As I embark upon this new adventure in life...aka entering the "real" world, I've decided to record my thoughts and, inevitably, my mistakes.  I hope this will prove to be some form of entertainment for those who stumble across my space, though with that website address the chances of it are pretty unlikely.  Ultimately though, this blog will simply provde entertainment and cause for embarassment ten years down the road when I look back and read my entries, reflecting on how immature and naive I am now, though I assure myself everyday that at 22 I am quite worldly and am ready to handle pretty much anything life will throw at me.  Earlier this month, I did go through a flash of concern as to what I would add to the world.  In college, my contribution was easy to identify.  We had a self-enclosed group of 8,000 privileged students of which I could take their diverse experiences and educate the other students about the incredible amount of diversity we have in our world.  I don't mean in any way to demean what I did for the past four year.  On the contrary, I believe it to be one, an incredible learning experience for myself both internally and externally, and two, a great place to start when addressing such a broad topic.  Diversity....doesn't necessarily mean "race" (which I believe to be a terrible word of which no one truly understands the meaning, myself included).  Diversity could just mean the fact that I grew up in an extremely rural area, while my best friend grew up in the suburb of a large city.  Forget the fact that I'm white and she's multiracial.  I've digressed, but as I was saying earlier, I was at a loss as to how I would address diversity in a city that is one of the most diverse in the world.  Thankfully, the city itself posed a challenge.  On FoxNews.com, an article was printed claiming that an NYC politician expressed his idea that racial profiling should be used when randomly checking bags on the city's subway system.  Now, at first thought, one could be pursuaded by this logic.  The majority of terrorist bombers have been of Middle Eastern decent, but that's as far as I'm willing to pardon this train of thought.  Look at our security systems.  Every major terrorist attack has occurred because these people are smart.  Do you really think that they will have any difficulty finding a willing terrorist who looks like a non-terrorist (who knows what that really is for these people...many people still confuse Indians (from India, not American Indians) or Italians for Middle Easterners)?  Anyway, I don't feel so lost anymore because I know that there is still change that needs to be made.  I'm certainly not vain enough to believe I will be the change, but I do believe I can be a part of it.  Well, that was a bit more of a rant than I originally intended it to be, but when I'm passionate about something it all just kind of pours out.

 

Oh, and for those who are curious since I brought it up before, my website address "cailin alainn" roughly means "beautiful girl" in Irish.  I don't use it as a vanity...more as a source of strength...we are our own worst critic, are we not?  So once we can convince ourselves of our beauty, it should be easier to convince others...or so I would like to hope.  Who knows...maybe one day one of us will find out.