The Ever-pressing Issue of Food

Every day, three times a day, sometimes four times a day, I am scouring the Earth, or my fridge, for some form of sustenance.  It amazes me whenever I am at some large sporting event or an airport that there is enough food on this planet to sustain all of these people eating three times a day.  

If you think about it, there really isn’t enough food to sustain everybody, what with the starving in third world countries all of the time, but it seems that way over here because of our industrialized society.  Food is easy to come by here, in fact, getting fat is cheaper than eating healthy and staying slim.  Think about it, a poor family can afford to go to burger king three times a day, but wouldn’t be able to afford going to the store to buy relatively heart healthy foods.  Eating healthy is expensive, and I think that is one reason why our country is getting heavier and heavier.  People need to eat, but what they eat is what matters the most.  

The subway I’m about to go and get when I’m finished writing this blog post, will be forgotten as the day goes on, but the nutrients that I received with it will be used throughout the week.  I’ll try and think about that while I’m scarfing it down.  I’ll try not to take it for granted because I know, because of the media, that there are people starving and dehydrated throughout the world.

Finals

A motivational illustration for finals week.

Finals week can be the bane of everyone’s existence (yes I did just the The Dark Knight Rises), but it has potential to be one of the more productive weeks of a student’s entire semester.  Throughout the entire week the student in question is put through a series of tests; I’m not only speaking of the practical exams that are taken for every class, instead I’m speaking of tests that involve how long a person can go without sleep and how good someone is at acquiring caffeine.  

Of course, during the summer (right now), I only have a single exam this finals week, however, I do have a portfolio due this Thursday.  I have to gather everything I have written throughout the duration of this semester and fill a hole-punched folder.  My test is in Differential Equations, which surprisingly I’m  not at all worried about.  I digress, finals week during the fall and spring semesters is incredibly amplified compared to the summer course sessions.  Not only do you have around 3 times more exams, but they are much more difficult.  After every semester, I look back and wonder how I pulled it off yet again.  

It is a test of will, wit, and endurance.  You can go into them thinking that you have it memorized and under control, but you will quickly find out how incredibly unprepared you were.  

Majors

As a Mechanical Engineering major at LSU, I tend to be swamped with work throughout the majority of semesters.  I usually befriend other fellow engineers, mostly because two or three heads is always better than one.  My major has proven itself over these past two years to be rather difficult and discouraging.  I plan on completing the full curriculum and receiving my degree in the middle of the 2014-2015 school year.  

Some people try and differentiate between majors, saying that one is more difficult than the other.  They will say that the general studies majors are much easier to coast through than some of the more technical majors.  I don’t believe that is so.  Many of my friends are Kinesiology majors and Biology majors and I couldn’t even begin to decipher some of the sciences that they must take part in.  I sometimes listen in to my friends discussing Organic Chemistry and it sounds like gibberish to me.  However, they have also said that they feel the same way whenever I discuss my many Calculus classes with my fellow engineers.  Obviously, it isn’t an issue of difficulty, it is an issue of what you as an academic person are good at.  I am solid at practicality and numbers, while other people even find happiness in writing papers focusing on right brained projects.  

All majors are difficult, if they weren’t, then they wouldn’t be taught at universities around the country.  

Club Midd

The LSU library is probably the best public library that I have ever encountered.  Of course, right now it isn’t that great because there aren’t that many students here over the summer.  Once the fall starts, however, Middleton Library changes into a sort of social gathering.  People go there to study sure, but because of its areas where people are allowed to talk and not remain silent, it is possible to have a social experience there.  

Even during finals week, Middleton plays host to a rave party.  It is a fifteen minute party involving techno music, glow sticks, and hundreds of anxious college students.  It acts as a method to blow off steam during an otherwise stress filled week.  Also, during the Halloween season, zombies will even attack the LSU library.  People will dress up as their favorite undead and follow a group of others doing the same thing.  Then, they proceed to bang on the Middleton reference area’s windows, causing quite the scene.  

Middleton Library, aka Club Midd, plays host to many stressed out students, but it always allows those same students, some fresh scenery from cooped up dorms and one-person apartments.  

Buying music in Lafayette

Radiohead performing a show in 2008

I just got back from a trip to Best Buy with my sister and I realized how difficult it is to try and find music in Lafayette, LA.  When I was little there was a place specifically to purchase music, it was called Raccoon Records.  This place was torn down once they went out of business and I was truly distraught to find this out.  I went to Best Buy today to buy a Radiohead album and I couldn’t find anything Radiohead related.  There was plenty of Drake and Rihanna, but there was absolutely no Radiohead.  This band is pretty famous and hot right now, but the Lafayette Best Buy, apparently does not deem it so.  It seems that in our day and age, people want music that does not involve any instruments.  Instead, they want rhymes with large bass drops.

Living off Campus as Opposed to on Campus

Throughout my two-year college career, I have lived in a condominium in the residential complex called University View.  Yesterday night, I was required to attend a filming session for a group project that I was doing for one of my classes.  We had to meet in a place called The Cottages of Baton Rouge.  When I initially drove up, it was as if I was in a golfing club like Le Triomphe in Lafayette, LA.  The grass was cut, the houses or “cottages” were brand new and looked incredibly clean and well built.  This was all stunning to me because the complex that I live in isn’t nice at all. There are beer bottles everywhere, and trash is left outside people’s doors.  The grass gets mowed about only once every two months.  We do have two pools, but they are notorious for being urinated in.  It is suddenly clear to me that I don’t live in the nice off-campus complex that I thought that I lived in.  That being said, I still enjoy living off-campus as opposed to living on campus.  The media throughout my childhood and high school life portrayed college life in dorms to be full of dorm parties and the all around good time.  From what I could gather from my friends, this isn’t the case.  I’ve had many friends who have lived in dorms and they have told me that it isn’t what it is cracked up to be.  In fact, at LSU people who live in dorms go off-campus to party, whether it be Tigerland, Bogie’s, or Shady’s.  My complex is located literally, across the street from these places, so you could say that my living off-campus is more convenient for parties than living on campus, which is not the case for a good bit of the colleges around the country.  

CrossFit Games

This past weekend I took part in an international event called the 2012 Reebok CrossFit Games.  The CrossFit games is a six year old event where competitors take part in grueling events designed to test the fitness of all participants.  It is one of the fastest growing sports in the world.  Every event is completely different from the last, and sometimes the events aren’t even announced until moments before they occur.  Because of this, the athletes must be physically prepared for everything, and so they train year-round for anything.  

This new sporting event shows how our society is changing.  We are becoming bored with everyday sports.  Football, baseball, basketball, and even soccer are quickly becoming old and used up.  In all of those sports, the best team doesn’t always win.  The better baseball team could potentially lose the world series because of an error from one single infielder.  In CrossFit, however, every man and woman are fighting for their own glory.  They participate in many  different challenges throughout the weekend, and therefore, every aspect of their endurance and stamina is tested.  This way, the truly fittest person always wins.  Honestly, I’m thinking it’s about time America decided to find the best all around athlete.  

A Glimpse into Reporting

I recently began work on a film project for my English class.  It has given me a new outlook on how difficult it must be to be a reporter in the field.  It involved a couple of my group members and me grabbing the attention of people who were going to workout in our campus gym and proceed to get them on camera while they answered a few questions of ours.  It was difficult to say the least.  Of the 15 people we asked, we only got around 4 strangers to answer a few questions, and when they did, they were never too excited to be on camera while doing it.  Luckily, we found a couple people we knew while filming, and they were a little more prone to saying yes to being on camera.  

Tricia Tanaka reporting during an episode of Lost

 

I can only speculate on the annoyances that are involved with being a reporter.  Not only do they have to ask people throughout the day to respond to a multitude of questions, they are also on a deadline.  We have a deadline too, but it isn’t as severe of a consequence if we fail to acquire the footage.  Having this as a career, those people could potentially lose their jobs if they do not come up with a sufficient story to give to their editor.  Sometimes, reporting can be dangerous.  I once heard of a story where a reporter asked a professional wrestler if he would admit that professional wrestling was fake.  He then proceeded to punch the reporter in the face.  Reporting is a tough and dangerous job, and it took me having to bother people with my reporting to figure this out.  

The Effects of Violence in Media, or lack thereof

I recently watched the film Natural Born Killers for my English class.  On the surface, it is a film about two lovers who murder their parents and set off on a road trip killing spree.  They murder so many people, and become so infamous, that they media changes them into celebrities.  There has even been some controversy about whether or not this film, or other violent media (Grand Theft Auto), cause people to commit the same crimes and become “copycat” criminals.  I do not believe this to be true.  People have committed horrible crimes before there was violent media, they will continue to do so for years on end.  If there is something to blame for these crimes, it is the way these people were brought up.  Home lives set up the characteristics of a young person, and people grow up basing things on what they learned in their formidable years.  An angry person is an angry person, no matter the materials they absorb.

Movies these days…(continued)

My last post I discussed how most movies these days tend to follow the same line.  That line being one hero or group of heroes who find some way to save the day, whether it be destroying some evil overlord or just catching some crook or criminal.  I would like to add that most comedies today seem to jump into their own bandwagon.  Yesterday, I screened yet another movie called Ted.  Ted began with a young boy and his teddy bear that he received as a gift for Christmas.  The young boy the made a wish that the teddy bear could actually talk, and the wish came true.  The bear grows up with the boy and the rest of the movie involves the shenanigans that ensue when a thirty-something year-old man still hangs out with his childhood teddy bear.

The similarities that I would like to point out is that most comedies today follow a pattern where jokes revolve around the f-word and other shock-tactics.  Some movies that follow these patterns are The Hangover, Anchorman: the Legend of Ron Burgandy, and of course, Ted.  Please don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed these movies.  I’m simply noting how movies are shifting toward dane-cook-esque comedy, where swear words are the norm, and pain and cup-checking reigns supreme.

Some slapstick imagery from the feature film, Ted.