All Poets on Shirts T-shirts are now in! After a two-week wait the red American Apparel v-necks (If I shall stop one heart from breaking… I shall not live in vain –Emily Dickenson) have finally arrived. The beige and black T-shirts have been on campus at all lunches since the week before spring break for sale and for pick-up. Students and faculty that have purchased the red shirt (or any of the three shirts) can pick up their size at any lunch today until at least the end of the week.

The T-shirts were designed in collaboration of various students in JWAC to create the Poets of Shirts campaign. All three shirts are still on sale, $15 each, or three shirts for $30. All funds will go towards funding Chile earthquake relief.

“We’ve raised over $600 so far,” said JWAC Vice President Daphne Chen. “We’re really excited because not only is everyone getting excited about the cause, but they are getting something cool in return.”

The new and super-soft red American Apparel T-shirts are going fast, so grab one at lunch today. However, JWAC members are planning on having to order more shirts, which will take one week for arrival.

Seniors Duncan Dominguez and Kelly Winkle model the new JWAC shirts. Photo by Katie Quill

Last semester, I noticed a trend about myself. Something alarming. Unprecedented. Unacceptable.

And yet, I never cared.

After all, what kind of senior cares if his or her grades take a downward slide?

And keep sliding?

And keep sliding?

I realized that I had just failed two quizzes in AP Macroeconomics and didn’t care enough to ask if I could retake them. I realized that I didn’t care that I hadn’t checked Portal in two six weeks. I realized that I didn’t care where my grades fell at all for the semester – as long as they were above an 85.

But these weren’t the most disturbing of my realizations as I pondered my steadily declining grades over the last six weeks. And last weekend, over a five-hour bus ride home from Austin for a Model United Nations competition, I had even more time to think about it.

What scares me is the dawning realization that, after having been accepted by my dream college, I had lost all motivation for the things that once used to be so important to me, that used to give me pride. An identity. And were my grades part of that identity?

Partly, yes. Some will think that I was too defined by my academics, that I had “no life”, but what I miss isn’t the grades – I miss the constant striving for a goal I made that was basically 16 years in the making, that I sacrificed for, that I cried over when I failed, and ultimately when I succeeded.

Something that drove me forward.

I’m not saying that I want to repeat the first three years of high school again, but I can’t help but to mourn the loss of something that was so important to me. Here, finally, is what I dreamed about for so long while suffering through the indignities of freshman year, the tribulations of sophomore year, the torture of junior year.

And now what do I have my senior year? Freedom. Freedom to choose what I want to do, when I want to do it, how I want to do it, to the ends that I want to accomplish.

Or is that only what people say about the mythological “second semester senior year”?

I have my freedom, I suppose, to slack off on my schoolwork and to stay out late while doing just that, but I also lost something as well.

It’s funny to think that when you reach your goal, you also lose it.

And I can’t help but to feel a bit lost these days, like I’m wandering in and out of each day, looking for something to give me a purpose again.

Of course, there are the usual goals that people set for themselves as they go into college: deciding a major. Starting a great career. Finding a potential spouse.

But such aspirations seem so much more distant, so much more untouchable, so much more vague and uncharted. Working towards college acceptance throughout high school was easy because so many people had walked the same path before, like a map. But for these larger life goals, there isn’t a planned route – there isn’t that map I can follow, step by step, grade by grade.

Maybe I feel lost simply because I am.

I’ve been asking people a lot about their religion lately.

I’ve had this hunger, this need to find out who believes what – and why.

From my former church-attending middle school days to my current indecision, I have floundered from hesitant Christian to atheist to agnostic to looking up the definitions of deism and theism. And I still don’t know.

Ultimately, what strikes me most deeply as I think about this question is the fact that I wish I was Christian myself. Having something to believe in, to hope in, is a precious gift, and I can see its powerful effects especially here in Texas, part of the “Bible Belt”. I would never want to take the power of pure faith away from someone else.

Even I, when I’m feeling especially low, pray sometimes – to whom, I don’t usually know, but I clasp my hands together and bow my head and whisper for anybody, anything, to help me. And sometimes, I pray directly to God. I describe my beliefs as having faith – but not religion.

But lately, I haven’t been able to shake off my fundamental problem with Christianity, which is the only monotheistic religion I have since considered: I can’t believe in a god because I don’t want to believe that anyone who created this world can let so many awful things happen to it.

Murder. Rape. Famine. War. Suicide. Genocide. Infanticide. Natural disasters. Discrimination.

In a sense, it seems that believing in God can make me even more depressed: is it worse to know that there is no god protecting and loving you from above – or is that there is a god, and that he created a world and a human race that feels hurt and pain as deeply as we do, only to watch ourselves kill and rape and tear each other apart? Does it seem right to me that someone could let good people suffer at the hands of bad people just to teach a lesson? Why not just have bad people hurt bad people?

For some reason, my mind always wanders to the story of a Japanese girl named Junko Furuta, who was kidnapped in 1988 by four boys. She died after 44 days of continuous torture. I advise you not to Google her any further, because her story tore a little chunk of humanity out of my heart.

I brought Junko up in a discussion about religion once with some friends. What did she ever do, I asked, to deserve it? The answers: God works in mysterious ways, he was testing her, it was evil, the absence of God, and therefore not really God’s work.

What I still couldn’t understand? Even if all these things were true, God – any God, not just the Christian one – could have allowed the torture continue for 43 days instead of 44.

So why didn’t he? Why didn’t He?

GotQuestions.org, which a friend directed me to, described the question of why God allows bad things to happen to good people as “one of the most difficult questions in all of theology.” For me, it has been the most difficult. So today, I am asking a sincere question, not as a challenge to Christianity, but as someone simply seeking an answer.

Tell me, God. Why not 43?