The Internet is For Porn

We’re always taught not to talk to strangers, and the horrors of chat rooms and Internet predators are engraved in our heads from the age we start using computers.  One day, I went into a chat room for one of my favorite bands, The Maine.  I had no clue what to expect, but the nicest group of people welcomed me.  We’re not all the same age or race and we come from places like the United States, the Netherlands, Germany and Canada.

            It’s been a year since I first went in that chat room, and I still talk to everyone everyday.  Our conversations don’t center on the band that brought us together, but also our personal lives, school, family troubles and so much more.  This group of people probably knows more about me then people I see on a daily basis and for that I am so grateful.

            We may not all have the chance to see each other at some point in our lives, but to us that doesn’t matter, we’re happy just being able to talk to each other on a daily basis.  Text messages, video chats, and other forms of communication have helped us form our own little misfit family.  If I had never entered the chat room that day, I would never have met the best people to enter my life in the past year and eventually we will all have the chance to meet.  For some of us, that may occur sooner than others, but we have The Maine to thank for all of this.  The Internet can be a dangerous place if you misuse it, but it has helped me open up to these girls in ways I never thought possible, all because of a chat room and our mutual love for one band.

Word Count: 300

Point:  You don't need to see someone on a regular basis in order to call them your best friends.

My love/hate relationship with English classes

In tenth grade, I had a teacher that didn’t like teaching high school students.  I watched her scream in student’s faces and throw things across the room.  Unfortunately, my experience with her was slowly spiraling downwards and it reached an ultimate low when she accused me of plagiarism.  I had no interest in the book we read so my work was not my best, but I’d always been good at writing papers.  When she handed back our papers, she could not believe that it was my own work and since then I’ve tended to strongly dislike English classes. 

Word Count: 98

Oddly enough, my best experience was when taking English 100 here at UMBC.  Professor Dunnigan was an odd man but he knew how to get the students involved in our discussions, and the topics for our papers were interesting to analyze and write about.  I’ve never liked being told what to read, but the books we were expected to read were just as interesting as the lectures we had to sit through.  One class with Professor Dunnigan changed the way my entire high school career had shaped my hatred for English classes and the books we were forced to read.

Word Count: 100