How To: Register for Classes

        Looking to my left now I see my father's bookshelf, which contains hundreds of novels, non-fictions, and guidebooks. But the ones that catch my eye are his old textbooks from college, Intermediate Accounting and The Fundamentals of Marketing for example. Upon request he revealed to me that going into college, his intention was to become a marketer and an accountant, yet his job today could not be more unrelated to both.

        While conducting my oral history interview with the owner of Guitar Works in Evanston at the beginning of the semester, I found that he also ended up on a different path than the collegate system had intended. It's obvious that his years studying geology ended up having no relevance to his career as a small business owner. 

        More examples of college learnings not playing significant roles in the lives of graduates are out there, but I will spare you their stories. I am not suggesting that a college experience cannot enrich people's lives; for the most part it does. 

        What I am suggesting is that all of us registering for senior classes should try to avoid flow-charting our lives. By this I mean consciously disproving the thought that all the classes we take next year will have great effect on us for the rest of our lives. At this point, the most important thing is to enroll in classes that interest us, and gradually get a more specific idea of what we may or may not want to do in the future. The best that we can do as students is hope that we learn about things that we like, and if we're lucky these things will have something do with our occupations later in life.

How To: Categorize Art Incorrectly

       The music video featured above for the song All Your Light by Portugal, the Man is very similar to another music video I blogged about earlier in the year. In case you haven't seen it, here it is:

        A conversation I had with a fellow fan of both bands sparked this blogpost, because she told me that both videos were created by the same artist. This seemed almost obvious after she shared this fact with me; of course they were made by the same person. They're so similar, right?
        Wrong. After doing some more research, I realized that this was not true at all. The Portugal, The Man video was made by Justin Kramer and Lee Hardcastle, whereas the Grizzly Bear video was made by Allison Schulnik ( <-- check out her website, her work is outstanding!).
        But why did it excite me that these two works of art might have been by the same person? Was it because I was simply glad to hear that two of my favorite bands had collaborated with the same artist, or was it because I felt like this new information gave me a deeper insight into the behind the scenes process for the creation of these videos? Maybe.
        How do you think it would change your view of these two works if they were authored by the same person?

How To: Avoid Brainwashing

         This silkscreen, a piece by Jay Ryan, comments on American Studies in regards to the disconnection between the citizens of our nation and the issues we are faced with, and to the stories the media tells us of the world’s events.
        The way that Ryan depicts the cats(?) looking at the painting of the volcano parallels with how many Americans watch as world events unfold before them on the news as if they aren’t connected to them, and will therefore not be affected. When we listened to the RadioLab about memory in class, we learned that whenever you remember an event that occurred to you, you are simply recreating your own memory of what your experience was. This recreation is slightly altered each time, possibly resulting in an entirely different memory after time. For example: I was sitting at my kitchen table eating pancakes while my parents were both huddled around the small TV next to the stove as the second airplane struck the World Trade Center. (This setup was the same on the day that George Harrison died, and I will always associate the two events with the same level of severity, despite my knowledge that this is not the case.) In a way, I was like one of the cats staring up at something I wasn’t quite sure what to make of. It wasn’t until much later that the historical weight of 9/11 took hold for me, and that is because for years after the event, I would always think of pancakes when it was mentioned and not give it much more thought.
         Similar to how the media is inadvertently making world news feel more disconnected to our daily lives as Americans, the media is also relaying the worlds events to us in its own way, perhaps telling a story instead of handing over facts. In the context of Ryan’s piece, the cats see a volcano because Ryan intended for the cats (his audience) to see a volcano. If a majority of the news available to us has been pre-filtered by the media, how can we differentiate between pure facts and the ones being spoon-fed to us? During the Perilous Times: Cold War presentation, we learned that propaganda on the radio and on television resulted in the Red Scare. Today, news companies that support the Republican Party make it seem as if the Democrats are thwarting to ruin our nation, and the same is true for the Democratic news companies. Is the media setting us against ourselves the same way it set Cold War era Americans against people who may have had connections with Communism? We learned during our group work about secret messages that almost everything has a hidden connotation, and as subjects of the media we should be aware of the effect these messages can have on us. In my first blogpost, I wrote, “If secret messages are present in what is supposed to be innocent children's books, it makes sense to assume that they are also common in the media, pop culture, and just about anything else you might come across.” How have these messages already affected the way that we make political decisions?
         Ryan’s piece, although was used simply as a concert poster, warns its audience about the feeling of disconnection we may have from events going on around the world, and about being subject to the media’s sometimes ulterior motives to presenting us with their version of the facts.

How To: Account for the Nonexistent (The MetaPost!)

        It's not news to anyone that teenagers are bad at managing their time, prioritizing, and focusing on their schoolwork.  As the semester began coming to its close a week or two ago, I became increasingly aware of how my procrastination has accumulated over these past few months. Specifically for American Studies, considering the absence of a traditional grading system, the number of blogposts each of my classmates and I have published is the most easily-accessible and concrete way for us to get a feel for where we're at grade-wise in the class.
        (At this point, I would like to clarify that I am not using this meta-post as a means to make excuses for my lack of blogposts. I am simply extending a helpful arm to those of my piers who, like myself, made a sincere attempt at conquering the blogpost assignment, and were wildly unsuccessful.)
        To those in my class like Kathleen and Betsy, who are either New Trier's most disciplined students or are natural born bloggers (or quite possibly both), I commend your dedication to the task at hand. Not to say that those two are the only ones who religiously blogged every week, but I personally found Kathleen and Betsy's writing to be interesting and informative a majority of the time. As both a writer and reader of our class's blogs, I am painfully aware of how difficult that is to pull off.
      As I was blogging, I found the 'Boring Idea' to be a rampant cause of death for the hefty collection of half-finished blogposts that are now reluctantly in my possession. These ideas are typically caused by a shortage of time and inspiration, which left me desperately trying to crank out a post, regardless of its content.
        I have learned that blogposts are products that the writer is attempting to sell to all readers. Beginning with the first word of a post, the writers mission is to convince the reader that they are not wasting their time. If you're Mr. Bolos or Mr. O'Connor, you only blog about things that you're passionate about, and it keeps the reader wanting more.
        Of all the blogposts that I wrote this past semester, the ones I find the most interesting are the ones that I didn't force myself to write. It's no secret that our blogs are a weekly assignment, but I would be more proud of myself if I could write a couple of posts like Interpreting Creativity or Getting To Know Someone than a surplus of the sad excuse for a blogpost that I forced myself to write about a current event I found pretty uninteresting.
         Keep an extra pair of socks on you next semester, because my blogposts might knock them right off. And if they turn out just as boring as they were this past semester, maybe me and blogging aren't meant to be after all. We'll see.