Writing In & For Digital Environments

Even though our fall season has technically been over for about a month now, we really have not seen any slow down. We are either running or lifting 6 out of 7 days of the week- just like in season.

Don’t get me wrong here, I actually do enjoy being with the team and getting better every week. This will be something that will pay off for us in the spring so we have all bought in to this off-season training. Although the running is great, the team lifts are what we all really look forward to.

This is a time where all 50 of us can be together and do cool man things. Like, what is more manly than lifting weights?!  You see the that man there? Yea, thats what we are all striving for… ha ha kidding. I think we would need a lot of steroids and protein shakes to ever look like that.

But in reality, our team lifts are an opportunity for us to get better. We all think of our lifts as a competition between each other. Of course, everyone can lift different amounts of weight but it is your improvement that is most important.

Another reason we all love our team lifts is because of the unbelievable weight room we get to lift in. Student-athletes here at Dickinson are so fortunate to have the Durden Center. This athletic training center is easily one of the best facilities in Division III.

Our coach is always telling us we can think of these lifts two different ways. We can either think of them as an obligation or an opportunity. Well, I can say with complete confidence that we all think of it as a great opportunity to get better and have a ton of fun doing it.

So as I forgot to mention in my “about me” blog post, I am a senior this year. With that comes the realization that in less than six months I’ll be in the real world doing real world people things (whatever the hell that means). To be honest it’s starting to slap me in the face pretttttttty hard considering the fact that I don’t have a job yet, so I should probably get going on that shit.

The end of college is pretty scary for people my age. You can’t hang out with your buddies all the time. No more college parties and doing spontaneous activities because you’re bored. You can’t skip class and ignore all your responsibilities so you can sit on your ass and watch Netflix all day. You actually have to do shit and be a functioning member of society, which is daunting af.

With the end of college comes the beginning of finding a job and entering the work force. Looking for jobs is a fools errand at times, especially when you know the first job you get out of college will consist of doing a lot of bitch work and staying in an office until all hours of the night. It’s kinda like bird hunting. You just have to sit there and watch and hope a cool looking one falls in your lap. But, what usually happens is it flies away so fast you didn’t even have time to capture it.

Shooting this bird is like interviewing for a job. Sure, you practiced a lot and you think your aim (interviewing skills) are pretty good, but when it’s actually go-time you melt worse than Bill Buckner in the World Series and completely pooch it. That beautiful looking bird flies right away from you but the guy next to you shoots it down with a Call of Duty looking headshot and you sit there hoping another one flies near you.

So, my fellow seniors, I know it may feel like college has flown by and that you’re not ready to leave the safety net that is college, but sometime (hopefully) soon you will have perfected that aim so you can claim that bird and brag to all your friends about how awesome that bird is.

For this week’s post I’ve decided to do a close reading of Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Mid-Term Break”, first published in his collection titled Death of a Naturalist. We briefly looked at this poem in my English 220 class but ever since then I’ve been wanting to go back and dig a bit deeper into it.

Before we get started, I think I should define what exactly a ‘close reading‘ is for those who aren’t familiar with literary criticism. A close reading is like taking a single text and putting a magnifying glass up to it. When you close read you pick apart and analyze every last bit of the text you can and pull all of the information out of it that you can. You have to look at not only every day literary devices that the author uses but also out-of-the-box sort of things such as the title itself and even the shape of the piece your analyzing as well as that of each individual paragraph or stanza.

Normally you would end up with page after page of analysis, but I won’t be going too in-depth here as this is only a short blog post. I’ve reproduced the text for you below so that you can follow along. Feel free to do some close reading of your own! Enjoy!

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close
At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying-
He had always taken funerals in his stride-
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.
Whispers informed strangers that I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up to the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

The first thing I notice about the poem is the title’s reference to the events that occur in the poem. The word ‘break’ is a reference to the severing of ties between the speaker and his younger brother. Heaney continually builds up the funeral to express the abnormality of the situation, describing his unusual pick-up from school and telling us that his father “always took funerals in his stride” but is now weeping uncontrollably. Another thing to note is the “poppy bruise” on the deceased boy’s forehead, which resembles the British emblem of Remembrance given to fallen combat soldiers during World War 1. This could hint at the speaker’s reverence for and remembrance of his brother as he is viewing the casket.

It is also worth noting that the poem consists of seven three-line stanzas and one one-line stanza, all with no discernible rhyme scheme. There are, however, instances of consonance such as classes/close/clock and assonance like close/drove/home/blow. Heaney uses that final line, “A four-foot box, a foot for every year,” as a final ‘punch line’, revealing just how young his brother was at the time of his death and thereby giving the reader a sense of finality along with an idea of the suddenness and heartbreak of his loss.

1. Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996. New    York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Print.

As I said before, I played two games invented by my friends McClain and John. McClain’s game was a survival-horror genre game that had shor

t and simple limitations. John’s is a fantasy mash-up “4th wall” game that is long and comes with a limitless number of customization options. Here I’ll give a few details about how they went:

McClain’s Haunted Castle Game:

• McClain’s game is designed to be a 2-hour “one-shot” campaign. If the players cannot find a way out of the haunted castle before the end of session, they lose.
• Each character is simply one of three classes (fighter, rogue, athlete) and only two starting items. Items included a sword, a rope, a torch, a set of armor, and a lockpick. No other character customization is allowed. By making character creation this simple, a player’s character is defined mainly by their actions during the game.
• The Game begins with every character waking up in the central hallway of the haunted castle, presented with four doors. To make communicating in long distance simpler, McClain added that each character was “telepathic” and that every character has knowledge of what the others were doing. In short, the goal of the game is to find a way out of the castle. While things in the castle will try to attack the player, the player is also on a time limit. Every turn, a “darkness” creeps through the castle’s rooms. If the darkness fills the entire castle, it is game over for any character left inside.
• Along the way players find ghosts, skeletons, gargoyles, and spiders to fight while also solving riddles with their items. There were no hit points or stats to measure fights, but fights and actions were both performed pass/fail as determined by a single D20 roll.
• In my experience, I enjoyed the fact that the simple layout made the game easy to jump into. There was also the combat and action system, which seemed both simple because it was just rolling a single 20-sided dice, but annoyingly unclear due to no one except McClain knowing what the rolls would mean. Each of our players traveled in a different direction, which gave the house a sense of enormity and unknown-ness. It became quickly clear that there was more than one way to win the game since there was more than one series of rooms in the castle.

John’s 4th Wall Defense Initiative Game

• John’s game is designed to be a long campaign involving several sessions. We only got a pilot session in, but over time the story could have progressed and involved more branches of John’s main plot. At the end of the session, John just left a note of the group’s progress.
• The story of the game is set within the “multiverse” of all fictional worlds as well as the real world. In some worlds, there exist background characters that are not important enough to be mentioned in the stories of their fictional work. These characters instead serve as guardians of balance in the multiverse, making sure our world or any other world does not blend into theirs. They make up the Fourth Wall Defense Initiative (FWDI), a kind of police force for all of existence. The story follows a group of FWDI agents who are pulled briefly pulled into our reality by an unknown enemy. This enemy manages to shatter the barriers between the worlds. Now, pursuing a
• Character can be invented from anything you can possibly think of from any genre of fiction, so long as it is not an already existing one. Along with with freedom to make any kind of powers and items that go with them.
• You also may assign stats as well, in the categories of strength, speed, intelligence, wisdom, endurance, sneaking, close-combat, long-range, charisma, magic, defense, and dexterity. Each ability helps with different combat and non-combat actions. Speaking of actions, every player and non-player character is allowed to do a single action during their turn.
• The game began with an hour of character-creation, in which everyone completed a character sheet and gave their character sheet to John for him to process. John balances the stats of each character’s powers. For instance, I made up a magic power called “deathwave”, which John  calculated as “(aoe, 1d12 for 1d6 turns)”, meaning it would do a number of damage points according to the result of a twelve-sided die for a number of turns equal to the roll of a six-sided die.
• In terms of my experience, the game occasionally was quite slow during character creation and while other players made turn decisions. I think this was mainly because the fourth wall game has a great deal of freedom, and with it a lot of ambiguity. This also added to the challenge and fun of it. When I was playing on my turn, I mainly kept asking myself how can I explore the world, and what the action that would make the most sense would be.

Time is flying! I’ve been here for almost 3 months and I have gone through a storm of feelings and sensations.

I have traveled, I have known amazing people, I have laughed and I have cried, but the most important thing is that I have learned.

I spent my 24th birthday surrounded by new people, I received gifts and letters that demonstrated that although we have spent little time together, we are a family.

I went to Philadelphia to see the Pope, the Argentinian Pope on September. His words, his Spanish homily and his message based on family values made me think about my own family in Argentina. They are definitely a crucial part of my life. Pope Francis invites us to think about the love we can transmit to our family members in small daily acts:

“These little gestures are those we learn at home, in the family; they get lost amid all the other things we do, yet they do make each day different. […] They are little signs of tenderness, affection and compassion. Like the warm supper we look forward to at night, the early lunch awaiting someone who gets up early to go to work. Homely gestures. Like a blessing before we go to bed, or a hug after we return from a hard day’s work. Love is shown by little things, by attention to small daily signs which make us feel at home. Faith grows when it is lived and shaped by love. That is why our families, our homes, are true domestic churches. They are the right place for faith to become life, and life to become faith.”

I would really like to be home now, in Argentina, practicing all these examples of tenderness and affection. We all need them; we all deserve them.

I also visited DC during the Fall Pause in October with my friends from Spain and Argentina. We had a great time together and we visited a lot of places. I really enjoyed being there and learning so many interesting facts about American history and culture.

When I was coming from DC to Dickinson, I really felt that I was coming home. I was anxious to see my friends just to share our trips. I insist on this: we are a family. We have meals together, we study together, we share our problems and our goals, we are here to share the amazing experience of learning in a different culture and teaching ours.

I have cried with the letters that my family and my friends have written, I have taken deep breaths after doing FaceTime with my boyfriend and I have wanted to hug my niece and my nephew more than once. But I am here, 12,000 km away, learning about others, learning about myself, my reactions, my goals, learning from challenges and emotions.

It is coming to an end; everybody says that after Thanksgiving the semester is almost done. The months spent in Carlisle have been tiring but exciting and I feel a deep gratitude towards the ones who have stayed with me here at Dickinson and at home. Everybody has helped me some way or other, with gestures, with companionship, with words of wisdom and with inspiring messages.

It is true: the semester will be over and I’ll go back home. But I just hope to see the people who have been part of this amazing adventure again. Sometime, somewhere. I can’t wait to share all the events that have taken place during my Dickinson experience with my family and friends and I can’t wait for my ‘Dickinsonian friends’ to come to Mendoza to know my people and my place!

I left my home in August, but I will also leave my home here at Dickinson, where I have spent great and unforgettable months. Home is not a physical place; it is where your heart is. I am really looking forward to coming home to hug everybody, but I am also ready to visit the other ‘houses’ that I have in so many places around the world.

My Dickinson experience will never end, I’ll always feel grateful for this opportunity and I’ll always be ready to come back here or to visit the people that during this semester have been my colleagues and my friends.

So I rolled my ankle last Sunday on my run. This Sunday, I saw a hawk flying across the academic quad of campus holding a squirrel. How peaceful on a Sunday morning.

But it got me thinking to the various animal encounters I’ve had while running outdoors. I mean I love animals, but I’d rather not have such “close encounters” on my runs.

One time I was running by myself on this trail I normal run through a local park near my house back at home and suddenly I hear something moving ahead of me on the trail.

I could see something moving, but I couldn’t make out what it was because it was so black and furry. Then it clicked and I realized I was in a bit of smelly situation. Yes, I did just drop a pun about finding myself across from a skunk.

GIF via Giphy

I had no idea what to do! I never thought I would have the issue of running into a skunk! I mean I really felt that was like more of a problem that dogs have. I just stood there frozen staring at this skunk who was going about its merry business on this running path when I hear more leaves rustling.

I look a little past this skunk and see that flowing it was the CUTEST LITTLE GROUP of baby skunks! (If you’ve never seen baby skunks before look here) I was in terrified by this full grown skunk, but I also felt this instinct to audibly say “AWWWWW’ at the baby skunks.

But I didn’t want to get sprayed so I stood there silently for five minutes thinking about how I could’ve been watching Netflix right then until all of the skunks moved along then I continued my run.

The other animal encounter was with my running partner.

GIF via Giphy

We have been running together since high school, we have the perfect balance of motivation but still allowing lazy days and it is great. We’ve come across many different animals over the years from box turtle to bunnies, but this story is by far the scariest and also funniest.

We were running (just to clarify in case you didn’t know what we were doing on our run) through our typical trail in the afternoon over the summer. We had been going for about a half an hour at that point and we started to goof off. There was a softball that we found and we were kicking it along with us.

We got to a turn in the trail where it is a tree and a fence to our left and a section of short bushes on our right.

I kicked the ball to left too far and we HAD to stop to find it. Suddenly the scariest noise comes out of the bushes on the right.

I thought it was a rapid dog. That was it, you know? I was dead right there. My running partner was screaming so I was screaming and there was just a

GIF via Giphy

lot of screaming happening as this TURKEY, that’s right a mother fucking turkey scared the shit out of us, flew away.

Oh yeah, turkeys can fly and it’s probably very entertaining to watch when YOUR LIFE ISN’T FLASHING BEFORE YOUR EYES!

Once we realized it was a turkey that just almost murdered us we started laughing really hard. we almost were attacked by a turkey! A TURKEY! Of all creatures, a turkey. I still don’t understand why the are not considered dinosaurs because they really look like a kind of dinosaur.

After, we collected ourselves we continued on run but to this day we still run cautiously past those bushes.

This past weekend, I was fortunate enough to spend a few nights at my grandmothers house with my brother. I did some filming for a future post and I definitely think I struck gold. Granny could be a movie star. She reminds me of Betty White. As soon as the camera was rolling it was all business.

The weekend gave me some incredible memories of my grandmother that I will never forget. On Saturday, she bought herself, my uncle, my brother, and myself tickets to see the Book of Mormon.

I was terrified to see this with her. It is from the creators of South Park and is definitely not something anyone would want to watch with their grandmother. If you haven’t seen it or heard about it, here’s a quick gif to give you an idea.

Honestly, this was one of the more appropriate scenes…

I could not believe the fact that I was watching this with my grandmother. I looked in her direction throughout the show expecting for her to be horrified and pissed off. It was quite the opposite. She was laughing harder than anyone else in the audience. There were tears streaming down her face.

Her favorite part of the show? Well just enjoy…

My grandmother is absolutely insane in an incredibly great way. She is 84 and fun. Not many grandmothers would have that kind of reaction to The Book of Mormon. Gotta love her.

Grandfather

I don’t think it would be fair to leave my grandfather out of this post so I will also have to share a story about him from over the weekend as well. We went to dinner on Sunday night and, as usual, discussed his multitude of girlfriends.

I learned that he was taking a women in his apartment on a Caribbean cruise in a few weeks, and the old bachelor seemed pretty excited about it. I personally think it’ll be a good place for him to meet women. Hopefully the lady he’s taking isn’t the jealous type.

About halfway through the dinner I started picking up on the fact that my grandfather was hitting on the waitress. She was about 70 and definitely liked him. He was playfully calling her “sweetheart” and “baby” while I cringed in my seat.

When we got the check, he looked over at me with a huge grin and said, “man she’s really cute.” I jokingly told him to ask for her number and he said that he might have to. The man’s got game. I went to the bathroom after that and refused to ask him about our waitress when I got back.

There’s just some things I’m better off not knowing.

Before coming to Dickinson, I couldn’t read or write in Russian; it was soley conversational. I’ve always gotten away with slurring endings and mixing and matching them to my nouns and adjectives with my family and native speakers. (I never really thought much about grammar, I just spoke the way I heard words and phrases my whole life)

When I came to Dickinson and declared my International Business and Management major, I learned that I had to complete three courses beyond intermediate in a foreign language. First, I thought Spanish. I’ve always loved Spanish, and not going to lie, I’ve always been really good at it since learning the language in 1st grade. But as I thought more about it, I started drifting away from the idea of sitting through more Spanish classes. I’ve already taken them for 10 plus years and seem to be comfortable enough with the language. So, next on my list was Russian. At first I thought, “Man, that’s going to be so easy, I’ll probably place out of the language requirement after taking the test.” I was totally wrong. When I signed in to take the exam I realized I couldn’t read anything on the screen. I emailed my professor and told her the situation and instead of taking a written exam, I had a phone interview (which I nailed). Unfortunately, she told me that I would struggle starting in anything above 101 because I couldn’t read or write. After thinking about it, I decided taking Russian would be the best decision for me. I realized that I wanted to learn more about the language, how to use proper grammar, and learn traditional things like movies/songs/poems/books that I could talk to my grandparents about.

My first day of Russian class at Dickinson is something I will never forget. I remember trying to get away with being just like everyone else and learning Russian for the first time. But, that ship sailed as soon as I said “Hello, my name is Alexa” in Russian; the professor immediately knew through my accent and pronunciation that I was a native speaker. (My cover was blown.) Throughout the semester my class started to get really annoyed with me because in class I would usually be the only one who really knew what the professor was saying, volunteered when no one else would, and would always be called on for demonstrations. They also would get annoyed with me when I would study for Russian exams. They would always say, “Alexa, are you seriously studying for Russian? Isn’t this your first langauge? Why are you in 101, thats so not fair.” It’s always been hard to explain to my classmates that I also have to study for Russian exams. To this day, I still have to put in as much work as them; but in a different way. Yes, in class, I would always be on the ball and know what to say and how to say it. But when it came to grammar and understanding how to read and write the language with proper endings and conjugations, I was totally lost. Overtime, my classmates understood that even though I was fluent in Russian, that didn’t mean that I knew grammar and knew why words are conjugated the way they are.

I’m really happy that I decided to go with Russian at Dickinson because I now am able to read and write letters to my grandparents, read my families favorite stories/poems, text my parents and family in Russian, and most of all, appreciate and learn more about my culture and language. I encourage you (whoever you may be) to take chances even if there’s a chance of failure. I was scared to take Russian in an academic setting because I was scared of failing in something I thought I was so comfortable in. But, by taking Russian and facing my fears and failing a couple times, it has been a great learning experience and has taught me more about myself than I ever thought I could.

I dedicate this post to a really catchy alphabet song that I learned in Russian 101. Give it a listen and maybe you’ll nail the Russian alphabet song 🙂

Sources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIKX9RYOX5w

Taylor Callaghan is one of my closest friends, roommate and on top of all of that, an avid traveller. Out of anyone I know, she has been to the most places, so I knew her experiences would be a perfect addition to my blog about traveling. She also loves taking pictures, and I knew she would have some amazing pictures to add. She travels somewhere new with her family, which includes her dad, and four siblings. Her dad plans all of the trips and makes it a priority for her family to travel together every year.

You travel a lot with your family?

Yes, we travel to a different place in Europe every summer and every December we go to the same resort in the Dominican Republic.

Can you tell me some of the places you have been?

I have been to Italy, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Croatia, Greece, Spain, Germany, Prague, Budapest, Portugal, Turkey, England, Morocco, basically most places in Europe. I don’t remember them a lot but when I was little we traveled to a lot of islands in the Caribbean.

If you had to pick, which was your favorite and why?

Greece, by far. We went to Santorini, Mykonos, Crete and Athens. It was just beautiful. It was a great trip because we saw not only the beauty of Greece but also the historical background of the country. We did a lot of sight seeing in Athens, the Parthenon and the other ruins. We went to Mykonos first and saw the picturesque island with the white buildings and clear blue water. We went to Santorini next and took a Catamaran around to the other smaller day islands and saw the blue cave. It was just beautiful. Oh, we went to the hot springs, that’s what we did, we went swimming in the hot springs, which was actually kind of gross but really beautiful. We finished up in Crete and it was just another beautiful island.

Why do you think your dad thinks its important that you guys travel?

It all started when I was 13 maybe, and my sister went to Sweden and Denmark for a soccer tournament and my family chose to follow them and visit Europe. Ever since then my dad has brought us to Europe every summer. He think its important to understand different cultures and he is a huge history nerd and loves learning about each city we are in and teaching us the history of how the world came to be what it is today, with all of the different traditions.

Have you had any scary or negative experiences while traveling?

When we were in Italy, we had someone come up to us and kind of curse and gesture in Italian about us being American. He approached my dad, and my dad quickly pushed us off to the side and tried to get us quickly around him. It was scary to see someone have a negative opinion about America, and that was something I had never experienced. I noticed especially they had problems with our politics.

So you decided to study abroad, where have you decided to go?

Bologna, Italy.

What made you choose Bologna?

I chose to study abroad in Italy because it was one of my favorite countries in Europe. It is also a business program which will help me with my major. I just love the feel of Italy, it is the most similar to the US out of a lot of other countries I have been to. Their traditions, food, culture is just very friendly, open and accepting. Bologna is a cute little quaint town, it’s a good place to actually experience living there versus a large city.

What are you most nervous about?

The duration of the trip, it’s a four month trip and that seems like a very long time to be away from home. I think I will get homesick and miss my family, but my excitement right now is much higher than my nerves.

Many people ask me “how did you get into running?” This is a question I still ask myself. Until the 10^th grade, I was an avid horseback rider. I would ride my ponies, Ruby and Lulu, everyday after school and bring them to horse shows on the weekends. I would even go down to Wellington, Florida in the winters to ride in the horse show series there. I loved riding horses; I especially loved the special bond that I had with my ponies. They were almost like giant puppies because would always know how to cheer me up. One of my most special memories of riding was with my pony, Ruby. I remember feeling especially down one day, so I went to give her a hug and she wrapped her neck back around me, as if she knew I was sad. My ponies always knew how to put a smile on my face.

So how did I go from an equestrian to a runner?

            I decided to go to boarding school in the 8^th grade. There, I was able to ride horses everyday because they had a riding program. My interests started to shift in May of that year when I joined a “May Program” run by my school called “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise”. (May Program: a two week outside of class room study, taught by teachers at my school) Within the Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise” program I learned all about healthy life styles, such as exercise, healthy meals, and budgeting.

The first thing my group did everyday was go on an easy two mile run. At first, I was very intimidated by the two-mile run, but as I ran in more often, I started to really enjoy it. In fact, it became my favorite part of the program. The leader of the program suggested that I should run cross-country the following Fall (9^th Grade). However, the thought of actually racing a 5k course seemed quite daunting. Also, having been a rider for my whole life, running was not an option.

The thought of running cross-country never left my mind. By my 10^th grade year, I ended up convincing myself to run cross-country. I am so happy I did, it is definitely one of the best decisions I have ever made. This decision resulted in me continuing to run throughout my high school career. I loved running so much in high school, that I wanted to pursue it in college. I knew that if I trained hard, that I could be strong enough to join the team in college.

How did I start running in college?

I never actually joined the team until second semester freshmen year. This is because I was too nervous and thought that I would not be able to keep up with the harsh demands of college running. However, I kept finding myself wishing I had joined cross-country throughout the fall of my freshmen year. Finally, in the second semester, I was able to convince myself to run.

As I was too scared to set up an actual meeting with the head coach of cross-country/track, I ended up signing up for a spin class that he taught. This enabled me to talk with him at the end of class about joining the team. Through hard work and collaboration with the cross-country coach I was able to join the team. Once again, joining the team was one of the best decisions I have made throughout my college career thus far. Practice is the highlight of my day and I continue to strive to get better.