I’ve recently come to the realization that my generation is slowly losing the ability to communicate. It’s a simple life skill, but one that is nothing short of extremely important. But now with Facebook and text messaging, it is completely possible to have entire conversations with friends, acquaintances, and even bosses without ever seeing their face or hearing their voice.

Which can lead to many an awkward situation.

An example: You meet someone. You exchange phone numbers. Instead of calling the person, you send her a quick text message to see if she’s interested in going to lunch. You throw in your usual and hard-suppressed sarcastic comment, just to make said new acquaintance giggle. She never responds. Lunch plans ruined.

Let’s dissect this encounter (which, to clarify, is an encounter from personal experience). When you aren’t actually speaking to someone, conversations can easily get muddled and mixed-up. Sarcastic comments can be read and misinterpreted as low blows and mean jokes. An accidentally inverted parenthesis can make light of bad news or an embarrassing anecdote told in confidence.

And I won’t even start on the ills of Autocorrect.

Facebook, in my opinion, is even worse.  We can’t go anywhere without checking Facebook or updating statuses.

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We are mired in a crisis. Our country is suffering from what may be the greatest dearth of leadership in its history. Economic greed has led to a financial collapse, politicians show more loyalty to their parties than the people. But if anyone in our nation’s capital is interested in learning from true leaders, there’s a group visiting this week that would love to lend some advice. The surviving veterans of the first black military pilots in American history, the Tuskegee Airmen, are in town to celebrate their 70th anniversary.

image source: npr.org via AP

It’s incomprehensible today. Denied the right to fight for your country because of the color of your skin? This wasn’t back in ancient times. It was seven short decades ago.

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When I imagined what my first trip to Europe would be like, I didn’t anticipate camping four days into the trip. But when I arrived in Oslo, Norway, the beautiful plans I had delicately crafted for months on end, frankly, blew up in my face. Stuck in the Oslo bus station, suddenly left without a place to stay, my travel companions and I threw open our guidebooks, secured the emergency tent to our already over-sized backpacks, and made our way to a nearby campsite.

Apparently, though, the word “nearby” is relative in Norway.

Three modes of transportation later, which included a bus, a tram, and the metro, the campsite appeared, covered in fog and freezing cold.

Maybe I forgot to mention it was already raining.

It was a bit foggy.

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To be honest, when I first heard the phrase “Growing Bolder,” I did not believe it could ever apply to me. How could I grow “bolder” when I’ve only done 19 years of “growing?” The math didn’t add up. My life experience was close to zero.

I sat down in an attempt to reflect on my short life and came to realize that even in the past year, I, too, was given the opportunity to “grow bolder.”

Some back-story: two years ago, I began the arduous process of applying to film school. I drowned under college brochures, took the SAT more times than I could count, and wrote essay after essay after essay. I applied to eight schools, worried that my top choice, Florida State University, a school that accepts only 30 students, would not work out. The odds were clearly stacked against me. I asked myself if it was even worth applying.

Next step college!

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Time after time, the willingness of perfect strangers to rally around a good cause (and good people) blows my mind.

I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of several quality projects, but one of my proudest moments came this week with something called The Great Fundraising Act.

image credit: The Great Balancing Act

A little bit of background — a few weeks ago, a blogger named Susan (The Great Balancing Act) announced that after weeks of feeling a pain in her neck and some other subtle symptoms, doctors dropped some horrifying news on her. [Read more...]