June 30th

In Phyllis Allen's "Leaving Identity Issues to Other Folks" it makes you think about how terrible we use to treat "the blacks". I feel awful for those people back then. How would you feel going to school every day and people screaming at you because you are darker than them? How blind can people be? I believe people are people. White, black, brown, orange, green...it is all the same to me. I like how Allen told her story and shared her beliefs. She let the reader know where she came from, what her background is and then went from there. I also find it interesting how people in general change together. In each decade and in each age group there are different "expectations" or "the norm" that a lot of people follow. It sounded like Allen was one of them until she got older and decided that her mother's advice was best; "Baby, people do what they do. What you got to do is be the best that you can be." This is good advice for all of us. I think a lot of teenagers go through "identity issues" and even many adults. 

 Coming from a large family I can relate to Allen maybe not feeling like she had a "place" all of the time. I am one of the youngest of ten so it is easy to not know where you stand. You tend to follow the "cool" crowd and let them determine your beliefs. We need to learn to hole to our own beliefs because what if people had all joined Hitler's "cool crowd"? It would be disastrous! On the other hand if we all joined God's "cool crowd" the world would be in a much better moral and economic state. 

June 29th, 2011 Blog #1

It was approximately 7:30 in the morning on January 2, 2007, when my dad walked into the bedroom that my sister and I shared. "Time to get up. We are going to storage to get our bags and moving to California today." he said in a matter-of-fact voice. My sister and I were still too tired to really process this new information. We lived in Vermont at this time and had lived there for most of our lives. We spent the day packing just our clothes and a few necessities and left the next morning without having a chance to say goodbye to our friends. We drove for three days in our fifteen passenger van without stopping, just my parents, three younger sisters and me. Dad drove the whole time. I remember when it was my turn to sit in the front seat and read the map to dad, it was so hard to stay awake. Driving cross-country in the winter is not something I would suggest. The wind is really strong when going through farmland. It is flat for miles. The Rockies are even worse. It got so bad driving through one day that we had to pull off the interstate and stay the night in a hotel. Us girls did not mind at all because we finally got to shower and sleep in a bed! We stopped over night at my brother's house in Utah and got to California on Sunday the 7th, the day before my seventeenth birthday. Needless to say it was not the kind of birthday I was planning on having that year. We moved from a nice, two story, four bedroom house in Stowe, Vermont to a two bedroom apartment in Folsom, California. It was beautiful there though! Back in Vermont there was still two feet of snow but in California it was spring. We only lived there for three months before we moved back east to Massachusetts. California was fun while it lasted. It was actually part of the reason why I moved to Branson, Missouri in 2008 but that is another story.

"This I believe" Freewriting

I believe making cookies isn’t always easy:

Some may say making cookies is easy, but it’s not always so. It’s like them saying “easy as pie”. Making pie isn’t easy! At least not for me. Maybe it is for chefs or people like my older sister who loves cooking. I wonder if….I don’t know. I lost my train of thought. Trains. I’ve never ridden one but have always wanted to. I lived in Boston once and rode on an underground train, if that counts…back to cookies. When I make them there is a mess all over the place. Flour, sugar, chocolate chips, butter and so on. I usually mess up the batter or cook them on too high or too low a heat so they get all flat on the edges and burn but the middle isn’t done yet. That’s all fine and dandy when you are making brownies, but not cookies. Unless you like burnt/undone cookies. I don’t. I’m running out of things to say about cookies. My favorite are just good ol’ oatmeal and chocolate chip. Yum! With vanilla ice cream. Make an ice cream sandwich with them and stick them in the freezer for later. My sister and I did this once. She is better at making cookies. They were chocolate cookies with peanut butter chips and vanilla ice cream. Amazing! Ok how much time is left? I don’t know my timer isn’t somewhere I can see, just hear. It’s my husband. He is suppose to tell me when to stop. I really am running out of things to say. Sorry to all my readers if you are getting board! I kind of am too but at the same time this is kind of fun to not really have any purpose but writing. Maybe I should working on making better cookies? Probably. I’m not very enthusiastic about any kind of cooking unless it involves “Stoffers” frozen dinners. Those are good and easy! Not as good as my mother-in-law’s food but better than mine. Man, this is a really long 10 minutes! Cookies. Mess. Ovens. Timers. I’m done!!!

343 words

This I believe

I believe writing can be a challenge

I believe making cookies isn’t always easy

I believe candy is bad for your teeth

I believe dentist mean the best even if they hurt you

I believe in God

I believe lemonade is refreshing

I believe I am a good sister and wife

I believe bread is addicting

I believe teaching is worthy of more praise than it gets

I believe water is necessary for life

I believe camels have humps of their backs

I believe people generally mean well

I believe all people want someone to love them

I believe in “cat naps”

I believe that trash should be put in the trash can and not on the ground

I believe cats are cute when they are sleeping

I believe cats are annoying when not sleeping

I believe fish don’t do well as house pets

I believe tuna is disgusting

I believe a good pizza is food from heaven

I believe in family

I believe in exercise (physical and mental)

I believe music can influence people for better or worse

I believe in marriage

I believe cooking is best left to those who know what they are doing

I believe bird songs are usually beautiful

I believe there is purpose in this life

Jung Typology Test

The Jung Typology test was fairly accurate about my personality. I am “Introverted, Sensing, Feeling and Judging”. I think I am a creative writer, but I get stuck trying to figure out what to write. I sometimes tend to look at the world in a different way than other people; at least I’d like to think so. I am a loyal person and believe I have good work ethics, as the test suggests and I hope they carry over into school. I try to do the best I can and sometimes I wear myself out with trying to get school and work done on top of everything else.

Like I said before, I have a hard time getting started. When giving a topic to write on I sometimes think and think and think about it until my brain hurts and my eyes feel like they are going to pop right out of my head. I read a lot of information during the day and with reading that much, one would think I would be able to process it and put it right down on paper but it is not that easy for me. I think being an “introvert” does not help. I am use to keeping to myself so putting a part of me down on paper for others to see takes more thought, time and energy. At the same time being introverted I am more likely to look inside myself than at the outside world. Many people have similar feelings and think fairly alike. Being able to identify myself as a person and what I think and feel allows me to look at things as others would see them.

The Jung Typology test says I am “sensing”, something I do not entirely understand yet. What do I sense? Do I sense the world around me as it moves and changes? Do I sense different people and their constant moving around with their own busy lives, some focused on themselves while others working together like a beehive? Do I sense people’s moods and meaning? What ever it is, I think having a good understanding of people and their habits is good for any writer to have. How can you write about people if you do not understand them? It would be like me trying to write about cars and how they work. It would not work. To understand people I believe you first need to understand yourself, which is not always an easy task.

“Feeling” is another word that could have different meanings. Is it the wind I feel on my arms and cheeks right now? Or the warm touch of the blanket on my legs? Or is it deeper? The feeling one has when a loved one has to go through pain, the happiness one feels at a wedding or the sympathy one has for a stranger who has lost a friend? I think the meaning of this particular “feeling” is more along the lines of the latter. “Feeling” what the other person is going through so you can, in a way, understand. This is helpful to have as a writer because how can you write about something you do not have a feel or an understanding for it?

“Judging” of fact or fiction is important to have not only in writing but in everyday life. I have never thought of myself as “judging”. Thinking about it now, I make judgments everyday. In writing my stories, writing essays, what is right and wrong and more. It is important as a writer to have the ability to judge. The writer can make decisions to make the paper he or she is writing better because revising requires judgment.

In writing this paper and taking the Jung Typology test I believe to have come to know myself better as a person and as a student. Having an understanding of my personality and how I deal with different situations will help in my writing. A good writer is able to look at the world around him or her and be able to perceive what is going on, why it is happening and he or she should be able to look at it from others perspectives.

As an Introverted, Sensing, Feeling and Judging type of person, I feel with practice this could be me.