Final Paper is due...TONIGHT!

Our final paper is due tonight and I need to make some small adjustments to my paper because...I'm one of those people that like to wait until the last minute to turn anything in. Also, I have a case of vacation-itis. One week from today I'll be in Boston for work and three days later, I'll be in Thailand meeting family members, working on my tan and doing a lot of coconut milk drinking.

I'm extremely excited for the semester to end!

I enjoyed writing my final paper and was happy that we were allowed to pick our own topics. The military is something that I hold close to my heart since I dedicated 6 years of my life to it. Fortunately, I was discharged before things started going down and since, have watched my peers being shuttled off into Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
The spark that provoked me to write about problems in the military was an article that Rolling Stone published last year about three soldiers that went on a crime spree down in Colorado Springs (which is obviously not far from where I am now in Denver) and the background on how this all came about. How could these atrocities have been prevented? And why didn't the military help them out? What is the military doing NOW to prevent this from happening and protecting our public?

Luckily I have some friends outside of the Air Force (we don't do anything TOO dangerous in the Air Force) and I have been fortunate to cross paths with those that actually have done some dangerous things in other branches of the military. One of my friends, Oscar, who I interviewed for my paper is a hardcore Marine that I attended high school with and have had the opportunity to see in person as he was touring Walter Reed Medical Center (where they keep a lot of the wounded from the war) as I was living in the Washington DC area. He had just returned back from a tour in Fallujah and was sent by the Marine Corp to talk to the injured and thank them for their service to keep the morale up (dangit, I should have included that in my paper...maybe that will be an adjustment I do tonight!).

I hope that our members of the military will one day feel ok to speak up and stand up for themselves and not live in the shadow of who they really are (the "don't ask don't tell" rule is lifting...perhaps we will see the military slowly change as a whole!).

Aside from the final paper, I did learn a lot with all the exercises that we did. The humor topic was a fun and good subject to start with (could you imagine if it was something BORING!?). Some of the papers were a difficult read, perhaps a level above a 1020 class, yet it was a challenge to read and I feel that encouraged us to think outside the box and we weren't penalized too bad for not understanding. The discussions in class as well as the feed back Mackenzie provided were EXTREMELY helpful.

All and all, I am glad we are done and I wish everyone good luck in their future endeavors!

Final Paper

I received my final rough draft paper back *yay!*. It seems Mackenzie liked my paper and it honestly does need some fine tuning. However, I'm very troubled about how I described a "thug" - baggy clothes, standing on the street corner, selling drugs. The comment I received was "avoid the racial profiling/stereotyping that you have now." This bit makes me a little uncomfortable. I did not ONCE mention race in anything that I wrote. This person could be of any color so why did she write that??? Is that what she pictures in her mind? Race? This is more socio-economic than anything. Interesting comment to write on my paper.
Needed to get that out.

I'm revising that part, per her suggestion, to write about the "nice" characteristics of a soldier, rather than having the reader picture the "bad man". She says the shock value would be a lot better. I agree.

She also asked me for page numbers in my insite citations but all my citations are clearly web pages. How do I do that?

Well the semester is finally coming to an end and I'm extremely thankful for that. For some reason, I have been so overloaded that I've mentally checked out of school life (which is stupid) but I remain hopeful that I pass all my classes although I didn't turn in a few papers (naughty Carina).

I can already see myself on the beaches of Thailand, sipping on coconut juice, straight from the coconut. Sigh.