Only the best for an athlete

Last week both of my sisters came home for Thanksgiving. Naturally, we spent alot of time talking. Somewhere in the mix the Swine Flu vaccination was brought up and my sister, a soccer player a Lafayette, giggled while informing me that everyone at her school got it. She noticed I looked rather confused and explained the reasoning behind her laughter. She told me that the athletes at Lafayette were given vaccinations first, then the students with a registered illness, and then the general population. To me that seems a little ridiculous. The college actually prioritizes their mediocre athletes above the students that have low white blood cell counts? WTF mate. College athletes seem to get all kinds of perks: their laundry is done for them, they can get free tutors for any subject, they are often allowed to postpone exams, ect. I can't help but wonder why these athletes are treated like royalty. When did it happen? How does the special treatment influence the athletes? Would our universities be more efficient and fair if, like every other country, we did not have serious collegiate athletics?

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Stumbling Upon Creativity

This morning I took a practice ACT reading test that contained an interesting passage relevant to Mr. O'Connor's most recent (anamericanstudies.com) blogpost. The passage concerned John Maeda, an MIT graduate and current president of the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a prize-winning graphic designer and kinetic artist. His revolutionary works consist of moving images, some of which move in response to vocal command. Anyways, I think John Maeda's story in relevant to Mr. O'Connor's post because he revolutionized an art form despite being educated in the formerly artistically lacking world of technology.
Initially I didn't think twice about this passage. However, after my practice test I began stumbling <-- don't need to click to understand post) and came across a beautiful shape shifting piece of art (which can't be linked for some reason). I really started to appreciate John Maeda's story. He started in a field of education foreign to creative thinking and built an entirely new form of art that can now be found all over and is appreciated to the same degree as a photograph or portrait.
Like the students of New Trier, John came from a, "creativity is super, but the academics are what actually matter" culture. Do you think that growing up in such a culture challenges students to develop new kinds of creativity? Does suppressed creativity always manage to emerge in new, revolutionary ways? How do you think the next innovative creativity will take form?

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Fad Diets

This weekend I was running some errands with my mom and we stopped at the Vitamin Shoppe to pick up a bottle of your basic One A Day vitamins. I rarely find myself at the Vitamin Shoppe so whenever I go I like to peruse around a bit. There are all sorts of obscure remedies and supplements for almost any need. However, the thing I remember most was a pamphlet in the weight management section. It was promoting a newly developed diet that has some very shocking guidelines. You are only allowed to have white fish, a few steamed vegetables, steel cut oatmeal, and a small quantity of low-fat cheese. To make things even worse, every morning you have to stick a half-inch needle into your stomach and inject yourself with a hormone designed to quicken the metabolism of pregnant women. That contends as one of the most creepy, unnatural things I've heard in my life. However, the thing that I found most troubling was the warning to participants to stop the diet after forty-five days. That's blatantly saying that the diet will hurt you after a certain amount of time. Plus, after the forty-five days, people on this diet will probably revert to their old bad habits and gain back any weight they lost. A change in lifestyle is the real key to losing weight and keeping it off, but alot of people just don't want to recognize that. I'm really quite curious about how these deranged "fad diets" originated. When and why do you think they came to be? Is their existence evidence of a change in American lifestyle over the past few decades? What does the future hold for "fad diets"? Why are they so appealing to people? Or anything else you want to say.

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