Writing In & For Digital Environments

So my brother decided to blackmail me in the most malicious way imaginable. Some may call it funny, I call it evil. We are heavily involved in a fantasy football league and he threatened to read my blog posts to our grandparents if I did not complete a trade. I love my grandparents, but I really love fantasy football. I thought he was bluffing so I declined the trade. I convinced myself that everything would be okay. Then I received this video…

Apart from the obvious fact that granny can drink, I now had an intoxicated grandmother that was about to read a blog about her. So what are my options?

1. Move to Canada
2. Call and apologize

After some careful thinking I decided to go with option one. I considered option two but really it was never a possibility. Some people are afraid of spiders, snakes, and heights; I am afraid of Jewish grandmother guilt. If you’ve never experienced this Jewish guilt, count yourself lucky and knock on wood. It is truly horrible.

Since I decided to move to Canada, I had to do some research in order to become a Canadian citizen. I learned about hockey, the cold, and maple syrup. I called some Canadian folks and they told me that was pretty much all I had to do so I packed my bags, kissed my girlfriend goodbye, and left with a tear sliding down my cheek. I was leaving America. Fantasy football, a blog, and my dick-head brother got in the way of my future. 

As I walked out of my dormitory with all my belongings packed up, I felt my phone vibrate. It was a picture. I stared at the photo while my depressed face quickly subsided into a wide grin. My grandmother was laughing. She thought it was hilarious. I started getting texts from my uncle telling me how the blog was making my grandmother cry from laughter.

Would my grandfather react the same way?

They both loved it! My grandmother and grandfather have both called me since telling me how much they love the blog. They are so happy that I cared enough to write about them, while I am so happy that I am still an American citizen.

Everyone wins except for my brother who still has a horrible fantasy football team.

Capitol Critique is a time for teams to, for lack of a better word, be critiqued. The only two things necessary to be there is having a synchronized skating team and a complete program. The point of this is to hear from judges first hand, this way you know what judges would like to see in your program: what is working, what should stay, and what should leave the program.

Team Reflections has always gone to this critique. Going to it can give you the benefit of letting you skate in front of a crowd, and also hearing the judges’ reviews. This year our program’s theme is “After the storm.” We mashed up two songs of completely different genres, Idina Menzel’s “Let It Go” and Lindsey Stirling’s “Take Flight.”

Getting ready for our performance, we gathered at a hotel that half the team stayed in over night. I started the day with a breakfast of fruit and a bagle with cream cheese. Now, the thing is, I normally don’t eat breakfast in the mornings. However, when the skating competitions come along, it’s necessary to eat breakfast in the mornings. This is because we don’t get the chance to eat anything until after we have performed, which could be hours after we wake up. We need to eat something that will fill us up and is good for us, providing the energy we need.

Next thing is to get hair and make up done. Our team of girls are between the ages of 12-19, so we are all capable of fixing our hair. We decided to do a part on the right side with a French braid on the left, and then putting the remaining hair into a simple bun. Doing each others hair is always fun, however every girl’s hair is different. We have girls with long, short, thick, thin, curly, and straight hair. This makes it complicated sometimes. Our makeup this year is done with a smokey eye using all different shades of blue. Our team manager does our makeup for us. When she is doing our makeup she’ll have little conversations with us. Most of the time they are just comments like, “Are you ready?” “Are you excited?” and always “You girls are going to do great!” She really has a gift for lifting our spirits before we skate. After we get hair and makeup done, we move onto putting our dresses on and gathering everything we need to leave. Then, its time to head to the rink.

Once the whole team was at the rink we needed to warm up. We went outside and found an empty spot and started our warm ups. Our warm-ups are meant to stretch out our leg muscles so they aren’t tight when we skate. Not only does it stretch our legs it stretches our entire body. We can’t have tight muscles while skating because there is a risk for serious injury. After doing our warm-ups we run through our program, practicing our steps and arms. This can be hard because you aren’t on the ice so you aren’t gliding. The feeling is completely different compared to actually being on the ice. After a couple of run throughs we talk with our coach and figure out what parts of the program we want to go over, what we feel are the weakest parts.

It’s now time to go to the locker room. While in the locker room, we listen to our music while we get our skates on so we can envision our program before we go on. This is also a time for those who have key elements in the program to stretch. For example, I have a 135.  This is when you are skating backwards and you lift one of your legs up and to the side. You have to stretch out both of your legs really well so you don’t pull a muscle. After everyone is stretched out we sit down, close our eyes and play our music one last time and envision our program.

Heading out to the ice, we line up outside of the rink, waiting for the team that’s on the ice to finish. During this time, our team manager is giving us encouraging words. Then, halfway through the team’s program that is currently on the ice, we all huddle around and say a prayer. Our team is called and we enter the ice. We get into our starting positions and…. the music starts. We start our program and everything is going well, we get through our first run-through and it ends. We stand up straight and skate over to our coach and the judges. We are all out of breath.  The judges look at us for about five seconds, but it felt like a lifetime. Then they say, “We love your program, your dresses look gorgeous out there, you girls skated very well.” Then they send us back to do our second run-through. We hit our starting positions, and we are all ready to go. I look right across the rink and make eye contact with my fellow skaters and we give each other a nod. The music starts, and for the second time, we begin our program. About halfway through, it gets very hard to continuously smile, so I find someone on my team to look at and we all know that that’s the moment you make a funny face at each other so you can get that smile back. We finish our program and the crowd claps and screams. We head off the ice and immediately look at each other in astonishment. Those two run throughs were our best so far in the season.

We head to the locker room and change into our normal clothes and go sit in the bleachers, watching other teams. We wait for our coach to join us and she tells us that they loved our program and our music. Our coach told us that we did amazing that she was so proud of us. We continued to watch some other teams and then we were released to go home. And that was the end to our 2015-2016 skating critique.

Hi my name is Ashley! I am a college student at small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. I was born in New York City, but then moved to Virginia when I was in the third grade. I part of a big and loving family. I have an older sister, Evy, and two adorable dogs named Wags and Scruffy. My parents sometimes joke that I like getting to see Wags and Scruffy more than seeing them when I come home from college. At home, I live amongst the most delightful neighbors, who my family and I consider part of our family too. My favorite things to do are running, reading, and spending time with family and friends. I love to travel and learn about different cultures. Something interesting about me is that I went to boarding school for high school. I am incredibly lucky because I was met people from all over the world. In high school, I discovered my love for running. Which has translated into college, where I run cross-country and track.

Running in college makes my days pretty hectic, but I love every minute of it. Everything from my coaches, teammates, grueling workouts, to the freezing ice baths we take. My team is one big family, just like my family at home. I am writing this blog for my English class. I am really excited, because it is about running, which is one of my passions. In my blog, I hope to share my journey of running with my audience. I am new to blogging, so writing this blog is a journey just as much as my running is a journey.

Running has always been a journey for me because it has taught me many things. I was a “walk on” the track. I didn’t even do “cross country” my fall of my freshman year. I joined in “track” spring semester of freshmen year. Running has been a challenging and unique experience. I want to share what it is like to be on a varsity team and how it is so special.

Just needed to drop this here. It’s a wonderful video, and an awesome thing to have happened.

A funky take on Kanye, Rihanna, and Paul McCartney’s FourFiveSeconds from Soundcloud power-users JSmith, Lido, and Brasstracks. 

Alfredo Sauce, fettuccine Alfredo, and everything that follows or precedes the word Alfredo are all things that Italians don’t even know. So why is it such a huge deal here in the States?!

Well, let’s start with a bit of history: 1914 Rome, Alfredo Di Lelio used to make his typical “fettucine”, called by himself “bionde” – blondes, because of the color of the cooked and served meal. They were more butterish and cheesy (of course Parmesan cheesy) than the usual “fettuccine al burro” because, as my beloved queen Sonia says in her Giallo Zafferano, his wife lost appetite during labor so he had to come up with something that she would have eaten, and it worked. She, then, asked Alfredo to put this recipe on the menu and that made him so famous because few years later in 1920 a just married couple who were spending their honeymoon in Rome, decided to go to see what was that kind of pasta everybody was talking about. Mary Pickford e Douglas Fairbanks, the famous Hollywood actors, then, were so impressed by the “bionde” that gave Alfredo as present a pair of golden silverware. From that moment onward, once the couple was back in LA, everybody knew about this extraordinary recipe.

In Italy or better in Rome, Alfredo grew famous and famous creating also a real Alfredo’s Dynasty (Alfredo, Alfredo II and Alfredo III) but actually nowadays if you’re not from Rome, you probably never heard of “Bionde” or “Fettuccicne alla Alfredo”. Most of Alfredo’s clients are – not shocking at all – Americans. Over the years, the recipe’s been shaped into an Americanized version of what it was at the beginning.

[This is the real Alfredo restaurant in Rome. FYI there’s no such video in Italian.]

In the States, this meal became easily and quickly the best thing people could have dreamed of! But, of course, it had to be changed, or as I say, “it had to be messed up by Americans putting random ingredients into meals that do not deserve this brutality” – mostly because Alfredo sauce became a convenience food in many grocery stores: unlike the original preparation, which is thickened only by original Parmesan cheese, the prepared food and fast food versions are thickened with eggs, starch, and worst of all sour cream – not to talk about the way the pasta is cooked!

But don’t worry, Italians are here to save you! Thankfully, we have the perfect recipe both from the original Alfredo (which I do not recommend because of the Americanization mentioned above) and from our Savior and Queen Sonia who has the perfect recipe for everything – yeah it is in Italian but who hasn’t a friend that can at least translate a recipe, we all have!

Remember that the ingredients are (/must be) easy and genuine. You can, of course, use something to flavor them, but usually it is either pepper or nutmeg which gave them a “fancy” taste!

Be careful, though, that cuisine purists in Italy will tell you that:

Seasoning the pasta with butter and Parmesan cheese is allowed only in the following situations: if you have stomach pain, if you are in hospital, if your fridge is empty or if there’s also sage and you’re eating tortellini.