In the Sub-Pattern: Anna's Writing Blog

Just an update

2009-07-27T21:07:00.000-07:00

So I updated my web-site for the first time in..........a while. And I updated my resume. These things make me feel good about myself right now.

I also made a Ficly account, which has been good, nerdy fun for me.

Oh yeah! And Like Water Burning ran one of my submissions on the 'net last month! Exciting.

The Story of Dexter Season Two

2009-04-28T10:51:00.001-07:00

Once upon a time, in a strange, dark place wherever the hell people at "Showtime" work...there was a group of writers. These writers were either very new at their jobs, and had never, ever in their lives seen the Great First Season of the television series they were working on, or perhaps they were just idiots. Either way, all footage they owned of this wonderful Great First Season was burned at the studio, and it was a horrible, heart-breaking sight, kind of like a scene from "Fahrenheit 451" but with screenplays and DVDs and stuff instead of books. Although perhaps some of the books that this wonderful first season was based on were destroyed in the fire as well.

Once the Great First Season had been disposed of, this misguided group of writers decided to shoot up heroin together. After doing this, they went to their computers and vomited all over their keyboards. Then they started violently banging their heads against the keys.

And this is how Season 2 of "Dexter" was written.

Out of the writers' vomit, an ugly, annoying creature was born. She had a big square head, botox flowing through her veins instead of human blood, and she spoke in a horribly attempted British accent. Everywhere this creature went, she caused misery, annoyance, and unnecessary melodrama. The drugged up writers suffered brain damage from their excessive heroin use and general retardedness, and they decided to give her a new leading role in their show.

Because the believable, complex character Dexter was established as in the Great First Season was a person who would never in a thousand years open up to an obnoxious psycho bitch of a new character, the writers snorted some cocaine and decided to give Dexter a new, ridiculously stupid personality that he's never had before. This new Dexter has emotional breakdowns every few minutes. He opens up to strangers because he wants to tell them all his dark secrets. He has passionate affairs with psycho bitch new characters. He HARDLY EVER KILLS ANYONE ANYMORE. He doesn't want to kill. He pretty much abandons everyone who once kept him grounded after very little persuasion. And it's strange because in the Great First Season it was established that Dexter was empty inside, faked normal human emotion, and had no interest in sex. The average intelligent person would probably call such a drastic character change stupid stupid bullshit.

But there is hope that maybe these screenwriters will all die and get replaced by better writers--or perhaps somehow the magic of the Great First Season returns and fixes everything. Maybe Season 2 will improve, and get a lot better, since I haven't actually finished the DVD set yet. And maybe Season 3, which has already aired, will get the show back on track again. We can only hope.

My first piece of published fiction!

2009-04-14T23:00:00.000-07:00

One of my short stories has been published in Phantom Lips, a new literary magazine that I thiiiink is all organized by grad students at CSULB (but I could be wrong). Yay. I should revise the version I have posted on my site...

Anyway, here's their blog, for anyone interested.

Part Two: Coming Soon

2009-01-30T11:24:00.000-08:00

Part two of my homeschooling cover story for the Easy Reader ran yesterday. It's not on the web yet, but when it is, I'll be sure to post a link.

Adding to the web

2009-01-25T23:14:00.000-08:00

Updated the site and added new clips to the college and Easy Reader portfolios. More coming soon. The homeschooling cover isn't on the portfolio just yet, but part one's on the Easy Reader site now. You can read it here. Yay!

Or just read it below. I'll warn you though, it's a lengthy monster.

Read on...
"School's In"
By Anna Mavromati

South Bay homeschoolers Kyle Barry, Joshua Waier, Roland Lau, R.C. Hwang, Daniel and Debora Fisher. Photo by Anna Mavromati

It was a Tuesday afternoon, about the time of day that elementary school children finish up their final class projects and pack their belongings away in backpacks.
My 8-year-old brother, Xan Mavromatis, was at home in Redondo Beach. More specifically, he was in the den by the living room, huddled over a computer screen with his friend, 8-year-old Cy Peru. They were playing some sort of online game together.
“Why aren’t you guys in school today?” I asked, curious to hear their response. Neither looked up from their game.
“Because we don’t go to school,” Xan replied simply.
“Just say, ‘Because it was earlier,’” Cy advised my brother, waving his hand as if to shoo me away.
“We’re homeschooled,” Xan said. “You already know what it is.”
“What if I didn’t know? What if I asked you what homeschooling is?”
There was a brief pause as both boys raised their eyebrows and turned their heads to me as if I was completely insane.
“Uh…wow.” Cy said.
He and Xan turned back to their respective computer screens and began clicking away again.
Homeschooling is a slow, but steadily growing trend in the U.S., including the South Bay. A survey by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) estimated 1.5 million children in the U.S. (about 2.9 percent of all school-age children) were homeschooled as of 2007. These statistics show there was a 36 percent increase in homeschooling over the past four years.
The reasons for homeschooling and the different systems of doing it vary widely.
Rules of the Game
The different forms of homeschooling tend to incorporate the use of acronyms. Homeschooling organizations that file Private School Affidavits (“PSA’s”) operate as private schools. Those whose homeschooling is facilitated through the public school system are considered Independent Study Programs (“ISP’s”). Sometimes private schools organize curriculum for homeschooling families, and these are dubbed Private School Satellite Programs (“PSP’s”). The California Homeschool Network (“CHN”) is a secular support group for homeschoolers, not to be confused with the Christian Home Educators Association of California (“CHEA”), although the groups sometimes work together. And associated with CHEA is the national Home School Legal Defense Association (“HSLDA”).
My mom, Loren Mavromati, who is president of CHN, is combing Xan’s hair as she
explains it more simply. It’s about noon on a Friday, probably about the time for lunch and recess at regular schools. There are four legal options for homeschooling in California: you can hire a tutor (who is required to have a teaching credential) or opt to enroll in a public school’s independent study program, called an ISP. These choices tend to follow the same curriculum as the public schools, and generally receive state funding. The PSPs, or homeschooling academies are run by private institutions or individuals. Teaching credentials and government mandated curriculum are not required. The fourth option, what my mom does with Xan, is similar to the PSP, but does not operate under the umbrella organization of the PSP. She files the affidavit for a private school herself and homeschools independently. She calls this a “home-based private school.”
All of these are legal options for alternative education, and are recognized by state law.
“People are always like, ‘Don’t you need to have credentialed teachers?’ Private schools are not required to hire credentialed teachers and they don’t have to follow public school curriculum,” she says. Xan fidgets and kicks his feet as she combs his hair. “This is the law.”
Most homeschoolers gather together in support groups or homeschooling organizations and academies. Two of the main homeschool groups within the South Bay are the South Bay Homeschool Network (SBHN), a secular support group for homeschooling families, and Hope Chapel Academy, a faith-based academy and a PSP that provides curriculum and social gatherings for its homeschool students.
Homeschooling families choose to educate at home for a variety of reasons. Some for the freedom it allows, others because of dissatisfaction with traditional schools, and still others to incorporate religion-based values into their children’s lives.
My mom has been a member of SBHN since she began putting me through eight years of homeschooling. The self-proclaimed agnostic says she liked the appeal of working one-on-one with her children and having a flexible schedule.
Torrance resident Melinda Batty, on the other hand, is a member of Hope Chapel, and homeschooled primarily to raise her children in a Christian environment. She smiles casually as she explains she has homeschooled nine children – yes, nine – who now range from age 2 to 21.
Batty remembers her sense of fear right before making the decision to homeschool.
“My older sister was a certified teacher and she started homeschooling before I did. I called her in a panic when I was ready to start because I was feeling like I didn’t know how to teach this, I’m going to screw up,” the Hawthorne mother said. “And she says, don’t worry, most of my classes were on behavior modification, dealing with children in the classroom. The teaching part, it’s like baking a cake. They tell you exactly what to do, they tell you exactly what to say, all you have to do is follow directions. You don’t have to know it before you teach it.”
Batty bounces her 2-year-old on one hip as she talks. Her 9-year-old Mimi disappears and reappears from her side every few minutes.
“In some ways, you have to prepare beforehand, but you end up learning alongside your kids,” Batty said. “So that has been really fun for me. I always tell my kids I would win on ‘Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader’ because I’ve been teaching all that stuff.”
She sees the fact that her eldest three sons have passed her in several subjects, particularly in math, as a great accomplishment on the part of both herself and her children.
“I just gladly tip my hat to them and let them go,” she said.
Redondo Beach Unified School District Superintendent Steven Keller said that although he would never – and he emphasized the word never—choose to homeschool as a parent himself because he believes public school better suits his son socially and academically, he has respect for parents who choose to educate at home.
“I want my child to have the educational experiences that include the whole child, socially, emotionally, academically,” Keller said. “And I believe based on experience and as a parent that having a child attend a public school provides those experiences to better prepare him as a student. And at the same time, I respect homeschool parents who believe otherwise.”
Although Keller does not have family or close friends who homeschool, he says that comparing the public school system to smaller, privately-run operations, like Vistamar in El Segundo, illustrates how some families prefer having a variety of options to choose from.
“I understand why parents send their child or their children there,” Keller said about Vistamar, which caters to only a few hundred students. “We at Redondo Beach Unified School District could not provide that atmosphere. Do I prefer that they attend my school? Yes. But I respect that what they have at Vistamar, like with homeschooling, we can’t provide.”

Unschoolers and Homeschoolers
Most of Joshua Waier’s wardrobe comes from Hot Topic. Tripp jeans, band T-shirts, long black coats, the works. His dark hair keeps falling into his face.
He’s 12 years old, but he has no idea what grade he’s in.
“They always ask you what grade you’re in and I’ve never been able to answer that,” the young Lomita resident says. “I was above in my math always and I’m kind of even at my grade-level in reading now. But I could never answer that because when I was younger I was really bad at reading, and in math I was like, two grades ahead.” He laughs a little. “So it was like, if we round that, I’d have been in sixth grade.”
Waier is an “unschooler.” Unschooling is typically the least structured of all the homeschooling systems. Waier does not have to wake up at a certain point in time each morning to finish his schoolwork, his education is not based on any sort of traditional curriculum and his coursework is not provided by the state government nor regulated by it in any way. This is very similar to how I was brought up – eight years of unschooling after previously being a public school student.
Waier says he’s been homeschooled “since birth.”
“My mom’s taught me since I was born,” he explains simply.
Many unschoolers find perks in being free of the restrictions of institutionalized education. For example, Waier noticed that not being assigned a specific grade level has broadened the age-range of his friends.
“You get to hang out with older people,” he says. “I hang out with people who have a 10 years difference and stuff.”
Contrary to a myth I remember encountering from my own childhood, and one that causes Waier to nod his head slowly at its familiarity, social interaction and playing with friends is not inhibited by homeschooling.
Xan unschools, but he doesn’t seem to lack social interaction. His geography class consists of a co-op of 16 homeschooling families that gather together with each providing different materials for the class. The class takes place Tuesdays at 10 a.m., about the time of third period in public school. And every Wednesday at 1 p.m., Xan attends the South Bay Homeschooler’s support group park day, where he and his posse of waist-high boys run around a different play structure each week.
“It would be difficult in most cities, especially L.A., to isolate yourself,” my mom says. “There are homeschoolers everywhere. There are so many of them that our challenge is not to find social activities but to limit ourselves to how many of them we participate in so we can actually get work done.”
Parents enjoy the extra interaction and involvement in their children’s education. Redondo Beach homeschooling mother Doreen Philbin says she can tailor a more efficient educational plan for her children through homeschooling.
“Really it only takes, like, 100 hours to teach someone to really read, write and do basic math, but we lock them up for 12 years, seven hours a day, and it’s like, what else are they learning?” Philbin says. She cites John Taylor Gatto’s book, “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling,” her original inspiration for homeschooling. “They’re not learning to follow their passion, they’re learning to obey and listen for the bell instead of getting mesmerized in what they’re doing.”
“And how do we learn as adults?” she adds. “We don’t learn because it’s time to learn that. We learn because we have a reason we need to know it. I graduated with two degrees from USC but I can’t tell you five things I learned in grade school. I remembered the things that were interesting to me, not the facts that got poured into my head.”
“My mom, she didn’t like homework because it was school after school and it wasn’t fun,” says Doreen’s 10-year-old daughter, Jennifer. “She wanted to teach us new ideas.”
Jennifer says she’s very happy with her parents’ decision to homeschool her. The little blond girl talks a mile a minute about her experience.
“It’s so much fun, you get to go outside and play whenever you want.”
She likes to talk about her father, a member of a barbershop quartet, who is “really famous in the barbershop world and he knows over 4,000 people,” and her favorite pastime of “saying random things.”
“I’m the champion of it in my family,” Jennifer said grinning about her ability to say “random things.” “I have this friend who is a boy – I wouldn’t say boyfriend – and we have these contests of who can say the most random things.”
As for curriculum, Philbin says the only structured work they do is math.
“Because it’s not something I instinctively weave into our lives like everything else,” she says. “I was kind of math-phobic so I try to follow somebody else’s curriculum on that because I just don’t trust myself that well.
“We definitely don’t have a ‘typical day,’” she adds.

A History Lesson
Xan has an affinity for white board math.
There’s no scheduled timeslot for the practice. No bell rings, signaling the start of it.
His mom leaves a few rows of simple equations written in dry erase marker on a board in the kitchen, and as Xan walks in and out of the room to retrieve Gatorade bottles, “Go-Gurts” and Lego-shaped fruit snacks, he casually sits down to answer a few of the math problems.
He says he knows he’s good at the subject. “Because every single one of those math things I figure out,” he explains.
Xan’s learning environment may seem a bit unorthodox compared to traditional classroom education, but homeschooling actually pre-dates the public school system.
In early America, schooling in the colonies was voluntarily provided by children’s parents – homeschooling. School became a requirement in Massachusetts in 1647, when a law was passed that towns of at least 50 households had to hire a teacher to educate the town’s children. Towns of 100 households or more were required to build public elementary schools.
John Taylor Gatto is a former New York teacher with 30 years of public school service. He penned “Dumbing Us Down,” as well as “The Underground History of American Education.” In the latter, Gatto says the idea of compulsory schooling began as a way to insure uniform religious and moral values. By 1850, every state had a system of public schools, and although attendance was not required in each state, it was highly encouraged. By 1900, it became mandatory when each state added a compulsory requirement to their constitutions after a heavy push from teachers organizations, such as the National Education Association (NEA). It was an attempt to emulate countries like Prussia and Germany, where public education was required.
“By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century a form of school technology was up and running in America’s larger cities, one in which children of lower-class customers were psychologically conditioned to obedience under pretext that they were learning reading and counting,” Gatto observes in “The Underground History of American Education.”
Deborah Fisher, a South Bay homeschooling mom, teaches a history class Tuesday afternoons, a decision she made after discovering that her 10-year-old son, Daniel, wanted to take history lessons.
This particular history class incorporates creating paper crafts, occasionally acting out skits, and eating foods that relate to the historical events being taught. I vaguely remember a similar class from my own childhood, for which I donned an old dress from Good Will for a Civil War reenactment. I think I ended up cast as one of the slaves.
“He thinks it’s fun,” Fisher said with a shrug about Daniel’s interest in history lessons. “He just always felt it was a lot of fun. He liked some of the information and he liked the craft ideas and he liked keeping his notebook.” She holds up a notebook with her son’s hand-drawn illustrations on the cover.
“As long as I introduced it to them early it became a part of their lives that they can, and do, do it,” she said about teaching materials to her children.
As Doreen Philbin noted, a homeschool education offers this advantage – the child has more responsibility for his or her own education. Philbin said she hopes her daughter Jennifer will develop a lifelong love of learning, something that goes beyond the forced march of any school.
“That’s kind of my goal with her,” Doreen says about Jennifer. “Teaching her to love to learn and teaching her how to learn.”
Philbin’s daughter, Jennifer is also in Fisher’s history class and spends her Tuesday afternoons on the floor with about 20 other children sitting Indian-style for their lesson. Co-op classes like this one are a common occurrence in the lives of most homeschoolers. Fisher’s history class begins at 1 p.m. and usually runs for an hour or so, about the same amount of time as a regular class period at public school after all of the students have filed back in from lunch. On a recent Tuesday they studied the Jewish Diaspora, the Roman expulsion of the Jews from their land.
Scattered across the carpet, the children listen to a tape telling the fable “The Wise Rabbi,” then use colored pencils to chart the emigration of the Jews to other countries on maps. At the end of the session they share matzos and grape juice. A week before, Fisher says that the kids acted out skits about Henry III of England.
In the back of the class Joshua Waier is crouched next to his friend Roland, a quiet boy with long black bangs that hang over his eyes.
Roland’s mother, Ruenn Chiou “R.C.” Hwang, recalls how she got her education in Singapore, through a strict schooling system, an experience that encouraged her to seek alternative methods of education for her own children.
“When I came for college I remember that’s when I really learned and retained the information, and I was able to ask questions, to be able to decipher ‘Why was this?’ ‘What was this?’” Hwang says. “So with homeschooling I feel like I could empower my child that way. To learn, not just ‘get an education.’ I’ve seen so much of that, too, in Singapore.”
Hwang says she felt limited as a child when she attended public school in Singapore. A particularly frustrating moment came in high school, when she was learning about Christopher Columbus.
Hwang’s follow-up questions about the explorer were disregarded by her teacher, who deemed the information unnecessary.
“All I knew before I came to this country was there was this person called Columbus, he sailed across the ocean and discovered America — and it was on this date, you’ve got to remember it,” Hwang says and laughs. “And I was so curious. How did he do it? How many days did it take him? Did they sink? Did they have to go home? I had so many questions. The teacher was like, ‘You don’t have to know that, that’s not on the test. You just have to know the date and which continent he discovered.’
“I’m just saying, learning doesn’t have to be so rigid, as if there’s only one path about it,” Hwang adds. “And I want my children especially, if not all children, to actually learn, not just be fed information.”

Next: Hope Chapel Academy and Homeschoolers out of school.

Sneak Preview...of sorts...

2009-01-25T16:08:00.000-08:00

Still finishing up Part Two of my homeschooling article for Easy Reader. My editor asked me to include my own personal testimonial, seeing as I'm pretty close to the subject (full-fledged unschooler since mid-grade school). At first I was dreading it. I didn't want to write too much about myself, as I'd thought it would take away from the story as a whole. It was supposed to be a simple, as-unbias-as-possible portrait of homeschooling in the South Bay, not my own soap-box. But I think I managed to make the end-result less than preachy. This may be changed (probably cut down a bit too) when it's inserted to the rest of the story Thursday. That's tomorrow's project. But here it is in it's original form...

Read on...
I interviewed each one of these homeschool graduates and felt a bit like I was hearing my own voice talking back to me, responding to my questions.

Up until college, I hadn’t really set foot in a classroom since I was about 9 years old. I stepped into one again at age 15, taking an afternoon course at El Camino College. It’s interesting how little that changed my life.

For whatever reason, anyone unfamiliar with homeschooling always asks me how difficult it was to transition into college. The truth is: it wasn’t. Socially or academically, I didn’t feel much like I was swimming in unchartered waters. More like a backyard swimming pool where everything was familiar, been-there-done-that. It just wasn’t a big deal.

Some aspects of life just don’t change. My friends were still more or less the same people after I first started college. My social life had never seemed to lack before college and it continued to thrive after. The workload and the classroom environment were both very different from my past as an unschooler, but the workload was never something I couldn’t handle, and the classrooms didn’t feel intimidating or even that strange to me. The system was extremely easy to adapt to.

And the questions people asked me about homeschooling never changed either. I remember how I had to find ways of explaining my entire life story in a nutshell to other kids and adults who launched intense inquisitions about homeschooling whenever they found out that I wasn’t enrolled in a public school.

It was so strange to us when people asked about homeschooling. People couldn’t seem to fathom what, to us, was the simplest concept. I remember sitting at the park with a fellow unschooler and friend of mine when I was a kid and hearing her talk about a “weird lady” she ran into at the library. The woman had asked then 9-year-old Liberty Peru why she wasn’t in school, and when Liberty replied she was homeschooled, the woman apparently had asked “what is that like?”

“She was really weird,” Liberty told me after the encounter, as kids swung back and forth on screeching swings behind us.

And at the time, I understood why it was weird. It was similar to asking what it’s like to walk outside, or yawn, or laugh at a joke. It was like asking someone to describe a regular day, which, as a child, didn’t seem like such a big deal that it called for an explanation. For us, it was all so natural. It was just life.

And even now, as I attend Cal State Long Beach, weird people ask me where I went to high school—a question immediately followed up with “Why didn’t you go to high school?”

It’s gotten to the point where I’ve pretty much memorized a little speech and it’s really boring to have to go over it again and again. Maybe I should forward some sort of a chain e-mail around so that people can make sense of my life. Or maybe you should just pass this article along to your friends.

Morbid Obsessions

2009-01-25T16:04:00.000-08:00

There was a neat little opinion piece about death in the L.A. Times today so I had to share it.

Note: keep in mind this one isn't mine. Just an article I admired today.

Read on...
"Do not go gentle"
By Amy Goldman Koss
January 25, 2009
In theory, I approve of death for the old. You live as long as you can, and then you die. I accept that the balance of nature requires the inevitability of death -- and that war, infant/childhood/teen diseases, accidents and murder aside, the system works out to be essentially fair.

But today's news from home was that my mom's friend, Bernice, woke up to find Marty (her husband of nearly 60 years) lying dead beside her. That was a shock, not just for poor Bernice before she'd even had her morning coffee, but for everyone.

True, Marty was 80-plus and had always played fast and loose with his diabetes, but still. He was one of my parents' close pals, and he had the faded photos of their cheesy luau vacations to prove it. Marty wasn't the first of their friends to die. He wasn't even among the first. But after awhile, enough is enough, and you want to say, "Cut it out, already! What are you, lemmings?"

That's the downside of living a long time. My parents go to a lot of funerals. They've become eulogy connoisseurs. They know where the bathrooms are at the funeral homes their crowd favors. They get a lot of horrible phone calls. Some expected, others totally shocking.

"Actually," my mom says, matter-of-factly, "it gets less shocking."

She reminds me that last week it was Phyliss; before that, Sol's sister. And now Herman is cueing up.

I live across the country from my family, so sometimes I can't even remember for sure who's alive and who isn't back there. The plus side is that I am spared all but the most essential funerals.

One thing I've learned, though, watching my tribe die off, is that there's no tidy line. One guy can be circling the drain, round and round, when -- zip! -- someone else, totally unexpected, darts out of place and takes cuts. Some of the most unlikely people end up dying that way, all out of order.

But my parents and their remaining friends have kept patiently in step, and, thanks to medical advances, health insurance, careful diet and exercise, they are right on schedule, arriving all together at the edge of the last cliff.

I hear the resignation in my mother's voice. I can picture her shrug, "Even Sylvia, so slim with all her yoga and vegetarianism."

I want to say, "Listen, Ma, just because everyone's doing it ... I mean, if all your friends were smoking crack ... ."

But in their mid-80s to early 90s, with more friends and siblings on the other side than on this one, it's hard not to see what's coming. My father is basically bionic, with multiple bypasses and a pacemaker and whatnot. He spends a big part of his mornings washing down a multitude of pills from little brown jars on the counter. But in spite of the meds, the violin fell out of his hand during a concert a few years ago, hinting that some fairly significant aspects of his life are over.

My mother, once a great reader, is practically blind.

My father-in-law is in hospice and has even stopped using his hearing aids. He says he found the dying experience interesting at first, but now that he's feeling weak, he likes it a lot less. I half expect him to give up on the whole thing and return to his former health. Death doesn't sit right on him; it seems phony, like he's wearing a French beret or a goofy tie.

But none of these people are old the way old people seemed old when I was young. These guys are mostly still themselves, and they look nothing like my grandparents did to me back then. While my grands and great-grands looked dried out and dusty in a useless, used-up kind of way, my parents and their peers look like they just grabbed an old picture of themselves, crunched it into a ball, then smoothed it back out a bit.

My own knees crackle at the thought of sitting on the floor, my hands ache in the morning, and I pee whenever I cough. The history of my species -- in fact, of all living things -- gives me reason to suspect that these symptoms of age are not likely to reverse. My husband is wearing not one but two pair of glasses to read the paper beside me. Sometimes reality is just plain hard to deny.

But getting old is one thing; dying is even one thing (because you're still alive while you do it). But going all the way and actually being dead is totally another. I mean, it happens to everyone, as I know it must. But Marty?

Amy Goldman Koss is the author, most recently, of the teen novel "Side Effects."

Direct link: Old age, death and dying

"School's In"

2009-01-24T16:59:00.000-08:00

So my first cover story for the Easy Reader ran Thursday! Yayyyy for me. I'd link to it, but it's not up on the web yet...and I haven't scanned it yet either...I'll do that soon. Very soon. Right.

Minor adjustment

2009-01-20T01:25:00.000-08:00

Happy inauguration eve.

Haven't uploaded any new PDFs to the site yet, but I did do some tweaking to the navigation system today. It's progress...I like it better for now.

I'll get back to work again sometime this week. Really.

Daily Breeze: check.

2009-01-17T12:49:00.001-08:00

I uploaded pretty much all of my work from The Daily Breeze to my portfolio. All the links oughta be working. I may fix up the quality in some of them later and possibly add more little mini-stories or "Go & Do"s as I find them, but all the big stuff is there and ready to be viewed. I'd like to make a fancier navigation system for the site sometime as well, but this will do for now.

And while I'm still on the topic of the Breeze, it was pretty disheartening to hear about their most recent batch of layoffs. I recognized quite a few names of recently-fired employees. All I can say for now is best of luck to them in the future.

I'm becoming more and more aware of the fact that life is going to get scary after graduation.

More clips will be added soon. Probably sometime next week. I have a lot from the Easy Reader to upload and I'm currently freelancing a cover for them--more details on that next week. As for the school newspaper stuff, I think just a few sample clips will be enough.

Movin' on up

2009-01-15T01:21:00.000-08:00

Like I said...I'm slowly but surely learning how to use technology. I used to think I was halfway decent at it. How naive I was.

I believe I've made notable progress by creating a home page. Once again, reminder: it's unfinished and you may encounter blank pages or broken links here and there, but it's a start.

Huzzah.

A little note

2009-01-13T12:25:00.000-08:00

I am slowly but surely figuring out the art of PDFs and HTML. More on my progress with that soon enough.

Just in case any interested persons happen to stumble across my humble little corner of the web, I'd like to let you know that as of right now I'm in my very (very, very) early stages of throwing a blog together. I apologize for any broken links/general errors/etc. you may find. Feel free to point them out to me and I'll do my best to patch everything up.

Many thank you's!
Anna

More El Co Op-Ed

2009-01-11T21:12:00.000-08:00

A defense for horribly unhealthy foods...sort of. I hate eating it, actually. I guess it's more like just an anti-"Supersize Me" piece. I was a quiet, but very opinionated teen. This one ran March 25, 2004 in The Union at El Co.

"When big is no longer what's in"
by Anna Mavromati
Read on...
McDonald's is going to stop selling supersized fries and sodas. There's nothing wrong with that, but at the same time there's nothing great about it either.

The large McDonald's portions have been blamed for causing obesity, and the chain recently had to deal with a lawsuit. The lawsuit was thrown out of court, but now McDonald's is trying to save its image by serving smaller portions of its food.

This could improve the fast-food chain's image for the moment and assure that it will keep plenty of its customers. But this will not help people diet or make McDonald's any healthier a restaurant, because not everything's perfect.

The entire situation is selfish and unreasonable. The people who sued McDonald's were only trying to bank off of the popular franchise's profits. This is so obvious that it's sad. It's amazing how greedy people can be. If that wasn't bad enough, now McDonald's is attempting to look like the good guys again.

Getting rid of supersizes is a small and unnecessary movement, but it may be enough for the company to show that it has consideration for its customers' diets.

There is an argument that getting rid of the supersizes forces people to eat smaller portions, thereby making people eat more healthy. This is not necessarily true. We could still eat five small orders of fries and we could still refill our medium sodas as often as we want. When you view it from that perspective, taking away supersizes could practically go unnoticed.

McDonald's is not a health food restaurant. That's OK, it shouldn't have to be. Not every restaurant must serve healthy food. Besides, those fries are good. Also, if customers are so health conscious, they shouldn't be eating at McDonald's in the first place.

Supersizing an order is an option, just as it is an option to choose to eat at McDonald's. It is up to the individual to decide where to eat and what to order. It has always been this way, whether the supersized soda sizes existed or not. We cannot deny these facts, but it seems like people try to when there are lawsuits like this followed by cheap, small improvements for the public image.

Of course this supersize business is all about the McDonald's image. As society starts watching its health, the food industry tries to market that it cares about people and what they should be eating; then it suggests they buy salads to go with their greasy burgers.

Don't get me wrong because I eat fast-food all the time, but we can't blame the chains for selling it to us. It's their job to do that. We can't sue them after we buy and consume their food on our own free will.

In an ideal world, there would be no junk food to tempt us. If we decided to diet, the entire world would become a buffet of salads and various healthy snacks. Unfortunately, it is not an ideal world, and we have to make choices. Although it is not easy making the right choices, taking away supersizes does not make the decision any easier. Taking them away just isn't necessary or helpful.

Let's face the facts: McDonald's serves fattening foods and it is most likely that it always will. No one can stop them from selling it, but people can stop themselves from eating it.

My first-ever column

2009-01-11T20:44:00.000-08:00

Back when I was a young and sort-of-innocent 16-year-old this got published in the El Camino College Union March 4, 2004. It's not exactly Shakespeare, but it got me a spot as weekly columnist my first semester writing for the publication, which was pretty neat for me at the time.

And for the record, I don't really watch "American Idol." No. Just no.

"William Hung, in my eyes you're the real American Idol"
by Anna Mavromati
Read on...

I have found my true American Idol. It is not any of the past idols like Kelly, Ruben, Clay or Justin.

His name is William Hung.

Yeah, laugh if you want. For those of you who are unenlightened, Hung is the infamous reject from the hit reality TV series, "American Idol." His audition for the show was, well, it wasn't exactly great. In fact, it was terrible. Hung cannot carry a tune or keep a beat to save his life. He was put on the show simply to be laughed at. He's one of those people the public loves to hate. Yet, his performance has mesmerized me; there's just something about him.

With the publicity and fan sites Hung has gained since his appearance on "American Idol," I'm obviously not the only one who's under Hung's spell. I ask myself over and over again, why is this man's performance so captivating? Are we such a cruel and insecure society that we need some poor loser to pick on? Well, that may be true in some cases, but I have a different answer. I believe that deep down, we all secretly admire Hung because of his courage. I also believe that deep down, we are all similar to Hung.

Let me elaborate. Hung has been dissed, laughed at, teased and humiliated on national television. Has that stopped him? No, he has willingly performed on talk shows since his broadcast dismissal on "American Idol." Hung has performed an incredible act of bravery, especially when you consider his lack of talent. It is even more incredible that he has even thought of pursuing a career in which he is clearly unskilled.

Above all, the most incredible aspect of Hung is that he has been successful. Who doesn't admire that? I also want to note that Hung took his rejection well. He did not cuss or cry when the "American Idol" judges turned him down. He even admitted to having no vocal training, saying "I did my best, I have no regrets at all." He was complimented for having a good attitude, that could be another reason why he is so appealing. He seems to have an easygoing personality.

Of course, you could argue that this is just Hung's 15 minutes of fame. It is not unlikely that after a month or two nobody will remember or care about who Hung is. But maybe 15 minutes of fame is all that Hung really wanted.Another theory I have about Hung is that he is an excellent representation of mankind.

Yes he is.

Although we try as hard as we can to publicize the manufactured beautiful and talented people, we all know that in reality Hung is a much better reflection of ourselves than someone like Christina Aguilera will ever be.

If the average American stepped onto a stage and was given a microphone, he or she might not look or sound too different from Hung.

We can laugh at Hung and be embarrassed by him (or for him), or we could applaud, be proud of him and give him a standing ovation. At least he had the guts to try. We can celebrate the fact that at least one of us is willing to show off imperfections and gets stardom for it.

William Hung, I salute you.