Writing In & For Digital Environments

This is my mom sometime between 1960 and 1980, so that would make her somewhere between 20 and 40. I wish I could be more precise. I just know that this picture is very old.

My mother’s name is Susan Whalen. She was born in 1942 (yes, my mother is 72 years old) and she’s really awesome. Her favorite things are the beach, writing, and those little sugary orange slice gummies. She met my father in the eighth grade and together they would go on to raise a family of eleven kids. Five are biological and six are adopted.  I would put a picture of all of us here, but there are only about 3 of those in existence because there are way too many of us… The oldest is around 50, and I’m the youngest at 19 years old. So, in light of this incredibly large, strange family that my mother created, I decided to interview her about it.

What made you decide to have so many kids?

That’s me as a small(ish) baby circa 1995.

I love babies of all shapes, sizes, and colors. They’re beautiful. I had my first child when I was around 21 and adopted my last child, at age 53. That was you!

Haha, yeah! Fifty-three is kind of old, though, Ma. Why did you keep adopting?

Like I said, I love babies. I grew up in a kind of a hard house-hold. I’ve always felt a need to give, give, give. I felt like my purpose in life was to give little tiny babies a better life.

Did that ever get hard? Having all those little kids running around?

Your father was a lawyer, so he was gone most of the day. But I did have a lot of help. When you have so many kids, eventually you reach a point where the older ones are smart enough to take care of the littler ones.

What was your favorite part about having all those kids?

Definitely the holidays. From the time you were born to the time you were about 11 or 12, we lived in a huge house to accommodate for all those kids.

My father and I swimming in our pool.

Yeah, I remember that house. That one was my favorite. 

Mine too. So, the holidays, and as I was saying, the house was pretty big. So all your brothers and sisters and their husbands and wives would come home for Thanksgiving and for Christmas. The entire house would smell like food and sound like laughter. We would have a huge, twelve foot tall Christmas tree.

The Fourth of July was another good holiday too, because we had a huge yard and a pool and a trampoline. Your father would spend all day grilling hotdogs and playing music from the pool house.

Good times, good times. What about vacations? How did you manage to take all those kids on trips?

The boat on the far left is one we lived on for maybe 17 years. My parents had the pink one built in the early 2000s.

We had a house in Key West, Florida for about twenty years that we would all go and stay on. Sometimes we would spend Christmas down there. It was always hard to get a real tree, so we would get a fake tree and then put plastic flamingo lights on it. Santa would get Key Lime Pie instead of cookies. That always made you a little upset.

I always though Santa would be so mad if he didn’t get his cookies, but it always seemed to work out…

Haha, yeah it always did. Key West is still my favorite place in the world.

Thanks for letting me interview you, Ma — I love you!

I think it’s pretty safe to say that mostly everybody has seen the movie Pitch Perfect. You know, that movie about the ICCAs (that stands for the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella). I am actually one of the few people that haven’t seen the movie, so I can’t say too much about it. I do know that the acapella group in the movie ends up winning the competition, of course.

Anyways, the ICCAs are a real competition where over 300 acapella groups from around the country compete to be named the best acapella group in the country. This year, after a group vote, the Dickinson College DTones, of which I have been a member since my freshman year, decided to enter the competition. I will admit, I was a little bit hesitant to enter. Not only would I have to dedicate more time to singing, but the group also decided that one of three songs that we would be singing for our audition video was my solo, “Bottom of the River” by Delta Rae.

Here is a video of my group performing the song. I think this was the first time we performed it in front of people. I was terribly nervous and listening to myself sing will always be weird and uncomfortable.

Anyways, we performed my solo, “Say Something” as performed by the Pentatonix, and “Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel. To prepare for the ICCAs, we extended our practice time to two hours instead of an hour and a half. We had performed “Bottom of the River” a million (not an exaggeration) times last semester, and “Sound of Silence” was learned for Parent’s Weekend, so the main focus of our practices was often learning”Say Something”. We would always sing the other two songs though, just so that we didn’t forget them.

Sometimes we had practice in The Site, which is the on-campus dance studio. There’s a huge mirror in there, which was good because we had a lot of choreography to learn. The choreo was hard to learn at times. There were so many little moves that were essential to the piece that it was often easy to forget which leg we stomped on for which song or which arm we raise first for another.

The DTones getting ready for the Spring 2014 concert in Allison Hall.

After weeks of practice, we recorded our video on Thursday October 30th. The video was submitted that night, as the deadline was Halloween. After the video was submitted, the president of our group notified us that our results would be available on Saturday November 15th.

Saturday morning rolled around and none of us had heard anything. I was sitting at breakfast with one of my friends when I decided that I would check Facebook. The Dickinson Infernos, another acapella group on campus, had also auditioned for the ICCAs and had posted a status saying that they had gotten in — congrats to them again! I have a lot of friends in that group, so I was very excited for them to have gotten in. In the status, they also gave a shoutout to the DTones for getting in. I wasn’t sure what was going on because, as I said, none of us had heard anything yet.

I immediately went to the official website of the ICCAs and sure enough, under the Mid-Atlantic category, the Dickinson College DTones were listed as one of the 300 groups that would advance to the quarterfinal round.

We did it.

As of right now, what comes next is a road trip to Penn State on February 7th (I think). There are two other locations for the Mid-Atlantic quarterfinals, but I’m almost positive that that’s where we’ll be going.

Even if we don’t get very far in the competition, knowing that we even had the opportunity to go to the competition is something I’ll always remember.

*featured photo can be found here*

I was lucky enough to sit down with my good friend, Colleen, and ask her a few running questions. Colleen is a student at Georgetown University and just completed the Marine Corps Marathon—Congratulations! She has been running for about a year now and does not plan on stopping anytime soon. So, without further ado, How…