final reflection

Once I read the first line of this week's prompt, it all hit me. I realized that I have been a college student for five weeks. Before coming here I did not expect college to be like this. I thought that I was going to become best friends with my roommates, I thought that would be up all night every night doing large amounts of tedious homework, I thought that I wouldn't make friends, and I thought that attending summer school was the biggest mistake I was ever going to make. I was completely wrong about every single one of these things. I was put in a triple room for summer and my two roommates were people that I would never talk to if I didn’t have to. One is an extreme party girl and the other a foreigner with an attitude. I had it out with each of them at least once but by week five they weren’t so bad. By signing up to take College Algebra and English in six weeks, I thought that I was signing my death certificate. How I managed to attain good grades in both of these classes with their quick pace is besides me. Luckily my math class was a review of what I had been learning all throughout middle and high school, so I didn’t have to do that much studying for it. Also, in my English class, all we really did was write. Now, I don’t enjoy writing, but all of our assignments had to do with talking about ourselves, so it wasn't too hard to fill 6+ pages. Who doesn’t want to talk about themselves? Once I figured out a method for writing, this class turned out to be easy peasy. I have never been good at talking to people and making friends so I was expecting to be that loser that sat in Suwannee by herself. Instead, once I walked on campus, I found that FSU houses the friendliest people that I have ever met. I was also blessed in meeting Olivia who is in both of my classes with me. We would study together, walk to class together, and even go out and enjoy the Tallahassee nightlife together. The biggest misconception I had was that I was making a mistake by attending summer school, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I will be entering my freshman year with a good GPA, I will already know a handful of people, I will know my way around campus, and I know what to expect as an 18 year old entering a new city with responsibilities. :)

my mood

My biggest pet peeve in the world is when people say, "I'll sleep when I'm dead." I hate that phrase because people know that they need sleep, like me. Today, I am feeling extremely tired. This is the story of my life. Every single day I tell myself that I will do all of my work, go to bed early, and get at least eight hours of sleep, but none of that really ever happens. I tend to waste my life away on oovoo chatting with old friends, Facebook creeping on random people, Netflix watching bad, waste-of-time movies, and Twitter seeing what my favorite celebrities are up to instead of typing papers and practicing math problems. I go to bed at about two in the morning and I have to be to class by 8. In the mornings I gulp down a huge can of Monster Energy, but it never works for me. I just sit in class and daydream of sleeping. :)

how to write literary non-fiction!

For my third and final  paper, I have chosen to write a literary non-fiction piece of a traumatic occurrence that I experienced involving a car accident. The website below explains that this genre of writing is simply a mixture of literature and non-fiction. You tell a true story but you can jazz it up a bit, which is exactly what I plan on doing. What actually happened to me is interesting, but not interesting enough for me to write eight pages about, so I plan to add more characters, different voices, a lot of explanation, more tragedy, and most importantly, a ton of sensory details. :)

 http://www.class.uidaho.edu/druker/nonfic.html

end of week four prompt

I have found my college writing style to be completely different from my high school writing style. Before, I would always wait until the complete last minute to start writing papers, but now I don’t. My papers go through specific steps to get from mind boggling ideas to final polished drafts; I call them the seven steps to an A.

1. Call my mother and tell her the essay topic. 

My mother is a talker so when I tell her what the topic is, she gets excited and starts to ramble off dozens of things that I could mention in my paper. I never really use her ideas, but just hearing all of the things that she thinks of gets my brain working on something incredible to write about.

2. Go to Strozier, buy a Grande Caramel Iced Latte from Starbucks, and start writing my first draft.

I have found that if I get out of my room to write the first drafts my papers, I get less distracted and I can get things done faster. Also, the coffee wakes up my brain.

3. Sit in my room and fix a couple of things for draft two.

If you go back and look at the drafts of my papers you will see that draft two is never that much different than draft one. 

4. Read the classmates comments and completely revise paper for final draft. 

I guess you can say that for the final draft, I get extremely serious. This is when I pay a lot of attention about what my classmates had to say about my paper and I will change the whole entire thing around to make it perfect.

5. E-mail final draft to my mother to read.

My mother is a good writer and isn't afraid to tell me if a paper that I write is terrible. I need an honest eye to read over my papers before I submit them.

6. Do a final read over and spelling and grammar check.

Before submitting that final polished draft to blackboard I must do a crowning read over the entire thing. My mother always said that you must read your paper three times before submitting it, but I always skip out on those last two times.

7. Pray for an A!

This step is pretty self-explanatory.

 My steps have worked for me thus far. We will see what happens for paper three. :)

my obituary

Natalie Hughey, 77, passed away on January 25, 2070 surrounded by the people that she loved. Born on January 24, 1993, in Melbourne FL, Natalie attended Palm Bay High School and graduated from Florida State University with a degree in Exercise Science in 2015. She then went on to attend the University of Florida Dental School where she became a licensed dentist in the year 2019. After running her own dentist office for 40 years, she decided to retire. She is survived by her four children, Riley, Reese, Reed, and Rodney and her loving husband, Ryan, of 50 years. Her laugh and sense of humor will always be remembered. :)

end of week three post- my definition of art

According to Merriam-Webster, art is "a skill acquired by experience, study, or observation." I do agree with this, but I also believe that art does not begin with these things, it usually ends there. Ever since I was five years old, my form of art didn't require any of this. I was a tap dancer from kindergarten through the seventh grade, and sure, by seventh grade I had acquired a little bit of skill, but at first, it was just pure fun. The feeling of putting on a leotard and tights made me feel like I was doing more than just banging my feet obnoxiously on the floor and making all kinds of different noises. When I was five years old, I had absolutely no experience in tap dancing, I just thought that it was fun to hear the different sounds that a normal body part could make as it touched the floor. At the end of every year there would be a huge dance recital. The younger age groups would never have too much of a routine, they would just stomp around in circles to hear themselves, but as I became more and more advanced in this form of art, I certainly did acquire skill from my previous dance experience, from having tap practice once or twice a week, and most definitely from observing and learning new things from my instructor. I fell in love with tap dancing because I became better and better at it. Up until I was 13, tap dancing was the ultimate form of art, until soccer came in the picture. In conclusion, art is my definition of art is having fun and then acquiring skill. :)

the watcher at my bedpost

I am almost never motivated to write anything, but that one out of ten chance that I am excited to get my thoughts onto paper, my watcher always slows me down. Because I always save my big writings assignments for the night before they are due, I am always extremely tired and writing makes me even more sleepy. My watcher is this little tiny being that teases me. He appears every single night when I have something school related to do. He has pale-flushed skin, he is round like a cue ball, and he chills on my bed counting sheep. I don't know what his hair looks like because he wears pajamas with a matching hat everytime I see him. His sole purpose is to make me cave in to sleeping, and most of the time, he wins. :)

the speech in my home town

Florida is not considered part of the "South" or part of the "Bible Belt," but I believe that for Melbourne, Florida an exception can be made, or maybe just an exception for my family. Where I'm from, common speech is as inarticulate as Donald Duck when he is in a rush to say something. My family has all of the Southern values like going to church every single Sunday morning, all day long. On Sundays, no household chores are to be done. Also the yard must be perfectly kept. It's kind of like my family lives in the 60's when perfect speech and grammar were the absolute least of their worries. :)

end of week two post- character description

My little sister, Cassie Leigh Hughey, is a 15-year-old sophomore in high school, but she acts anything but her age. She is an African- American female with thick, coarse black hair about the length of her shoulders. In the fourth and fifth grades, she had braces, but now, six years later, her bottom row of teeth are twisted and crammed together due to her lack of wearing her retainer. My mother, my father, and myself all have pretty straight, unusually pearly white teeth, but my sister's are slightly yellowed and the dentist will either fuss at her for not flossing or find a cavity or two at almost every appointment. Don't get me wrong, she has a beautiful top row of teeth, they're just not as white as they could be. She also has perfectly arched eyebrows, and she has never even had them done before. She stands at about 5 feet and 6 inches, three inches taller than me, her older sister, and she is average size. When I say average size, I mean that she is not small, but she is not at all big, she is the perfect size. If she could, she would wear shorts everyday of her life because she has a pair of incredibly elongated legs, but she is not at all lanky. No matter what she's wearing, she will always have on her favorite pair of black and white, worn out, checkered Vans and an attitude. She reads the dictionary for breakfast, the thesaurus for lunch, and when she's not reading, she's watching every episode of Glee available on Netflix. Her goal in life is to correct you and make you look like you have an IQ of lower than 70. She is that jerk that will tell you the dim-witted jokes that no one will ever get like yesterday when she asked me, "What did one snowman say to the other snowman?" I said, "I don't know what?" Her response was "Smells like carrots." She read Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire in six days flat. She makes A's in almost every class and has a boatload of friends. She has already completed three years of Latin and now plans on taking three years of French. She got her first guitar a week ago and has already learned to play four complete songs. She even gets the title of "Sweet Pea" by our dad, while I just get called "Nat." She has a huge confidence and believes that she is above the Pope. She's only nice to me when she wants me to drive her somewhere or buy her something. Most might think she is a huge "B" word, including me, but in a way my little sister is everything that I wish I could be. :)

the grinch!

I have personally met the Grinch a few years ago. In the book after he tries and almost succeeds at stealing Christmas, his heart grows and he becomes sweet, caring, and loving. Despite his emotional development in the book and in the movie, he wasn't quite as friendly as I expected him to be in real life. Of course, when we went to Islands of Adventure, we knew we weren't taking a picture with Jim Carey, but we at least expected this man in the costume to be happy. There are a number of possible reasons for this attitude of his though. It was a hot day in Florida in Dr, Seuss lad meaning there were a bunch of rowdy, screaming kids everywhere. He was wearing a hairy, dirty green Grinch costume and had to put in mustard yellow contacts which also wasn't anything to be proud about. And to top that off, he had to wear an old, worn Santa Clause costume over the other ugly costume. Yes, he was supposed to act like a Grinch, but not to the extent that he was. :)

my morning commmute

My 8AM College Algebra class is freezing cold, atleast 60 degrees, so when 9:20 hits I am so proud to be moving on to my next class. When I walk out of the doors of the HCB building everyday, I get excited to feel the sun burning on my skin. As I venture to the Williams building, Olivia and I take the less traveled by route. This route has more hills, stairs, and obstacles than the usual one. As I walk I can feel my muscles growing in my calves. I see orange dirt everywhere and sweaty construction workers staring as we try to make our way around all of the tall metal gates and flimsy bright orange ropes. As we walk past the Suwannee room and people are opening the doors, I can smell the maple syrup that is getting spread all over waffles and pancakes. When we reach Dodd hall, I feel as though we were just running a marathon and we are at the last stretch. That burning sun that felt good before was now sizzling and turning into sweat. As we walk up the stairs to the Williams building and open those double doors, it feels like we just walked into heaven as the cool, refreshing air conditioning blows on our faces. :)

end of week one post

Over my first week at FSU, I was assigned three readings all by different female writers with one thing in common, teaching people their views on how to write. Though each writer tried to convey the same message, they each had completely different ideas on how to produce a beautiful work of art. 

Anne Lammott's "Shitty First Drafts" was my personal favorite of the week. The meaning of the story is quite self-explanatory. You must write a sucky first draft to be successful with the rest. She says, "All good writers write them. This is how you end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts." I feel like I was able to relate to Anne Lammott more so than the other two writers because I felt as though she was having a polite and intelligent conversation with me. At some times she would make jokes, like when she mentioned that one writer that writes elegant first drafts that no one likes very much, and at other times she would be blatantly honest, like when she talks about how terrible her first drafts were. In a way, I feel as though if I would have read this and took Lammott's advice a year ago, I would have passed my Advanced Placement English Literature exam, and then I would not even have to be taking ENC1101.

The next reading that I was assigned was "How To Become Better Writer," by Lorrie Moore. Her story differed from the first in that the writer tells her audience to do extremely random descriptive things to become a better writer. For example she would go from, "Turn in a story about driving with your Uncle Gordon and another one about two old people who are accidentally electrocuted when they go turn on a badly wired desk lamp," to telling you to, " Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend's name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them." This story is surely composed of random streams of consciousness. Like the previous story, I like how the writer has a discussion with her audience, but when I finished reading it, I do not think I learned "How To Become A Writer."

The final reading of the week was "The Watcher at the Gates," written by Gail Godwin. It seemed to be completely different than the rest. In this story the writer tells her audience about a watcher who checks up on all of her writings. She says the watcher is "dedicated to one goal: rejecting too soon and discriminating too severely." To be completely honest, I have no clue how this "watcher" is supposed to help me improve my writing, but Godwin ends the story telling us that this watcher ultimately does not want us to fail. :)