Image: source unknown. World Map art installation by Clinton De Menezes, 2012

She isn't weak or timid. In fact she's pretty bad ass and easygoing. I was surprised at what she’d experienced. Okay, not really. But she explained to me that because her English is broken she gets slighted by other students on a daily basis. When asking for help, to form study groups, that sort of thing. They look at her like she's stupid and sigh impatiently.

"Just imagine," she says to me with indignation at our table outside of the campus' Dunkin Donuts. "If they were in my country, or any foreign country, and did not understand something, and there was no one to help them. How would they feel?"

Ah, empathy. A lost practice in the age of competitive individualism. To expect these modern day narcissists to put themselves in other people’s shoes is asking too much.

Why extend any courtesy to the foreign students sitting right in front of your face, people you can actually learn something from, when you can study abroad in their country for a semester, fueled by Christopher Columbus Syndrome and only then act fascinated by a culture and a people while you’re the minority in their country.

One of my quirks is having spontaneous bursts of yearning, and because I am generally hanging out on my own when these bursts occur, like today after the Architecture class I'm taking, where I sat introspectively on the bench in the quad, observing the stream of students walking by me in segregated clumps — a gaggle of chirpy white girls, a cluster of designer-wearing Asian kids, a pack of athletic guys in baggy jeans and Red Sox caps, a group of freshmen reveling in their new found freedom, all of whom I feel no affinity toward, the yearning I experience slowly dissipates within the abyss of my mind, and that's that.

I’d never gotten sucked into the trend of cliques back in high school or wherever, so I don't really have any stories that allows me to personally relate. but just observing these sort of things around me is fascinating. It's like people have restrictions, like they can only hit it off with people who look and sound just like them.

Last week I was talking to a girl from Saudi Arabia, and she was telling me how she was already in her third year and she calls her mom at the start of every semester to cry and ask to come home.