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Blog Entry 10: Back 2 School

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The best plan for me has always been no plan. I figure that as long as I point myself in a general direction I want to go in, the rest will figure itself out. This is not the most stable way to go about things, and though it has given me a lot of fun memories, it has certainly given me the opposite end of the spectrum as well.  When I graduated high school, I enrolled in community college because it seemed like the thing to do next, and I didn't really have a plan for my future, so let's see where this goes? Where it went was me attending random classes that I had little interest in, with no real endgame in mind. Naturally, my stint in post-high school education was short-lived, not even finishing a whole year's worth of credit and burning a very nice bridge of financial grants in the process.  These actions led to a long and arduous period of self-reflective choices that brought me back to school as a transfer freshman at 27 on the other side of the country. Throughout al...
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Blog Entry #8: Consistency Isn't Always Key

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Discipline and drive have been at the forefront of my daily practice; honing and adding things when they start to feel "comfortable." "Use this momentum to create momentum" has been a common mantra the last month and a half.  Journal every day for a month, check...write jokes, check...verbal journal every day the following month, check...wake up every morning before the sun rises and climb a mountain as my first accomplishment of the day, check... Queue a rolled ankle because I got cocky and had a 18 day streak going. Then I went against my inner voice telling me to do the recovery mountain, check. Once that happened I took a step back (with a limp) to look at my entire schedule. I was creating a road that lead to only one outcome. All of my dharmic practices were only getting a fraction of my attention and the result was abysmal at best. 6 nights ago I decided to set aside my ego and ease up on the throttle. I don't care what my process looks like, I care abou...
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Blog Entry #9: A Single-Edged Sword

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I have always been hyper-keen about my surroundings, thinking about what I see and why it was made. This has sometimes felt like a curse, but I have realized what a blessing it is over the years. We as a society are being waterboarded with every form of media at all hours of the day, and it can be hard to go through our days with all the noise.  Since the idea of media has been a common topic in my English 102 class for the last couple of weeks, a new version of observation has developed. For the last few years, I have taken the time to narrow the number of things I evaluate so that my thoughts and time are more focused and productive. I've been introducing levels of this hyperevaluation when I see fit. Instead of thinking, "Why am I hearing this?" or "Why are they saying these things?" I think, "Whatever these people are trying to convey, I can get something positive from it, so I should see this through because who knows what gems I could stumble across....
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Blog Entry #7: Humankinds Rolodex (Pocket Translation)

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I remember being at my grandparent's house for Thanksgiving in 2006 when my uncle brought up this new website called Twitter, similar to Facebook, saying that it was going to be the next big thing. My Dad and cousins were rattling off all their opinions of how it'll never take saying things like, "Who's going to be interested in anything 140 characters or less?" or "Tweet? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard." People always make jokes when the latest and greatest is in its infancy. At the time, I was only 9 years old and was just along for the ride as the grown-ups were talking, but I learned this new word that my uncle said, sticking out beyond the rest, "Hashtag." "You put this character before a word or short phrase, and it allows you to categorize and summarize your statement." my uncle said. Almost like a title for the end of your tweet, emphasizing whatever you want to be emphasized.  Fast forward nearly 20 years, a...
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Entry #4: Learning How to Read

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I didn't read a single book growing up, from kindergarten to my senior year of high school, and up until I was about 20, I wore this fact like a badge of honor. I never took the time to get good at reading early on, so it's no wonder I thought of myself as someone who "isn't a book reader" any time a conversation came up about it. Of the short list of regrets I have, not getting into reading sooner is on that list.  During the time when I started to read physical books, I would read books I knew would hold my attention, like the Harry Potter series and certain historical fiction novels, leaving the more complex topics for audiobooks because it was the best way I could digest the information since I was so unpracticed when it came to sitting down and doing nothing but read a book word by word. This was a great place to start because I decreased the likelihood of getting discouraged, creating a library of cool-looking, unread books. It is common when you are first s...
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Blog Entry #6: A Month Without Music

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I like to come up with random challenges that are relatively easy but go against what I usually do in my daily routine. Towards the end of January, I noticed I always had music playing in the background. It felt like I couldn't live in silence, even if it was just between walking from my car to the library to study.  Whenever I recognize a dependency in my life, I consider why I have gravitated there and take it as a sign that I need to shake things up. Simultaneously, I have been wanting to stop paying for internet radios and go back to owning the audio files that I listen to so I can fill up my Zune and relearn exactly what type of music I want to listen to when I don't have every song in the universe to choose from. Since February was about to start, I decided to take the whole month off from music to see how it felt and how much of a difference it made to my day to allow silence back into my life. The first few days weren't that bad; I would think of a song I wanted to...
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Entry #3: Thanksgiving Dinner

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      When the topic of slant reporting is brought up, it is hard not to go straight to politics and how the titans of political media are mismanaging their power by inserting their own narratives while claiming to be unbiased, demonizing whoever is on the opposite side of the court.       Elon Musk has been investing a lot of time and money to lessen the amount of misinformation by legitimizing levels of X to report all ends of the political spectrum in one service with the intent to show that the extremes of each side are not the only voices out there. One of the ways this is being done is by hiring political reporters from the left, right, and middle of the political seesaw who seem to have some semblance of journalistic integrity.     Musk's most recent hire and fire was Don Lemon, a "popular" CNN political reporter who was let go last year for his comments on specific incumbents of the republican party . Lemon conducted an interview with...
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