Capstone Begins!

     I started taking my capstone class, the one that's supposed to be a culmination of all my work in college, and it is fantastic! I absolutely love who I'll be working with and our professor/mentor is supportive and cares about both the product and the experience. We'll be looking at "Words + Image = Picture" as our theme and I got really excited to work with movies and children's adaptations and all sorts of combinations of literal images juxtaposed against words and the images created through text.
     The first thing I thought of was "It's like when they picked Daniel Radcliffe to be Harry Potter!" Now, I do like Daniel Radcliffe as HP, but he isn't what I pictured when I read the first book in my head. I don't remember anymore what I imagined him to look like, but it certainly wasn't like in the movie. Similar things have happened with other stories I've seen turned into movies: Eragon, the Lord of the Rings series, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days, just to name a few.
     Now we've received the syllabus and had a chance to look through the books. There are books about photography, there are short essays, there are long essays, there are works about works about pain, there are photographs, there are novels: the scope of the writing is amazing and I am so excited to take the class and start working on my final project that I don't know what to do with myself.
     We started work right on Day 1, collecting work from throughout our lives and condensing it into a single portfolio that will be the "Portrait of a English Major". From this work we will develop our personal statements to be read when we present our final papers--the climax of each student's work in the English Department. So far my portfolio was 99 pages long, and I still can add to it (for which I am grateful, I'm taking a couple classes I want to add into the mix).
     I am nervous that I'll get too wrapped up in the fun of this work and lose track of my other classes, or that I'll swamp myself with more than I can chew. But this is what life is about: taking the chances and making mistakes while there's someone who can pick me up and say "Might want to try that another way." I go to Day 3 in the morning and have my first conference with my professor after class. I'm excited, nervous, and ready to get rolling on this project.

Just a thought....
Stephie

Patriot Day

     Today was an interesting day: eleven years ago four air planes were hijacked in flight and used as weapons in an attack on the United States. Now, I know that most of what I truly know about 9/11 is filtered through a childhood lens and what I've since been told by the media and my parents, but I did live through one of the most traumatic events of the last thirty years.
     Everyone says you remember where you are when it happens. It's true: I had just turned eleven years old,  my sister and brother and I were at daycare while my dad was at work and my mom was in Turkey on a trip for work. We were just getting to the "big kid center" when our supervisor/teacher got a call. It was the daycare's main base--where the younger kids stayed while the school-aged kids waited for time to leave--telling her to check the news. She turned on the television and the image of the smoking towers was everywhere.
     We stood in shock: what happened? What did that mean for a bunch of kids living three thousand miles away? What was going to happen next? It was a bigger question for my sister and me; what would happen to us? Both of our parents were in the military and any attack on the United States meant they could be sent anywhere around the world. The most difficult part for us was that neither of our parents could be reached... All military bases were on lockdown--nothing goes in or out (people, equipment, non-military communication)--and even they couldn't get a hold of some places overseas.
     It turned out that my dad wouldn't be going anywhere (he had three children at home and his wife was overseas) but my mom wouldn't be coming home either. Mom ended up coming home several weeks later than expected, and no one knew how long anyone was going to stay. My siblings and I ended up going to school as normal, going home, and staying with an aunt while Dad worked.
     We later learned that there were more than just the two planes we'd seen on the television: one landed in the Pentagon wiping out thousands of lives, and another was commandeered by the passengers, who diverted the plane from its destination in the White House to a field in Pennsylvania. Those passengers are now considered national heroes and are remembered for the lives they saved.
     It's sort of terrifying to think that all of those events, events that have driven our country into a decade-long military conflict and caused a significant change in how we live our daily lives, were so long ago. I am now twenty-two and have spent half my life living in a world where the people are scared to death of anyone different. If the attack on the United States hadn't happened, would we have moved beyond caring about what a person looked like or where their ancestors lived? Or would we still ignore the actions of truly amazing people just because they look or speak or come from somewhere different than us?

Just a thought....
Stephie

Tea! The Morning Pick-Me-Up

No, this is not my tea set. But I do wish it were.

     Some people drink coffee, some people drink soda, but I am one of those people who drink tea. I love my tea, but I kind of fell into it by a process of elimination. Soda is all well and good, but a little too sweet. Coffee has something in it that gives me migraines. Tea is only as sweet as you want it to be, and has the necessary caffeine to wake me up. I was just a little curious about the different types of tea. Here's what I came up with:

• tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world (the first is water)
• drinking tea is good for you -- it's filled with great stuff, even some anti-inflammatory
• tea can help regulate food intake
• it can produce a meditative state and causes an alert and focused calm
• there are white, yellow, green, oolong, black, and post-fermented teas
• most teas in tea bags are blends of different types of tea (but you can get "single estate" teas too)

There's so much more to know about tea, but I'm not going to bore you with it all. I'm off to enjoy my cup of Earl Gray.

Just a thought for a good night...

Stephie