1. I wish I could reflect on this unit and say that my perceptions of charity and philanthropy have been wildly altered, and that I now have this profound appreciate for the joy of giving back to others. But the truth is, I’m a pretty self centered person, and my credo has long been to take care of myself before others, with family being the exception. Maybe that’s not the best way to go through life, but it’s gotten me this far. So I feel more or less exactly the same on the matter: it’s important, but there are plenty of people with more money and more time than me to do it.
2. I did not attend the field trip, so I take it I am exempt from answering this question.
3. Well, we raised $65 from canning outside a supermarket for a few hours, so it’s a bit easier than expected to raise some money for a good cause, albeit one that’s arguably less important than say, child cancer research. In the future, I reckon it would be wise to use social media and the internet to my advantage, making a GoFundMe page as well and promoting it on social media to receive even more donations.
4. At the moment I feel wildly unqualified answering this question, as my worldview seems to change as frequently as my hairstyles, but I could see a future in which I support some cause(s) in one way or another. That would likely be in the form of non monetary promotion, but who knows? Maybe there’ll be a huge market for cripplingly sad folk-jazz-punk-afrocuban-noise music one day.

Sparkle Motion got Jazz House Kids to come, and it was an enlightening experience. Frankly, I’m not sure if anything “impressed” me, mainly because we were bombarded with information from 6 different people all trying to sell us something. If anything surprised me, it would be that Jazz House Kids wants to come full circle and expand into the elderly too. That’s pretty hip to me. I want to learn about how to get involved with Jazz House, and Melissa expressed mutual interest, so opening a line of communication is up there on the priorities list, right under worshipping The Shaggs for their musical virtuosity and immaculate beauty expressed through sound. Overall, I feel much better about getting Jazz House Kids on board, because I find their whole organization way cooler and more interesting than initially expected.

I interpreted the brown paper bag exercise as a way for us to get to know one another by sharing our general interests/things that could sum up our personalities in a way. That’s cool and I definitely saw a different side of some of my classmates. One example being that there are a whole lot of lacrosse players. I can’t say I was surprised by most people listing their phone as an item, given our age and the tremendously scary and influence role Apple has played in our collective being. For myself, I realized how much of a bitch social anxiety can be, and that reading Infinite Jest (one of my items) is a form of masochism in a weirdly enjoyable way. I can’t say I’m necessarily more connected with my classmates, but I can say I know more about each of them individually.

Getting the MAD cards down from 20 to 6 proved more difficult than anticipated, solely because I found little to no interest in three of the six. However, this proved useful when working down to three, as I immediately knew which ones I wanted to pick. I ended up with arts, environmental protection, and religion/spirituality. Arts was the obvious first choice for me, being a musician and all, and one of my preferred ways of filling my mandated community service hours is doing trails work, so environmental protection came easy. Religion/spirituality was interesting because I don’t really consider myself to be “religious” (it baffles and intrigues me that people can such vehement faith in something that arguably can’t be proven into existence), but with more contemplation I thought about how strong of a role spirituality and eastern philosophy, and to some degree, faith, has played in my life. I wouldn’t exactly say my parters card choices were an enlightening look at his personality, but they painted some vague picture so I guess that was something.