slacking

It’s been a bit since I last updated…I’ve been unfortunately consumed with school for the past few weeks and Law of Mass Communication is eating up my life. I also haven’t done anything particularly interesting.  Took some pictures for the student newspaper…they’re nothing exciting but I’ll post them later.

Anyways now that I have have some semblance of downtime…I’m slightly bored and urge you to indulge me by asking me questions of any sort. http://www.formspring.me/pitseleh09

I Am Jack’s Complete Lack of Surprise

So I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands lately.  Except I really haven’t but in between doing French homework and reading for Law of Mass Communication, I’ve started watching the show Skins again.

For those of you who don’t know, Skins is a British show about teenagers in Bristol, England who basically spend each episode snorting, smoking, popping and fucking anything they can get their hands on. It’s a pretty great show and unique in that it actually uses really young writers rather than a bunch of 30 somethings who have to work at figuring out what exactly kids these days actually say and do. Sometimes it can be a little ridiculous in that it sometimes come off as a slight distortion of reality-an almost fantasy parallel universe where everything is almost the same but not quite; people light up joints in classrooms and parents are (with the exception of a few characters’ storylines) out of the picture, ala Charlie Brown.

Anyways.  The point is that watching the wreckless abandon with which the characters of Skins lead their lives for the past few days has reminded me a little too much about my own tendencies. No, I’ve never done mdma (which the characters in the show name drop like its Lady Gaga) or set my locker at school on fire.  I’ve never driven a car into a harbor or stolen a boat in a random town.  I’ve never even been to a party that could be classified as a “rager.” But I do have my own wreckless tendencies. Not so much in what I actually do (because I’m tend to live life on the straight and narrow-I’ll take a brownie and tea on a Saturday night thanks, sans the weed) But in what I would do if I let myself.  I caught myself thinking yesterday that if I had friends like those characters in high school, I would be just like them.  If the opportunities would’ve presented themselves, I would’ve done it. The draw wouldn’t have been the drugs or the booze but the sheer temptation to just not care.

I’ve been catching myself thinking this a lot lately.  That I just don’t care. Despite only being sophomores in college, I can’t go a day without hearing talk about grad school and future careers come from my friends and roommates. Graduating school with great grades and an unblemished record in order to graduate in a couple years and jump right back into school. Getting into a “good” grad school. Taking the LSAT. Having a career. And after all this, I realized that I just don’t care.

That’s actually a lie. Because I do care. I obviously care enough to have gotten mostly straight A’s since beginning college. But I don’t care about college itself. I hate school.  I’m good at it but I’ve always hated it . I don’t care about grad school or starting a career the second I take off my cap and gown.  I’ve been to school for 14 years in a row now, I think I’ll need a break after a couple more.

Which is why I plan on not caring about anything when I graduate.  Is that an oxymoron, to plan to not care? Fuck it. The point is, when I graduate I’m giving into my tendencies.  I’m not going to go wild and crazy. But I do plan on leaving and I don’t plan on knowing when I’m coming back. I’m saying fuck grad school. Fuck a career. I’m going to do the stereotypical thing-take off to Europe and Asia.  Travel. Experience the world. I’m going to let myself do what I’ve always wanted to. So what if its stereotypical? I don’t care.

overload

Okay so two posts in a day might be a little excessive for me especially following the novel that I posted earlier. But I’m currently feeling sick and am laying on my couch completely bundled up and bored. Therefore I have nothing else to do except dig up old pictures on my Flickr that I took in the time that I stopped posting on my blog and the time that i picked it back up again.  So here you go.

you want to do what?

“Congress shall make no law…”

This is how the past two days have begun and ended for me.  I’m taking a U.S. Government class (it’s a California state requirement for undergrads) as well as Law of Mass Communication which is a requirement for the journalism major.  Suffice to say… There’s been a lot of talk and reading about the First Amendment between those two classes in the past few days.  The content of each class pretty much overlaps, although the Law of Mass Comm. class deals with more of the specifics of what is discussed in my government class. On one hand it’s nice to have two classes so closely related that I get the broad scope of how our government works as well as the specifics of how it works (court cases, policy, restrictions on the government, statues vs. rules and regulations etc.) but its contributed to an enormous amount of boredom on my part.

It’s not that I’m not interested in this kind of stuff because I definitely am.  As an aspiring journalist (whether I’ll actually be successful remains to be seen) I have to be interested in government and its inter-workings.   Or at least stay awake and afloat in class enough to be reasonably well-versed if I ever need to be.

For example, when you know enough about government and the law, you are then able to ask questions about the facts to determine whether something might be unconstitutional or not, or at the very least, whether it will raise questions.

For instance, this morning it was discovered that someone had vandalized the gay and lesbian resource center on the University of Oregon campus. Someone broke in sometime between yesterday afternoon and 1 a.m. and spray painted a large swastika on the center’s carpet.  Most people suspect that the vandalism is related to recent controversy on campus with the Pacifica Forum, although no links have been proved thus far.  The Pacifica Forum is a group that is categorized as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its invitations of holocaust deniers to speak at events and its alleged condemnations of gays and lesbians.  Apparently the University of Oregon, because one of the group members is a retired professor, allows this group to meet on campus to hold discussions and events. This year there has been a considerable uproar about the group coming back to the school (although I do not attend UO I saw postings and groups opposing the Pacifica Forum on Facebook).  Associated Students of the University of Oregon (ASUO) [were] considering a ban on the group in order to take a strong stance against hate speech and support student safety, according to an intern at Autostraddle.com who is a student at U of O.

So. What that all tells me and should tell you is that banning the group would have been an obvious violation of the First Amendment (because the University of Oregon is a public school, and therefore controlled by the government).  They know that.  The most obvious argument to me against banning the Pacifica Forum from the U of O campus is that as a public university, the facilities used by the Forum are in default, a public forum designed for the exercise of free speech by the public.  According to my handy dandy Communications Law textbook by John Zelezny, “…If a public forum has been created, government attempts to control the content of speech in that forum are presumptively invalid prior restraints.” Edit* According to the Oregon Daily Emerald a resolution to ban the Pacifica Forum was rejected last Friday.  ASUO is currently working on a new resolution that states their disproval of Pacifica Forum and asks the administration to take appropriate steps about keeping students safe.

Now as much as I’m not a fan of crazy white supremacist folk, It was a good choice to reject a ban against groups like this from the campus, especially if it’s not a blanket ban on all outside groups, and if the Pacifica Forum takes U of O to court, they probably would have won.  My campus dealt with similar issues last semester (only on a much, much smaller scale) when an anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-drug etc. etc. preacher paid us an annual visit and all hell broke loose on campus (see my photos from my last post).  As much as I hated the guy’s messages, they were all protected under the Constitution, as was his ability to speak on the university campus.  It was utterly shocking to me how many people pushed for kicking him out because they didn’t understand that doing so would be a violation of the First Amendment.

Anyway, that’s my rant/input for the day.  if you didn’t know about what happened at U of O, now you do.  If you didn’t know crazies were allowed to be on public university campuses, well now you do.  If you think I got any of my info wrong, or should’ve expanded more on something, let me know.

here we go again

So tonight I started my semester of potentially boring, potentially exciting/challenging photography for my university’s newspaper. All last semester I was a reporter and I loved it…but I decided that this is not the semester to be dealing with school in addition to writing multiple articles a week and tracking down impossible to find people. I did some photos for the paper last year when a crazy preacher guy came to campus and I happened to have my camera handy when all hell broke loose.  I ended up snagging the cover photo of the next day’s issue and decided that this semester that’s really the direction I want to go in right now.

Anyways. I think every week I’m going to post the photos from my assignments..both what makes it in the paper and the outtakes. So here’s this week’s assignment:

And since I mentioned the photos I did for the paper last semester here they are:

I feel like a freshman again

So it’s that time of the year again.  Filled with college applications, mailing transcripts, scrambling to meet deadlines and anxiously waiting by the mailbox for an acceptance letter.

Except I’m not a high school senior and this is my third year in a row doing this.

Last year after going pretty stir-crazy in the Lost Coast of Northern California, I wanted to run away.  Run away and go anywhere else I could and never look back basically. I’m not even sure why. I think I have chronic dissatisfaction with every aspect of my life whether it’s justified or not.  So anyways. I ended up applying as a transfer student to University of Oregon, where I was accepted when I applied as a senior in high school.

After a few months of battling the bureaucracy and being rejected and accepted to UofO (in the same day), much crying, a hellish BYU correspondence math course and complete frustration on my part I gave up and for the second time in two years, I declined attending UofO.

Which brings me where I am today.  Half a year more at Humboldt has gone and I can’t say that I’m not glad that I decided to stay.  Sure it’s a little small. A little boring. A little more of the same old same old stereotypical hippies and being trapped in the forest, no matter how beautiful it may be. But it’s been a pretty worthwhile year after all. Living with good people…making sure I’m on track with classes and finally learning how to be happy. And most important of all, I’ve been able to have an outlet for both my writing and photography, to learn new things and push myself.

So on to next year. It’s not that I’m dissatisfied with Humboldt this year; like I said, I’m not. But I do feel like next year, my junior year should be my get away year, if last year couldn’t be. It’s the year that everyone traditionally goes on study abroad and friends get separated in  all corners of the globe. Unfortunately next year I can’t do study abroad (options for journalism majors are a little slim) so I’m hightailing it to the east coast instead and going to University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

I’ve never really spent any time on the east coast so its pretty much a shot in the dark for me. I’m going on the National Student Exchange (NSE) program which is like…domestic study abroad basically and it allows you to attend any participating school in the country for up to a year if you’re accepted. Which brings me back to the beginning of this post.

I feel like a freshman again…waiting and wondering.  I was told by the NSE coordinator at my university that she was almost positive I’d be accepted to UMass which was a huge deal for me. I’m going to hold her to it. Not only is next year going to be exciting for me in that I get to attend a brand new school in an unfamiliar place, UMass is also the kind of school I never could have attended straight out of high school due to grades but always dreamed about. And now I finally have my second chance.

So here’s to next year I guess and whatever it holds.

Oh and a side note…for whatever it’s worth I submitted an application to the National Press Photographers Foundation’s scholarships for undergrads. No idea if I’ll get anything…highly doubt it though. The app was pretty basic…submitted up to 12 photos, basic info and my resume. Unfortunately the professor who was teaching my photo-j class retired so I have plenty of references for my written work but not so much for my photography so I probably won’t be too successful in my bid for scholarships but I figured it couldn’t hurt.

a triumphant return

So it’s definitely been over a year now since I last posted. I’m not really sure why. Life got in the way I guess. Maybe someone told me blogging was stupid. I’m not sure. But either way I’m back. Mostly to give myself an outlet to rant and engage in some petty narcissism by posting photographs I’ve taken.

When I began this blog over a year ago, I didn’t want to have a strict photoblog…after all I have a Flickr. I wanted an outlet for rants and thoughtful writing paired with my photography. I think maybe now, even more than I could last year, that will be possible. I’ve really been pushing myself this year with my photography. I took a road trip from Portland, Ore. to Los Angeles, CA in June and documented every stop on the way. I’ve just kept going ever since, whether my work was for myself, my photojournalism class last semester or my university’s newspaper.

One of my personal goals I’ve been trying to work on the last few months has been to take a closer look at my surroundings.  Now, that might seem pretty basic for photography but for me its been a drastic difference in my work and what I aim to do.  I’ve been dissecting everything around me…all the layers and the minute details. Focusing on the tiniest aspect of a scene in the forest or the beach or the middle of a crowd in a demonstration and making it beautiful and compelling. Not only has it changed and shaped my photography, it’s also changed my thinking. Each day I continue to push myself to focus on the details of the big picture. The how and the why and the interconnectedness of it all.

So anyway. I guess that’s an overview of what will come in the future, be it artistic photography or photojournalism. Get excited.

[click pictures to link to Flickr page]