People in general suck.  I'm sorry get outsider your freaking selfs and think about others. As in people cause "going green" and doing "what you can" to "save " the earth means jack if you don't care about people. 

Also don't be surprised if people wont be there to help you out of a tight spot if you arent there to help them out.

So Tornado's hit Murfreesboro yesterday. Yes i was there, no I wasn't hurt. Actually I was at school and called dad to tell him i was being irresponsible and watching the storms. Campus wasn't hit at all, some hail, that's it. However roughly two to three miles away, my cousins house and neighbor hood was demolished pretty much, as well as some homes near where I live. Amazingly our house was untouched. Thank the Lord.
[ to see pictures of it check out the DNJ, The Tennessean, and MTSU Sidelines)

This only furthers the belief i have in a very silly superstition. Things like this never happen directly to me (thankfully) they might and often happen all around me, but rarely happen to me. I know it's silly and I don't really believe it. I know it's just the hand of God protecting me from my own idiotic and irresponsible tendencies.

I am very saddened by all the lives that were lost, hurt, or affected by this. But I would be lying if I said that seeing the sky and the pictures and hearing the tornado hit a few miles down the road was beautiful. In a completely damaging slightly sadistic way.

Tornado's fascinate me. I would love to take a vacation with my dad and go tornado chasing out in Oklahoma. There is just something Majestically beautiful about the power and form of Tornado's. Not to mention it's ability to completely miss one house but devastate the rest of the neighborhood. I mean just looking at the aerial veiw (http://tinyurl.com/dzbcx3 ) a ten mile path through a city. Demolishing everything in it's path. But leaving places just a few feet from it's path virtually untouched.

It's like it has more precision and destructive power than most bombs. ( i knw i know not neccesarily more destructive, and the military as very precise smart bombs and such, but don't get caught up in semantics and miss the point.)

My prayers are definitely with all of the families (and people) affected by this weather.

ETA: this is the path it took http://www.tennessean.com/assets/gif/DN132629411.GIF My cousin's house is right around the hayne's drive area. They are very luckily and thank the Lord Safe and sound.

I'm a year from graduating college (give or take a month) and it's completely scary, but at the same time I'm really looking forward to it. A new chapter of life to embark on.

At the same time it's also a time of reflection and reconsidering a lot of things in my life. We'll see how those work out.

I'm really excited about internships and finding one. The question is which why i want to go. Do i do a political one for advertising, or one for a larger Ad company, non-profit, out of the country or what!? either way the possibilities are exciting and i can hardly wait for it.

You cannot love that which you do not understand. Or put another way that which you love you will understand.

Let the discussion begin.

In Public Opinion we talked about Health Care, a lot. About how it would be so great to have a health care system like Canada or France. And the more they talked the more this idea came to be fleshed out: People deserve this. They can't help themselves. They aren't responsible for their troubles and the Government should provide for them.

And the entire time I kept thinking about Faith of the Fallen, a Terry Goodkind book. The Imperial Order preached just this thing. Only about everything not just health care. Richard, the Seeker of Truth, and sworn enemy of the Order is taken to the heart of the Order, its city of birth, by a woman who is seeking something more from the life she has. This woman ardently believes that the Order is Good and Nobel and that its cause is right; that people are wretched and can't help themselves, that it is everyone's duty to go without or to give up what they can't keep anyways for the good of someone else, who, while they didn't do anything to earn it, deserves what someone else worked hard to get.

Richard is immersed in a land where excuses abound as to why they can't work, where people take no pride in what they do because the Government (the Order) tells them what they can work at, when, and that you can't work harder than someone else because in doing so you are evil and prideful in abilities you don't posses because you can't do anything for yourself. You are miserable wretched people. Scum of the earth, since your life doesn't mean anything, you should give what you can to make those less fortunate than you (ironically no one is less fortunate, because they are all equal. . . )because you can't do anything for yourself.

The people who lived in this town were miserable and stuck in perpetual poverty. Slaves to the Orders bidding. Alive and making it only by the grace of the Order.

With Richards coming things begin to change. Richard takes pride in his work and does everything with a sense of nobility and pride. It starts small , but soon all those around him are living life, enjoying living instead of merely surviving.

I can see this happening to the American people and it saddens me greatly. We expect the Government to take care of us. But we still want to keep our freedoms. We shouldn't have to work for what we want, it should be given to us.

We gripe against hose who have the inclination, drive, and talent to achieve great things. Instead of finding the drive and talent that we have that will allow us to do great things too. We flock to jobs that we think will make us rich, instead of doing what we have a passion for.

We pass the buck instead of saying, the buck stops here with me. I am going to take responsibility for my life, for my decisions. Things will not get better until people learn to understand this.

"Your life is yours alone. Rise up and live it"

More ad stuff

Just finished and turned in my latest ad Project, in which we had to write a full page ad (commenting on illustrations was optional) for Tide and their new attempt at going green, by using recycled paper for their boxes of powdered detergent.

I was happy with it. It was actually fun to write, but how my professor felt about it is a another story. Of course I cant say he didnt like it as he didn't offer feedback.

I feel though that it is a bit insane to be picky and belligerent about the way body copy should be done and then in the same breath continue on to tell us that nobody reads body copy anymore.

If nobody reads it, why are people bothering to write it?

The more i thought about it the more it makes sense, people don't want to read body copy, not unless the visual element catches their eye, and the headline is intriguing enough to them, and even then they don't want to read about why a company thinks they should buy the product.

With then internet people are actually going to research major purchases before they buy. And often they are checking out third party sources for what they think of the product.

That being said, it seems to me that print advertising is becoming the appetizer of the ad world, just enough to interest and intrigue a consumer into going on line and finding that commercial or third party review to satisfy their need to know about the product.

So I'm working on my Advertising Copywriting project. Or not really since I'm busy writing this. But since I'm stuck on the "thesis" statement so to speak, I figured it was time to take a break. Or another one really .... * sheepish grin *

I have to write up a Creative strategy for a product. I chose Dr Pepper, shocking to anyone? i think not.

However my problem becomes, writing for who their Target audience is. Those that the company wishes to reach, and those I think it SHOULD be. I mean i understand why the T.A. is who it is, and that makes sense to me, but sometimes it just feels like, "hey if you'd just reach out to this group a little bit more your profit and sales would increase."

But then I'm just a student, and so I'll finish the project, and it'll be good. Damn good. (better be after all the numbers i poured over just trying to make sure we are advertising correctly)