serena's thoughts

      Thanksgiving break came faster than I could even begin to process, 2021 has felt like the fastest year of my life. Maybe it was because 2020 felt almost neverending, making 2021 feel like it was over before it even began. With the semester almost over and final deadlines emerging quickly, I felt myself stressing this Thanksgiving break. Yet I still made sure, even though the stress, to make time for my family and to relax over the break. And I hope everyone else was able to do the same.      Usually, Thanksgiving is a big event, in my family, with my whole family coming together to celebrate the holiday at my Tia's house. Although this year it was only my immediate family, we still were able to spend the holiday the way it was meant to. With family. We have a thanksgiving tradition and that is to watch the movie Planes Trains and Automobiles. We kept the tradition going for this year and watched one of the only Thanksgiving movies.  Also ove...

       Throughout the week I have been reading up on America and specifically American Democracy. This is a huge topic, and for a moment, I believed I bit off more than I could chew. And being honest, I still feel like I have a bit. The topic of democracy and especially the current state of democracy in America is a huge topic to even begin getting into. This is because there is really no simple answer or resolution to most of the problems facing not only American democracy but any country's democracy. It is one of those things that even if we do get a resolution to a problem, not everyone will be happy with the resolution. This is what makes it more difficult in the end, the idea that you can come to a resolution and people will still be unhappy. This topic alone and the other ones I thought of were all difficult topics to talk about, because of the depth f them. Yet that was the objective of the project. We aren't searching for definite answers but 2 sides to a sin...

       On Friday, November 12, I turned 19 years old. My birthday crept up on me this year, with me not thinking about it until my mom asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday. And as I turn 19 it is still weird to think about me being out of my teens, even if I still have a year left. Yet instead of talking about my 19th birthday, I find myself thinking more about my 18th birthday. Like most people (unless your birthday is before March) my 2020 birthday was a bit of a bummer. Due to the pandemic, I and the rest of my family wanted to keep each other safe. Meaning that I didn't get to spend my birthday with the people who had been there since I was a baby or my closest friends. There is one special moment from my 18th birthday, that I will never take for granted.      My grandpa, who had been exposed to COVID, drove past my house to see me for my birthday. He wasn't sick with COVID at the time and drove past my house with my cousin to say happy bir...

       In 2016 we got a call that my brother was going to be fostering a puppy. We met him and thought he looked like a little bear. Which resulted in a name change from Bing to Bear. Although Bear was only meant to be in our lives for a few weeks, we ended up officially adopting him. Well, it was my sister and her then Finance who adopted them. Yet they had not graduated College yet, meaning that Bear lived with only my parents and me. I was the one who trained Bear, He was a Dutch Shepard, meaning he was incredibly easy to train. I taught him all your basics but my favorite thing was how I taught him to use bells. Every time I took him out I would direct him to bells we had bought and I made him hit them before we left. This taught him to ring these bells anytime he had to use the bathroom. It was always the cutest thing seeing him hit his bells. Even if he would sometimes ring them just because he was bored.      Bear was the weirdest dog I had ever...

       Halloween is one of my favorite holidays and has always been. I always like to have a fun costume, even though I usually do it last minute. Last year I was Dani from Midsommar and the year before I was El from Stranger Things. Before that, I was David Bowie for 2 years. Doing things so last minute that I needed to resort to painting the infamous blue and red lightning onto my face. So this year I wanted to do something fun and be Carrie White for Halloween. I dressed up as the iconic scene from the climax of the film. Where Carrie wins prom queen, only to be doused in pigs' blood by her peers. This was by far the messiest Halloween costume I've ever had, leaving me to clean up my leftover blood the next day, which actually was Halloween.      In order to wear this costume, I had to buy a dress from Amazon. Because believe it or not I still did everything last minute. Even though I told myself I wasn't going to be doing that. So I ventured to Spi...

           With October in full swing, there is one thing most people are watching, and that’s horror movies. Whether it be the classics like Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), and Carrie (1976). Or the more recent horror movies like Midsommar (2019), Us (2017), and Halloween ( 2018). Looking at these films you might not realize their similarities, because at the surface there aren’t many. Yet there is one thing, one aspect that connects not only all these horror movies but most of them. And that is their use of women. This is a constant theme within the horror genre. Whether it be through the largely popular “ Final Girl “ trope. A term used for the final person alive after our villain’s reign of terror, which is almost always a young girl. This is often confused with the “ female survivor “ trope which recognizes the female survivors who aren’t quite final girls. Some examples of this would be Dani from Midsommar or Adelaide and Zora from Us. ...