Kawledge and Knowledge

(I count this as a post for yesterday because it was finished but I forgot to click publish...fail)

So internet as been a little sketchy and getting on and posting has not been the easiest so I'm sorry for my fail of the last couple of days.

8/26/2011
Picture 6:

FAIL.  I don't have a picture for today! :(
Today was orientation stuff which I mostly didn't have to go to, but then they had a giant freshman dance outside at the end of the day. Which was fun ;)


8/25/2011
Picture 5:
MOVE IN AND ORIENTATION = cray cray chaoticness - except not as bad as I expected.
And I was already moved in - extra win.
Day consists of: Free stuff and lots of people. Convocation (PARK/MUDD PIRATES REPRESENT)

Everyone in their ResCollege T-shirts, finally sitting down after cheering like crazy for our respective ResColleges!

8/24/2011
Picture 4:

At City Museum, being completely terrified, but also having SO MUCH FUN. Do you see how high up we are? Do you? DO you see what we are climbing though?

As well as having a ridiculously crazy time at City Museum we also did another service project which was fun.


8/23/2011
Picture 3:

The whole picture thing kind of FAILed today. We did a lot of interesting things but I just never got out my camera or phone, which was stupid, because today was pretty eventful.
I can however, give you a blurry representation of how we all felt after the day's work.

Everyone, meet Declan. Also meet blurry bus pictures.

Some of the days activities: community service talks/discussions, scraping/cleaning/painting the longest outdoor wall you have ever seen, eat at a random Thai restaurant, a big international grocery store, and hanging out in a cool park playing Egyptian ratscrew, and a poverty simulation

8/22/2011
Picture 2:

We had some incredible speakers today and learned all about what goes on outside the WashU bubble. It was intense and amazing, I couldn't even begin to fully describe.

Looking on at a memorial for one of the many kids who has died as either a direct or indirect result of the poverty/ drugs/violence/neglect  in certain areas

Hands prints of his classmates

Bo-bo-BODACIOUS!

8/21/2011
Picture 2:
I guess I will be writing a little about each photo for now as well, like a mini diary about my days. I'm writing from my phone now however because I'm not sure how the internet works so this should be interesting...

Anyway. Today LTS (leadership through service) started and apparently the theme this year is Kool Aid so there are different color groups all named after Kool Aid flavors. Me, being blue am on the "bodacious blueberry" team. Wh00t! We have a count off where at the end, being as loud as possible we shout (getting progressively louder) "Bo-Bo-BODACIOUS!!!" It's a little competition between the groups to see who can be most obnoxious :P

So today we just did intro stuff and each group went to a different restaurant for dinner. Our group went to "Blueberry Hill" which rocked because it coordinated with our color and no other group had that! The food twas yummy too.

Outside of the restaurant

And we're off!

8/20/2011
Picture 1:
Ok, well I'm breaking the rules, it's going to be 3 pictures. But that's because they aren't super interesting and rather stereotypical. But that was kind of the point.

See? I told you. The classic - look! My car is really full of all my crap! shot.

However I felt I needed at least 2 pictures to kind of portray this idea. Although no picture I took from any angle seemed to exactly capture it :/

 Then I was playing with my doggies for one last time (ahhh I miss them!!) and got this surprisingly good shot of Lily. Usually Pringles is the photogenic one. Awwww isn't she adorable?

I'm going to miss you sooooo much Samantha! Don't leave meee

Did you know stressed backwards spells desserts?

Well it certainly is a terrible oxymoron of sorts. I'm sure the person who made this happen is silently laughing at the rest of the world's pain as they realize dessert and stress have no similar associations and all the stressed out people in the world actually want is dessert. Chocolate. Rich, dark, fudgey, delicious, chocolate. AND THEY CAN'T HAVE IT BECAUSE THEY HAVE TOO MUCH DAMN STUFF TO DO. Ok, maybe that's just me.
Maybe the realization of this was meant to calm the normal human being. To give them something light in a dark and stressed out world. Then again, I'm not a normal human being.

If you can't tell I'm a bit stressed out. That's what being an incoming college freshman does to you. Especially when you is me. And you are driving down to your college with literally EVERYTHING. TOMORROW. Big things down to little hair clips and pencils and paperclips and all of that crap. You also have a skating test tomorrow morning. You hate testing. It scares the bajeebers out of you. This past week you have been running around like a monkey with a screwdriver freaking out and hitting everything in your way. You've probably scared a lot of young children. You've lost so much of your mind that half the time you don't even know who you are, or who you're freaking out at now. Oops.

Anyway, I'm not going to go much further, this has already become a bit of a diary entry and I don't want to scare away the crowd of no one actually reading this. But I just thought I'd let you into a bit of the mindset of a girl, 18, leaving for college the very next day. Combined with lots of other fun stressful things happening in her life that very same week and even day. Introduce you to what is to hopefully become a slightly kept up photo blog. Oh isn't life just joyous?

My oh my, the (invisible) blogs from this quarter... (fav blog post)

So the year is wrapping up and that thought goes through me head: blogs.

As we started junior theme I was told that we should be doing a blog about junior theme now, and somehow that translated to the fact that we didn't need to do as many blogs, even though I knew I was wrong. As the month of April continued on I was the most busy I'd been in a long time. Junior theme, plus busy in other classes, plus lots and lots of skating going on. After forgetting one week, the pattern went on. It saddens me because I really liked blogging, and I wish I had been a better student and remembered, however I was not, and I am very sorry for that.

So I guess my favorite blog is my most recent. Yes it is really the only real blog I have, but I still like it a lot. When I started writing it I didn't realize the depth I would go and as I was writing and researching it was fun for me to do that research and learn and connect it to ideas we have talked about throughout the year.

Blogging this year has been a fun new experience. I've never kept a constant blog before and it really taught me consistancy and focus, or at least how much is needed. I felt myself listening to the news more, and critically thinking about the world around me, even as my consistancy in blogging went downhill. I'm really glad we did blogging this year, because even though I myself wasn't completely able to keep up, I know many people were and I still learned from it and had a lot of fun.

PHEW. I think that was longest "favorite blog post" ever.

Disappearing Diversity (LOST)

As we have been talking about in class throughout the year, heightening with Mr Bolos's "TV Tokenism", there is a prominent issue of race in television. We talked about the TV show LOST and how it started out with this huge diversity of characters, a very powerful and good part of the show, but as it came to the end all the ethnic characters had been killed off and all the white people were left.

In my ventures to watch the anticipated LOST series finale, there was a little "pre-show" lets call it. The "pre-show" had the two writers and some of the actors/actresses talking and reflecting upon their experiences. A huge part of this pre-show was to explain how diverse and amazing the cast was, how they had been flown in from so many places and represented so many people. The writers however failed to mention the fact that they killed off all these characters. Obviously the fact that they started out so "diverse" made them think that they had done their job and could now kill them all off so they can play with their more "relatable" characters, as Mr Bolos talked about with the "key audience".

The even more interesting part to me was hearing the actors and actresses real accents. For example, Naveen Andrews played Sayid, a former Iraqi torturer. In the TV show Sayid is given an Iraqi accent, yet in real life he has a very strong British accent. This completely shocked me. Here I was on the show, taking him by appearance and believing this accent, yet the "diversity" is all just created by the false accent. As I researched Naveen Andrews I found out another interesting fact: he is actually of Indian decent, not Iraqi. Again, here I was believing the false Iraqi background and accent and they actually took a British man of Indian decent. 
Also, Jin, played by Daniel Dae Kim, is an American born actor who actually had to learn Korean, and fake his Korean-American accent. And his Korean is apparently so bad that he is laughed at by native Koreans (although this is a "fact" from my father, so it's not completely trustworthy).

As I researched these actors I realized a very interesting thing. Even if a show looks diverse, it's not necessarily what it seems. Yes, American shows are going to have American actors, but it can be quite deceiving when actually watching a show. You don't realize that the, say, Chinese people on your American TV show are just barely fumbling over their new basic Chinese skills, or that the Italian on your show is faking an Italian accent and is actually from Canada.

And the writing begins...

So we started writing. Eek.
I initially was having a lot of trouble just getting started because I couldn't figure out a thesis. Mostly I couldn't figure out what to do about the "sex education" part of my paper. I encountered so many different opinions that I couldn't quite find substantial evidence for one side. I'm still kinda working on that...

Now as our body paragraphs, or newly termed "paragraph blocs", are starting I'm starting with the media portion of my essay and will later rearrange. However, I'm having difficulty deciding what my different paragraphs in my "bloc" are going to be about. I was originally going to separate the media into, obviously, different types of influencing media like TV or movies or music, etc. Yet I was starting to feel a trend in how they each effected the teenagers and figured maybe I could organize my paragraphs that way. But as I started to focus on it that way, the lines between the ideas were very blurred and I realized I think I still need more sources. Yay more researching!
Which creates a question of mine:
How many sources should we have in each paragraph? And can those sources be repeated within the paragraph blocs?

So that's my issue of the moment, and I hope I can start to figure it out tonight as I rewrite a bit.