Signed, Midwestern Redhead

Previously, I mentioned how much exercise isn't my cup of tea. I don't like sweating, I prefer breathing without labor, and I (personally) feel that there's more that can be done in a day if I don't have to set aside time to work out. Throw in back surgery and dislocating a knee (twice) and there's not much more motivation to keep you going. This summer, an ad popped up on Instagram for an app called "Daily Yoga." Remembering how much I enjoyed it in high school as I took yoga for my gym credit, I thought that it was something I could do. The next day, I went out and bought a yoga mat (buying something holds me to it) and decided to download the app. I was surprised out how they tailored my preferences of what I wanted to work out, my difficulty level, problem areas and what my purpose for downloading the app were (losing weight, getting toned, become more in touch with myself etc.) I decided to save a few programs that had an appeal to me and most importa...

Hello everyone, My apologies for keeping up with this blog. When you overfill your plate with working a part-time job in the summer, become the news director of your college newspaper and decide to take 18 credits to get started on your major in the spring of 2023, finding time to blog can become difficult. This being said, starting my sophomore year of college has been drastically different than my sophomore year of high school. Four years ago, I was overly stressed with physics and geometry and hating every minute of high school, struggling to get through. With all that I'm juggling this semester, you'd think that I would have returned to that state. Surprisingly enough, I'm not. In fact, I feel that I'm in an amazing state of mind.  I recently moved into my first apartment in August and living off-campus is amazing. No drunk students yelling in the halls on the weekend or having to attend floor meetings that could've simply been sent to our floor's group chat...

 Hi everyone,  I'm back with the last of my mini journal entries from my college English class. The semester is wrapping up and while I'm in the middle of preparing for finals, I have finished another project for my English class since I last filled you guys in. After writing that extensive rhetorical analysis, I wasn't too thrilled at the idea of starting another paper that would inevitably take up much of my time. However, this next paper we would write would be a group paper on a topic of our choosing. At first, I was apprehensive of the idea of doing a huge group paper. Would I be put in a group where I would do most of the work? Would my group members be rude? Turns out, the group I had was pretty sufficient in getting work turned in on time.  The topic that my group and I picked out needed to be easily searchable and pertain to campus. After jumping around from idea to idea, we decided to research the idea of dorm rooms. To narrow down such a broad topic, we decided...

 Hi everyone, I'm back with another update on my writing and rhetoric class. I just finished up my second project and my first paper for this class. This was more of a struggle than the first project, but swapping my sanity for caffeine and balancing this project with a number of assignments for my other classes, I got it done. The second big project that we had to do was a rhetorical analysis of an article of our choice. This project was all learning, in the sense, that everything I did was new to me. The style, the type of writing, the formatting everything. The only consistency I knew was how to read an article and take notes on it to throw some words together for a project.  The article that I chose to read was "All Writing is Autobiography" by Donald Murray. In this 1991 article, he discusses his opinion that writing, no matter what form it is in, is all autobiographical. He found out in a study that most authors write about experiences they went through before the a...

 Hi everyone, One of my favorite classes this year has been English, more specifically writing and rhetoric. As someone who does a lot of writing in their free time, I'm always interested in finding new ways to learn the craft, and what better way of that than hands-on experience? We just finished up our first huge project and while I started out having mixed emotions about it, it was one of the easier assignments I had for the month (ugh to math in Labs). Our project was to take a piece of our literary history, be it reading or writing, and how that impacted our lives. It was easy for me to discuss finding my passion for writing after my back surgery and the challenge of writing a novel in two months. I've told many people those stories, so it came naturally to me to write about it.  However, the project had to be multimodal, meaning to use a combination of text, photos, audio, etc. to get our point across. For me, I could write endlessly or turn in a paper, no big deal. My t...

 Hi everyone, I know I promised that I would update once things calmed down and that was all the way back in February. Let me fill you in on what I've all been up to since the last time I wrote here. The last few months of high school were a crazy blur. I finally became an adult, had a super fun time at prom and took a tour of my college. It was so crazy to walk around on campus, knowing that it would become a home away from home for the next few years. I decided to push myself out of my comfort zone and decided to turn in an application for graduation speaker. The odds were in my favor as I was chosen! I thought I'd turn into a puddle of nerves when I heard my name be called, but I was so excited and it felt so natural. After weeks of practicing, I stood up in front of around 4,000 people, memorized speech engraved in my brain. I understand why musicians love getting up in front of people now. The amount of power you have commanding a room where everyone is silent and listenin...