Why Have a Family Dinner When You Can Have a Stranger Dinner!

I have a love hate relationship with my phone...Actually that applies to all technology. I mean I love how I can communicate with anyone anywhere with a little black square that fits into my pocket. but what ever happened to verbal communication? I know what all y'all are thinking, Michelle, I talk to people verbally all the time. In some cases this may be true, but in most cases, especially in our generation, we spend most of our time texting our friends compared to talking to them face to face. Technology has enabled us in such a way that we don't really have to leave our beds.

photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdhancock/3420540107/">JD Hancock</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">cc</a>

If you were to ask me how many friends I have I would say that I have a lot of friends but no more than 15 good friends. Now, if you were to ask my facebook that you would learn that I have over 450 friends. I am going to be honest, I barely know most of those people, and I couldn't care less about what they had for lunch or what their significant other said or gave them. Most people say oh, the more "friends" you have the more popular you are or the cooler
you are...In my personal opinion, the way I look at it is, the more friends I have on Facebook the more crowded my newsfeed will be with a bunch of random crap. Now, Facebook isn't all bad obviously. It is a good way to keep up with your friends lives. Especially the ones who don't live close to you. One of my favorite parts of Facebook would have to be how you can create groups and events. I am apart of several groups and they are very convenient. I am always extra careful about what I post on there. I don't want to be applying a job and end up being denied because of something I said/posted on Facebook ten years prior. Also, if I was too post anything on there that was inappropriate my mom would call me so fast and then proceed to lecture me about how people can get in trouble for that. Then she would complain how my cousin uses vulgar language in a lot of her statuses and blah blah blah.... Yes, this has happened before.

In Share or Die I read a passage that was about stranger dinners. Basically, how these dinners work is you invite a bunch of random people who you have never met before over to your house for a dinner. All of the guests are required to bring a random item of food. So its like a pot luck. She talks about how there are various ways of inviting these strangers. She suggests that for your first stranger dinner you should ask your friends to invite their friends so those people have to go through your friends so you know they are not serial killers or something crazy like that. Another way she suggested was to use the internet to find strangers for your stranger dinner. Her suggested site was Craigslist...I don't know about you but this sounds kind of sketch to me..Whatever. To each is own I guess.

Its crazy to think how much we have advanced technology wise in the past century. From phones to social media to Youtube and Google. It's had to be bored now a days. Just don't forget to put down that phone every once and awhile and enjoy life.

What's Good Enough For You May Not Be Good Enough For M.

All our lives we have been told go to college go to college. It’s been drilled into our heads that after high school you go to college and do something with your life. Sure. College is awesome. It’s full of freedom responsibility and it’s also a lot of fun. And if you know what you want to do with your lives you learn a bunch of stuff about whatever, and hope that, after 4 plus years of constant studying your butts off, you can somehow get a job in you preferred field of study.

 photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mathieustruck/6551303327/">Mathieu Struck</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">cc</a>

If you are able to get a job right after college doing what you went to college to do that’s fantastic for you! Unfortunately, not everybody who gets a degree is this lucky.  In order to get a job you need experience, but how are you supposed to get that experience without that job? Financially Poor says, “In today’s job market, experience trumps a degree every time.  So much so, that there is a push to keep seniors and boomers in positions past traditional retirement age in many industries.  This is due to the fear of losing knowledge and experience that recent graduates and young professionals do not have.” I think this is ridiculous. If companies would just give the college graduates jobs they could get the experience they need, and in return people could retire at the normal age and less college students would be without jobs.

I keep reading about how the dropout rate for college is so large. Ramesh Ponnuru says that, “40% of kids who enroll in college don't get a degree within six years — may be a sign that we're trying to push too many people who aren't suited for college to enroll.” I agree with him. I mean, college is not for everyone. Everybody thinks that college is for them because that’s what everyone has been telling them their entire lives. Unfortunately it takes them wasting a bunch of money to figure that out. My first couple weeks of college were very stressful personally. At that point I was not sure at all if I made the right choice of going to college. I called those first couple of weeks the weeding out period, because every teacher is literally weeding out the people who are not supposed to be there. Did you ever notice how at first you classes had a lot of people in them or more than you originally started out with, and then gradually you would lose more and more people?  

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Career Chase says, “The old adage of “it doesn’t matter what kind of degree you have as long as you have one,” doesn’t hold much water anymore. Truth of the matter is, it seems like everyone is sporting a college degree nowadays. This is why a college degree isn’t enough anymore.” One of my close friends wants to be a missionary instead of going to college because she does not think it’s for her. After she spent the summer as a missionary in Porto Rico she was sure that she did not want to go to college. But her parents really wanted her to still go to college so she would have something to fall back on. The problem with this is what if her fall back can’t back her up? I mean a degree does not guarantee a job. It’s just a piece of paper that says I went to school for four plus years and I am qualified to work in this particular field. Does that sound good enough to you?

Think about this. I you do get a job right after college doing what you want to do. First of all you’re very lucky. Second of all, is this job going to pay off all of your student loans? Nones Notes says, “total student debt, which surpassed the country’s credit card debt for the first time in August 2010, now tops $1 trillion. Compare that to student debt being only around $200 billion as late as 2000. So we’re talking an increase of ~400% in a little over a decade, which is miles more than the inflation rate over this period. Average debt now stands at almost $23,000 per student, which is a spike of ~8% over the past year alone.” That’s insane. I don't know about you but if I am going to be in debt for the rest of my life then college is definitely not good enough.

One of my favorite quotes is “Some people are so poor all the have is money” some people don't need fancy things to be happy and to survive. I read a poll that asked if college was good enough. One person said, “What is success? Its not money. But for some people it may be something else. Bookish education will only equip your mind with some facts(sometimes the facts may not be proven true). For human beings what is required is moral education. If a person with high qualification doesn't know what human compassion is and how to work, then what's the use of degree. Its just a certificate that tells the world that, you have studied some facts from a textbook.” So before you spend more then you can afford, ask yourself if college is really good enough for you.