One person's trash...

Can be the fodder for someone else's creativity!

(Okay, so that's not quite how the saying goes, just bear with me here).

I've previously mentioned my love of making stuff out of what other people would consider trash, and I thought this theme-less week might be a good time to elaborate on that a bit.

I don't know if it's as bad for everyone else, but I seem to always have lots and lots of plastic bags. I'm not sure how they all even got there - I have a sneaking suspicion they're interbreeding while I'm not watching.

I hate getting plastic bags. It means I forgot my reusable ones, and then the plastic ones will just sit around; I don't want to throw them out, but always forget to take them for recycling (and there seem to be so few places that recycle them!). What's a girl to do?

Well, I decided to make plastic yarn (or "plarn") out of them and make something. It's actually a really simple process (if you're interested, there's instructions here, but I didn't want to bore everyone else with a lengthy how-to), though a bit time-consuming since I wanted a lot of plarn. I ended up crocheting a doormat and giant circular rug for my room, and I love both of them.

They're sturdy, colorful without being gaudy, and feel nice on my bare feet. And I used up 200 plastic bags! Whoooo!

(I would insert pictures here, but I'm writing this from a computer without my pictures on them :( I'll put them in when I get back to my computer late this weekend)

My plastic bags are starting to pile up again.... I think I might make a reusable grocery bag out of them. That'd be some excellent poetic justice, right?

What other things do you guys think I should make out of plastic bags? I've unfortunately started running out of ideas. I thought it would be cool to take people's bags and make them into a reusable one for them, but most of the people I run around with are also people who try to avoid getting extra grocery bags.

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This might be outdated now, since I'm writing this on Thursday and will be afk until at least Saturday, but I really like Sophie's idea to make a Facebook group instead of communicating through Your Pants. We all have to be friends for that to work though, so to help things along, here's a link to my Facebook (since I've now just posted that on the interwebs, if you make note that you're one of us in the request space it'd be helpful - there's a whole lot of Sophies, Kaitys, Katies, and Sarahs in the world). Since Sophie's quick I've already friended her and started up a group, so as soon as I get requests from the rest of you we can all be in there :)

Effort was made :D

Again, I'm not too sure what to right about because there's no theme but I'm going to make an effort this week.

I haven't really been up to much recently, I went up to Aberdeen at the weekend to visit some friends who are university there. I'd never been there before so I didn't really know what to expect. All the buildings there are grey, I'm not even exaggerating, they're all made out of granite. But yeah I had fun in Aberdeen, it's actually quite a nice city.

I've also spent most of the week geeking out about Doctor who. I don't know if everyone has seen it yet so I won't go into any detail about it. I was just so amazed, I mean, so many emotions packed into one episode, I was a wreak by the time it was done. I also never really like River Song since the episode she appeared in but I hate to say it, she is actually growing on me, I think her and the Doctor have a lot more chemistry than they used to but I think that's actually because the Doctor kinda knows her now and is able to joke a bit more with her.

Any way if any of have any theories I'd love to hear them.

I also have a suggestion for this blog, rather than use YourPants for a place to suggest blog themes and discuss other things, that perhaps we create a private facebook group. Just because I don't feel that many people use YourPants any more and that we just forget about it sometimes, I know I do. Anyway it's just a suggestion, feel free to ignore it.

Whoops

So, hey.

I could pretend this post is late because I just moved over the weekend and am still in the process of unpacking and getting settled, and didn't have time all day, but that's not true.  I was really pretty lazy about the whole unpacking thing and spent a lot of time standing in my room staring absently at my stuff.

Or I could pretend that the mid-afternoon break that I spent reading ridiculous theories about the recent Doctor Who developments was definitely a better use of time than writing a blog post.

Or I could pretend that it's because I had to go run a bunch of errands with my family in the evening... actually that one's true, but it was only a couple hours of the day.

Or because the new episode of Glee was on tonight and I mean, I obviously couldn't have written a blog post during the commercials.  That would just be way too much to ask.

No, no.  The real reason is because in the hour and a half that I had after Glee, my plan to quickly check my email and Facebook and such before writing a blog post somehow turned into getting sucked into TV tropes...

So, sorry.  I guess I'll await the decision of the punishment thread in the YP group.

I know there was discussion on Rachel's post on Friday about the theme for this week being "I never though I'd say this, but..."  However, since Sarah didn't do it yesterday and I still haven't come up with a good response to it, can we make this another free week and push that one ahead to next week?

As I mentioned, I've been busy moving and getting settled.  It's really weird to move back home after being away for three years.  Especially since we moved here only a few weeks before I left for university, so it doesn't even really feel like home.  The room that I always stay in when I'm here to visit was always essentially set up as a guest room that would work equally well for me or my brother or my grandparents or anyone that was staying here, but for the summer we're rearranging it so that it can actually be my own space.  We've moved a lot of the things that were stored in there so that it's not cluttered up with any of my brother's stuff any more, and we made space for a lot of my furniture from my apartment, and it really feels like home, which is something I've been lacking for a long time.

I never really felt at home living in university residences because, well they were residences.  No matter how long you lived there and how hard you tried to make it your own space, you were still sharing one shower between eight people and the toilet broke about once a month and those are just not things that make you feel at home in a place.  My apartment was a huge improvement, but it was very small and didn't have much storage space so I always felt cramped.  Plus I had roommate issues the first year I lived there and mouse issues the second year.

Long story short, right now is the first time in a long time that I've really felt as though I had a space of my own, and it's wonderful.  I want to make use of the comfortable, nurturing atmosphere I've created as a springboard for self-improvement this summer, meaning I want to do some serious writing, get into a healthy exercise routine, decrease the amount of time I spend on the computer, and finish the knitting project I've been working on for three years.  Those are my plans.

Long weekend was not long enough

We forgot to choose a theme again.
Hey look, Howl and Sophie.

Just this weekend I was at Anime Boston and it was fabulous, I was a Weeping Angel on Saturday in honor of the new series of Doctor Who, which I didn't get to watch the first episode of until Sunday. The waiting nearly killed me.

It was insane, I couldn't move five feet before getting stopped for a bunch of photos. There was a Doctor Who photo shoot at the convention, I got lost trying to find it from outside the convention area to the third floor where they decided to change their minds and make it the second floor instead. There were many Fourth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors running around plus one Nine (armed with a banana), a TARDIS and a couple of Masters.

You know, for an anime convention, there's a heck of a lot of sci-fi.
Here's a picture of me I found on Twitter. Now that I think about it, that guy behind me was also behind me in other photos... creeper.
I'm 41/46 in the slideshow.
Pictures from the photo shoot.
I tried to sneak up on a bunch of Doctors, but they all moved too fast, so much for being lightning fast. The Doctors all snuck up on me, multiple times for some. I'm sure it helped them that the majority of the time I had my hands covering my face so I couldn't see.

One of the best parts of this weekend is I'm using it to get CAS credit for school.

I also went to the formal ball at the convention on Friday, I can totally do a waltz... poorly. Tango was probably my best until I danced with this guy who really could tango like a pro, then I had to acknowledge how much I suck at dancing. There was a girl dressed up as Belle from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, they played "Tale as Old as Time" so everyone kind of just watched her dance. Amazing times were had.

After the Melody Ball there was a bit of a gap in which they changed the beautiful ballroom into a rave. It's the same room yet instead of the beautiful slow melodies playing you're bambarded with strobe lights, glow sticks, and blasting music. Odd how the atmosphere can change so drastically in a matter of minutes. I had just been waltzing across the floor and suddenly the place is overcrowded and booming so loud that all thought seems to disappear from existence.

Sunday was Easter and we left the convention. I just ate a Peep from my basket of Easter candy. Now I remember why I hate them. I feel like I just massacred this cute little animal and forced its friends and family to watch.

That's all I have to talk about now. Not much, not really all that organized. Bye!

Can I Get an EXP Bar For That?

I can't say I've ever identified myself as much of a gamer. I've mainly played RPGs off and on, usually finding them enjoyable but moving on to something else rather quickly, and I'm ridiculously lacking in skills in the video game category (though I do play a mean PvP Tetris!). So while I've grown up around games, they've never been a huge part of my life.

Now, suddenly, I've found myself hanging out with someone who wants to work in video games and enjoys playing them. Where work and hobby overlap, that generally means there's a whole lot of interest, so it's safe to say that I've been hearing about games a lot. A lot.
One of the subjects we've ended up talking about a bit is gamification - taking attributes of games (progress bars, achievements, points, levels, etc) and incorporating them into real life. I've found this interesting since it seems to overlap a lot with education in terms of ordering tasks a certain way, gradually working up difficulty and removing supports, and offering positive feedback, but hasn't had much effect on my everyday life.

Then a couple of days ago I was complaining about one of my classes at the gym. I take two different classes: one involves dancing, and I can see progress as it's easier for me to keep up, I start to remember the moves more easily, I look more fluid and natural, and I don't get tired as quickly. It's hard, but I feel good at the end. The other class involves a stationary bike and putting on resistance while mimicking doing hills or sprints. It's hard, and there's no real way to tell when I'm improving (the resistance is a knob, not a number, and I can't see how fast I'm going).

While I was whining, the gamer laughed and said "Wouldn't it make that so much more motivating to have an experience bar?" at which point I practically shouted "YES!" This got me thinking that there must be some ways to productively gamify some parts of my life.
I found a chore-completion RPG (if I'd had that as a kid my room would have been spotless), and lots of talks and theories on how to best use gamification well rather than just tacking on meaningless achievements and points just for the sake of having them.

I started this blog thinking about how I could adopt gamification into my life to help motivate me, but between the last paragraph and this one is a space of about two hours looking through videos, presentations, and articles. And I think I've changed my mind.

Levels and achievements aren't what make a game good and engaging; the actual game does that. Transplanting those aspects of a game into a mundane task doesn't make that task any less mundane. Maybe there's a little more motivation for awhile, but that's not long-term motivation; no extrinsic reward, particularly not a number on a screen, can give us that (yes, even money doesn't work, it's been researched).

But there's something else in games besides the superficial awards, status, and competition. Games are structured to give incremental increases in difficulty, so that tasks are neither too boring nor too challenging to be completed. There is something to be mastered.

I think maybe that's how I might try to use game mechanics in my life a little more. Instead of expecting to jump in and do a big task, how about trying a smaller one? Then a little bigger... then a little bigger... until my confidence and skill has gotten to the point that I can tackle the big project.

Though I'm going to admit that I may still draw a progress bar for how many times I clean up all my dishes or put money in the bank instead of buying caffeine drinks (they are just soooooo good!) because there's something fulfilling about getting to watch a progress bar fill up. But I don't want to have that for everything in life, because that removes all my intrinsic motivations.

Sorry this one's a little long guys, this subject's been bouncing around for awhile and I've been trying to make sense of my thoughts on the idea. As for a topic for next week, I found a Tumblr called "I Never Thought I'd Say This, But...", based on the idea that life is a culmination of a bunch of sentences that start with that. I'd be interested to hear everyone's sentences, if we're all up for that. :)

What I've been doing and what I will be doing

Good evening Nerdsisters!

Today was the last day of my undergraduate degree.  It hasn't really sunk in yet, but at this point it feels weird more than anything else.  Actually at this point it mostly feels like any other semester where I'm just glad to have survived end of term madness and have a bit of a break.

I passed in my very last paper yesterday, and today I had to defend my honours thesis, which is probably the most stressful thing I've had to do in the entire four years, but I think it went okay.  A bunch of my friends and I went minigolfing to celebrate being done.  We are the coolest kids.  But it was super cool minigolf with black lights and everything is painted in glow-in-the-dark paint, so that has to count for something.

As much as I'm glad to be done for now, the next few days are going to be really hard in a completely different way.  It's time to say goodbye to people, some of them probably forever, and that's really tough.  One of my roommates moved out on Sunday, and I haven't been handling it very well.  We've known each other since we were six and been close friends since junior high, and now he's just... gone.  I know we'll see each other maybe once or twice a year because we'll both go home for Christmas and such for a while yet, but it's just so weird that I've seen him on a daily basis for most of the past 16 years, and now we're going to live in different provinces.  I think the very worst part, though, is that it's not like everyone leaves at the same time.  People trickle off one by one and every time I turn around someone else is leaving and breaking my heart all over again.

Well, that was a depressing paragraph.  On a more positive note, I'm moving back home for the summer, and I'm kind of excited.  I like Halifax, and I like being able to walk to everything and I like it in the summer when you can go to restaurants and sit on the patios and when you can just go out for ice cream or grab fish and chips from the chip truck on the way home from work and all those delightful summery city type things.  But I also really like being at home for the summer.  I like having a deck, and my dad built this amazing outdoor fire circle place last summer that I absolutely love, and I like driving on the highway with loud music, and more than anything else I like having easy access to beaches.  Also the lake that's insanely deep and has a raft and a rope swing and we always stay there way too late and stargaze from the raft.  Also camping.  So yeah.  Excited about going home.

I have the next week and a half off completely, and I'm going to spend it reading and catching up on TV and movies and finishing my screenplay for Script Frenzy and I've decided I'm going to take up running.  That should be, erm, interesting.  After that, I'm going to be working at a Service Canada Centre for Youth for the summer, which basically means that I'll be helping other people find summer jobs and make resumes and cover letters and all those fun things.  It's really different from any other job I've had before but I think it should be interesting and I'm excited to get started.  Also it's only a 14 week position, so I'll end up with almost a month off at the end of summer, and I'm really excited about that!

Anyway, I guess that's it for me... especially if I want to get this posted before midnight! :)

Galleries and Conventions and Angels, Oh My!

sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssslllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllkkkkkkkkkeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

That's what it looks like when I try to fix the stickers on my keyboard while typing other things.

It's another freestyle blog week, and I have things to talk about.

So tomorrow I'm headed to a Steampunk art and invention gallery in Foxboro MA. I'm pretty excited about it. I'm ruining my own fun a bit by making this research related. I have to write this extended essay and a possible topic for me is how authors like Jules Verne and HG Wells contributed to the rise of Steampunk, or science fiction in general.

Then on Thursday I'll be going to Boston for an anime convention. I don't really go for the anime all that much anymore, I think I just go for the fun of it and all the people. I have not met a single person at the convention in my years of going who wasn't just out right awesome and fun to be around or talk to. It's as if even though you never met any of these people they're already your friends. You'll be sitting in line with them for the next seven hours so you better be friendly anyways.

The events can be great or they can be terrible, but you're going through them all with a bunch of people you have a lot in common with. Conventions are great places to meet people, in my opinion. I'm looking forward to seeing all the different outfits and wacky events that will ensue.

I'm cosplaying a Weeping Angel this year, all I need to do is finish the wing harness, paint the gloves and it'll be done. I hope to find a couple Doctors to try and sneak up on before being seen. However, in a center of more than ten thousand people, I imagine it'll be quite difficult to move around while in character. D: I'm wearing the costume Saturday in honor of the new season of Doctor Who, hopefully there will be others doing the same. Last year I did the same thing when the new season started by cosplaying the Fourth Doctor and there were many other Whovian outfits out there.

So that's basically it, along with a side trip to Suffolk University, that's going to be my week and everything I have to talk about.

Not all that interesting, I wanted to talk about something meaningful but figured I would talk about the stuff that was plaguing my mind and current piece of life instead.

Inspiration

(So on Tuesday I commented to say that as my punishment for being late last week I would do a video for this week, but through a series of events that I don't think you all want to hear that wasn't particularly possible. I am still up for doing a vlog for my punishment... just not this week.)

Inspiration is kinda a tricky thing; at least for me, there's no one guaranteed recipe to get inspired, no person or place I can go and know that I'll absolutely get something creative out of it. But here are some of the places I usually hit if I need some inspiration:

The King Arthur Flour Blog (do not visit if you're at all hungry. You've been warned!) almost always gets my creative baking juices going with fresh ideas for recipes or techniques to take and use on something else I'm working on. Also, it's total food porn. Just saying.

Since I follow lots of artsy and nerdy people on Tumblr, that's usually a good way for me to get inspired as well... though it can also lead to lots and lots of procrastination.

Ravelry and Five Awesome Knitters are good places for me to go to get crafty-inspired, since I'm always trying to find different things to do and keep myself challenged, not just sitting back and making basic scarves all the time because to me, that's really boring.

And finally, and this one's really cheesy I know, but the kids of two of my friends often inspire me. They're kind of like my adopted nieces and nephews, and they inspire me partially because they're both crazy and occasionally poignant, which gets me thinking, but also because I get to watch them grow up.

I realize that sounds weird, but as I hit the end of college there are very few milestones left in my life other than starting a family, so I feel like it'll be harder to mark progress and passage of time. But while a year isn't a huge difference to a twenty year old, it's a huge leap in progress for a kid, and this helps me remember how much life changes and moves on.

Also, they're adorable! (You should definitely watch till the end...)



And now, I am off to start my weekend (I made extra sure to post on time this week, aren't you so proud of me? :P)

I need more inspiration

This probably isn't going to be the best the blog, I've been out all day at the zoo and had to get a pretty late train back, but I'm gonna try.

One person who inspires me in my life in general is my dad. It's hard to put in to words why but he really does. He's a really nice, friendly, helpful person.

Creatively, there's a lot that inspires me. Music, books, films, places, people. Just about everything really. Obviously John's books are a real inspiration for some of my art work. Right now with my art I'm going through a bit of a black and white phase but sometimes I'll see a colour I really like and I'll try to use it in something.

Sometimes I like to cut words out of magazines and make up sentences and try to make up something around that.

Ok, sorry about how bad this is, I promise I'll do better next week.

Sources of Inspiration

Mostly I draw my inspiration from words.  Bits of overheard conversations, phrases read in books or on blogs, pieces of lyrics... certain words or phrases just explode into my mind, bringing an image or emotion that sticks there, fully formed, the moment I've processed the words.

So most of my sources for inspiration are things with words.  If I'm finding myself getting stuck in a creative project and need some inspiration, I'll grab a book or pull up one of my favourite blogs, or else I'll stick my headphones in and listen to some music.  I find that new music or things that I haven't listened to for a really long time tend to work the best.

I also like things that generate random words.  Seeds is a really good one.  There's also this site, which rehashes old tweets into new tweets - most of the time they're useless nonsense, but every now and then they'll actually fit together as a sentence, and sometimes they're brilliant.  I especially like this one because I can use my own previously-boring words to come up with phrases that inspire interesting ideas for me.

Speaking of twitter, I also get inspiration from Sarah Selecky.  She's an author who wrote a brilliant book of short stories called This Cake is for the Party which I read last summer (it is wonderful, I recommend it).  She tweets daily writing prompts, and although I don't usually have time to do many of them, sometimes not even her exact prompt but some image or thought that conjures for me can be really helpful as inspiration.

Inspirations

This week's theme is inspiration, where we write about what inspires us.

Now that I have to think about it, there are a lot of things that inspire me. People, places, things, there are lots. I really love art so there's a lot of inspirational things related to art in my life.

There's this artist, Emy Bitner. I think she's just really amazing. She's the author of the webcomic Trying Human, I'll post a link at the bottom. Anyways, her artwork really inspires me and I love watching her livestreams. Just by watching her draw on LS I've been able to improve my own artwork. I also feel inspired by the DeviantART user Eternity-Waits, she's got some good stuff. I feel so tiny compared to them, but they make me want to try harder to improve and develop my art.

Also, seasons and time of day, especially winter and sunset. They inspire my artwork a lot. I love the winter when snow falls down all fluffy an light, (ideally, here on Cape we have muddy slush snow, it's crud). But pine trees with their branches weighted down heavily by white blankets of snow, a fox peering around the snow drifts. Those scenes really just make me want to paint something.And sunset is filled with such golds, reds and blues. My favorite color combination is gold and blue. Gold and anything else comes second. The sunset colors just seem so much richer to me that the dawn colors, they are the last ones before the sky goes black, therefore they seem to mean so much more to me and that's why I want to draw and paint with them.

When it comes to inspiring me as a person, I'd have to say my friend Toria really, inspires me sometimes, she's a really confident person who can get along with other people easily, she's not afraid to talk to new people or hang out with them, at least it looks that way to me and I wish I could be like her more and I also really wish she won't read this.

The Vlogbrothers have also inspired me as a person. I've changed a lot since watching their videos, I've become a much more active person and I think a lot more about the type of impact I have and could have in the world. John and Hank inspired me to not FTBA, because I used to forget that awesome even existed.

I think those last two paragraphs became pretty sappy. Sorry. So those are some things and mostly people that inspire me, Vlogbrothers, my friends, Emy Bitner, Eternity, Snow, sunset, foxes and I didn't mention science. Science inspires me, too, mainly stars and nebulae, I like all the colors, they make me want to paint more.

These are the links to the two artists that have inspired me a lot.
Emy's Webcomic, Emy's DA
Eternity's DA

Late blog is late!

Crapnoid. I'm not sure how I forgot I had this due this week, it just kind of slipped away from me.

Do we do punishments? I would be open to doing a punishment for this one.

Anyway! I too had thought that I would have interesting things to say without a theme, but I am suddenly drawing a blank. Hrm.

I've been sick all week with strep throat, which has been really frustrating and I'm glad I'm finally getting better because it was making it so I could only sleep an hour or so at a time, and I just couldn't function too much longer without lovely REM sleep.

I've been in a strange creative mood lately. Of course, I've been sick and have lots of school things to do so I don't have time to do a whole lot of these creative things, but man I want to! You know, that might be a good theme for next week - pieces of inspiration, whether creative or otherwise (I'll need to pop over to Your Pants to post that idea when I'm done here).

I'm getting a little nervous now, because I'm getting into the last bit of college now. I've got six weeks left, and then I will officially be a college graduate. I'm really excited at the prospect of being done, because I've worked very hard and it will feel good to complete my education.

But it also feels like this is my initiation into "official" adulthood, and I am just completely not prepared for that. I will admit that I am generally fairly well disguised as an adult, but once you scratch the surface I'm still quite a goof.

I wonder if being an adult is accepting that being an adult doesn't change a whole lot; the house is still messy, there's still junk food in the pantry, and I occasionally sit in my pajamas all day to watch cartoons or laugh far too hard when my foreign-born boyfriend accidentally pronounces aluminum like "ahl-yoo-min-ee-um" instead of "all-oom-in-um".

I won't ever just magically level up into being an adult and suddenly have my life together and be doing everything I want to be doing. And while that's comforting, because it means everyone else is in the same boat, it's still kind of terrifying.



Adulthood, I'll see you on May 21st. Nerdfighters, wish me luck :)

P.S. It is 9:00 PM local time, so it is still only Saturday, one day late, thank you very much, Blogger.

Awful bolg is awful

I don't really know what to write about today, I thought not having a topic might be easier but I was wrong, oh well.

Today I went to the cinema with my friend to see Source Code, it was interesting. We only really went cause we were bored and it had Jake Gyllenhaal in it, but I actually really liked it. Then we went to go to KFC only to discover it was shut, so we had to Burger King, which I really don't like.

There's also a Scottish election coming up soon and it will be the first one that I will be able to vote in which I am looking forward to but it just made me realise how little I know politics, so I'm gonna have to study up on that because I don't want to waste my vote. My mum keeps on reminding me that women died for my right to vote, I know this and that's part of my reason for wanting to vote, the other is that I think if you don't vote you have no right to complain about how your country is run.

The spell checker on this is telling me I spelled "realise" wrong and I'm like, "But I'm British, we spell it with an S not a Z!"

Anyway I'm sorry for awful this was.

This post is boring.

So I'm going to follow Sarah's lead and write about what I've been up to lately.  Unfortunately for you guys, that means this post is going to be incredibly boring, because all I've really been up to lately is school work.  It's end of term here, so this week is insane with tests and exams and papers and things.

Mostly what I've been working on is my honours thesis, which is about missionary work in seventeenth-century New France.  I'm looking at how improvements to the methods of communication between the missionaries and the indigenous peoples were related to increases in the amount of conflict between the two groups (because better communication = more successful conversion/assimilation = more sources of conflict).  It's actually a really interesting subject, but I've been working on it for eight months now, and I'm just bored of it at this point.  It didn't help that my main source were the Jesuit Relations, which are literally tens of thousands of pages long, which I had to slog through.

Fortunately, I'm almost finished!  The final version is due on Friday, so I'm into final edits at this point.  Currently I'm working on re-writing the conclusion, where I look at how themes of communication and violence continued into the present day.  It's sort of brutal because conclusions are my least favourite parts of papers, and editing is my least favourite step of the process, so editing the conclusion is a double-whammy of things I dislike.  But, once I get through it, I've just got to edit for clarity, style, and grammar, and I'll be done!  I'm really excited not to have to work on it any more, but also to be able to say that I've completed a real, serious piece of academic work.

Anyway, so that's what I'm doing right now.  Once I get through my thesis, I've just got a few exams, one more paper to write, and then my thesis defence (ugh, I don't even want to think about that part), and then I'll be done for the year and hopefully will have exciting summery adventures to tell you guys about instead of writing awful posts like this.  I promise to never write about school work ever again, okay?

I can tell if a person is unconcious or not

So this week is a bit of a freestyle blogging week.

I figured I’m going to talk about what I’ve been preoccupying my weekend with. I have been slowly progressing through an online Red Cross course on CPR/AED and first aid.

They give you these pre-exams before each chapter. I failed the bit on recognizing when someone is having a heart attack, oops. If you have a heart attack, don’t have it around me. I also failed the bit on helping a choking victim.

I promise I read the lessons thoroughly afterwards.

Some of the pictures they use made me cringe, like the one for an avulsion. They had a picture of the majority of someone’s finger hanging off what little bit was still attached the to the hand. It was a tad hard to look at.

So far, I can clearly tell you that I am absolutely, positively, completely able to tell you if someone is unconscious or not.

I’m kidding, I’m learning everything very easily, it also helps that I used to be certified so a lot of this is familiar to me.

The reason why I’m doing this is for my trip to Morocco with other classmates and World Challenge this June/July, our teachers thought it would be useful as a skill and reassurance to the many worried parents of students.

The reason for our trip is mainly to do service projects in local communities while also experiencing the country’s culture and developing leadership, teamwork and organizational skills.

I really want to talk about our Morocco expedition here but I don’t want to make this post too long and there is a lot to talk about. I’ll make it a topic for another post sometime.

Well, that’s all for today.

Here’s a picture I drew yesterday. WIP

-Inova

If I could shape the universe

I think rather than creating a whole new universe, I'd really like to alter our own. It's funny, the more I thought about it the more I realized that I wouldn't take away war or greed or the capacity to feel pain. Truly awful things happen in the world, but I think that part of being human is having the option to do evil; and without that ability, when we choose to do good it isn't as meaningful.

Most of the changes I've been thinking about (and they have kept me up quite a bit as well because omg imagine that I could make any change to the universe I want) are really about money. I'm not quite sure how that happened.

If I could change the universe, I would make sure that researchers have funds to investigate alternate fuel sources, cure diseases, and figure out better systems for distributing food, water, and medical supplies. Don't get me wrong, it's fascinating (and a teensy bit terrifying) that to remotely control cockroaches via microchip or train a monkey to use a cybernetic arm, it seems a bit frivolous to do that when people are dying every single day because of a lack of basic resources.

This one might be broaching into the territory of taking away humans' capacity for evil, but if I could alter the universe I would bump up humanity's sense of compassion, empathy, and understanding. This is partially fueled by the American health care debate.

I know perfectly nice people that are adamantly against health care reform that, when someone they know and care about are in need jump at the chance to help them. So they're very nice people, but it's kind of an "out of sight, out of mind" mindset, or a distrust that others are really doing all they can to get a job with health benefits.

I'd like to think that if our compassion was bumped up, we'd be okay helping other people even if we didn't know them. I'd venture that the quality of internet dialogue would sure go up! Bullying, whether cyber or IRL, would drop down, the quality of political discourse would go up (because suddenly it would be much harder to call someone a fascist communist elitist hippie or war mongering corporate buy out fat cat) and relationships would probably be substantially healthier.

It certainly wouldn't solve everything - there are still people that are bad, and that would do bad things, but it would help all of us who sometimes forget to take other people's opinions into consideration and jump to conclusions.

If I could bend the universe to my will, I would make a free and appropriate education available to every person, everywhere on the planet, regardless of race, creed, income, or religion. This kind of goes with my first one, because people only have time to get an education if they don't spend several hours a day getting their water, or being constantly sick with easily treatable diseases but lack the medical supplies.

As a kind-of-sort-of-not future "teacher" (have I put enough qualifiers on that?) the thought of every person in the world having the opportunity to learn makes me incredibly excited. When I think of the impact on about countries, it's kind of abstract because I've never been to them and can't fully grasp the difference it would make, so at the risk of sounding country-centric here's what I would like that to look like in America:

• a 20:1 student-teacher ratio, as opposed to a 30 or even 35:1


• adequate supplies, so the teacher isn't forced to ration out paper or buy some on his/her own dime and students do not always need to share (but some sharing is good practice!)


• adequate funding given to all schools, regardless of standardized test outcomes (currently, if a school does well on a standardized test it recieves more money than a school that does poorly, and if a school is unable to improve its scores for a set number of years then the state takes over the school)


• in elementary school (approximately ages 5 - 11) multiple art, music, physical education and maybe even science specialists, as well as enough priority given to them that each class has each of those subjects at least 2-3 times a week (currently, it's often once a week, if that)


• in middle school/high school (approximately ages 12-18, the end of required schooling in the U.S.) a broad availablity of upper-level science, math, and advanced placement classes (A.P. classes can count toward college credit) as well as art, music, and other elective classes


• this one's particularly close to my heart, since I work with students with disabilities: a tablet computing device, iPad or otherwise, for every student, special or general education. This stems from two things: a) tablet devices can be wonderful, wonderful devices for kids with autism and offer control and indepence to students that very often lack in those areas and b) as I've looked through lesson plan ideas I've noticed the disturbing trend of games and lessons that require 5-10 times the menial prep work (i.e. cutting paper, numbering flashcards, etc) for it than it will take to actually do the activity. And then those piles of paper/game cards/jeopardy sets all have to be stored somewhere until next year when you can use them, and it's all just a mess. I want to be able to load an app on the kids' tablets and have them be ready to go; it's even an instant reward for kids who finish early since I could leave some apps on permanently as things to do when they have extra time

And you know what else I'd do if I ruled the 'verse?

Bring back Firefly.