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I have been to New York a few times in my life. My aunt and uncle live there so we would go see them every year and stay for a few days. Then when I got older I started going with my friends once in a while to go shopping or see shows or just go out by ourselves. We would get a hotel room and just go out to dinner or to the bars and dress up and bond or spend the day shopping and going to the spa.

When I was in high school after one of our trips my good friend decided that she wanted to go to school in New York. She was so excited and dazzled by all of the commotion there (were from Chicago but she still thought New York City would be amazing or different somehow). But her mom was worried about safety since the crime is high and she had to walk a lot of places in the dark by herself. So her mom made her take this self defense class that we all went to take with her. It was actually a lot of fun and helpful. Even though I am not sure if I could fight off a bigger guy if he was trying to attack me, I do feel more confident that I could control the situation and definitely not just give in, and fight back.

Even after the classes though her mom found the best locksmith New York had to offer and they redid all of the locks in her apartment. And they came in and showed her how to make her apartment safer and put in timed lights and a huge outside light her in the hallway that was motion sensored.

I guess you can never be too safe though and nothing has happened to her so far which is good (probably because she has a tunnel of light and the locksmith nyc association to back her up ha). But she has heard of other people being attacked or mugged and even raped, so I guess her mom was right to worry and do those things. She is having a great time though the last time I talked to her and she just started her internship as a photographer and she is spending a month at home this summer so I'll get to see her and everything that she has done and then I'm going to go visit her and see her apartment there after!

These days many people are focused on weight loss. It is understandable with the obesity rate on the rise. It is really no wonder, with the sales of fast food up and deceiving food packaging that leads you to believe that you are eating less calories than you really are. This type of misleading packaging along with less than nutritious ingredients are leading to the obesity that is plaguing our nation. Even the newest commercials that are seen on Television about corn syrup are misleading. I mean of course you expect to find corn syrup (a form of sugar)in a Popsicle or other sweetened item. And of course, it is okay in moderation. However, did you realize that there is corn syrup in many things that are not sweet. For instance did you know that there is corn syrup in items like crackers, peanut butter, and many other products that you wouldn't think. I really think that in order to be a wise consumer and avoid the traps that you need to read the labels on your food to have a better understanding of how these ingredients like corn syrup can be affecting your diet. Let's face it, we all know that the more natural the food, the better off you are.

The American diet is in such a place now, that in a desperate attempt to lose weight and regain their health, many people are turning to gastric bypass surgery. This only works well if you change your eating habits forever, because if you slip then you can not only regain the weight you lost, but you can actually put on more weight in the long run. Personally, I think that diet and exercise combined with diet pills is truly the best method for most people to lose weight. Gastric bypass is a very expensive and dangerous procedure, and truly is not recommended for most people who are overweight. Only the most obese cases are eligible, and it is really best to address issues with weight before it goes that far. Unfortunately, many American's won't heed this advice and will find themselves in the obese range, before they even know what has happened. More needs to be done to educate people about the truth in advertising, or in this case the lack thereof. Understanding how our thought processes are truly misled by the media, could really open people's eyes as to why obesity is running rampant in our society.

All the talk about a government health plan is getting many American's worked up. There are those who are paying a fortune for health insurance, and to them they see the government plan as an opportunity to get low cost family health plans for themselves and their families. And for others, the thought is that by going to a government influenced health insurance system, we will be giving up on the very core of democracy and become a socialist nation, trading in our freedoms for health care. I think that perhaps the two sides of this coin reflect those who have affordable health care plans vs. those who can't afford to insure their families. I don't think that those who are concerned about becoming a socialistic society, don't really realize how tough things are on families trying to survive in this difficult economy.

I guess I feel that the essential difference is the haves vs. have nots. Those who have the money and the stuff in this society don't want to give up the upper hand, while those who are on the bottom, see anything that they can get as an opportunity to advance their lives and the lives of their family. I don't think that it is unreasonable for a person to expect that in a country this wealthy that there should be low cost family health plans available to all. I really think that if we live in a country where a person can make $10,000,000 for their role in a movie, for entertainment, then we can probably afford to make sure that all of our citizens can have food, clothing, shelter and medical care.

If we can fight the good fight for other countries, then I know that we can do at least the same for those in our own country. Health care rates are rising out of control, and one must truly wonder if there is a good reason for this. It is my understanding that is what the government is going to look into, and at this point I do think that some cap does need to be put on the medical and insurance industry. We can't just allow people to die, while others are getting rich.

This past weekend was so much fun, my mother came for a visit by herself, which usually never happens, because dad usually comes with, but this past weekend was just a girls weekend and we had a really nice time. We stayed up talking and watching girly movies until really late at night, then the next morning we went to brunch and then out for a marathon shopping spree. We started out at the local mall, where we picked up some clothing items and a really nice pair of sunglasses for mom, and then by mid afternoon we had found a great outlet shopping area just outside of town. It was in the middle of nowhere, but they had some incredible deals on all kinds of stuff. We found this great home furnishing store, which had some Pendant Lamps that my mother just completely had to have, so she bought them. It is a good thing that she was driving back after this weekend shopping spree because there is absolutely no way that they would have let her bring all that stuff on the plane, not without charging her a fortune. She also bought some stuff for my apartment, including some really cute designer lamps for my bedroom, which were just absolutely perfect, and dirt cheap, which I love! We went to dinner with my boyfriend, my roommate and her guy that night, and they had a live band which was just great. For the first time in my life, I realized how lucky I am to have such a great mom. I never really thought of her as a friend until this visit, but so many of the people I talk to here have such strained relationships with their parents, that it was nice to have her here hanging out like one of the gang. Don't get me wrong I get along well with my father too, but women just have more in common with each other, and I am so happy that we had this little bonding weekend. I really hope that she comes down again soon, it was just too much fun!

For my health psychology class we had to read a lot of articles that the teacher picked out. He would send them to us through email or blackboard and then we would have to read them and write a summary paper and then a reaction paper. They usually had to do with the topics we were talking about in the book at the time so it was nice to see that he was taking what we were learning and applying it to real life (I like when teachers do that, it makes me feel like I'm not wasting all of my time) and they were actually really interesting. And then at the end of the semester we had to pick an article of our own that had to do with health or exercising or sleep and basically do the same thing but longer and on a bigger scale.

Thankfully the several articles and papers we did throughout the semester helped us and got us ready for the final project and we knew what he was expecting from us. I chose weight loss pills and a topic and found a weight loss pill review in a magazine about health to use as a source. I talked about what they were and named each weight loss pill that I had researched and studied and the results that they had gotten and also side effects if any that people experienced. My paper was really good and I ended up learning a lot about health and the right way to take weight loss pills. You need to balance them with a healthy diet and also maintain a workout routine that fits your lifestyle and the one that you want to have as well.

I didn't just learn about weight loss though and health, I also learned a lot about writing papers and what to expect from assignments from teachers in my major. This helped me to refresh my paper writing skills and also work on the works cited page (everyone always has a hard time with that). I realize now that things we do in school aren't always busy work. There are a lot of things, like these research papers and articles that we read, that will help us out in the future. Both the content of the paper and the structure and routine of writing it will be carried with me.

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, and always has been. Actually, I was born on Halloween, so from that stand point, it has always been an exceptional day. One of may favorite Halloween Costumes is a clown costume. Growing up, I would be a clown every year, but it was always a different type of clown. I have bought some very elaborate clown costumes and yet, I have always been able to throw together a clown costume pretty simply. As a matter of fact, one year, I purchased some face paint, and had a pair of big funky looking pants and suspenders. I put on some big socks one striped and the other one polka dotted and I wanted some crazy hair, but I didn't have a wig, so I decided to use a pom-pom from when I was a cheerleader. It was Redskins colors, yellow and purple. Well, I didn't have anyway to keep it on my head, so I used a baseball cap and stuck the handle of the pom pom up under the cap to help hold it in place. This was by far better than any wig I had ever purchased.

To this day, out of all the clowns that I have been, I really love that one the best. It was just thrown together and was so much a hodge podge of everything, yet, I think that I was truly impressed that I was able to piece a bunch of things together and come up with a costume. Whether you choose to buy a costume for Halloween or just piece one together, make sure to make the most out of the holiday. Since coming to school, we now have big Halloween parties, after all we have gotten just a bit too old to trick or treat, but for as long as live, I will dress up for Halloween, after all, it is one of the best holidays. A day for ghosts and goblins, clowns and princesses, and I know that inside every adult is still that little child wanting to play dress up.

There is this place in Chicago called Fieldworks and they do all sorts of research for marketing companies (like the Direct Marketing Association). They get groups of people together (usually a big variety of them) and have a specific topic in mind for that particular group setting.

One of the groups that I was called to participate in was on text messaging and cell phone advertisement and something called short codes (that I didn't know what they were until later on in the discussion). They wanted us to talk about mobile coupons and how we felt about them compared to getting coupons online or in the mail. I think the group was pretty split up on how they felt. The younger people (like me) really liked the fact that you didn't have to get a ton of paper junk in the mail everyday and that you didn't have to print it out to be able to use it. The older people were more skeptical but even people in (what I would guess to be) their 50's thought it was a good idea. Only the way older people like one 70 year old women and an older man really didn't see the appeal to getting mobile coupons but even they said they don't like getting all of that junk in the mail every day.

And for the second part of the group meeting we were left alone to look at a website www.textmessageblog.mobi/. Well actually, we thought that we were alone, but really they were watching us and listening to our comments through the glass and microphones hidden in the room. It was basically a website about text messaging and different plans and people would blog about their opinions on it. I think they just used that website as a way to get us talking about different cell phone and text messaging plans so they could get our views on them and see which ones we had and how we felt about them. We all talked about how we loved our plans and how some of us had unlimited text messaging and we even got out our phones and were talking to the older people and teaching them how to text and it ended up being really fun. It was probably the most fun I have had with a random group of people and I ended up getting paid a lot to do it!