That Time Again!

It's that time of year again when the city of Provo goes empty and apartments seem to be dark at night before bed time. You all probably know what I'm talking about. If you don't than maybe someday you will experience it yourself. It's that time when school is out and people have gone home for the summer or just for the weekend before school starts again. I've never liked it. You would think that after going through this so many times that I could handle it. You would think that having to do it a lot on my mission that I could handle it. But it's not true. I get to a point where I become so comfortable with my friends and everyone around and the routine I get in. Then things change and life throws you a little twist. I tend to usually handle it pretty quick, but for some reason this last departure of friends has shaken things up a bit. It was quite the interesting semester, but it was a good one. It was my second semester back at school in a while and I'm so ready to be done. Only three more finals left and I'm free to work my summer away. I've made some good friends this past semester and I hope they have enjoyed my company. I hope that we stay friends for a long time and learn to continue to grow and laugh with one another. I think this past year I saw more friends leave and that's always hard to get used to. But I know that I'm strong and that the Lord is there to help me make it through. My friends will always be my friends. I love my parents and what they have done for me. They have helped me out so much in my life. They have supported me in my times of trial and I can always count on them. My hope is that some day I can repay them for there generous and unconditional love towards me. To my parents I owe so much. I owe so much to my Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ who have blessed me with such great friends and family.

Let me know what you think about this time of year. Thank you all for being my friends and being there for me when I have needed you. Please enjoy this summer for those of you who are away and are coming back. For those of you who have left because of graduation or other life choices: good luck and I'm glad I got to know you and be your friend. Enjoy life and I hope to see you soon.

You have got to be Kidding ME!

So for those of you who didn't know this already, Disney owns its own city. Well not so much that it owns the city, but it established it in 1994. Celebration, Florida, the name of the city, was built as a new way of life that takes you back to the old way of a good simple life. Talk about a company that has enough money to start its own town. After watching the movie "No Logo" you really do realize what Naomi Klein was saying about how Disney has reached "Brand Nirvana". For those of you who don't know what that means, it pretty much says that Disney is so well known that you will know their brand so well. I mean, they do have their own town. Can you imagine having so much money that you establish a city? Crazy stuff! What's also amazing about the town is the fact that there are no other major brand icons there. Disney has pretty much said that all other brands/franchises need to stay out of our town. It must be killing other companies to be rejected like this.

Here is a link to the cities website for anyone who wants to check it out:
http://www.celebration.fl.us/
And here is what Wikipedia has to say:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida

As much as brands are everywhere, who cares? I think it annoys me more that people are bothered by brands everywhere. Yeah product placement in shows and other media outlets can get annoying but there are ways around avoiding them. And just because I know a products logo well enough doesn't mean i care enough to do anything about it or buy there clothes. I buy stuff because I like it. And if I bought it and don't like it then I'm not going to go out and buy it again. Brands may be everywhere, but brands don't control me.

When I watch my TV shows I usually notice the product placements that are in the show. I've noticed them more as I've taken this Comms class. It's kinda weird when you look at shows from 10 years ago and notice that the products they used on TV shows were no name brands. You never saw a Coca-Cola or Pepsi can. You never heard people talk about Ikea or Bed Bath and Beyond. Show were just shows and you watched it for the content it supplied. I guarantee that a lot of shows would lose money if they didn't use product placement. You gotta wonder how much companies are paying to put there products on American Idol or The Office.

Web What?

It's crazy the society we live in. It's unbelievable to think how attached to the Internet and electronics we have become. I wonder if I will be able to participate in the class electronic fast we may have. I don't know which one of my electronics I would give up for a weekend. It's so hard to decide.

Web 2.0 is an interesting concept to think about. The fact the everything is beginning to revolve around the Internet. Will we ever be able to live without it? Like I mentioned in class, it seemed hard for my friend to go a few days without Facebook when we went to his families farm. It's not that he was suffering but I think he just wanted to know what was going on. He even used dial up Internet access. Has anyone used dial up lately? It's like pulling out bad teeth. You don't want to have to do it, but it needs to be done. You don't want to have to always use the Internet, but sometimes you just make the sacrifices needed to access it. And if that means using dial up, than so be it. I myself don't have a smart phone yet and I don't know how long it will be before I get one and that's mainly because they are expensive and cost more than I can handle right now to get all the cool features that come with them.

I love my computer. It probably does so many things and I don't even know. I use it for four things mainly. 1) to surf the Internet 2) watch movies and TV shows 3) look at my pictures and videos 4) do school work. How could I even exist without it? You can't even do your school work these days without using a computer. Everyone wants your assignments typed. And I don't own a typewriter. I might be able to find one if I really needed to use it, but finding a computer these days is so much easier.

Who Knows?

I'll be honest. I can say that I've never really that all that much about where my clothes are being made. I suppose that the problem is is that I should be more concerned. I suppose that's part of how we live in our society. We tend to just live our lives day to day and not worry about all the mundane things that are going on around us. I know for sure that I sometimes look at the tags on my clothing or other peoples clothing to see what country they are made in, but I hardly ever think about what the conditions are like in the factories the clothes are made. I guess I've never taken the time to really think about it. And that's probably a horrible thing to say. I guess my hope is that the companies I buy my clothes from are being morally right and not treating their employees horrible.

I do think sometimes about the music I buy and listen to. I'll sometimes buy a whole CD and not listen to all the songs on it because of some of the lyrics or meanings within the songs I choose not to listen to. But the problem arises that, am I still supporting them in those songs even though I am not listening to them? I'm pretty sure I've had this discussion with my mom before. I had a friend tell me once the Michael Buble is not a very nice guy and I wasn't to happy to hear that because I like listening to him and hearing something like that kinda disturbs me. My hope is that it's not true and he is a nice guy.

I feel sorry for the people who do suffer because of the businesses and marketer's who choose to exploit those suffering for their own profit and good. Why does anyone feel the right to treat other humans as less than them and abuse them. Whether you believe in God or not you should always see someone as being your equal as a human being. It's just not fair to see people treated like animals. If you watch the show "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery channel you will see that without those people who are willing to work the working class jobs than there wouldn't be sky scrapers that have nice comfy offices for some others to work in. We tend to forget that every human is important and plays a vital role in our societies existence. When we forget this principle that's when racism, sexism, or any other type of hatred fall's into play.

Livestrong!

Fads are a killer and I do my best to stay away from them if I can. It kills me when someone just wants to do stuff or buy things because everyone else is doing it or because it's the popular thing. For me, as I mentioned in class, I remember when the Livestrong bracelets came out to support cancer. They were so popular. It seemed as if everyone was wearing them as a fad. It was annoying. I admit I ended up wearing one myself, but it was because my father bought some for the family because he was into biking and actually cared about the cause the bracelets supported. The killer after that was the fact that everybody else was in the market of making those same kind of rubber bracelets. At one point I my-self started wearing the ones that said CTR on them. I haven't worn one in a long time though and I probably wont go back wearing one again unless it's for a pretty good reason.

We really need to stop letting mass media and major companies decide what we should wear or how we should act. When it comes down to it I will make the decisions on the cloths I will wear. I like Old Navy cloths because they are comfortable to me and they are sold at a pretty descent price. I'm the kind of guy who does his best to not spend a lot on clothing unless it's athletic wear. Even then I try to buy sports attire on sale.

THEY are EVERYWHERE!!

I'm not an IKEA follower but I do like its furniture. My mom has it all over her home and I'll probably have some of my own. It was interesting when we talked about how we can consider ourselves a certain brand or type of furniture shoppers. You could almost say that we are what we buy. I like Adidas more than I like Nike. If it were up to me I would buy everything Adidas sports wise and for some of my casual wear. It's not that I hate Nike, I just never really fell their way like I did with Adidas. It might have to do with the fact that I love soccer and I always felt like they were more of a soccer company and now I just like their stuff a lot.

It's so sick to realize that we see so many advertisements a day. In the video it was like 3,000 a day in 1999 and I'm pretty sure it is way more than that today. And I wonder how much of it we actually remember. I know that there are certain adds that I remember. The thing is that they are usually the ones I see either on a daily bases or they really made me laugh.

Also, I drove up to Kearns this past Saturday and I tried to look at all the adds on billboards and of the ones I looked at there was only one black person. The interesting part was that It was an ad for BYU football. You would think there would have at least been another advertisement with people of minority colors on some of the billboards. Because we know that there are more than just white people here.

I really thought it was annoying that they were picking kids to take pictures of in the video we watched that didn't represent me at all. Yeah, I watched TRL, but I think it was mainly for the music. Such a long time ago and I didn't know much then either. But i felt like they picked kids that they thought represented my age group at the time, just ridiculous. I've never had tattoos or spiked my hair. I was never one to go to concerts or be all hyped up about following the crowd. I'm still not that way. I've done my best to not follow the crowd. I tried to avoid Abercrombie and Fitch. I was just fine wearing Old Navy and didn't feel like spending a lot of money to wear clothes that looked the same as other more expensive name brands. I was fine in cheaper clothes that looked just as good.

I just hope that I can avoid being changed by advertising. I don't want to be labeled as someone who follows the crowd or whatever is popular. It makes no sense to let someone control what I do, say, act, or what I wear or listen to. And I'm not a Mooke, violent and carefree and it's ridiculous that the media feels that it's okay to advertise to my generation that that's what is OK to show us. They don't know me and they shouldn't assume to know me. The funny thing is that they only know some of me and it's that part that probably gets me to watch the shows I watch and listen to the music I watch. Weird huh? It also stinks that the media turned girls into or defined them as Midriffs, girls who are sexually active or should look sexy. A 13-year-old girl should never make herself look older than she is. It just doesn't seem right or normal. The same goes for boys the same age. We need to just learn to be ourselves and be happy. People wonder why we are the way we are, and it's probably because we are letting the media tells us who we are. That's not nor right and it should never be that way. It's our responsibility to tell them who we are. We need to take control. We have to tell them what we think is cool.

I'm talking about "IT" again!!

So what are we going to do about the problem we have with racism? Is it going to go away? It seems like it may not any time soon. It feels like we in society keep perpetuating the problem of racism. I've said it before and I'll say it again, let it go and then we will be better people than we were before. Don't forget racism or don't put it on the back burner, but why do we still allow racism to control us and who we are?

We had a very interesting talk in class about the different shows we see on TV and how TV is portrayed in a completely white world. I didn't make the comment in class but I think the region you live in in the United States might make a difference as to what shows are being played and at what time. I'm probably wrong. I do realize there are not as many black TV shows as whites TV shows but it has improved dramatically in the past few years. We began to talk about the "token" people of minorities that they have on white TV shows and it goes both ways. I thought about it in class. The shows that I have seen where the family's are of a minority race seem to have a token white person on the show. It's kinda interesting. I don't have a problem with it, but i just thought it was something to mention. And I also wanted to mention all the famous black actors or actors of other minority backgrounds that are being more recognized in the movie and TV world. I like Will Smith and I have never had a problem with him being black. I don't care about the color of his skin. I just like the movie he has been in and I use to enjoy watching the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And I think Bill Cosby is hilarious. He does a good job of making jokes not about racism but just about life and the funny things that happen in it.

Like I mentioned before, I think that racism today can stem from a lack of education and the world around us. The more we become educated both school wise and street wise the better off we will be. The world needs to use its common sense better. I need to use common sense even more my self. I hope I can be better.