UW's Regulations on marijuana

Our final project is based on UW's regulation on marijuana and whether or not student's are fully aware of the rules. We originally started the project looking at legalizing marijuana on campus but soon realized that there was a much bigger topic involved with marijuana on college campuses. So, we decided to clear up the gray area involved with UW's regulations on marijuana. We surveyed students and it became clear that almost no student's knew the actual consequences of being caught with marijuana on campus. Now, our goal is make it clear to the students what the real consequences are for example losing your financial aid or getting kicked out of the dorms. Our project will eventually be turned into a youtube video so that we can see other student's opinions on the matter.

Confidence is Everything

What engages me?
While I admit that the following answer is rather bland and somewhat clique, the one attribute that grasps my focus more than anything else is unshakable self-confidence. You may have heard people say, “confidence is everything”, and while it may not be “everything”, it is without a doubt the majority of any battle, whether it be a presentation, interview, or one’s goings in day to day life. It’s no coincidence that some of the world’s most successful people today, including the highly adored president of the United States, are also individuals who without a doubt have a high level of self-confidence. The fact that a conservative Republican such as myself becomes highly enamored whenever left-wing President Obama steps to a podium speaks towards the entrancing power that a person who communicates with a sense of self-assurance has over me.

To expand upon this, I look towards President Obama’s acceptance speech as a further explanation. Although at this point on election day I was disappointed with the night’s occurrences, I was willing to listen to what the newly elected President of the United States had to say. While a portion of what he spoke about was debatable and disagreeable in my mind, I went to bed that night conceding the fact that what I had just witnessed was very powerful and moving. The way that Barack Obama held himself and spoke to the people of the country on that night has left a lasting impression on me. I now look to this display as a model of the kind of self confidence I wish to exude when I have to speak to an audience, whether it be for school work or a church function.

Finally, I should speak towards my own personal experiences with self confidence and how this has led me to have all the more respect for someone who has it. In all honesty, I’ve always been a person that has struggled with self confidence. All throughout grade school and high school, I was more reserved and quiet than I’d like to admit, mostly because I lacked a sense of self-assurance, or confidence. While this isn’t totally uncommon for most people to have periods of their lives where they lack self-esteem or self-confidence, it just goes to show that confidence in ones self is often fleeting, and without a doubt harder to have and develop than you’d think. For this reason, those who have mastered this area of their self-being garner high respect from me, and often inspire me to strive and improve myself in this regard, and in other important areas of my life.

Weird Is Where It's At

What Engages Me?
This is a hard question. If something is truly engaging we are probably not aware of how engaging it really is because we are engage by it; consumed and unaware of our surroundings. It is hard to recall this feeling because like I said if you are thinking about being engaged you are obviously not that engaged. I recently saw Fast & Furious, and frankly I don’t know where to put this on the spectrum of engagement. For one the plot was awful and involved an uncalled for, unexpected, out of nowhere “plot twist” every five minutes. At the same time I don’t and never had an interest in cars beyond if they could get me from point A to point B. Top that all off with some awful acting, CGI effects and random car chases that makes no sense and there you have it a hit action movie, or one car chase after another. Yet this movie is making millions of dollars and I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it even a miniscule amount. At the end of the day this isn’t my cup of tea, but it still engaged me enough to laugh and wonder once again how blockbusters came to be the incoherent mess that they are.

Still Fast & Furious is nowhere near the pinnacle of my onscreen entertainment. Call me a sucker but my most regularly watched TV show is America’s Funniest Home Videos; I would also say that this one of the fastest hours of my week. I don’t know what is better than a montage of people getting hit with balls while standing on giant balls, kids running through glass doors and generally anything dumb that anyone has ever caught on tape. Maybe I have a short attention span; maybe I need to grow up and start watching more news shows, but really I don’t think so; there is nothing better than a solid hour of bloopers to end the day. Maybe it is the laughing that causes it to be so engaging, or maybe it is the fact that my roommates and I all watch it together. AFV could be the newest form of male bonding.

Really though this brings up two interesting things to consider when thinking about what engages us. Not only do we need to consider the speaker, but we also need to consider the environment and the physical reactions a speaker may cause us to have. Take Barack Obama for example; we have all seen him speak on TV in front of thousands, but the feeling that gives us is nowhere near the feeling I got when I was crammed in the Kohl Center with my peers hearing him speak. Humans are a social species; I can’t speak for us all but I think in most cases we are more engaged if we are with friends and can not only be engaged but also further our relationships by being engaged in the same thing. Along with being engaged as a group our reactions are different in a group setting compared to when we are alone. Laughing by yourself is not the same as laughing with your friends. Laughing by yourself might make you feel weird more than anything. On the other hand, if you are in a group and you know that everyone in the room is feeling the same way you are then the feeling only becomes stronger. In essence what I am saying is that the larger the group you are in and also if the group is similar to you; then you will be more engaged.

For me this question goes much farther than what engages me. We need to consider why and how just as much as what it is that engages us. Bloopers, absurdist humor and anything that generally pushes or crosses the “line” is what engages me most. “Embrace your weirdness” as that man said; I couldn’t agree more. I don’t see the point in watching the same old laugh track sitcom because they are all the same. When I really want to be engaged and forget about my problems, I like most college kids I know, dig into the depths of Youtube for those moments that were never supposed to happen or were never supposed to be filmed. Normal is boring and overrated; weird is where it’s at.

Capture the Experience

I come from a place where there is no snow, no seasons changing, and no temperature difference beyond ten degrees the whole year. One may start imagining such place and relate it to Hawaii, but I can continue describe that my place is no way near the beauty of the island. One will sweat walking on the street and not even stand of the heat and humid of the place. Someone who has never been to those places will have trouble figuring how it feels to stay there. Just as same as me when people tell me the beauty of white snow and a huge surface covered by white snow that I have never seen before I came here. I can only refer to images I saw in movies, but I can hardly feel the snowflakes dropping on my skin and the feeling stepping into snows because it needs to be experienced by myself.

So the question is can language capture the enormity of an experience? Most of the part is my answer. You not only need the sense of feeling to participate in an experience, but also the cognitive ability to make sense of the experience. With that, each person has his or her own understanding of an experience described in words. Looking at words on a piece of paper or listening to sentences spoken through the space, the audiences may have difficulties in totally understand and feel the experience the same way as the writers and speakers. Language can never recreate experience by it own, no matter how precise and accurate the words chosen to illustrate the event. However, we cant ignore the usefulness and significant of language to commute experience.

Language acts as a median to deliver experience to others. Without language, we cant even keep those experience we had as record our selves. Words help people remember and summarize the experience. It can encourage other people to experience other things themselves. People relate the experience they listen or read to the experience they have. Language is by far the only way to learn about other experience as humans communicate using all kinds of languages. I know three kinds of languages, but I am sure I wont be able to tell my own experience thoroughly with any of the languages.

People try to close the gap between experience learned and imagined by going through the experience themselves. But with a little bit of imagination and own experience of the audiences, they themselves can recreate their own unique experience. And, language simplifies the process of recreating an experience.

Words Can't Recreate an Experience

The question of whether or not writing and language can capture experience is a tough question to answer. In my opinion, a reader can capture some sort of experience through writing and language. However, the reader won’t have the same experience as the author because the reader will lack the feelings that the author had felt during whatever experience. To me, experience is mostly feeling. It is what went through a person’s mind during that particular moment. That feeling, that idea that crossed the person’s mind is the experience. For example, in the Lone Survivor the reader gets a great idea of what Marcus Luttrell’s emotions, ideas, and thoughts were during his time in Iraq but the readers will never know his thoughts at every moment. We will never know exactly what crossed his mind when he realized he was the only survivor of his Navy SEAL team. We will never know what exactly his body felt like, or the pain he went through. Yes, we can image and develop a general understanding from reading his book, but we can’t say that we have had the same experience as Luttrell. The reader can have an experience while reading a book such as Lone Survivor. They would have ideas and emotion’s that cross their head while scanning the words, but it would be an experience unique to that person.

If two people are reading the same book, like the example before with Lone Survivor, they will have two completely different experiences. A person’s experience comes from their previous experiences, their ideas, thoughts; everything about the person can affect their experience. This is why I think that the experience that an author would want to share with his or her readers will never be portrayed exactly as they felt it the first time. The overall idea can be shared, but never the whole experience. The ideas, feelings and emotions that are unique to an individual also make experiences unique and unreplicable.

My boyfriend and I recently went to Mexico, just the two of us. We spent every waking moment together, at tours, swimming on the beach, enjoying the nearby town but when somebody asks us how our trip was, we both answer in two completely different ways. I say “oh it was great! I loved the beach.” When my boyfriend answers he takes more of an anthropological approach and talks about the poverty and the people in the area that we visited. We had the exact vacation, but we have two different experiences. Mine, mainly on a sunny beach, and Nick’s was more of a field study on the local people. Even though we basically had the same vacation, our experiences are totally different. To me, it is the same if reading a book. Two of the same people read the same book, and they have two separate experiences on the book. Separate feelings, separate ideas crossed their minds while reading, so an experience can’t be duplicated.

I think the problem that I am having about this topic, is imaging two people having an exact experience. We really will never know what any other person is feeling at a particular moment or what they had felt during a particular time. They may tell or try us or write a book on it, and we may understand it but we will never know the exact experience that person had because there is no way to duplicate every emotion that a person felt during that time and emotion is a large part of experience. I could right a book about being in a tornado on my sister birthday, and having my dad almost die from our house collapsing, but none of you could ever have the experience that I had by reading a book. You can’t duplicate the feelings I had at that particular moment when I heard the front of my house collapse. I don’t think I could even express every emotion I felt into words. People can understand, and get an idea of the experience that an author is trying to depict, but it is almost like trying to create an experience without actually having it.