Reading hasn't always been a pleasure of mine. I remember quite vividly sitting at my dining room table with my parents when I was in 2^nd grade and them helping (and forcing me) to read a book that was 5^th grade level. My elementary school was doing a contest to see which grade could read the most books and the winning grade would win a pizza party and if the whole school met the goal our principle had to kiss a pig. Well, my grade didn’t win the pizza party, but we did get to watch Mrs. Putnam (amazing woman god rest her soul) kiss a pig. Back then reading was a chore. It was hard and the words were too big and let’s face it the English language is a damn confusing language to read. But, as I got older, reading got easier and I started to love it. I remember hiding under the covers with a flashlight reading the Sabrina the Teenage Witch series, I remember spending hours in the library to find just the right book for me to read. The summer before I started high school I did a lot of reading. I would stay up all night glued to a book. That’s the summer that I really found my passion for the written word. It’s also the summer I learned I could read entire books in a day if I really wanted to. Ever since then reading has become more than a hobby to me. It’s become a definitive aspect of who I am. There’s something magic that happens to me when I read a good book. My imagination runs wild, my boredom ceases to exist, and all the petty little problems fall away as I immerse myself into another world. I find that my speech and even my thoughts become more fluid. It’s as if I create an inner dialogue in my mind because I am so used to living inside the books. There is something so romantic about a girl and good book. We fall in love with it. We wrap ourselves up in it and it becomes our primary focus. There have been many cold lonely Michigan nights that I’ve survived simply because I had the warmth of a good book to take with me to bed. I firmly believe that my ability to write as well as my ability to communicate so clearly comes from the fact that I’ve always been a strong reader. Even when I didn’t want to be. I remember being forced to read books for classes in high school and hating them the whole way through. I think the first book I had to read in my high school career was To Kill A Mockingbird and I remember our teacher Ms. Ferris (another amazing woman) telling us to stick it out because it would “get good,” and it did and it is still one of the best books I have ever read.  I remember the tiring task of reading Lord of the Flies. I hated it, but I’m damn proud to put it on my list of books I’ve read. Pride and Prejudice please, I had better things to do in high school than to read that..but now I list it as one of my favorite books of all time. When reading was an assignment I hardly ever wanted to read. I can’t be forced into doing things. No matter how much I might actually enjoy doing it. But, when it’s on my own terms… everything changes. Just like Pride and Prejudice did when I reread it with and open mind. It’s been a long time since I was in high school. In college the reading assignments changed. It was all text books and research papers and my love for reading doesn’t stem that far. However, I have been known to thoroughly enjoy reading communication research papers. But, most of the reading I’ve come across as an assignment has been something of a struggle. Beyond the academic reading I’ve done since I got to Lake State I’ve been introduced to some amazing books. Passed along by friends in the hallways of dormitories like secrets and each one of them I’ve poured over with a passion that can only be compared to the way I approach Laker Hockey. Reading is a gift. Something most people take for granted. Today most kids, be they toddlers, elementary-high school, or even college kids pass up the chance to read because there more exciting things to do. But, if it wasn’t for my love of reading I would never have met a boy named Harry Potter, I would have never fallen in love with a vampire (it was just a phase I swear), I would have never competed in the hunger games. If it wasn’t for reading I wouldn’t know what the girl cried about when the thunder rolled, I would never know what being On the Road really meant. There are so many life lessons and adventures that I have gone on all while in the comfort of my own home. So, to my parents who forced me to read that book in 2^nd  grade, I say thank you. Thank you for pushing me to do something I thought was both impossible and a waste of time. Thank you for opening up my eyes to the magic that is the written word. And, to those of you who are fellow book lovers, I say you rock, you are my kind of people. The kind of people that have experienced more adventures, laughter, heartache, and excitement that most kids will ever find within a T.V. show or a video game. Long live the readers! Long live the written word!

Books I Laker Love <---click here! 

Change:to make the form, nature, content, future course, etc., of (something) different from what it is or from what it would be if left alone:

My generation has all but given up in a lot of ways. We were so fired up at one point back there in 2008 and we were sure that we had the power to take control of the future. We thought if we used our rights as Americans and put politicians into power that we believed in that the change this country so desperately needed would come to play. Moreover, we were sure that it was the beginning of our control. It was the beginning of my generation stepping into the world of American politics and we thought we could ride the wave into a bright new future. But that didn’t happen. We put into power people that we believed in only to have them trip and stumble over the mess that this country had become. It went from a surge of hope from our generation to a surge of power plays from others. The bright new hopeful future full of change and new beginnings was gone. We were back to the same game but with a new captain of the team. It didn’t take long for generations that had come before us to decide they needed to be back in power again. The white, upper class, straight, well educated males, seemed to all of the sudden decide that the future of America couldn’t be put in the hands of these mixed cultured, middle class, glsa, currently being educated college kids. No, in a matter of what felt like seconds the country became a clear us vs. them atmosphere. While we rallied for change and a new direction the tea party rallied to get the country “back.” But, back where? It always amazes me when people talk about how our founding fathers would roll in their graves if they knew what we’d become. Well America has come a long way baby and there are a lot of things we do everyday that would make our forefathers grimace. Me, openly expressing my opinion on political matters would shock many of the men that signed our Declaration of Independence. Hell, our close ties with England would probably make a few of the founding fathers just a little uneasy. We’ve come so far as a country; true, stumbling the whole way but we came from nothing to become the nation we are today. So when they say they want our country back I wonder just how far back they want to take us. Are they going to strip my right to vote? Bring back segregation? We have made leaps and bounds in our short time as a nation that countries that have been around since the dawn of time have been unable to do. But, I worry about just how far we can keep going. The passion in the country is dying. The fight for our country has somehow become the fight with our fellow country man. The lines have been drawn so deeply in the sand even the greatest of all waves can’t seem to wash it away. My generation has slowly become complacent. It’s a tricky thing for a generation to use it’s first wave of electoral power to elect one man, hundreds of new representatives, congress men/women, and a new progressive front only to have them stalled in doing the things we expected them to do because of Washington party politics. And, then to have those representative and congressmen/women booted out in the next election by a wave of people that have decided that the country could not be ran by the people that my generation so believed in. So we shrugged it off and we gave up. Because the fight is gone within most of us. I believe it’d be different if we could just decided what we are fighting for, but instead its more about who we are fighting with. The liberals vs. the conservatives, the democrats vs. the republicans, us vs. them. Many generations before us have found their voices in their early to mid 20’s and decided to use those voices to make a change. But, us, we used our rights as American’s to make a change and realized that change is impossible in a world where it’s all about the dollar signs and what it could mean for the party. We never rallied behind one unified cause and because of that our futures are now in the hands of people that, to be honest, will be dead before they can really see what the future of this country is. I’ve lost a lot of hope in this country. Hell, I’ve lost a lot of hope in myself since this all began years ago. But, with every change in the political climate there is room for a new revolution. In the 60’s where the political climate in the country was literally becoming deadly a movement began that established equal rights for Americans no matter the color of their skin. It had only been a short 40 years before that the 19^th amendment was added to the constitution stating that women’s right to vote shall not be denied by either the state or the country. It seems that within tricky political climates there is always one group that finds hope and clings to it as the fight their way towards their rights so clearly stated in the constitution but so clearly denied by our society. So that’s why I say that the most hope within this mess of a country really stands amongst the LGBT community. While we’ve been arguing over us vs. them they’ve been fighting for their rights and slowly but surely gaining them. For the first time in a long time the rights of LGBT people are the forefront of political discussion. The President himself is discussing these rights on national television and in fact doing away with DODT as he said he would so long ago when most members of my generation still believed that change would come. The LGBT community continues to battle in today’s world of cut throat politics to gain rights that it seems every American is inherently given but so often denied. That’s why even in the darkest of times in the country I can see a shining ray of hope radiating in the distance. While my generation starts to give up, and while the older generations cease to open up to the new world. One group of people in the country continue to fight for their rights. They continue to be more American that most of us because their freely use their rights handed down to us over generations. They assemble, they vote, they lobby, the fight, and they use their right to speech to light a fire in this dark time. That’s why the greatest amount of hope I have really is for the queer kids. They’ve got the future in their hands and they are doing something about it. They are fighting everyday to be granted rights that they should have never been denied. They are the shining light of hope and change in a country that has lost it’s grandeur. The road that lies ahead of us in the country is not going to be smooth. The road that lies ahead for LGBT is going to be even rockier. However, the pay off is going to be worth it in the end. Just ask women or African Americans it’s an amazing thing to live a reality that was once just a dream. So as I stumbled and fall along with the rest of America tangled up in the mess of politics I promise to do my best to push aside some of the mess and allow them come marching through. Marching through into the future of this country because no matter what the tea party says, in America there is no turning back, there is only moving forward. There is only progress. No matter how long and hard the road is to progress, we always seem to make it, and it’s thoughts like that, that keep me holding on. 

Missin' MySpace

I’m going to make a pretty heavy confession here. Sometimes.. I miss MYSPACE. I know. I know. I was there when the ship set sail and I jumped with the rats off the ship and onto SS Facebook. However, there are some days when I miss those little things myspace offered. I want to be able to bombard visitors to my page with a song that I really love or that says just the right thing. I don’t want them to thumb through my information to get to the music I like. I want to like HELLO THERE! THIS SONG F’IN ROCKS AND YOU SHOULD LIKE IT TOO! I also miss the html crap. You know, where you went out to some random site and found those corny quotes, lyrics, and glitter flashing things that said your name. You could post them all over your page. It was a kid with serious attention problems dream. Flashing things and music! OH! And then there was the ability to actually pimp out your profile. Backgrounds, borders, scrollbars, even the mouse icon could be changed on myspace. My boring facebook profile has gone through it’s “banner” stage and let’s be honest, most of those are really friggin lame. But, oh.. more than anything I miss the music. Not just the music on your personal profile, no the go to a profile of a band you love, look at their top 8 (sometimes I miss that too..top 8 lost a lot of friends over that..)…anyways you could look at a bands top 8 friends and there would be another band and then another band from that bands list and another and another and all of a sudden you have this new found love for 5 different bands/musicians and you’re telling all your friends (Chocolate Bear, I know you’re out there) and everyone has this new love for some dude who deserves fan a lot more than most of the people on the radio circuit. So, yeah. Sometimes, I miss myspace. Myspace started it all, it was the beginning of a social networking revolution, a com/marketing/pr nerd’s dream, and it had the music. The day I abandoned ship for myspace, the day the music died. (Not really but I like to end things dramatically.)  Oh and here is the song I am currently obsessed with: OneRepublic-Good Life. I hear it on the radio all the time and it was the song of the "X Games" coverage this year....