Final Rough Draft

Be thankful and be yourself!

Does anyone want to try some Brazilian rice and beans?
Happy Thanksgiving!

Since I moved here from Brazil, celebrating Thanksgiving is something that is relatively new for us. We don’t have a lot of family in the U.S so we usually spend Thanksgiving with our close family friends which happen to be American. Therefore, we always leave it up to them to cook for us.

                Cooking a large turkey is not a Brazilian culture, in fact, not too many Brazilian know how to even prepare at turkey. The first time that we saw stuffing, we thought it looked like gross soggy bread and we didn’t understand why this was a meal. Although Brazilians do eat sweet potatoes, it is usually eaten as a dessert so it was weird seeing people put their sweet potatoes in the same plate as the turkey and stuffing. The only thing my mom would bring to our friends house was the pies, which we are also not used to because Brazilians don’t make apple and pumpkin pies. After watching our friends cook Thanksgiving dinner for a few years, we decided to make our own Thanksgiving dinner this year.

                My mom and I read all over the internet how to stuff a turkey, make stuffing and ham. We were extremely excited and proud of ourselves for finally making our own Thanksgiving dinner. My original plan was to take a picture of our dinner table and display our home cooked American style dinner, but due to the fact that we burnt the turkey, made the stuffing look like soup, and my little brother dropped the apple pie on the ground, that was impossible.

                So instead we decided to make our home cooked Brazilian rice and beans. We learned that it doesn’t matter what food you make, Thanksgiving is all about being thankful for being part of this country and this country is all about diversity so having rice and beans for Thanksgiving is okay!

Are you feeling intellectually stimulated?

                I would say that the class that I feel most intellectually stimulated would have to be my psychology class. I took psychology in high school and I found it to be really interesting so I was excited to take it in college as well. My college professor Dr. Leonard, has made psychology not only a lesson that he teaches, but also the world you live around. Since he is a doctor, he meets with his patients everyday and then comes to class and gives us real life examples of how the human mind works.

                I love learning about all of the scientists that discovered human feelings such as motivation, and self consciousness. When he teaches us and explains to us how the brain can make us think and feel a certain way, it really gets me thinking about myself, my friends and everyone else around me. It helps me understand why people act the way they do, or why people don’t act the way they should. Trying to analyze the human mind is one of the most interesting things I have ever tried to do. It really makes you think and wonder how that is happening.

                After being in Dr. Leonard’s class, we now know what part of the brain is being stimulated and what kind of medicine a person would have to take in order to even that out. I like feeling intellectually stimulated, it makes me feel like I am accomplishing something when I can use knowledge I learned in class, and apply it to the real world.

Boy do I love This Library

My own little corner = <3

                The place that I love to study on campus is the library. Although that may sound boring, I like to go to the basement of the library and study all the way in the corner by the windows. Since it is the basement, it is never crowded and no one is ever walking around looking for a book. I think it is perfect. Every test I’ve had so far, I go to the same exact place. And since I go down there so often, I’ve realized that there are people who do the exact same thing, almost like “regulars” in a restaurant. It’s actually quite funny because now we’ve become acquaintances and smile at each other when one of us arrives.

                Although I love that place in the library, I must say that it definitely let me down last Monday. Because I was lazy and didn’t want to study Sunday night, I decided to just go to the library on Monday morning and study three hours before my exam (should have known it was going to be a bad idea). After having a stressful morning and having to go back twice to my dorm because I first forgot my hoot loot, then forgot my cell phone, I was relieved to finally get to the library. The second I smiled at my acquaintances, and opened my books to get comfortable and study…the fire alarm went off and everyone had to evacuate the building and wait outside in the rain for then minutes before coming back inside.

Lesson learned, do not wait to do things last minute because it always kicks you in the ass.

What I say goes!

At home, I am the number one babysitter.

              Since I was young I always saw myself as a leader due to the fact that I have a twin brother, I was the one to always take charge. When we were fourteen years old, my mother was in the middle of separating my step dad when she found out that she was pregnant. Being an independent person, she decided to leave him anyways and be a single mom. When my little brother Eddy was born, I automatically took a leadership role over my brother. I would clean the house, get my mom whatever she wanted, and babysat Eddy so she could rest. When eddy was only four month old my mom went back to working night shifts which left me and my twin brother home with our new born brother.

                Right away I no longer was a child, I felt like an adult because I had an adult responsibility. I organized my time to do homework and study right after school, so when my mom left for work at six o’clock, then I would have nothing else to worry about other than taking care of Eddy. I would feed Eddy dinner, play games with him, give him a bath and then give him a bottle and put him in his crib. By the end of the night I was extremely exhausted.

                Although sometimes I feel as if some of my childhood was stolen because I matured so fast, I think it has helped me in the future, especially in college. For some freshman students, this is their first time being on their own and having big responsibilities, but not for me. I would say that since coming to college, I feel a lot less responsibly than I did at home. One down fall for being a leader at a young age is that sometimes when I work in group projects, I tend to be bossy and want things my way, only because that's how it is at home. But since college I think I have gotten a lot better at working together and realizing that I am not the boss here.

                It is really weird for me to only have to worry about myself, I often catch myself being bored or missing having to do chores and put Eddy to bed.

Try not to bump heads

One of the most difficult things I have ever dealt with this semester was dealing with my roommate. My best friend from high school and I decided to live together in a double. Sadly we were placed in triple with a roommate who had a very hard time getting along with us at first. She is from Hartford and has a very different outlook in life and has an extremely aggressive personality. Knowing that she would feel out of the loop since me and my other roommate has been best friends for years, we decided to invite her out with us and even play mad libs, and she was always rude and never wanted to.  She had a box in the middle of the room and every morning, one of us with trip on it. But we were too intimidated by her to approach her. We spoke to our CC and she told us that we should just calmly explain to her that we have been getting hurt by her box and ask her nicely to find a better place for it.

We finally built up the courage to talk to her about it, and surprisingly she was calm about it and moved it right away, she had no idea her box came as an inconvenience to us. This taught us not to judge people by their ethnicity and background, because now we feel lucky to have her as a roommate because she is actually very down to earth and she hangs out with us a lot more often.