2008

Tonight's Christmas Eve service was bare, but my family and a few other families we knew attended. I enjoyed singing the Christmas carols that I had memorized from years of tradition though. There is an aspect of reflection that comes with church, forcing you to think quietly. So I recalled the year 2008.

A lot happened this year. As usual I boomeranged into adulthood and grew up and out of my home.
To get some perspective of how far I've come and how I've returned, I'll start with the beginning of the year. Winter Quarter 2008, I was the new president of the American Sign Language club at South Puget Sound Community College. Jobless, but I had a place in the academic world. Finishing High School and Community College. The spring led into summer with graduating. Flying to Washington D.C. Taking Oceanography and Piano. Getting a job at Kmart. So here we are August.
I turn 18, smoke cigars, work a 8 hour shift at Kmart and go to dinner with my boyfriend, my family and a girlfriend of mine at Red Robin. It is not until August 1st that I learn I am accepted to the University of Washington in Tacoma. I attempt to move out into Court 17. Sudden Change of plans I move in with my brother in the apartments down from Court 17. Fall rolls around. I move out and start school at the University of Washington.

Amazing. One thing after another happens in my life. I graduated from high school, from Community College, moved out, turned 18, found my soul mate aka boyfriend and became the Editor of a Literary Arts Magazine. Huzzah for the Tahoma West!!

So now I am home in Olympia. I come home every weekend practically and came home for the holidays this year. I have two lives. One in the city with my brother, fast paced with freinds and college. One in Olympia with best freinds and family. All the while keeping my grades up and stacking on the college credits

Wow. I am quite the person. Still with now job and no money. I feel like I have nothing sometimes.

Take back the City tonight.

Riding away from my apartment, I passed the giant residential home for Asian
Elders. Across from it is the Bicentennial Pavilion with a park nestled in the corner. Well fed
trees are lit up for Christmas time adding to the always burning city of lights. Turning right on 13th Avenue of Market street, the pleasantry deteriorates as I go uphill. With my brand new apartment complex in the background, I see a half torn down building in front of me. Next to it is Tacoma’s history in graffiti on bricks. National Rent a Fence has blocked it off, but the windows and doors are broke through, making it susceptible to vandalism. Stairs once leading up through a building now ascend into thin air.
Where this building once stood is now a graveyard and vandalized and littered. How come the city hasn’t reconstructed this block but has built new apartments? As I continued to ride west on my white bike, I noticed green, pink and other off color odd looking houses. Riding down Fawcett Avenue I reached Abbey’s ballroom. Again with the lights bright those are forever on. The miniature houses and the small ballroom didn’t look housed by the rich, rather original. I was filled with an unsurpassable amount of jealousy. Because I lived in a box prison as my dad calls it. The ugly apartment housing disgusts me when I see these unique houses with green fenced in yards that are a street away from where I live. I didn’t there was green grass in the city, let alone antique houses.
Learning about the history of Tacoma meant I further uphill to the hilltop area. A place I thought it’d be safer to avoid. So I zigzagged down the streets while passing an occasional salon. The high buildings which are unique to the city kept my attention though. I felt like a magnet being drawn to downtown where everything happens. The further I went towards the skyscrapers and the light, the more stores I passed. They were the “city breed” of shops though, which is a whole other type of vendor than those you see in rural towns.
The glamour and darkening sunset behind me illuminated the colors of the lighted shops as I rode through Broadway Street. I want to live on Broadway now. My eyes are widening and a million and one thoughts are rushing through my head. There are dazzling spaces that people occupy that I’ve never seen before. I see art galleries, grand restaurants and fancy grills. This is what brings me to the city. The life and flashes of excitement that I get when I ride around buildings that have ten different purposes. Broadway is where you should go to eat foreign food, buy expensive art and get your hair done by city hipsters; unfortunately you’ll consequently go broke.
Well that is unless you have a high paying fancy job in the city. You might work at a useless looking company who’ve tacked their logos on sharply designed offices and put you in a cubicle. Staffing group. What an awful name for a business, what can all those great looking people possibly be accomplishing? Giant windows act as magnifying glass for the cubicles on Broadway Avenue. I smile as one woman munches on a chocolate bar while looking over post it notes pasted on typed up reports. Looking over to do lists? Next to her is a large computer. These office cubicles and business are everywhere down here. I can’t imagine working in a cubicle forty hours a week. These people must be out of their minds. Luckily I made it passed the cubicles without catching any flies in my mouth.
Sitting in the Subway inches away from the Theater district of Tacoma, I notice a brightly lit Christmas tree. It’s taller than the glittering Pantages sign. Dare I continue into this theater district? Mass Transportation roars behind me as a man runs to catch it. Do I go to the transit station on Commerce Street at night? Or do I follow my irrational fears and return home? I’ll return home and keep this positive image of the city as a place to work, eat and live the party life. I’ll keep the city of lights as an image in my mind. I’ll continue to be drawn like a magnet by the sky scrapers as place to live and work. Obviously my fears and imagination shifts as I travel through the city. From the fear of hilltop and going too far into downtown to the silly fascinations I have with all the brightly lit art galleries and foreign restaurants. These are the affects that city imagery has on us though. Their powerful and can change behaviors.

Someone Searched my name!!!

Alright so this should be a short blog. *hold your applause haha*. I was searching through my google analytics report....Which is a site that tracks the trafficking sources, who is on your site, how many people go on it etc. There's a bunch of graphs and tables and percentages which are confusing to try to figure out... and I found that someone had googled my name and found my blog. It makes perfect sense, my name is all over the Internet. Someone had actually googled it though! My name which when you google it, isn' that rare! Someone googled my name, Monica Jonen.

About this time, I could feel a strong sensation of fear twisting in my gut. I was so scared and freaked out by the thought of someone actually finding my blog by searching my name that I desperatley tried to find out who it was. At first, I was like oh it has to be my best friend. Well after checking, it turns out they had no interest in finding me on the web! This scared me even more.

Some stranger out in the giant world of the web was trying to find me! Creeeepy. So after walking around for a couple of days with this reoccuring fear that some odd man was trying to find me on the Internet. I found out my mom had googled me to see what I had on the Internet. She was looking for saftey reasons and was dissapointed by how much I had on the Internet. I own up to it though, I guess I feel once it's out there, I can't do much of anything to get it back.

I dont know, what do you think about getting your information from sites back? Impossible right?

The Tacoma Art Museum

This blog should share the space of my writing class and Tacoma, not just my Internet Class. In that writing class we took a trip to the Tacoma Art Museum. I was told to practice my descriptive writing and thoughts about the affects of public space. Here's what I got, its pretty much prose too so don't expect context.

Lack of focus, unable to slow down. Ignorance, nerves unending. Suddenly boom.
The woman. She's struggling, hurting, hurting more and more as I watch her. I found him staring at her which originally peaked my interest. The more I got to know her though, the more the scared fear and emotions were evoked. Death, digging nails, a dead plump baby. Her eyes evoked, cried out to me. Asking me to engage with the murders. Asking why they killed her family. The should take her too. Put her out of her misery. She won't stop crying out to me. I stand in awe at this painting by a man and suddenly become fearful, is he a murderer too? I shiver, squirm, shudder and flee. Not before I read though. Pshh they say it's erotic. It's not. Her breasts are up in the air, her body bent back, her nipples exposed to the death seekers. There's nothing erotic about this painting. There's everything powerful instead.

This room is big and the giant walls have a high elevation ceiling. White with big spot lights. Giant posters with bold colors that talk of trade. Between countries and discoveries. People from India are on the walls. Weddings are on hold. There's tall ships and cine a mon plasted up on the galleria wall. What is trade? You have so much space to answer this question. Room to conceptualize, worlds, countries, people. This giant room invites global thinking. I like it, I think big and travel. I sail and visit India. I wander the positive and negative affects of trade all in this big room. Cargo ships of blue and black to elepahnts of transport. What do we give other countries. Anything?

What I've learned today so far.

In class, there were two nicely done in depth presentations. They weren't simple and quite lengthily, but I suppose that is the point when it comes to academia. New Technologies, technologies in Toyko (who are five years ahead of us techwise arg), the lone Communications professor critic of the Internet (what can I say writers are cynics sometimes), the attack on the blogosphere and the tracking of buses and UPS Trucks (*drifts off to the MIA song*) and smart mobs.

What I thought was interesting, but not surprising was the text gang. At first I laughed at the idea of it until the presenter said an incident happened where a girl wanted the leave the gang so she got beat up. This is an example of technology at it's worst just like the youtube video of the girl being beaten by a bunch of cheerleader preppies. *shivers* I am so glad I am out of high school.

Wifi was also presented as a new form of changing technology. It is positively cheaper and gives more access to people, but there is a huge threat and negative side to that the presenter failed to present. So I am going to use an example of my own life here about this. I was at a friend's house and she lives in a an apartment complex, well the party was going great and than a computer techy decided he wanted to hack the other people's wireless Internet in the apartments. This made me feel a little uneasy, nothing too tragic happened, but it made me think of my own wifi in my apartment. Is it secure enough, can someone hack into it use it up, run up our bill, get into my computer because of this drifting unsecured network??? Luckily my brother and I have a password you have to use to get on it. Still, there is the immense chance of hacking with wireless Internet.

Another unconnected point to wifi lol, that I'd like to point is the ridiculous argument against the blogosphere. Yes there are no limitations of what people can write, sure rumors turn into fact, and ya it's personal opinion. I however think that blogging is the conceptualizing of our world around us. If information is merely, data and knowledge is understanding. Than why don't we encourage blogging as the development of thoughts and personal opinion which helps us understand not only ourselves but all the data we get on a day to day basis. For example, this blog is me saying that yes I not only attended today's lecture, but understood and am intellectually thinking about what was presented in class. *lol I am not a suck up...noo lol* Seriously though, the lone critic was out of line in lambasting blogs. It's just a form of journaling, but only it develops community and while it has it's negative side affects. It's used for good by most of the people on the Internet.

Alright before I type a bazillion words and you get bored of reading this, I want to talk about something I am really excited about. Digitally tracking buss es and UPS packages. How cool is that! The fact that these are realistic things that are happening makes me squirm. Okay, let my explain my silly excitability. I ride the bus occasionally, because my bike is the only form of transportation I have right now, which is fine. But there was this one time..lol *not in band camp* that I was in the middle of Lakewood at night in the dark and standing at a bus stop. It gets better too, I had no idea if that bus was coming, if that bus was out of service, if I was going haft to find a new way home etc. It was the scariest moment in my life. There was no time schedule or anything. I know I am irresponsible, not the point. All I knew was it said 57 to downtown Tacoma and that's where I wanted to go. If I could see where the bus was somehow, I would have been much more at ease knowing it was coming to pick me up which it eventually did.

I could use another example of when I was waiting for a bus to go down to Olympia and it was an hour late! What! That's crazy you say! Well it was because it broke down and had to be repaired. Can you imagine the benefits of being able to let people know who are relying on that bus that it's going to be late and it's a 10 miles away waiting for a tire change. That would be amazingly helpful to the people. Just amazingly. I would love it if that technology was in place a few years from now. The transit system would be updated to the 21st century which it desperately needs.

Well those are my thoughts on today's presentations in class. Any questions? CommentS?

Thea's Park

Tacoma Culture

Today was a long interesting day that seemed eventually centralize around a theme. To be chronological, I started out making an amazing egg sandwich with salsa, cheese and scrambled eggs. Than I buckled down on my Internet Class homework for a few hours. After deciding I had ADD and could not focus since the Internet was just a click away. I went to a movie. I watched The Secret Life of Bees in the Grand Cinema of downtown Tacoma.

After walking through the cold, but interesting Fawcett Ave, I arrived to the small theater that only has I believe four or five screens. There was a bunch of retired old folk that were there too because it was the middle of the day on a Friday. Normally young college students are preoccupied with class, work, homework, etc. Not me though, I had become restless so here I found myself walking through a small volunteer run theater to see a movie I'd randomly decided to go see.

What ended up happening was me watching an emotionally heart wrenching movie that moved me to tears. I don't want to give away the story line, but lets just say it had to do with abusive situations between family, African Americans, racism, death and life. All set within a beautiful pink house in South Carolina and the 60's. I didn't expect the movie to be so powerful or intense. Either way, I am glad I went and saw it because it was amazing.

After coming back to the apartment and having dinner. I persuaded my neighbor who is a good Friend to walk with me to the Art Slam at the Rialto Theater. Which I found through FeedTacoma.com. I think we were both pretty impressed. For me, the art was wonderful, but the poets and spoken word that I found interesting. Just to clarify, the Art Slam was a bunch of artists putting together a short slide show of their work and than having 50 artists slide shows being shown. Anyways, the spoken word was composed of three African Americans and two Caucasians. Topics like hilltop being displaced and the minorities being discriminated against in the city were presented through spoken word. Slavery and the history of African Americans in this country were also put out there through poems. I was really moved by all of the art through film, paintings, poems I witnessed tonight. Tacoma for me has a lot of culture as for tonight. Overall, a night well spent.