Ballsy Friday: The Beginning

Hello! Well, my Ballsy Friday activities involved phone calls. I made two nerve-wracking but necessary calls at work today. One was a pitch to a newspaper editor, and another was to one of our mentally ill clients whom we’re doing a success story on. This was ballsy for me for many reasons:

A) Interaction makes me nervous. Period.

B) Pitching to reporters and editors is an important part of PR and one of the hardest to learn, unless you happen to be good at getting people to listen to you. It’s the cornerstone of media relations. And for me, as an assistant who only has a certain amount of information to share, and no solid relationships with reporters yet, it can be weird. And they aren’t always patient.

C) This particular client has been hard to reach, I know his/her diagnosis, and I’m afraid I’ll say something wrong…etc. I’m already afraid to talk to people, add unique circumstances to the mix….um, yeah.


But I called the client first and made some progress because I actually was able to leave a message this time. Before, her voicemail was full. Then I called the paper, and I had prepared my speech, and tried to sound as conversational as possible, and only part of it sounded like me reading aloud, and she was nice, and didn’t make any promises, but was agreeable to receiving our press release. We’re trying to get them to interview our new Executive Director.


Whew.

I'm down for this.

I guess that means I need to do something ballsy this Friday. I've actually been really good about being ballsy a lot lately and it's been really fun.

I've been going to all sorts of good meetups and lectures. I carpooled with the biology faculty at Flagler to see EO Wilson talk in Deland, and had a really great time and got along awesomely with everyone, despite me feeling so so so young. (They are young at heart/mind :) ). Last night was another really great talk by a UNF professor. At the talk, we saw some people from our Atheist meetup group that I had told about the talk, so we chatted with them afterwards.

I've been learning:
*Unicycle
*Keyboard
*Re-learning shorthand (need to get on this! been lazy... okay, actually, not lazy. BUSY. ha.)
*Re-learning slight-of-hand card things

I've also been reading more (yes, this is possible), and even giving more TV shows a chance. (I have NO idea how I am finding time for all this. Like, this is seriously blowing my mind a little bit right now.)

Alex and I do fun ballsy things together, like being Derren Brown on St George street (video to come soon), and eating somewhere new in St Aug each time we go to eat, and doing crazy brain experiments on ourselves. AND we have been simulating evolution with Excel, and have a huge project in the works that is going to get us a TED talk. (Oh and I guess deciding to date him was actually a Ballsy Friday thing, but it was Saturday.)

I was more vocal than usual about Darwin day, which felt really good. I actually wore my Darwin day tattoos (especially Ballsy because of my creationist boss...), and told people what they were when they asked, to which the response was always positive. I had a nice conversation with the one other female I work with directly, and I just like her more and more every time I get to talk with her.

It's been a Ballsy year for me.

[Reviewing this, the one thing that I see that's missing that I love to do is volunteering. However, a financially ballsy thing that I have been doing is donating money. A LOT. Like whoa. So I guess that counts enough. The thing w/ volunteering is that people will depend on me and I will have a schedule, but events that I'm interested in can crop up at any time, and I don't want to miss out on them or let someone else down if they are depending on me to be somewhere volunteering. OH WAIT! I forgot. I AM volunteering. I'm doing this: http://www.epals.com/]

Lisa/whoever else decides to do this... I eagerly wait your Ballsy Friday story for this week. :)

I'm reviving this old community because I've been feeling down and out, and one of my goals is to learn how to be more confident, or at least fake it, and I thought this place might be a good place to recount my activities.

I'm not sure what my next ballsy Friday thing will be, but I'm open to suggestions.

So, there's someone I'm interested in getting to know better. He is in my poetry class, and I have yet to verbally comment on his poetry during workshops, let alone make conversation. I was thinking for ballsy Friday, which will have to be a surrogate Thursday, if we do workshops in class, and if we discuss his poem, I'm going to speak up. Even if we don't discuss his poem, I'm still going to speak up. It's been hard for me to open up, and I need to break out of my comfort zone because I'm taking two more creative writing courses next semester which involves a lot of workshop. I'm trying to teach myself how to express meaning clearly.

Been busy w/ class and work and all, but Ballsy Friday lives on!

So yesterday/Friday I decided that my ballsy thing would be to decide to go ahead with SIFT. I had given it up but I am going to force myself to try because I don't want to regret not trying. I'm scared out of my mind though... help keep me pumped! Meh. (Going to talk to Moser about stuff on Monday.)

( The Happiness Project )

So I only skimmed this website because I like coming up with my own ideas, not just completely copying other ideas. And since my Refresh! thing is about nearly the same thing, I didn't want to dive in too much. However, stumbling upon it made me wonder if she had read The Art of Possibility. I found this post.

I left a comment with a link back here. It's the first I've posted about Refresh! publicly. So that was pretty ballsy, I'd say.

For Ballsy Friday, I first participated in 30 minutes of the Gargoyle protest. I only agree with it partially, so I didn't want to at first, but I did it for Ballsy Friday.

THEN, people came in to see our room because they will be living here next year, and Marie was one of them, and I finally said hi to her. In person! Marie lived across from us last year and gave us coffee under our door when she moved in, which was the day before we did. I am her LJ friend and we comment back and forth occasionally, and see each other in real life all the time but I never have been able to say hi. It's weird. But I finally did. Anyway, she seems cool and plays video games and stuff and give us coffee so yup.

Mostly, that's it. I also asked a girl to take my picture (the one I linked to). And took photos of a bunch of people I didn't know. And got all up in their grills and stuff.

Briefing:

The Gargoyle is Flagler College's newspaper. They ran a fair article about Club UNITY, which is a club aimed at uniting all students and giving them representation regardless of sexual orientation. Club UNITY has tried for a second time to get approval from the administration and has failed, and the article explored the fight to get approved without really portraying any bias and representing all sides, including quotes from the administration themselves, and everything was factual.

Because this article was of a "controversial" nature, the administration asked to review it before it went into print. They have the right to do that because The Gargoyle is not independent. They returned the article so edited with quotes taken out of context and things reworded so much that the original article was basically torn to pieces. And about 300 words were cut out.

The reason Club UNITY has not been approved is because it is contradictory to the conservative values Flagler College was built upon. I think this is ridiculous. To my knowledge, and this may be an assumption and a stereotype, but it's mostly true, generally religious people, or people affiliated with Judeo-Christian religions, are opposed to homosexuality. Flagler College is NOT affiliated with any religious sect. It's part of why I CAME here. Whether you advocate homosexuality/transgender/bisexuality or not, there is a population of them here, and they deserve the same representation everyone else does, and an opportunity to build awareness and breakdown stereotypical barriers. But that's not what this morning protest was really about...sorry for the schpiel.

What I Did:
There was a small peaceful protest against the censorship issue this morning. It was organized by those outside of The Gargoyle staff and seperate from Club UNITY. It was organized by students who care about our student body and feel like we should have a voice. That's why I went out and participated. I could only stay a few minutes because I had other things I had to go do, but if I'd had more time I also would have protested for saving the darkroom as well. Because we are losing our darkroom here on campus, and we had a campaign going for a while but it died out, so if this protest was about having a voice on campus, I would have protested for:
-the darkroom
-tuition being raised
-all the spending the school is doing
-being forced to have more roommates so the school can have more on campus students and therefore more $$$

As one girl put it, even though one of the things Flagler claims when they're trying to get you to attend is that you're not treated like a number here, well, we're actually one step below, "we're treated like a dollar sign"

If it wasn't for my friends, the beauty of this place, and the academics (because the Comm department is really great), I would leave tomorrow.

So that was my Ballsy Friday....in a very big nutshell.

So my ballsy Friday thing was to post a comment about my YouMe shoes on the artist/director Miranda July's myspace page:

www.myspace.com/mirandajuly

(hehe)

I know what I'm going to do for ballsy Friday. I just need your help. How do I post a picture in a myspace comment? Is there some html code I need to know? The picture will be from my file on my computer. Thanks!