After the Election

I think I'm ready to talk about the election now. Or, rather, about what will happen now that the election has ended, and ended the way it did. Or, rather, about what is happening, or what has been happening, since the primaries months and months ago.

But before that, I'm going to talk about my students. At the end of October, a couple of weeks before the election, my students from the Anime Club hosted a maid café. I'd never been to a maid café, even while I was living in Japan, so I was a bit tickled to be losing my maid café virginity here in California.

This maid café was a lot of fun, and very, very souped up. And get this—the students gave me an Attack on Titan scarf!! OK, supposedly I won it in a raffle, because paying for your entrance got you a raffle ticket (or two, I have no idea). But the raffle was rigged, I tell you—RIGGED!!! In fact, it was very Japanese of them to make it so that the club advisor won the raffle on the first go... kind of embarrassing, but very cute.

Every semester, I get to meet so many new students. And every semester, there are always a few that are just so cool, so fun, so smart. The more semesters I'm here, the more and more amazing students I connect with.

We discussed among some of the faculty the idea of making CSUF a sanctuary campus for our students and community members. Efforts are under way to move forward, to resist and combat rhetoric that attacks and marginalizes our students and our family members. It's sad but true that there are faculty members who use the kind of language that undermines all that public university education should be about—providing opportunities for all of our students to learn and succeed. So, there's a lot of fighting that we have to do.

But fighting happens in different ways, in different places. I know I won't act in ways that other people will think are effective or productive, but I'll do my best to fight in my own way—in the teaching that I do, the advising I give to individual students, the articles that I('ll one day, I hope) publish. And everything that I do, I'll do it to fight for my right to work with the amazing students I meet every semester, the students who will rig a raffle just to make me win something. That's what this election has meant for me—that I do what I do because I want to see my students happy and successful. They've earned it.