Senioritis is here.

This is my last semester of college and boy do I feel that senioritis.  I found this on Pinterest today and it pretty much sums it up.

The Elsa Craze

So by now, I'm assuming that most of you have seen Disney's new movie Frozen.  It's spectacular and all the things that the reviews say it is but the reaction to it has really surprised me.  Everyone on facebook and all other types of media are super obsessed with the character of Elsa, who is voiced by Idina Menzel.  

Elsa is a strong female character that goes through an amazing character transformation and gives little girls a great role model to look up to.  However, it is her sister Anna, who is voiced by Kristen Bell, who I found the most interesting and who I identified most with.

The story told in Frozen is Anna's story.  Elsa may be the one with the special powers and most evident problems to deal with but the story belongs to Anna.  I thought it was brilliant storytelling on Disney's part. It was very interesting to see through Anna's eyes as she tries to help her sister figure out how to control her powers instead of simply telling the story through Elsa's eyes.  And not to mention, who knew Kristen Bell could sing like that?  She's fabulous!  I didn't get why people were so excited that Idina Menzel was so phenomenal (as usual) when there was such a surprise as Kristen Bell's rockin pipes!  

Anyway, if you went to Frozen and were preoccupied with Elsa's fabulousness, I urge you to watch it again and let Anna's story come through.

Sometimes the Internet Describes My Childhood Perfectly

I stumbled upon this and it sums up my childhood perfectly.

Every time I went to the store with my mom, we had this constant debate.  It's kind of funny to see my childhood feelings displayed on the internet.  This probably due to the fact that someone out there on the internet felt the same way that I did.  I think this is part of the magic of the internet.  It allows us to find a kinship with others that we don't even know.  And that's kind of nice.

Tights Are Not Pants Debate

So I keep seeing this on Pinterest today and I thought I'd share.  It made me laugh.

I think it's pretty funny that there is even a question of whether or not these tights could be pants.  I think that if they are tights, they should be worn as tights and if they're pants, they should be worn as pants.  I just know that my mom and dad would kill me if I ever stepped outside of the house in tights as pants (Regardless of the fact that I am grown and moved out of the house and married. They would still have something to say about my wardrobe.)

Ken Garff Billboards

My family and my husband's family live in Salt Lake City so we travel back and forth from Provo a lot.  Because of this, I pretty much have all the billboards along the way memorized.  For the past year or so Ken Garff has been pushing the "We hear you" slogan with billboards like these:

According to the Ken Garff google plus profile and their mission is this:

"The message we're trying to convey is that our customers should expect a very different car-buying experience when visiting a Ken Garff dealership...We've learned, through extensive research with customers, that in most car-buying experiences, sales people do too much talking and not enough listening to customers. We're committed to providing an experience for our customers where they will not only want to come back to Garff to buy their next car, but to tell their family and friends how we listened and really helped them find just the right car for them."  ( https://plus.google.com/104478314347265149108/about )

This sounds great but the message that I get is that they are putting others down in order to look like the better option.  Maybe it's just the fact that I used to be an el ed major but I cannot tolerate people putting others down.  It's one of the first things we teach our kids about kindness.  I feel like you should be able to advertise your product without putting everyone else down.  I understand that they didn't mean to have this effect (as shown in their statement above) but this is the message I am getting when I see these billboards.

Olympus High School's One Act Plays

This past weekend, my husband and I went to our old high school to see his sister in their one act plays.  These are a series of student written and student acted short plays.  They usually last about 10 minutes each.  Since they are student written and acted, it is always interesting to go watch them.  They usually deal with teen issues like having a crush and awkward situations.  This year, they had a few like that but there were also a large amount of drug abuse or death related one acts.  I come from a fairly affluent community in Salt Lake City.  Most of the school is LDS and live super normal and happy lives.  So it surprised me to see so many one acts on drugs and death.  I asked my sister-in-law if there was a drug problem at the school now and she was as baffled as I was.  She also talked about how the students who had written the drug one acts were happy and cheerful and didn't seem like they would write about drugs at all.

This is super interesting to me because had a stranger  judged my home community based solely on these one acts, they would think that there was a serious drug problem at my high school.  So sometimes media can reflect things that aren't totally true.  I think that, in the end, the students that wrote about drugs and death were just trying to be the most dramatic they could be and those were the topics that felt the most dramatic.  But it was a good example to me of how looking at just media can be misleading in trying to understand.