Rhetorical Actions

While I found the Kress and Jakobs readings to be fascinating, I'm not really compelled to write about them. I personally have always had issues with defining "genres" (usually music genres), and I'm not sure if Kress is calling for a new genre system or a simple recognition of various genres (and the freedom to combine or make new genres as needed). He says:

"My preferred solution is to accept, to begin with, that mixing is normal, in whatever domain, and at whatever level...mixed genres exist in written text, though they have been somewhat of a theoretical embarrassment. Mixed genres exist in multimodal, or mono-modal, non­verbal texts. The question is, what do we call generically mixed texts in writing?

In my approach, where genre does not name the text, but an aspect of the text’s organization (though I am happy to name the whole text after its dominant generic features -as in "interview”), there is no problem in saying that a text can be and in many cases will be genetically mixed."(52)

So...mixing genres is normal but it has been a theoretical embarrassment? I wish we had some examples of that (unless he's referring to the lab reports...).

Anyway, I don't think we should be so concerned with what to call new genres as much as we should know how to use them.

On to the UC Davis protests Doug posted about on our course page.

I was really impressed by the number of cameras (more like smartphones and even some iPads). In fact, there were probably more people holding cameras than not. But were the people holding cameras protestors? Apparently not, because one of them even got a smile from a police officer who politely directed him/her to an appropriate filming location. The people getting pepper sprayed were sitting on the ground linking arms—not filming. However, some filmers did participate in the chanting.

The protest might have been more moving if the people seemed more interested in participating than recording.

That's a strong statement. The protest was moving. It gave me goosebumps. I was shocked at the number of police officers that got paid to forcefully remove students from their own campus.

Really? There's not enough real crime going on? Not enough to do?

Also, I do think that recording events like this is essential in today's society—people like real-life evidence, and video is great for that. I also know that the recording devices probably came out in force at the same time as the police. But, you know, maybe 10 different angles would suffice.

And I'm confused as to how the police chose who to drag away from the protest. The people sitting up the straightest?

Anyway, I don't know much about the whole situation but it seems like peaceful protests are gaining power these days. There's something scary about large quantities of people posting up in one place watching you. And I think that's still the strongest rhetoric humans have.

Critical Analysis Draft

https://sites.google.com/site/newswithoutpaper/

I made a Google Site for my Critical Analysis assignment. It's not really done but it was quite time consuming so far (I'd say it took as much or more time as I would have spent on a 10 page paper, so there).

My research question is "How is the traditional institution of the newspaper responding to new technology trends?" (or something like that)

I want to do more with screen shots and analysis of how website design encourages certain actions of the reader, but I haven't done that yet....any comments/suggestions/feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Have a great Thanksgiving everybody!

Infographic Assignment

I'm pretty sure I spent way too much time on this and I'm not even sure if it's an infographic at this point...but here it is, I used Adobe InDesign CS2 to make it.

Who's in control?

The most disturbing thing about the myriad of texts for this week was Slavin's image of land being blown up to lay a cable that transmits algorithms from New York to Chicago "faster."

I have a rich uncle who got rich working for Goldman Sachs. He no longer works for them, but he has a giant mansion in Atlanta. I never really understood what he did, but I know it involved the stock market.

The stock market is where algorithms make money. There are no products or services, there's just exploitation. I guess the original money of the companies in the stock market probably came from products or services, but I don't think that has much to do with their value on the stock market. I don't understand it much.

When I was in high school, a graduate of the University of Alaska - Fairbanks came to talk in one of my classes. He was an economics major, or something like that. He had a success story for us—he had learned how to exploit the stock market and made a bunch of money, because he had gone to college to learn how to do so. So now, he didn't really have to worry about working (but I'm sure he had some job exploiting the stock market).

Is that a good example for the youth?

The U.S. government spent a bunch of money bailing out the banks a few years ago, another example of promoting making money from money and algorithms, not actually producing a product or helping people in any way. And it didn't help at all, we're just further in the hole.

Again, I don't know that much about this stuff—I'm just going to be a high school teacher. I must be pretty dumb because teachers barely make enough money to support themselves.

But that's all I really need to be happy, anyway.

Heffernan's article also relates to this idea of algorithms dictating peoples' lives. AOL apparently doesn't really want to offer a service, it just wants to figure out how to get the most advertising revenue and the prestige of a high rank on Google (again we see how Google rules the world). The sad thing is that people buy into it—advertisers and writers and the people who run AOL who thought it was a good idea.

The commodification of algorithms, the stock market, and Google rankings are just a few examples of how technology is getting a little too powerful for humans to keep under control. It's not the technology itself that is dangerous, it's the way people covet it. I honestly can't believe that laying a fiber-optic cable from NYC to Chicago to transmit algorithms for one company was even allowed to happen. That is the farthest thing from "sustainable" that I have ever heard of.

Technology is great, but how much of it is really necessary? How much of it is sustainable? Does producing a Kindle take more resources than producing the books people might buy instead of getting the electronic versions?

Do we really need all of this technology to be happy?

I know that I rely on technology every day and blah blah blah, I'm too young to remember life without technology. But I do think that we could be happier and more sustainable if we stepped back and tried to live more simply, without such heavy reliance on technology.

Do we control technology, or does technology control us?

NPR rocks.

I subscribe to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. I get the paper delivered to my house every day and enjoy the ritual of going outside, picking it up, separating the advertisements and checking out the headline stories (and the police reports and comics, obviously).

Conversely, I never jumped on the YouTube bandwagon. I guess I don't have the right sense of humor to find videos of cats or children or prank calls very funny. I don't like huddling around somebody's laptop and laughing at the appropriate moments. It's kind of awkward. The only YouTube video I'm an avid fan of is Rebecca Black's "Friday." It's a modern classic and I jam to it every Friday. Deal with it Heather.

But, I'm really enjoying the shift from reading articles to watching videos for this class. And when I realized that I thought, "Doug is modeling the course texts after the natural progression of rhetoric. How clever!" Doug is a pretty crafty guy who probably plans much of his classes around his personal amusement. Wouldn't it be funny to stage a class battle over whether there are or are not original ideas? Hilarity ensues. Wouldn't it be funny to make people complain in writing about how they hate to read? Wait. Writing means reading.

So at this point, we should all be recording video blogs instead of typing them.

But that would be so embarrassing to do in a coffee shop. Oh well.

So if I'm realizing that, like Anderson said, "what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication," I'm realizing that whether I like it or not, my old buddy the newspaper is going out of style.

If I was really hip, I wouldn't read the newspaper. I would get all of my news from obscure video-only news sites (future: YouTube News Edition?) and probably do my best to become functionally illiterate, because the written word is so 20th century. By the time I pick up the newspaper, it's already several hours out of date. What I read is yesterday's news. So when I go out into the world with my newspaper-knowledge and somebody says "Oh my goodness. Did you hear what happened this morning?" I have to blush and say "No...I don't have TV, nor did I turn my computer on this morning, and I didn't see anything crazy in the newspaper. What happened?"

I guess I should take after my mom and my sister and start listening to NPR in the mornings. NPR will always be hip in my book.

So Dash takes the YouTube age to the next level. "If you have the ability...what are you doing with it?"

Step it up, YouTube.

Not only YouTube, but the government. Twitter is another bandwagon I never jumped on, but that's just because I'm stupid and set in my ways and don't recognize innovation when I see it. The idea that people can communicate with the government through Twitter is just a fraction of the way the government could use technology to be more transparent and democratic. Which is probably why the government does not use social networking technology, not even YouTube...because that would be too transparent for their liking.

So let's just put it on the young people. The people who the government kind of ignores (how many politicians in D.C. are under 40 years old?) and whose vote politicians scoff at. The next generation must put these tools to use, Dash says. Sure thing, I'll do that.

But I still like to read the newspaper.

Hipsters

I'm going to go out on a limb and approach my blog differently this week. Call me lazy, but I'm simply pasting the notes I typed while reading. Mainly because I found them somewhat amusing (my notes). I was intrigued by Porter, then Johnson-Eilola was hard to get into - as soon as he got into the Google discussion I got confused, and the annotations in the photocopy added to the confusion of ideas. Anyway, if you read this thanks and enjoy.

PORTER intertextuality

What is originality?

sources + social contexts > writer

editing and editors - objectivity - use of quotes

"norms" of discourse communities

posthumously famous people -Robert Frost

starving artist

hipster.

Eliot's "tradition" = intertextuality?

Bartholomae "The struggle of the student writer is not the struggle to bring out that which is within; it is the struggle to carry out those ritual activities that grant out entrance into a closed society"

"there is this tendency to see writing as individual, as isolated, as heroic" (44)

"community writers"

Johnson-Eilola The Database and the Essay

"We are comfortable with unreliable narrative."

What's reliable?

"The production of 'original' text will continue to be an important activity, but the cultural and economic power of that activity is on the wane."

the anti-hipster, or, hipsters don't want cultural or economic power.

"What right should any single person have over an idea?" should they care about "rights"? greed.

writing≠compilation

sampling in music=[good] compilation

What is creativity?

Does publicity relinquish your creativity/privacy?

Google=writing/rhetoric?

Flying Toasters!

I'm a big fan of Lanham, because even I am old enough to remember the era of After Dark, and the flying toasters were my favorite screen saver.

Even though I never knew how to modify anything about After Dark, I see how it is a metaphor for the modern ability to modify pretty much everything you come into contact with. If "the critic can become a creator" (159) in every situation, what happens to professional creators? If everybody wants to do things their way, that means some things are not being done the best way, and the best way does not get the respect it deserves. This definitely relates to the Kohl et. al article—if everybody can update Wikipedia, how do we know what is accurate or trustworthy? I personally try not to use Wikipedia for important purposes (professors don't like it), but I don't think that just avoiding it is a good enough answer.

At first I was afraid I'd lost Lanham when he started talking about how technology is endangering the development of human reason (on 160), but luckily I think that was just an attention-grabber to keep us reading (it worked for me).

"Might scholarly communication become iconic in ways never seen before? It is fun to think about." (161)

Lanham is talking about this in 1994, and I think that some scholarly communication has become iconic, but not nearly as iconic as communication in general. Again, we see how the institutions in our society actively resist new ways. Lanham says that "I myself don't think that literature will die, but clearly it will change as it moves from page to screen. Graduate programs in English ought to be considering that movement." (162)

It's 2011, and I'm not sure that graduate programs in English are considering that movement as much as they should be. Feel free to shoot me down on this one—I hope they are, but it's not something you hear about often (and I don't know much about graduate programs myself). But it seems to me that individual classes do take multimodal technologies seriously and incorporate them in very meaningful ways, but in classes like the US101 freshman seminar, students are still laboring away reading paper texts with nothing but words and writing papers in MLA format for 80% of their grades. Personal rant: I'm a peer leader in US101 and I had to argue with my professor that instead of assigning another writing assignment alongside an upcoming paper, we should have the students draw concept maps of their papers to enable them to write better papers. You can't make a better writer by telling them to write more. You can't make a better communicator by giving them the same communication tools. It's common sense!

So my main concern coming away from the Lanham article is that teachers who do push the envelope and incorporate more innovative technologies and ways of communication will not get taken seriously. Students might love it, but what about their parents? What about other teachers? What about all of the old people who make important decisions? If they don't like it, how are we going to effectively incorporate it into something as important as graduate school?

Lanham says that "digital technology democratizes the art and letters," (162) and maybe that is what is so scary when it comes to incorporating it into the educational institution. But really, it should be the most exciting thing about it. As Emerson would agree, we always have to push the envelope; we always have to develop more as thinkers and innovators, and technology is what enables that. So maybe we should redefine "scholarly communication" to include multimodal texts, not just text-only journal articles.

It's Friday!

It's Friday!

Diversify!

I'd like to make a motion that all of the cool stuff we are learning about multimodal writing in WRIT 371 is actually applied to texts about multimodal writing.

I still suffer through long articles from academic journals.

In the syllabus, Doug has titled Tuesday's class "Imaginary but Real."

That's pretty all-encompassing, especially if you're an existentialist (I don't really understand existentialism, but I imagine it relates).

Wolf's article talked about computer technologies taking on massive and unprecedented roles, like satellites collecting a terabyte of data in ten days and technologies which simulate crash tests of cars that have never been built (422, 426).

The problem with this is that nobody wants to analyze a terabyte of data every ten days, and who trusts a computer-generated safety rating?

Basically, computers are flawed. They're imaginary. But they're real! And they are very overstimulating. It's basically impossible to analyze a terabyte of data every ten days, and it's equally impossible to process everything the internet has to offer on a daily basis—news, Facebook, email, Netflix, articles from academic journals that are required reading for class.

So I imagine that not everything out there needs to be processed, and focus on the most pressing reading material (Facebook).

Mishra was a more painful read than Wolf. I agree that the use of images in education should be (should have been a long time ago) researched more extensively; as a future educator I want to know what's happening with visuals and stuff. But I imagine that Mishra's concerns can be addressed by any teacher, if the teacher explains the visuals they use, their conventions, abstractions, biases and assumptions. But first, the teacher must understand these concepts, hence the call for more research.

Graphic attention

Bernhardt objectively explores organization of text, and how font size and placement can call attention to certain ideas within the text; even though text is linear and must be read from left to right, the reader can figure out where to start or stop reading without much difficulty in a well-organized text.

Wysocki is offended by a magazine ad, and uses this as a diving board for criticizing the available criticism of visuals, ultimately calling to change the "social and temporal expectations of visual composition" (172).

That's mainly what I got out of this.

Bernhardt makes sense—because of the nature of text, people generally start in the beginning and read towards the end, so calling attention to areas not in the beginning allows for people to start in the middle somewhere and at least read the part of the text they find most interesting.

Wysocki is on more slippery ground. Images (without text) are always "read" subjectively; even if the artist wants to send a certain immoral message, that doesn't mean that every viewer is going to get that message—they could see something totally different than the artist intended. This is why it's always really interesting to look at a piece of art without text, and then look at the title of the piece and maybe a little blurb about it by the author. When I do this, I often see something totally different than the title/description of the piece suggests, and regardless of authorial intent, the piece has the ability to send mixed messages.

This is the main flaw in Wysocki's idea—she assumes that the "expectations" of art are the same as its understood messages. There is something to be said for art that portrays women as strong and beautiful instead of turning them into sex objects, but who decides which category an image of a woman falls into? The beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Cliche.

Facebook creeping and attention or the lack thereof.

Williams argues that social networking sites prioritize popular culture references, which lead their users to judge others based on popular culture references. I have no doubt that this is true; I too once had a MySpace (before it was my_____) and I won't tell you what songs played on my profile.

I still have a Facebook, and I was obviously thinking about my "Facebook creeping" methods while reading "Online Performances of Identity." I realized that the main page of a person's Facebook these days consists of their profile picture with links to other stuff (info, photos, friends) under it, their wall with some stuff other people wrote and/or that person's posts and status updates, and now a little "photo reel" on the top. You have to click the "info" tab to find out personalized (or pop-culture-ized) info about the person, and who takes the time to do that? Facebook definitely prioritizes photos and human networking—I usually click on the person's profile picture and see what other pictures they've deemed profile-pic worthy, read some posts on their wall, and call it good. And I am going to venture to say that these things do not have to do with pop culture unless there are pop culture-related things on their wall or in their photos, which is totally possible, but not guaranteed.

They aren't really intellectual, either, and neither is this post right now. Whoops.

As far as Jones and "inter-activity" goes, I found his examples pretty interesting (and impressive). My question now is, what kind of people most often engage in inter-activity? There are definitely different levels of inter-activity, and they don't always have to involve the computer. For instance, while eating breakfast, I often chat with my roommates and read the paper. If I read an especially funny comic, I point it out to my roommate and we laugh together. So the inter-activity becomes social, kind of like when people bond over Star Wars in online forums.

The idea of "cognitive" vs. "social" attention and that "what gives value to information is the amount of attention it can attract" (Jones 22) can also be applied to both online and real-life situations. Lately I've found myself re-developing the skill of tuning people out when I'm trying to read something (this is what happens when I live with three girls). Just by the act of reading, I'm not really paying social attention, but I could be paying cognitive attention, but I'm not. Whereas, if I was online chatting, I would appear to be more polite because I could still read what the person said at a point when I felt like turning my attention there, thus giving it more value than when it was spoken out loud and never registered in my brain.

So, I'm all about FTF interaction, but I can't deny the merits of online communication, whether or not inter-activity is a factor.

Change.

The main idea I took from this week's readings is that people hate change. As a general rule, the older and more established a person is, the more he or she hates change. But they don't say that; they go to great lengths to prove why their resistance to change is not because they are set in their ways, but because their ways are better.

Baron's article really exemplified this; he noted several examples in which people denounced new technology because they found it to be pointless, or maybe because they found it threatening (Thoreau needed to sell his pencils, so he wrote that the telegraph was dumb).

Trimbur would do well to embrace the changing style of rhetoric that is more reader-friendly; I unfortunately found his prose unnecessarily dense and hard to follow.

Finally, Stroupe took the bull by the horns to tell people like Trimbur what is happening in a lengthy article they can appreciate (although with much more reader-friendly prose). Stroupe had to do this to convince all of the aging academics out there that change is good, that the internet is changing rhetoric and the rhetorical power of combined words and images, and that all those aging academics would do well to take the hint (nobody wants to read dense scholarly prose anymore, if they ever did in the first place).

Anyway, I know there is much more to these articles, but since everything we are reading is converging into the theme "writing is still quality if there are pictures involved, and the two combined are probably better than text alone," the real issue here seems to be convincing the world of higher education to embrace this and teach students to capitalize on it.

Comics and Stuff

"It's considered normal in this society for children to combine words and pictures, so long as they grow out of it. Traditional thinking has long held that truly great works of art and literature are only possible when the two are kept at arm's length. Words and pictures together are considered, at best, a diversion for the masses, at worst a product of commercialism."

Meanwhile, television is wildly popular.

Do academics really enjoy reading dense prose? Probably not. I know I don't.

McCloud demonstrates the complex language of comics by painstakingly illustrating the tactics that can be employed to alter the message. He also says that people can relate to comics because the people in them are ambiguously drawn, which means that it is not for lack of artistic skill that comic art often lacks detail. I'm sold. I hold the graphic novel to a higher standard.

Maus I has been the nominal graphic novel of my education. I've read in in literature class in high school and again in college. I didn't think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, maybe because of the story itself. I probably would have enjoyed reading Calvin & Hobbes as a graphic novel much more (I own every Calvin & Hobbes book ever published). I know that Maus I tells a historically essential story in a way that can be grasped and even embraced by many, but maybe we should back off and look at some other graphic novels in our classes before people forget that there are other graphic novels.

I know that McCloud never uses the term "graphic novel;" he proudly uses the word "comic." The term "graphic novel" seems to serve to legitimize comics for naysayers, people who believe in only "refined art"—words with no pictures, and pictures with no words.

One of my roommates is a Drawing major. Words appear throughout her art. She draws a simple object a puts a quote underneath it. For instance, a drawing of a donut is captioned, "What a blessing." It gets deeper, too—right now she is working on a project of a human moving from a crouch to a stand and growing wings, and one of the phrases in the piece is "Embrace repression."

Because there are words, I connect more with the art. Maybe it's because I'm an English major, but I find a composition much more engaging if there are words.

It amazes me that McCloud wrote his book in 1991, and 20 years later nothing has changed. Professor Lisa Eckert is a strong supporter of the graphic novel, but when she surveyed teachers to find out what they thought about graphic novels, many of them didn't even know what a graphic novel was (or they thought it meant a novel with R-rated content). It's funny that as a society that thinks we are so advanced, we are also so stuck in the ruts that polarize images and words that we cannot see a reunion of the two as academically advanced.

"I do feel a certain vague longing for that time over 50 centuries ago—when to tell was to show—and to show was to tell."

What happened?

Reading, Reading the Visual, Hyper-Reading, and the lack thereof.

When I was in elementary school, I was an avid reader. My favorite activity was reading; I did it all the time. Often, I would become so absorbed in a book that I became completely oblivious to what was happening around me; I would not hear when my mom asked me a question; I would have no idea what the conversation going on in the room was about, because I was so focused on my book. My mom would have to tell me "Ten more minutes and then you have to go to bed," and ten minutes later I would say, "I'm almost done with this chapter, then I'll go to bed."

I wish I could focus on reading in the same way now. Jacobs' metaphor that reading for the fascination of it is like traveling to Narnia made a lot of sense to me. I still like to read, but 1) I have too much required reading during school to read for pleasure (except for the newspaper) and 2) I get easily distracted while I am reading, my mind wanders, and I find that I can only read a couple pages before I look up and my eyes glaze over, and then I have to go back and re-read the last page. In one of the comments on Jacobs' article, a man says when his childhood fascination with reading went away, he could only replace it with reading on the internet, with its multitude of hyperlinks and never-ending possibilities. Sosnoski would probably like that, as he advocates hyper-reading for reasons other than the fact it saves paper (not one of his points, but valid).

All of these ideas relate to Hill, whose article I found quite interesting. In school, we are given rules for writing papers. Use only 12 point, Times New Roman font, always double space, etc. When I studied in Argentina, one of my teachers had a huge aversion to Times New Roman, so she required that we use Arial, an interesting argument for the importance of aesthetics in writing.

It is easy to imagine why people would shoot down Hill's article as irrelevant, because it advocates changing the paradigm of what should be considered literature, and what rhetoric, and what art, and whether there should be a distinction between the three. The more I learn, the more I think that we cannot just study the "classics" in literature and graduate with the ability to make a difference in the world. This class, Digital Rhetorics and Multimodal Writing, is a huge slap in the face. You thought that Shakespeare was the epitome of literature? Nobody cares, they're too busy watching YouTube.

On page 126, Hill states, "pedagogical efforts should be aimed toward helping students deal with combinations of picture, word, and symbol," and adds that images "are essential for expressing, and therefore for knowing, things that cannot be expressed in any other form."

As a future English teacher, I find this overwhelming. There is only so much that can be taught in one class, as Hill points out on 147, and how to prioritize is going to be a struggle. How can I tell my students to type in 12-point Times New Roman while teaching them that the aesthetic appearance of a text is equally as important as its content? I would be crushing their opportunity for artistic expression, crushing their personality.

Rhetoric fascinates me, because it disregards confines in favor of sending an effective message. How to bring this into the classroom seems to be evolving, as people begin to get comfortable enough to shift their paradigms.

Rhetoric: you know.

On page 6 of "What is Rhetoric?" Covino and Jolliffe write, "all utterances are texts, and all texts have the potential to change auditors." They expand this thought to say that all texts have "potential activity," both intentional and unintentional, which all relates to the concept of "kairos," a kind of climate of rhetoric.

Reading this made me think back to the first day of class, and Doug pulling up random things on the computer, and me thinking "is this a writing class?"

The point is that the internet and every electronic device that can connect to the internet have changed everything. MySpace was bad enough, but now Twitter is extremely popular with older professionals (I say this because I still refuse to get a Twitter account). These days, it is admirable to summarize your most epic epiphanies in very few words, and honestly it's the only way anybody is going to read about them in the first place.

So basically, I have to resign to the fact that a Twitter post is a legitimate form of rhetoric, and is in fact a genius way of communication in the kairos of the digital world.

My roommate's dad is a pastor, and she has a modern translation of the Bible called "The Message//Remix: The Bible in Contemporary Language." Take, for example, Hosea 9.1:

"Don't waste your life in wild orgies, Israel.

Don't party away your life with the heathen.

You walk away from your God at the drop of a hat

and like a whore sell yourself promiscuously

at every sex-and-religion party on the street.

All that party food won't fill you up.

You'll end up hungrier than ever."

The times are changing, we must keep up. What's next, Biblical books summarized in Twitter posts?

I may have digressed a bit, but if "rhetoric is the art of knowledge-making" (C&J 8), it's hard to drop knowledge on the "digital generation" in old-school Biblical prose. So I think this class is very relevant, and also a legit writing class, because all of us writers want people to read our stuff and know what we're talking about.

Both Grant-Davie and C&J discuss Bitzer's 3 elements of a rhetorical situation (exigence, audience, rhetorical constraints). I like Grant-Davie's specification that both the rhetor and the audience are "real or imagined" and "dynamic and interdependent," so while a rhetor might write something with a particular exigence, that doesn't mean that everybody who reads it will read it with the same exigence in mind. In the digital world today, it is so easy to read things out of context you basically have to write them for people who have no idea what your context is.

This blog is for WRIT 371, but who knows what audience it will reach?

Here I am.

Hi everybody, I'm Karen.

I'm originally from Anchorage, Alaska, and this is my fourth year at MSU. My number one passion is snowboarding. I am double majoring in English and Spanish Teaching with a Writing minor. Last summer/fall I lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for almost 6 months; I lived with a host family and took classes in Spanish at a university there through MSU's Study Abroad program. I decided I am never living in a city of 17 million people again (even Anchorage is too big for me, and that's only about 300,000 people). But, it was awesome and now I can speak Spanish pretty fluently.

After living in humid, hot Buenos Aires for a while, I was itching to get back to the mountains, so I decided to work at Big Sky as a lift operator last winter. It was pretty cool, because the semester in Argentina ended November 4, and I started work November 15, so I had basically the first two months of the snowboarding season to be on the mountain every single day. Through some lucky scheduling, I was able to live in Big Sky, work 4 days a week, and commute to Bozeman on Tuesdays and Thursdays for 15 credits of classes during the spring semester. It was pretty intense, pretty fun, and I'm never doing that again.

So, I decided to not work at all this summer, thinking I'd saved up a lot of money, and I traveled home to Alaska and back with many adventures in between. Now, I'm broke and I'm taking 21 credits, and trying to get a job on top of that. I'm writing for the Culture section of the Exponent this year, and I'm a peer leader in US101, both of which I'm super excited about—I'm getting real world writing and teaching experience, what could be better?

Other essential information about me: I have a pass to Moonlight Basin this year. Headwaters, yeah!!!