Crunch time

            It’s down to the wire in classes now. All of this nice weather has given me spring fever and it’s so much more appealing to enjoy it instead of doing class work. Because I’ve been choosing to have fun lately instead of balance school and fun, I am currently paying for it. I’m stressed out even more than an average student should be around this time in the semester but I know that in these next two weeks that I’m going to have to suck it up and get it done. We’ve been talking about everything that needs to be done to get an A in English, which includes making a PowerPoint on one of our papers. We’ve also been discussing our portfolio, which I will be trying my hardest to get put together within the next week. On Wednesday we had to write an in-class essay about our contribution to our individual learning and the learning of our other classmates. I will admit that this semester I have not been up to my usual student standards. College is a whole different world from high school and it is so much easier to slack off, which makes it also so much easier to get behind. On Friday, those of us who signed up for an A have to present a PowerPoint for the Student Expo in the library. It's Thursday night and I'm just now making mine, oops. It’s time for me to get all of my stuff together and cram until I can’t think straight. May the curve be ever in your favor as this semester comes to an end.

All Time Low concert: Out of class activity

            For my second out of class activity I went to Richmond to see one of my favorite bands perform for at least the fifth time since I started listening to them back in 2009. I will admit that I skipped Sweeney’s class so that I could get a head start on all the errands I had to run before leaving for Richmond. Sorry Sweeney! When I left the Richard Bland College campus that day I had to go pick up my check from Shoe Carnival because even after over two years of working there, I have yet to sign up for direct deposit. I also squeezed a visit to Verizon into my busy schedule because the week before spring break I dropped and cracked my iPhone :( According to one of the sales associates there, because I cracked the screen moisture is able to get into the crack and mess up the way my phone works, which explains why my phone will randomly not send and receive texts. I have insurance on my phone but have been too broke recently to pay the money to get a new one so for now I’m just dealing with a broken phone. Once my best friend got out of school, we were off to Richmond. We got there around 4 o’clock and decided to go eat an early dinner at Galaxy Diner. After dinner we drove over to The National where the concert was being held. Once the concert started, we patiently waited for the other bands whom we were not at all familiar with to finish their performances. Finally when All Time Low took the stage the crowd went wild. They played an absolutely amazing set for a sold out show. After the show ended Danielle and I made our way to McDonald’s for a late night snack. We ended up getting home around three in the morning, and after such a long day I had never been happier to lay in my bed.

The struggle is real

          Monday’s are never good, especially when it’s the first day back to classes after spring break, and ESPECIALLY when the weather sucks! With those crappy factors making Monday worse than it usually is, all I could think was “CHOO CHOO! All aboard the struggle bus”! I don’t know how I managed to roll out of bed that morning but I made it happen. As the day went on it was just a blur to me and I was overly excited to be finished after English that day. The Rape of the Lock was yet another weird story that we had to discuss on Wednesday. Sweeney helped us out by helping us pick out a ton of words that went along with the story and putting them all up on the board. After we finished doing that we picked our own groups for once and had to answer a question about the story. All of the groups answered their question and then shared their answers with the other groups. Sweeney cancelled class on Friday because a family issue came up and asked us to watch J.K. Rowling’s Ted Talk about failure in life, but also the fear of it in life, writing and education. 

Spring break

           The beach is a typical spring break vacation destination but I prefer to spend my spring break about 15 minutes away from the nearest beach in Wilmington, North Carolina. My dad’s side of the family lives in North Carolina and I have always referred to it as my second home. Ever since I was younger, my cousin and I have been inseparable regardless of our four year age difference. She shares a house with two other roommates, five dogs and a cat. As most girls do, we shopped on a few different occasions. We both played softball growing up so we decided to reconnect with our past and played around one night. Even though it was my spring break, it was not hers so while she was in class I used my time wisely and worked on biology homework. Downtown Wilmington is one of my favorite places in Wilmington itself. There’s a bunch of cute little boutiques and it’s the perfect place to people watch on a nice sunny day. While my cousin and I were there, we got sushi for lunch and people watched by the Cape Fear River. Later on that day we got ice cream from my new favorite ice cream shop, it’s called Kilwins and it was absolutely fantastic. As my week with my cousin ended I was sad to say “see ya later” because she will be making a trip to Virginia the week after we get out of school for summer vacation!

Baseball weekend: Out of class activity

            As the lovely month of March began it brought us closer and closer to a spring break that many of us students so desperately needed. During that first weekend, I attended a few baseball games that made me long for spring break even more. A week or so ago, I received a “Guess what” text from a boy that I had dated over the summer. He plays college baseball up in the Washington D.C. area and because of all the recent snowy and messy weather that we had been experiencing, his games that weekend had been moved to a different location. It really is a small world and that weekend was a perfect example to proven it because his baseball games had been moved to the baseball stadium in Colonial Heights. It had been about eight months since we had last seen each other and I had always wanted to go see one of his baseball games, so that’s what I did with my weekend. He pitched the game on Saturday night as I froze in the bleachers. The weather was a lot nicer on Sunday morning and the team also pulled out a win in that first game. I had to leave before their second game began because I had to work. I was really glad that I got to see him play and being able to use his baseball games as one of my out of class activities was just a plus!

Ugh

            Before the seventh week of class even began I was ready for it to be over and done with. Monday’s class was cancelled because Sweeney came down with a stomach bug. I was unaware of that until I actually showed up to the class and checked my email. Speaking of our email server, I think that the Outlook app for iPhones sucks. Half of the time it takes forever to load once I open it up and sometimes it says that I need an update, which I assume is why I was not notified of Sweeney’s email. But nonetheless, I was still glad to find out that I had one less class to attend on the worst day of the week. During the middle of the week, we finally finished watching The Glass Menagerie which stayed true to Sweeney’s story choices with its obvious weirdness. Even though it was a quirky movie, I was sad to see it end because I enjoy watching movies in class because it’s like a mini break from school. Sweeney had arranged for us to play Jeopardy on Friday, and it was once again like we had a little break. He grouped us off, like he always does, with people that we aren’t fully familiar with. When it was finally time to play, it shortly became apparent to Sweeney that very few of the students had been keeping up with the book as well as we should have been. He eventually dismissed us from class because we clearly weren’t doing the best job of participating.

Happy Valentine's Day

         Valentine’s Day is today and the lack of class this week was quite the early V Day present! Sweeney was sick on Monday so class was cancelled, but I didn’t know that until I got there and checked the email. Even though I still showed up to class I wasn’t too bummed out because I had been at school since around nine that morning. Wednesday was a rough draft day so Sweeney separated the class into groups so that we could talk about our papers and help each other out. I had forgotten to print out my rough draft so I talked about what I had written my paper on and how I had struggled with it. When I got home that day I decided to work on my paper some more but then I ended up changing my paper completely. The winter weather that we’ve been experiencing this year hit us again on Wednesday night, so much that Thursday classes were quickly cancelled. Slushy snow is the worst, so I was rather disappointed with the rainy weather on Thursday. With the help of the cold temperatures, the rain eventually turned to snow and class was cancelled again for Friday! I was so excited to have yet another day off from school.

Scavenger hunt

          The third week of Sweenglish class was not at all what I had expected it to be, although I will admit that I was relieved to have somewhat of a break. During class on Monday, we participated in a scavenger hunt so that we could become better acquainted with our library and its resources. After our groups had found all of the things on our lists, we had to share what we found with the rest of the class so that we could all know a few new things about the library. Thankfully on Wednesday, school was cancelled because of the snow. During the snow day I could’ve spent the day being productive and getting some of my homework out of the way but instead I just relaxed with my dog and watched a movie or two. Once we came back to class on Friday we had to discuss “The Chrysanthemums” because the wonderful snow day had put us a little behind. Like most other stories that we had read this far, “The Chrysanthemums” was an odd story that was a little hard to understand. After a long class discussion about trying to interpret this story, the class decided that the woman in this story was bothered by the fact that her husband did not see who she really was but instead only who she appeared to be on the outside.

No days off

            The second week of Sweeney’s English 102 class began on with a day off of school because of MLK Day, which sadly, I spent working my life away at the carnival (Shoe Carnival) like usual.

In class on Wednesday, “The Yellow Wallpaper” was the story that was up for discussion. In this short story, a woman who suffered from a slight depression and some anxiety problems, was taken on a summer vacation by her husband. He wanted their vacation to be almost like a treatment for her, she was especially not supposed to work or write. But as the story began, she was completely intrigued by the huge house, especially one room in particular. The room that she had become so fascinated with became a reason for her to write in her journal because her husband would not listen to her curiosities about the room. She believes that there is a woman trapped in the wallpaper and quickly became extremely bothered by it and decided to lock herself in the room so that she could set the woman free by ripping the wallpaper off. When her husband realized what she was doing he tried to stop her. Apparently when he finally got the door open, he fainted in the doorway. His wife’s last words in the story were “I had to creep over him every time!” which left me with a creepy but curious feeling.

Elephants are my favorite animals but “Hills Like White Elephants” was definitely not one of my favorite stories that we have read so far for class. This story was simple, although I will admit that it annoyed me. It was pretty much just a conversation between two people who I had assumed to be a couple that took place at a train station bar while they waited. What I gathered from this story was that the female character was pregnant and was unsure about whether or not she was going to keep the baby or not. She seemed to be making her decisions based off of what the male character wanted. That’s what mostly annoyed me about this story, even though the two characters were probably a couple I think that the woman should have made her own decision without letting somebody else influence her.

Welcome back to school :-(

As a long and wonderful winter break ended, a very interesting English class began. I had heard great things about Sweeney’s English classes and I was determined to have him as a teacher for English 102, so here I am now. After the first day in class I quickly realized that his English class was not like others that I had taken in the past. On the first day, we discussed the syllabus, our grade contract and blogging. For Sweeney’s class, it was required that we create a blog and keep up with it weekly. I was already familiar with a blogging website called tumblr but I never really wrote too often on my personal blog, I mostly reblogged pictures instead. 

According to the schedule given to us on the first day of class, we were to read “How to Become a Writer” to discuss in class on Wednesday. This short story was hands down one of the weirdest stories that I had read in a while. The main character in the story had a dream of becoming a writer but she ended up finding out that she wasn't as good at writing as she wanted to be. Reading the story was difficult to do because it had many incomplete sentences and thoughts that were sometimes random and didn't always go along with the story itself, but I guess the flow of the story went along with the way that she wrote her own stories. Most of the stories that she wrote lacked a plot and had bizarre encounters with death. The next story we read was “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”, and even though that story was also a little strange, it was a lot more interesting than the previous. It made more sense than “How to Become a Writer” just in the title alone. The main character was an Indian who could be represented by Tonto, while the white race could be represented by the Lone Ranger, lastly “Fistfight in Heaven” stands for the struggles that the main character faces in his dreams.

After the first week back to school, I may not be overly excited to be back but I am excited to see what Sweeney's English 102 class has in store for me this semester!