Another thing to be thankful for

America is clothing hungry. Let me explain, many people in the United States own more than twenty pairs of clothes. Now if you ask me, ten or twelve is average, while thirteen is pushing it and seven or eight is maybe not quite enough. Still at school I see people that have any assortment of odd clothing mixed and matched outfits. This is not bad of course, but why do we need to have so many choices? Our ancestors who came to America came with “only the clothes on my back and the food in my stomach.” They made it through their experience. By today’s standards this would mean that you were dirty and a social outcast, I have to agree with this, for if you wore the same clothes for weeks until you could find another pair cheap I would imagine that you may not smell or look very good. This is not my point, however. Despite the need of hygiene, they still got along just fine in their voyage to America, or else none of us would be here at this present time.

Here is another example. This is a corny example but it once again proves my point. Remember Dobby the house elf from the Harry Potter series that I am sure that most of us have read? Now he did not even have a pair of clothes! He got along fine (Ok, not fine, he had an evil owner, but he made it in only a pillowcase). He shows that even in extreme poverty people could make it through with the most meager of apparel.

Last year my family had some friends from France come and stay with us for a few days. I could not help but notice that they wore the exact same outfit every single day; it sort of grossed me out. When I asked my mom why they did not change their clothes, she replied that in France they routinely wear the same clothes every day until they get a stain or until they are visibly dirty. This seems really gross to me, my whole life I have been raised in a home where after you have worn something, you wash it, but in France I guess it is not like that. I guess that it does not make much difference to them if they have already worn the clothes, which goes to show that different countries have very different customs than others.

Now please, if you are reading this, don't think that I am saying we should all go and throw away all of our clothes but one pair, or that we should walk around in pillowcases. That would be really, really gross. I am just saying that in numerous cases other beings have been alright without twenty pairs of clothes. Also don't think that I am encouraging us to wear our clothes four times before we wash them, that is also gross. Just be thankful for the clothes we have and not be constantly in the want for more.

So next time you go to the store and decide to spend your recently earned twenty dollars on a great new shirt, just imagine yourself next to Dobby the house elf and consider how much you really want that shirt, and if you really do want it, then buy it by all means. If you don’t really need it, then don’t buy it. The choice is simple as that.

A very interesting person indeed...

I have this very interesting friend.To protect her identity, we will call her Cass Jones. Many people may consider her “weird” or “crazy,” some people may even say “she is really strange sometimes.” To me though, I consider her to be all of the above. It's what makes her so much fun to be around, and such a good friend! She has many interesting things about her, to name a few she has Asian background, another is that she is very talented in many ways, and another is her strange interests and the powerful urge inside which must be what must make her love to annoy people, but the most amazing thing is that through all this she is still one of the best friends I have ever had.

Both of Cass' parents come from Asia, her mom from Vietnam and her dad from China. She and her sister have a cool way of life, theirs is like this, they speak fluent Vietnamese at home, and in the Jones' house, they eat lots of very cool food that I had never tried before like dried squid, fried shrimp, and sweet rice that her mom cooks and buys from Salt Lake. She has also become enthralled with Asian actors and actresses, with everything she writes and owns, comes something to do with Asian movie stars, or her favorite Chinese TV series. Her series' stories are normally based on some sort of war hero, I watched one with her one time and it was pretty cool. Her house is cool too, her houses' yard is covered in roses and other cool landscaping.This summer all the Joneses went to Vietnam for a month to visit her grandmother who had previously lived with them for a few years. She says it was a very cool experience and made a lot of new Vietnamese friends while there. While already being bilingual, she has many other talents also.

Speckofsand is one of the most talented people I know. If I had to pick a brilliant mind from my school, hers would be it. For one thing, she has had a 4.0 every term in junior high so far except for one term where she had a 3.952 and was really mad about it, so in other words she has an amazing brain. She is also trilingual, not only does she speak fluent English and Vietnamese as I have mentioned before she is also learning french in school. Whenever there is an assignment in school that involves a lot of looking things up she is awesome and speeds through it with ease. She has amazing handwriting and isn't bad at cartooning. But I believe that perhaps her most amazing talent is her piano skills. Cass' piano books songs that she plays from have very hard songs. She can play dozens of tough songs on piano and have over ten of them memorized; I think that this is really amazing. She doesn't ever make mistakes either, or hardly ever at least. Of course, every amazing person has their strange sides too.

I think Cass must have some invisible yet powerful urge inside her that makes it irresistible for her to pass up the chance to poke someone. She might hide one of their belongings, or step on their heels, or tickle them, or scare them and make them shriek very loudly, or tie them to a desk by their shoelaces when they aren’t looking, or even recently she started keeping a journal in which she records the date and time that one of her friends did something weird or got tongue tied; the list goes on and on. Of these qualities, I think her most tortuous tactic is that she loves to play with people’s minds. Many a time I have talked to her and she will say “I know something about you, but I’m not supposed to tell.” And then she will grin her wide, cheesy grin and walk away very smugly. It is its aggravating sneakiness of her torture that really amazes me. Who doesn’t go crazy trying to figure out what someone else knows about them? Other times on the internet someone will be chatting with her, she will say something nonsensical like saying something in an abbreviated form, and when the person she’s talking to asks what it means she says “Oh, I might tell you someday.” Yes, Cass loves to annoy people. Despite her strange habits, Cass is still a very good friend.
Cass was my first friend when I moved to this area eight years ago, and has remained one of my very best friends ever since then. She is so much fun to be with, she has a great sense of humor, and she is always laughing if you can get her in the mood. She is always ready to do any activity when we do things together. She is a good listener and usually has some very enthralling stories to tell also.
Cass is a very interesting person, she has Asian ancestry and family, she is really talented in many ways, she loves to annoy people, and nonetheless remains a really awesome friend. I think that my life and many of the rest of our lives might be pretty dull without her there to stir things up a bit, so I am glad that she is here to make things interesting for me!

Sometimes you have to wonder...

Sometimes I wonder why the world is the way it is. Now I am not going to complain about that weird, horrible, or otherwise completely bogus earth we live on as I have for my many past entries in here, I was just wondering, why is the world the way it is? Why is the sky blue, I mean sure, we learn in science that it is because light is reflected off of the particles in the air and the light comes back to us blue? (For those of you who still do not understand this, do not try to figure it out, it still makes no sense to me.) What about the english language? Who ever came up with the word dog? What if they were called cat instead? Now wouldn't that be weird? I wonder if in the days of the cavemen some huge caveman saw a dog, grunted, pointed to it and said "dog," and ever since then we have called them dogs. But hey, we also call mangy human beings dogs, such as "ye scurvy dogs!" In pirate times. Since when did people have anything to do with dogs and since when do they look like them? Once again I am not trying to bash whoever uses the word "dog" when they see a mangy person, but hey; really; where did it come from? My best guess is that someone was a little loopy and decided to call their friend a dog since they had not bathed for many weeks, or something like that.
Here is something else that goes along with what I am saying. I got an email a few weeks ago that had a few "incidents" on it. By incident I mean that some people are so stupid they just can not function in life. Here is one of the stories on the email.

Mrs. Grazinski purchased a brand new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On her first trip home, (from an OU football game), having driven onto the freeway, she set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver's seat to go into the back & make herself a sandwich. Not surprisingly, the RV left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mrs.Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising her in the owner's manual that she couldn't actually do this. The jury awarded her $1,750,000. plus a new motor home.

Come on, who is seriously so stupid that they sue a company after they stopped driving their vehicle on a high speed road? The woman in this email is relying on her own stupidity to earn her money. Now I for one would rather not have that sort of reputation. Well, I guess our earth has a few loose screws and they come in the form of people like this.

Ok so i'm starting to sound negative again and i'm really trying not to so let me just say that I sort of like having a few real idiots out there, because it makes the rest of us look so smart! And it gives us something to laugh at. Luckily, most of us have our heads screwed on right or else our whole planet would crash and burn.

Crazy lifestyle

Every season my family and I have different projects. We have recently started to make the transition from summer projects to our autumn projects. I love this time of year, but things can get a little hectic around my house. One major thing that we do as autumn arrives is put up our Halloween decorations, this includes every wall hanging in the shape of a witch, skeleton or goblin; every pumpkin shaped figurine must find a place in our living room; and every stick on leaf must be firmly pasted on our window. We did all this last week and had loads of fun doing so, but it took us three days to complete all of it. That is how much stuff we have.

Another thing my family is doing this year is we are building a new deck in our backyard, not an easy task as I have recently learned. It is even harder since we are trying to get the whole thing put up by winter so we don't have to work in the snow. I thought that to build a deck it was basically digging a few holes, sticking a few posts in the ground, measuring a few feet, then laying boards. I was completely wrong in that assumption. To make a deck, it involves hours of digging holes, pouring concrete into the holes, measuring and re-measuring different boards, cutting those boards, lifting those heavy boards, and screwing in hundreds of tiny screws. Through all our hard work, which took place for many hours on Saturday in the rain, we have the frame of a deck! It actually looks like all those boards and holes and screws will become a deck! So that was our great accomplishment of the week.

Here is another thing we do every year, we can various fruits and put them in our storage room to enjoy for winter, and for most of them we all work together in the canning process to make it a short experience. Grape juice is the exception, only my mom knows how to make grape juice. So for the past two and a half weeks she has stood in the kitchen and made grape juice whenever she gets the chance. I absolutely love grape juice so I am really glad she does this. All in all, we have a ton of autumn projects as you can see from these past few paragraphs.

Ok so this is off topic, but to me, when I view the school year, I see it in little increments, there is the September increment, that one is the beginning, the part that I look back on and say “wow, I did not know what I was doing back then, I was still getting used to the new grade, new teachers and all together going to school again.” During the September time period it also feels like the beginning of school will never end and the time where you are “starting school” will fade away and the time of being “in school” will finally begin. Thank goodness it is October! In my odd way of looking at a school year, we have finally advanced from the beginning time frame to the middle time frame, May being the end time frame. I am soooo glad that we are now in school, not starting it. Autumn is fun, but to me it’s mostly fun when the beginning is through and I have adjusted to the stuff it brings in place of summer.

Count yourself lucky

We are so lucky to live in this century. What are the odds that of the billions of people to ever live on this planet our speck of life happened to be born into this century? Let me state a few examples of why we are so lucky. Take the washing machine for example, one thousand years ago; you had to wash every item of clothing or anything by hand on a wooden washboard if you even had that. This also is in the conclusion that you had more than one outfit. I read somewhere that at the beginning of summer you took a single bath, washed your one pair of clothes, or if you were lucky, you put on your new pair, and then were sewed into them. By sewed into, I mean that the stitches on the clothes were made while you were wearing them, leaving no room to get in or out of them again. In this century, we complain that we do not have enough, so we buy more, and we wash them after every time we wear them, whether they were worn for three hours or a whole day. All we have to do to wash them is stick them in the big white box, add some soap, and push a button.
Here is another example, if you needed food in one thousand AD, then you butchered, or grew most of it yourself, you only went to the market to get the necessary items you could not get for yourself. You did not have much variety either, you got what you got, and if you did not like it then you went hungry. Now, you go to the grocery store and have whole racks of different kinds of cheese, beans, grain, even milk. Who ever heard of four kinds of milk back then? No one. And we did not toil in the fields for months to get it either, maybe if we were farmers, but even they have new machinery to make things easier on themselves. No, to buy our groceries, we sit in air conditioned offices and pushed buttons with our fingers. I think that they would have gladly switched with us. Granted, our jobs are hard on our brains, we have had training to do them. I think that it may have done us good to work in the fields for months on end. Perhaps we would have less obesity in America if we did.
Ok, I do not want to get really negative or anything so I will stop there. I just think that we should recognize how lucky we are to live where we do, when we live, and how we live our lives. Our new gadgets make life a piece of cake compared to how things used to be, and we want more more more. Our new amazing gadgets also deplete the worlds’ resources, we can have our gadgets, since they have helped the human race survive, but would it be too much to ask to try and conserve electricity and turn off our lights? Or maybe to walk to our neighbors house instead of drive? Please don’t think that I’m a tree hugger because I’m not, but I just want to give anyone who reads this a few things to think on.