Hello! I hope you are ready for another post of Sigma Nu Zeta Omicron, because here we go!

Last week my life changed.

So, the thing is that my first-year seminar has kind of a strange dynamic. Because of that, our classes follow this rule: one week we meet in an auditorium with all 130-something students, to see someone’s presentation, And on the next week we meet in small groups of 8 people to discuss the course and what we are doing. So far I have seen three presentations. The first was about people that volunteer (not as a tribute) to go help a country in need, usually an African country. The second was an astrology professor talking about her study of the center of the galaxy. The last one was about photographs. It was during the third presentation that my life changed.

My whole life I have never given importance to photographs before, even though my father always tried to teach me their importance. I never liked to take pictures and never liked to take photos of myself. If you go to my Facebook or Instagram page you will find that 99% of my pictures are the ones that I was tagged on. I never saw pictures as something of importance. Therefore I wasn’t excited at all to this presentation.

The presentation was given by my first-year seminar professor because he is a professor of photography too. As he showed the slides and spoke more about pictures I got more and more interested. At one point I just stopped and said to myself: “what was I doing with my life until now? Why was I so blind and never saw those things before?” And, maybe for the thousandth time in my life : “my father was right”. My professor spoke of how pictures capture a unique moment by a unique point of view while he showed more and more pictures and explained a little about them. At one point he showed a picture that just inspired me. I saw that and said: “my god, that’s amazing, I want to do something like this!”.(the picture is called “playground in Tenement alley” by Lewis Hine, I will try to post it).

So that was the moment that changed my life. I’ve been so inspired by this presentation that whenever I see a good “frame” I just take a picture of it. Now I want to learn more about photography. I think I will change my arts class for a photography course next semester and if I really like it, I will try to get a minor in it. The only thing is the only camera I have is the one on my phone, I don’t know if I will have to buy a camera, probably I will. My knowledge about cameras is very poor, I can only say that they are expensive. So I’m already saving money.

 

Now going to a completely different topic. During the weekend I went with some of my friends to parts of the downtown we hadn’t seen. And part of the adventure was discovering this cool and strange bookstore called “the haunted bookstore”. You may think that the name is just to attract clients, but believe me, when you go inside you can really see why they chose this name. The bookstore is a house, an old style house with two floors. All rooms of the house are filled with shelfs with old, and probably second-hand books, each room is a different category. They also have two cats that wander around the house (cats are the only animals that I don’t like, but that’s a story for another day). The place is so creepy that while you walk you actually expect a book to fly off a shelf and hit you in the head. But the things they sell there are very cool and it’s worth taking a look. I bought a book about chess (it’s been a while since I started looking for one) and a friend of mine brought a Monty Python’s card game, (they have board games there too). So this week was a pretty good week, despite the  fact that I spent it studying for my chemistry second midterm. That was all I had for today. See you next week.

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