It's gotta have passion.

How do you learn about writing? Passion. Passion of your soul and words to say what pisses you off, what made you speechless, what was beautiful about your journey. If you're not passionate, you can't write.

And that's what I came here to say. I haven't written this blog because I wasn't passionate about the assignment. Since Thursday, I've been stewing over the idea of dropping this class to hell and below, but now that I have a moment, here I am. I've been staring at the Schedule page on the wordpress blog for a while now but every time I sit down, I find myself wondering off with my camera or receiving a call from the journalistic world putting me out on an assignment. Fuck excuses any way.

What the hell did these broadcasts all have in common? Soothing NPR voices. Damn those voices remind me of my grandfather listening to his classical favorites, or the summer days I'd spend in North Carolina with my uncle cleaning his entire house for a Benjamin. It took time, but I suppose it was worth it. Yeah, nice NPR voices... Also, I suppose you could say they collectively contained some sense of what that individual's belief on life was about. It made me realize that we all have our own way of saying, "This is life as I see it. Let me try and personify that for you, or bring it home with an example." I thought all of them we're overly sappy and grasping at straws except for the god one. Of course, I agreed with the man completely because I'm passionate about a world without gods, so that's probably why it's the only one sticking in my mind right now. I know there was one about pizza (which only did enough good to remind me what I can't have) and there was another about baseball. I fucking hate people who are overly passionate about sports. Get over it, it's a game, remember? You're not helping by screaming at them, or wearing a mock-up of their jersey. Let 'em lose. Christ. I picked two with topics I was passionate about: Books and dogs. Holy shit, there's nothing better in life than books and dogs. Maybe sex. Maybe. Books about sex? Nah, they just say the same things over and over again. Oh, also music. Music wins all. Music can be about books, dogs, and sex. I digress.

I picked books and dogs. Okay. The dogs one almost brought me to tears because I miss having dogs so bad. I had 10 at one point. A poodle, a beagle, an Australian Cattle Dog and her 7 puppies. That was the life. I was rolling in puppies. Maybe I just really liked those puppies. Dogs are, by far, the best animal to evolve yet. They come to you, they're funny, they want to make you happy, and above all, they don't care who you are - the just want to be your best friend and maybe eat away at that tennis ball in the meantime. Dogs, man. My boyfriend gets mad because the majority of my dreams contain dogs in some form.
Then there's the books. My favorite band's name is The Books. They're like a book. They use sound clips behind their music to create the story. Even with that useless knowledge, books are great things. Currently, I'm reading three fiction books. The Complete Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, Flowers for Algernon, and DragonLance. Without books.. I'd never have a way to leave this world. I want to throw all the nonfiction and textbooks I read against the wall. I can't stand that crap. If I'm about to read 500 - 1000 pages of you rattling shit off, it better be entirely made up and contain dragons or murder - preferably both.

Maybe I'm stubborn. I don't like being told what to do. I'll do the opposite. Sometimes I'm asked to clean the floor. Well fuck you - I'll clean the floor when I can't stand it anymore.
... I'm not sure that's on topic at all.. If I'm passionate about it, I'll do it.

Once again I don't understand the entire prompt of this blog. "The goal of this assignment is to identify what appeals to you about each option, what you think you might like to choose, and what you think you might like to say." No idea where the context of that is from. I think it's referring to the "digital tool" we'd like to research on and I already know I'm doing 8tracks.


Oh, and one last point - I have no idea how to use that DALN site. What the hell was that?

* * *

Upon further review of this blog post, I'd like to elaborate on something I've been thinking about.

I choose dogs and books and loved the broadcasts because I felt like I had something in common with the speakers, however, the fact that all of the "This I Believe" speeches are essentially about the same exact, "Here's-an-experience-of-mine-and-how-it's-manifested-into-a-minute-principle-I-think-should-govern-my-actions" guidelines, I find the broadcasts very.... unimpressive. A couple here when someone has a really interesting perspective or outlook should probably make the program, however, when I looked at the URLs of the broadcasts I picked, they're already on 68,000+ of these things. Penn did, what, number 34? Slow it down, NPR. 

Which leads me into another problem. There are so many of these where's the passion anymore? Where's the passion to find that one unique outlook and broadcast it for the world? Are these 68,000+ broadcasts even differing really in subject matter anymore? TV shows don't usually last more than 200 - 250 shows, how can we have 68,000 people all telling us something different about life? I'm sure 35% state something about how we should all just slow down and 25% tell us about how kids can teach us something, while another 15% or so discuss educations benefits or a revelation someone had one day. Then the remaining 25% are probably unique enough to stand out. And then how far is someone really going to take this random advice given by random people. I mostly listened and said, "that's nice, cool bro," and moved on. How many people are doing the same? To really have that passionate impact, I think an amount of carefully selecting what you want to say, selecting the cream-of-the-crop, the Grade A plays a part. I wouldn't take the first 25 pictures of my 1000+ frames and say, "Here's my finished work, sir." I go through and stare at each individual image. I think over it's strong points, point out it's weak ones, debate over what I should and shouldn't include. I also don't say, "Here's 1000 pics, sir." How exasperated would you be trying to look at 1000 pictures while trying to understand the story? NPR's got a good idea with these broadcasts but there are only a certain number of experiences that can happen to a person. You can understand a type of person by understanding what sort of experiences they've had. That's what makes that "type" of person. While sure, they'll vary in their minute details, overall their grand picture of life is the same. Where else would we get political parties, civil rights movements, or romantic novelists?

This update brought to you by a Journalism major/Sociology minor. 

(broadcasts I chose: http://thisibelieve.org/essay/10598/  http://thisibelieve.org/essay/68795/ )