I leave for Boulder in an hour and a half.

This is how I feel today. I’ve known this song since eighth grade and even then, I knew this is how I’d feel. You can ignore the visual part of it; just listen to the song.

Expect a more articulate post later today or tomorrow, after I’ve settled in.

Four days left…

I leave for college four days from today. Most of my future schoolmates say they are more nervous than excited; my emotions are directly proportional to theirs, it seems. Although there are things I will miss about where I grew up, I feel like I am finally going to my true home. This summer has been full of change, so this is just another adjustment for me. I’m completely thrilled to be taking classes I’ll actually care about, spend time with friends I’ve only otherwise known through the screen of my computer or cell phone, and wake up every morning to see these:

Needless to say, I have a lot to look forward to. My car is already loaded, my planner is full of fun things to do the entire first weekend, and I’ve even got my outfit for move-in day picked out. Tomorrow I am saying good-bye to one last friend, and then I will be waiting for two days. Climactic, huh?

I will be using this blog to update my family and friends on my life while I’m away at university, as well as posting things I think are interesting. For visual updates not included in my blog, feel free to visit my Flickr page, where I will be posting random photos throughout the year (you can also see thumbnails of recently uploaded photos on this page’s sidebar).

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you around!

Jess

Dear Honda,

Really? Really?

What’s with the Prius rip-off on the 2010 Insight?

2010 Insight

2010 Prius

I understand the benefits of getting more hybrids on the road, but COME ON. They look exactly alike! This makes me doubt the presence of originality in the world.

This whole @aplusk vs @cnnbrk thing is interesting.

So I’m assuming you’ve already heard of the Ashton vs. CNN war, since you’re using a computer to read this blog, and it was all anybody talked about yesterday… which also means you’ve already heard of Susan Boyle, but that’s a whole other post (that will probably not happen because I’m actually in the dissenting group and I generally just keep quiet about that sort of thing). Anyway! I was on team @aplusk because 1) he’s funny; 2) CNN, while wonderful, doesn’t post interesting Tweets; and 3) he pledged to donate $100,000 to fight malaria, a cause near and dear to my heart. I really don’t understand his vendetta against the media though. Yes, with the advent of social networking websites and “citizen media” (oh look at me, writing a blog!), the people have taken control of what news they recieve. While I agree with Ashton that journalism has deteriorated ethically and content-wise in the last few years, I disagree with his belief that we need to get rid of it altogether.

Professional journalism, unlike blogs and other citizen-based journalistic expeditions, requires some degree of balance. True, you have your MSNBCs and your Fox Newses, but *most* media sources at least try to avoid bias. Because they rely on advertising as well as their viewers, professional news sources are more likely to do fact-checking before posting their stories. Bloggers, however, rely solely on their readers, who have expectations about the type of information portrayed in those blogs. For instance, readers of Perez Hilton’s Blog expect “Celebrity juice, not from concentrate.” They demand the latest gossip about Miley Cyrus and Heidi Montag. Most of what Perez writes, however, isn’t necessarily news (or true, for that matter). Most of it is just commentary like “Oh, bb. We’re trying hard to sympathize. But that is LOLtastic!”

While I love social media and am an avid user of sites like Twitter and Facebook, I feel as though Ashton’s belief that traditional media must be eradicated is a dangerous one. Having citizen journalism (bloggers, Tweeters, etc.) as the people’s only source of information is just as dangerous as having one or two conglomerates controlling all of the information available to the people. We need balance not only in the content being distributed to the masses, but also in the methods being used to distribute such information.

Hello!

So this is my first blog post here on WordPress… we’ll see how it goes! I don’t entirely understand it, but hopefully I’ll adapt to this like I have other sites, and hopefully I will thrive! I’m not sure what I’d like to blog about yet, but I guess we shall see.

Thanks for reading this, whoever you are.