Writing Post #1-Rough Draft

I have always been a strong believer that a child’s greatest adventure is discovering everything that this world has to offer, and as I stood before those great doors painted with bright greens and reds and blues, I realized that this place could be one of the greatest discoveries for any adventurous child. “The Children’s Museum,” stated the door very bluntly with a cursive font that curled and twisted to suggest that the mood of this place was much more relaxed than the door of a business with a Times New Roman entrance. The moment I walk in, I’m instantly greeted with the smiling face of a young woman working behind the red, blue, and yellow ticket counter. She seemed very nice and caring but a little bored with just sitting all day. As I looked around the towering hall I thought to myself, “Wow! You can’t put a price on how many memories a child could make here!” At that moment the young woman stated shortly, “Six dollars please.” I was wrong, I guess you can put a price on it.
Once I passed the primary colored counter, I was suddenly overwhelmed of all the options and adventures. I realized that if I was even stunned with the opportunities of this place, imagine how the children would feel. The three story building was packed floor to ceiling with varying opportunities for each of the kids to explore. The children had the option to explore space, fly a hot air balloon, become a newscaster, and live in a tree house all in one day. First, I sat myself by what I remembered as one of my favorite attractions when I was younger, the prairie dog exhibit. Here, the children were able to crawl into a series of tunnels that intertwine together, much like a prairie dog town. I watched as children would eagerly crawl in one side, vanish for a few moments and then suddenly reappear on the complete opposite side of the mound, smiling from ear to ear. As I watched and noticed many different children popping their small heads out of holes and imitating Timon from The Lion King, I realized that I wasn’t just seeing the same few smiling faces over and over again, they were each different kids. At this point I wondered to myself, how many children did those tunnels even hold? The children became more and more ecstatic every time they popped their head up and shouted “SURPRISE” to wherever their otherwise occupied parents were sitting. After awhile, I started watching the parents more than the kids. Many of the mothers were sitting together and chatting about the latest thing their child did or whatever the newest drama on the soaps but one father in particular caught my eye. He was sitting alone staring at his little girl as she sprinted into the tubes like all the other children, almost tripping, and before she disappeared he shouted to her, “Anna, be careful!” but she just waved him off. As he sat down, I realized that he had given the warning more as a comfort for himself than her. During the time she wound about the tubes, he never took his eyes off of the exit I’m assuming he was expecting her to come out of. After seconds turned into minutes, the father scooted farther forward on his chair. A few minutes longer he seemed like he couldn’t take it any more and he stood up. Not wanting to be too hovering, he took a lap around the mound. After still not being able to see her, I saw a flash a panic cross over his concerned face and right as he opened his mouth to call her she popped out the opposite side. “Daddy!” she squeaked, “There are so many tunnels! It’s so cool!” And with a sigh of relief the father grabs her by the hand and says, “It sounds like fun, but let’s see what else there is.” I laughed to myself and realized that this was his way of ensuring that she didn’t vanish into the tubes once more and scare him like that all over again. As I watched the little girl, Anna, skip away in her princess Velcro shoes and twirl her already curly hair, I decided it was time for me to move on as well.
But again, I struggled with the problem of the unlimited choices. The children had the option to temporarily become almost any profession they wanted, with the exception of pimp and drug dealer of course. I strolled over to the grocery store section and watched while a small girl in a plaid dress and pigtails cleared every item off of the pretend produce self and packed it into her midget-sized cart. She scooted her way past a young boy who seemed to be comparing two pieces of plastic meat much like I’m sure he saw his mother do before. The children were so engrossed with the hollow food that I’m not sure they didn’t forget it was all make believe. At one point, another little girl dropped a neon yellow banana to the ground and promptly picked it up, handed it to a volunteer, and stated, “This food was on the ground. It’s too dirty to sell now.” I had to stifle my laugh to make sure I didn’t discourage the small girl’s obviously serious statement and she continued on her merry way. I then stood next to the volunteer and inquired if the children always took these modules this seriously and she smiled and said yes, all the time. As a volunteer scanned the food for the pigtailed girl, she made small talk about the weather and other “grown-up” things. After she bagged her fake food into little plastic bags she pushed the cart about five feet out of the store. Once she was out of the store and back into the walkway, she stopped and turned to volunteer and said, “What do I do with this now?” Then it was back to reality. She wasn’t really a grown-up going grocery shopping for an insane amount of vegetables; she was just a little girl on a big adventure.
As I kept on touring the museum, I passed a pizza bakery where a boy stopped making the messy pepperoni pizza to pick his nose, a police car where the small boy was informing the other car that they were going a “bazillion miles per hour,” and a veterinarian where if that stuffed dog were real, PETA would definitely make sure the little boy lost his veterinary license for what he was doing to it. Each of these tiny rooms offered a new discovery for the children. Each of these tiny rooms was just another adventure. It was amazing to me how excited these kids were just for the future. Throughout the whole time I was there, I never saw a crying face. I did however, see children with the freedom to paint each other’s face instead of letting a grown-up do it, children telling their parents all the dreams they had for when they grow up, and children taking the time from a somewhat hectic world to create their own adventure and to just stop and discover.

Blog Post #6- Movie Interp

My music video, The Sound of Truth by As I Lay Dying, holds a plot within the movie. There are many music videos out there that have no story behind them at all. They just show the band over and over again in different settings. For me to truly enjoy a music video, I think that there needs to be something more than just the music. There needs to be a meaning.

At the beginning of the movie, we are given a scene of a woman obviously about to be pushed off of a large cliff to her death. Behind her stand two guards dressed in complete black. The black alone symbolizes that these men are working for the bad side, whatever they may be. Right away, the viewer notices the color scheme for the video. Everything shown in the video is gray, black, or rainy. The color scheme symbolizes the dark story that the video is about to unveil. After we see the lady on the edge, the video shows the rest of the people forming a small mob. At this point, we are introduced to the villain of the story. He is standing in front of a video recorder sending a video to all of the people of him wearing black gloves and black clothes shouting his demands of the citizens. This point reminds me a great deal of 1984 where they had Big Brother who watched over them and sent out the daily hate to the people. We quickly learn that he has taken a dictatorship position over the people and the people don't seem to like it. As the story goes on and the mob grows more and more crazy, we learn that the dictator wanted to kill this woman because of some defect on her hands that he thought was unholy. As this one man rallies everyone against the dictator, the man starts to lose his power over the people. At this exact moment, two people dressed the exact same as the black men pictured at the beginning of the video show up to the dictator but when they take off their masks we can see that one of the men is the man in charge of rallying everyone. These two men grab the dictator and take him in front of the mob, who at this point are going absolutely mad. They take a vote from the mob and everyone wants him to be sacrificed like he did to all the people with the small defect. The only one who wasn't yelling for him to be murdered was the girl that we originally saw in the beginning of the video. She seemed to be the only person who had any compassion for the man who tried to kill her. When a couple of men throw him down to the ground they also strip him of his gloves and the entire mob freezes when they see that this dictator had the same defect that he hurt all of these other people for.

The main point of this video is to point out the irony of life. The only person who wasn't fighting for the dictator's death was the same woman who he was trying to kill before. Not only that, but this man was trying to get rid of every person with this defect when he himself suffered from the same problem. All of these create a dramatic effect to the story. As the movie goes on the rain gets harder and harder until the very end when the dictator is exposed. At that point, the rain stops completely and so do the people. I think that the rain could symbolize the people's hate. As they get more and more pissed, the rain gets harder and harder but when they realize that the dictator was just like them, the hate stops, and so does the rain.

Blog Post #5- Free Topic- My dorm

I believe that everyone has a certain place that is their center, their place to get away, their place to relax. As we move to college, many students lose their beloved serenity spot. They are moved into an unfamiliar place with many unfamiliar people. Where do they go to get away in a place they don’t even know? Last year, during my first year of college, I struggled with that very same problem. I never knew where to go to be purely in Zen. Every place I went was strange and not mine. So, one day I got fed up and decided that if I couldn’t find a place to be my own, I’d make one. From that point on, I worked on covering all the walls with memories of things that made me happy. I used pictures, old letters that I had kept, a giant pirate flag that I commandeered from a friend and many different band posters. From that point on I felt the year went by much more smoothly. My room here at Wesleyan is no different. I have taken all the creativity I have in my to create a room that makes me smile every time that I walk in it. Even though I was supposed to be living in an apartment on campus and got moved into Burt Hall which is notorious for their extremely tiny rooms, I still enjoy every inch of my dorm. On the North wall you’ll find that you can’t even see the color of the paint on the walls because they are covered from ceiling to floor in my favorite pictures and favorite memories. The East wall, which houses the only window to my cell, has a large Beatles poster and other random letters or notes that I cherish. The South wall is completely covered in band posters including Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, the Ramones, and Pink Floyd. The west wall, where our closets are found, is far from bare as well. Underneath my loft you can find a groovy Buddhist tapestry that my roommate brought. Underneath her loft is the pirate flag that I so cherish. If you look on the ceiling, you’ll find an abstract version of the sun and moon made out of construction paper. Everyone always tells me how my room looks like they just stepped into the 60/70s. My room is definitely my comfort place. All I can say is that I’m glad my roommate has the same hippy style as me!

Blog Post #4- Free topic--PAIN

Everyone knows that there is no real definition of pain. Some think that pain comes from a paper cut; others say that you have to go as far as any serious injury requiring surgery and even others say that that isn’t even true pain. It’s all based on one’s pain tolerance. Recently, I’ve learned that my pain tolerance is not very high. But then again, this comes as no surprise to me. I’m not going to pretend that I’m comparable to Rambo because, let’s face it, I’m not. Recently, I’ve been required to wear a brace because of the, what I consider to be, severe pain. It’s not broken, it’s not sprained, in fact, I have no clue what’s wrong with it. Last Wednesday, I was forced to go to the doctor, who happens to be my own dad, so that they can run every test under the sun to find out what in the hell is wrong with me. Their leading guess is that I am suffering from a pretty bad case of carpal tunnel so they started me off with that test. If you don’t know, the carpel tunnel screening is a test that hooks you up to a series of wires that connects you to a machine. The purpose of this machine is to shock you over and over and over again to determine how your nerves react to decide if you do have the symptoms. Each test consists of ten shocks to the hand. They start by connecting the wires to the wrist and up to you middle finger. After ten shocks to feel very similar to grabbing on to an electric fence multiple times, they continue by shocking the opposite hand to compare. For some reason, the tests to my left hand weren’t being read by the machine so we have to retry it three different times. Now my hands have gone through 40 shocks. After this test the nurse returns to my right hand and connects the wires to my pinky finger. Ten more shocks. After sitting in the minor surgery room for 15 minutes, waiting for the results, the nurse comes back with a guilty look on her face and informs me that the results from the very first test didn’t come out either. So we proceed to torture my hand for two more tests. After the nurse had successfully shocked me 70 times she comes back to tell me that the results came back negative. Great! All of that for nothing! Even though the tests were negative, my dad didn’t want to take any risks so he informs me that they are going to inject a steroid into my wrist to help with the pain. To make this story complete, I think that you need to realize that I might be the worst patient to give shots to. For some unknown reason I have gained a huge phobia to needles. Believe it or not, the pain in my wrist was so horrid that I was willing to go through anything just for the hope that it may be better soon. As they injected the steroid into my nerves I could feel the pain shoot up all to the way to my elbow but the doctors promise me that that was a promising sign. I really didn’t understand how more pain was promising but I wasn’t in any shape to argue. So how does one define pain? Can it be described as any physical discomfort to the human body or is everyone’s definition of pain just what they can or can’t take? If each of our definitions are different, mine would be short and simple. For me, pain is everything in my right hand.

Blog Post #3- Movie Clip

My video, Das Rad, or The Wheel in English, shows the development of the world from a rocks perspective. Winner of the best short animated file, this German video has been translated and accepted to be part of the Animation Show 3. In this video, we see how a couple of "rock people" live life and how they view the development of the world. Some interesting points that I noticed from this video were the materials that the animators used to create the rocks. i can't tell if this film was made by advanced claymation, or if it was all created by digital animation, or even if they actually used real rocks. that shows how believable the animation was for the video. The super speed of the movie is very important to the plot because I believe that it symbolizes how quickly time moves for the rocks because of how long a rock lives. a day to us, feels like a second to them. throughout the clip, we see small villages appearing in the background while the rocks go about living like they always had. eventually, one of the rocks starts playing with a circular rock that he had found and we can see that he starts to realize the power of a wheel. at this point, an early caveman comes and sees the circular rock that the rockman had been playing with. from this point, man creates the wheel and once the wheel is created, the development of the land around the rock men is sped up twice as much. we see a road appear, and soon the villages grow larger and larger. At one point in the video, the speed of the development becomes so extreme that the rocks don't know what to do. this clip is very symbolic because it shows the progression of man and how it's just been getting faster and faster and never slowing down. Another ironic point was the billboard that was put up by the rock men that said built to last and eventually just broke down. By that, the creator is showing that he believes nothing is "built to last" As the development went on, the sky grew darker and everything became much more polluted until everything just stopped. I believe that the creator of this movie was trying to get a point across of how much our world has changed but I don't think the creator is quite a fan of how much we've developed lately. He makes a statement about what he thinks will happen in the future about how mankind will be the end of mankind. After all this development, everything is just swept away and everything starts over again as new. The movie tends to have a negative point at the end that makes you think. To me, that's what makes a good video/essay. It has to make you think deeper about a part of your life or some experience you've had.