Crayola

If I was a Crayola crayon I would be a blue and red one. Blue on the outside and red on the inside. Blue symbolizes freedom to me. It’s the sky, the water, peace. I love swimming and I love skydiving and flying. I feel so light in both of these areas. I feel free. It resources me. Blue actually reflect how I am most of the time. I am kind, I try to be nice to people and help anyone who needs help. I don’t really show my emotions to people. (Except to my girlfriend). I am friendly and I just want to have fun with friends. I am glad when I meet new people. I like trying new things all the time. Experience is important to me. Be open to people and to the world is great. That is what blue reflect in me.

The inside color would be red because of course I can still express myself when I am not happy about something. It shows my limits. Trust me, you don’t want to see me when I am mad. Nothing can make me feel better. I have to stay alone or I blow up on everyone and everything. Red is also the color of craziness and danger to me. I like that. I’m no often scared by anything. I also want to give a try to something… in a smart way of course. People think I am crazy sometimes. But I think that if you don’t do everything to achieve your dreams, then you are crazy. Life is shorter than we think. LIVE, today!! Red is warm. I definitely prefer summer to winter. Be warm feels great! Dream dream dream dream.

 

Smile and just be famous.

 I think smiling is very important. Show people how happy you are. Or even smile when you are not in a good mood. Make people feel like it’s a great day for you. That’s how I think. Sometimes I see people in the street or at en avent. They say : Hey, I remember you! Thomas, right?. I confirm and ask them how they remember. They often tell me they couldn’t forget my smile. It makes me happy and sometimes proud to hear that. Smiling make you happy and alos other happy. Smile is like laughing or sneezing. It is communicative. Be famous to me as two meanings. The first one is that you have to be proud of yourself. No matter what I do, no matter how I feel, I still have to be proud of what I accomplished and what I would like to accomplish. Ambition and motivation are part of that proudness. If you are proud of what you do and if you believe in yourself, everything is possible. The second meaning of famous would be more literal. I would like to become famous. I like having people’s attention. I want to be famous but I don’t want to reveal everything. To be famous you have to accomplish good work and alos be interesting. How can I be interesting for a lot of people. Well, I try to stay mysterious. I don’t reveal a lot about myself. But I try to accomplish as much as I can and I will make sure it is visible and people notice it. Be famous is like a reward you get. You feel appreciate. Off course you can’t make everyone around you like you. Haters exists and will always be there to get in your way if they want to. But it doesn’t stop my goals and dreams. Smile and just be famous. It makes me think about Tony Stark. You know the guy from Iron Man? He is pretty much like that.

What is in the way…

 Today, as a college student, there are several things in the way that keeps me from leading a life without stress and worries. The first one of those things is money. I know money does not make happiness but it contributes to it. And by money I mean pay for college. Last year, I was an exchange student and my first plan was to go back to Belgium and study marketing and management. But my plans changed completely and I decided that I really really, really wanted to come back over here and study video production. So I started looking up at some colleges… God I realized I needed to be rich to get an education over here. It was so crazy to think that! Over in Europe, you need only $1,000 to go to college and have dorms! But here it is just enough to pay your books! I could not believe it! I still convinced my parents that I would work hard and I would do my best to get scholarships… which is hard being an international student! There is a lot of competition!  As a college student, I have now a lot more financial responsibilities than before. I have to pay for my car, my gas, my rent, my food while my parents can still afford my needs for college. But I know that oce I will transfer to MSU it will be totally different! I will have to help my parents to pay for my education if I want to keep studying here in Missouri. It stresses me out to think how much I have to save, how many sacrifices I have to do to have enough money to afford MSU. It sometimes destroy my mood and ambition. On top of all of that, I have a girlfriend. Haha! I can assure you that it is hard to save up money like that… But she is the one who encourage me and I’m so thankful to have her.

What if…

My dad was the president of the US?
Planes didn’t exist?
I decided to stay studying in Belgium?
Oceans were made of acid?
One of my future kids become a serial killer?
Live expectancy for humans was 500 years?
Facebook did not exists?
I had 1 million dollars?
My car insurance was cheap?
Only one kind of language existed?
Money did not exist?
I lived in Florida?
My parents had decided not to let me come back to America?

 

What if I had 1 million dollars?

If I had 1 million dollars I would start by opening an account and put 5% on it to pay for college and the studies I need to get my degree. I would give 5% to each of my siblings and also 5% to my mom and dad. I would then buy a new car. I would give 5% in some kind of association. I would invest half of my remaining money on a company and put the rest on a saving account. Even though money does not buy happiness, I think it contributes to it in some parts of our life. As a student, winning that amount of money would relieve me worrying about how much my rent is going to be or how much gas money I can spend a month. Those are little details of life that stresses me out right now.

 

What if my parents had decided not to let me come back to America?

If my parents had decided not to let me come back to America and study here, I think my career pat would be totally different. First I would have been really sad, because I had such an amazing experience last year as an exchange student that I definitely wanted to come back. Secondly, I have a girlfriend here and not be able to come back would have ruined my feelings and my ambition I think. I also made a lot of good friends and I wanted to come back for them too. If I had to stay in Belgium, I would have attended a communication school in Brussels. My first goal was to become an event manager. Here I am studying Video Production, which would not have been possible in Belgium. There is no college that proposed video production studies… Instead there are private film schools but those are pretty expensive and it is usually hard to get in. Plus, jobs opportunities in that area are difficult to find over in Europe.  Finally, if my parents had decided not to let me come back to Springfield, Missouri, I would probably have had to pass my permit in Belgium, which is way more expensive, boring and harder than over here. Getting my license here was a piece of cake! So easy! I would probably have a different car … and I would have to save up a lot more money for gas. It is three to four times more expensive than over here in the U.S. Chocolate. I want chocolate.

 

What if I had decide to go to Mizzou?

Well I don’t know anything about that school. I think I looked up on their website once and it was crazy expensive for international students like me. Plus, they didn’t seem to have a program in Media studies or movie making. That was definitely not the college I wanted to attend. But anyway. Even if I had decided to go to Mizzou, I would probably be studying something different. I would have to live on campus because this is my freshmen year. I would have made different new friends. I want summer back. I am tired of winter. Cold cold cold cold. I would probably be practicing a sport like baseball. I like baseball. I played last year in High School and it was a lot of fun! Even though our team was bad and we lost a lot of games. The school spirit would obviously be different at Mizzou than here at OTC. I think I would have more opportunities to do something on campus, they probably have more entertainments like games and all that kind of stuff.  I probably wouldn’t be with girlfriend anymore. First because I would have met a lot of new people… girls… so she would have got jealous all the time. Second because I would have to stay on campus most of the time. My life would have been a lot different I guess.

 

We were so scared but it was always a fun adventure.

This was back in elementary school. I was going to a small school in my village. I had a fun group of friends. Life was fun. No worries. We were so young, little, without preoccupation about the outside world. We used to do crazy things outside school. One day, we decided to run into a field behind my house. There usually were cows and two horses. The goal of the game was two run around and separate the cows from the horses. It was dangerous but so exciting and funny to us. The grass was so high that even standing up, we couldn’t see each other. We could hide very easily and surprise the animals around us. At one moment, we heard a big truck pulling over and a door opened. One of my friend told us it was the farmer. Everybody was told to hide and remain silent. I was so scared. We were in a lot of trouble. My parents were going to beat me up if they heard about it. I saw one of my friend trying to escape from the field. The farmer saw him and starting yelling at us! He was walking with us with a hunting gun. We started all running to the other side. Big surprise when we noticed that the farmer’s son was waiting for us in the other side. We were caught. No escape. I did not really understand what was happening. We were just having fun. We had not done anything wrong. The farmer looked at us and starting yelling. He told us how dangerous what we were doing was. Horses could step on us or cows could even chase us if they felt in danger. He looked at each and every one of us. He asked for our names and said that if he saw us around here again, he would call the police. Then, he let us leave. I was shacking really bad. Trust me. I never went back there.

Grandma’s house

The ghost, Breakfast & dinner, Sheep.

My grandma’s likes to keep her groceries in her basement. Nobody knows why. That is something she has always done. Since my sister, two brothers and I were little, we have been used to go to her house every Wednesday to have dinner together and every Saturdays for breakfast. The funny story is that we are big Coke drinkers in my family. So every time we want something to drink, one of us has to go down in the basement and grab whatever we want. Nowadays, being older, it is not such a big deal anymore. But when we were little, my siblings and I used to play rock, paper, and scissor to decide which one of us had to go down in the basement. We were scared of this dark and cold place. Strange noises would make us scream to death. We always told stories about a ghost living in the basement. We called it the Courli. So anyway, no matter if we were the one chosen to go down, we would argue indefinitely, which used to lead all 4 of us to go to the basement together. We were so scared but it was always a fun adventure. Sometimes, my grandma would wait for us to get down, then would turn the lights off for a second. She would scream and say:” Come up here quick! The ghost is down there” , and we would run really fast up the stairs the laugh really hard together.

Operation Hollywood: The American influence

            The Constitution of the United States of America begins with those three words We the People. In America today, there is a general belief that each and every individual is unique and should have equal access to the American Dream of life, liberty and pursuit of Happiness (Griffin, 2009). Hollywood, since its creation, has never forgotten to show those principles through their productions. The strength and tenacity of such internalized ideologies within an efficiently working hegemonic system allow people to consider their society open and free, since it appears that no one is forcing anyone else to live a certain way, or keeping them from reaching their highest possible levels of achievement.

Today, the greatest power of Hollywood is the mass media. Newspapers, magazines, television, radio, film and internet. Hollywood is in charge of their own production. But the rest of those medias have the job to interpret them as much as they want and in every meaning of the term. Those cultural ideas presented by Hollywood appear to the public, and first, here in America. The media has more influence on cultural ideas and ideologies than do school, religion or families. Hollywood films dominate American theaters so much that US citizens have a relatively little access to other types of films- international films or films that express a different idea than Hollywood want to express. Hollywood shows America at its best. And because Hollywood’s business have dominated both American and global cinema, their motion picture is often considered to be the standards, correct way to make fictional films (Lyden, 2003).            

                                                                     

              Let’s take for example the movie Air Force One. One of the multiple movies were Hollywood had to work closely with the US army. Would you be surprised to know that the government is often reading Hollywood’s scripts before studios start shooting a scene or a movie where the US forces are represented?  Not only Hollywood want to show America and the rest of the world that the US army is good and powerful, but the American government stay smart and keep a close eye on what directors want to show on the screen. Well, before shooting the movie Air Force One, movie which starred Harrison Ford as the President of the US engaged in hand to hand combat with terrorist who have hijacked the president’s jet, the US Air Force general carefully read the script and immediately noticed some adjustments to make. For example, Hollywood was talking about a lot of coded messages, using real army terms like “Delta Force”- the army’s highly classified Special Forces commandos. The general refused to let Hollywood’s director to use those kind of specification in the movie. He also insisted to cut the Marines and the other branches of the army out of the picture altogether (they were represented as “show stoppers” in the script), and order to only show the Air Force on screen.  Why is that so? Well simply because when a producer want to include the US army in a movie, the result gives the same effect as an advertising. Showing ONLY the Air Force was a good idea to only promote that section of the army. Hollywood knows that a lot of teenagers and young adults watch their productions. Showing the air force branches would provide all public relations and recruiting values coming out of the film.  In the end, most of the script changes were made. The Pentagon was happy and the producers too. However, the public never knew that the “show stoppers”, the other branches of the Army, had been deleted from the film (Robb, 2004).

Ideas about Happiness…

The little things that build happiness. Happiness is the key word of life.  Happiness has probably different meanings for you, or my classmates or even someone in my family. To me, happiness has a clear meaning. It is the realization of our dreams. People keep repeating me that I have to be realistic, that life is not everything we want. I do not think so. I believe that if we don’t pursue our dreams, then happiness cannot be completely accessible. Happiness is not only about one thing we really want. Some people think money would make them happy, or getting a private island in the middle of the Caribbean for the rest of their life would make their life perfect forever. Happiness is not defined by how materialistic we are. It’s about enjoying little moments in life. It’s about enjoying the things you do and the events that happens in everyday life. Happiness is love, joy, laugh, smiles, emotions, tears, family, friends,… Nowadays people always want more. They are like donkeys. They have a pack of money floating in front of them and keep running straight in order to get it. Then they realize that time goes fast, that they skipped a lot of things around them. They find out other paths in life were possible for them to take. I was a lot like that. But life taught me that happiness is primarily possible if we enjoy little things in life. It is important to talk and remember about the past. It is important to imagine and see how our future is going to be and how we want it to be. But it is very important to live today! Live every single minutes. Enjoy everything. Have you ever watched Kung Fu Panda? One of the big quotes from that movie is the following: “Yesterday is History, tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift, that is why it is called the present”. I love that.  Those little details happening every day in our lives can make us happy. The sunrise in the morning, the birds singing, the water running hard on rocks, the wind blowing on the leaves, a little kid laughing, the ice cream that you eat during hot summers, the fireplace keeping us warm during cold winters, cats or dogs seeking for comfort on our laps, random people being nice to us, a “thank you” or a “you are welcome”,…There are so many things in life we don’t pay attention to.

Happiness is something that a lot of people don't believe in. Though, it's simple to find it. Yes, life is not always how we want it to be. Who said that everything was perfect? Nothing is. Life is an unexpected adventure. It’s shorter than we think. Bad and good things happen. Sad and funny stories come up every day. But no matter what, we have the choice to be happy or not. We are responsible of the personal choices we make in life. What if happiness was simply directed by those choices? I believe in that. The choices we make today influence our present and our future. It can be short or long terms choices. The main idea is: we, as individuals, are the one and only one who build our happiness. Yes, people around us will influence us. Yes, events in life will influence us. But we are the one who decide. We decide who we want to be friends with, what we want to learn, which path we want to take, right or left, yes or no, sorry or not sorry,... Happiness is determined by our own decisions in life. We can change anything. Anytime. Nothing is really done forever. We just have to be smart, stay who we are, and be simple in the way we live. Sometimes we are still looking for more happiness, we can get desperate, we then realize we are happy and life can go on. Some other times we realize it too late.

 

A smile can make my day. I like smiling. People often tells me that if there is a thing they often remember about me it is my smile. Smile is one of the key to happiness. Guess what... smiling is a virus. It is very communicative. It shows a lot. Does it make you happy to see people around you smiling? Doesn't it give you a little something inside when children or babies are smiling to you? Smile 30 minutes every day can make you live longer than expected, scientists say. It is good for our heart. It is good for our soul.

Happiness is thinking about what makes us feel good in life. Everybody has problems. Life is not perfect for anyone. But the way we look at our problems will definitely influence how happy we can be or want to be. I took a “Keys to College Success” class last semester. We talked about how some people have a creator mindset and others have a victim mindset. Creators tend to always seek solutions. They don’t give up. They think positively and try to find a way out. Victims blame others for their problems or mistakes. They think they can’t be happy either because they don’t deserve it or because people around them don’t do anything to help so the only solution is to give up.

 

In life, doors shuts and open. All the time. Some of them need a key. We have to find it. To find happiness, we always have to keep one door open. Sometimes we want to open one that we can’t have access to because it is not time yet. People try to force it. Rush everything is a bad idea. There is always a solution to everything. It takes times to find it. It ask for a lot of thinking and reflexing. It asks for patience. If a door shuts on us, we should not try to open it back. If we are the one that decide to shut a door, then we can always come back to open it and try again. What I mean by this metaphor is that when we want something to be happy, we can always find a way to get it. Happiness is accessible to anybody.

 

Happy people make people happy. I think I heard that in movie recently. I believe it is right. Seeing someone happy can usually makes you feel good. I know a lot of people, mostly of my generation, will say that with “love relationships” it is not true. I can love my girlfriend but maybe figure out that one day we don’t work together. What is the best? Stay together, fight to keep us together and not feel too happy because of our fighting and repetitive brake ups? Or is it best to let the person I love go away, because I know that she will be happier without me. It is hard to think about. Can you make someone happy? I don’t think so. I think that in a relationship, happiness comes from how people interact with each other. They create happiness between each other but they cannot make the other person happy. Happiness results from an interaction between the two persons that forms a couple.

Blue

 

Blue is freedom. It’s the sky. The water. It is my favorite color. Blue is so peaceful. I have lived in a lot of different houses. But no matter what, paint my room in blue was always my first choice! I never regret it. I just feel safe and fall asleep easily. I just feel good around blue. Blue is a beautiful color. Like I said, it makes me feel in peace. Blue appease me, makes me feel relax. Don’t you feel better when you can see a nice blue sky on top of your head instead of dark heavy clouds? Would you rather not go to the Caribbean beach where the water is perfectly blue instead of swimming in the Mississippi river?

A Mix of Traits

I decided to lay in the grass against a very tall tree that afternoon. The sunny sky was shining on Campus. I kept looking at people coming to and leaving their class. Then, I noticed one of this couple sitting at a table. The girl standing behind that elegant male looked like a double sized hobbit comparing to that rangy individual who seemed to perform Olympics every day. Contemplating her standing next to that athletic men, I wondered if those two people could be a couple or not. They started kissing. That answered my question. Though I could not figure out what they found to each other. I became really curious. Physically, nothing matched between them. I did not see her as a glamorous female because of the red and white excrescences that appeared all over her visage. The zombie shirt she wore that day and the artistic pieces of metal gripping into her face gave her an extraterrestrial glimpse. She also revealed a couple of tattoos who looked like crosses… maybe they symbolized a sort of virtuous ethic. Her school bag with zombie’s drawings and her headphones with The Walking Dead writing on it made her obviously a dead walker fan.  She looked primitively archaic and into a dark fashion. Her ghostly white expression made her seem impaired and nauseated. Her meager mandible appeared ridiculous and her big nose looked disproportional. At the other hand, her boyfriend showed his gracious white and shiny denture a lot. His colorful and expensive looking outfit made him look prosperous. They totally belonged to an opposite vogue. Reading some business book situated in front of him, his concentrate face changed to a surprised expression when the girl came. To me, he seemed to be some kind of professional in the business world already.   His body surface reflected a cocoa complexion which made me think he probably traveled a lot.

So, on one side I found that guy who looked very sophisticated and neurologically well educated, and, on the other, that passive female who seemed starved and psychologically nervous by how white she appeared  to me. This crazy and awkward looking couple at least proved me one thing. Appearance does not matter. Those two seemed so twitter patted together. They kept giggling a lot. That made me realized how much prosperity they shared with each other.

The Invisible Me

 

If I would wake up invisible one morning, I would simply take a day to make the life of people who do not like me miserable. I would not do anything illegal but I would scare them until they decide to go see a psychiatrist! There is some people who really do not like me, some people who act very bad towards me, spread rumors,… and I want to take my revenge on that.

The second thing I would do is get in a plane and take a seat in first-class. Destination: somewhere hot with thunderstorms most of the nights, beautiful beach and warm ocean. I need vacation!

I would probably spy my girlfriend for a while and see what kind of discussion she might have about me with her friends. I guess I could be surprised… maybe I will even regret it but it is still something I would do.

I would also take a plane back to Belgium and go scare my brother at night. There is no way for him to thinks it is me. It would be so much fun! I miss annoying him and I know he hates me when I make him jump in his bed in the middle of the night, when I hide in his closet and slowly open then door making weird noises.

If I was invisible, I would help the cops do their job. If they need to catch someone running, I would make that person trip.  I would also go into some political meeting that the public can’t have access to and listen to the discussion politics are having.

Vocabulary

 

I was walking at the beach with some of my bumbnerd friends. We had work for school. No one wanted to study. We did not really knew where we were headed to and walked across some random places. A storm was about to happen because the sky looked like a rock at the horizon.

My friends were those kind of crazy dudes who would do cool stuff all the time no matter how the weather is. It started lightning so we went inside a forest of palm tree to not to stay uncovered in the middle of the beach.

One of my friends said: hehehe we might died under those coconut trees if the storm strikes us. I told that dingus to shush or I would literally make him swallowing a jellyfish and then we would see which one of us would end up being strike first.

The waves were huge! It was legit to be at the beach in the middle of that storm. I was really scared though. I hoped it would stop before sunset.

It was getting dark and chilly so we decided to make a fire. The wood was wet and it was difficult to make fire like that. Osmosis, one of my friend, tried to start it by hitting two rocks against each other. I told him I could start my own fire before him with just one hand. “Bullshit!’ he said. That turkey didn’t believe me until I put some wood together, took the lighter in my pocket and just started the fire in 2 seconds. All of us laughed besides him. He said: “You freak you suck. That’s unfair.” I walked toward him, gave him a little punch on the head and went: “palalalala”. I am the best.