don't shove it in my face, let me make my own decision. jeez.

i can be very cynical. so if you hate to hear cynicism stop reading right now. the sun is shining, there ya go, something optimistic to help your day. but. so anyone else confused about this week's speaker?

Mr. Macke Mauldin, president of Bank Independent. nice man, over-all. but i didn't sign up for the honors program and attend this class just to hear a commercial. because that's basically all his talk was, a commercial, propaganda. sure, your bank is awesome and all, i'm glad it works for you and all the people doing business there. but do you have to rub it in my face?

he started out kind of connecting it to us and how values affect our lives. but then he got off on a tangent about...yep you guessed it, his bank. apparently, there are 5 words they use for everyday practices. if anything isn't a part of those 5 words, they don't do it. uhhuh, i'm sure you audit every single instance of your business to see if everything is doing right. like you have that much time. you may have good intentions with that, but you admitted yourself that you mess up. and you can't fix every single mess-up because some people don't even notice the mistake. the five words are: people, community, strength, service, and convenience. seem sappy to anyone else? does to me.

ok, so you have live people on your phones from 8 to 8. so you're open on saturdays. that's not enough for me to switch banks just based on one talk. and the way he was talking just came across as if he was better than all of us because of his success and the bank is the best in the world and we should all become members. and i have a question. so his grandpa helped start the bank back in the 1960s. and then his dad took over. and now he's president. isn't there some kind of rule against that? or at least shouldn't he have explained how he came to be the president, like what are his qualifications? and his siblings are in the bank too. yea there are other family crews working, like father-son, mother-daughter. but still, seems a bit sketch to me.

the bank plays by the rules? is forthright with everything? NOBODY is like that, much less a big entity like a bank. it just isn't practically possible.

i'm sure that he made good points, and was a good representation of the bank. but. i don't want that shoved in my face. i didn't sit there just to have him spew about his bank and its awesomeness. i don't like commercials on t.v. where i can switch the channel, what makes him think i'll like it where i can't get up and leave?

thanks for the consideration, i really appreciate it.

go for the gold, or just stick with silver?

So...this week we got a visit from the Honorable Gilbert P. Self, Circuit Court judge for Lauderdale County. pretty interesting. i learned a lot of new stuff, for instance about how the fact that lady liberty holds a book of law is paradoxical; one wouldn't think that law gives liberty, but it does. Also, we were given a couple of life lessons, which i guess are always useful. basically, keep track of where you are and where you're heading. "keep your guard up" and don't get lost in the world of secularism. if you truly want to be happy in life, go outside your comfort zone. if you play it safe and only do what is comfortable, then are you really living? unless that's all you, in which case God bless and have fun with that. but if you're gonna go for the challenge, you need to have backbone to do what is right. don't let others talk you into doing something you know isn't right.

as a judge, the Honorable Self gets to deal with the "underbelly of the community". that may sound glamorous, but i'm sure it's not. i mean, yea, everyone wants to be this awesome crime solver who puts nasty criminals behind bars and save peoples' lives. that's possible. but there's always a bad part to every job. if there's no bad you can't properly appreciate the good. of course it's good that cruel humans are put in prison, but life isn't black and white. how do you know if the sentence is too harsh, or not harsh enough? being a judge must be incredibly hard, and i commend the Honorable Self for it. it takes guts, and backbone, to get up in front of everyone, especially the convicted's family, and denounce the convicted for crimes if guilty. it takes equal amount of guts and backbone to proclaim someone innocent if the public opinion is against them.

life is full of decisions and choices. the hard part is picking the right ones.

-aly<3

if you're good at math, it's probably you...

Thomas J. Calhoun Jr., Ph.D: our speaker for tuesday's class. it was rather interesting. confirmed my idea about the school system, and its not so great ejumacatingness. according to polls and research and such, few people in the united states are good at math once they reach high school.

so it really hurts kids who want to go into fields that need strong math (and science) skills, such engineer, computer programmer, etc. the CIS field is seriously in need of qualified people for work, and the jobs are only being filled because of foreign employees. My dad is a CIS professor at the university of south alabama, and a majority of his grad students are from india and the surrounding areas. so what are we supposed to do? train teachers better? get kids more interested in schooling? i don't know, i'm not a doctor.

when asked, only about 7 people in my class considered themselves good at math. we have 56 students. and this is the honors program, where we're generally considered as smarter than the average college student. and if we're having math problems, what does that say about the rest of the student population?

we've got an issue, and there's no right way to solve it. that sounds like a math problem. oops don't know how to do that.

once again, we've proven that everyone is different...

when a person murders another person, everyone is in an uproar. they want the murderer to get what they deserve, be punished similarly, etc. but how do we arrive at these conclusions? do we not all have a subconcious set of values and morals that we hold others accountable to? well, we do. that is quite obvious in the way people treat others who are seen as wrongdoers. but when we try to write out a list of our values, it becomes quite hard. if told to select only 10 out of a list of 28, as we were instructed in class last tuesday, many people get frustrated and can't decide how to choose one and not the other, because they're all important, right? of course right. but no, you have to make tough choices sometimes.

Having split into 8 groups of 7 (that took a little bit, you'd be surprised how many honors kids, such as me, have problems with math), we attempted to create a collective list of values. but we could only have 7 at the most on our list. most people went with the whole 'FAB FIVE' deal. my group ended up with a total of five also: knowledge, passion, ethical standards, independence, and love. do you know how hard it was to file our lists down into those five? well, it was difficult. we decided to just write the ones that a majority of the group had written. it was rather funny hearing which ones some people didn't have. not to judge or anything though. judging is mean. oops there i go, spouting a value. well at least we know they're good for something.

so in conclusion. values are good. if they come in conflict with each other you've got some tough decisions ahead of you. life is good. love people. aly out

-aly<3