If today was your last day...

If today was your last day, what would you do?  What would you like to do before you die?  How do you want to die?

These questions are rather popular in the media, as evidenced by movies like The Bucket List and songs like "If Today was your Last Day" (Nickelback).  But do we really take the message to heart?  Or do we just enjoy thinking about these questions in a rhetorical fashion? It seems to me sometimes that the question is taken too lightly or used as a way to judge people as being insufficiently family-orientated.

I watched two movies tonight: Forgiving Dr. Mengele and Sophie Scholl: The Final Days.  Both films were about the Holocaust, but took completely different approaches.  FDM was a documentary about Eva Kor, an Auschwitz survivor who has "forgiven" the Nazis for the events of the Holocaust, and SSTFD was a drama based on a true story about a young woman in Nazi Germany who got arrested and executed because of her involvement in the White Rose resistance group.

Both movies brought up important questions.  

FDM-What is forgiveness?  Do we have the authority to forgive?  Does forgiveness heal?  Is forgiveness more for the benefit of the victim or the benefit of the person who hurt the victim?

SSTFD-Would you have the courage to stand up for your beliefs if you knew you could get in serious trouble?  Is there a point where you can turn back or is it better to just accept all of the consequences?  What would you want your final words and thoughts to be?

SSTFD was the kind of movie my mother would really enjoy because there were several quotes in defense of humanity.  Sophie tells the man interrogating her, "Trucks came to pick up the children at the mental hospital. The other children asked where they were going. "They're going to heaven," said the nurses. So the children got on the truck singing. You think I wasn't raised right, because I felt pity for them? "

Oh and I'm really glad American court systems are better than the ones of Nazi Germany.

For more information on the Sophie Scholl movie, please visit http://www.sophieschollmovie.com/
If you want to learn more about Eva Kor's museum, go to http://www.candlesholocaustmuseum.org/

Dear whoever is reading this: Please post any comments you might have!!! :D

What YOU REALLY should know about JOURNALISTS and JOURNALISM

There are two things that really stick out to me about journalism that I'm not sure if people are familiar with.  I feel these two general concepts are extremely important to keep in mind while being interviewed.

For one thing, if you don't say "take me off the record" or "please don't write this in your article" or "this is just between you and me," the journalist can write it in the paper.

Basically, you have the right to remain silent.  Use it.  It's only libel if the facts are UNTRUE.  If you don't want it written, tell us during the interview.

My personal quip about this is that I've been more than ethical to my sources for one of my articles, checking over their quotes with them and losing part of what they originally said as a consequence.  I did not have to do that, and I could have gotten a much better story if I hadn't.

Also, journalists can be very rude people.  According to a poll in my Inside Reporting book, 77 of 100 interviewed professional journalists would read notes and letters if left on a public official's desk while the person they were interviewing left the room.

Be careful of what you let us see and hear.

Bashed in the Head with Freedom

I wish high school could have prepared me better for university life because being a college student is really not so simple.  We finally have all the time in the world, all the courses we could possibly want to take, and all the decisions a bunch of us (I assume) are not 100% ready to make.  I'm glad we have a core curriculum.  Otherwise, I really wouldn't know what to do.

Angel has stressed to a bunch of us over and over that college is our one opportunity in life to take risks we normally wouldn't be able to take.  But how can we when we have so much work to do?  I'm swamped in the enormous amount of reading and writing my professors expect me to do. I've never read this much in my entire life.  I don't even know sometimes if I can read; it gets that bad.  All the words just tend to flow together so that I can barely get any information out of it...I skim almost everything because I can't afford to spend the time to make sure I understand everything completely.  And yet the alternative isn't so easy either-SCIENCE.  Actually, I was sorta kicked out of science by Professor Faltynek since I really wasn't doing so well at it.

And then come relationships.  The freedom to have the best-and the worst-feelings, experiences, everything.  No wonder college is typically a madhouse.

Not that freedom should be taken away from us.  Freedom is a good thing, especially if you realize the responsibilities you maintain.  But sometimes it just really hurts my head, what with my extremely active imagination which can play out sequences of a variety of events that could potentially happen.  It gets scary sometimes too.  The expectations of college students are high, and the stress they produce is anything but low.

Movies this Weekend

Blind Side
Passengers (2008)

Both were good; please see.  Blind Side is less cheesy, but Passengers is still good.  Passengers is one of those "trick movies" like Fight Club.  I thought the acting was great in each.

When you find yourself in times of trouble...

and have an hour to refocus your energy, direct yourself to the nearest legitimate library. Pick a subject, any subject, that might interest you at all or just wander around until you find something that looks potentially interesting.  Then you shall find bliss...at least for a while.

Ok so that sounds stupid.  Point is, I was browsing the Dominican library for a little while around the section I had been using for a slightly boring exercise in dictionary skills for Italian class.  Near the massive Italian-Italian dictionaries I FOUND IT!!!

What?  A two-volume set of 5-language pictorial dictionaries from the 1950s.  They seriously made my day...with the picture of "the lady's servant" and the picture of the baby carriage.

libraries are officially back on the cool list.

The Value of a Non-Profit

"Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone..."

You never truly know the value of something until it's too late.  Or can you?

Team Kid Care is yet another one of those organizations I intended on working for but failed to because honestly, I don't have much time and my interests in helping specific organizations tend to fluctuate.

Information about Team Kid Care:

"Team Kid Care is an innovative non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the lives of children with serious medical conditions and their families"
http://www.teamkidcare.org/

Unfortunately, I never volunteered with them. :( Maybe if I had helped them they wouldn't have gone under?  Maybe?  This might be what it feels like to witness someone or something die and wonder if it's your fault.  Of course it isn't as dramatic; I doubt my support would have helped substantially, but still.  I think I could have done more.  Maybe if they had let people know they were in financial troubles people would have helped them out more.

I can't wait until this summer; I love working at Community Support Services, another non-profit agency.  CSS works with people who have developmental disabilities and I've really learned a lot working at the organization even though it does have some issues I don't like dealing with.  Maybe this is a reminder to value CSS for the good work it does instead of remembering the times I felt I was wasting my time with bureaucratic messes and inefficiency.

This week's issue of the DU Star

Great: My article got on the front page!  Weird because it's really not that important of an article, but I'll take it as it comes.  I'm overjoyed, personally, professionally ehhh... whatever, lol

Not so great: part of it got cut so a quarter of it makes no sense.  "Young people believe nothing can of the 29 fire alarms last year were related to maintenance or construction activity."

Yup, that's actually in the paper. FAIL.

Addition:
What they left out was actually pretty important, looking back on it.  It should have read

“Repeated false alarms wears down the sensitivity to alarms,” River Forest firefighter Lester Telkamp said.  “Older buildings can be bigger disasters because the fires can spread in less time, due to outdated building codes…Young people believe nothing can happen to them and parents expect children to be safe at school.”  He said “It’s a huge help if people exit the building” and that Dominican might consider augmenting their fire safety program, making it a bigger part of the resident assistants’ duty.

False fire alarms are actually a rare occurrence, Nayder explained.  There have been four to five alarms pulled without a fire since 2001, when he first started working at Dominican University.  There were 29 fire alarms in total last year, but only two or three significant fires since 2001.  Most of the 29 total fire alarms last year as well as the significant fires were related to maintenance or construction activity."

I think that's pretty significant.  If they wanted to cut it to make it shorter, they should have cut the two final paragraphs of my story.  THOSE were not so important.  They were solely description of the types of alarms we have on campus, not the suggestion the firefighter made.

I REALLY REALLY REALLY wish I had my old job as copy editor back.  PLEASE GOD, PLEASE!!! (But let nothing bad happen to Angela Romano or any other staff member to satisfy my request.)
Maybe this is the opportunity I'm supposed to take to remind myself how lucky I was to have that position, even though I felt sometimes as though it was futile.  And I realize I cannot run a paper by myself, people make mistakes, etc. but come on. I think something's lacking in our judgment if we put certain articles on the front page and then chop them up messily.  It's stupid.  And I'm not taking it personally.  It could have happened to anyone.
Which articles should have been on the front page?  The one about the professor who died and the one about Haiti.  Those are a great deal more important than mine.

Better late than...WOAH

I can't seem to come on time to my Italian class but at least that's because I take too long in the shower and getting ready rather than because I was stuck in the elevator for two hours like one of my classmates was.

Evelyn Macedo and Nicole Marin were stuck in the elevator for at least two hours this morning due to the incompetence of either Campus Security or Switchboard.  Maria Vessia, one of my friends and classmates in Italian class notified the class and my professor, Tonia Triggiano, at the beginning of class that she had received a text from Macedo and read her facebook status which said that she'd been stuck in the elevator with Marin for almost two hours.

Triggiano told our class that she notified two security officials who apparently had no idea the incident had occurred two hours after the women had become trapped in the elevator.  The question now is: WHY didn't they know sooner?

A Dominican student who wishes to remain anonymous due to a professed fear of Donna Carroll's henchmen commented on the situation. "I wasn't there.  I just think that DU should get maintenance service done more often and check the placards in the elevators for when they need to be inspected more often as well."