Some think barren, we think source -Haley Schwartz

Hello all. First off, in case you decided to skip the title, my name is Haley.

Before I get into the intricacies of my ad choice here's some sun facts about me:
I'm co-president of Speech Team. I'm president of Gay-Straight Alliance. I'm a huge Obama Supporter. I'm on Junior Exec Board and Viking Ambassadors. I like French things & black and white prints. I work at Banana Republic. My dad, step-mom and three half sisters live in San Diego. I was born there. I've never loved a place more than Paris. My favorite movie is Breakfast at Tiffany's. I make sushi. Speech rules my life and I love it. My main event is Verse Reading which is performance poetry. I want to be a foreign service officer and work in US embassies abroad until I retire early and open a patisserie in Paris or a Cafe Provencal in Provence, France.

I chose this ad because it embodies an important theme in my life, looking at things from a different perspective. For example, in the movie Truman (starring Jim Carey (in a serious role... SHOCKING) he plays a guy who was raised not knowing his life was a reality show & the world has been watching him grow up) when he is a wee boy, he says he wants to be an explorer, and his teacher shoots down the idea saying that the entire world has been explored. She really just doesn't want him exploring and finding out he lives in a huge bubble shaped studio in California. this may be coming off as a bit abstract, but if you think about it, you really can't be an explorer these days. I guess you can explore space, but we have robots for that, and even if you decided to, i hear it all looks the same anyway, and what hasn't been explored is too far away.
So there is nothing new to explore. which is a bummer because how are we expected to grow as a society without exploring? The answer: to explore that which we have already discovered, or more simply, to look at what we "know" and to challenge it.
and that is how i try to approach life. So what if everything has been done before, as long as you approach it with a new, fresh perspective, isn't that exploration?

Reality is just what we perceive it to be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we exist. I think it's too bad that life is about practicality. I think that instead of learning what to think, we should learn how to think for ourselves, and I don't mean in the typical, overstated, make your own decisions way, I mean being a free thinker.

I think the true measure of greatness is not what you know, but your capacity for original thought.