Who Invented a New Alphabet?!

Hey readers!

Before I get started I want to let everyone know that I have a Skype and would love to chat with people from home that I haven’t seen in a while J My Skype name is on my Facebook in my contact info section so check it out and add me! No, seriously, please talk to me it gets really boring around here sometimes  :/

I actually Tweeted about this next thing a few days ago but I feel the need to elaborate about it here.  One of the first things all little kids learn to sing is the ABC’s.  You know, A B C D E F G etc.  Well in England, the do it a little differently.  Their alphabet goes A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Zed.  Yeah.  Zed.  I didn’t spend my formative years learning the alphabet of my language and fighting against evil as the Pink Ranger only to have this guy show up at the end of it, out of nowhere, 19 years later:

If you were a child between 1993 and 1995 and you don’t know who this is, get out.  If you weren’t a child between these years, this is Lord Zedd from the Power Rangers.

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This change in letters doesn’t really affect my daily life.  But poor Carly all of a sudden has to re-learn how to spell her own last name (which starts with a Z).  Ridiculous. Of course I continue to say the letter Z as any American would, as “zee”.  So the English will just have to deal with it. #Merica

My essays are going well-ish so far.  I have about 850 of 4000 words for one essay and I haven’t started the other 2 but hopefully I will soon haha!

I’ve been doing some more observing in my classes and I think I’ve found something that I understand better than my more academically advanced colleagues.  Recap: In the UK, students only take classes that pertain to their degrees.  History kids only take history classes; business kids only take business classes etc.  In the US, universities require gen. ed. classes.  Using La Salle as an example, there were religion, philosophy, foreign language, art and music classes that could be taken in addition to major-related classes. 

When I was at La Salle, I took 2 philosophy classes and nearly jumped out of 3^rd floor Wister I hated them so much.  Philosophy just isn’t my thing.  I never thought I learned anything useful in the classes.  But it turns out I actually did! I have 2 solid examples of how I understand things better in class because of my (miniscule) background in things other than history.

Okay so in one of my lectures, we were talking about Antonio Gramsci who was a Marxist during the early 1900’s.  One of his ideas was that “every man is a philosopher”.  A few people raised their hands and said they didn’t understand how every man could be a philosopher.  It just didn’t make any sense to them.  But, for once, it made sense to me! 

It’s not that every man is a philosopher like Plato or Nietzsche in the sense that they are well-known and revered by the intellectual community, but rather that every man is a philosopher because he can create his own ideals and apply them to his own life to overcome the hegemony imposed by the upper classes and intellectuals.  Every man can create his own philosophy using his own words, thereby making him a philosopher.  Figuring that out was like hitting the lottery! It seriously made me feel so smart haha!

Then, I ran into a classmate in the library a week or so later.  We were talking about the essay we were writing for one of our classes and he said he chose to write a response to the question: “Did the Bolsheviks win or did the other parties lose?”  He said of course the Bolsheviks won, because they won and there could be no other answer.  I agreed just because I didn’t feel like getting into an intellectual argument but I wanted to say something like ‘but you could look at the efforts of other political factions during the Russian Revolution and show that they in fact lost, making way for the Bolsheviks to take over, rather than the Bolsheviks being the strongest party in their own right. ‘

I have so many more examples of the rigid academic thinking of my classmates and how it differs from my more well-rounded thinking.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say my undergrad education was better because I was exposed to things like philosophy, because half the time I sit in classes with a blank stare on my face not knowing what the heck is going on.

But it does provide certain perspectives that my non-American classmates do not seem to have. 

That’s all I really feel like typing for now because I’ve had a very long day but I’ll try to post again soon!