The Lumberjack



Students Serving The Cal Poly Humboldt Campus and Community Since 1929

Day: March 12, 2022

  • Student debt is coming faster than you might have thought.

    by Ian Vargas

    If you’re anything like me, there’s no way you can afford to pay for college on your own: you’ve probably got student debt. While you’re still taking classes, it feels like you don’t have to worry about it because graduation could be years away. It’s always looming on the horizon, far enough away that it seems like you’ll probably have it under control by the time you’ve actually got to deal with it.

    I am in my last semester as an undergraduate, so that horizon is closing in real quick for me and it’s scary as hell. My current debt is just shy of $20,000, which is slightly lower than the national average, but still by far more money than I than I’ve ever made at a job.

    Ideally college would help with that, but considering the job market, that’s no guarantee.That leaves me and many others with crushing debt in the position of having both a huge amount of uncertainty about what we’re going to do after college and a huge amount of certainty that whatever it is won’t be sufficient to not be living on the bare minimum.

    I appreciate my education. I plan on continuing it into graduate school, but this system feels as if it’s built more to place you into a position of permanent debt than to provide an education to people.

    Even if you’re lucky and don’t end up missing payments, you’re still paying about 10% of your income, and if you aren’t then you can rack up extra fees and put yourself even further back. On top of that are the countless other ways that you end up gouged for money while still enrolled like expensive but mandatory meal plans or fees for services that, depending on the current level of COVID lockdown, may not even be available to the students using them.

    According to educationdata.org, the average monthly payment for someone with a mid-paying job and in the same category of debt as myself is $393 over the course of six years, which is currently more than I even get per paycheck at work.

    These debts are what keeps people from buying homes or starting any kind of family. Ideally this whole thing should be free and improve peoples’ lives instead of operating off of a profit motive at all. But that’s a fight that seems like it will take way longer than any of us will be able to see through to the end.

    As students, we need to press for more scholarships and grants for students. Ones that don’t incur years of debt, and push back harder against tuition hikes that force students to either abandon their education or take out more loans. Otherwise, college becomes the exclusive domain of people who already have money, even more so than it already is.

  • Photo Essay: Contrary

    by Lex Valtenbergs

    Photo by Lex Valtenbergs

    Breathe in,

    breathe out

    Feel divine pneuma

    climb up your lungs

    and oxygenate your blood

    Lock yourself

    in the closet

    and throw away the key

    Shut your eyes

    and pray to God almighty

    To eradicate your sins

    But not the shame

    Straddle opposing parts of you

    like church pews

    Dangling legs and

    Roving eyes

    When will the sermon end?

    It ends with you

    and begins anew.

  • Cal Poly Humboldt Directors in the spotlight

    by Carlos Pedraza

    In the Van Druzer theater on Thursday, March 3 for the first time since the start of the pandemic student films were shown to a live audience. Around 40 people came to the showing of Cal Poly student films. Several of the films were made in the fall of 2020 there showing being delayed by the COVID pandemic.

    The short films ranged from psychedelic, documentary, serious, and funny; some of the films were a combination. The audience made sounds of laughter, shock and sadness reacting to each film with emotion equal to the film itself.

    A film director who was in the audience was Kylie Holub, a senior film major. Holub directed and wrote the film “Abstraction” in the fall of 2020. They film . During the pandemic Houlb said “ just keeping our crew really lean and realing thinking about how to tell stories with minimum actors.”

    The narrative film “Abstraction” is the story of a beach treasure hunter finding an alien artifact and the fallout of her discovery. The unknown and aliens being major inspiration for the film.

    Holub said “ you see a lot of people with metal detectors, we know very little about the ocean and aliens are fun to play around with.”

    Another director was alumnus Valerie Rose Campbell created the experimental film “Recipe for Young Mothers.”. Campbell goes through the recipe of banana bread while she narrates the experience of a young mother and her attempts to reclaim her life from an abusive relationship and societal expectations of a mother.

    The COVID pandemic heavily impacted the creation of the film Campbell said “ everything got done digitally and that was really hard.”

    The film is inspired by Campbell’s own experience in the local family system. “ How it felt so unjust for my kids and family.” said Campbell describing her own life experiences.

    There will be another film showcase in the fall of 2022 showing films created in the spring.

  • Latinx artists collaborate on chorus

    by August Linton

    Like the blossoms of our early spring, genuine and vulnerable artistic collaboration is blooming at Cal Poly Humboldt.

    The Toyon Multilingual Literary Magazine’s ‘SANA, SANA: Hope and Healing for Latinx Communities in Times of Precarity’ was a contest that asked for submissions of poetry, with the intention of having the winning entries set to music.

    The poem selected to be interpreted into a choral work by the award-winning composer Carlos Cordero was Alannah Guevara’s ‘Fresh Fruit.’ It is a deeply affecting rumination on vulnerability and intergenerational trauma, filled with haunting and tender images of bruised fruit and parental care.

    Guevara says that she wrote the poem thinking of her father, who passed over ten years ago. She’s a native of California’s Central Valley, where many Latinx people have settled and work on the area’s vast orchards. Guevara is half Mexican; she sees in her family and in her community an unwillingness to discuss the painful past, and an unending hope for the future.

    “I have really vivid memories of going to an orchard in the town I grew up in… It all melded together, these words that I had and these memories,” said Guevara. “Here in Southern California, who’s working in those orchards is Latinx people, Mexican people. And it got me thinking about my familial trauma, my generational trauma, the things that my dad left me to deal with.”

    Graphic by August Linton

    Guevara is about to become a parent herself. In ‘Fresh Fruit,’ she feels the protection and hope that her parents struggled to give her, and also the intense desire to protect and uplift her own child.

    The final choral piece is deeply beautiful, modern, and connected to the emotional core of Guevara’s poem. Cordero was a fantastic composer for the ‘SANA SANA’ project, both as a stunningly talented musician and also as a member of the Latinx community.

    Cordero’s Friday talk, hosted by CPH’s El Centro Académico Cultural, focused heavily on his personal struggle towards vulnerability, and how that has affected his compositions and musical career.

    Cordero’s writing process is a very visual one, although his medium is entirely auditory. He works with charts of inter-connected words and line graphs of emotional intensity to visualize his compositions in a more visceral way.

    “[Vulnerability] isn’t always going to come back to you immediately, but it’s coming to build or to open that door for people who want to connect with you,” Cordero said. “I’ve learned in art that I open up the door, I don’t make you come in. All I can do is present myself.”

    He recounted a story of opening up about his family’s experience of losing his younger sister to members of a choir he was working with. They came to him with stories of their miscarriages, of their losses, and that allowed the whole group to access an emotional connection that was not visible before.

    Cordero is originally from Maracaibo, Venezuela, and now lives in Austin, Texas. He says he, like Guevara, has struggled with an unwillingness to have hard conversations with his family about the traumas they’ve experienced.

    His piece ‘¡Ayúdame!’ was written as a “Venezuelan plea for life.” Members of the choir cry out “ayúdame, escúchame” (help me, listen to me) in Cordero’s attempt to communicate the suffering and disillusionment of the Venezuelan people.

    However, ‘¡Ayúdame!’ also represents the importance of being vulnerable, both by asking for help and by letting other people support you.

    Cordero spoke about the expectation within Latinx families and communities that people be strong, that they don’t show their struggles. As he struggled with the trauma of being Venezuelan in the midst of an ongoing humanitarian crisis, Cordero realized that he sorely needed help, that people need to ask for help.

    “[In ‘Fresh Fruit,’] Alannah showed me that the struggle is OK. It says to our kids, to our generation, to our families: we want to show that everything is ok but we can also share in their struggles,” said Cordero.

    The Cal Poly Humboldt University singers will perform ‘Fresh Fruit’ on Sunday, April 24th, alongside other musicians performing other works from the ‘SANA SANA’ project.