Post #6 - Hola!

This week’s blog topic was rather difficult to decide. I had barely any ideas, and nothing seemed to inspire me. However, at my high school we have started a new trimester, and this trimester brings back a subject that is very dear to my heart: Spanish. Spanish, Spanish, and more Spanish! Currently I am in Spanish IV as an independent study student, so I have been studying the language for quite some time. I cannot seem to get enough of it. I love Spanish so much that during my break from class, I looked up advanced grammar lessons that a professor provides on YouTube just so that I wouldn’t forget anything. There are several reasons why I love this foreign language so much, and I will discuss them in this post.

My interest in Spanish began when I was very young. My dad, who has a minor in Spanish, would occasionally speak the language in the house when he would talk to himself. We also used to live in a town that had a very large Hispanic community, so he had many friends that came from this community. I would hear my dad have conversations with them in Spanish and admired him for knowing a different, trill-like language. I thought it was the “coolest thing ever” that my dad was bilingual, and I decided that I wanted to be just like him! Now, 10 years later, I am on my way to being considered a fluent Spanish speaker.

Although I am not as fluent in Spanish as I am in English, I am still able to hold conversations decently with others who speak Spanish, and I mostly speak with my friend and her family, who moved to the United States from Mexico when my friend was 8 years old. I immensely enjoy speaking in Spanish with her, and she tells me how much she loves it as well. Anabel often says that “speaking English for too long is like eating the same food for a couple of days.”

Later in life, I plan to utilize my Spanish-speaking abilities in my career as a pharmacist. This would make me highly marketable when I begin to apply for positions. I would love to work in a Hispanic community. Even if I don’t end up being a pharmacist, I still want to speak Spanish for the rest of my life.

Basic Spanish lesson:

Post #5- Avada Kadavra!

Tomorrow (November 18^th) millions of people will be lining up at movie theaters around the world for arguably the biggest film event of the year: the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1. I also plan on seeing the movie tomorrow at midnight (thank you Professor Brooks for cancelling class), and I am extremely excited to see it. The other day when I was thinking about WHY I am so obsessed with the books and movies, I also thought about the reasons that millions of other people love J.K. Rowling’s fantastical masterpiece.

The main reason that people could be so fascinated with Harry Potter is that it deals with the concept of magic in a detailed manner. Not only does J.K. Rowling go in depth about how her idea of magic operates and its uses, but she also creates an entire wizarding world that is placed within the mundane world. For thousands of years, mankind has perceived magic and supernatural powers as both dangerous and exciting. The latter is what draws Rowling’s audience in as she created an adventurous, elaborate story about a young wizard who must face a malevolent, adult sorcerer.

Another reason that Harry Potter is the object of admiration of many individuals around the world is J.K. Rowling’s writing style and talent. As stated earlier, Rowling put enormous amounts of effort into creating a universe where not only magic and wizards exist, but a world that actually makes sense if it was not fictitious. She includes the daily lives of wizards, their mannerisms, traditions, education systems, and even their form of government. Furthermore, her writing capabilities are superb. She writes in a simplistic yet mesmerizing way that always causes readers to read until they find themselves unable to stay awake. I myself have stayed awake until 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning at one point or another when I read a Harry Potter novel. I just can’t put those books down once I begin to read, and the same is true for many others as well.

If you have not read any of the Harry Potter books or watched the movies, I highly recommend both. Of course, the books are better than the movies, but I will still be standing in line tomorrow overflowing with anticipation at 6 o’clock waiting to watch the seventh installment of the series.

Post #4: Effects of Birth Control on Women

Even though I do not have an actual job with pay at the moment, in the future I plan on becoming a pharmacist. As many of you in my English 102 class know, we must write about a topic that deals with our career field or future career. Because a pharmacist’s main task is to handle medicine, I am deciding to write about the physical effects of oral contraceptives on teenagers. This topic is familiar to me because I use oral contraceptives, and I also wish to further investigate some of the effects of “the pill.”

If any men are reading this, I apologize and am truly sorry for causing any discomfort (I seem to be doing a lot of that with my blogs these days). This topic and blog are strongly geared towards women, so any men that don’t wish to read detailed information should stop reading now and perhaps try a different blog.

Although the long term effects of oral contraceptives among women (all ages) have not been determined, a few short term effects include blood clotting, increased risk of stroke, and hormonal withdrawals during the 7 day period that patients receive the placebo pills that replace the hormonal ones. Regimens like these are referred to as “21/7 regimens” because the patient takes 21 days’ worth of estrogen plus progestin pills and then 7 days of inactive pills. The “21/7 regimen” will be utilized throughout my paper as the majority of oral contraceptives use this method.

One major side effect that I plan on investigating is the alleged decrease in menstrual-induced pain, more commonly known as “cramping.” I have been using an oral contraceptive called “Microgestin + Fe” since April of this year, and the cramping that I experience about every other cycle returns to the previous level of torturous pain before I began using the medicine. Other months I experience a dull pain that “feels like Heaven” compared to my previous symptoms; however, I want to know why this occurs because I should experience that dull pain every month instead of alternating months.

Because I am choosing to write about a topic that directly affects me and many other teenage girls, I look forward to researching the effects of oral contraceptives. Even though my focus of the paper will encircle teenagers, many of the effects are similar to those that women experience as well. I hope that the final product is a success!

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3149043