Movie Review

I love watching movies. My Father, 2 of my brothers, and my best friend are all HUGE movie buffs. One of the best movies I've ever seen is Inception. A large group of us saw that movie the day that it came out, and we were so intrigued and confused and in search of answers, that we went and paid to go see it again the next day. After the second time we watched the movie, we were able to draw some better conclusions and we caught some vital things that we missed. The movie is essentially about a man who goes into peoples dreams. He wants to go in this one man's dream and give him an idea, but he wants confuse him so much that the guy thinks he came up with the idea on his own, and Leonardo DiCaprio didn't give it to him. It's tough for me to explain because the movie is so complicated, but it's extremely entertaining and suspenseful and every intelligent person would enjoy it. I say intelligent not to offend, but because you really have to sit and pay attention to the movie to even understand it, let alone speculate on it, and an unintelligent person is incapable of doing such. I give this movie two thumbs up!

Art Review

I'm a sucky artist. I have bad handwriting, I've never drawn anything that looked good, and I don't have an "eye." I had an uncle who was an artist. He was extremely talented; we have a lot of his pieces hanging up in our house. I got NONE of his artistic genes. Sadly, he is one of the only artists I know. I really need to expand my horizons, because i really like looking at art. I thought all of the things we saw in the Banksy movie (can't think of the name right now) were extremely creative and enjoyable to look at. My personal favorit artist is a guy named Ernie Barnes. We have a piece of his in our house called Skins and Shirts. I like his style of painting, and I also like it because it involves basketball. I think the detail in this picture looks good, and I like how stretchy and abnormal the people look. I associate this picture with my childhood, because I have been seeing it in my house my entire life.

McCarthy's Birthday week

I'm sorry I missed your bday Mr. McCarthy. This is actually the week my grades dropped in all my classes, because this is the week we went down state, and this week and the week before this one I was focused solely on basketball. I hope this week went better for you than it did for me. This was one of the worst weeks I've ever experienced. I ended my high school basketball career on 2 losses, which resulted in a total of 4 losses for the season. This was bad, because in the lockerroom after the last game my coach said she was extremely disappointed in us, and she couldn't remember the last time she ended the season with so many losses. That was on March 7, which was a saturday, I think. Or maybe it was Saturday March 6th. This was the Saturday of your birthday weekend. Hopefully this was a good Saturday for you. Hopefully you and your wife and your kids got together with all your neighbors and friends and barbecued and ate birthday cake and opened presents and watched college basketball. Hopefully your parents and distant relatives sent you some money in the mail that saturday. If all that stuff really did happen, I wish we could have switched shoes that saturday.
Just kidding, you deserve to celebrate your bday weekend. You can keep that saturday.
Happy belated.

X marks the spot/X is known

Malcolm X was my favorite book we read this whole year. I am almost embarrassed to say that I had never read the Autobiography of Malcolm X before this year, I had only seen the Spike Lee movie. I learned alot about him during this unit, and it made me feel like he should be recognized more than he is. He viewed the world differently than a lot of people, but he is definitely responsible for the advancement of african americans during that time. We grew up knowing the date of Martin Luther King's assassination, and we have a holiday for his birthday, but until i read this book I knew neither about Malcolm X. I wonder why that is...

Album/Track Review

The album I choose to review is My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West.
Kanye West is one of my personal favorite artist. I am hugely biased because he is from Chicago and I am a Chicagoan to my core. That not withstanding, from Chicago or not, Kanye West is wildly talented. Something I find special about him, is that fact that he is equally great at rapping and producing. I thought everything on the album was good, but what I liked the most was the Runaway extended video. I had heard a lot of people talking about it, but I first heard it when I visited my brother in Virginia and he had it playing on a big screen back in November. I watched the whole video... all 30 minutes of it... in one sitting. We watched it, analyzed it, then watched it again. This was before the album came out, so I had never heard any of these songs, and Kanye hadn't come out with anything big in a while, and this was HUGE. I thought all of the special effects in the video and all if the imagery was beautiful. When I got home I made my parents sit down and watch the whole thing as well. I never heard of anyone who had done something like that before; make a music video using almost every song on the album. I think it was a great marketing idea because now that everyone had gotten a taste of what the album was going to be like, it made people more likely to buy it. Again, credits due to Kanye West's creative and innovative mind.

I know this means something

I have been playing basketball literally my whole life. All of a sudden, after my high school career ended, and now that I am presented with the option of playing in college, I have the urge to stop playing. I don't know what's wrong with me. I used to get mad at people when they quit playing basketball. I couldn't see why anyone would want to quit, or how they could quit for that matter. It is hard to explain the way I feel about basketball at this point in my life. I am still trying to recover from the constant stress and physical and mental exhaustion from the system I have been in for the past 5 years of my life. Now that I am on the outside looking in, I don't see how or why I abided by some of the things I did. I know that without being apart of the Lady Dolphin/Lady Fire/Irvin family, I would not be the person I am today, and I would not have met some of the best friends I've ever had. I was apart of something epic, and I appreciate that daily, but some of the heartbreak and disappoint I've experienced with basketball is tough. It takes a lot out of you. There are some things I wish that would have happened differently, but I'm not going to sit here and dwell on them. I love basketball to death, but I don't have the desire to be in a system like I was all through high school. I don't want it to the be be all end all of my life like it has been so far. I want it to be enjoyable 100% of the time, I can't afford to be emotionally affected negatively by basketball anymore. I have a huge drive and desire to go to college and finish at the top of my class. I don't think I can play D1 college basketball and graduate at the top of my class and intern and network etc. I am willing to sacrifice what I love the most for my success. I KNOW that means something.

Ultimate Recipe

I do not know many recipes I am sad to say. I actually mentioned to my father yesterday that I need to learn how to cook for my husband (boyfriend) as well as Khloe Kardashian cooks for Lamar Odom. I probably can count the items i know how to cook, but I am very good at cooking them. The items I can make from scratch are macaroni and cheese, waffles, pancakes, and brownies. Once, on one lonely summer afternoon, kennise and I decided to teach me something new. She instructed me to make a cherry pie. It ended up being the most delicious pie i had ever eaten. This is monumental, because i actually hate pie. I hate everything that oozes with fruit; pop tarts, danishes, jelly filled donuts, i think all of that stuff is gross. But there was something about this pie. I think part of the reason the pie was so good is because we made the crust from scratch. It was sweet, and when we cooked it it was so sweet and flaky and delicious. The cherries we pitted were extremely ripe, and turned out great when we put them in the oven. We added some sort of raspberry liquor to the pie as well, and i put in too much sugar, which bade well for the pie of course. i dont remember all of the ingredients, soi i cant successfully portray the ultimate recipe, but take my word for it, THIS PIE WAS DELICIOUS. you never would have known that i made it myself. people would have spent money to eat that pie. I was so proud and impressed with myself.