Traditional my Thanksgivings consist of going to my grandparents house in Plymouth, Michigan and spending the week with my Moms’ side of the family. Thanksgiving up there is just like everyone else’s Thanksgivings. Everyone gathers to talk and catch up on life as the grand children play football in the back yard. My family might be a little different in the aspect that their is usually two or three kegs of Octoberfest beer made by Sam Adam’s always at their house to last through the week. As this would throw you off about the traditional Thanksgiving concept, this is the only part that isn’t as traditional as it can get. The food that my memaw cooks is to die for. She makes the best marshmallow casserole ever. The turkey is stuffed with an assortment of fruits and veggies to bring out a zest in the turkey. The ham is glazed to a perfection of both sweetness and smokiness to make your taste buds pop. While sitting at the tables scattered throughout the house with everyone talking and laughing, my grampa gives the traditional Thanksgiving toast. This is a Kleiber secret so I can’t let you in on the toast but its apart of our Thanksgiving tradition and one of the most memorable parts. As I have gotten older I have learned to love Thanksgiving for the love that passes through the air as our entire family gets together to set aside all the worries of the week past and the week ahead but to live in moment and really take time for each other. While kickin’ back watching some football with my grampa and the men in the family drinking some beer while the girls gossip in the kitchen everyone finally comes together to say goodnight and we all hug and say a prayer for thanks for each others lives and what is to come. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays and after my first semester of college comes to an end and the hardship of pledging a fraternity comes to an end, I’m sure more than ever that this will be one of the most relaxing and well deserved breaks of my life. I can’t wait to get on that plane to make our way to Michigan and get greeted by my grandparents at the airport with all the other family members rolling on one after another. Hopefully everyone has just as good as a Thanksgiving as I do. Happy Holidays Everyone !!

For this weeks blog I wanted to express how excited I am for homecoming to be over. Homecoming week has probably been the worst week of my so far college career. Since I am pledge a fraternity right now, this is a huge week for us and AOPI. AOPI is the sorority we are doing homecoming with this year. Thus far all of the girls I have met have been really nice and enjoyable to hangout with. I have made a lot of friends and am reall enjoying that aspect of homecoming. But their is absolutley nothing else I enjoy. What homecoming consist of is the pledges making a float a banner and some other miscellaneous stuff. The main products of your float consist of these little balls of paper called pomps. Pomps are quite the thing during homecoming week. I had no clue what a pomp was till now and I never want to speak of them again. What we do for hours and hours is sit down and take a bottle cap from a Dasani bottle and shove a colored piece of paper until it fits like the shape. This doesn’t seem like a very hard task, but it is the most annoying thing I have ever been through. We you get down into doing around a thousand of these little nuisances you start to feel the hate. The entire float is made of the little pomps, they make the design that your sorority makes for you to produce. When you sit down and think about the size of the float and then the size of a pomp, it really hits you how many of these little guys you are going to have to make. In three days we totaled 79,000 pomps and received nine more boxes the next day to bump us up to 158,000 pomps for our float. We filled trash bags and trash bags full of pomps and finally have possibly reached our final amount. This week has been not only miserable but considerably the a week that I would never want to relive. I can’t wait for this week to be over, I’m actually writing this blog while I am pomping !!!!

I decided to talk about snowboarding for this blog, because their is nothing more I would rather be doing right now. I’m imagining my families traditional family vacation to Aspen. If you have never been to Aspen in late December, you should really take into consideration going. I don’t know if there is anyplace in the country I would rather be. The beauty that the mountainside offers on a crisp morning when a light snow is falling and the air so thin takes your breath away is a feeling I experience every year and can’t wait for December to roll around. I have been snowboarding now for about 11 years. I grew up on the mountains, being at my grandparents cabin on Sugar Mountain in North Carolina. I came to love snowboarding and knew that this was my thing. Not to be cocky, but I’m not gonna lie you, I tear up the mountain. I’m not much of a freestyle rider, but more of a mountain rider. When your in Aspen their are trails that the everyday skier or snowboarder abide to, but not me. I make my own trails, I hit the woods blocked off by fencing with my best friends that come with me every year. We are the group of guys you see finding 10ft drops off a small rock, hitting it full speed and riding off with bigger and better things in mind. On of the stupidest things I have ever done is try to 50/50 a small tree that was at a 35 degree angle. I didn’t take any consideration into what I was doing. The tree was frozen solid with a thick sheet of ice covering the bark. I didn’t realize how fast I was really going and absolutley ate it. whipped forwards and thankfully moved my head out of the way of the tree but my shoulder took the punishment. I thought I had broken my collar bone, no pain I have ever experienced in my life compared to this. That feeling when your stomach is churned and your heart comes to a stop while reality is hitting you of what just happened hit me, and hard. But thankfully I wasn’t hurt, but that was my last run of the day. I woke up the next morning a little uneasy but got out of that fast because it was one of the best days of snowboarding I have ever had. We found a small cliff off the backside of the mountain that over looked to entire backside of the mountain. We didn’t do anything off of it because it was probably a 75ft drop. We all sat there and watched one of most beautiful sunsets we had ever seen. I wish one of us would have had a camera but all we had were our cell phones but I recently got a new phone so I couldn’t upload the picture. Its hard to describe the sun on top of one of the most beautiful mountains in the world. It non the less breath taking, but inspiring. I had this feeling of being in a place where some man greater than all men had created. He had given this to us and this moment where nothing in the world mattered but him and I being on the mountain together experiencing possibly the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I have this feeling a lot when I’m in Aspen but non like the one on the cliff. 

Globalization is endless from country to country but the United States influences more of itself upon more countries than any other. There is countless aspects that the United States globalizes. Other countries want to be just like us, they promote or resturaunts, sells our food, and wish for a country like ours. We embed our nationality into everything that we do, we may conform sometimes to produce a product that appeals to another country, but over-all we make it to be by us. Every country knows who is the dominant force in the world, and they envy that. Globalization was in no case preventable because of other countries willingness to become a country like our own.

We may not realize some of the globalization other countries have on us, but it is all for our desires. Other countries need us to survive, we feed off of this because we like the art from Italy, the rugs from India and the sushi from China. But this doesn’t stop us from leaving our roots and become a country of needs. We like these things but we don’t need them. We dominate by this, thus labeling us as the dominant force of globalization across the world today.

As the days get closer Tennessee and Alabama prepare for one of the most heated rivalries in college football. Alabama is with no doubt Tennessee’s most hated rival. The rivalry began through streaks of winning throughout the 90’s. Tennessee and Alabama would fight back in fourth winning three, four or five games straight. This is where the hate flourished. When I say hate, I literally mean hate, there is no other team I despise more than the Crimson Tide. But, in my opinion the rivalry has weakened because of lack of tradition. The game throughout history has always fallen on the third week of October, this is no longer the case. These little things are what make a lasting impact on someone, like me as a boy. My mom and dad always used to say around this time,”its gettin close Mitch,the ole third week of October.” I quickly caught on to what they meant and that’s when my hate for tide began. 

Most new age Volunteers would say that our biggest rivalry is Florida because of the high energy and new found dislike. But, next week if you get the chance take a trip down to Neyland Stadium and look around and see what you see. You see the tradition that has been passed down for many generations. You see the Volunteer army at their fullest, ready to strike down and tide that walk through our path. GO VOLS !

At the beginning of his presidency, President Obama issued at $787 billion dollar stimulus into the the economy to promote growth in the economy and the job industry. A promise was made that was going to pull America out of this crashing recession and promote jobs, which would promote employment in return. Unemployment is not becoming any better, this stimulus has literally done nothing. People will argue that it has become better because the stock market has gone up, which to them implies economic growth. As this is true, this increase in the stock market obviously has no effect on the unemployment factor. If the economy is getting better, great, but why then isn’t unemployment getting any better? This is the question that the unemployed american wants to know, and they want to know now. Now as the midterm elections roll around, another $180 billion dollar stimulus is being put into effect by President Obama. The massive amount of money that was put into the economy on his first stimulus did improve the stock market, but not unemployment. Maybe this will be the stimulus that will attack unemployment, and give the countless out of work americans the promise that they deserve.

We should all have faith in our president on what he is doing to fix the unemployment, but this is a problem, and a serious one. Obama’s approach to fixing the unemployment is the only, and the right way. Obama is attacking more than one factor at a time; the economy,unemployment rate,and producing jobs. This task is not a easy one, but it is one that can and should be done. With the amount of money that already has been put into the economy should be enough to show the american people a little sign of hope. If the unemployment rates even dropped to 8%, this would give us all hope, and that is what we need. Obama is doing all he can right now, although It will take some time for everything to fall into place, we are on the right path.

For this weeks blog I decided to write about how pumped I am for fall break. I am finally going to get some time to sit down an relax for more than a fifteen minute period. Sleep, I cannot describe how excited I am to sleep. Honestly, I don’t know if I have had more than six hours of sleep a night thus far in school. This probably comes off as a little bit pitiful but believe me, when you join a fraternity and try to balnace out sixteen hours of school; this is no walk in the park my friends. I have gotten to the point with the whole fraternity thing that I love going to class, I enjoy sitting down and listening to Brett or another one of my teachers speak. It is probably my most valued part of the day because I actually really like school and enjoy learning. This is almost impossible to do with a frat on your back, but hopefully it will be worth it in the end. Oh, and don’t worry I’m not one of those stereotypical frat daddy’s, I’m in for making life time friends and I understand that this doesn’t seem right and all but I’m really in it for the brotherhood. Other than all that my fall break is going to be the bomb because my family owns a cabin in Gatlinburg that overlooks downtown. The leaves are actually starting to change up there just a little but and the temperature is becoming somewhat cool during the evenings. My family and my girlfriend are spending the entire break up there and I can’t wait. My cabin is like my second home, we always spend Christmas up there and frequently take long weekend trips up there just to relax and forget about Knoxville for a couple of days. This is probably the most excited I have ever been to go there because I have always taken advantage to how relaxing it really is. This is going to be great for me, being in probably the most stressful time of my life. Hope everyone else has as good as a fall break as I am planning too.

Dear Mom and Dad,

This letter here is to inform you on a decision I have recently made. My decision is something that I have given great thought, and is something that I cannot see myself hiding from. I am a man now and need to make decisions on my own and learn from them. If something is to happen where I change my mind when I’m fighting for what I assumed to be the views that I relate to, then that will become a thing of learning. But, if i found that this is exactly what I want and view as being apart of me, then what is better than that ?

I have decided to leave the South’s views and ways and establish myself in the North. I am going to be fighting on behalf of the Union for the rights of myself and others. Though we treat our slaves with the upmost respect and deem them to be apart of our family then intention behind it is still not right. I am not holding this against you all in anyway because, if you are forced to have help around the plantation you should treat your workers in the way you would want to be treated, and you do this. The reason I am leaving is more about my take on Federal Government. If you go and look under my bed you will see all the research and articles I have been reading that has changed my view on State by State laws. We all need to come together as one and be able to unify under a common ground of strong central government. Wether the government posses more power than we think it should, its not out there to hurt us, it is there to unify us as one. We need someone that can step up and run the show of America. We are destined and are the best country out there, and we need to capitalize on top of that. I think that the North really has there view on government correct Mom and Dad, and I’m going to fight for that.

I hope this hasn’t changed how you feel about me or deem me not be your son anymore because of my decision. I have made this by myself and for myself just like you all have. Our views my be different and disliked but I am still your son and unconditionally love you all. Please don’t be upset with me when I return, I cannot imagine walking back into this house and not being welcomed with loving arms as it always has been. I will write you all as much as I can and hopefully will receive a letter back, but if not I will still continue to write you until the day I return. You are my family and always will be. Love you all and can’t wait to see you.