19. Finally, final presentation

It was a sunny Wednesday, I woke up with the sound of the birds...
Ok I was trying to be funny. I did not woke up with the sound of the birds.
First I woke up with the sound of my alarm which is very annoying.
Then Nil called, she asked if I am coming to breakfast or not.
This happens every morning, every morning we call each other and ask each other if we are going to breakfast or not.
Every time we convince each other to go to breakfast.
It is a very good habit to go to breakfast because it makes you more energetic and you go to every lecture by the help of breakfast.
Then Ayşe texted me about out meeting at 8.00 am in the cafeteria so I had no excuse to spend more time in the bed.
I got out of the bed and got ready and run to the cafeteria.
Nil was waiting for me and no one was there so I took an açma and coffee and then Ayşe and Bahar came.
They also got their açmas and coffee and our meeting started.
Everything was clear and fine, we have gone through for the last time and then we were ready.
After NS we went to the English class.
First there was the Truman Show presentation.
They were really nice and actually watching them made calm because I realize that there nothing to be worry about, we are going to stand there and we are going present what we have prepared.
It was our turn.
We made a good start I guess.
I tried to slowed down myself according to Sonja's advices.
Everyone in our group was aware of what they were doing and did not become nervous.
Therefore I think we made a very good presentation.
Just a small confession; we managed to meet more for our practice presentation but although we could not meet a lot, we were well organized and we did our best.
Thanks to my teammates for being nice all the time and my friends for listening us with respect...

18. Our final presentation

I don't understand why I am out of luck.
I don't like to be a whiner but I guess I should do it this time.
My close friends know that I am not the luckiest person in the world but I am thankful for everything I have and I good coincidence that I have gone through.
However, when I miss the boat or shuttle for a stupid reason I feel sad.
You might say that these are very little things but when it happens all the time, I feel bad.
So, what is the relation between my luck and Eng 101 presentations, let me tell you.
Our practice presentation was on December 9, which was the next day of my birthday.
I am not a celebration kid but come on, no one wants to work on a homework or a presentation during their birthday.
I did not mention this or complain about this because I had wonderful teammates. I told them about this issue 1 month before the presentation and they accepted to work on the presentation before that day. Our presentation was ready 2 days before the due date.
For the final presentation everything was the same.
I had my high school reunion before the presentation day, which means I was out, I had fun, I saw my friends together. (You might say you could go and see time later but it is not the same, everyone goes to different schools, lots of them are studying abroad so that night was also important for me.)
Anyways, I came back to school at 00.30 and I met Ayşe. We were almost done but we had to add some pictures and talk about some details. I went to her study room, everything was wonderful, we had music and also water. So we started to work. It was 3.30 am when I was leaving and Ayşe was saying that I am going to practice more.
I hope everyone will love our presentation and it would worth...
I know from high school, sleeping is not the most important thing, you could live without it : )

17. About the final presentation

At the beginning I thought that presenting a short story is harder than a movie because you have more to read. However now I think it is harder to present a movie because you don't have everything in front of you. You need to watch and write every single detail very carefully. To catch the small jokes, sometimes you need to go back and watch it again, watch it again and watch it again. Thank god that all the movies that we are presenting are fun to watch and also fun to think about them. Although we shared the topics in our group, we need to be more aware of the general information about the movie. Anyways, enough with the complains lets move on with the positive parts. Our movie is "The Full Monty" and I am watching it for the first time. It was the only movie that I did not watch before so I am a little bit lucky, I am watching a new movie. If you wonder my first impression about the movie, it was very funny but in a different way. You feel sorry at the same time. Also the accent that actors and actresses use is very hard to understand so it was not very easy to follow the subtitles and watch the movie. However I am glad that our presentation movie is "The Full Monty".

16. Mini Christmas Concert

Today I went to the mini Christmas concert at Information Center and it was very nice. I always wanted to talk aloud at the Information Center because I was wondering how it will be like. Last week we stayed until 21.30 and we managed to speak aloud. It was very nice to speak aloud there.

But today it was totally different. I watched a little video, a boy was playing a flute at Information Center and it was magical. Today I listened the choir and it was also magical. They put a Christmas tree behind them. Little girls were running around while they were singing and two of the girls wore princess dresses so they looked like angels. There was hot wine with cinnamon and it was also very nice. I liked the new year lights at Information Center.

So overall it was very nice to be there. I didn't know all the songs but I enjoyed it a lot. I hope there will be more activities like this one so that we could spread our happiness around.

15. A game called "Go"

I am not sure how many of you heard about Go but it is a board game and usually people compare it with chess and backgammon. However for me it is very different than chess and backgammon.

To play the game you need the board, black and white stones and two players. That's all. If you can't find the board you can draw the lines on the board on a piece of paper and make the little stones with paper. You could continue to play with those primitive ways because these things are not very important in this game.

I hope you wonder what is the important thing about this game? So let me tell you the important thing is: YOU. While playing you show your all characteristics to your opponent. Your every move has a meaning. I hate this question "so what's the purpose of this game?" and I really don't know how to explain this.

At 6th grade, when I first learn how to play this game our instructor told us that your purpose is to gain more area but this is not the case. When you go into the philosophy of the game and when you start to think of the meanings of the moves, you realize that this game never repeat itself and you learn a lot about yourself and about your opponent as you play the game.

14. How I feel about Billy Elliot

Billy Elliot. I watched this movie 8 years ago and I felt very sad about it. I don't know how to explain my feelings but I definitely remember how I feel about Billy. I just can't bear what he has gone through and I thought that this is not fair.

He was just a boy who has passion and a dream. It was very hard understand why his father accept him as he is. I always think that fathers and mothers love their children as they are, nothing will change this. Well maybe if the children is lying or stealing or because of any other bad thing that they did the parents want to warn the children or maybe punish them but they won't deny their child.

During those 8 years I changed a lot but I don't know I just can't feel very comfortable about Billy Elliot. Maybe because I was very young that movie had big effects on me but I can't predict my reaction to this movie.

I will watch it again anyways...

13. New Year

First of all, I would like to thank Sonja because I had fun today. I learned some new things and also I had fun at the same time. We first we played the grammar game and if you are to compete with others then it becomes more fun so it was very fun. Then we ate cookies that Sonja made for us and it was a very kind attitude. I wasn't expecting something like that and I became very happy and someone thinks us and bakes cookies for us. :) . After that we listened 2 songs. The first one called "I'd love to change the world" (so do I) and it was a very nice song. I also want and wanted to change the world but I don't and didn't know what to do and did so I don't want to leave it up to anybody but what should I do? Who is going to change the world if I don't? People even doesn't care about the other people around them. Even no one says "çok yaşa" if someone sneezes. We don't know how to say "thank you" or "özür dilerim" and we are expecting a change in the world. How would the world change if we don't change?
I really don't know. These topics are very hard to understand and it is better not to be mean to world.
but still;
"I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do"
About the second song maybe you might hear from me saying "you may say I am a dreamer" before because I use it a lot especially when I start a silly sentence. Anyways I love that song too so I was really happy during the class. Then thanks to Sonja she let me play Nil's song. If you loved them you could listen more here: www.myspace.com/nilvegitari
I wasn't very happy about the Obama song because I don't like it a lot. Then our time was up so we left class.

About the new year, I don't understand the concept of new year. Maybe we are celebrating new year because we need some things that we could celebrate as a result we celebrate every single, silly thing.

I wish I could make a list that I am going to do and I am not going to do during the new year but unfortunately I cannot think of any. So Merry Christmas to Sonja and an early happy new year to you all :)

12.You can leave your hat on...

If you watched the movie you might understand the title but if you didn't let me tell you the topic of this post: it is going to be about the movie called "The Full Monty".
That movie will be the topic of our final presentation. I watched it on a Sunday night at our Information Center. I learned something because of this movie (thank you very much Ayşe, again), we could watch some movies online in campus by using Information Center's website. I couldn't believe this until I managed to open the movie. Also I thought that I can only watch it at the Information Center but then Ayşe told me that I can watch it everywhere at campus so it was a little funny. I couldn't watch the last 10 minutes on Sunday night and I was wondering what happened at the end and then Ayşe told me that I can watch it everywhere so after NS I went to my room and watch the end.

It was a very sincere movie. It was not like the Hollywood movies. Even though it is hard to understand the accents, if you get the jokes it became very funny. I don't know how classify this movie (please don't say, then don't classify it let it stay alone) but it is separated easily from the other 'funny' movies.

For our final presentation I will again present the characters but also this time rather than symbols I will be presenting the background of the script writes and the director so that we could make an overall glance on the movie and we could find an answer to this question: "Why those guys used gender issues rather then other popular topics?" .

11.Into The Wild

I watched the movie called "Into The Wild".
I have lots of comments and dozens of ideas about the movie but I don't know, I am afraid to be misunderstood.
Anyways, I don't want to write "oh everyone should watch this movie, it has lots of important things and bla bla bla" but, (here comes the but) there is a quote that I would like to mention which is:
“Happiness only real when shared.”
Sometimes people use these kind of slogans in the advertisements and we make fun of them.
We shouldn't do that because this is so true...

I feel very happy when somebody share his/her happiness with me because some people only share their sadness.
I think we should share our happiness too so that people around us also become happy.


P.S.: I realized that I used so many "I" in this post, I am not a selfish person but I used lots of "I" in this post. (Should I use "I"?)

10. Something about our presentation

We did our presentation and now I am writing what I feel about our presentation.
As my classmates know, we presented a short story called "The Man Who Was Almost a Man".
As I mentioned during our presentation first I don't like the story because I didn't read it carefully. But then I read it carefully and I found it interesting. I tried to understand Dave etc etc.

Let's move on with the presentation...
Ayşe, Bahar and Onur were in my group and we worked a lot on our presentation. We met 3 times. Some of them were not very efficient but even those meetings we came up with lots of different ideas.

It was really easy to share who is going to present what, we were very kind to each other.
Moreover everyone did what they supposed to do so I was very lucky, responsibility is the most important thing with those kind of project.

In addition to these as a group we did our best.

For self evaluation, I guess I should be honest to myself.
I have problem and I don't know how to fix this and also I guess I don't want to fix it anyway because I feel comfortable that way.
For every kind of literature analysis, I cannot find the right answer. I have my own truths and it is very hard to find the "real or literature" truth. First I found my own truth, then the teacher says the literature truth and s/he convinces me and we move on. This has never changed. It was like this in middle school, in high school and I was very hopeful about the university but NO, I am still the same and I don't feel sad about this. For example when we read a poem, everyone make the same comment about an obvious symbol but then I make a totally different comment. Fortunately or unfortunately (depends on you point of view) this situation was same with my analysis on Dave.

About my use of language and fluency, I guess I did well. Of course I had some errors and spelling mistakes but overall I guess I was fine. Also I am sure that our final project will be better.

Thank you everyone for listening us and preparing good presentations....

9. Killing us softly

Well I did not blog much lately so I feel a little strange so I will start with something personal.

I realized that I watched this movie in 11th grade with my marvelous English teacher. She was the best teacher I have ever had. Also this is true for most of my classmates. Then at the end of 11th grade, she left school. She was too good for us I think. Anyways I just remembered her when I saw the video and I felt different. Now she has a baby isn't it wonderful?

I would like to answer this question: "Do you feel that the media reflect or create the ideal image of beauty in our society – or both?"

I wonder who could say that "No, media does not create the ideal image of beauty."
Media creates almost all of our ideas. Media manipulates us. How can we deny that media does not affect us? It is impossible. I am not watching TV at Sabancı and also I don't read newspapers a lot. I just check the news and move on. I feel like I am changing. I feel like I don't judge or criticize people, ideas or any other thing that I judged or criticized before. This is because I am far away from the mass media.
As mentioned in the video, Killing us Softly, advertisements sell products. However also advertisements sell values, images, concepts of love and success. Unfortunately this is true and some of us don't realize this before someone mentions this. This is very sad. If media has the power to change our values then media must have the power to change our ideal image of beauty.

I always believe that today it is very easy to become beautiful because media gives us the formula, if you become skinny, if you have a small nose, if you are tall, if you have big eyes, if you have long hair and if you smile all the time then you are beautiful. It is that easy.

If you are fat, if you have big nose, if you don't smile, if you are short then sorry; you are ugly.

It is very hard to find a fat top model or it is very hard find a fat girl on a billboard. So sad...

We don't watch fat people in a Hollywood movie.

Why?

(irritating silence)


For me, no one is ugly because we are all different.