One Quesiton and a lot of Advice

This weekend was filled with holiday excitement. We had the annual Christmas party on my mom's side on Saturday night, and then all of my dad's family at our house earlier today. It was wonderful to see so much of my family; Some I had seen as late as this Thanksgiving, but for others, the last time we saw each other was last Christmas. Of course the only thing anybody seemed to ask me was "where are you going to college?". If I had a dollar for every time I was asked that question, I think I might have enough money to afford an application fees. At one point I considered just gathering everyone together, allowing me to only give the college speech just once. Right now I have no idea where I'm going, in fact, I haven't even submitted all of my applications yet! I found it even hard to come up with an answer to the question, " well what's your top choice?". I don't know. I really like a lot of the places I've applied to and that's why I've applied to them.

But through my many conversations with adults who have gone through the whole college thing and older cousins currently in college, I came away with a lot of advice. Everybody I talked to had to add their two cents from their college experience. Although some of the tips were rather trivial, I did leave the parties with some really sound advice. The first pointer was that there are no bad decisions. Every place I could get into is a great school, and I will most likely be happy at any of them. The other, more important piece of advice came from my older cousin who is currently a sophomore at RIT. He told me the most important thing is to pick classes and only do things that are interesting to you. He said from personal experience that he has taken some classes just because they were supposed to be easy. Unfortunately, they turned out to be pretty demanding, and overall, were just not fun.  Although I did get pretty tired of talking about my college plans, it was really great to talk to so many people who went through the same thing I am going through right now. 

Two Weeks

     In exactly two weeks time, I will be sitting around the living room with my family with the tree fully illuminated, watching Christmas classics as we do every Christmas eve. I always look forward to the holiday season and everything that comes with it. Although getting into "the Christmas spirit", is merely a saying, the season really does have a physical and emotional effect on our society. However, with only two weeks left until the big day itself, I have found it difficult to get into the spirit. There are a number of reasons that contribute to my lack of holiday cheer.

     The first is the weather. It does not feel nor look like the classic New England Christmas that I have come to expect. For me, it still feels like October and November, and I still see people raking leaves. For the past couple weeks the average temperature has been around 50 degrees. I haven't even bothered taking out my winter coat yet. Another big problem with the weather is the lack of snow. Now obviously I wish we had snow for other reasons, (SKIING!), but for me, Christmas needs snow. It is so strange to drive around and see Christmas decorations and lights with no snow around them. I hate driving past houses with elaborate cheerful holiday decorations, only to be ruined by the barren, and quite frankly, dead lawn. I know it's pretty cliché, but I am really hoping for "a white Christmas".

     The other big reason I'm not in the holiday spirit is simply, college applications. I've doing a lot of the same for the past month and a half now, and I can honestly say, I'm pretty sick of it. The monotony of writing essays, sending scores, doing this and that over and over is starting to get to me. Last weekend we put up and decorated our tree, a great holiday tradition right? In our house it is typically a fun thing that we take the time to enjoy together. This year is was about a 30 minute break in between doing things for college. Luckily I am almost done with everything, so I can get back to enjoying the "most wonderful time of the year"!.       

FIFA

There are many shocking events that occur so frequently in our society that when we hear about them, we aren't as nearly surprised as we should be. This week, 16 more FIFA officials were criminal charged. This is part of a now 92 count indictment, including charges of racketeering, money laundering and wire fraud, and corruption. And we're not talking about a slipping a couple of ones under the table kind of bribes, these bribes add up to hundreds of MILLIONS of dollars! Now you think that this sort of thing should be incredibly shocking right, the only thing is that this has happened before! Last May, the FBI lead a raid on the FIFA headquarters, obtained serious evidence, and arrest a number of high ranking officials. It was one of those things that everybody knew, and it was only a matter of time until someone put this corrupt organization in its place. At this point, they are a comically transparent organization. A "non-profit" with over $ 1,000,000,000 in the bank. Even their selections for future world cup destinations are ridiculous. The only logical explanation for the 2022 World Cup being in Qatar is bribery, because while else would anyone actually want to play soccer in desserts where civilization barely exists at the moments. There are stadium that are scheduled to be built in places that don’t even exist yet. If anyone hasn't seen the John Oliver segment on how ridiculous FIFA really is, I would highly encourage it. He perfectly exposes all the crap that FIFA tries to pull. My personal favorite was how he called out Jack Warner, the former FIFA VP of CONCACAF. Warner publically came out saying that it was the US that was corrupt not FIFA. To prove his point, he presented an article that claimed the US forced FIFA to give them a special 2015 World Cup. Sounds crazy, right? Warner, remember a very high ranking FIFA official, was quoting an article directly from "The Onion". This is just one of many outrageous things that have happened within FIFA over the last year or so. I can't wait to see what they try next.