Aliens - Blog Post #5

       Looking back on my life, I can say that my four years as a rower on my high school crew team were definitely the four most stressful, painful, and especially influential years of my life. Not many others can relate to the torture that were the 2k and 5k tests, nor can they imagine the toll that hundreds of hours of practicing over the course of each season of the year takes on the growing human body. Not many people can grasp the concept of waking up on weekends at 4 in the morning to drive three hours to race sites, spend six minutes on the water, and then drive all the way back late in the evening. Even more so, not many people realize the amount of dedication that all of this took, especially when every stroke of a race brought tears to your eyes and extreme doubt to your heart. However, in the end of the day, it was victory that kept me coming back for more. Rowing made me into the person that I am today.

That being said, I also dealt with something that I believe no one else has ever had to deal with: contact with an alien. This alien happened to be my coach. And I do not mean from another country; I mean, from another planet. You are probably quite skeptical right now and are wondering if I have any proof for this claim. If you had asked me even when I was on the team, I would have looked at you as if you were the alien in question and had three heads. No, I was not sure of anything for the longest time, but by the time I had graduated, I was as certain that my coach was an alien as the sport of rowing was difficult. 

My coach was an odd one, but usually when you spend large amounts of time with someone for four years, you tend to pick up on their quirks and idiosyncrasies. My coach had plenty of them, but this should not mean that he was an alien, right? He had quite a method of remembering names, and usually it never worked. Twice he named people who did not exist as captains of the team, and he would come up with statements and words of advice that did not make sense in any known language on this planet, especially English. On other days he would claim to speak other languages such as Spanish or German, but judging by his many attempts, I really doubted that he did. He had an odd obsession with ducks and always quacked at them when he passed in his motorboat. My teammates and I would constantly discuss his craziness but we could never put our finger on the reason for it. Maybe he was just a quirky guy? For some reason, I did not buy that either.

So I go back thirty-five years to when I was eighteen years of age. The year was 2010, and it was one of those early morning practices in March where every drop of water that landed on our three layers of clothing froze solid. The one difference though, was that instead of having practice at a normal time such as 8 o’clock, or even 7, we sat on the water at 5 a.m. While we  stood on the dock with our boat in the water, grumbling that we were up at such an extraordinarily early time, let alone working out on less than four hours of sleep, our coxswain had an even bigger problem to figure out: it was still pitch black out, as the sun did not rise for another hour and a half! Of course, when this situation was brought to the attention of our coach, he laughed it off and said, “Oh, I have a light for the boat. Hold on.” At this, he proceeded to take a little reflector out of his pocket, which, since there was no light for it to reflect, did not help this problem at all. As he bent down to put the reflector on the bow of the boat, an extremely strange sight caught my eye and caused me to do a double take. By this time my eyes had grown somewhat accustomed to the darkness, and I saw an odd glow in Coach’s eyes as he looked into the reflector while he put it on the boat. I nudged one of my teammates, and pointed at Coach’s eyes.  “How are his eyes reflecting light if there isn’t any light to begin with?” I asked, to which my teammate just shrugged and whispered something about it being too early to think about anything.

I tried to shrug this off as I climbed into the boat and began to row, hands numb from the cold and muscles heavy from lack of sleep. As soon as we began our pieces, the glowing eyes slipped my mind as I was too busy worrying about not passing out from exhaustion. It was still dark out and I could barely make out the back of my teammate sitting in front of me. The only reason I knew that I was on the water was the motion of the boat and the slight splash of freezing-cold water on my legs. Even the coxswain’s voice was subdued as I assumed that he must have been scared to death. Having to maneuver a boat filled with eight other people on a river in complete darkness sounds like a terrible task, and I began to think about the possibility of crashing into something like a bridge or the riverbank due to our coxswain’s blindness. I was yanked out of my daydreaming when I heard a strange sound coming from somewhere outside of our boat. I looked out of the boat and peered through the darkness; out of the corner of my eye I could see that my teammates who were behind me in the boat were not paying attention to this sound.

       I continued to squint through the darkness and saw that there was a strange light moving along with us. After a few moments, I realized that it was Coach’s eyes. I watched as he maneuvered the launch that he was in further up the river past our boat, and thought, “Why would he leave us here in the dark?” Again, I noticed that none of my teammates had changed their body language which meant that I was the only one seeing these strange turn of events. At this I knew something was definitely wrong. My gaze followed him up the river as we continued along, and I did not care if I messed up the consistency of the strokes. When Coach reached this one inlet along the side of the river which contained a few old, rotting docks, I saw a really strange flash of light and a shadowy figure emerge. I let out a yell, and apparently it was quite loud as the coxswain asked if we needed to stop the boat because it sounded like I was in pain. I did not answer, but swung my head in the direction of the light, which had passed. I could still make out Coach and his glowing eyes talking to a shadowy figure on the dock. Before I could catch my breath to finally acknowledge this strange sight aloud, a whirring noise became very audible. A large shadow seemed to descend from the trees on the river bank and hovered above the shadowy figure to which Coach still seemed to be talking. Our boat came to a stop as everyone strained their eyes through the darkness in order to see the strange transaction that was happening before us. We were dumbfounded; all of a sudden the whirring stopped and the two shadows seemed to rise up and disappear. Coach turned around, the glow in his eyes fading. He powered the boat back over to us and held up his megaphone and said, “Why’d you guys stop? I was just talking to some ducks!” Up and down the boat, we looked at one another, realized that we had no idea what was going on, and started rowing again. 

That day will always stay with me. Although I have no physical proof that he is of another world, I firmly believe in what I saw, and I have eight other witnesses that agree with me. Whatever did occur that one, dark morning was truly a strange sight, and I swear on my life that I am telling the truth. Ducks, indeed!

Product Treatment - Blog Post #4

“Screaming” Alarm Clock

This treatment is for a screaming alarm clock. It will be adaptable by the person using it. It will contain a squirt gun that sprays water if snooze is hit too many times. It will also contain a recorder and a speaker so that the person may record a sound or a voice that makes them wake up. Hence the “screaming” alarm clock.

The target audience will be for teenagers/young adults. High school students could find it useful, but they usually have their parents to wake them up, so this will mainly be targeted at college students and those just out of college who need to adapt to the career life.

This product will be advertised using magazine ads (whatever college kids read), Internet advertisements on popular sites like Facebook and Twitter, on television (most likely on MTV or Comedy Central), and on billboards located near college towns.

Left vs. RIght Brain Test - Blog Post #3

  According to the Left vs. Right: Which Side Are You On? test, I surprisingly answered all 18 questions as a left-brained person. While reading the various descriptions before I took the test, I was really unsure in which category I fit because I thought that I sided with both left-brained and right-brained responses, and that it depended on the situation for my brain to react in either manner. The one line that stood out to me in the description was where it said, “If you are left brained....you complete tasks in order and take pleasure in checking them off when they are accomplished.” I found this extremely funny because that was exactly what I was doing to all my readings for Idea Development; as I got through each one, I put a check mark on the cover page to let myself know that I had just completed them. However, I had no way of knowing that I would answer all 18 questions without using the right side of my brain.

  Since I am considered to be left-brained, I supposedly think linearly, which means that I process information in a straightforward manner. This goes hand in hand with the next step, which states that think sequentially, which means that I start from the beginning and go to the end. The example states that a right-brained person may need to know the overall topic when learning something in detail; I do not believe this is the case for me, as I pick up on information as it comes to me and I am able to process and draw conclusions from that information. Therefore, I am indeed a left-brained person. It also states that left-brained people are good spellers. The next category, in which left-brained people process information through symbols versus right-brained people absorbing information through concrete examples, is a little bit murkier. I am able to learn from symbols and words, especially when I reread my own notes, but then I am reacting through visualizing concrete examples. However, I do think in a logical manner; when I come up with answers, it is usually because I have gone step by step in order to guarantee the best answer possible. I rarely guess when trying to figure something out. i am also able to verbally express myself, which is another aspect of being left-brained. Nevertheless, I have no sense of direction whatsoever, so when I give directions to someone, I have a hard time doing so without visualizing the locations in my head; therefore, I believe I fail that aspect of being left-brained. Last but not least, I am able to adapt to my environment, as much as it usually pains me to do so. I am usually one set in my ways, as I am a linear, organized person; however, if something is out of my comfort zone, I will usually go the extra distance to force myself to be uncomfortable, because, after all, it helps me to be a broader person in the end. In doing so, though, I do not cross boundaries or rules; I am a fairly obedient person, and the rules in life need to be respected. This is one of the reasons why I did so well in high school. Although I would procrastinate like no tomorrow, my own system of completing tasks would work in the end, and I would do well. This was especially true since I was able to adapt to new situations and to build off of what I had already learned in order to improve my basis of knowledge. 

  Although I can draw, at least in the sense that I can copy what I see, and although I love movies and the creative aspect behind movies, I just do not think creatively to the point where I can come up with my own amazing ideas. I can work off of ideas that already exist, just like I can copy a picture of something that already exists, but I cannot draw something off the top of my head; my brain just does not work like that. This has led me to want to become either a movie critic or another profession that involves a more logically-based system for developing and nurturing ideas.