Its becoming all to real

I just filled out my housing and first year seminar paperwork for college. I have spent 4 years in high school wondering who my room-mate would be in college, now I know his name is Aaron. I spent my whole school life wondering where I would be going, now I know it is University of Redlands. To be honest, I've spent my whole life wondering and pondering and observing, never once thinking of actually being there, but now that I am; that feeling of excitement is slowly being replaced, its actually a bit scary and daunting to know what lies ahead. There was a bit of safety in it not yet being a reality, still being a high school or middle school kid with more time to be at home. Now that I know exactly how much time I have left at home, it fills me with a ton of anxiety, its pretty weird. Believe me though, with all this said, I am super stoked to finally be going to college and to be able to enjoy what is coming, there is nothing like it, and I can't wait. I guess I'm just starting to understand the significance of all this too, and its pretty big.

What is up with the college catalogues

As we are doing our college catalogue power point, I am finding out the simple and well known truth about the catalogues, they suck. I cant understand a thing about them. I take that back, I understood the table of contents, but that was it. Once I was into the different sections, it felt like it didnt correspond with the title the information was under. Its not like im going to harvard or anything, why is this thing so confusing.

College food-pizza

In this blog, I am going to talk about the perfect college pizza. I personally am a plain cheese pizza guy, so I am not gonna be going crazy with toppings, but I will go crazy with other aspects. First, I need a pizza with a thin, crispy crust. I love that stuff. It needs to be a place that will deliver it to my dorm room in sufficient time for it to still be steaming hot, cause I like hot pizza. It also needs to be a lot of pizza for not a lot of money. After that, I guess the only thing left would just be to hope the delivery people are nice people, that would be an added bonus though.

bucket list

As I have read many peoples bucket lists and seen what their interests in life are through them, I have noticed that I have many of the same interests and desires as others. So I want to be a bit different with this bucket list. I swear its not laziness, this is my actual bucket list:
1. Find happiness
2. Never end the pursuit of happiness

Its pretty simple, but how I plan on living my life to the end.

creative blog 3

Its March madness time, a time where people fill out brackets and break down the seedings of title contending teams. There is much effort put into the picking of these brackets. In this blog, I decided to play it a bit differently. So far this year we have read "There eyes were watching god," "Pride and Prejudice," "Hamlet," "Heart of Darkness," "The Metamorphosis," and "The Stranger." If there were others, I don't remember, and just like the real tournament, if you cant be remembered, your not in the tournament. Just like the tournament, I am seeding these books with my obvious bias, but also a small portion of judgment being made based upon the class's response to the books as well. So, here are the seeds: 6-Heart of
Darkness, 5-There eyes were watching god, 4-The Stranger, 3-Hamlet, 2-Pride and Prejudice, 1-The Metamorphosis. Like the actual committee, I wont give any reasons for why I have these "teams/books" seeded where there are. I will give my potential upset picks though, they lie in seeds 3 and 4. So there's my bracket, now you get to pick em, and lets see how it all shakes out.

creative blog 2

Back to the idea of Conformity. As I sit in class, I notice the enormous emphasis on using the Internet to advance our learning. We are using vehicles such as blogs, chat-rooms, and cork-boards. This is all great stuff and makes what we are learning that much more enjoyable. One thing it makes me think about though is how big a role the Internet is beginning to play in our lives. I recently made a Facebook page. It took me longer than most to create one. So far it has gone pretty well with the people already on congratulating me for finally joining the club so to speak. One reason I never had one though was because I felt conformist if I did have one. This might just be an unfounded thought, but what if education, as it evolves into an Internet based institution, will be sucked into the vortex of cyberspace all together; and the Internet being the dominant force in education will be just as common place as people wearing clothes. Just a thought

creative blog 1

In class we have talked about two major themes of our world; college and conformity. One aspect I elaborated on a bit in my essay was that I have gone through an acceptance to conform to the "need" to go to college. I have never once questioned my parents or my teachers when college comes up in conversation. As I began this process of writing this essay, I noticed that I conformed to the social necessity to be a college grad as a means to be successful in life.

intro paragraph for conformity

The last thing any one of us wants to do is conform. As humans, we have a need to be unique, and have something to distinguish ourselves from everyone else. One questions persists though through our quest to be our own person; what is conforming. Conformity seems to differ in definition depending on who you ask. Conformity has also seemed to have changed over time. We can see this change through literary works such as "Metamorphosis" by Kafka and "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen.

main idea and conformity

My main idea for the upcoming essay is to focus on the evolution of conformity over time. I will be looking at how conformity has changed from Gregors time to now. As far as the classroom conformity goes, the big idea I took from our discussions was the debate over what is conformity versus a necessary tool to proceed in life. We talked about certain things we learn and whether it is conformists to learn this way or necessary.

leaderless group discussion

the leaderless group stuff was a very interesting exercise. It definitely forced me to speak more and express what was on my mind. I will say that while the group was interesting, I'm not sure from a production side of things, how affective we were. We somewhat mulled on meaningless topics for a little while. I feel that leaders are definitely needed, but the level of leadership can be brought down from the teacher student dynamic to something closer to what we had in class, but not quite that free in my mind.

Intro Paragraph for Conrad

Marlow's journey into the Heart of Darkness clearly didn't come without serious repercussions. His mind was tested and pushed as far as it could go. He was left to bare witness to Kutz's fall into insanity. His own mind began to lose it's touch with reality, but he was able to escape before it was too late. As a reader, we can observe what is happening without ever being in the actual situation. We often will associate neurotic behavior and detach ourselves from the characters and the author. Ross Murfin and Fredrick Karl presented a different view point. They displayed a platform of dropping the facade that we aren't like these characters. Once we do, we realize how similar we are to them, and begin to put ourselves in their positions. When this happens, we are forced to challenge ourselves as if we are in the boat going down the river, and wonder what we would do.

Psychological journey

It is evident that the journey Marlow went on severely altered his mind. His constant struggle to articulate events as well as his repetition and out of order speech are evidence of his mental disturbance. He started the journey a confident man, but came back damaged and unable to comprehend what happened exactly on his horrid journey.

Blog 6

Kurtz was sending a warning through the painting. He was trying to convey that this lighted torch that represents the western values is being led by a blind source. The english who are attempting to bring their lifestyle to Africa are blind to facts that by doing so, they are causing more kaos then they are help.

#2 on page 429, Heart of Darkness

Marlow offers an account of England in Roman times to describe and show the similarities between then and now, England and Africa. Marlow is equating the Roman citizens who as punishment were sent to England, as in his day, English men going to Africa. He views Africa very unfavorably, and views it as his own banishment and prison that he is about to go to.