Weekly Assesments

I liked having one assignment to do weekly, because I knew what I had to do and when it had to be done. And they weren't hard, and the readings weren't long. It was much better than indefinite assignments, or multiple ones throughout the week like the ones I got from other teachers.

Using Google Drive

I was already familiar with Google before this class, and had an account and used Gmail. But I LOVED that the prof required everything to be Google Docs! I don't have Word because I can't PAY for it so when teachers require Word documents I have to use online converters and it's a lot of extra work. But using Google Drive makes it 100% easier to turn stuff in and collaborate on group projects.

Blogging

I like blogging in this class. I never had before, nor did I follow any blogs that weren't on Tumblr. But this has led me to interesting profession blogs, and it also helped me make some friends in the class through comments and posts. Overall I think it's a cool idea.

Doc3 Peer Quotes

I related with Erica Barbour's Doc3 posts the most this week. Her writings on "My inability to do stuff on time" describe me very well. I feel for her not being able to "do anything with my topic of choice". I'm right there with ya Erica! Why did I think I could find sources? Or do anything right? Ever? WHY?! *bangs head against wall* Literally I just keep procrastinating this paper. I'm sitting here with the tab open watching Cake Boss. My week has been so long. I'm ready for some naptime.

Aaaaaaaaand Another Post About the Uncertainty of My Future

I did go to Nashville last weekend to see Belmont University. I've also toured Mercer (not going there though) and Georgia College & State in Milledgeville.

So the question is, will I go to a school 45 minutes away from my house, or 6 hours? Six hours seems like a long time when you're in the car. What if I hate college? If we're being honest, I'm a total baby. I cry so much. And I don't really think it's that bad, I just have a lot of feeling and it comes out in tears. I mean, sometimes I cry when I watch a really good movie, or think about how amazing it is that we are specks of dust in the universe who know how to love. But what if my roommate doesn't get that and just hates me? What if I can't live without my mom?

Belmont is definitely a better school. It's also more expensive. And it has a BFA program, but... I don't know, there are a lot of rich white kids there. And I wouldn't know anyone is Nashville. And getting my degree in four years would take a lot of work. Plus, I don't know if they credit internships there, like the Disney College Program, an experience I'm obsessed with having.

The fact is that Belmont would be way more of a risk than GCSU would, and it scares me. I don't know whether to do the safe thing or choose a potentially scary choice. Being a senior isn't as laid back as I thought is was going to be. It's okay. I'll figure it out.

I feel like a lot of my posts end with "I'll figure it out", because that's the place I'm at in my life, where I'm constantly figuring it out, so I 'll end on something different today. Pancakes. There ya go.

The (Peer) Reviews Are In!

I really like peer reviewing in this class. Some people think it's a lot of work for the students, but you know, it'd cool to hear someone who's not the professor give their opinions on your papers. No offense, Professor Hamon. I also like giving advice because it feels like I'm helping someone finish something, and then it's kind of my victory too, you know?

Doc3 (WEE!)

Doc3 has been really hard for me. After I did the Mind Map, instead of starting on it right away, like I usually do with assignments, I had to put if off because I was simply too busy to worry about it. It was tech week before opening night of Annie at Theatre Macon, which meant I was in three-to-four hour rehearsals every night, and then I had my college visit to Nashville, and I could make excuse after excuse as to why I was too busy. I looked up and it was the 15th and I had no draft! I have to say, the most important part of college seems to be time management. Guess who's really bad at time management? Yeah. So that's probably been the hardest part of writing it, not the actual content. Like I said, I've had an outline since the beginning. However, I have no idea how I'm going to turn that outline into a paper and find academic sources (for The Muppets. Yeah. It's a challenge.) in like two days?? I know I'll get it done, I always do. God, I can't wait for break next week.

Favorite Blog

Honestly, my favorite blog was my own. I am pretty charismatic and funny. And I have those cool fish you can feed at the bottom of the page! I feel like I agree with myself on a lot of subjects too, such as in my "Right To Bear Arms" post, when I said "I think life would be easier f all the guns were taken away and replaced with real bears". What a humorous and current point to make. Like Emma, I also read a lot as a child, so I feel that we have a lot in common. I'm so glad this course helped me connect with Emma.We will be best friends forever.

Rewriting Documents

I love that we have the chance to rewrite in this course. Some of us are unclear on expectations the first time around, and it's useful to have another try. And some of us also have group members who inexplicably seem to be dead, who won't write their parts of the paper and won't respond to emails. So the whole "having another try" thing gives me time to cover for them by doing their work...again. So that's fun.

I'm sorry this is really passive-aggressive. But being aggressive-aggressive didn't work with this person who hasn't been in class in two months. I saw him on campus yesterday going to my other class, and he had the gall to look at me and smirk. And I just stared at him with the passionate heat of a thousand suns, burning him slowly to ashes.

Rainy Days

I love this weather so much!! I can't stand humidity, which isn't good if I want to work down in Florida and everything...yikes. But I like hot summer rains, when it feels like the whole earth is letting out a drenching sigh of relief, and I like winter-fall rains, when it's cold enough for sweaters and foggy breath and great blanketed skies. And we're finally getting appropriately-November-cold.I felt like I was being cheated out of autumn, a little.

Also I'm excited because I'm doing a COLLEGE VISIT this weekend to Belmont University in Nashville...I'm going to look at their performance degree, but I don't really think I want to get a degree in performance, I want to do theatre management. I think Columbus State has theatre management, but I also want to go out of Georgia. Idk, on the other hand, Nashville is all artsy and cool but something like seven hours away. Not sure if I'm ready to be that far away. It's really hard to think about all this. Living on my own and stuff. I feel like there's no way I can ever be prepared for something like that. But it's coming! Woo.

Child/Adult Conflict

There will always be some level of conflict between children and adults. Both have the uncanny ability to be completely themselves: children never think of when they will be adults, and adults have trouble picturing themselves as children. This creates a kind of gap that can't really be filled unless the two meet in the middle.

"Childhood Games"

So did everyone but me play hopscotch or red rover as a kid? I most definitely did not. I had more important things to do. Instead, I actually spent 85% of elementary school reading.  I believe this came from having an English teacher for a father and a women's studies teacher for a mother (she has a degree in literature).

Yep, this was me at fourteen months.

Don't get me wrong, I had Hi Ho Cheeri-o and Candyland (I always cheated so I could get the Queen Frostine card), but the shelves in my room were stacked with books. Dr. Seuss, Curious George, and Maisy the Mouse were my friends in preschool. My mom told me that before I could read, when I was a toddler, I would take books off shelves and flip through them, looking at the pictures and pretending to read words I didn't know out loud in gibberish. And it continued in the same way throughout elementary school, really, with me always having a couple books with me. I brought books on field trips, in case we had down time. I read on the bus and at lunch.

I think it was really a way to escape to wherever I wanted to be. I used to reading as a way to control my environment. If I wanted to be in a fantasy land, then I could open a book and be there. But that fixation also made me a romantic, and a general purist. When I got to high school, I thought life could never be enough for me or measure up the way books did. And maybe that's true, that life will never be like a book. But I am really glad I loved reading for so long (still do! I just don't carry three to five books on my person anymore). I think it's made me educated, and it did give me a way to escape in the darker points of middle school. At some point, I had to wake up, right? To the real world. Those were my childhood games- the ones I played with reality.

Writing With Empathy

Writing is a way to communicate, and as such, you need to approach it with communication skills. I believe writing with empathy is one of these skills. Empathy in writing comes across as respect for different points of view. Respecting your audience and maybe not throwing your own opinions in their faces. We practiced this some in our Wikipedia articles, but that was just for the sake of professionalism and contribution to an unbiased source. It's good form to incorporate into all your writing.

Right to Bear Arms (ROAR!)

Can you believe the people in the South who would rather lose the freedom of religion than their right to keep deadly weapons that cause millions of deaths every year in the U.S. in their homes?

I think that question sums up my opinion on the matter.

I think life would be easier if all the guns were taken away and replaced with real bears. They would be significantly less dangerous in the hands of Southerners. I couldn't be that cruel to the bears, though.

Family conflict

Family life can be hard. Not for me, but for some people, I'm sure. Like Sarah Vowell.

My parents are both democrats. They may not understand some of the new gender and sexuality plectrums, but for the most part they're accepting of them. They don't like gun violence, they're feminist and unbiased. So we get along pretty well. 

A family that isn't mine.

One time I really wanted a magic spinning fairy wand from a booth at the fair and they told me "Maybe later", so I tried to get them to go back and buy it for me when we were walking to the car, and they said no. That wasn't a fun day for me. But I was seven, so it wasn't as traumatic as you might think.

"Nuclear" family

I know nuclear means immediate family, but I have a great, uneventful relationship with my family, so I thought, what if I compared them to a nuclear explosion? They're not, of course. We are some of the calmest people you will ever meet. We are all artists, writers and illustrators and singers and actors, but like I said, we have a constant, even relationship. If anything, I was the nuclear explosion a few years ago. " ", writes Manning. I've got to say I know a little about what that's like. I was a lit fuse ready to blow in my self-identity crisis when I was thirteen and fourteen, trying to dye my hair black and understand the secrets of the universe. No, my family has always been supportive and patient, even through my "hatred" phase (don't lie, we all had one). They were my gas mask in the nuclear disaster of growing up. Wow, that sounded a lot better in my head. No, that was a lie, it didn't. It sounded just as bad.

Others' Posts?

A lot of the posts I saw were pretty sad, and I realized I'm pretty lucky that I'm very close with my family and have two parents who are still married. I could relate to a few: Matthew Griffin wrote about his relationship with his sister, which "could get heated at times", but when she left for college they hugged and knew they loved each other. I have a younger brother that I fight with sometimes, but I know he loves me.
Another one I could relate to was Tiffany's post about how close she is with her family. She writes "A lot of people think I'm weird for not wanting to move out." I still think the world is a little scary, and I'm excited of course, but also a bit nervous to move out next year for my real freshman year.

Info from my Wiki Article

I really don't know what I'm going to write about for this paper, and it's kind of freaking me out. My topic I wrote about was the Muppets in Disney theme parks (I want to work at Disney World while in college, and after college I'd like to work for Muppets Studios, so this was kind of a combination of both of those). I did find out a lot of information (the future of attractions according to the VP of Muppet Studios, for example), but I don't know how to use that for my paper. Maybe I'll argue something from the Disney side rather than the Muppets side. An academic paper about Disney World...I could do that. But what do I argue??

Writer's Block & Tattoos

One of our assignments was to write about two of our classmates' posts. I enjoyed reading a post from Erica Barbour about writer's block, in which Barbour describes the feeling as an "unfortunate disease". I'm not sure why I found that phrasing so funny, but I laughed for a while. She goes on to capture pretty well the frustrations that come with writer's block.

The other post was about tattoos, and was written by Mariah Cummings. Cummings generously included pictures in her posts that show beautiful sketch tattoos of flowers and an eye. Her favorite, and my personal favorite also, is a watercolor tattoo, with beautiful coloring and a wolf. Cummings says under the picture that watercolor is her "favorite kind of tattooing". I agree; I really think watercolor lines and blending are beautiful in tattoos.

Effective Intro to Wiki

A Wikipedia introduction needs to be, above all, informative. The hook that engages the reader can often be new information provided; I've found that works well to captivate the reader and keep them...well...reading. An opening just generally needs to reinforce what they're about to read in the meat of the article, so I'd say keep in simple, interesting, and informative.