Entry #1: The Blog World

Personally, I really like blogs. It's a way for adults and maybe even teenagers to get their thoughts and ideas in writing. Like a public journal in a way. I like looking at them and finding new ideas and things I didn't know before. I started my first blog when i was 16 and I have kept it ever since. I may have drifted away from it at times, but it's always there for me to return to.

So the first blog I liked out of the ones I have just scowered the internet was www.videogum.com.
If you didn't get a chance to look at this one, I thoroughly reccomend, especially if you like movies, youtube vids, and TV. They give reviews on everything. I read the funniest post about the latest Glee episode and about one of my favorite movies, Bridesmaids. They definitely caught my eye considering I am all about watching every single TV show, the good ones, on television. I also really enjoy a good thrashing when people make some big copyright mistakes.

The next reccomendation is definitely www.thehairpin.com
Being a girl, this one stuck out when the review said it had tons of beauty ideas and crafty things all over it. When I visited, it had a lot more than that. I read the most interesting article about a Princeton professor who was verbally harrassed by a former student and the article just baffled me. I really hope you take a look at this one. I just spent the last hour looking at 30+ blogs and this one is by far my favorite.

Now this next one was terrible or anything, but it just wasn't interesting to me because I could care less about finances at the moment www.getrichslowly.org
I will definitely keep this blog in mind when money starts to be more prominent in my life but for now, ehh. It had some awesome tips on how to keep a little pocket change here and there and I will defnitely keep those tips in mind the next time I go shopping but really, all the money advice and tips I have come from my parents. I know that other advice can go along way with some people, and there are countless books on the subject, but I personally feel that it just doesn't affect me. I know not to spend money like it never ends and that if I don't need it, then don't get it. I went to a university already, and there isn't much to do to cut corners when you are poor and the only money you have to spend is on books and tuition. I already know the things that are neccessary and the things you can live without.

"Growing Up" by Russell Baker

I really enjoyed this essay and I hope you take the time to read it

"Growing Up"

The notion of becoming a writer had flickered off and on in my head since the Belleville days, but it wasn't until my third year in high school that the possibility took hold. Until then I'd been bored by everything associated with English courses. I found English grammar dull and baffling. I hated the assignments to turn out "compositions," and went at them like heavy labor, turning out leaden, lackluster paragraphs that were agonies for teachers to read and for me to write. The classics thrust on me to read seemed deadening as chloroform.

When our class was assigned to Mr. Fleagle for third-year English I anticipated another grim year in that dreariest of subjects. Mr. Fleagle was notorious among City students for dullness and inability to inspire. He was said to be stuffy, dull, and hopelessly out of date. To me he looked to be sixty or seventy and prim to a fault. He wore primly severe eyeglasses, his wavy hair was primly cut and primly combed. He wore prim vested suits with neckties blocked primly against the collar buttons of his primly starched white shirts. He had a primly pointed jaw, a primly straight nose, and a prim manner of speaking that was so correct, so gentlemanly, that he seemed a comic antique.

I anticipated a listless, unfruitful year with Mr. Fleagle and for a long time was not disappointed. We read "Macbeth." Mr. Fleagle loved "Macbeth" and wanted us to love it too, but he lacked the gift of infecting others with his own passion. He tried to convey the murderous ferocity of Lady Macbeth one day by reading aloud the passage that concludes:

. . . I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums . . . .

The idea of prim Mr. Fleagle plucking his nipple from boneless gums was too much for the class. We burst into gasps of irrepressible snickering. Mr. Fleagle stopped.

"There is nothing funny, boys, about giving suck to a babe. It is the — the very essence of motherhood, don't you see."

He constantly sprinkled his sentences with "don't you see." It wasn't a question but an exclamation of mild surprise at our ignorance. "Your pronoun needs an antecedent, don't you see," he would say, very primly. "The purpose of the Porter's sccene, boys, is to provide comic relief from the horror, don't you see."

Late in the year we tackled the informal essay. "The essay, don't you see, is the ..." My mind went numb. Of all forms of writing, none seemed so boring as the essay. Naturally we would have to write informal essays. Mr. Fleagle distributed a homework sheet offering us a choice of topics. None was quite so simpleminded as "What I Did on My Summer Vacation," but most seemed to be almost as dull. I took the list home and dawdled until the night before the essay was due. Sprawled on the sofa, I finally faced up to the grim task, took the list out of my notebook, and scanned it. The topic on which my eye stopped was "The Art of Eating Spaghetti."

This title produced an extraordinary sequence of mental images. Surging up out of the depths of memory came a vivid recollection of a night in Belleville when all of us were seated around the supper table -- Uncle Allen, my mother, Uncle Charlie, Doris, Uncle Hal — and Aunt Pat served spaghetti for supper. Spaghetti was an exotic treat in those days. Neither Doris nor I had ever eaten spaghetti, and none of the adults had enough experience to be good at it. All the good humor of Uncle Allen's house reawoke in my mind as I recalled the laughing arguments we had that night about the socially respectable method for moving spaghetti from plate to mouth.

Suddenly I wanted to write about that, about the warmth and good feeling of it, but I wanted to put it down simply for my own joy, not for Mr. Fleagle. It was a moment I wanted to recapture and hold for myself. I wanted to relive the pleasure of an evening at New Street. To write it as I wanted, however, would violate all the rules of formal composition I'd learned in school, and Mr. Fleagle would surely give it a failing grade. Never mind. I would write something else for Mr. Fleagle after I had written this thing for myself.

When I finished it the night was half gone and there was no time left to compose a proper, respectable essay for Mr. Fleagle. There was no choice next morning but to turn in my private reminiscence of Belleville. Two days passed before Mr. Fleagle returned the graded papers, and he returned everyone's but mine. I was bracing myself for a command to report to Mr. Fleagle immediately after school for discipline when I saw him lift up my paper from his desk and rap for the class's attention.

"Now, boys," he said, "I want to read you an essay. This is titled 'The Art of Eating Spaghetti.' "

And he started to read. My words! He was reading MY WORDS out loud to the entire class. What's more, the entire class was listening. Listening attentively. Then somebody laughed, then the entire class was laughing, and not in contempt and ridicule, but with openhearted enjoyment. Even Mr. Fleagle stopped two or three times to repress a small prim smile.

I did my best to avoid showing pleasure, but what I was feeling was pure ecstasy at this startling demonstration that my words had the power to make people laugh. In the eleventh grade, at the eleventh hour as it were, I had discovered a calling. It was the happiest moment of my entire school career. When Mr. Fleagle finished he put the final seal on my happiness by saying, "Now that, boys, is an essay, don't you see. It's — don't you see — it's of the very essence of the essay, don't you see. Congratulations, Mr. Baker."

For the first time, light shone on a possibility. It wasn't a very heartening possibility, to be sure. Writing couldn't lead to a job after high school, and it was hardly honest work, but Mr. Fleagle had opened a door for me. After that I ranked Mr. Fleagle among the finest teachers in the school.

"show and tell"

Hey there!

So my name is Rhianna and I am just gonna use this first free post to let all you know a little bit about myself. You know, more than what meets the eye.

I'm 19, only a sophomore in college, currently taking a break from University up at NAU in Flagstaff. It's quite the education, you know being too cold to go to class and with all the exciting......mountains and stuffffff......

Anyways, while at school there, I met a few people who are quite important.
Such as these lovely people right down here.

They all became my family, whether I met them in the dorm where we had many a sleepless night, we were sisters in the sorority I joined (Alpha Delta Pi) or they just happened to be the surrogate family these five other girls and I created. :)

I also have three amazing best friends here in Phoenix, and an awesome boyfriend who I love more than anything.

I'm very blessed in my life to have all these people and more. I wish I was able to go on and on about the people in my life and all the ones who hold special places and who I have more pictures to share but I must go on and leave this post to what it is. An intro to this blog. My thoughts and opinions on worldly things and whatever seems to pop into my head. So hopefully you enjoy my ramblings about the social media of blogs, politics, the earth, the weather, technology and etc. And all I really have to credit this genius is this grey matter between my earlobes.