Feb 01 2009
in which stereotypes and misconceptions abound, and also Alaska is weird
This comic was printed in a recent issue of The Northern Light, the student-run paper for UAA, and it actually cracked me up (click for the full image):
The comics run in there are mostly okay, but they’re almost all by students, which would be fine except, um, I have this slight grudge because I was sort of assigned find-new-comics duty since we had almost none at that point? And I decided to run with it even though they were maybe partly joking? And I got permission from xkcd, Wondermark, and Ctrl-Alt-Del to print their comics, which kind of took forever? And then nothing ever happened and when I finally asked about it, I was told that no, actually, the paper is trying to run just local comics? Okay. Thanks for telling me NOW.
Regardless, this comic is actually funny, although maybe it wouldn’t seem like it to anyone who doesn’t live here, and a non-Alaskan definitely wouldn’t think of this idea for a comic. But it’s funny because the announcer’s dramatic monologue is more or less what others tend to think about life here, and the students with their Starbucks cups and t-shirts are pretty well representative of UAA students. And the dig at the University of Alaska Fairbanks? Well, I suppose that’s even more of an in-joke, because UAA and UAF have a long-standing rivalry that’s not always a friendly one, based partly on stuff like their changing the name of their team from the UAF Nanooks to the Alaska Nanooks because they want college-sports fans to think of them when they think of sports in Alaska, even though UAA beats UAF at just about everything sports-related. Also the fact that UAF gets more money than UAA does even though UAA is far bigger, or the part where UAA hasn’t actually been allowed to have any PhD programs because we don’t have the “research infrastructure” that UAF does…because we haven’t been given the funding for it. The actual fact is that 1) the University of Alaska statewide administration is based in Fairbanks, so that’s where the power and money is, and 2) if not for the whole “research university” thing, which is kind of bunk because there’s not much they’ve got there that we couldn’t also have, UAF would kind of die off.
Anyway. The other point is that Fairbanks is in the interior of Alaska, and it tends to get insanely cold there–and I say that from the perspective of someone who spent five years in Barrow. Like right now? Well, here in Anchorage, it’s 6° F. That’s cold. In Fairbanks it’s thirty below. (For comparison’s sake, it’s only -21°…but there’s a 15 mph wind, putting the windchill at -46°. You have no idea how glad I am not to be living there now.)
But here in Anchorage, at least, college life isn’t that hugely different from that anywhere else. I mean, it’s different–we get a lot more snow, and pretty much every week there’s a report in the UPD blotter about a moose wandering around campus–but it’s not that different, and the biggest dangers don’t come from things like bears. The biggest problem lately has probably been the weather. Yeah, again. It finally got cold again, right, and just when all the water from the warm period was freezing over again, it snowed. And then it snowed some more. And let me tell you, about the worst thing you can find for slippery walking or driving is snow on top of ice. I slipped and fell twice on Thursday, and the next day I was sore like I’d had a hard workout.
