fashionably late?

Hey everyone! I am currently lacking a laptop and it's been a struggle to get access to a computer this weekend, so please forgive the lateness of my introduction (although I'm glad to see I'm not the only one)! My name is Cara, I'm from a small-ish town called Camp Hill located across the river from Harrisburg. I graduated this year from Cumberland Valley High School, which I hated, and I actually took all but one of my classes in senior year at Harrisburg Area Community College. It was a good deal, I only had to go to high school for 45 minutes a day and now, as a freshmen, I already have quite a few credits that transferred.

I'm a very optimistic person; I almost always have a smile on my face and I love getting to know new people and experiencing new things. I dabble in a wide range of hobbies-- singing, photography, art, writing-- but I don't really take any of them as seriously as I wish I would. Out of all of them, though, writing is the one I always find myself coming back to. From the short stories I wrote obsessively as a kid to the journal I've been keeping religiously for as long as I can remember, writing has been a lifelong passion for me. I'm excited for this class and the opportunity to practice more and hopefully improve my abilities.

I'm majoring in Psychology, which has been another lifelong fascination for me. I have a very analytical mind and I love to ponder what is really going on in people's minds and what causes them to behave the way they do. I'm currently taking a Sociology class, and the lecture this morning happened to fit perfectly with the points Raymond Williams made in Culture Is Ordinary. Judging from the other responses I read over on the blog, I think many people misinterpreted his point based on his use of the word ordinary. Of course culture is an amazing, incredibly complicated thing, but at the same time, nothing could be more ordinary; it encompasses every aspect of our day-to-day lives and all that is most familiar to us. In Sociology today, my professor said one thing that I found very interesting in particular: on Earth, only humans have come to rely on culture rather than instincts to ensure their survival. Since we are such social creatures and our place in the cultural hierarchy is of such importance to us, culture has become so ingrained in our minds that it has actually taken the place of instinct. Of course, that is just the universal aspect of culture, the parts of it that apply to every individual member-- the awareness we all share of the proper ways to greet a new person, when to eat with silverware and when to use our hands, etc. But beyond that, there is definitely a more individualized version of culture that is shared by smaller groups: families, groups of friends, employees of the same company, all of these share a culture that is a microcosm of society at large, but which applies only to them based on their shared experiences and environments.

Alright, enough rambling! See you guys in...about an hour. :)