Saving People, Hunting Things: The family Business
Lol. Idek. Just wanted to use that title.
Anyway.
I really need to pick my grades up. I can feel them slipping away.
So today is another homework day, mixed in with some breaks here and there. And I need to make sure I stay on top of everything this coming up week so that I can go to Atlanta Pride with my buds. It will be my first ever pride, and I’m kinda excited.
Other than that, I still haven’t managed to get my sleeping schedule back to normal. -.- I slept till noon today, lol. Oopsies!
But Alyssa and Levi are going to be dying my hair black today, and I’m excited and nervous for that. They should be coming over soon.
In other news, it’s finally time for me to plug in my phone to my computer and take everything off of it. I need to clear out my memory, especially for pictures. *sigh* I really hate doing this because I love pictures so much! I take pictures of everything, and I like to have them all on my phone. Sometimes I just scroll through my pictures and remember things and smile. Whoever invented pictures was the bomb dot com. They are awesome, and I don’t know what I would do without being able to take and look at pictures. I like documenting my life.
and ended up having to stay up till 4:00 A.M. last night to study for my Criminal Justice Exam, which was this morning, at 9:05 A.M.
I think I might have gotten a B.
Hope so.
I know my grade on my Psych exam!
I got a 94!!!
WHOOT!!!
Random update before I continue:
My knee is bruised and cut from my bike crash, but it doesn’t hurt anymore.
Anyway.
I think I got a B or an A on my Psych exam that I took this Monday. I’ll be finding out either this weekend or on Monday. I really hope I did good. I honestly don’t see why I wouldn’t have done good, though, because Psychology is just my thing. I have a natural propensity for it. Then again, I was super distracted this Monday and having a very rough time of it because of the horrible week, followed by the breakup, and the horrible weekend. I did study, though…So hopefully that paid off.
I also had a Chemistry quiz on Monday that I already know I failed. Since I didn’t have much time for the studying and all because of my lack of time and ability to concentrate, I chose to give up studying much for Chem and just focused all of my time and effort on Psych, since that’s my major. I feel ok with that decision, even though I made a 40 on the Chem quiz, because honestly, in all reality, one quiz is not going to hurt me that much. I’ve done really well on everything else so far in Chem. It’s also only the beginning of the year. As long as I keep trying hard and do my best to make sure something like that never happens again - in any of my classes - I should be fine.
Then on Tuesday, I had to attend the Madeline Albright seminar for my Leadership class. For those of you who don’t know who she is, she was the first female secretary of state. Even though I wasn’t looking forward to dressing up and going to sit through the seminar, it was an honor to have her come to our school and speak to us. I’m glad that I went, and I definitely did get something out of it. She talked about seeking the truth and how that means that we shouldn’t let our own opinions end conversations but to start them. Just because we believe something to be true doesn’t mean that it necessarily is. We should be willing to let our perceptions of our realities change through our experiences. Of course, she wasn’t saying that we shouldn’t have concrete beliefs and values; everyone is entitled to those…for example, believing that there is a God. However, we should recognize that the world around us continues to change. We need to move with it and change with it. Back in the day, people believed that African Americans were somehow lesser than Caucasians. Now, we know that just isn’t true…but it took a handful of people seeking truth and knowledge and being willing to continue to recognize that they don’t know everything there is to know in order to change that reality for the USA. We should always be willing to learn; we shouldn’t close our minds off! We’re allowed to have concrete beliefs and values, but really, we should continue to listen to the world around us…because beliefs and values could turn out to be just theories (“a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; ‘theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses;’ ‘true in fact and theory’”). Maybe something we’ve believed to be true without a doubt is in fact wrong once compared to more evidence and put to the test again. We shouldn’t just take things to be true without putting them to the test through comparing them to our daily lives, experiences, and continual efforts of open-minded learning.
Yesterday, I had my American Government quiz. Dude, I thought that thing was going to kill me. I hate studying for history-oriented things. However, I think I did well on it.
I also attended the White Like Me seminar, geared toward the discussion of white privilege and other types of privilege. It really did a great job of talking about this, and I was glad I attended this seminar, as well. I’m much more aware now of the privilege I was born with just by being born white, and I’m glad I know more about it and can understand it more. Of course, I have somewhat of an advantage in understanding privileges and stuff like that, because while I hold one privilege category (of being white), I belong to a minority, as well. I can see how it feels on both sides, even though the struggles are unique to groups of colored people and to groups of trans* people. In any case, one thing I liked that the speaker said was, “People sometimes wanna ask why we don’t have a White History Month, when we have a Black History Month and a Hispanic History Month. Well, guess what? We do! They just call it something different! They call it June…May…December…October…November…January…we’re always learning about white culture and history! It’s all in our schools. We learn white literature, white music history…Think about it! We never learn about the unique histories and cultures of colored people. When you graduated high school, you weren’t required to know about black culture and history, but black people were required to know about white culture and history. You see where I’m gettin’ at? Now, this doesn’t mean we’re racist or insensitive or anything. This is just conditioning. And I’m not trying to guilt anyone into anything. There’s a difference between guilt and responsibility. Most of you have probably never done anything wrong to feel guilty about, but listen - we’re still responsible for fixing this! The majority of demographers have predicted that some time in the next thirty - maybe forty - years, our country will be half white people and half colored people, and if we’re still living in a society based on white supremacy, we’re in for some troubles. And I’m not just talking about the struggles between race and ethnicity. This has to do with all sorts of social injustices - the poor and rich; lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgendered and heterosexual or cisgendered people. We don’t want to just leave this to roll off on our next generations - like our parents and their parents and their parents did to us. We need to start fixing this now.”
Now, I’m paraphrasing that, so don’t take my word for it based on a word-for-word basis, but that was pretty much it. I thought he really had a point, and I was proud of him, even though I don’t know him. His name is Tim Wise. He has written lots of books related to these topics, and he goes all over to give the same or similar speech/es.
So now it’s the weekend.
I’ve got to do a quiz for Psych online, and I have a Criminal Justice exam on Monday to study for. When I’m not focusing on my academics, I’m going to do some fun stuff…like dye my hair with Alyssa, go to the home game (Caw caw, motherfuckers!), and possibly go to another GSA party this Saturday. I also need to Skype with my mom, since she’s home alone this weekend and feeling lonely.
And don’t forget - Sunday is Bisexuality day! Be proud! :)
(I’m probably going to run out of tags to tag this with)
