Progress Defined

prog·ress

–noun

1. a movement toward a goal or to a further or higher stage: the progress of a student toward a degree.

2. growth or development; continuous improvement: He shows progress in his muscular coordination.

3. the development of an individual or society in a direction considered more beneficial than and superior to the previous level

If I could sum up this semester in one word, this is the one that I would use. For some reason, this semester is the one where I have felt more mature, more wise, more intelligent as each day goes by. I feel like this is kind of the equation for one's junior year because for most, it's the year you officially become an adult. 

But I don't only feel progress in my maturity and intellectual level; I feel progress in my creative ability. I think one big contribution to this expansion of my creative ability is keeping up this blog. I've found that not only have I been able to reflect on things going on in my life in a creative way, but I've been able to put down in words the unfiltered mumbo-jumbo going on in my brain in an eloquent, developed manner. I found that I would write down the first thing that came to my mind and make it into an interesting, engaging topic for a blog post. 

With the social, intellectual and creative progress that I have made this semester, the situation is nothing but win-win. 

Given this conclusion, there's only one thing left to say: 

peace out ☮

And This Dedication Goes to... Melanie

Meet Melanie, my first dog. I got her when I was three years old. She's an interesting mix: half bird dog, half dachshund. Throughout the years, we've shared a lot of memories. 


I'll never forget my childhood days with Melanie. I remember when I was little, the first thing I would do when I got home from school was go to the back yard and visit her. Since I never failed to do this, she always knew when it was 4 o'clock. My mom said that she would always get really excited right before 4, because she would always be awaiting my return home. 


I'll never forget the way I felt one time when I thought she had run away. My parents and I had gone on a short trip out of town and when we got back home she was gone. I remember bawling my eyes out and crying myself to sleep because I didn't think that I would ever see her again. However, we got a phone call from the vet the next day and they had her. It turned out that somehow she had gotten out of our backyard, wandered the neighborhood, and returned to the backyard of a different house-- one that looked very similar to ours. 


My parents and I always called her a mute because it was very seldom that she would bark. But then, as she got older in age, she began to get more neurotic. I would play a game with her where I would pretend to be letting her inside and then close the door, over and over again. This game would get her so wound up that she would begin to bark in a way that I had never heard before. Below is a photoshoot of this game.

I did this photoshoot my senior year in high school for a photography project. I took these pictures on the digital camera that I got for my 18th birthday. 

These pictures are the last pictures that I ever got to take of Melanie, because she died the day after my birthday two years ago. She died in the kennel my mom had left her in while my parents came up to Dallas to pick me up for Christmas break. Since I was still in Dallas on my birthday, we decided to spend the night in Austin to celebrate. My mom's cellphone rang late that night, so she decided not to answer it. The next morning she checked her voicemail to find out that Melanie had died in her sleep of a stroke. It was my first Christmas home from college, and I didn't get to see my dog. I felt gipped. I wish I had known when she would leave the world, because then I would have taken more pictures of her on my camera for memory's sake.

I believe that first pets have a significant impact on a child. I believe that they can even bolster a child's creativity: most of my drawings in school consisted of me with Melanie. First pets also serve a loyalty that one could not find anywhere else. When I was 9 and halfway through the third grade, my family and I moved to San Antonio. Since I started at a new school halfway through the year, it took me a while to make new friends since everybody had long ago formed their cliques. For a while, Melanie was my only friend.


Though later in life I will have new dogs, Melanie will always be in my heart. 

There's a Place, and it's called Aldi-land

Monday, after over a month of not going to the grocery store, one of my friends did me the favor of introducing me to a new grocery store called Aldi. Though Tom Thumb is normally my store of choice, I decided to try it out. 


I was completely amazed with the amount of food I got for the small price I paid. Normally, since I apparently only go to the store once a month, my grocery bill ends up being about $100, if not more. My bill at Aldi was a grand total of.... $41.84. With that miniscule amount, I got:


-- A bag of spinach leaves
-- A package of mushrooms
-- 2 pounds of grapes
-- Hummus
-- A block of swiss cheese
-- Fresh Mozzarella cheese
-- An entire bag of onions
-- An entire bag of bananas
-- A bag of organic baby carrots
-- A mango
-- Tomatoes on the vine
-- An avocado
--- 3 cloves of garlic
-- Granola bars
-- Chewy bars
-- Peanut butter
-- Dijon mustard
-- Sandwich bags
-- Golden raisins
-- Chili powder
-- 18 rolls of toilet paper
-- 1 gallon of milk


I was amazed by some of the prices on this list. Take tomatoes on the vine for example (the baby kind). At Tom Thumb you would pay a good $5.00, same with the baby carrots. I only paid $1.49: more than half of what I would normally pay. My entire gallon of milk was only $.99. I felt like I was back in the 1980s, where everything was much cheaper, and the millennium inflation had not yet kicked in. 


After going to this unbelievable wonderland, I got to thinking: How did everything get so expensive? The price that we pay for some things (cough, a cup of coffee at Starbucks, cough) are so ungodly expensive, yet we pay the price in a heartbeat. I know that if my grandparents were still alive they would be in shock. When they were young, they only had to pay something like $.50 to get into a movie. Now, we pay $10, if not more. 


I wonder what would happen if we tried out reverting our prices back to what they originally were before inflation. Would it make our economy crash? Or would it be beneficial to it because people would be more willing to spend money since they'd be getting their dollar's worth?


Since I'm not an economist, I don't really have an answer to this. But I do know that I will be shopping at Aldi way more often. For the record, the shopping center that Aldi is in (off of Abrams and Skillman) is phenomenal if you're trying to keep you wallet thick. There's a dry cleaning place in the same center with incredibly low prices; one time I brought in a white silk blouse that my messy-eater self spilled a bunch of queso on and the price to flawlessly bring the stain out cost less than $3.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year... Or is it?

The lights are up in the Dallas Hall quad, which means only one thing: the holidays are very close. It always amuses me how the preparation for Celebration of Lights begins around the end of October. I always love attending every year, bundled in warm clothes with a hot chocolate in hand, singing Christmas carols with my fellow SMU students. However, I found an interesting tidbit of information when I did a news package last year on the preparation process for the Celebration of Lights:

It costs $30,000 for the Celebration of Lights, each and every year. That's basically the cost of my entire tuition for a year at SMU. Don't get me wrong, I love Celebration of Lights. I think that it's a tradition at SMU that should stay because it brings our university together and lifts up everyone's spirits before finals kick in. But the cost of this makes me wonder how many other things our school spends money on that may not necessarily be, well, necessary. 

I read an investigative article in one of my journalism classes last week about the SMU Board of Trustees and its oath to secrecy. The Board meets in a room in the business school and the windows are even covered so nobody can look in. The Board has never released any public records for what it talks about during meetings. There is only one member from the student body on the Board, and that member was selected by the Board for his or her ability to keep confidentiality. So basically, the Board makes decisions that the student body and the rest of the SMU community has no say in because everything discussed in the meetings will never be revealed to the outside world. 

It makes me wonder if the Board had anything to do with making the decision to plant winter grass all over the university every year. Necessary? I think not.

1000 Ways To Die

Above is a a typical episode of Spike TV's "1000 Ways to Die." Lately it's been one of my favorite shows. I find it very entertaining and amusing despite the great amount of gore. The actors are so bad and reenact the deaths so humorously that you can't help but to laugh. 

However, some of these deaths are so incredibly unfortunate that they make me stop and think about the concept of life and death. For instance, the episode above is probably one of the more average occurrences (the wife yelling at her husband as he does chores) and the wife's life ended from it when she acted out of frustration. Granted, most of the episodes involve people doing ridiculously stupid things (peeing on an electric fence, eating so much that their stomach explodes, jumping in an empty swimming pool while on an acid trip, etc.) But other deaths are so unexpected (having your tent get blown away while you're inside it and then crashing into a building) that it's kind of scary when you think about it. 

This show just makes me realize even more how precious life is, and how it can be snatched from you at any moment. And apparently, if your death is ridiculous enough, you could be reenacted on this show.

How Would Your Life Be If...

Do you ever wonder how different your life would be if something else had happened other than what actually happened? Take the place you grew up for example. I was born in California, spent my early childhood in Oklahoma, and the latter part of it in Texas. But I wonder what the scenario would be like if:


My family had never left California. I was born in Walnut Creek, which is a little town about 20 minutes outside of San Francisco. My parents originally moved because the cost of living was too high and they worried about me growing up there. My mom had some terrible image in her head that when I would become a teenager, I would take the Bart (San Fran's version of the Dart) far away from home whenever I would get upset. But I think it would have been really interesting to grow up in the Bay Area. Here are a few ways my life may be different if we had stayed there:


-- I would have grown up in a much more liberal community, which may have differed my political views from what they are now. 
-- I would have been more city savvy, since San Francisco is such a vibrant, urban area.
-- I would have been even more a chocoholic than I already am (Ghirardelli headquarters, duhh)
-- Instead of playing tennis in high school, I may have taken up surfing as my weekend hobby.
-- I could have had a different personality altogether. After all, your personality is partially influenced by who your friends are, and I obviously would have had a completely different circle of friends.
-- I may have ended up somewhere besides SMU (but who knows, maybe I'd still be here. There are a lot of California kids here).


As interesting as it is to come up with ways my life would be different if I had never moved, I think that things worked out for the best. Since I moved around so much I think it's a symbol for how my life will be. After all, I do want to travel as much as I can while I'm still young, so I think that living in a few different places may have been my calling for this because now I know that I can adjust to new places. I'm not meant to sit still; I'm meant to be a doer, an explorer, a discoverer. And I know that the way I have lived my life will help me with this destiny. 

My Happy Place

Do you ever wish that you could be far away from reality? Do you ever wish you could go somewhere far away and never come back?


That's how I feel right now, most likely because finals are just beginning to start up, and I have four. When there's something I don't want to be doing, I tend to revisit old memories and look at pictures that I have taken. As of late, the series of pictures that I never fail to revisit is this year's Labor Day Weekend that I spent at Nocturnal Festival. It was the first rave that I've ever been to and after going I want to stay in one forever. There's something about everybody dressed in neon clothes, the vibrant techno music, and the festive light shows and fireworks that make me incredibly happy. 

I think Nocturnal appealed so much to me because the setting of it is far from one that you would stumble across in everyday life. For one, in real life, people would look at you as if you were crazy if you were constantly dressed in rave clothes. For another, everything is so carefree that it's unnatural. Everyone always loves each other because the only thing you can do is bond over the music. I guess you would call it our modern-day Woodstock. Unfortunately this is not the case in the real world.


I wish that everyday life was always like Nocturnal. Nobody would ever be upset. There would never be any fights or conflicts going on. And there would sure as hell never be any judgement for what you're wearing. It would be utopia. Too bad it only comes around once a year.