Lack of sleep

So today was the last day of school for the first semester, the very first semester in college for freshmen. The past week was a rough one and I had to find a way to grind it out. Of course, all of you are aware that our rough draft for our final position paper and our final revised copy of fourth and final position paper was due today in class. I am not the type of person who can complete an essay in parts or on different occasions. I am also not the type of person who can complete an entire essay two, or even a week early. As I see it, I am a pressure writer because I almost always end up writing a great majority of my paper. So it is now Sunday night, 12:04 am to be exact, and all I have is the audience analysis. To make a long story short it took me about six hours to complete the first rough draft of my final position paper and then i save it onto my computer and went to sleep at approximately 6:24 am. I say first rough draft because that morning I woke up to revise it one more time before class. However, when I went to go save it onto my flash drive in order to print it from another laptop it did not show up. I went back and fourth from my computer to the other checking to see if I was missing it, but I wasn't. After failing to find my essay on the the flash drive I went back to my saved documents on my hard drive to look for it. But it was not there either, at this point I am starting to get angry because my flash drive and computer failed me, plus the fact that class was beginning in seven minutes. I continued to look for my essay, however, for another twenty minutes. Finally, I left my stuff and ran to class to explain my situation to Natalie. Of course, she was understanding and she let me leave from class to go to OIT across campus in the computer and space building. When I got there they did a recovery search on both my flash drive and on my computer with no positive results, meaning that I would have to retype the entire nine page essay over again. From the moment I found out that I would have to redo it I tried to keep it positive telling myself that God stole my essay from me so that I could produce one many time better. And I do believe that I did, since the second version of my rough draft was much more well written and fluid than the previous one. I was able to e-mail the new essay to Natalie by the next day after spending another six hours retyping it. Now, moving onto the final essay, again I was up into the wee hours of the morning revising and rechecking all the little nuances in the essay and finally decided to go to bed around five in the morning because my friend did not have any ink and neither did her roommate. I figured that when I woke up I would just go back and ask her other roommates if I could use their printer. It turned out this morning that everyone in the suite had run out of ink and at 9:00 in the morning there were not many people I would try calling and risk waking them up. At this point it is now 9:20 and I am a little angry, I rush over to Susquehanna thinking "It's the English building, they must have a printer so I can print this essay out." I was sadly mistaken, however, when I got there a man in the main office told me that I could not print anything in the building and that I would have to go all the way over to McKeldin to print out my essay. It now about 9:30 am or so, and I am running over to McKeldin to print out my essay along with my sources unknown to me that you have to have a terrapin express account in order to print, if not you have to purchase a print card. Furiously I purchase one with just enough money on it to print out everything I need. So now I am ready to print and insert my flash drive into the computer and I can not open my document. Again, I feel the wrath of God crushing me. Knowing that I have limited time to print out my essay I storm over to the front desk and inquire as to why I am unable to open up my documents on the computer. He explains that, the one's I was using were not as "advanced" as the ones behind the desk and allows me to use one. And so finally i am able to open and print out of my documents and have just enough time to sprint back over to my friends house gather my things and run back to class where I handed in my fourth and final English 101 paper. With such a trying ordeal, i would like to think that God had a plan for me and hopefully i can receive a big fat A on my final essay, I think I deserve it.

Team meeting

Time is running out for students here at the University of Maryland. Finals are rapidly approaching and fall sports are coming to an end and winter sports have already become. We are all on the ball trying to fit in study time with practice time, and preparing ourselves for competition. Just today after practice the men's track team had a group meeting at the Comcast Center in Heritage Hall to discuss plans for our upcoming season and the expectations that the school had for us both as a team and individually. My coach Andrew Valmon, spoke mainly about the men's scholarship situation and a new campaign for more scholarships. then he spot about roster spots and the travel team, meaning who would be competeing in meets where we have to travel to place like New York and Miami to run. I think this made a few of us, especially the freshmen like myself, a little bit nervous because this was our first time going through everything, and even though we were performing well on the track there are still sophomore's, juniors and seniors who have spots already. I find a little bit of comfort knowing that as a hurdler as well as a sprinter, he needs me to do my job than the six or seven people trying to run for a spot in the 400 dash. We all have to perform now. Our sport advisor Antwon Goff spoke to us briefly about what he expected to us and was very blunt and to the point, he wanted us to win and perform at the level that we were recruited at and better. I thought hard about something that was in a packet that he had handed out prior to the beginning of the meeting and it dawned on me that, I really needed to take advantage of this entire opportunity presented to me, despite whether I am going to travel as a hurdler or not I need to perform for this team. I am a sprinter and of the teams main sprinters at that. I know what is in me, i know that I am well adjusted and ready to finally take this all on and prove to myself and my coach that I can be counted on to provide a solid source of points for my team. This is what I love to do and I will continue to work hard at achieving the goals I set forth for myself. It is just in my nature to do so, I just needed to see it in a different light.

thanksgiving food

For the past month I have been talking about how excited and ready I was for Thanksgiving to finally be here. I was looking forward to the feast that usually takes place either at my house or a relatives and whenever the topic of Thanksgiving came up I let everyone know exactly what I wanted to eat. "First I want to have main plate, more like a platter filled within a little bit of turkey, rice, macaroni and cheese, string beans, collard greens, stuffing, sweet potatoes, tomato collard greens, yams, and of course the staple of my meal some honey glazed ham, as well as some cornbread slices." After that, if I had any room left I would help myself to a second plate filled with all of the same ingredients and then just relax and watch some television, probably some basketball and then later on that night I would gear up for some desert which would simply be some warm apple pie with ice cream on top. That to me would be a complete meal and a traditional Thanksgiving. However, Thanksgiving did not happy according to the way I had envisioned it. I do not really want to say that it was lame, but it was not what I had expected at all after coming home from college. Of course we had the traditional turkey, all though not my favorite thing to eat, it is an important part of my family's Thanksgiving tradition. We had stuffing, some good stuffing, some collard greens, string beans, sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese and biscuits with cranberry sauce. There were no collard greens slowly simmered in tomato sauce, and that got me down a little bit. But I have to say I was most upset that I did not have any honey glazed ham, or any ham at all. I had been talking about it with my mother for over two weeks and she did not get any ham for us to eat. All in all I guess the Thanksgiving feast was good, I mean the food that was on the table was on point I was just looking for more. On a good note however, I did end up enjoying some hot apple pie with some vanilla ice cream melting on top of it while I watched a basketball game. I am Thankful however for the food that I was able to receive and I can't thank my mother enough for all the cooking that she did. I am now looking forward to Christmas and all the good food that will be on the table there. I am not about getting presents, I do not ask for much if anything at all in recent years because times have been tough but I do want some good soulfully cooked to perfection food.

thanksgiving

So last Wednesday I went back home to New York for my favorite holiday of the year, Thanksgiving. I left the school at around twelve with my teammate who took me into D.C where my bus stop was at G and 11th street. From my bus top you can see the capitol, it was kind of cool and unfortunately I did not have enough time to see it up close. I grabbed something to eat real quick and then I was on the bus and on my way home. I was unaware that it would take over eight hours to get home, almost double the amount of time that it took to get home the last time it took for me to get home. The trip started out well as we left the nations capitol, but after only an hour we hit a wall of traffic that held all way until I got into New York entering the Holland Tunnel. Finally, I got into the city and caught my train, I was home in 20 minutes. When I got home to my family I got some hugs and kisses from my two main ladies, my mother and my sister and we talked for a little before I decided to see some of my friends from high school. After almost four months I finally got to see my best friend, Eric. When he found out that I had finally gotten home he scooped me up within a hour of me being home and drove me to meet up with some of my other friends. In the car with him when I got in was my other good friend Steve, he now goes to Maritime and I could tell how much his demeanor changed. He used to be a constant joker, always playing around being sarcastic, now he was exuding a more reserved manner and a seriousness that caught me off guard and surprised me. Thankfully, by being back home with his boys, he lightened up and fell back into his old clowning self. However, being back home did not necessarily mean that there was going to be that many things for us to do- at least not for us. We just ended up chilling and riding around and then going to get some Checkers. Throughout the rest of the break I saw most of my other friends at some point, and over Christmas break I expect to see a lot more of them.