time

A tiger and a bear wanted to become human beings. A god promised to make their dream come true if the tiger and the bear went to a cave and survived only on water and garlic. The tiger quit, but the bear persevered and was transformed into the first Korean, going on to create the aboriginal generation of Korean people.

Valentine’s Day: The holiday connotes heart-shaped chocolates, awkward dinner dates, and making love—all events that occur between people. Yet “love” is a feeling, a state of mind that isn’t constricted to solely between a lover and a beloved. Don’t worry, we at Spectrum aren’t here to remind you of Lit Hum or Foundations. Instead, we just want to remind you that love takes on many forms besides those reflected in conventional Valentine’s Day celebrations. One of these is self-love.

At the beginning of my 1:10 p.m. journalism class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the room’s sole clock displays the time as 12:04. Whenever I check the time in that class, I have to remember to do the math to figure out the correct time. Adding 66 minutes to the time in my head isn’t hard, but it would be easier if someone could just fix the clock.

If there’s one archaic saying that almost every Columbia student understands on a painfully personal level, it would probably be the phrase “in a New York minute.”

While in high school, I became very interested in reading a lot of self-help and motivation-related books. One that especially caught my eye was Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In his book, Covey describes how to manage time effectively by dividing our time into quadrants so that each quadrant corresponds to a different type of activity. For example, one quadrant would be for urgent and important activities, such as work-related deadlines, while another would be for activities that are important but not urgent, such as spending time with family.

“Have you ever been in a codependent relationship?” The question came during a late-night encounter I was having with a boy I was seeing at the time. It was the first time I had heard the term, and when I told him that I had not, he launched into a detailed account of the “codependent relationship” he had been in during his first year at Columbia. When recalling the sheer anguish that came with extricating himself from his codependent relationship, he explained to me that his worst fear was falling into that type of mutual dependency again, the type where one person ostensibly satisfies all your requirements—checks all your boxes—to the point where all other relationships are neglected, and eventually fade into oblivion.

In the second semester of my first year, as winter turned to spring and Columbia was just becoming mine, I’d sometimes stand in the middle of campus at night and look at Butler Library, sandwiched between the glowing trees on College Walk, still amazed I was here. As I’ve gotten older, the wonder of Columbia often seems like it has worn off, but as graduation gets closer to becoming a reality, our school’s romance has started to pop up for me again. Some nights, Butler is just as beautiful—and as daunting—as it was to me three years ago.

If you’ve been paying attention to columbia buy sell memes in the past 24 hours, you may have come across a common theme.

Barnard's Sustainable Initiative Consulting Board, a committee of appointed students that works with the administration on sustainability policy, and the Student Government Association's committee on arts and culture presented "Waste of Time" last Thursday, a student exhibition addressing issues of climate change, waste production, and sustainability in artistic practices.