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.

Change

A fact of life: people change, not always for good and not always for bad. We have all seen our close friends turn into “one of those kids” and we have seen our friends turn into some of the nicest people with the best reputations around. There is no stop button in the direction of change; you are always going either one way or another, towards being a better person or a worse one.

There are people in our lives who affect which direction we are changing, obviously we have our families that for the most part, pull us in the right direction. We have our teachers who will also push us in the right direction. But everyone knows that these are not what influence us the most. I have to say that our peers definitely affect us the most at this time in our lives. I know that I look to my friends as examples on how to dress and act. I don’t mean to sound like I copy my friends; I am just saying that when a friend of mine has an admirable quality, a fun personality, a cute style and so forth, it makes me want to have it too. So I guess you could say that I take all the things I like about my friends or all the things that make life good for them and squash them together to make me. I don’t know for certain, but I suspect that most people do this too.

The problem with this is different people like different things about other people. Say that a friend has a quality that you admire because they look cool or everybody knows them because of it, but it is something frowned on by society unbeknownst to you, and then you want to be like them so you try to apply that quality to yourself, now we have two people with a bad quality influencing their friends in bad ways. It can go the other way too, someone has a good quality and then a few of their friends take on the quality and you have more good people. In this way people are constantly changing, by influencing and being influenced by other people.

Another way that people are influenced is by example, and not necessarily good example. If someone is actively trying to be a better person, then they can learn from example in two ways, the first is by good examples, and the second is by bad. I have learned not only from the good people in my life but also from the ones that made bad choices. I know people who were happy and then started on a bad path and are now unhappy, I now know from observation how to not accidentally get on that bad path. We learn from the bad people what NOT to do to be better people. I think this applies to everyone except for those who are trying to be bad, and in their case I see no purpose in them doing so.

“I do believe I have been changed for the better, because I knew you.”- Wicked

If that could be said about all of us, what would the world be like?


** I have heard from a lot of people that my blogs are “really serious” and “make you look like you have no fun.” I guess that they are, but I want everyone to know that the topics for my blogs are things that I think about when I am on my own, the things that I explore in my mind when I am in a thoughtful mood. Please don’t think that I go around school and discuss philosophical questions with my friends, except with a choice few who also have lots of things going on inside their minds. I like to do other things than ponder the mysteries of mankind. **

Traditions and Habits

Tradition: (dictionary definition) the handing down of statements, beliefs, legends, customs, etc, from generation to generation by word of mouth or by practice.

I am not sure that I really like that dictionary definition, it is really boring and does not tell me what a tradition really is to most of us, things we do every week, month, year and so forth. A weekly tradition could be to always go to the movies with your friends on Saturday night. A monthly tradition could be to go to your grandparents house every fourth Sunday. I have never met a person in my life that does not have at least one or two traditions they do on a regular basis, most have at least fifteen.

Habit: (dictionary definition) Compulsive need, inclination or use, addiction.

Once again, I am not sure that I totally agree with the dictionary definition, as it doesn’t really state what a habit is, though it comes a lot closer than the tradition definition. To me a habit is something you do because you have always done it, or something you do because you can’t seem to stop yourself from doing it. As with traditions, everybody has habits, and everybody has good ones and bad ones.

What exactly are traditions? I guess you could call them habits, if that is an accurate way to express them. They are more advanced habits. By that I mean that they are things you always do; only they are more elegant, they have more meaning to them and involve more planning than the average habit. That is why they have a nicer name than habits. From my point of view, I think you could probably call brushing your teeth before you go to school in the morning a tradition because you do it every day at a given time. This means that we could likewise say that going to neighborhood Easter egg hunt at Easter every year could be called a habit.

Of course, nobody wants to use an elegant word like tradition for brushing your teeth, so we gave that the word habit, and let tradition be used for bigger, better events that we would much rather look forward to. Every family is different, we all have different habits and different traditions, I can not speak for everyone, but I really look forward to my family’s traditions every year. Traditions can range from huge to very small, my extended family always has a big Christmas Eve party with all of my aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins; this would be huge tradition. A small tradition that also happens at Christmas, my cousins and I do this wooden Santa puzzle, and it is always near impossible but we do it every year because we call it a tradition.

Traditions vs. habits, they are really not that different from each other, but when you say the words one after another you think of a big elaborate party when you say tradition, and you think of a nervous compulsion when you say habit. Why is that? Nobody has a good reason, but all I can say is I love my traditions a lot more than my habits. Anybody who reads this, please tell your favorite tradition in a post, I have heard some wild ones from my friends and it is entertaining to see what fun things everyone else’s families do.

Promises promises...

Everybody loves a person who keeps their promises, but is there anybody who honestly can say that they keep EVERY one of their promises? I don’t think so. We all would like to, but it is impossible unless you are a superhuman. Everybody is human, so we all forget about things that we promised someone else we would do; we accidentally are late for a dinner we promised a friend we would be on time to; sometimes we even purposely break a promise. Wouldn’t it be great if everybody kept all of their promises? Actually it would not be, we would have no free will and our lives would be ruled by the things we told each other we would do. There would be no “I actually don’t feel like going to work today, I will take a sick day.” No, that would not happen, we would have to go to work because when we took the job we told our boss we would come in every day unless we were deathly ill. I think the world is actually better because every now and then we don’t keep our promises.

One example of what I am saying is in politics. I think most of us know that there is hardly a politician out there that keeps EVERY SINGLE PROMSE that he makes while running for office, they might be able to keep most of them, but not all of them. They can say that they will keep us completely safe from terrorism. That would be nice, but it is a really hard promise to keep. Now, nobody wants to be killed by terrorists, but I’m saying that if we were 100% safe from them then we would be in trouble if one somehow snuck in, we would not know what to do or how to handle the situation if that happened. Do not think that would ever, ever want a terrorist to attack us, and I would love to be 100% safe if I could, but the fact is, it’s never going to happen. It’s impossible to be certain we are completely safe. (Also, if it sounds like I am saying we are doomed because the government can’t protect us, I’m not, I’m just saying we should always be on our guard because it is one of the promises the government can’t fully keep.)

There are a lot of examples I can go into besides the one about the government. Who hasn’t ever told your parents that you will clean your room, do your chores, homework etc. after you go to your friend’s house and then don’t do it? Who hasn’t left your homework until the next day to do during reading time so you can play video games or something after you promised yourself at the beginning of the school year you would always do it the night before?

All I’m saying by this is that life is more interesting, and possibly more enjoyable because of the promises we do and don’t keep. Am I saying it is ok to break promises? No. I’m just saying breaking one now and then is not the end of the world because it makes interesting experiences for us as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone in the long run.

More than 7 wonders of the world

America is absolutely amazing, we live in the place where we can do practically anything we want, we can worship whoever we want in whatever way we choose, we can say anything we want, we can do anything we want to do as long as it is legal, we are all given equal opportunities to do whatever we dream we can do, providing that we are willing to work for it. There are plenty more reasons that I love living in America. There are thousands of people around the world that would give anything to come and live here. So why do some people want to get out of it and live somewhere else?

My guess is because they want to have a change of scenery, or have a new experience, or something else like that. I personally plan on living in our amazing country for the rest of my life, but I, like others, would love to experience a change every now and then. I am not talking about ever living there, but I think it would be cool to be able to go to all of these other places that I see in pictures and movies that look so beautiful and different.

I guess i'm one to talk about wanting to see the world, I spent a year in Western Europe when I was four years old because my dad was relocated to Germany, and then again when I was eight years old. While we were there my family and I took mini trips within our big trip and saw most of the countries surrounding Germany and The Netherlands where we stayed. This is something that most people can't say they have done, most have never left our country before. I wouldn’t have except that my dad’s work paid for our air fare and stay there. Because of going to Europe, I know that there are things out there that are really cool I never knew existed. Which means there are other wonders somewhere on the earth which are beautiful and worth seeing.

To name a few things i've heard about and want to see are the Aztec ruins in South and Central America, Sydney harbor and the Sydney Opera House in Australia, the coral reefs in the Caribbean, Mount Everest. I want to see everything in New Zealand, Ireland, and Norway because the pictures I have seen of them are so beautiful. I want to see Africa, all the animals and the beautiful sunsets there that I hear about all the time. I want to see penguins in Antarctica! There are lots of other things I want to see elsewhere in the world, and I am positive there are other things in every one of these places which are equally special yet not as publicized. Of course, these are all wants, with a lot of hard work and a little luck I may be able to someday see a few of these places.

My point in writing all this isn't to share my wants, but to point out that our planet is filled with beauty, it’s all around us and all we have to do to find it is look. Most of us don’t realize there are people around the world who hear about our one of a kind Great Salt Lake, and want to come and visit our vast salt flats. We (me included) don’t realize the beauty of the lake, because we see it drying up and it has always been around us. That may be how others see their things, and they don’t realize they're beautiful either. I guess that all I’m trying to say is we may not be able to ever see penguins in Antarctica, we want to, but it will never happen. Instead we should notice what we have and be thankful for it.

A few thoughts

This week I do not really have a definite thought that I want to go on, so I am going to write about a couple of things that I have been thinking about lately.

This week was Thanksgiving. The main things that people think of when someone says Thanksgiving are: long weekend, turkey, feast, giving thanks, football, etc. Of course everyone is excited for a long weekend, who doesn’t love to sleep in and relax rather than working or going to school? And at Thanksgiving we always have turkey and a big feast, it is almost the biggest thing that Thanksgiving is about, although it probably shouldn’t be, and neither should football. Everybody says at Thanksgiving “I am so thankful for everything I have.” Well, truth be told, most people are thankful for everything they have, or at least most of what they have. So whoever says that they are thankful for everything they have is a good person, because they are really grateful at least in that moment, but it does not seem like their thoughts are really on being thankful for the whole time. They go and watch football or do something else like that. I don’t see anything wrong with this; weekends are meant for having a lot of fun. I am pretty sure though, that while they are watching football they are probably not thinking about how blessed they are. I think that all of us, me included, should try during the next Thanksgiving season and the rest of the year to stop every ten minutes or so and name one thing that we are glad we have. This may be easier said than done, but I hope that we can at least try.

One other thing I have been thinking about is something I have never really realized before, but is sort of interesting if you ponder it for a while. There are people out there that I have never met before that may become my best friend, might teach me something that I will remember forever, might save my life even. I don’t know who they are, but I will meet them someday. I realized that when I was four years old I didn’t know most of my friends that I have now. There were little four year olds running around living their own little lives that would someday become my friends, they were out there and I didn’t even know it. They had their own lives, challenges, and they had good times and bad times just like I did. They didn’t know I existed, I didn’t know they existed, but now we are friends. I know this sounds stupid but I just haven’t realized before that there are people whose lives will cross with mine somehow, either I will move to a new area or they will or I will meet them at a party or something and my life might be different from that point on because I met them. Probably not, but I know that my life would be enormously different had I not moved to Layton seven years ago and met all my current friends. Would my friend’s lives be dramatically different if I hadn’t moved here? What I am saying doesn’t make any sense now that I read over it, but it is just such a weird thing if you do understand it!

Politeness

What would happen if everybody went out of their way to be polite? What about helpful? Everybody would be so much happier, the givers AND the receivers. It might inspire the receivers to give more, thus making a cycle of charity. What if everybody didn’t go out of their way to help others, but at least did a good deed when they saw the need of one? Society would still be a much happier, crime free place, because the people that were helped would not need to break the law or starve in order to survive. What if only a few people did good deeds and hardly any went out of their way to help others? Then nation would be a corrupt nation, in my opinion. Luckily, in this rare case, I am not talking about the United States.

I once read an article in a magazine or some other source that had done a politeness test in many cities around the globe. They tested in a few different ways. They did all of their tests outside Starbucks coffee shops, and did three tests. The one I am telling about happened in New York. The first test was to have a reporter come in with a handful of items and order a cup of coffee. Then the reporter would stumble his or her way to the door. The test was to see if a person would hold the door for them. I don’t remember the exact results, but I think that they said that 45% of the people tested held the door for the reporter. The second test was to have the reporter carrying a faulty briefcase and then have it suddenly pop open, strewing papers everywhere. This time the test was to see who would help to pick up the papers. The results were that 30% of the people would stoop to the ground to help them pick up the paper. I do not remember what the third test was, but it had a similar outcome. These were really good results, higher than the rest of the averages of other countries, aside from the fact that apparently people are more likely to help a woman than a man. There were nations above us in politeness, and below us.

I did not just write down the results of a whole experiment for nothing, I wrote them to show how good our nation does in politeness, and how much we could improve. In seminary recently, we watched a video about a man who left almost complete strangers his few meager belongings when he died. Every one of them had hardly ever met him, but through small acts of kindness they greatly influenced his life. It amazed me that I may have influenced someone out there and that they are eternally grateful to me, or hate me because of something I had done many years ago. After I thought about it for a while, I also realized that there were people who would never remember me, yet they had either helped me or hurt me without even knowing that I would remember it to this day. This has made me a little more conscious to what I do to people every day. If we were all more polite, then nobody would have to have bad memories and we may have found the one way to be truly happy, which is through charity.

The information age

The information age, that is what we live in, according to the historians anyway. Over the past few years technology has skyrocketed, there are new devices for researching the smallest particle inside and out or exploring the furthest reaches of our galaxy to the maximum. There are laboratories that research every topic we could barely think of, there are even devices that can extend the human life twenty years beyond what was thought to be our maximum life span a quarter of a century ago. But what has come with these spectacular new inventions and what has been left behind?

Everybody knows what an ipod is, it is a little box with a microchip inside capable of holding hundreds hours of music and entertainment. Who doesn’t want an ipod? Nobody. A color television; these three words seem so basic to us now compared to our super advanced computer language and flashy names for our new gadgets. But back only a quarter of a century ago color TV was just barely coming out, it was the most amazing thing in the world, to be able to see color on television! Wow! What will they think of next? How about the basic computer? It didn’t have color, or icons, or games or anything, it was a black screen with white type that could do basic computations, but it was absolutely stunning to people back then. What about Pong? Pong was the very first video game. You moved your control stick back and forth and watched a grainy white ball bounce across the screen to the other end, it was returned, and then you hit that little white, grainy ball back to the other end again. That was the game, the entire game. NOBODY would want to play that game now, with all of our new games with amazing graphics and tons of challenging levels, I know I would much rather play those that hit a grainy white ball back and forth across the screen, but back then, it was amazing! The idea that the movements of your hand on a stick could control where that ball went was totally new and wonderful! These are the good things that have come with the information age, longer lives, amazing entertainment, and much more “fulfilling” lives altogether. But every good thing has its bad things about it too.

I realize that playing Halo 2 is much more fun to play than Pong will ever be, but because Halo 2 has so many levels and is so intriguing to many people (boys) that the people who play it become so mesmerized by it that they may sit there for hours on end and do nothing besides stare at an illuminated screen shooting virtual people and running around in a virtual world. There are many reality TV shows about teenagers that captivate other people (mostly girls). This is probably the reason that we have so many overweight people in our country, without this technology, yes some of us would still sit around and do nothing, but many more of us would, say, go and do something productive! Thus the information age has its downsides.

The examples above send my message, but really what I want to say is that, though I love our new technology, as I’m sure many of us do, we have lost something through our technological breakthroughs. I watched “A Christmas Story” not to long ago, despite it not being near Christmas. It is based in the 50’s, an age without ipods, reality TV or Halo 2. Life seemed so simple back then, if you had some time on your hands you took a walk or went to the ice cream parlor. I am glad I live when I do, but some days I wish that life could be as it used to be, simple and steady.

Some people disgust me

Sometimes I look at someone and say, “Why don’t they try a little harder?” I realize, according to our counselors, that Utah has an excellent high school graduation rate, but every single day I think I could pick out a new person at our school alone who gets bad grades, and could get good ones if they tried even a tiny bit.

There is a myth at our school; at least it is a myth in my mind, that getting bad grades is “cool.” In my opinion, if you get bad grades because you didn’t try in class, you look like a lazy slug. If you get bad grades because you are happy to do work in class but homework is a no no, then you do no have my respect, but at least you are somewhat motivated. If you get bad grades on purpose however, then I have absolutely no respect for you or the person you are choosing to be. My only exception to having bad grades is if you really do give every assignment and test your very very best and still can’t get anything decent out of it, then in this case and only this case will I take your side of the bad grade issue.

Trust me, I think that every teacher and most of our peers would agree with me that if you try to get bad grades so you can improve your social image, your efforts are in vain. You don’t look cool by looking stupid, maybe to some of your “cool” friends, but they are getting just as bad of grades as you.

I know of many specific examples, but this is one of the really ridiculous ones. There is this boy in my science class, this certain kid manages to keep a C average, which is not bad but it is much less than he could do. He has more potential in him, I know because he was in my second grade class and was one of the kids that always raised his hand and got the answer right. These were his exact words after getting an A on a quiz a few weeks ago; “What!? I got an A? I didn’t even try! Now I look like a nerd!” I couldn’t believe it; he was disappointed that he got a good grade! He was so worried about his social image that he couldn’t stand to improve his grade that will count toward plans for the rest of his life! Chances were nobody, including his friends, would have even know about his good score unless he had shouted it out to the whole class. People like him make me scared for the future of our earth.

I am sure that every one of us in our honors English class at least has enough sense to realize how stupid people like him are. Hopefully it will be the people like us in our advanced classes and not people like him that will eventually run major companies and become president and things like that. Most likely they WILL be people like us, since people like him will be the ones working night and day to get enough money to go back to college and get a better life for themselves while the rest of us, will working at successful jobs because we decided early on that education does matter. Thank you, one and all who actually work at succeeding in life and not sitting on your butt waiting for something to come that never will, the day when stupid people like those who I have mentioned many times in the above paragraphs will no longer exist and everybody will work hard for what they really deserve in life.

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.

Old age is not a curse

Why is everyone these days scared of getting old? As far as I can tell the only time we are excited to age is when we are kids. When you get to the teenage stage you are happy right where you are and do not want to leave it, and then when you turn eighteen you start doing things that only teenagers should be doing, like wearing miniskirts. It is like we are groping for the days when we all had not a care in the world except which party we were going to go to next, or so it seems. Who would not love to be carefree their whole lives? We all love to party, it is plain to see why we want to stay young forever. But the fact is, we will not. Instead of dressing like we are all sixteen and going to parties every night, how about we dress our age? I know this is easy for me to say, since I am still in my sweet fourteens, and having an easy life aside from the mountains of homework we get from school (I guess it is not that bad), but I think that those fifty year old ladies who dress in sun dresses even though they do not have the bodies for them and should have retired them years ago are just putting on a show for the world. Not many women or men can truthfully say that they can still fit into their college jeans. It is the sad truth, and we are all going to have to accept it eventually, whether we like it or not, we will age. And I do not think that that is such a bad thing really, once you are twenty or so you can get married and go on newlywed trips, which sounds like a ton of fun if you ask me. You could also have a family, which sounds like quite an adventure to me, even if it is not a senior trip. And once all those kids are grown you can go back to taking trips with your spouse and you can join those health clubs and go to parties with adults just like in high school. Life has so many different stages that it does not really matter which one you are in, you can still have fun and live the way you would want to. Of course there is the fact that as you age you get that aching back and those weak knees, everyone has those. In this I would say count yourself lucky, at least you are alive. If it you had been born five hundred years ago then you would be dead by the age thirty five. I hope that eventually I will be able to make the switch from youth to adult without too much trauma and pouting. Hardly anyone pouts, but I have seen a few. I also hope that I will not have one of those mid life crisis’s and go berserk like some people do. I think that old age is a golden age, by the time your eighty you have gained so much wisdom you could be a great scholar or something. I think what this all comes down to is that old age is not a curse, it may be the best time of your life, so don’t dread it, look forward to it with as much enthusiasm as you can muster.

Rich Americans vs. Rest of the World

So recently I was thinking about the state of our earth. Pollution, overfishing, animals going extinct, the list can go on and on. But then I thought, why is the earth like this? I recently read a graph in my Geography class at school that showed that The United States of America uses 40% of the oil the world mines each year, while the rest of the world put together uses the rest. We alone, one country in a big earth, is using 40% of the oil on our earth. It's not a wonder that we are getting global warming, and the people to blame first is ourselves. As for overfishing and extiction, we as Americans are not the only cause, but we are as much to blame or more for paying large amounts of money to eat exotic fish and animals. What could be done to help this situation? Animals are going extinct because poor villagers in faraway parts of the world are hunting them to extinction. "Stop hunting those animals you greedy villagers!" We say, bundled up in warm clothes eating at a Red Lobster restaurant. What we do not realize, is that if it were us in that situation, with our own children crying with aching stomachs because they have not eaten more than one meal a day for their entire lives, them freezing to death at night because they have no blankets in winter, we too would say "hmph, I think I will eat whatever I want." I mean what do you expect those villagers to say? "Oh ok, we will stop hunting those animals for food and blankets like you rich Americans tell us to, it does not really matter if we starve to death in a month or two or freeze to death tonight, we will just think of the happy endagered turkey that is wandering free getting plump and ready for some animal to chomp on, rather than on my table with its' feathers in a down pillow and my children fed." I think we can all see the point. How about we try this, we will all trade places with the villagers from Africa and Central America. They will come live in our million dollar air conditioned homes and eat Mcdonalds Supersize burgers and watch NFL football games on big screen televisions with surround sound and send their kids to amazing universitys and take vacation cruises to the south pacific ocean. Meanwhile, we can go live in one hundred and nine degree muggy heat near the equator in a dense rainforest fighting to survive against the elements and hunger. We will live in straw shacks or three foot tall packing crates and if it rains, it pours, and that packing crate, I am afraid, does not have much sealing in the roof, and we will get wet. So I think that I have made my point which is that it is pathetic how America can live in huge amounts of wealth while many other parts of the world are living, if you can call it living, in poverty. Now, we are aware of a problem, what can be done to solve it? Well for one thing, I am sure that every person who reads this will say: "This is awful! She is right! We need to do something, the next time i'm at a press conference, I will tell president Bush that he needs to end world hunger." THAT is NOT ENOUGH. Anybody can do that, and I am 100% certain that president Bush aready knows that world hunger must end. He is only one man, even if he has lots of power, he can not provide entire countrys with food and shelter. How about we help him? What an idea! How about we go through our storage rooms and pick out a few things that we do not really need and put them in a box and ship it to a needy country? Lets do the same with blankets, good timber for houses, and medicine. If you have time and money go over there yourself! Maybe, just maybe, if we do things like this, everything that is mentioned here will not be a reality in ten or twenty years. We have some pretty cool things around us, we have the biggest houses, and the tiniest cell phones which hve every gadget you can think of rolled into one, but how about we try helping everyone else around first?

Blog Post #1

Hello world!