Happy Valentine’s Day! Tonight I will be making a cheese board and chocolate fondue with my best girl friends who are also single and just hanging out; as God intended. Valentine’s Day isn’t my favorite holiday because of how cheesy all the couples get (you know who you are). But it’s always great to do something for and with the people you love, so I’m looking forward to fancy cheese and chocolate with my girls. In my Olympic history class, we learn a lot about the political relations and undertones of the games. On Valentine’s Day, we followed a story of love between two athletes. During the 1956 Melbourne Olympic…

Don’t I mean the Disney classic, The Lion King? Well, yes and no. Today in my emerging technologies class we did an exercise in storytelling. We talked about how there are usually three side to every story involving two people: one person’s version, the other person’s version, and then the truth, which is likely a mix of the previous two. Everyone has their own experiences that lead to their unique perspective. Perspective is important in emerging technology storytelling. We’ve done projects involving 360 video and virtual reality where the video perspective is first point of view. Perspective is essential to the narrative created when telling a story. The perspective changes…

Ah, the Telenovela. The art of excessive drama, unrealistic plot twists and never-ending stories…what’s not to love! Similar to soap operas, telenovelas are the Latin American dramas that kept housewives and the middle-class entertained during the early half of the 1900s. Then they grew into a phenomenon. The American hit comedy Ugly Betty was inspired by the wildly popular telenovela “Yo Soy Betty, La Fea.” Recently, Jane the Virgin took viewers by storm in a comedic dramatization of the telenovela. I have always been fascinated by the story lines behind Days of Our Lives and Dynasty. I’m OBSESSED with the remake of Dynasty right now on the CW, starring my…

I love numbers but I hate math. You might be thinking…that doesn’t make sense, but I promise it does! I like the ~aesthetic~ of calendar dates, the continuity of years and that numbers can sometimes tell a compelling story. For example, fun fact, todays date, 2/20/20 is a palindrome! It’s the same order forwards and backwards, which is cool. I love that my mom went to UNC too, and what’s cool is that it was exactly 30 years ago. She graduated high school in 1986 and college in 1990. I graduated high school in 2016 and will college in 2020. (All really pleasing years as is!) Today is Super Bowl…

I love stories. I love talking. I love myself. So it’s no surprise that I love talking about myself. But when I sat down to write a whole blog post “introducing me” and “telling my story” I hit a wall. After all, my life can’t fully be described in 10 fun facts or one quirky story. To top it all off, I’m only 21 years old so how much ‘life experience’ do I even have? But everyone has an origin story and on May 15th, 1998 at 3:43am Jamie and Lisa Rademaker had their first child…a daughter…and named her Melissa Grace. Melissa means honeybee in Greek. My mom has called…

I use the phrase “story time” a lot in my life. When I was a kid, every night there was story time where one of my parents read to me and my brother. We even had a system of whose room to read in each night so it was fair. Now, when I finally see my friends after a few days and we have to catch up I start my monologues with “story time.” I even start texting conversations by sending “story time” with no context until paragraphs of the long story follow. via GIPHY Stories are my favorite thing in the world and they are all around us. They’re…