This is it, This is me.

Usually I want to post a blog, just so I can get a little bit of feedback, from my dad and all of you, mostly his friends, I have yet to make any of my own. I try to blog for my sake, but have trouble telling this huge internet the things that I really should be telling it.

Life has been lack luster. I am back in school and I am working at a 'fun' job and I'm only 20 years old and engaged to this amazing guy. But sometimes I just don't even want to get out of bed in the morning. I just want to curl up and cry.

Nothing particularly bad has happened. I just feel like even if I get up and shower and go to school and do my homework and finish this semester. I still have next semester and the year after that before I really start work on my degree and that will take at least four years, so I will be 25 then. That's not too bad, except that the people in my profession, unless they get their foot in the door when they are a freshman, usually don't even get to see any wild whales or do anything for years because of internships and paperwork desk jobs.

Sometimes I wonder if I will even graduate. Will I end up teaching? I don't even really like kids. I don't want to spend the rest of my life getting up early so that I can go to work so that I can earn money to pay for things I don't REALLY need. Will I be happy when I finish this semester? The next one? What about after that? Will I be happy then? Is there something I need to do that someone forgot to tell me about that will make me happy? I should be able to deal with my roommate (a dick though he may be) not wanting to share art supplies without not wanting to speak to him for a few days or wanting to hit him in the face with a metal baseball bat.

Nothing feels worth it anymore. I want Colorado to be enough for me. I don't know why I feel so worthless now. I never used to. In high school and the summer after that I felt so amazing, all the time. Galveston was hard. Harder than anyone knows, it changed me and I wish I could go back to before. I want to take it back. I feel like it took a part of me away and I don't know how to get it back.

Asshole

This last week I was on my Facebook and one of my friends posted a link to a group called "Nuke the Whales". I clicked on the link and was really hurt by what I saw. There were over 200 members and most of them had posted comments about the group that sound a lot like this:

"Nuke the f***ers! they deserve to die!!!"

and

"Stupid animals can't even breathe underwater, all they do is eat our fish!"

and

"United Nations Indoctrinating Our Youth in Earth Worship; Documentary uncovers the real objective behind the Earth Charter. Many U.S. city and educational officials have already been persuaded to endorse this pro-UN manifesto. Learn why this campaign, masquerading as a plan to protect the environment, is potentially lethal to family, faith, and freedom.
http://www.documentarywire.com/indoctrinating-our-youth-in-earth-worship"

So, in response, I posted a note (kind of like a blog entry) that goes like this:

I know that most of my friends don't necessarily find the Save the Whales cause to be one that they strongly support. Some of you may not even think this cause is valid. I glanced at my home page today and found something that truly offended me. One of my friends had posted a link to a group called Nuke the Whales, most of the wall posts contained members who seemed almost excited by the idea that these wonderful creatures are a drain on society and should be eliminated. I want to dedicate my life to helping restore the world's population of baleen and toothed whales and I was deeply hurt by the ideas expressed in this group. I understand that the premise of the group is intended as a joke, but I am deeply offended by it. Some of you may not understand why, but I don't find this funny. These animals are endangered and are dieing out before we know enough about them to understand them. There is still so much we don't know about whales and the conservation efforts are not moving very fast. In a world where stupid things amuse the majority, I would feel defeated and that my efforts are for naught if more groups like this start popping up and become more popular. Cartoons about stupid people are popular all over the place and I do not want Nuke the Whales to join the ranks of Charlie the Unicorn, South Park or Family Guy. I'll get off my soap box now, for those of you who actually read this, thank you :)

I tagged a few of my friends that I thought might appreciate the fact that I took a stand and wrote about what I believe. One of these people, who I tagged because I consider him an intellectual and was curious about what he thought wrote this to me:

First off, you're wrong. That's ok, most people are most of the time. Including me. The group itself is parody and they're expressing loudly that they think whales are important. This is similar to making racist, sexist or otherwise bigoted statements that are absolutely untrue to point out the ridiculousness of said statements, the only problem is that this group took it to an extreme and made it a little less satirical and a lot less funny. They point being, they're still on your side. None of those people think that losing whales is a good thing at all and I'm sure plenty of them appreciate good humor. Like South Park. Which is satire. Second off, they are expressing one of the most treasured aspects of free speech: you have no right to not be offended. You're bound to run into plenty of people who offend you and it is your job to understand what they are saying completely, to comprehend their motives and methods and realize that 1) they're wrong or 2) they're not so bad after all. The free marketplace of ideas is a harsh place to live, a no-holds bar arena of thought and reason. To be unable to communicate thoroughly or take the time to read the statement of the group (and I found three in a search, all of which were in no way serious) then you should in no way be complaining. Do realize that I love you, but I will in no way coddle you. Your argument is flawed, misspelled, and holds as well as a sieve on a shooting range. And to help you learn from it the best thing for me to do is not tell you it looks like a nice bucket.

I am furious. So I told him:

Thanks Alex, I thought you might have something intelligent to say because I consider you an intellectual. Obviously I underestimated your sense of morality and understanding for other people's causes. I stated that I understand that the groups are meant to be funny, but that I do not find them to be and was simply expressing my opinion that in my current field of study these groups, while seemingly harmless have the potential to be detrimental to the cause I have chosen to spend my entire future promoting. Also, if I misspelled any words, please, do tell! I can't find them.

I know this is kind of long, but I needed to vent. :)

Earth Day

buzz...buzz...buzz...

Dad is calling again, should I answer?

"Hi Daddy, what's up?"

"Ohh I'm just watching t.v. and was thinking about you, there is a show on Thursday night at 8 o'clock about orcas by Jean-Michel Cousteau"

. . .

Turns out that Orcas are very cultured. The matriarchal resident pods of the Pacific North-West are the pods that most of us know about. They stay with their mother's their whole lives and when a full grown adult male looses his mother, they have been known to mourn for weeks, sometimes dieing from lack of food. They have been known to help lost boatmen find their way and were sensationalized in the 1980's and 1990's by Keiko (Free Willy) who was taken from his mother in the waters of Iceland. Keiko was eventually returned to the Atlantic Ocean only to be rejected by the tight-nit pods of the area. He would eventually take his last breath on the coast of Norway.

There are other cultures of Orca all over the world. Orcas have the largest range of all the marine mammals but number fewer than 100.000 worldwide. The residents off the coast of New Zealand are not matriarchal but do stay in very tight nit pods of 20 or 30 individuals. They hunt baby baleen whales, sharks and manta rays. An orca might find a manta ray and call over another orca that is better at catching the rays. The second orca will then roll over on it's back and pick the ray out from under a rock and flip it on it's back, making the ray go limp. The two orcas will share the manta ray.

The calls of the orca are also cultured geographically. The calls of the Australian orca tend to sound 'twangier' (much like the people of Australia) than the calls of the transient pods or pods in other parts of the world. Orca have dialects down to the family level and do not tend to mix well with orcas that have a different cultures and languages. Some transient orca meet with 200 or 300 other orca to hunt huge balls of fish that gather near the North Sea. The year that the team went to film this Orca feeding frenzy, the orca didn't show up. Neither did the fish. The waters that at one time were teaming with fish and orca were almost completely deserted.

The second half of the two hour special was about salmon farming. The salmon farms of British Columbia have depleted the wild salmon from the rivers, and sea lice are infesting salmon spawn before they are ready, before they have scales. Salmon are the main food source for the resident Orca certain times of year. Salmon also feed the bears, the sharks and humans as well. Salmon are also predators of the deep. The fish, whales and even humans all contain alarming levels of toxins. I'm not sure what we must do about this, but I know that something has to change.

Yesterday was Earth Day. Save the Whales.

Informative Speech

I GOT A 95!!!!!! It was horrible though, I was so nervous, but my teacher didn't see to notice!!


Oh and my dad sent me a link to a post he did a few years ago. I really liked it and I don't think I read it the first go-around so... Here it is!

My speech today

Today I had my first speech in my, well, speech class. We have been talking about how communication works and how to avoid disagreements and to solve things rationally without fighting about it. I suck at this. I think about what I'm saying and how it will be perceived by the person I'm saying it to and somewhere along the way "shared meaning" is not achieved. I stopped writing and talking as much when we were going through that section of the class. So I have decided that studying the way I talk is nothing if not detrimental to my speaking habits. I will not be taking anymore speech classes after this. Not my thing.

So today I go in to class, all dressed up and nervous about my speech. I am thinking of all the different ways I can explain to my classmates "How Yoga is Beneficial to Students of all Athletic Abilities" (an informative speech). I show up to class almost 10 minutes late (my teacher comes in shortly after I do) and have forgotten my evaluation sheet. As we are getting organized my neighbor has an extra (YAY!) so I give my outline and evaluation sheet to my teacher and put my name at the bottom of the list of presenters. Mrs. PhD, my teacher, is in a particularly bad mood today. I am scared out of my mind. Mrs. PhD decides that we need to practice speaking so that the first time we are up in front of everyone is not when we are being graded. I'm first. I get up to the front and my heart drops into my stomach.

I completely forget what I am supposed to say. I cannot remember what my speech is even about.

I sit back down and wait until it's my turn to melt under the pressure of the spotlight.
Lucky me, we ran out of time.
Darn now I have to go through the whole thing all over again.