Salsa Dancing

I learned something new this week! I learned how to salsa dance! Well … pretend to salsa dance at least. 

I have a friend at work who is from Columbia and has been trying to get me to come to Salsa club with her for months, and getting me to come to salsa club is no easy task.  If you were to ask my friends my hobbies, dancing is not something that you’d hear.  I just never have been the biggest fan of dancing.  But my friends persistence paid off and I she finally broke me. 

Well, I still don’t really dance, but it was a lot of fun, or a lot of ‘funny’ rather (for the witness of my dancing crimes that is).  But definitely a positive experience and who knows if that is the last time that I will go to a dancing club, be it country dancing, square dancing or whatever.

The thing I learned is that is good to try out new things.  I’ll admit that I am an awkward person that is often out of my comfort zone, but believe me I don’t going looking for opportunities to embarrass myself.  But maybe I should.  Going out of your way and trying new things can give one a broader perspective on the world. 

I don’t think I am going to try to become a talented salsa dancer or anything, in fact I know I won’t.  But I can now say that I have done it.  I don’t have to say that I would be a horrible dancer, now I have confirmation.   

I am going to make sure that I jump on future opportunities to learn new things, especially things that I have never tried before.  Who knows I may find a passion or hobby that I didn’t know existed.

Cosmic brownie vs. Tillamook yogurt.

At the end of last week I started to feel a cold coming on.  I didn’t pay much attention to it, until the next week.  While I was bemoaning and coughing Monday which was really sad because it was holiday, I began to consider my health.  I realized that maybe there is more that I could do to keep myself healthy. 

Being a college student it can be hard to eat healthy foods and when you are feeling sick it probably isn’t a good idea to go to drink a gallon of Tampico, eat at Waffle Love, and down a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips.   –hence I got sick.

I am not a health major but I feel that sugar is really bad when you are trying not to catch a cold.  So to recover as quickly as I could I decided to get extra sleep and restrain myself from consuming sugary foods, it was hard.

My first temptation: A cosmic brownie. 

I went shopping with a friend who bought a box of Cosmic brownies.  After sampling a piece of one I was offered one for myself, which I obviously accepted.  But then I remembered my goal.  This brownie surely would be the end of me.  So I was strong, and I put it away to save it for later. 

Because I had just gone shopping I sat down and pulled out a Tillamook yogurt, harmless I thought.  Out of curiosity I decided to see how much sugar was in my nice little yogurt . . . 27 grams! What? I jumped over and took the box of brownies from my friend, 26 grams! 

I was shocked.  A yogurt has more sugar than a cosmic brownie?

Being healthy is hard work.  I think that we have stigmas with certain foods.  In reality there is so much unsolicited junk food all around us.  I am going to try to educate myself on the foods that I eat.  This will be a good habit that will either lead me to eating healthy, or, realistically, just end up helping me justify eating a good old cosmic brownie.  

When You Forget...

This week I walked into one of my classes, everything was normal, I was at ease, the students in the class were chatty as normal.  I began to get my stuff out of my bag to get ready for class, the scene only to be described as calm.  Then as happens I overheard the students beside me speaking one to another,  “. . .  so for my project I . . . ”  So in my mind I am like “project… what project”, then that thing which was left back in the innermost dark regions of my mind resurrects and—well, then calm is over.

Forgetting things is one of the worst feelings in the world.  I wasn’t lazy either, I had two really big midterms the week before and in my great efforts to succeed in them, I plainly and simply forgot.  Telling that to your professor though, is not really the greatest recovery strategy. 

Forgetting this project immediately put me at the zero percentile in the class. 

While standing beneath an un-scalable ten thousand foot mountain face, a mountain climber looks up and gets chills.  A student looking at an equivalent ten thousand foot academic mountain also gets chills. Difference being, the climber feels pumped the student feels pummeled. 

Bad grades are not the end of the world.  In fact I will be more than fine.  Bad things are really frustrating when they happen because of dumb reasons.  For instance, even though in both cases you lose, it is interesting that fans leave sporting events happier when their teams has just lost by 30 points then when they lose by 1 point in the last second by a bad call by the referee.   

Details make big differences.  That is why it is so important to pay attention to the small things.  I need to make sure that I am diligent in keeping track of when things are due.  I am going to every week go through every class of mine, to make sure that I know exactly when everything is due so that I don’t miss the things that make the differences, the details.  

Look Up!!

Have you ever seen the image of the evolution of man? - It starts with a hunched over monkey and progresses onward until it becomes and upright-walking man.  Well the next step for man is going to backtrack.  We will return to our heads being hunched over- why will they be hunched over . . . Because they will be staring into our phones.

For my entrepreneurship class I was asked to go to a place that I normally attend and to sit and watch for 15 minutes, to just simply observe.  I decided to go to a food court, and just see what I noticed about the world.  And what I noticed, is that we don’t, that is, notice.

I was amazed, by observing I figured that at more than 80% of the tables there was a phone or a computer that the person sitting there was buried into.  This included people that were eating at tables with friends, and this was the majority of the tables. 

I don’t want to sound like the old person that always says “you youngsters these days are so into your electronic things, you need to look up more” but . . . I want to sound like the old person.  –GET OFF YOUR PHONE!

The assignment alone is not what makes me so passionate.  But the assignment made me especially aware to other experiences I had this week.  Because of where I was going passed a girl 10 times; she was engulfed in her phone and her face was engulfed in her hair, and not once did I even see what she looked like.  Another experience, which I think is the worst, is that I came up to a friend to do a task, and literally said “It is nice have someone to talk to while we do this task.”  After upon saying this, they immediately put earbuds in and started watching YouTube clips on their phone.

I found another blog that talks about this same topic, it seems that most of us are realizing that technology is talking over our lives.  Too much technology

I think that society would be surely be a much more social place and most probably a happier place if we would just unplug for a moment or two.  I am going to make sure that I am not that person who forgets the people around me, or doesn’t take time to enjoy the real world which is ever around me.