Category Archives: Outlook

Outlook, Travel

Living Abroad in Indonesia

By Stephen Kim

People say to me all the time: “Have you ever thought about studying abroad? Don’t you ever want to experience living in another country? Think about it. College is the only time for you to go out and do something like this!” I’m sure everyone has been asked this before. But my response to them is: “I already have! For six years of my life!”

After being born and raised in southern California for the first twelve years of my life, I moved to Indonesia and attended an international school during my junior high and high school years. Living in Indonesia has impacted my life tremendously, providing me with a broader cultural perspective and worldview, and has made me the person I am today.

One aspect of Indonesian culture that I experienced and was fortunate enough to learn was about good manners when you enter into another person’s home. Upon being welcomed in, guests will usually be offered some food or some sort of tea or coffee. However, you must kindly decline their offer. A little while later, they will generously offer food, tea, or coffee again for the second time. Once again, you must respectfully decline their kind gesture. Finally, some time later, they will offer it to you for the third time. By this time, however, you are free to accept it. The reason for this long and complex process is that the first and second times they offer you food and drink, they might not actually have anything in their kitchen to offer you! They are just trying to be good hosts. If you say yes to their first or second offers, you will put them to shame for not having anything to present you. This is an example of a small cultural lesson that I had to learn in my daily Indonesian life but, big lessons were also presented to me in various ways, one of which I’ll remember for my whole life.

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Outlook, Travel

Easing the Restlessness

By Matt Keibler

“Do you want to go to the Grand Canyon to see the sunrise?”

Now, I am one for adventure. Hiking Mt. Baldy, snorkeling on the Atlantic shelf, walking alone through a Moroccan market, traversing the hills of Scotland through sleet storms – I have no trouble with getting outside. The real issue is getting friends to go with me. Happiness is only real when shared, no?

So, when I asked my dear friend Rachel to spend her one day off on one of the last weeks of Summer 2015 to drive seven hours across the Arizona desert in the middle of the night for a few dawn hours on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, I was nervous that she would say no. After all, this was the last thing on my summer bucket list before senior year. Who knows where we would both be next year? I warned her. It would be an exhausting task. We would need coffee and Clif bars and maybe some 90s throwbacks to get us through the night. And I knew that she was the only one crazy enough to say yes to this.

And she did.

“Great. Go take a nap. We leave at 9:30pm. Sun rises at 6:37am.”

She did not realize the immediacy of my question and yet, she took it in stride. Within a few hours, we were packed, caffeinated, and midway to Barstow, where we would leave the traditional route to Las Vegas, instead opting for the 40 freeway and another 4 hours of desert. Musically, we had moved through The Great Boy Bands of the 90s, and into 90s alternative rock. Blink-182 was a better vibe for a midnight drive through the California desert anyways.

Now, I am a boy from Florida, and I thought I knew heat. Summer nights are a balmy 80 degrees Fahrenheit, with a light breeze, if you’re lucky. My best memories are sitting on the beach after midnight in the late summer, watching the lightning from a far off storm illuminate the ocean. The flash of blue mirrors itself on the water, and for a split second, you can see the beach around you. Sometimes you could see a boat far, far in the distance. Most of the time, you saw the horizon of blueish black meet the stars. But only for a second. In that consuming darkness, you are left with nothing to do but sit down and bask in its awe.

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Outlook, USC

The Revolving Door

By Zachary Cantrell

Graduation. I can feel it hovering over nearly every conversation I have with my friends, colleagues, family, and even acquaintances, like a ponderous star destroyer, a harbinger of the end times.

“You’re almost done!”

“The last leg…”

“Make it count!”

“The last push!”

It makes me feel as if I am reaching the end of the line. The big race. My life. Honestly, it starts to feel that way sometimes. It’s as if I have lived out my life of education, and beginning my life as… a real person, I suppose? It’s positively daunting. How do I completely construct a new life? I have been wrapping my mind around this for months now, until recently when I began to look at things in a slightly different way. This is not an ending of one life and the beginning of another. Afterall, we only get one life each!

It sounds ridiculously obvious. Of course we only have one life. Here is a different way of looking at it. Last spring, I was in an acting class with a professor named Joseph Hacker, which I enjoyed immensely. One day in class, he said something that gripped me, and stuck with me all this time: “This is the work.” Basically, what we do here is not in preparation for something else. It is not two separate things, the preparation and then the thing, but the preparation IS the thing. It’s all happening, in the here and now, on a continuum.

I could write this off as an isolated circumstance, since I usually like to have more than one credible source on such matters (thank you, Writing 340). However, I was recently in a production of a play by Tom Stoppard called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Forever a fan of Stoppard’s writing, I took his printed words to heart, especially the phrase, “Every exit is an entrance somewhere else.” It nearly blew my mind. Our lives are not a play, with different scenes to mark the biggest moments of our adventure. Life is a revolving door, out of one place and into another. It’s all there, it’s all fair game, and it never stops.

What I am getting at with all of this existential blathering is this: What we did here, are doing here, or will do here at USC is not preliminary. Maybe for some classes it is about going through the motions for the letter grade, or maybe some of the people I met here will never enter into my life again. However, I cannot deny that all of it, “significant” or not, has played an essential part in my identity, here and now.

Graduation is neither an end, nor a beginning. It’s a part of the whole, and a very important one at that. So whether you are walking the stage this Friday, or just beginning your time here at USC, think of it not as a means to an end. Dig deeper. Consider how this university changes you, and how you change it. Because I guarantee that, no matter how big or small the changes are, they are there. And they matter.

Featured image from Pxfuel

Zachary Cantrell is a senior in the BFA Acting program at USC. He has performed in numerous productions during his time here, most recently with Downtown Repertory Theatre at The Pico House. He is also currently pursuing a minor in Cinema. In his free time he enjoys reading, playing racquetball, and bouldering.