Time, why is there never enough?

Every notice how nowadays everybody seems to be in a hurry? Where could they be going that they need to get to so fast?

The other day I was walking in the hall at school when one of the seventh graders flew past me, almost knocking me and a few other people over and dashed into a classroom a few doors away. By the time I got to my own class a few minutes later there was STILL two minutes before the tardy bell would ring. Sure we all have been worried sevvies, always afraid of being late to class and so forth, but you have to wonder what exactly was so important that he needed to be to his class before a full minute had passed between periods.

Again, there are always going to be the people on the highway going not ten, but twenty miles over the speed limit practically causing an accident with every car they pass. You again wonder, where could they be going in such a hurry? Is the capital building on fire? Is their first grandchild being born at that exact moment? Or is there simply a clothing deal they can’t bear to miss? My point is that except in rare occasions we don’t have a reason to be in such a rush that is inconvenient to those around us.

I admit, I have many times been in a hurry for a stupid reason and people around me give me the looks that mean “could you slow down a few hundred miles per hour please?” For example, I hate getting up early in the morning, like I REALLY hate it. So I push the time to its limit and end up dashing around the house trying to pack my backpack, grab some breakfast, find my shoes, etc. all in the last five minutes before my bus comes. This seems to happen on a daily basis. So I did a little experiment. A few days ago I set my alarm clock five minutes earlier thant I usually do. That morning I actually got to eat breakfast at the kitchen table instead of on the bus. Just five minutes made my morning way easier.

As I thought over this experience later I realized how much this could help us all be less stressed. The more I thought about it the more it made sense. The more time we allow ourselves to do things the less stressed we are when we don’t have to crunch a ten minute task into a two minute time period. Assuming that I don’t normally encounter a day where I absolutely cannot drag myself out of bed in the morning, I will start setting my alarm five minutes earlier to put less stress on myself. What if everyone else did this too? I think that everyone could be a lot less stressed if we did this. Think about it, when we really get stressed it is because we don’t have enough time to do something. If you have an incomplete homework assignment it is because you didn’t have time to finish it (or because you are a slacker). You are late and you needed ten minutes to finish wrapping the birthday present. Just allow yourself a little more time by not packing your schedule to the brim and you will probably be a lot happier.

Haha. Sure. That is way easier said than done, but seriously if you choose what to fill your day with and say no to a few things then we could all be much happier; the people who are the victims of car crashes due to speeders and those of us who just need more time.

A little privacy please!

This week in my English class, my teacher handed us all a copy of a newspaper article published a few years ago stating that teens don’t have the right to privacy. The reason? Columbine high schools shooting spree. The woman writing the article believed that it could have been prevented had the students involved been more supervised by their parents. Perhaps she is right, but the ideas that she laid down to supervise us went too far in my book. She said that until we get old enough to be responsible, we don’t deserve to have privacy. By no privacy, she meant zero privacy. That meant no phone, computer, TV, and other things like that in your bedroom. It meant no retreating into your bedroom with or without a friend accompanying you, they said that if their kids ever did that then she would pull them back upstairs and involve them in a family activity. She also said that her kids could never have a personal journal that she and her husband were not allowed to read.

I talked to my friends after class and they all agreed that her point of view irritated us. Some of her points were valid, but many of them we saw as a little extreme.

To start off, I agree that perhaps we shouldn’t have our own computer passwords. I can see a few of us getting into trouble with stuff online. As for the rest of her arguments, I think that there are ways we can give and take on each side. For example, having a computer in your room is ok. Many of my friends have one in their bedroom but their parents have put locks on certain websites and the computer is connected to the one upstairs, so that the parents have access to the places they go online.

A part of her article that really bothered me is the part where she stated that there would be no retreating into your bedroom no matter what, if you did so then your parents would be “wise” to bring you back out and involve you with the family. I am the oldest of five children, and at my house it gets REALLY hectic with all the little kids running around and having arguments here and there, not to mention half the time one of them has a friend over which adds to the chaos. My bedroom is my escape from this, and I would go insane if there was no place for me to retreat when everything is crazy. My brothers have a little game they play whenever I have a friend over, it’s called “annoy starchild as much as possible until her friends leave.” Again, in the article it mentioned that if your children had a friend over and went into their bedroom, then parents should drag them out and have them do something with the family. When my friends come over, my bedroom is the only place I am allowed to push my siblings out of, the rest of the house is fair game for them. I don’t believe that my friends would ever want to come to my house again if they had to play a board game with a five year old every time they visited.

Another point I want to address is where the article stated that we should not be allowed to have private journals. Our blogs are different; the whole world can read them, so I put things I would be ok with the whole world knowing in them. But I also have a private journal. The things in my journal are things that I would never repeat to anyone. In my personal journal I vent frustrations on my family and peers, say things about others which would be pretty embarrassing if they were repeated, and organize my thoughts about personal stuff my friends have told me about themselves. Therefore, if anybody were to read my personal journal, it would be catastrophic to me and everybody mentioned in it. I mean I don’t write horrible stuff in it, but if it were to get out then me and my friend’s personal experiences and problems would be exposed to whoever happened to get a hold of the knowledge. How am I to know that whoever reads it will not let something slip? I am sure that my parents are trustworthy people and wouldn’t tell anyone what was in my journal, but it is nice to have one place where they don’t know the innermost details of your life, you know what I mean? And I hardly think that we are going to plan a murder in our journals.

There are other things that me and my friends didn't like about the article, partcularly her know it all voice, but i won't go into those at this time.

Frankly, I bet that the kids that cause the problems like the ones at Columbine High School are the ones who are either REALLY troubled, or cannot find another way to express their frustrations on the world besides shooting some stranger. I mean I wonder what I would do if I couldn’t get the stress from everyday problems out somewhere. I imagine it would build up until you burst and do something irrational, like shoot someone. Being in your kids face every moment of every day would drive them farther below the surface than where they started. If a parent is trying to get you to open up, then I know from my experiences that the absolute worst way to do so is to give them no opportunties to retreat. Please, if we want to talk to you about something, we will come to you. Forcing it out of us will not work!

To all you parents out there: GIVE US SOME PRIVACY PLEASE!

Respect

I was thinking not to long ago about what causes most of the problems between people. As far as I can figure out, excluding wars, almost every disagreement between two people is caused by lack of respect for each other. I mean think about it, if you and your parents do not get along it is probably because you think they are wrong and therefore disobey them a lot. Your parents also don’t have much respect for you, for each time you disobey them they trust you less and less and see themselves more and more as the one in charge of you, this almost always means that they don’t respect you.

If there is a quarrel between friends it is because they don’t respect each other enough to view each others ideas as anything important, or they don’t care about them enough to respect their image in front of other people so they gossip and say bad stuff about them.

Say that someone doesn’t complete a task they were assigned at work. It is probably because they don’t view the project as important or urgent because they don’t care what their boss thinks about them.

Here is something that happened to some people I know: They owned a duplex and the people occupying one of their apartments had zero respect for their landlords. In the six months they stayed in the apartment they did not once pay their rent on time, they kicked five holes in the walls, they broke a window and the door, and then moved out without paying a penny towards repairs. This caused a huge conflict between the renters and the landlords which all could have been avoided had they shown any respect for the landlords or the house they were occupying.

I am sure that there are more examples, but my point is that there is more to stop having conflicts between each other than merely not fighting, if we would respect each other than I think almost all problems between us could stop.

The way to do this is harder than it seems. To some this may be easy, but to others it is the scariest thing in the world. In order to stop conflicts between parents and teachers, we have to admit that most of the time they are probably right. You sluff class, Mrs. Hall Nazi catches you. Well frankly, there is hardly a chance anybody is going to believe you when you say that you are doing nothing wrong, and if you complain that you got twenty points there is really no point to doing so. In reality I don’t think anybody besides the friends that sluffed with you are going to give you an ounce of sympathy. You can say that the teachers aren’t fair as much as you want, but the more you think like that the more you are going get in more trouble and it is all because you are trapped in the silly mind frame that teachers are not justified in giving you disciplinary points, and if you are one of these people then it is obvious that most of your problems at school are caused by your own lack of respect.

I could go on but let me leave you with this, if you have a lot of problems with other people and can’t seem to get along with anyone then try looking at your view of the people around you. I am not perfect but I know that I get along with people so much better if I respect them. If you find that you look at most people as idiots then you probably need to switch your view. It will make your life tons less stressful.

Pride and Prejudice

Surprisingly this does not have anything to do with the extraordinarily long book that many of us have chosen to read for our honors English requirement. What I have chosen to write about is how many of us have something we are very proud of: our amazing artistic talent, our good looks, our athletic ability, our good grades and so forth. There is NOTHING wrong with having a something special that no one else has; in fact without our individual talents the world would be incredibly boring. What happens, though, is with our individual gifts we sometimes raise ourselves above others and think that whatever it is we have makes us a lot better than our peers. We become proud and sometimes a little conceited and that can make us prejudice against others. Don’t try to say that you haven’t, we all have at one point or another done it, myself included.

What I mean by saying that we are prejudice, is we judge others before we know them. We see someone that does not have the talent that we have, and write them off as a “not as special” person.

Let’s say that you have a great ability to make friends and meet new people without worrying about what they will think of you. There is someone who is in a few of your classes that is obviously extremely shy because they never ever talk to anyone, as far as you can tell all they do is hunch in their chair at the back of the room. Whenever they are forced to answer a question or get up enough courage to say something they stumble over their words in a tiny voice. Their statement comes out sounding silly and everyone in the class exchanges disgusted glances. You know that you are “much better” at speaking in public situations, as they have little or no friends, and so you write them off as a “socially impaired” as does most of the people in the school. What you don’t know about them however is that around their few friends they are the most trustworthy, caring and wonderful person you could ever meet and if only people would reach out and talk to them instead of making them start the first conversation they could have the best friend they have ever met. Your talent is meeting people, theirs is keeping friends, the two are very different and if people would look past the outer shell and see the true person they would see how special the person actually is.

This is only one example of how we are prejudice against others before seeing the hidden gifts that we all have. If you ever find yourself ridiculing someone you hardly know behind their back for some stupid reason, realize they have something in them which you will never have, and without their certain talent something in someone else’s life, perhaps someone whom you know and love, would be a bit darker and less happy. You never know if the very person you are making fun of is highly respected by another person standing nearby for a reason that you don’t know about. Think about that the next time you are tempted to bring into the conversation something nasty about another human being.