Presentaciones

Ok, so there be a lot of things that I could write about here as it’s been like a month since I’ve dropped a post. A lot of things I’d LIKE to write about as well. But I think I’m gonna rock another moderately encompassing one that gives a bit of an overview about some of that crazy crap that I have to partake in whilst at school. And one of those things that I seemingly have to do up all the time around these parts is the idea of the presentation.

Thus far this semester, I’ve had to give four of these presentations, or speeches if you will, and I’m still looking at dropping a few more. Funsies. Now I’m not gonna lie to you, my friends, I don’t overly mind doing these things. I’ve always been a pretty good public speaker and am pretty solid at thinking on my feet/just making things up in general, so it’s all hood overall. Although, I’m not the biggest fan of the work that oftentimes is accompanied with speeches. I mean, putting together the wording and the like itself isn’t that difficult, but throwing together a powerpoint and doing any necessary research/working with other peeps can be a bit of a hassle at times. But meh, like I said, it’s all hood.
Speaking of hood, that’s a pretty good segue into my first speech of the year. It centered on the capucha/casucha controversy that I wrote about a few posts ago. Now I don’t think that I really need to rehash the whole story again, because you already know what happened, Amy (and the one or two other people that maybe read this/stumble upon it blindly), and I would literally just be repeating everything I said.
This was just to be an introductory speech for my Management 3033W class, so the whole thing was pretty chill. The only hard part about it was that it was only supposed to be 2 minutes long. Max. That was a bit unfortunate, so I had to cut some good material out of the whole story, but in short, it went really well, and the class seemed to quite enjoy it.

But yeah, as opposed to actually writing about this speech again, I’m going to drop some more MGMT 3033W knowledge here instead. Now you may remember from my last blog entry that I talked about all my classes and their general suck-age and such. Well, I made what many would construe to be a mistake by actually naming names in it. As in, I called my teachers out, more or less, by using their legit nombres.
Well… turns out that my MGMT 3033W teacher receives Google alerts every time someone posts her name on the internet. Wait. What?! Ok, so here’s the logic she gives for that. Apparently, since giving the introduction for Barack Obama when he came to Minnesota a few months ago, she’s become curious as to what people say about her/the speech. So in an effort to better be able to track what people write in relation to her, she signed up for some sort of Google thing where she actually receives a notice whenever her name appears on the internet.

OH SWEET!!! That awesome Brady Bunch episode where they go to Hawaii is on right now! Poor Greg just got tooled on his surfboard. Let that be a lesson to y’all: Don’t wear cursed/”taboo” Tiki idles while playing around in the water on some sort of floating ironing board. Looks like I’m going to be multi-tasking for a bit right here. Good gravy, those are some literally tight swim trunks the dudes are rocking. Gross. Moose knuckle = never appropriate. *shudders*
But anyways, one day said teacher came into class and started talking about this whole alert thing; of course, I wasn’t really paying too close of attention at this point as this just seemed to be irrelevant information. But then she started quoting my blog, and my attention quickly snapped to the front of the room. Ohhhh crap.
Now she said she wasn’t angry about the whole thing and that she actually somewhat enjoyed reading it. But yeah, there’s a pretty fair chance that that’s a lie; although, granted, I really didn’t say anything bad about her at all. In fact, even though I’m not a big fan of the class material, she’s actually a solid teacher. But nonetheless, I did say some bad things about some of my teachers, so she probs didn’t enjoy that too much… So yeah. Thus, I can say that when I got back home that day, I changed the names within the blog in order to not get completely tooled.
I mean, I don’t particularly care if my teachers actually find what I wrote, BUT I do care about being failed because they can’t take what I escribir’ed. I REALLY didn’t want to change the names, but I figured that there was a dece shot that it would hit the fan if the tree-hugging hippy or someone found it. Es decir, if they actually did decide to be d-tills to me because of this, though, all that would do is confirm my suspicions about them anyway, but some things are better kept in the dark, I say. I don’t exactly want to be proven to be correct in this matter..

Another thing you might be noticing WHOA! Hold on here. There’s a fairly massive spider on Peter’s chest right now. It still gets me that they didn’t just smash the Smurf out of that thing. But on the plus side (I knocked over the Sun Sphere) we get to see Carol get COMPLETELY owned for being an annoying woman and thinking that Mike bought her that coral pin she wanted and that he was hiding it in the bag from her that actually contained the spider after he saved the boys’ lives. HA! Take THAT, you stinkpot! Let that be a lesson to err’body! :-)
But moving on, you might be noticing that I’m refraining from mentioning my teacher’s name again here. Well, let me be clear on this. I’m not in the slightest feeling that way. Hers was actually the only name that I didn’t go back and change from the previous post. She asked me a couple weeks ago if I was going to write about her again, and I told her yes, straight-up, so yeah, it’s all capucha in that. BUT if she does find this post, that means that she went back to my blog to read it again or to see if I wrote something new about her without actually dropping her name. And THAT would be weird, and there’s NO way she could call me out about that. She’d just be stalking me. I mean, she could say that she was showing a friend the thing, but c’mon, who would buy that? Perhaps she “accidentally” got to it again. Really? No. The fact of that matter is that I got this whole thing on lockdown.
Dang, I forgot that this is actually a three-part episode. I can’t believe I’m watching the whole thing. Gosh, what’s wrong with me? If I weren’t EXTREMELY heterosexual, I’d question myself based on this, the obsession with High School Musical (which I’ll talk about more later :p), and the fact that I’m fixing to start reading the Twilight series tonight…
But anyways, back to the presentations. So I finished off the first one of the semester without so much as blinking, but I still had a lot to go. The second one that I had staring me in the face was another one for this same 3033 class.

The general idea behind this one was that there was a problem within some business that I used to have work/have a stake in that needed to be fixed. That’s a confusing sentence right there. Ok, let’s break it down a bit here *dances briefly* There’s a problem in a business that I used to work for. I need to fix it [(i.e. present an idea to management (which is being played by the teacher and other students)]. So basically, I pick something that was wrong with any former job of mine.
But let’s take a look at that concept, shall we? How many jobs have I had in my day… Hmm… 4. Hanging curtains on the pig barns at the Honzay place, trying not to get high while working at Dairy Queen, picking rocks for the Wertish’s, and then loading pigs again at the Honzay place.

There’s really not too much that I could say in reference to any of the farm work, because… well… I’m not sure how well that instructor would take that as a presentation idea. And heck, I’m picking friggin’ rocks. The only problem there is that I’m picking friggin’ rocks. Yeah, try and attack the manner in which I took a rock off the ground and placed it into a trailer being pulled by a four-wheeler. I mean, maybe Stevie and I shouldn’t’ve (double contractions, baby!) ghost ridden the ranger that one day (which obviously caused some corn to get plowed over), but hey, fun is what fun does. Wait, you don’t know what ghost riding is? Well, take a look at this vid and then imagine me and the awesome Christina “Stevie” Haubrich doing that in a four wheeler-like vehicle in doing that in a corn field. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlTvSUCCqPo But yeah, don’t even get me started on the pig loading either. As much as that sucked, I don’t know how we could really improve upon that anyway.
And then that leads me to DQ. I could write a juvenile-sized book about all the things wrong with that place. Ain’t no way I could choose just one and adequately describe the situation within 8 minutes. Unless, of course, I only said one line: “Fire the pot addicts.” That might’ve sufficed.
So yeah, I wasn’t exactly sure where to start with this topic. Luckily, my broheim/roommate Eric saw me brainstorming one day in our kitchen, and we started talking about jobs he’s held in the past. It wasn’t long before the hombre dropped a beauty of one on me. The Easter Bunny. “Wait, what?” you ask. Yeah, the guy worked for his local mall, decked himself out as the Easter Bunny, and took pictures with young’ins.
Crushed! Idea on lockdown. So he and I talked about what he used to there for a bit, and we pinpointed a legit problem within the process, and I commenced pwning this presetación. The basic concept was that there were only two employees working at any one time there: the Easter Bunny (Eric) and another guy who acted as the photographer/guy-who-printed-the-photos/everything else (because the bunny obviously can’t break character). Thus, inefficiencies could pop up in the form of bottlenecks and the like since there’s only one dude who basically does ERR’THING!

I can’t say that I worked overly hard on this little guy, though. I mean, like I said, presentations ain’t no thang for me. The hardest part was putting together the “takeaway” document that I was supposed to hand out in the middle of the presentación. Basically, this item was supposed to highlight the major points of my whole spiel and would serve as a reminder to the students/teacher… err… I mean, the management of what needed to be done to fix the problem. Due to the fact that my computer = not advanced at all, t’was a bit of a task to put the whole thing together. I spent far more time trying to put together something that looked at least moderately passable than I did writing the speech itself/putting together the powerpoint. Not gonna lie, though, the final document looked pretty dece considering all my lack of technology capabilities. I felt fairly solid about it and the presentation when I went into it on that sunny Friday morning.

Wait? Friday? I thought you didn’t have classes on Friday. That’s correct; I don’t. However, we were to give these speeches outside of class. Thus, we all had to sign up for individual timeslots. There were options for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thurday as well, but due to the fact that I have class ALL FRIGGIN’ DAY on Tuesday and Thursday, they were out. And dag-nabbed I was going to skip Tae Kwon Do on a sweet Wednesday to give a presentation. No way, sonny! Not in my house. Thus, Friday was the only way I could roll.
So I decked myself out in a nice-ish, avocado-colored shirt, black dress pants (that harbored some sort of weird stain – don’t ask questions, some things are best kept in the dark), and my dress shoes that are in dire need of a shining. You know, sometimes I wish I were rich and living in the great depression; I’d pay some kid a nickel to shine my kicks while I sit around at the train station hitting homeless people with a newspaper. But I digress, so yeah, got myself all dolled up and headed out to Carlson.
I arrived with much time to spare before I actually had to give this presentation because I had to print out my takeaway document, powerpoint slides, and other some such things (take THAT Carlson printing services – charge me $475 a semester! This is MY house!). Turns out I needed to make some changes to the powerpoint in order to match up properly with my speech. So I rocked that change and emailed the updated slides to myself (because… well… I needed to be able to access them whilst actually giving this beast.)
After I finished this mess, I found myself a seat in the dining area of Carlson to go over the whole thing. I wasn’t worried in the slightest about the actual delivery of the speech, but I needed to make sure I kept it under the time limit. So I went over some stuff and cut a bit out while I waited for my time to come up. Eventually, t’was showtime. I headed up to the room in which the festivities were to take place and went to town.

I sat around with a few other cats who were no doubt thinking the same thing: I don’t want to be here. I sat through their speeches, which were all decent, before my number was called. Well… we didn’t actually have numbers; that’s just an expression I’m using in order to make this whole endeavor seem more dramatic than it really was.
But anyways, I loaded up my powerpoint on the comp in the room and went to pueblo. I opened strong with a super-mega sweet attention getter, which was a picture of an evil-looking Easter Bunny. I had them before I even said any words. From there I worked my way through the presentation like John Mayer works through a setlist: Hilariously. I answered everyone’s questions without breaking stride. I was friggin’ Primetime out there, shutting down questions like he used to shut down wide receivers. Like a lock that had fallen to the ground, I was off the chain. A white guy with a flow as powerful as that of the Mississippi. All right, that’s enough pointless and possibly false analogies. Ya feel me? No doubt.

I wrapped up the presentation with a SICK close that tied the whole thing together. How’d I do this? Well, I dropped the evil bunny pic again, but then I followed it with a pic of a ridonkulously cute bunny holding a child – err’body smiling. “If we make these changes, we can turn this (evil bunny) into this (cute bunny). Holy friggin’ money, Batman!
It was over. I’d won. The enemy that was the Easter Bunny speech had been vanquished. But wait! From beyond the grave, that marsupial (yeah, I know that rabbits aren’t marsupials, but I don’t actually know what order they’re a part of. Hold on; let me check Wikipedia *checks* Huh, ok, they’re in the “lagamorpha” order. So I guess I should’ve said that “lagamorph” or something like that. *shrugs*) was still trying to thwart me. Turns out that I’d forgotten to pass out my takeaway document. Failboat! Straight lost half a point right there (out of twenty). Not good, but whatevs, the rabbit was dead and hanging upside down and inside out in my mind, so everything was hood.
The second incarnation of the presentation had fallen. Only two more which I can truly mention at this point. *obvious spoiler alert* I defeat those two as well. I mean, I’m writing this thing, so clearly I don’t die. C’mon, kiddies, think about it! Yeah, I know that you’re not supposed to draw the audience out of the movie like this, but whatevs, brohammer, this is just how it’s gonna be. But yeah, it was time to destroy another foe: The preliminary soccer presentation for marketing.
This iteration was to be a group project. Now I’m not gonna lie, Amy, I’m not the biggest fan of group presentations and such because coordination is always an issue, but the two other peeps in my squadron (Anna and Darren) are definitely good people, so it’s legit. The general premise behind this speech is that we just have to do research on something. The class, after all, is called “market research.” So we decided to see if there’s a demand for a men’s division one soccer team at the U (there’s currently not at team, but there is a women’s one). Not too hard of a concept at all.
Again, though, my man Eric got me the hookup on this thing as he’s actually the treasurer for the men’s club soccer team (that being the highest level of dude’s soccer at the U). So he dropped all sorts of knowledge and financial numbers on me that pushed the presentation over the edge in terms of awesomeness. Plus, Darren is a sports management major, so he’s privy to some solid info as well. Couple that with the fact that Anna’s basically a perfectionist, and this whole thing wasn’t too difficult at all. We definitely made up some facts and the like within this, but whatevs, this was only the preliminary presentation. We don’t need actual data (as in answers to survey questions and such – yeah, we’re writing a survey for this beast) until the final presentation. And even then, I’m not above lying in this sense. Meh.

Anna did the vast majority of work setting up and putting together the powerpoint, which was nice, y no voy a mentir, it was sick. The thing looked fantastic. Not sure how much she worked on it, but I’m dang glad that she’s in our group. Dinero, conozca el banco. The hardest part about this whole thing was actually deciding what we were going to wear. The syllabus said that formal dressing was encouraged but not required for this one, so yeah, we definitely knew that we didn’t want to go that far with it. I ended up just rocking a polo and some jeans. I still felt like a tool in it, but whatevs, I looked good :-)
The presentation itself went off without a hitch. We fielded everyone’s questions pretty easily and just straight crushed it. I don’t think any of us practiced really at all for the thing, but it still came off quite well. Sorry that this part of the entry doesn’t quite match the epic-ness of the Easter Bunny portion, but meh, this speech was actually kind of boring, so I’d like to move on to more legit stuff. Plus, I’d like to see if I could get this uploaded tonight. As it stands, I’ve been “working” on this thing for a little over two weeks now. Heck, I started and finished Twilight a LONG time ago :p
But yeah, I left this fallen warrior in the gutter and moved on to what was sure to be my easiest challenge yet. International relations. I mentioned in a previous post (my last one, actually) how pointless the presentations in that class were. The first group basically sucked and was boring as Smurf but the prof ate that crap up with a spoon. Thus, I knew that I wasn’t going to have to put too much effort into this one. However, this ended up being the one that I worked the hardest on, oddly enough. Why? Well, let’s find out.
First, though, a little about the concept. We, as a group, had to present on an international relations topic that was chosen by the instructor. Our group received constructivism. As I mentioned before, the class and the material is really interesting, so I wasn’t too put off by having to actually READ some stuff. There were a several book/internet articles that we needed to do up for this one, so we just divided everything moderately equally and attacked it from all sides. Our group had nine people and like six or so articles, so some of us had to double up.

I took on the task of the largest article with one of the girls in the group, Alex. I snagged up the first half and she the second. I can’t say that I ended up reading the whole article, though, just the first half. Nice. I read that hummer over a couple times and went to work on it. It wasn’t too long before I knew exactly what needed to be said. But I remembered what I’d written about in my previous blog post: I’d wanted to put tons of High School Musical references in this presentation. Now the material at hand didn’t lend itself overly well to just throwing these references in, but I still did my best to rock it out. I actually ended up fitting SEVENTEEN HSM quotes/song titles in it. Huge.
So yeah, I knew my material really well and had a solid powerpoint, so in theory I shouldn’t’ve needed to practice this thing really at all, right? Wrong. The HSM references were so strategically placed and thought out that I basically had to have the whole speech memorized in order to effectively deliver them. Sadsies. Thus, I put in a fair amount of work to make sure that I knew everything and had it all on lockdown. Like Aerosmith, I didn’t want to miss a thing.
I felt pretty confident about this cat when I walked into class on that Tuesday night. I chatted it up with the group and started getting ready for world domination. Problem, though. The girl who was putting together the powerpoint wasn’t there by the time that class started. Oh snap. She was a solid ten minutes late. Not good. But after she did show, there were still even more problems. We couldn’t get our powerpoint to load up on the prof’s computer. Apparently, she’d used the most recently updated edition of said presentation device, and his computer couldn’t actually support it. Fail. Oh, what to do, what to do?
We tried everything we could before we realized that it just wasn’t going to fly like that. So the girl had to run over to Coffman Student Union in order to reformat the presentation. Coffman’s about a ten or so minute walk from the room where we were having class, so we were looking at least twenty minutes plus formatting and who knows what other variable time. So what should we do in the downtime while waiting for this girl to come back, pondered our professor.

Well, after all the group presentations, he always has some slides of his own in order to go over the things that we just did to make sure we understand everything. Now that’s all well and good, but he NEVER finishes his slides because he’s soooo friggin’ long-winded. But apparently, he’s not aware of this, so he decided he would just go over this stuff first.
This was truly disconcerting for a couple of reasons. 1) He was going to talk FOREVER, and we had nine people to present. So yeah, time was going to be an issue; (2) he was going to go over ALL MY STUFF, so thus, peeps would be even LESS inclined (if that’s even possible) to listen to me and my HSM references; and (3) we had a review scheduled that night to go over test material, so yeah, cut about another ten or so minutes off our time. Weak.

The girl eventually came back from Coffman after about 40 minutes. So we were then ready to go, BUT the cat kept friggin’ talking! It wasn’t until like 8:10 (keeping in mind that class goes from 6:20 – 8:50) that we finally got to go. He told us to try and do the thing in thirty minutes. Not possible given our amount of material and presenters. Dreams. Crushed.
I sat around and waited while the first couple people went before I got the chance to rock mi parte. I thought about the whole time issue as I chilled. This wasn’t going to work. Not enough tiempo to deliver everything properly. Before I had the chance to fully figure out how I was going to rock this, my dice was rolled (again, with the weird analogies) and it was time. I walked up to the front of the room and opened the presentation in the boring way we were supposed to: by saying my name and what I was presenting on. “What up, guys?” I said. “I’m Aaron Landin, and I’m going to be presenting on ‘Taking Stock: The Constructivist Research Program in International Relations and Comparative Politics.’” While I spoke, my mind wandered to the question of in what manner was I going to drop the HSM references (as in drop them - not do them, or drop them - give them and how). I sighed at this unfortunate turn of events, but con-sarned if I was going to turn from this now. Time to turn it up; game on!
“You could say that it was the start of something new when Constructivism first really appeared on the scene in 1988…” First sentence, one reference (“start of something new”). There was no turning back now. I went through the remaining however many minutes of my speech dropping, I think, all the references, but it didn’t seem that anyone really caught on to what I was doing as I was forced to go quite quickly and couldn’t deliver the lines in the way I’d hoped. Although, I’m sure that some peeps figured that something was up when I said “Stick to the status quo,” “I just wanna be with you,” and (by far the weirdest phrase) “Bop to the top.”
I’d told Alex, the girl doing the second half of the article, about the whole thing, beforehand. She thought the idea was hilarious and later told me she was struggling not to laugh throughout the whole thing, but yeah, not sure what anyone else really thought. I’m sure I just looked like a complete fool in front of the prof, though. But meh, whatevs, if one person got the joke and thought it was funny, then it was worth it. Heck, I thought that it was gold, so there’s two peeps who enjoyed it. More than enough for me.
Unfortunately, though, we ended up running out of time and only five of our nine people got to present. Thankfully, though, I’d finished my part. Another presentation dropped to the wayside like Alec Baldwin’s career. But again, from beyond the grave, I was attacked. After the class had finished, the whole group went to talk to the professor about what the other four people were going to do. Eventually, it was decided that they would just have to go to his office hours and talk to him and give some sort of mock presentation to him. That sucks for them, not gonna lie.
But it was also decided that instead of being graded as a group (as was the plan), that he was going to grade us individually. Smurf! That means my complete fool-age-ness was going to be graded by itself. No doubt that my grade would probs (no doubt probs?) be affected by such absurd and confusing words/phrases. But again, whatevs, I say. I enjoyed it. And apparently Alex did as well. Good enough for me.

But there ye be, my friends. Four presentations down thus far this semester. I’m still looking at three more pretty big ones, though. Three more enemies that need to be kicked in the cranial region. Should be fun. No hay ninguna duda, though, that I’m a-rock them and Roll on highway, roll on along. Roll on daddy till you get back home. Roll on family. Roll on crew. Roll on momma like I asked you to do. And roll on eighteen-wheeler roll on (roll on).