I can safely say that one of the worst nights of my life took place in November of last year as I was leaving a holiday party that was thrown by the restaurant I work for. I had a couple of drinks in my system and honestly, the only reason I had left was that I had to work early the next day and didn’t want to wake up with a hangover. I walked down the block and into the 42nd street subway with a coworker who left with me. He took the same train as me so it made sense to leave together. I walked towards the turnstile, took my MetroCard out of my wallet, and I swiped it. Of course, I didn’t have money on the card indicated by the “insufficient funds” message on the display. I stood there and thought to my slightly drunk self, “I could easily get away with jumping over the turnstile”, in the middle of the night with no one around. So I did just that. I jumped over the turnstile (having sufficient money in my pocket to pay for a ride) and continued to E train platform.

 

 

I was approaching the stairs that lead to the train platform and out of the corner of my eye, I catch someone open a mysterious door on my left. He walks out from I could only now imagine is a surveillance room and calls for me. “Hey Miss come over here,” he says. I’m not a woman but at the time I had hair down to my shoulders and was mistaken for a woman on a daily basis it seemed. After hearing this and noticing that he was indeed a police officer I knew I had been caught. Before walking over I told Angel, my coworker, to just go on home without me and he did. The officer then said, “you do know you have to pay to enter the subway”. I apologized multiple times hoping my young appearance would save me from a healthy 200-300 ticket. He took my ID and said he was gonna run my liscense for any arrest warrents that I might have. Being that I’m not a criminal I didn’t think anything of it. I was really just worried about having to pay the ticket. I waited impatiently for the officer to return and when he finally does, the unthinkable happens. He instructs me to put my hands out in front of me and that was being placed under arrest. I was quite frankly in shock when this happened. I was upset and thought it was a misunderstanding. Sure he must be confusing me with someone else or made a mistake when he ran my ID. However, I did manage to figure out why I was being arrested. I had received a summons in 2014 that I never got around to paying. It was 3 years later and it finally came back to haunt me.

I was beyond upset with the officer because he knew the circumstances leading to the arrest and still decided to do it. To his defense, he claimed his boss was in the office so he had no other choice. The handcuffs and the escort to the car was also policy that he couldn’t skip. Luckily the subway was basically empty. After being put into the back of the officer’s car I was taken to the station in 59th Street Colombus Circle. In the station, feeling like absolute garbage about myself, I was stripped of all my belongings and also my shoelaces and belt. It was 2 am and the courts didn’t open until 10 am where I would eventually be taken to see a judge. As I layed on the floor of my cell I thought about all the different I could’ve avoided this. What if I had just paid that summons in 2014? What If I had put money in my MetroCard? What If I had gone to a different station? I spent the following 8 hours asking myself these same 3 questions over and over.

Morning Came around and I was finally taken to the courts on 34th street to see a judge. As I was taken from the precinct to the car to head downtown I had to cross the Colombus Circle subway station which happened to have 100’s people passing through it at the time, in handcuffs. Embarrassed couldn’t even begin to describe what I was feeling at the time. I had reached such a low that the only thing that could actually make everything worse was if by some chance someone recognized me.

When I finally met the judge who was assigned to my case I was sentenced to time served which essentially means the 8 hours I spent in the cell overnight was enough punishment for the unpaid summons and the jumping of the turnstile. Unfortunately, by the time this had happened, it was already 2 pm. Meaning I had wasted 12 hours of my life because I was too lazy to refill my MetroCard.

“I am an addict” discusses the different discourses that are out there regarding social media and its effect on the public.  The authors of the paper explore conflicting ideas that may or not be true regarding the internet and social media. Being that I am a young adult that grew up in the midst of the social media era, I’ve always had strong feelings when it comes social media. I’ve never been very fond of social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram and it actually took me quite a while to even start using these platforms. While I understand its purpose which is to stay connected with the people you care about I feel it also helps you stay connected with the people you could care less about. Instagram has since turn into a popularity contest with many of its users caring more about how many followers and likes they have instead of focusing on what its actually for. Social media today is riddled with superficiality which is why I’ve actually deleted all of these apps from my phone. I feel that its having many effects on many of us, especially the “digital natives”. While we are all capable of using social media regardless of age the youth definetley uses it more than anyone and it turning us into superficial and attention seeking cellphone addicts.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRs4Kuu4uxsWU0jSE3qNOvQ?view_as=subscriber

 

 

My Story is about me moving to Brooklyn and changing my life, while learning to love myself and who I am. I feel like my youtube channel visually reflects this.

For this week’s blog post I decided to write about “The Capture of Sound” by Brian Winston. In this article,  Winston talks about how the capture of sound and radio began. Sound is a hugely important part of life on Earth. Radio waves have the longest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum. They range from the length of a football to larger than our planet. Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of radio waves in the late 1880s. He used a spark gap attached to an induction coil and a separate spark gap on a receiving antenna. When waves created by the sparks of the coil transmitter were picked up by the receiving antenna, sparks would jump its gap as well. Hertz showed in his experiments that these signals possessed all the properties of electromagnetic waves. My husband is a Foreman (electrician) and when he brings home blueprints I look at them and I ask him how he is able to read them and understand them. Same thing with the capture of sound and radio. It happens without us even knowing. They compare the capture of sound to beach waves, the way they crash and make sounds is the same way they do for us everyday when we set our alarm clocks or the sound to our phones.

For this week’s blog post, I chose to respond to Lev Manovitch’s Visual Semiotics, Media Theory, and Cultural Analysis. In the essay Manovitch mentions how  text became relateable to how we study visual arts and media, based off a work that he read. He himself found, through his own study, that certain ways of readin texts ina computerized way, is impossible. From this I realized that even when we want to progress, and keep doing so, we will have stumbling blocks. We live in th age of computers, and therefore we think we are invincible in that field, but this shows me otherwise. As much as we live in the year 2018, and we already have self driving machines, and computers, and anything that comes after that is just a continually fixed or progressed edition or version. With that being said, we need to keep ourselves in check. We aren’t invincible. We cant play higher powers that can from the impossible overnight. We are humans, who hit bumps in the road, and this paper really showed me why.

For this weeks blog post, I chose to write about “I’m an Addict” and Other Sensemaking Devices: A Discourse Analysis of Self-Reflections on Lived Experience of Social Media.” After reading this article it made me think about how much technology has changed over the years. I remeber having a flip phone when I was in high school and having free minutes after 9PM and free calls on weekends. I remember when dial up internet wouldnt work when someone was on the phone or when the phone wouldnt work when someone was on the internet. These small annoying things made you not want to use the internet or phone. It’s so weird how now we are all glued to our phones. Before I got a car I used to be the girl that sat on the bus and train glued to my phone to make time pass and forget about how long it would take to get home. I am married to a man that loves technology he always wants the latest phones, apple watches, go pros, fastest internet, eventually it rubbed off on me and I love technology. My husband purched the “nest” and now I can see whos at my door, I can hear everything, I get notifications etc.

All my life I was never good at speaking in front of people. I always get nervous, I turn red, I forget what I want to say. The hardest part for me was standing up in front of the class and talking, especially about something so close to my heart. I spoke very briefly about my families history in Albania. When I wrote about the story it was much more meaningful. I feel like I was able to write more then I thought, it just flowed much better. I wrote a lot more but I erased a lot because it would be a long essay. My uncle wrote a book on my families history and he is currently waiting for the editors to finish their part so that the book could be released. I get very emotional when I think about everything my family has been through and everything they have sacrificed for a better life. God Bless America!

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=c0a0a3ea74e2ded3f229055db1dc1244&panels=cirrus,reader,trends,summary,contexts