Sep 27, 2021 | Exclusive, Feature, Horoscopes |
By Autumn Koors Foltz, Staff Writer and Astrologer.
Consider Libra season a breath of fresh air. Ruled by Venus, Libra is an air sign positioned in cardinality. Cardinal signs come at the beginning of the season, and inspire a push into new experiences with strength. The goddess of romance and pleasure ruling the season, consider this a time to evaluate your relationships. Where is the balance to be found in them? Do you take as much as you give? As the moon moves into both Taurus and then Gemini in the following days, use this as the basis for the stock taken in relationships. Taurus urges stability. Gemini asks for intellect and sociality. Trust yourself, and let the stars move you. On September 27th, Mercury will go into retrograde until October 17th. Retrograde describes the illusion caused by Earth’s placement, where a planet appears to be moving reversely across the sky. Mercury is the planet of communication, so the retrograde is traditionally associated with problems in this area — love letters gone missing, cues gone misinterpreted, professional frustration. Use this as an opportunity to hone patience. Remember: the retrograde is only an illusion. Mercury is still moving as it began.
ARIES:
Familiar with Libra season in your own cardinality, allow yourself to take the season of your polar with charge. The first of the 12 zodiacs, think beyond your first impression: how do you let others see your flame?
TAURUS:
As the year begins to wane, don’t get lost in the mud, Taurus. Sprout yourself from the hardening Earth and establish yourself.
GEMINI:
Let go of the desire to know someone fully, or not at all, Gemini. Allow yourself, and others, to take control of their image. What may at first seem hidden can be with good reason.
CANCER:
In the season of another cardinal sign, expect your world to become packed to the point of clutter. Be aware of your desire to either shut things out or control them completely: Cancer, dear water sign, not everything must be underwater.
LEO:
Feel your innate, fiery charisma blossom under the watch of Venus — but don’t forget the rooting of your fixed sign. Be decisive. Be edgeful.
VIRGO:
Don’t feel your grip on the world loosen as your mutable, changeable season fades, Virgo. You have strewn yourself in your own Earth and will begin your fall-time blossom.
LIBRA:
Libra, be cutting. The wind must lash at times, and so should you. Do not let your desire for balance be mistaken as a desire for nothing at all. Even in your own season, do not feel hesitant to declare yourself and presence.
SCORPIO:
You don’t need to love everyone so deep you lose yourself in everyone. Shut your lips, stop your kissing. Turn into yourself, Scorpio.
SAGITTARIUS:
Sagittarius, nobody will follow you when you burn the path behind you. Don’t put the fire in your sign, but learn to capture its warmth: not its char.
CAPRICORN:
Something in the air is changing, Capricorn. Let it. Don’t feel compelled to work everything to same: newness can serve just as beautifully in direction.
AQUARIUS:
Aquarius, do you ever feel like you’re speaking to the trees? Don’t stop yourself: what those around you won’t understand will not be your own undoing.
PISCES:
If the season changes, Pisces, let it. Don’t become burdened with the truth that nothing stays: not even the moon.
Mar 13, 2020 | Bite Me Beaver, Exclusive |
Want to hear from Bite and get some (not so) DAM GOOD ADVICE? Write in to umfdearbeaver@gmail.com for a chance to hear back from a beaver that learned to type!
Dear Bite,
The Rocky Horror table in the student center keeps trying to sell me edible dicks and vaginas. I really want to buy one but it makes me a little uncomfortable. How do I overcome my uncomfortableness?
-Scared Dickless
Dear Scared Dickless,
Oh, you sweet summer child. Of course, you’re uncomfortable- instinctually you have to know that with one lick of those lollipops it’s all over for you. You think you’re just buying candy but before you know it, you’re not just back for more, but you look down to pull change from your pockets and you’re wearing fishnets and heels, and you can’t remember where you got them. You can’t run away because now you can only strut and shake that ass with every step. All you know is absolute pleasure. It’s called a cult classic for a reason. But seriously, buy the damn candy and give us money because we’re very poor and won’t know what to do with our weird, kinky selves if we don’t have a show.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Dear Bite,
My e-board underling quit out of nowhere without any word of warning and none of us have heard from them since. Do you think they’re dead? And if not, should I arrange that?
-One of Many Dying Clubs
Dear Dying,
I too struggle with object permanence and assume that once I can’t see my staff, they must be dead, because where else would they rather be than at my meetings with me yelling at them? I’d suggest starting a search party, but you might want to go straight for the funeral. You might think you’ll see them charging in, yelling, “I’m not dead!” but given the campus’s haunted reputation, it’s probably a ghost. If you throw a crucifix at them hard enough, the spirit should quiet down.
Dearest Readers,
I know you probably picked this up just to read the back page and then toss this paper somewhere (like multiple people have told me to my face. You know who you are), and that’s cool, I can’t force you open the paper and read the amazing stories inside that we spent literally hours on. But have you ever thought of maybe contributing to the supply that you demand and I don’t know… SENDING ME QUESTIONS? The email is RIGHT. THERE. Please. I don’t make this stuff up. Help a mean beaver out.
Mar 13, 2020 | Exclusive |
Finding ways to make your funds stretch throughout a semester can be very challenging as a college student.
The weight of balancing a social life, paying for tuition, textbooks, phone bills, groceries and car expenses can be almost too much to handle at times. Isiaah Boria, FinLit Peer Educator in his fourth year, has made a list of some of the ways he saves money and stretches his funds.
After a tough first semester of college, Isiaah realized textbooks cost a lot more than he had expected. He now uses Sluggbooks.com, this website looks for the best textbook prices across multiple platforms like Chegg, Abcbooks and Amazon. This website saves him money and time hunting for the best price.
The Dollar Tree is a place where Isiaah buys some of his basic needs. This can oftentimes be an overlooked store where students can save money. Remember to pay attention to unit prices, sometimes you may be paying more than you would at another store. Some items are a great deal and sometimes the packaging is small enough that a dollar is rip-off! Entertainment can be expensive so take advantage of events like Dollar Movie Night and programs like Mainely Outdoors that offer free excursions. Student Life also promotes trips to professional sports games, Broadway shows and much more.
Keeping an eye out for these resources around campus can help you save a lot of money and have a lot of fun. Isiaah’s last big tip is to use budgeting apps. This helps him keep track of his expenses and also budget ahead of time so he can save money each week.
Feb 29, 2020 | Exclusive |
Andrea Swiedom Staff Reporter
When sophomore Antonio Cortez, 36, brought his wife to his parent’s house for the first time, she thought his brothers were initiating a spontaneous sleepover after dinner as they pulled out pillows and blankets. Cortez had to explain that was just their bed.
“I grew up sleeping on a living room floor,” Cortez said. There with him were his four brothers in a one bedroom apartment in Anaheim, CA.
In hopes of providing a better future for their children, Cortez’s parents crossed the border from Southern Mexico. “They wanted their American-born children to go to college,” Cortez said.
In 2002, Cortez enrolled in a vocational program in Orange County, CA where he earned an associates degree in mechanical engineering while working full-time as a cement mason. But he always had military service in mind as a back-up plan. By 2004, it became his best option. “Eventually I just got to the point where, we were struggling, we needed health care. It was really the lure of the financial assistance.”
Cortez’s wife was struggling with health problems and the hospital bills were continuously draining their savings. “I made up to 30 bucks an hour, but it seemed like every time we visited the hospital it was a couple thousand dollars,” Cortez said.
Antonio Cortez (Photo Courtesy of Antonio Cortez)
To cover the costs of education and healthcare, Cortez worked 60 hour weeks and saw the physical effects that decades of masonry had on those around him. “I saw a guy doing it for 20 years and he was calloused and sunburnt,” Cortez said, scrunching his fingers. “I thought, I don’t know if I want to do this for the rest of my life.”
Cortez’s first step towards military service was complete happenstance. He was running errands with his father one afternoon when their car got a flat tire. While waiting for roadside assistance, Cortez found himself staring into the window of a recruitment office. A recruiter came outside and convinced Cortez to apply and take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) test right then and there.
Within a week of the test, Cortez, determined to pursue the most intense level of training, jumped at a last minute opening for a Ranger Airborne spot and left for Army Ranger school.
“They do SERE training which is survival, evasion, resistance and escape and you go through psychological warfare,” he said. “They lock you in a dog kennel, spray you with a hose. . .it’s just seeing how far you can go before you break. You want to be the guy that doesn’t break, but eventually you do.”
Cortez was deployed in Baghdad, Iraq where he manned an old yacht house-turned army base with 12 other American soldiers and 25 Iraqi police. “It had marble floors, a marble staircase and it was all shot up,” he said. “The water was murky brown. It was half mercury and if you ate the fish in the river, you would get jaundice.”
While in Baghdad, he sustained a severe leg injury from a grenade attack while riding in a truck back to the base. He was wounded by what he described as a molten needle that penetrated the three inches of steel and electrical system of the truck before shattering his knee.
“I couldn’t bend my leg; I thought it was gone. I couldn’t feel most of the left side of my body,” Cortez said while gingerly rubbing the side of his left leg.
After eight years of military service, getting shot in the back and jumping out of airplanes, this was ultimately the injury that led to his medical discharge.
“Most of my military career was like, ‘Hey, you’re alive now. Just get through it to get back to hot dogs and Budweiser,’” Cortez said with a straight face.
St MèreÉglise Drop Zone, Fort Bragg, N.C. (Photo Courtesy of Antonio Cortez)
After his recovery, he spent 30 days in a military out-processing program primarily geared towards retirees and left him with little information as to what benefits and services were available to him as an injured veteran coming straight out of combat.
The lack of information influenced his desire to volunteer with veteran programs to inform others about resources available to them as they transition to civilian life.
“I have spent most of my time since the military trying to figure out how to make up for some crummy things I had to do, not necessarily by choice,” Cortez said.
At UMF, he’s studying rehab management with the ultimate aim to work with veterans dealing with post-combat issues.
Cortez landed in Farmington by happenstance just as he ended up in the military. After leaving the army in 2012, he spent several years soul searching. He worked various jobs in the automotive industry and as a millwright designing and welding custom kitchen suites. Once again, he found himself overworked and burnt out.
With some pension funds and the desire to travel, Cortez, his wife and 12 year old son hit the road in an RV traversing the country three times before ending up at a campsite in Canon, Maine. It only took three months at the seasonal site for the family to realize that Maine was home, and Cortez’s son was ready to attend a public school.
“We love small town life. We just like rural because people want to help you just because they want to help,” Cortez said. “People here are just generally great, and it’s beautiful here.”
He expressed a great appreciation for the UMF campus and the relationships he’s formed with professors due to the open atmosphere and small class sizes.
“Farmington is UMF, and UMF is Farmington. And it’s cool that the public is allowed to use the facilities and the gym,” Cortez said. “It’s really a community.”
Nov 21, 2019 | Exclusive |
Thank you to everyone who submitted a meme for the Farmington Flyer’s Inaugural Meme Contest! While there were many great choices, the competition was strong. Here are the memes that stuck out the most, including the choice as winner of the prestigious Meme Contest.
Honorable Mentions
Submitted by @slumberjack666 via Twitter
Submitted by Ze’ev James
Submitted by Jacob Bishopp
(I apologize in advance for the formatting) Way to go everyone! Very valiant effort, but not good enough to be the best!
Saving the best for last, the winner of the Inaugural Farmington Flyer Meme Contest is…
Congratulations to the winner, Rowan Burns
Nov 21, 2019 | Exclusive |
Faith Diaz Contributing Writer
Associate Professor of English, Misty Krueger, recently released her new memoir, “The Roller Coaster: A Breast Cancer Story.” Her collection traces her breast cancer journey in various pieces of prose, poetry, and essays.
The book was written over the course of Krueger’s discovery of her cancer, her diagnosis, appointments, surgery, and more. Different pieces of the text range in times of their creative origin, some having been written in real time as they were happening to her or as reflection after the events had passed.
“Roller Coaster,” according to Krueger, “traces a year in the life of a cancer patient, particularly someone with breast cancer and the treatment that she, I, received and how I dealt with that as a life changing experience.”
As the reader moves through the text, the story traces a linear timeline of Krueger’s life via realizations she has about her body. From being a young woman who did not consider the possibility of physical pieces of her body being removed, to an adult put into the place of having to make many quick decisions in order to save her life.
Misty Krueger with her self-published book, now available on Amazon (Photo courtesy of Faith Diaz)
“I follow that course through my decision to have or not have reconstruction, to have or not have chemotherapy, undergo radiation, to go on medical leave, and then the fall out of that whole experience combined,” Krueger said.
She described the mental toll that the experience took on her and the common misconceptions that the general public has about what it was like to live inside of a body that had cancer. “It is the whole person that is affected; its body, spirit, soul, mind, it’s everything.”
The story traces through all of these facets of Krueger as well as her teaching career at UMF. “I feel I would not have made it through this experience without the support from UMF,” she said.
When she was diagnosed in early 2018, a smaller group immediately took to showing Krueger how much they wanted to support and care for her throughout this difficult time in her life. She said, “People were reaching out to me and doing this in material ways like bringing me cookies, putting signs on my door, sending me cards, and also you know just telling me, ‘We’re here for you,’ ‘We love you,’ and ‘No matter what, you’re going to make it.’”
Krueger cites this positive energy, teaching, her family and more as being essential to her healing process. Her dedication to loyalty to these elements of her life were obvious in her pursuit to keep them close to her throughout her illness. “I knew that, that community would actually give me strength but, it turns out, my body was stronger than my will.”
As her illness progressed, Krueger grew weaker and against her usual ambitious nature, her teaching performance was affected. “I taught a month into the fall semester of 2018 and I just woke up one morning and knew I couldn’t do this to myself anymore or my students,“ Krueger said. “I wasn’t giving them the Misty Krueger experience.”
Through these series of realizations about what her illness meant for the other factors of her life, the UMF community stayed right by Krueger’s side even after she stopped teaching on campus. “I saw people from campus, they’d either come to me or I’d come here and mostly it was social media that really kept that community alive for me.“
Krueger heard from her friends, students and colleagues alike through social media like Facebook and Twitter. Even when she could not physically see her friends due to treatment they continuously made sure she got their message. “I just felt so loved. I felt excited to come back.”
That excitement stayed with Krueger as she survived her illness and began her recovery.
“It helped me get through radiation which I was going through as I was teaching and the transition to the drugs that I have to take for 10 years to stave off the cancer. Being here helped me get through that. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for everyone here,” Krueger said.
During her treatment and upon her arrival back into the UMF community in the spring of 2019, Krueger had been continuously writing about her experience with breast cancer, for which she found a wealth of support to publish her work.
Upon the book’s release, an education class utilized the text as part of an in-class analysis. On Nov. 6, Krueger visited class to talk about her experience and answer any questions that students may have had.
Students were intrigued by how Krueger could publish something that had detailed descriptions of her body and mind, and were awed at how she could be so vulnerable on the page. One student, Christine Destephen, asked, “How did you deal with putting the book out and exposing yourself?
Krueger said, “I will tell you my husband did not want me to write this book. He said, “This is too much, you are exposing yourself, You are going to let people read this? Especially strangers?’”
Misty Krueger’s self-published book, now available on Amazon
It was more than the idea of strangers reading her work that concerned Krueger’s husband. “Even worse for him was people we knew because he thought, ‘Strangers can read it, that’s whatever. The people you know, now they really know you, stuff about you they don’t want to know, are afraid to know, stuff that might traumatize them.’”
Krueger still wanted to write the book because she thought that in a way, that was exactly the point. “If we don’t talk about these things, if we keep all of this stuff a secret, then no one else will talk about it and we are all suffering alone,” she said.
As the class continued to ask their questions it was obvious that Krueger’s unique story was not only about her anymore, as she said, “It is about me and my story but there are other peoples’ lives that come into play because they are close to me.”
And with that closeness, for those that have since read her book, there are lives that have been affected and people that have found pieces of themselves within Krueger’s pages.
An unnamed student in the course had struggled with her own surgery and illness of a Cardiovascular variety and found Krueger’s description of coming out of surgery in this surreal wonder and uncomfortable state of surprisingly being alive, to be a spot-on representation of the experience. She ended her comment to Krueger simply with, “Thank you for writing this book.”
Krueger’s self-published book can be purchased on Amazon.
