Nick's News

       For this project, I decided to watch Cartel Land directed by Matthew Heineman, which covers different vigilante groups fighting in Mexico and along the border as a violent drug war rages on in Mexico. One particular scene that shook me to the core was when a young woman started sobbing listing 13 names, ages ranging from 40 to 6 months, as men dug a mass grave. The names she was listing were members of her family who worked at a lime farm. The owner of the lime farm had been doing business with the cartel, and when the owner did not have his payment on time, the cartel brutally killed his workers as revenge. As people scream and sob in the background, the woman described how the infants were smashed into rocks by the legs and then tossed into a well like trash. Others were cut into pieces and beheaded. I almost had to mute the TV as she was describing the slaughtering. I just couldn't believe what I was hearing. That's all I could say.     ...

      It wasn't like I forgot I had to complete a blog entry for every week, I just really didn't want to. One of many things these past few weeks I've decided to put off and kick down the road. This obviously isn't helpful to me, especially in college where procrastinating on work is already five times more difficult than in high school where I easily took advantage of lax scheduling and due dates. As I watch the Saints and Buccaneers brawl against each other in a giant pile of chaos, I realize maybe I should get work done on time, so I don't have to stress on weekends.      This is the third weekend in a row where I've been stressing to get work done before another week starts up again. I do have to say, I cruise under pressure and deliver results, but this is not a sustainable way of conducting business. Just last weekend, I somehow read (skimmed through) 105 pages of an Abraham Lincoln memoir (can't say I remember anything I read) an...

    Change can be a positive or a negative. Some of us hate change, some of us appreciate it. But change is inevitable in life, and it's how you respond to it that makes you better. I have been writing using virtually the same style for years. In the first couple weeks of college, I had to completely change that style to write a microtheme on a single page. However, I embraced that change in order to make myself a better writer.     Reading over the requirements for the microtheme assignment was confusing to me, to say the least. Everything I had learned from teachers over the years was irrelevant when it came to this assignment. I couldn't make a debatable claim or use direct evidence, but instead had to ask an open-ended question which was "although swearing is considered wrong, why do we do it?" The one page limit was also a change, and I honestly loved that considering other professors want papers at a 10 page length. After reading through examples, pee...

       Here we go, the required "tell me about yourself" post. In case you're wondering, it took me several days to write three complete paragraphs about myself, which should be easy considering this is the subject I should know the most about. This isn't because I live a boring life, in fact just the opposite. It's just something that feels a little weird to do behind a screen. Who knows maybe it's just me. But anyway, let's get on to the basics. I'm from Bartlett, IL, which is about 45 minutes north of NCC, 25 minutes if I'm the one driving. I compete on the golf team here at North Central and I am a business administration major.      I played baseball and basketball for as long as I could remember, but after stepping out of my comfort zone I discovered golf and soon fell in love with it. Ever since I was 10, not a day went by where I wasn't swinging a golf club. I'm so addicted to this game that I would practice outside in the snow. Eve...