NPR: Blogging and the Real World

Hello Everyone! Today was my first day back to school from summer break. It was a fairly uneventful day overall, no one noticed my neon houndstooth nails and I have to deal with a bunch of rowdy fresh-out-of-high school, straight from the farm teenagers, but that's what comes with being a non-traditional student in Iowa (I live in Nebraska, but I go to school in Iowa, I literally live right next to the Missouri River, if I chopped down the trees, I could see it from my house).

There were two instances today where I realized that blogging may actually have some sort of impact on my real life. The first instance was in my English Comp I class, where the professor said that we need to complete twenty 20 minute "Journals" before the end of the semester, the topic can be anything we want, and my mind went straight to the blog. It takes well over 20 minutes to write a good blog post, and another thing she mentioned was that we will also be doing in class journals on a topic she picks but we can manipulate it into something relevant to our lives. The example she gave was someone having a fight with their boyfriend and instead of complaining about it, we would write it down in our journal. Instantly I thought "Ooh! pre-writing blog posts!" Once again, probably not an effective use of time, but I might be able to make it work. I wasn't looking forward to taking this class because technically I don't need to. I tested out of it in placement exams, but I got nervous the day of my CLEP test (it's a $90 test to get credit for not taking a class and I hadn't studied at all because I forgot about it, bad Robyn!) and cancelled (I didn't pay for it yet) so I decided that I would just take the class and deal with it and put the class to good use boosting my GPA (not that it really needs it). So we will see if I can manage to write papers that aren't about nail polish!

The other instance where I thought about this blog and subsequently you guys was when my art teacher (who turns out to also have a blog) had us go around the room and say our name, major, and our hobbies. I instantly got nervous and wanted to crawl in a hole and die (more on this later). But how do I tell a group of people I've never met before that I have a blog, and not only that a blog dedicated to nail polish?! If I had been doing this a while I wouldn't bat an eye, but I'm still new to this. So I said that I worked too much to have hobbies, which is a complete lie. I am at work 45 hrs a week, yes, but I still do stuff. I have this blog (which I have been neglecting...I apologize), I crochet and knit, I draw (also neglected), and I watch a crap ton of Mythbusters. Do you tell people you have a blog?  Better yet, do people who blog for a living tell people that they're a blogger? The whole concept confuses me. 

Now back to the whole crawling-in-a-hole-and-dying thing. I. Hate. That. Activity. I had to tell people my name and major and some random factoid about me four times today. I have zero desire to make friends with any of these people, most of whom I have nothing in common with. Now, I was an education major for a semester (so that makes me an expert right?), and we were taught that activities like this are important for building communities within classrooms, but I'm in college...why do I need to do that? I'm there to learn, not to be chummy with the kid from australia that has such a thick accent I can't understand what he is saying...I don't know...maybe it's just the anti-social weirdo in me. I feel more comfortable here, in blogland, where the people I talk to have something in common by default, otherwise why would I have readers at all? I don't know, am I wrong for thinking that that activity is completely idiotic?

Do you guys have any fun college stories to tell?  Maybe I'll have more in the future.

Sorry for the wall of text, I felt like ranting, and so I did. lol. Thanks for reading and don't forget to follow me in all the lovely places I have to follow (Twitter and facebook = Rantingblogger) <<shameless plug to get more than two followers on those places lol. Maybe I'd tweet more!