So Much School Soo Little Time

       

            Every day my whole day is filled with writing and reading and punching a calculator. It is so hard to keep up with all my work but somehow I am averaging "B's" in everything. By everything I am talking about English, math, Spanish, Women Across Cultures, and Racial and Ethnic Minorities, these are the classes I am taking this semester. I do have my hands full but luckily I don't have to work because Veterans Affairs pays tuition and pays for my housing while I am in school full time.

           Spending my days like this is much different than the days that I am used to. I am from Sedona, AZ and I have to say I miss it. I miss it so much that I often wonder if what I am doing now is worth being away from what I love most. First off my family is in Sedona and the Verde Valley, and so is fishing, hiking, swimming in fresh spring water, and a beautiful waterfall only a couple of hours away. I have to say the smell of pollution, stuck up people, and horrible traffic is definitely not keeping me here in the big city.

 

         One morning I awoke it and was pouring rain, the skies were black. A little later in the day my girlfriend and I drove to the store. The roads were soaking wet and the sky was gray, my girlfriend being a Phoenix native turned to me and said "mm-mm...I love how it smells after it rains." This grossed me out because when it rains in Sedona you smell Juniper Trees and Mesquite Trees. You smell clean red rocks and clean red dirt. You wonder how I can say "clean" dirt, in Sedona there is nature and wholeness, untouched and unscathed by humans and industrialism. You don't see a grey cloud of dirty pollution and you don't smell dirty oily asphalt when it rains. Wow has life changed, living in this city, and going to school, using my brain and not my hands.

       My father and I work together when I live up North. We do just about anything and everything when it comes to peoples properties. We will remodel your house, landscaping, or maintenance your air conditioning. This full scale of work has taught me what it takes to successfully use my hands, body, and creativity to perform many tasks and problems. I am in school now so that I can be successful financially and understand the business side to what I already know hands on. My favorite part of working with my dad is being outside, hanging out with my dad, creating things that people imagined and we build it. I love using my strength to move boulders and carry logs, I have found now that  I do not do this type of work I am missing out on a huge stress reliever.

        Being in the sun is to me the best feeling in the world. I love feeling the heat on my back as the sun is beaming down on me. When you can feel your body releasing the toxins you take in on a daily, your body  perspiring and sweat dripping to the floor. The color you are when your skin is touched by the sun day after day. I sit in my office day after day now typing and scribbling and speaking Spanish into a microphone. When this is all over not only will I be proud of what I have done, I will have so much to look forward to. This also being my motivation to finish school accordingly and be back to my normal days in Sedona.

Assigned Entry #1 Blah Blogging

    Blogging is made for all of us, whether I like to believe it or not. This is definitely not my cup of tea and only because I want to become a better writer... And get a good grade do I have this blog. I think the way my voice will come across intimidates me and I think it will sound one-sided and in a way ethnocentric. I like things a certain way and I have a hard time letting someone try even when they try to do it my way. Kind of like assignments that you are told what to write about but use your own creativity and imagination. I am sure as a professor or a teacher when giving assignments you really never know what you are going to get, as everyone is so vastly different. I went on a hunt for blogs and this is what I concluded......  

    I always look for what I think is the best of the best. The New York Times is one of the most reputable papers in the history of writing. When looking for blogs to get a feel for perception, voice and tone I came across the blogging area of the New York Times -http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/  . This blog in particular gives you hints to make your writing better. I think this person sounds confident and their writing stands out to me because of the vocabulary they use. When Nugent writes "I got into a master’s program in fiction and moved to a college town on the prairie. On my stipend, I was able to live like an unprosperous gentleman-landowner of 19th-century Russia. There was nothing to do besides read, write, reflect on God and drink. It was a circumstance favorable to writing fiction.But it was also conducive to depravity, the old Calvinist definition thereof: a warping of the spirit."  I see how much I can grow as a writer and look at this as a goal. I do like this blog because I feel like it will help me strive to become a better writer, it is well written and comes from a reputable website.

    I searched and searched and then realized there is a type of blog I love more than anything and I don't know if you would consider it one but I do. This is the website https://soundcloud.com , it is a music blog where artist upload their latest tracks and people with soundcloud accounts can comment on exact seconds of the track. This gives the artist the opportunity to hear direct feed back (good or bad) at precise moments of their music. This goes to show there are endless ways to blog or get people to participate in blogs. My favorite song as of now, it is always changing, is https://soundcloud.com/thisistrapmusic/adele-skyfall-wiggznwonz-young-piff-sandor . This is a newer style of music that is called trap. I love music and this would be one way to keep me going back to someones blog, especially if they had a new song to check out every time I read about what they were doing.  

    I read some of the blogs on http://phoenix.craigslist.org/ and I have to say there is so much potential, they just have no regulations. I was trying to read about some pretty serious issues that I was interested in, and it really sucks that people have to be immature and post things about porn and tons of negative feedback that is a total waste for people trying to find facts. I was reading about HIV/AIDS and people insist on smashing on minorities, blaming them instead of reaching out a hand to end the spread of HIV. Everyone has their right to opinion but I believe there is a time and a place for it and http://phoenix.craigslist.org/ doesn't have the man power to regulate all that is being said. If you want a raw blog with no hold backs than craigslist is a good way to see the ignorant, uneducated side of the world.

    As you can see I found some pretty diverse things to read about and the sites I went are completely different styles of blogs than the ones we are used to seeing. I look forward to checking out your blogs, have a great day and thanks for reading. 

-Crashed out Crash