Aight ATL, what’s happenin’? I am David Veres and I came here from the far-reaches of Charlotte suburbs from a town by the name of Weddington in North Carolina to study Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. I anticipate to graduate with the class of 2022, but if my interests in foreign studies dragged that out by a semester or two, I wouldn’t mind it because I would always be coming back to my long admired city of Atlanta.

I am really looking forward to this English 1102 section of Television and Feminism because I am eager to delve into and understand a new form of media and art. I always found most of my experiences with English courses to be pretty dry because it was always the same recycled format of reading a book and writing a paper since my earliest days in elementary. Actually, I hated English classes for many years. I somehow reluctantly pulled myself through the AIG Reading program for about five years until I had my breakthrough in grades eight through ten. I had began to take rap more seriously in it’s lyrical dimensions and the poetry unit I loathed in previous years was something I yearned for — just not haiku’s and sonnets. It was the dissecting of hip-hop and rap verses that really helped me build up my analytical arsenal. In my last two years, College Board has once again managed to absolutely kill the joy I once had by making me write timed essays about article segments and read books that frankly had more incest than I could have ever asked for in Song of Solomon and Invisible Man.

Me trying to sneak in a Kanye reference for the ten millionth time.

Moving in a different direction, even though I said I think I would struggle most with the visual component of the class during my introduction video, I think I will still struggle more with the written component. Watching the novela Jane the Virgin has eased my nerves a bit and even made me excited to binge the whole season! However, even as I sat down to write this blog post, I still had to overcome this insane prewriting-phobia that I have every assignment. Seeing that the content of this course is significantly different and will be my last English class ever, I hope to overcome my fears of writing and even develop a desire to immediately put my thoughts into a body of work rather than procrastinate until the last day. Furthermore, I hope to become proficient in translating my thoughts and feelings into sentences that actually make sense (a longstanding Achilles heel of mine).

Finally, I am the farthest thing from “well-versed” in television. My only experience comes with Donald Glover’s show Atlanta FX which depicts a much more realistic struggle of daily life as an African American in modern America. Also, I have not had entrenched myself in the topic of feminism because I never had any social issues with the movement due to my very progressive and liberal ideology. I am more of a reserved person so I never had any friends that were girls, but over the summer I started my first serious relationship and I would not trade the knowledge I have gained and the way I view love for anything. It has been exceptionally exciting because my girlfriend is from a completely different country so getting to know her culture has been an endless supply for my curiosity. My curiosity is what is also leading me to chose to watch Orange Is the New Black as my show to review for this class. I am always gripped by highly provocative and polarizing figures because I enjoy how deeply they make me think about living a life from a different perspective and I feel like the radically lifestyle inside a women’s prison is exactly the fresh content my analytical mind needs.

Me to all my previous English teachers who never wanted to watch the movies for the books but that’s all I am doing this semester.