Looking for some new threads? Want to help the relief efforts in Haiti? Of course you do!
Go to Threadless.com and order this shirt with the words “Men anpil chay pa lou” across the front and know you are doing something good for another person.
(translation: “many hands make the load lighter”).
100% of the proceeds from the sale of this shirt will be directed toward the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development Fund, so help out some people in need!
♦♦♦
On another note, Conan O’Brien’s last show is tonight at 10:35pm. Show him some love, he definitely deserves it more than Jay Leno…
NV
Just heard about the new band, Broken Bells, made up of Danger Mouse and James Mercer (lead singer for The Shins).
Super excited for this album, and from what I hear from their single “The High Road,” I can tell it’s going to be good.
Anyway, the album releases on March 9. It would be a great birthday present *wink wink*
NV
Catching up on all my YouTube subscriptions, I came across an interesting idea. Philip DeFranco, if you’re unfamiliar, hosts the sxephil channel (where he talks about things he finds on the internets every day), but he also has a personal channel where he vlogs about his life and what he does beyond YouTube, his primary occupation (partnerships make moneys, it’s awesome).
In one of his vlogs I was watching today, he introduces something I realized I ought to have already been doing: a daily journal. Now obviously a blog is basically an electronic journal, but I only really blog when I find something interesting, much like Phil does in his YouTube videos. This idea that he revealed is something more than that.
What he does is commit at least twenty minutes to writing, and it doesn’t have to be anything necessarily profound or fascinating. It’s just an exercise to get the brain working in an otherwise inactive state of being. He does this because he realized after college, he wasn’t really applying himself in an academic sense.
Often I feel like that’s the case for me, and I’m sure it is for many other high school students. While we may (or may not) be getting good grades and applying ourselves to our schoolwork, if we take a moment and look at ourselves, we find that our minds aren’t geared toward personal reflection. School is a combination of awkward teen moments and entirely impersonal work. Even if you find it interesting to learn about biology or mathematics or even literature, there is no personal touch worked into our academic endeavors. We give answers that equate a good grade, not a sense of philosophical growth.
And yes, I’m even talking to you prospective English majors. Don’t be fooled when your English teacher tells you your writing style is important, that injecting a little “essence of you” into your essay means that you are growing as a writer. While your technical skill may improve, at the end of the day, you are still answering the question, supplying evidence, and striving for that elusive perfect 9.
What Philip DeFranco does is simple and easy to do (and I might be putting too much substance into his “Writing Exercise,” as he puts it), but I find it a daunting task to write everyday because it’s hard enough to bring myself to write blogs once a week. Given that I will push myself on a personal level, though, I think it will be worth it.
So, starting tomorrow, I’m giving myself twenty minutes to write a journal. There are a lot of ideas, thoughts, feelings, and experiences that I feel should have been recorded before, and now they are finally getting their chance to be permanently expressed in writing.
Should be interesting.
NV
