It's a jungle out there

A lot of people are astonished when I tell them I'm from Pennsylvania.

"Like in the woods?"

Yes.

"Are there bears?"

Yes.

That's probably the biggest question I get. For some reason, it always shocks me. Bears don't. I've grown accustomed to seeing garbage strewn all over the lawn by a bear's effort to find food. I've seen bears run across the street while I'm driving or running through the woods while my friends are having a bonfire.

I'm not afraid of bears, I don't know why anyone would be. What people aren't afraid of that they should be are people.

In the concrete jungle of New York City, there are no bears to maul you, but that doesn't suggest you won't be mauled. There's always that person on the subway that sits a little too close or stares a little too much. There are thousands of people in the city as tourists every day, and on special events there's double plus many of the people who actually live here.

People should be scared of each other, not animals.

Bears won't bother you unless you give them reason to. Sadly, people aren't like that. They're rationality isn't always fully there and that's when they become more dangerous than animals.

Living in fear all the time isn't the way to go, though. People need to be able to ride in crowded subways and accept the fact that they're all doing the same thing; trying to live in an overpopulated jungle. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't always be alert.

Whether you're in the concrete jungle or the wilderness, the world will eat you up if you let it. But everyone should be open to the experience of both wild habitats and embrace them. It's the only way to live.

Customary here, not there.

When we are assigned to dorm rooms our freshman year, we never know what will happen.

Prime example: when I received a letter stating that I would have five suitemates instead of one roommate, I was already surprised. It wasn’t much of a stretch. I always lived with five other people in my family, but these were people totally different from me with totally different backgrounds.

When I got there on the first day, there were only two girls already there: an Italian girl from Long Island and a Hispanic girl from Miami. We were still waiting on three other suitemates and already we displayed an insanely diverse room.

Much like the Tri-State Area,
the "DMV" refers to DC, Maryland, and Virginia.

Turns out two suitemates dropped out, but my roommate came back to the room: a black girl from Washington DC.


As we started to make friends and fill in the room as the semester went on, we welcomed another girl from DC and a girl a town not so far from mine in Pennsylvania.

But the changes didn’t end there. One roommate moved out (back to Long Island) and we welcomed my blonde friend from New Jersey into the suite.

After a first semester of exhaustion, I made it a new routine to go to bed by 12 AM every-night. Three other girls in the suite, not to mention the girl that lives across the hall, stayed up for hours later, laughing and joking and carrying on.

Somehow, I slept through it.

My suitemates would order pizza to the room at least twice a week. I made it a point to eat the best food I could find in the dining hall.

They listened to music I had never heard before.

Sometimes, when my roommate talked to me, I had to ask her to repeat herself two or three times. Her DC accent was so thick I couldn’t understand it.

When you’re thrown into situations like this, living with strangers, you never know what you’re going to get. I, in a sense, got a tour of the whole country. I got to see different types of ways people live their daily lives that are so different from the way I always did at home.

And I grew accustomed to it.

Now, when I go home, I find it strange. When my parents go to bed at 10 or 11 at night and I’m left in the quietness, it is almost creepy. I moved to St. John’s and developed a whole new daily routine. And at the end of it, I’ll have to get myself comfortable again with how I always lived prior to this.

People are not difficult to mold. There is a difference between molding and changing and that is what I learned through dorm life. I didn’t change, and clearly my suitemates didn’t either. We all just molded our lives around each other. And we will all have to do it again this summer, and next year, and many times to follow.

FINAL

my final is titled "...So Far" as in... the biggest disappointments of the year so far. It is a half hour minutes highlighting the top ten disappointments from celebrities and songs to laws.


MCC final from Tara DeVincenzo on Vimeo.

60 second news story

Man Down

 When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices; when the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy. Proverbs 11:10

Who else but college students would be up late on a Sunday night to hear the news of Bin Laden's death? As the news flooded in through social networking sites and was screamed down the street, students were elated by the fact that a man we knew to fear had finally met his end.

Penn State's main campus, where several of my friends go to school, had thousands of students rejoicing in the street. I watched my twitter timeline as my friend from Fordham updated me and his other followers of how Fordham rejoiced in the news, tweeting things like "you know you're a d*** when your death brings a nation to celebration." Harsh, but true.

New Yorkers rejoiced in the news as it unfolded late Sunday night. source: NYTimes

Boston Common was bustling with excitement much like that of which was occurring outside the White House and at Ground Zero, where people showered the streets in champagne. The game against the Mets at Citizen's Bank Park in Philadelphia announced to spectators that the evil mastermind was dead, bringing the crowd together in jubilation.

There is no doubt that in these points of interest and scores of other places around the country, the nation is celebrating.

What more appropriate way for me to represent relocation and unity? This country has seen it before, 10 years ago when the country mourned for 9/11 victims. Last night, and today, we join together again to know that, as President Obama said, justice has been done.

This is a day for us, as Americans, to know how strong we are. We are strong in so many ways because we stand together. Being at St. John's last night proved that to me so much more. I heard the Star Spangled Banner playing like it was a brand new Wiz Khalifa party anthem. I heard my fellow students chanting "USA, USA" much similarly to the how we chant "Red Storm." I watched my Facebook newsfeed update, where my friends asked who wanted to join them to Ground Zero.

A joke played on the political situation that
made the country rejoice. source: tumblr.com

Our generation is expressing our jubilation mildly differently than the older. While the older generation is most likely watching the news and hoping to get more information, we are taking to social media, creating jokes about it and making light of a situation that has brought our country into a massive party overnight. 

All of this is history that I am witnessing first hand. All of this is making me realize that I can move around in the country, and I may tour the world, but America is always the place that will be my home. I'm proud to say that every day.

Jaded

Take the Q42 bus from Union Turnpike heading

to Union Turnpike-Kew Gardens

Take the F train to W 14th St – 6 Av 

Walk above ground, and figure it out.

Hopstop can only help you so much as to get you to the general vicinity. The rest is up to you.

Yesterday afternoon, this was me. I had an appointment to be at by 5 PM, but wanted to get there by 4 PM. It was for a tattoo, so I wanted to be there first to make sure I was attended to. That meant getting on the bus in Queens by 3 PM.

 A man attempts to entertain the hurried train riders.

This is the type of commute that hundreds of thousands of people do every single day. They do this during rush hour, in packed trains where it is easy to get irritable. They do this when they have a very imperative objective: be there on time. There is not time to stare and laugh at silly (or talented) performers, and there is no safety assurance in reaching in your pocket to give a bum a dollar.

It is no wonder they are so jaded.

I was expecting to walk straight into the parlor from street level, but instead had to get buzzed into a second story apartment to find it.

I spoke to the receptionist, to assure me that 5 o’clock was a good time to come back. My friend and I walked two blocks to Union Square Park after grabbing a Subway sandwich, and enjoyed the beautiful weather, just as so many other New Yorkers were doing.

We ate and “people-watched.” We watched people, and they could have watched us too. As a bum walked by singing Christina Aguilera, my friend and I watched and laughed. Some others did, and some others didn’t.

It’s years and years of seeing this everyday, of knowing that this sometimes needs to be ignored because there is a more important things about the day, that makes people simply disinterested.

Union Square Park is a very popular place on sunny days.
source: http://islandwoo.com

I’m still young and can still appreciate it. But as Baz Luhrmann said in his famous commencement speech “Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard.”

This is a beautiful, fruitful, unique city. Residents eventually learn that it is too normal to be exciting. People focus in the annoying tourists, the loud horns, the hours of traffic, the garbage, the high prices. All of these things cloud the dream city, making it more like Gotham.

The idea of having to be buzzed upstairs to get to a tattoo parlor alone is amazing. The space in New York City is unbelievably limited, yet we just keep building up and up and up to reach the sky.

It scares me to think that there are people who don’t soak in life, especially in this legendary city, every single day. It is such a unique experience to live here, and after too long, it gets mundane.

It may be an option to move west, but Luhrmann also warned against staying there to long because it will “make you soft.”

The truth is that this city is anything but mundane. People may not realize it while they're here, but the endless options of pizza shops and hours of stand still traffic are things you will miss when you leave.