Laziness

Often times getting the ideas you have in your head down on paper proves to be a much more difficult task than originally anticipated. After reading Helen Keller's "Story of My Life," saying this statement seems to be ridiculous.
I have been lucky enough to grow up in a time where technology is used more often than not for almost everything, writing this by hand seems so foreign to me. I have access to multiple resources such as the internet, the ability to type and use tools like spelling and grammar check. Helen grew up in the 1800's where none of this existed and it was not uncommon for people to be illiterate.
 Now take into account the fact that she was also blind and deaf. Despite living with such great adversities and knowing only the words her teacher had taught her, Helen turned out to be a strong and inspirational woman with a love for writing. And this makes me wonder if our generation truly has become lazy. Now I know Helen's case may be a bit extreme, but it seems as though nowadays if the internet is down, or a computer crashes it becomes the end of the world fro some people, and why? because we've become reliant. Even I must admit that writing this down and editing it on paper seemed to be a gruelling task and I would have preferred to have just typed it, so I am not an exception to the lazy stereotype. Reading "Story of My life" and comparing my experiences to Helen's did however, open my eyes and give me a lot to think about and consider.

Internet Friends

In this day and age, with countless social media outlets, meeting people and communicating the organic way seems to be almost impossible.

Now I’m going to share with you a little personal story about an encounter I had when meeting someone on the Internet. It was around October 2009 when I started a YouTube channel (and no I’m not going to tell you what it was.) I used this channel as an outlet to share with family and friends videos of myself participating in my sport of choice (while on the topic of anonymity, I am trying to remain anonymous here) and occasionally the odd vlog. Now as I mentioned before, these videos were just meant solely for my family and close friends, but suddenly I noticed my views going up and after a few weeks I had about 20 subscribers. Soon 20 turned into 100, and 100 became 300 and after 2 years I was up to 900. Nine hundred people. Granted, in comparison to the “YouTube celebrities” 900 is not a very significant number, but to me this was huge. So now you’re probably wondering where I’m going with this. Well on my two year journey through owning and maintaining a YouTube account (it had gotten to a point where I was uploading 1-2 times a week) I experienced many of the ups and downs regarding the internet and forming relations with other

So lets address relationships, shall we? My experience with this ended quite well. I ended up meeting a few of my “Internet friends” who have now become some of my closest real life friends. But unfortunately with the Internet, you never really know who you’re talking to. For example catfishing has become somewhat of a phenomenon. With the documentary and now the television show, it really opens your eyes to how many people out there are pretending to be someone else behind an anonymous screen name. Now I have two slightly different opinions on this issue; on the one hand catfishing is where the internet gets weird and creepy and in some instances dangerous, but if you had the opportunity to be someone you couldn’t be in real life or even just an extension of yourself that you would like to be but weren’t totally comfortable being person, wouldn’t you? I must admit, while operating my youtube channel I put on a bit of an "Internet personality." I was much more confident and outspoken because, while I was not anonymous, being behind a computer screen made me feel somewhat safe.While pretending to be a 14 year old girl when you’re really a 40 year old man living in your mothers basement is wrong on more levels than I can count, using the internet to create a version of yourself that perhaps for examples sake exudes confidence whereas you would normally shy away from someone simply asking you the time in person, could just be what everyone needs. When you’re just another screen name, you can be whatever you want.

Unfortunately with being just another screen name, some people forget that there is another person on the other side of that with real feelings. This is where my second point comes in, and here I focus on a negative side of the internet; trolls. Now what a troll is, is a person who deliberately starts a fight just for the sake of attacking someone. Its here were anonymity can take a negative role, people often say things while disregarding race, gender, and religion and people end up getting offended.

So please, with all of this in mind, use your internet anonymity wisely.

           

A rant about writing rants.

So, for this assignment as you all know (assuming no one outside of my class read this) we had to write rants. I have sat down many times to write this and after hours of thinking, typing out ideas and thoroughly exercising my right to push the backspace button I have come to the conclusion that I just don't hate anything enough to type an entire spiel about it. And you know what? It's FRUSTRATING. It's not only frustrating that I can't think of anything to write, but also this assignment in general. On my quest to becoming a better human being, I made the executive decision to not complain about things and take life as it comes at me. I don't like the idea of getting worked up over something that doesn't matter and therefore, I don't have much to talk about here, except for how angry I got while trying to write this. And when I say angry I mean angry.

 I usually don't have trouble writing, I think of an idea, I write it down and then expand on my idea and I've got something sufficient by the end of the day. In this situation? Nothing. Nada. Diddly squat as one might say. (Not me… typing that out actually made me cringe a bit, I just thought it fit with the ridiculousness of this post.) 

As you can imagine, spending hours trying to think of something that drives you crazy and not being able to come with anything significant enough to write four to six hundred words actually makes you go a little crazy. And so here I am, indignantly punching my computer keys and whispering incoherent mumblings, trying to get something down on this page so I can finish this assignment and be done with it. And I would like to point something out, I am not the type to do something just to get it done. Which is another reason why this assignment frustrated me to the core. I couldn't think of a single thing to write and as the deadline approached, I realized I had to get something typed into this box or I would be receiving a zero, cue panic. So now not only am I pulling my hair out over how angry I am at this assignment and myself for trying to save my worries for real life problems (why can't I just be like everyone else and occasionally burst a blood vessel over a person who perhaps shouldn't have received a drivers license) I'm also panicking over not getting anything written. And it's not nice. In fact it's so not nice, I just wrote four hundred words about it. 

Phew, well I am feeling much better now that I have something to post (and after reading it over I've decided that what this post is, is basically the incoherent mumblings I was whispering to myself as mentioned previously) and that I got what had been bothering me off my chest. It is now almost past my bedtime so I am going to end here and say I hope we never have to write rants again. 

(I hope this post reads not... well, dumb.)

(Disclosure: This has nothing to do with the prof of this course. All it is, is a bit of frustration over not being able to think of anything to say. Nothing personal! Hope I didn't offend.)

Imagine for a moment you're 15 again. you're awkward, uncomfortable, still going through that ugly phase, and your social skills are mediocre at best. This is me. well at least the me in the story I'm about to tell you. Winding the clock back, I take you to beautiful Palm Springs California. The sun is beating down on my back, my acne riddled face dewy from sweat, I observe as the man of my dreams (okay boy. He was a boy. But to my 15 year old self he may as well have been a god.) slowly removes his Hollister polo shirt, exposing every detail of his perfectly sculpted (scrawny) physique. he plays with his blond side swept hair before diving gracefully into the pool. I had been sitting safely in the confines of my own condo watching (stalking) quietly for a while by this point and had finally built up enough courage to actually go and say words to this boy. Between him and I stood this short wooden fence, I had it perfectly planned in my mind. I would climb the fence, pause for a moment at the top and pull my soft and luscious (frizzy) locks out of my ponytail, because at 15 thats about as sexy as it gets. I figured that after seeing me perched atop that fence he wouldn't be able to resist my charm and would immediately fall in love with me. I made sure to walk over at the perfect moment, he climbed out of the pool glistening and reached for his towel as I put my foot on the lower level of the fence. When I arrived at the top I noticed him glance in my direction and I knew that this was my moment. I reached my arm behind my head to pull my hair from its restraint, we made eye contact and I felt my heart pound and... and suddenly I'm lying flat on my back in a pile of wooden boards. I had broken the fence. Yep, I was so distracted by the "beauty" of this dude that I didn't even notice the section of fence I had decided to put all of my body weight on was somewhat on the unstable side. So now I'm lying there petrified and incredibly embarrassed with him standing over me (he ran over after watching me plummet to the ground.) He reached his arm out to help me up and the way I saw it I had two options; I could grab his hand and laugh it off like a normal person, or I could curl up in the fetal position for a moment roll over in the most inelegant way and sprint off back to the condo to hide in the darkest corner of my bedroom (this was the option I chose.)
Needless to say I never saw this guy again, I actually didn't leave my room for the duration of my holiday. And now you know the story of one of the most mortifying moments of my life, hows that for an introduction?

hi