I have heard rumors that I would be teaching next semester, but I got the official word yesterday when I signed my GA contract. So its official, I will be teaching a CP 220 class next semester. It is basically an 8 week Photo 1 class for non-majors, teaching students how to develop, print, and introductory photographic critique. I’m not too worried about it, but it will be my first class. It will mainly be freshmen and sophomores, so for some of them I will be part of their first college experience! Kinda scary to think about huh? Can you imagine walking into your first college class and seeing me standing in front of the class? Maybe I should pull the “sit in class” technique. I’ll sit in class and talk to all the students and then I’ll stand up and start leading the class. I definetely look young enough to be able to pull it off. It would probably backfire though…they would be talking about me..saying that I’m only a grad student…push over…etc

Anyways, it should be an interesting experience. Let me know if anyone has any suggestions or great ideas about how I should start the class off.

All I gotta say is…

10th place in a 15,000 person poker tournament. I just won $40.00 playing poker online. Goodbye school, goodbye carbondale, hello Vegas.

Everyone knows that the perfect summer is not complete without a rousing game of ultimate frisbee. However, this is particulary hard to accomplish when you have no frisbee. Brad and I decided to remedy this problem by heading to Wal-Mart to buy a frisbee. You would think that in the dead of summer Wal-Mart would carry a large selection of frisbees, ranging from the little kiddie ones to the Wham-O competition disc that is needed for a proper game of ultimate. Wrong. Those jokers didn’t have one frisbee in the entire store!! How can you possibly call yourself a supercenter without a frisbee? Unbelievable. So we travel across the street to the mall hoping to find a small sports store or department store that would carry a frisbee. We went into K’s Merchandise, which is perhaps one of the most ghetto stores I have ever seen, but hey, its cheap. We get to the sports section and find a nice selection of billiards cues, poker chips, and weights, but no frisbees. So I ask one of the nice employees in the store if they have any frisbees and he says, “Uhhh no” with a kind of egotistical air in his voice. Like they are too good to carry frisbees, or frisbees aren’t really a true sporting item. Completely taken aback by this comment, I just walk away in disbelief. Carbondale has disappointed me today, and tonight I placed an order online for a Wham-O ultimate frisbee 175 gram competition disc. You know you live in a small town when you have to order a frisbee online….sigh.

Yes, the rumors are true. It is indeed my birthday today, (yesterday actually) and yes, I am officially one year older today. Its not that I have gotten a little older every day, every hour, or every second, but that today, and only today, I have become one year older. If I look at life this way, then I only have to deal with getting old on one day of the year, rather than every day or every second. So yes, today I turn 25 years old and I cannot help but look back on what I have accomplished and look forward to what lies ahead.
What I haven’t accomplished

I don’t have a job…like a real one

I don’t have any money

I haven’t graduated grad school

I haven’t made it into the Museum of Contemporary Art, or any museum for that matter

I still haven’t found the right girl to marry yet

I still haven’t figured out whether God is calling me to be single, or if I just still have a lot to learn first

I still haven’t skied every major mountain range in the world…yet

I haven’t made my first million…or my first $50,000

What I have accomplished:

I successfully navigated the birth canal of my mother to be birthed into this great world

I survived a near fatal snowmobile accident with my dad when I was a wee tot

I found enough courage to finally kiss Lauren Botts on the mouth in 8th grade for my first kiss…she was never the same

I quit the Tate High “Showband of the South” in legendary fashion during the middle of practice…I miss you guys!!!

I graduated high school

I was called “brotha Corson” by my department head at FAMU…I’m really proud of that one

I started playing guitar two years ago, which was a very good decision. I love playing every day.

I graduated college…and not just any college…FAMU, which is a pretty big deal, not academically, but you know…

I got into grad school and finished my first year

I survived moving to Illinois and living on my own for a year

I have an amazing group of friends that I had to leave behind in Tallahassee…I love you guys

Me and a great friend managed to invent and orchestrate the future of social interaction

All in all it’s been a pretty good life. I can’t complain. I have an amazing family, good health, and I am privaledged to call some of the most amazing people in the world my good friends. Here’s to a quarter century of good times and great oldies. I just hope the next quarter is at least twice as good as the first.

I’ve spent the last hour reading a blog that one of my best friends from high school writes. While reading his intensely deep and descriptive blog, I keep asking myself…”what is a blog supposed to be?” Is is just a collection of timely news stories like what current companies are doing, or should it be a deep look into someone’s life? My friend’s blog is incredibly honest, detailing the events that are going on in his life right now in a novel-like way, letting his readers delve deep inside his mind and discover whats going on. Then I read other blogs and they are all about news, products, and how they got drunk last night at the biggest party in town.

Then I start thinking about vulnerability and the fact that maybe people who won’t put a personal journal online are not quite as open or vulnerable as those who would. So naturally this leads me to thinking about myself, and where I fit in all of this train of thought. My blog has mainly been about the things I have been doing over the past 4 months, but everything is pretty much on the surface. A reader would really learn nothing about me from reading my blog that couldn’t be obtained from a casual first meeting conversation. Does this mean I am a closed book emotionally? Or does this mean I’m just reserved? How does expressing yourself online differ from writing in a private journal in the confines of your room? The one thing that I do know is that the ability to read other people’s journals or blogs from a distant location is an entirely new concept that has been brought on by the digital age.

I was scanning through blogger today and just happened upon a random journal from some girl who was writing about problems with her current boyfriend and other friends at school. I’m reading all of this drama and then occurs to me that reading a person’s journal whom I’ve never met, never seen, and never will meet is an amazingly curious idea. Here she is publishing her life online, and as I look to the end of the post, I see 0 comments. Well, that is to be expected. Who really cares anyway? But in reality, I do care, because I’m sitting here reading about her life at 8:00 PM on Friday night and actually enjoying it. I enjoy the honesty, I enjoy seeing situations in which I have found myself in many times before, and this familiarity makes me smile. But I won’t comment, of course not, why would I? I don’t know her, and commenting may seem like I’m some kind of peeping tom that is spying on someone else’s life. But then again, she is publishing this online, so can you really blame me? I don’t comment of course, I close the page and go out to eat with a buddy.

Back to my friends blog. He has written online for 4 years now, and has published some of the most amazing posts I have ever read, yet many of the posts have no comments. I can navigate over to technorati and look at some of the more popular blogs about technology or design or music and see people who have 10 or 20 comments for each post about seemingly mundane subjects such as the latest CSS code, or the newest Apple products…..look down. We seem to be eager to comment on technology or music or anything inpersonal, but once people actually start talking about feelings and problems we don’t want to touch it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming our society or technology or excluding myself from the foray, because I know I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I’m not advocating that news and current event blogs are unimportant or mundane, but I do feel that personal blogs are perhaps more of what the original intent of a blog was or is. So in conclusion, I will be attempting to provide you, the reader, with a more in depth look at what is actually going on in my life, instead of what is going on in Cupertino. I still can’t resist sometimes though, I mean who can resist talking about a shiny new mac?

It seems that apple will be releasing several new products in August at the WWDC conference. The most widely anticipated product is the new Power Mac line that will feature Intel processors and a brand new enclosure. Macrumors.com is reporting on this and several other new products coming out from Apple in the future. I suspect that with the new mobile processors from Intel coming out this fall the MacBook Pro will be getting a the new processor, and the MacBook will keep its exisiting processor. The two notebooks are almost identical as far as performance right now, which usually means that Apple will be updating the professional version pretty soon. I gotta admit, the price tag of the new MacBook is pretty attractive. You can’t beat having a Mac laptop for right around $1,000 (with the education discount). Also, it is rumored that Apple will be using Sony’s Blu-Ray technology in their new machines. So maybe the new MacBook Pros this fall will have Blu-Ray drives..pretty exciting, assuming that you could use your laptop as a portable Blu-Ray player for HD movies.