was given when I agreed to join this club. I had become immersed in so many different ethnicities that I was missing a chance to interact with people from all over the world because I felt insecure. The moment my anxiety subsided, I was able to make conversations with students from Pakistan, Kenya, and more of the Middle East. I also have the opportunity to talk to commuters, and others from the same state as I. Not only are there various ethnicities to learn, but one becomes accustomed to this world of billiards that differs from normal life. Billiards can teach someone both ways of making friends and various cognitive life tools. For example, pool is a problem-solving sport that allows one to look at the lay of the table and read what the next shot should be. Parallel to life, one must learn how to look at what they have and figure out what to do and where to go next. “Learning of the upmost importance occurs within our one-on-one experience, and it is the heart-to-heart, eye-to-eye conversations with our equals that provide us with life lessons that will extend further beyond our schooling years” (Picciano, par. 6).

I had the opportunity to get the personal scoop on the coach of Hofstra’s Billiards Club. Hammad Imran is not only the coach of the school’s team, but he is the captain for the American Pool Association (APA) team at Hofstra; a team that competes against other adult teams in Nassau County on Sunday nights. He is in the process of completing his Masters of Science in Finance here at Hofstra University. Hammad brings his talents, garnered from over five years of play, to the other students downstairs. If pool skills isn’t what one wants to learn from him, go on over to the ping pong table---after all, he is ranked number one in the area. From talking to him, Hammad explains billiards as, “an opportunity to play competitively with a variety of different players on and off campus” (Imran). That’s the best part, too! One does not have to be nervous when playing for the first time because there are so many players of different levels. Translated, that means that someone who is super good does not have to play a beginner. Even if one is to play someone of a higher level, they have a chance to learn something they did not know before. Again, everyone is amenable and caring downstairs, almost like a little family, and is willing to show and teach some tricks and shots that will help mold others into better players.    

Now, this idea of talking to anyone does not just apply to ethnicity, but also to gender. The game room happens to be a man-led territory. For women at Hofstra, it is a good way to immerse oneself into this community of men that share a common interest. This is also a beneficial way to break out of one’s comfort zone if one has an issue talking to people of the opposite sex. One can also see the game room as a way to stay in one's happy place and keep one's internal homeostasis intact. For someone like me, I am completely fine spending my time with a group of guys because that's what my household is like and mostly what my friend group back home consists of. On a campus where every other place puts anxiety on my comfort level, it is nice to know that I have a place to escape to that I am accepted in, even if I am the only girl down there. Don’t get me wrong; guys feel the stress of trying to fit in, too, but they just do a better job of hiding it. So, let it be known that the other men down in the game room are super cool and willing to open up and hang out. It is a healthy environment for friendship. I promise.

With friendship and techniques comes unexpected opportunities. Developing fresh and useful skills for the future is something a lot of college kids are worried about. In essence, billiards becomes the perfect trifecta for improving one’s health, meeting brand-new people, and learning something exciting to apply to something else. The act of dialogue that can occur when playing pool with someone builds communication skills that can be utilized in the future. Even when one lines up a shot, the critical thinking section of the brain fires up. Also, playing billiards against someone else can help us pick up on visual cues and read the body language of others around them. These skills become assets for students for when they are in job interviews or meeting with important people. Instead of pool following Paulo Freire’s “Banking Concept of Education,” in which, “ the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat” (Freire, par. 5), one can receive, understand, and employ these critical thinking abilities, learned through playing pool, and apply them to situations in the future. People should know that they can physically learn, live, and experience things instead of robotically spewing back information.

In just seven weeks of being consumed by this environment, I have already done something I never thought I would do. At the age of eighteen, I am in bars on Sunday nights for fun. It is fair to add that I am on the APA Hofstra Billiards Team captained by Hammad, and they allow me to compete against the other adults in the area. I may not win every game I play, but I get the opportunity to not only put my newfound prowess to the test, but also meet many characters from around here. One of my favorite people I have met so far is a man named Jesse who is actually an alumni of Hofstra. Throughout the games, he talked to our group about possibly starting an alumni tournament at the university, which I thought would be a cool way to integrate the graduates and the current students in a friendly game. So, no, I guess I am not doing something everyone else does, but instead, I am gaining maturity and tools for the future.

By now, I have probably played pool for a combination of thirty hours since starting this assignment. I have learned to expand my little fish fins and swim to this territory of comfort to learn some techniques from my friends. I encourage other students to explore the game room a little more, and find something they like to do. Like I said, a lot of interesting people are down there and are willing to pull anyone into this fun and electric environment of crazy antics and inside jokes that keeps us laughing for hours. Even if one may think they aren’t good at something, don’t worry! Picciano told us not to worry about that and just embrace it. Learning how to deal with stress, making new friends, and building skills/ opening new doors is the true meaning to growing up, so don’t worry about it and just have fun while you can.

Works Cited

Corbett, Bob. “PAULO FREIRE: CHAPTER 2 OF PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED.” Philosophy of Education -- Chapter 2: Pedagogy of the Oppressed, faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/philosophy/education/freire/freire-2.html.

Imran, Hammad. Personal Interview. 11 Oct. 2017.

Weber, Deanna. “Leaping out of the Cave and into the Light,” Taking Giant Steps. N.p., 20 Oct. 2017. Web.

“Walt Whitman, Alan Watts, and We” by DaisyMae VanValkenburgh

The most fascinating thing about a young adult’s life is that it is always changing. There is so much room for improvement, for seeing things differently, and for trying to understand the inner self. American poet Walt Whitman and British philosopher Alan Watts demonstrate in their writing how the world around us is in constant flux, how we learn to absorb information and then decide how we will allow it to change us. When I began my first college writing class, I felt as if I was quite the cultured person, but I soon caught on that the people around me and the forum style of the class would allow me to grow a lot more than I imagined. Our many discussions of texts, especially in regard to our identity, gave me an opportunity to reach a higher level of understanding. The variety of my peers’ responses to both Asian and Western appreciations of the spiritual side of life has made me open my eyes to just how much I was unaware of. These glimpses into other lifestyles, priorities and “techniques of the sacred” have allowed me to see things much differently.

Walt Whitman in Section One of “Song of Myself” writes, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume” (Whitman 1.1.1-2).  By Whitman saying I, he speaks about his own person, but he also insinuates a cosmic (or Vedic) self that is not higher or lower than anyone else; rather he asks us to see the self as universal, something we are all a part of: “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (Whitman 1.1.3). I view this as a brilliant escape from the demanding trap of the ego in which I must create, denounce, and defend a position or a personal identity in order to be comfortable or taken seriously. Whitman knows that we as individuals understand each other better when we are all involved, and that is a huge motivation for young, susceptible individuals trying to make sense of who they are. In Section 24 he calls himself “a kosmos” and adds this moral dimension, “Whoever degrades another, degrades me / And whatever is done or said returns at last to me” (Whitman 1.24. 1; 8-9).  

Indeed, the motive of “Song of Myself” strikes me as an appeal to the reader to think beyond the either/or of our perceptions. As fellow Taking Giant Steps blogger Emily Baksic astutely writes on Leaves of Grass and its relation to Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, “The yin and yang accept the flow between one’s life and the universe counteracting together. The yin and yang represent the integration of opposites not merely as polarities, but as complements” (Baksic, Par. 5). Though we may split the universe into good and bad, we need to see how opposites attract and create a larger whole in and of itself. Whitman caused me to recognize that we are all individual entities sharing space in the same universe. No one is anything more, and no one is anything less. To insist otherwise feels like an unnecessary defense against our own urge to grow our souls. When one works with another, dates another, or speaks to a stranger, one can gain so much by putting oneself on the same level as the other. It is not worth putting oneself above or below another, just because one is speaking to an individual of a certain status. One must find oneself in others to truly grasp all the dimensions of one’s identity. As Alan Watts would say, regarding our need to make all these distinctions in status, we are “putting legs on a snake” (Watts, 11). 

       

After reading Chapter One of his The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, I observed that Watts and Whitman are essentially singing the same song, each for their own generation. Watts’s reading of Vedanta, the end of the Vedas (knowledge), makes us as humans wonder if what we know is not what we actually need to know in order to be “in the know” (Watts, 9). Watts suggests that we must dig down deeper---beyond the masks of our personalities and the social conventions we obey without a second thought---into the taboo of the world, search a little in the unknown, and work on figuring out what the others refuse to tell us. Maybe there is “some inside information, some special taboo, some real lowdown on life and existence that most parents and teachers either don't know or won't tell” (Watts, 9).

Watts caused me to consider that life has more meaning than what we just see on the outer surface. We have to interrogate the taboos of our society and run with what the world does not want us to know. Watts states that we are “flesh or plastic, intelligence or mechanism, nerve or wire, biology or physics” (Watts, 39), a “human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns” (Watts, 37). Watts asks us to look at each occurrence that happens in life differently. As he puts it, “Taboos lie within taboos” (Watts, 9), and that is where we need to search in order to find what we are missing. These hush-hush, inflammatory, unpopular, or alternative readings of the world are what students need to learn for themselves. I gratefully entertain the notion that I am not merely a separate self, alienated from others, alone and afraid, but part of the greater whole in which my individual soul (Atman) is none other than the universal soul (Brahman).

Fortunately, I first encountered these two iconoclastic writers in my middle school and high school years. Growing up a sheltered child with a mother who perennially fought health problems, I was not able to explore as much as the other children were, nor was I able to go spend time with friends as much at a young age, due to the fear of contracting an ordinary illness and getting my mother more ill. With chronic illnesses, even the simplest of colds can have severe effects on the immune system. If I did have playdates growing up, I do not remember them clearly. In second grade my thirst for knowledge wound up distancing me from my peers. However, this solitude gave me a kind of freedom. I picked up an encyclopedia in my house one day and began reading it, one book at a time. Reading led to writing, and I learned to analyze material to find deeper meanings, but also to find a larger understanding in every circumstance. I am thankful for the chance to grow my interpretive antennae at such an early age. Fellow blogger Kelsey Picciano was not so lucky: “I learned only that of the history the school chose for me to learn; I read only the literature of which the school wished for me to read; I knew only of the environment that the school wished for me to be in” (Picciano, Par. 3).

       

In middle school, my English teacher realized I had a knack for seeing things differently, so she introduced me to the 52 sections of “Song of Myself.” Whitman’s way of expressing how we as humans are comprised of experiences, ideas, and mental states, as well as a personal spiritual understanding, demonstrated so clearly that each person is part of one universal self in the world. From a young age this point of view is something that I have sought to celebrate. Likewise, in high school, my English teacher, seeing that I needed a challenge, invited me to spend my sophomore year reading Alan Watts. Once again, I found myself in the company of a real seeker willing to question everything around him to get to the bottom of things. With this inside knowledge, I realized that I was no longer going to let anyone dictate who I was becoming. I took the chances I wanted and have never looked back. Because of these self-discoveries in middle and high school, “I no longer find myself with a void sitting inside of me; I no longer solely feel my physical being; I feel my existence as my own unique individual” (Picciano, Par. 7). 

In my first semester of college, I have further realized that in order to continue my path towards a career in journalism, I need to allow my mind to wander into the unknowns of the world, as Watts teaches us, and that I must find myself within others, as Whitman illustrates. My past is no longer going to define my future; rather, my present self is going to be the guide to find out who I will become. As someone who considered herself well cultured, I found that Watts and Whitman truly challenged my homeostasis. Whitman showed me how we are all a part of the same whole, working to figure out what truly works for each of us. Watts opened my eyes to see that what we already know is not all that we need to know. We must be in constant search of what we do not know to acquire what we still need to. I realized that my best strategy as a learner, thinker and evolving writer is to break out of my comfort zone in order to challenge what it is I have yet to learn. 

Works Cited

Baksic, Emily. "Corresponding Ideas of Nature in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass & Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching." Taking Giant Steps, 05 May 2016. Web. 30 Nov. 2016.

Picciano, Kelsey. "Forging a Whitmanic, Post-Traditional, Bisexual Identity." Taking Giant Steps. N.p., 28 Jan. 2016. Web. 07 Dec. 2016.

Watts, Alan. “Chapter 1,” The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Share and Discover Knowledge on LinkedIn SlideShare. N.p., 25 Dec. 2015. Web. 30 Nov. 2016.

Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself” (1892 Version)| Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.

Just Another Loose Brick in the Wall by Kelsey Picciano

Homeostasis, the tendency of a system or a person to maintain internal stability and resist change, can get easily upset, especially in the change from high school to college. I definitely felt my homeostasis slip away on September 3, 2015, as I entered my first semester's composition class. The wildly gray-haired instructor with the observant blue eyes asked us to think of him as a coach or midwife and to call him KP, just like his writing clients do in the real world. He said looking at the backs of one another’s heads put us at a disadvantage, another example of how the education industry was “running game” on us, and invited us to arrange our desks into a circle so that we could see one another better. We wrote our names on tags we hung from our seats, looked around and introduced ourselves. After we read the syllabus aloud, he asked us to take ownership of the course, journal on our experience (75 pages!), get to know each other, author our own author-ity, discover our identities as writers and not mind a little homeostatic upset.

He may not have realized that his interrogation of everything had already threatened our homeostasis. As class ended, some shook their heads, rolled their eyes or huffed their discontent. Was he too unpredictable for the grade-centric, too participatory for the shy, too poetic for the more rectilinear among us? Although some called him a hopeless nut case, insane weirdo or serious whack job, I felt intrigued by his strange antics, irreverent disposition and passionate bursts of ideas. He wasn’t merely critiquing our conventional expectations; he was celebrating an alternative that would prove life-changing for me. So, over the next few weeks, I gathered the evidence, but his medicine proved useful only after I took to heart his diagnosis of our millennial generation’s illness—we’re in peer competition; we fear being judged; we have weak attention spans co-opted by smart phones (“magic power devices” in KP-speak), computer screens, texts, TV—so we are reactive, not proactive (Gordon, interview).

Regarding our inability to listen for long, he called the prompts we’d been given for writing assignments in high school can’t-fail, paint-by-number exercises that eliminated thoughtful responses in favor of predictable mediocrity. He delivered to us what service providers at Hofstra had delivered to him: We, having had no experience out of our homeostasis, could not make use of the university’s resources that we had already paid for (Gordon, class discussion). Hence, our first prompts, though activity-driven—a) convince the class that one’s peer interviewee is an asset to us; b) experience a service at Hofstra, interview the service provider and convince us to participate in the service—came with no written instructions. As one of our best writers put it, “At first I was frustrated with a lack of direction because growing up all we had was a sheet of paper with an assignment and we stuck to that, but with KP I discovered that there is more room to express ourselves freely without fear of being greatly penalized in our work. Not only does it allow for creative freedom, but it removes the stress from writing essays” (Solis). Ironically, his encouragement of our transcending convention rather than enforcing it granted greater capacity to express, as well as to entertain, new ideas.

He talked ideas often and he increased my attention span with his animated commentaries: a combination of playful asides and cliff-hanging transitions, puns and double entendres, song lyrics and poem quotes, jazz and jailhouse slang, exclamations in other tongues. His rapid-fire delivery burst our little high school bubbles, but I sensed another motive more sinister than shock and awe. His trust-your-gut-&-let-go-into-the-flow convo style invited us to treat language as a tool for discovery rather than a restricting set of rules that kept us in our places. He also caused me to reconsider strategies for conveying a thesis as well as new ways to interpret data. As Sydney put it, “When he first starts talking, there is that doomed moment of total uncertainty about where he is going, but after slowly internalizing his diverse ramblings into a coherent whole, it turns out that his ideas can be applied with great benefit to most aspects of our college intellectual life” (Chesworth). 

Like he predicted, we did need one another—as study buddies, as readers of our journals, as peer reviewers and as writers capable of taking feedback—to repudiate the banking concept of education (Freire, 1) with a problem-posing method that engages us as peers. My heart opened while reading a blog post from his former student fresh from the Ivy League and a life-threatening coma who described KP “as being the weirdest person in the room in order to ensure that no one feels alienated by their fellow classmates” (Weiss, par. 3). His asking us to take him as he is meant that he wanted us to be ourselves and “quit frontin’.” Because of (or in spite of) his behavior, we learned to speak our minds and share notions that we may have otherwise rejected as below standard or out of orbit.

In essence, his wide-angle, learn-by-doing method suggests that we create room for all the possibilities, including the non-rational, intuitional and oddball notion. This involves an attitude adjustment about making mistakes or getting judged and leads to a more dynamic exchange of ideas. We students are allies to each other rather than aliens and one another’s greatest resource; the success of our peers is not a threat to our achievement within the class. Intellectual growth of those around us only encourages and evokes development within our expanding minds. Learning of the upmost importance occurs within our one-on-one experience, and it is the heart-to-heart, eye-to-eye conversations with our equals that provide us with life lessons that will extend further beyond our schooling years. Developing close interpersonal relationships facilitates the improvement of our skills as writers and thinkers. As a service to one another, KP asks us to critique the work our peers have presented and to offer praise when praise is due as well as offer solutions to what is problematically expressed. Not only must one be honest and tactful but also be willing to change one’s mind without fear of failure, which is particularly relevant because, preceding our university experience, we were tricked into becoming slightly different versions of the ideal student in order to get accepted by our dream college. We lost our individuality without any recognition of it even happening. Now that we have become acutely aware of this loss, we must regain the original and unafraid voices that we rightfully possess.

Nothing has stimulated this unlearning/re-learning process for me like discussions following reading assignments. From the parable of the Chinese farmer to the Gestalt vase/facial profile image, from Chuang Tzu’s butterfly dream to Lawrence Kohlberg’s levels of moral development, from Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” to Alan Watts’ The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” to John Smitanka’s “A Reflection on the Purpose of Higher Education,” from Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” to Susan Faludi’s Backlash, from Malcolm X’s “The Ballot ot the Bullet” to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Thomas Frank’s eye to contemporary university life alongside Roksa and Arum’s “Life after College,” I better sense reality’s multi-dimensional threshold. Talks about Taoism, Buddhism and other meditation-driven philosophies have inspired me to research ideas that had previously seemed bizarre, but I can now confidently say I identify with.

Having grown up in a strict, conservative household where I was constantly spoon-fed beliefs that I had to follow, I wouldn’t have even thought to reach beyond the Roman Catholic, predetermined, obedience-driven mold bestowed upon me. When I thought of school or church, it was the image of a machine filing in students and turning them out as plastic, uniformly faced learners from the music video by Pink Floyd, accompanied by the words: “We don’t need no thought control … all and all, you’re just another brick in the wall” (Pink Floyd). Now, for the first time in my educational career, my point of view is not limited by my mother’s fear-based, overbearing restrictions. I have expanded my ways of thinking and have been met with enthusiasm by my classmates. Having intellectually grown as an individual due to this inimitable character, I now understand what was meant by the comment: “With KP, you will do more than just learn” (Anonymous). 

Works Cited 

Anonymous. “Paul K. Gordon at Hofstra University – RateMyProfessors.com.” N.p., 25 May     2015. Web. 28 Oct. 2015.

Chesworth, Sydney. Personal interview. 27 Oct. 2015.

Freire, Paulo. “The Banking Concept of Education.” thinkingtogether.org. 4 Feb. 2004. Web. 5 Sep. 2015.

Gordon, Paul Kirpal. Class discussion. 3 Sep. 2015.

Gordon, Paul Kirpal. Personal interview. 6 Oct. 2015.

Pink Floyd. “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2).” The Wall. 1979. CD.

Solis, Lola. Personal interview. 27 Oct. 2015.

Weiss, Jared, “The Power of Belief,” Taking Giant Steps Blog, 23 Nov. 2015.