Throughout this week, I had a lot of celebration to do. Not only was it my birthday, but also my dads and little cousins. For my birthday, I went clubbing and had a very interesting experience. I also attended a family party for my little cousins birthday party. Both were two extremely distinct experiences, and I would like to address the kinds of dancing that occur within cultures and the dancing tendencies that certain cultures have. I will be making general assumptions and stereotyping but also making keen observations as a dancer.

 I thought it was peculiar that we were required to go to the Joseph O' Connor reading as part of IDC. For all of our other Meet The Artist events, we've had to meet an individual who has played a significant role in the artistic community, like the photographer who traveled to New Orleans to take pictures of the Katrina aftermath. This time, it was a reading and oddly enough I had to be there for my English class as well. Overall, I loved Joseph O'Connors excerpts. I was inspired enough to write down certain lines of his excerpts because they really were so profound.

 Last Thursday, I attended an ASEDOM club event. ASEDOM is a club dedicated to the dominican community in Baruch. Its event, called "Kumbacarey" was a celebration of the Dominican culture during communist rule, specifically when Trujillo, the country's last dictator was in power. This kind of afro dominican style of music was banned while he was in rule, as were many other things.

 When our IDC class was given the "Snapshot NYC" assignment, I was curious to see how it would play out. I thought it was an intriguing idea that we could have an assignment that was supposed to portray our neighborhood, be about something else completely, that still spoke of "home" to you. It took me some time to figure out what it was that I was trying to capture; a flower, an ornate object, the water, what was there in NYC that spoke of the "ideal" neighborhood to me. I was surprised upon my findings, actually.

On Thursday night, I ventured across Manhattan to the Macaulay honors College to my first Meet the Artist event. I didn't really know what to expect at first, I was little informed about what exactly we would be experiencing there that night.