Africa...oh my

So ever since I was little I've always known that I was not meant to be in Wisconsin. I never knew what it was, but I knew that I was not supposed to stay here.

I never did any real traveling other than when we went on ski trips to upper WI, MN and MI, and even bordering the fabulous Canadians..but that was really it. I went on my first big trip my senior year of high school to Myrtle Beach, SC with some friends. I had just had my surgery and had to walk on the beach with my huge black protective boot. I felt like the coolest person...spending $250 to go on a road trip with friends and lay on the beach. I had a blast and realized I really, really liked the south.

I have since only been on two other trips. One was Washington, D.C. last summer with the Royal Purple. I went with my three closest friends there and we had an unexplainable amount of fun. I appreciate every single thing that experience taught me (including that the university doesn't reimburse you if you tip over 15%!) I really learned and loved so much about that city, but it wasn't the hospitality and love I experienced from the people down south. I then went over winter break in January to New Orleans, LA to rebuild homes and lives of those who lost everything during Hurricane Katrina, which was over the summer of 2005. I've never seen devastation that has lasted that long. So many of the people around the U.S. have forgotten about what happened. It makes my heart hurt even more for those who were affected by the tsunami. I re-fell in love with the south. New Orleans has a sort of love and hospitality for its visitors. They know that visitors bring in money, money that the city needs to rebuild the town.

My sister Erin, who is turning 27 this year, dated Gbenga, who was from Nigeria, a couple of years ago. They were friends for a year through church. Gbenga's story of how he came to the U.S. was out of pure luck. He was working at a paper factory back in Nigeria, and a professor from UW-Madison came in to get some things copied and printed. They got to talking, and she learned that Gbenga had been going to school for a year, then taking off and working to pay his way for the next year. She was obviously inspired by his story, and she brought him back to the U.S. under grants for UW-Madison to learn. He then joined the church, met my sister, and they were friends for a year before dating. They dated for a short amount of time, and I appreciated meeting him. He taught me a lot about West African cultures and customs. He was from an extremely small town. He had never heard of a restaurant because "you could never trust anyone other than your own family to cook your food for you." He ate food from both my plate and my family's plate because he loved to share. He told stories and made me so interested in his life. He told me Africa was beautiful and that I'd really love it there, he could tell. From that moment on, I knew I needed to go.

Having the two speakers in class on Thursday really helped pique my interest. I have always wanted to go to Africa. Not South Africa (even though it is a fashion capitol of the world), but to travel around and see the world as I've never seen it. The warmth and love I saw exchanged among the speakers really made me realize that I need to go. It's not really an option. I just need to figure out how and when and all of the small parts. I need to go.

The Future of Journalism

I feel like reading that article was like having yet another lecture from Sam Martino on the fact that "the Internet is the information superhighway." I know it sounds bad, but ever since my first day at the Royal Purple in October 2007, I have heard that speech. That article is already old news. How ironic.

Journalism's a dying breed, at least the hard-hitting hot-off-the-press journalism that many professors are still attempting to teach. I believe that of course, as with many other things, people are turning to the Internet for their news sourcing. Even this semester, people have turned to RoyalPurpleNews.com for their campus briefing, and it's been totally great and completely what Martino predicted. He's a wise man, even if he tells me the same thing two minutes apart.

I think the article is right in saying that the journalism "pros" have no idea what's going to be happening in ten years. It's the students that I'm surrounded by today that will decide what's happening in the entire business. We're losing great papers. Minnesota and Chicago have had hard-hitting, hot-off-the-press news, but it wasn't enough to keep them afloat. We all need to start thinking out of the box. I guess I'm lucky that I'm getting a degree that can put me in the journalism world and the art world, because I'm not sure where the rocky road will lead in ten years.

New technologies and outsourcing

Of course with globalization comes outsourcing. Why pay a US doctor full when you can pay an Indian doctor half? That's a common thing in the world we live in today.

As for academic dishonesty and buying papers off the Internet, I have heard of it. The only close case I know of personally comes from a friend of mine who goes to school out of state. His friend said he'd pay him fifty bucks if he wrote him a paper on mudslides. Said friend of mine then got drunk and wrote that mudslides are worse than tsunamis and earthquakes combined. His friend got a C on the paper and was thrilled. Clearly a terrible example, but I digress.

I guess the whole "buying papers off the Internet" thing is totally bizarre to me. I worked extremely hard to get into college, probably harder than most students going to Whitewater. I would not once even take the slightest chance of having everything taken away from me because I decided to procrastinate and get hammered instead of working on a project or paper. Hello - we're paying around $50 per class period to be a full-time Whitewater student...what a waste if you're just using your parents money or loan money to party all the time!

I have a professor who has us electronically turn in our papers without our names on them so that he can submit them to databases to see if we stole our information. I say more power to him. I work hard so that I can get the grades I have, and if someone else in the class is getting a 100% on a paper they didn't write and we're then curved off of that, then I have a huge problem with it.

Media and Social Structure

The media has always in a way controlled our social structure, but I'd probably say it's more up to the family or the ones who raise us in the way we act in public.

I have always been outspoken and I give that credit to my mother and my siblings. My brother was born unable to speak until age 6, and my sister was diagnosed with echolalia, a disorder in which she could only repeat what was said to her. Since my brother spoke in screams, she would repeat. Who did I have to learn from? The best, clearly. I was pushed ahead a grade and told I was extremely intelligent, yet I constantly spoke out of turn and had "social butterfly" written on every report card into high school. My mom didn't rear me as a child and tell me not to stop talking. She told me to get average grades and to speak my mind, and that's what I did. The media and my surroundings showed me friends who got paid for each A they received. I didn't really follow that. My way of living when it came to how I acted was kind of shaped by what I was interested in at the time, which I can definitely blame on the media. My crazy black and pink hairstyle, my weird plaid pants and my latter following stage of long skirts and not wearing shoes have eventually mellowed, but in high school I was pegged by others (who learned from the media) that I was rebelling.

Now, as a college-educated adult in society, I believe society and media really begin to come to play. I am shaped by what I see in the norms. I show up to interviews and presentations in a pantsuit. I keep consistent eye contact per the cultural norms of my society.

I guess it comes down to aging when I think about the social structure. I could not have cared less about what anyone thought of me in high school, but I am aware of how I am presenting myself now at an adult age.