on the rocks

final thoughts

2009-05-25T19:21:00.004-05:00

i'm not going to lie and say that my blogging will continue after the end of the school year. there's a good chance that this will be the final post from me, not that many of you read this and care. i'll continue to read the blogs of my classmates if they keep their blogs going.

my relationship with blogging has been a rough one. i was very aprehensive in the beginning. when i first heard the assignment that we would be keeping blogs i wasn't all that excited. blogs tend to bring up the image of 30 something men living in the basement of their parents' house. can you say creepers? we were given plenty of days in the lab to read actual blogs and try to find a topic for ours. i never really picked a topic, i've just blogged about anything and everything. blogging was very challenging for me at first; i would forget about it easily and when i did try to post it was a stretch to reach the 400 words. i almost wished that we just had writing notebooks because i could fill that easier than i could blog.

somewhere in the middle of the school year i began to actually like blogging. there was even a time when i got ahead on blog posts. i don't know what brought about this but the words just came easy and i just kept on typing. this is also about the time when i began to read the blogs of my classmates, and not just the blogs of my close friends. i became very interested in what everyone else had to say. needless to say, my enthusiasim for blogging may have faded but i still enjoy reading them to this day. blogging has gone back to that task that i don't really want to do and have to force the 400 words three times a week. i have often been behind on blogs.

when i treated the blog as strictly a homework assignment it became harder and harder to complete. it was something i saw as being required to do rather than me wanting to do. somewhere around half way through, when i began liking blogging, i wasn't thinking of it as a homework assignment. i was thinking of my blog as more of a place for me to just ramble on and say things that i didn't say during the day. i wish i could say that others would find my blog interesting like i find the blogs of my peers interesting but i don't think i can and i'm okay with that.

i didn't realize just how much i have written on here until i looked back at all my posts. there is a lot of writing here and i'm honestly glad that we did blogs instead of writing notebooks. it's been rough but it was worth it in the end.

junior year: a reflection

2009-05-25T19:01:00.002-05:00

the school year is wrapping up and junior year is coming to a close. where did all the time go? i'm gonna be a senior next year and it seems like freshman year was last year. who ever said high school flies by sure wasn't lying. because everything passed by so quickly i'm going to take a walk down memory lane and go through my junior year once more.

summer 2008:
i got my very first job: detasseling. strange as it sounds, i loved it. i received my very first paycheck. i made some great friends out in the fields. was a section leader in the marching band. i may have found myself hating it most of the time but not going to lie, i missed it when it was done. my family and i drove to minnesota for a day to watch a baseball game. twins :). i wanna go back.

fall 2008:
i got a real job at old navy. i walked in knowing no one and now have many new friends. youth leadership for five seasons orientation and retreat. took a leap of faith, meaning i jumped off a telephone pole. met a boy. talked to boy. fell for boy. juggled school, marching band and work. went trick or treating with the foreign exchange students. added one more to the locker. drove to wisconsin with mom and dad to get apples. auditioned for all state.

winter 2008-2009:
took one/two wednesdays a month off for youth leadership. struggled to keep up with all my classes. let my grades slip. experienced working retail during the holidays. got a $500 paycheck. froze in the cold. went to florida with the band. marched in a nationally televised parade. went to everything disney. continued to talk to the same boy. went to my first ever basketball game as a spectator, we won. pitched up in independence. began to work out every wednesday at the y with dad. picked out a flute and piccolo solo for contest. graduated from youth leadership.

spring 2009:
began to refocus on my grades. started my countdown with the beginning of the term. studied here and there for ap tests. got a new car. city solo contest. said goodbye to boy. cried. went to chicago with the spanish class. millennium park and the bean. tried authentic spanish food, even the octopus. began to study more for ap tests. state solo contest. SNHS induction. NHS induction. softball. took three ap tests without studying as much as i should. sprained my ankel. picked up a new perspective on life. anxiously awaited the end of the year.

looking back there were ups and downs and periods of painful boredom but i wouldn't have done anything differently. whatever happens, happens.

countdown

2009-05-18T07:35:00.002-05:00

there are 18 days left in class. seniors have seven. twenty five days from today i will be done with junior year. ap tests are done. i have seniors in many of my classes so we're kinda just sitting and doing nothing. no final exams, just some final projects. my physics project is done. my bio project died. this is proof that i cannot grow plants to save my life, i killed them all. i think i watered them too much? or not enough. one of those. for lang we have a multimedia essay that i'm kinda freaking out about because i'm not good with multimedia. what is the point of being in school right now? for the most part i'm not going to be learning anything new in the next 18 days of class, all except for my us history class. we're going to do some learning and not take our final exam until final exam days. i was all for taking the final right around ap test time but no. i have to wait until june 10th to take my final. cool.

this is see you later, i'm not into goodbyes

2009-05-17T15:47:00.003-05:00

as the year is winding down it's finally starting to hit me that i have less than 10 days left with this year's senior class. after graduation i probably won't see the majority of them ever again unless i randomly run into one of them somewhere later in life. my brother is graduating this year and even though my parents insist on him trying to live at home i know he isn't going to. yes, it would make more sense for him to live at home and continue to go about life as if nothing was different but i know that he won't make it through more than a semester living at home. there is already tension between him and my parents over things like curfew and such and i know that college will only intensify these feelings.

growing up ray and i never really got along the best. we argued and fought more than we got along. as we both grew up we started to become closer. i wouldn't go so far to say that he and i are friends, i don't think he would ever acknowledge me at school if i didn't say something to him first, but we get along. as strange as it sounds, we always do the reader's digest vocabulary together. it's just what we do. i've lived with him for my whole life and i'm thinking that our days left together are limited and this saddens me. we're family and i want to see him more than at our family gatherings.

i guess you could say that i'm afraid of change. i happen to like my life the way it is and i don't really want things to change. next year it's going to be just me and nolan. i don't like nolan. his xbox obsession annoys me to no end and i hate how his friends have changed him from the loveable kid he once was to this rude, disrepectful teenager he is now. he and i used to get along so well and now all we do is argue, mostly over him living on his xbox.

recently, i have found that i'm not good with goodbyes. I don't like goodbyes because goodbye means forever, little tidbit from peter pan for ya. my last goodbye left me in tears and that was over a month ago. in a few short weeks i'm going to be saying my goodbyes to the senior class. i'm not extremely close to anyone there, i only talk to them daily at school. they will go off onto their next adventures and my friends and i will take their places next year.

conformity

2009-05-13T18:46:00.004-05:00

in class we recently read the essay corn-pone opinions by mister mark twain. the main purpose of the essay was about conformity and after our discussion in class i really got to thinking about conformity. and i formulated a conclusion of something that really bugs me; people who refuse to do something just because everyone else is.

they are too wrapped up with trying to be unique that they refuse to do anything they consider conformity. i am going to use the book twilight as an example. i thoroughly enjoy reading so when my friend kristi told me i should read the book because it's really good i did. i enjoyed the book and read the remaining three in the series. i am not going to name names here but i overheard a conversation between two people concerning the book twilight. girl one was very disappointed in girl two for even considering reading twilight just because the book, and now movie, have become mainstream america. girl one claims to be her own person and not do anything that she considers conformity. i want to ask her if she ever gave twilight a chance. did she ever pick up the book and read it? if not, i see no validity in her argument. give it a chance.

people like girl one are afraid of what other people think. they are afraid that other people with think of them as a conformist. who cares if you read the book twilight after it has become a popular book. it's the same for people who stop listening to a band if one of their songs gets played on a radio station. they just can't seem to stand it if other people listen to that band. i don't get it, if you like the music they're making then why stop listening just because others are too? i personally don't care if you started listening to them before they were on the radio or after, it's not that big of a deal.

relief

2009-05-13T18:06:00.002-05:00

please let me now jump up and down while gleefully exclaiming AP EXAMS ARE DONE! AP EXAMS ARE DONE! over the course of a friday, monday, and wednesday i have taken three tests that determine exactly how well i have mastered the subjects of us history, biology, and english language and composition. it is the score i get on these tests that will determine if i receive college credit or get an exemption from introductory courses in college. my final grade in the class does not matter. are ap tests really a good way to determine if i have mastered the material?

if i would have been asked this question either two years ago or last year then i would say yes, yes they are a good way to determine my level of mastery for the material. this year, my answer has changed. i no longer feel that ap tests are a good way to measure how well i grasped the subject material. wanna know why? it's not because i found this year's tests to be excruciatingly hard, i actually found all three of them to be not bad so i'm not here complaining that they shouldn't count because i think that i failed them. i think they shouldn't count because i honestly don't really know the subject material very well for any of the ap tests i took. thankfully i was able to learn it somehow but i definitely didn't learn it from the books.

in my us history text book there are 31 chapters from early 1700s up through the presidency of george h bush. i read a total of three whole chapters: 29, 30 and 31. in my biology text book there are more chapters, more pages and more words and i don't think i read a single whole chapter. i read sections of chapters but never a whole chapter. then there's lang. there isn't a textbook that goes along with this class; it's nothing like biology or history. those classes are straight facts and biological life processes. lang is not. i went to class almost everyday and that's really the only way to prepare for that test. it's a reading comp test with a lot of analysis and some fancy terms thrown in. there's three essays and i feel like i answered two of them well but the second essay just wasn't good. it's the kind that i never scored well on when we practiced them in class too.

i never did extraordinarily well on tests in either biology or history but my thoughts after taking those tests were that i did well. especially on the history test- i found it to be easy. wait, what? an ap test, easy? how does that happen. the essays were very manageable and because it's over two days since i took the test i can freely talk about the essay topics. i wrote an essay about the relationship of the colonies and great britain. i didn't need to take ap us history to be able to write that essay, that's something i have been taught for years and years now. then i wrote an essay about the homefront of world war II in respect to japanese americans and african americans. i didn't expect essays like that to be on the test. i expected them to be more like the essays i chose not to write because those were tough. the rise of the republican party from 1820-1860? can't do that. didn't read my book.

oops

2009-05-12T17:57:00.001-05:00

note to self: when using el cabrito's itouch to go blog reading and commenting remember to log out of your blog. i forgot to and then wondered what the heck happened when i looked at my blog today and saw that i apparently love on the border chips and salsa. no lies, that is true it's just that i didn't post that. el cabrito did. sorry for any confusion.

i am a big fan of his itouch. it's quite the nifty little piece of technology and i'm wishing that i had one instead of my cute little pink ipod. don't get me wrong, i love my little pink ipod it's just the more i use his itouch the more i want one. a lot.

i am a fan of technology, it's just that i'm generally not good with it. i can solve the simplest of computer problems and i know how to successfully navigate my way through the world of cell phones and ipods but other than that i'm pretty techonlogically stupid. which is why this final essay is kind of worrisome for me. i do not possess the skills, or required materials to make a video nor do i have any clue how to make a radio essay. i understand that he wants us to get creative and not write just a normal essay but that's what i want to do. i just want to write an essay.

I

2009-05-11T08:42:00.000-05:00

i really love on the border chips with salsa. the end.

mayday

2009-05-05T07:03:00.002-05:00

yes i know, i am a few days late because today is actually cinco de mayo but ima talk about mayday first. i love may. and mayday. i didn't give any mayday baskets this year, cabrito just high fived my head, he's such a charming kid, but i still like mayday. why do i like mayday so much? because mayday means that it is finally may. may means that it's almost summer and the weather is finally nice. the weather was fantastic on sunday. it was so fantastic that i could not bring myself to do any studying at all. instead i played outside. monkey in the middle. yes, i know, how old am i? i am too old to be playing monkey in the middle but who cares? definitely not me. you know what else i did? i layed on my back and looked up at the sky. life is good.

cinco de mayo! for all of you that don't know spanish it's my-oh not mayo. even though it looks a whole lot like the english word mayo. please get it right. nothing sounds more stupid than bad pronunciation. mack-e-lar-se anyone? hahaha. i'm sorry that you don't get it. so cinco de mayo is some spectacular spanish holiday right? maybe, i'm not exactly sure how big it is. but whatever that doesn't matter. you would think that because it's cinco de mayo we would have a little fiesta en la clase de español, verdad? we are not going to have a quiz that is graded like a test instead. it's okay, it shouldn't be all that hard it's only going to be over the conditional and double object pronouns.

pale people, unite!

2009-04-30T07:02:00.001-05:00

this morning i decided that i wanted to wear shorts today. so i put shorts on and looked down at my legs. you know what, i am quite pale. why is this? this is because i do not go fake tanning. and it has been winter / gross weather for the past many many months so i haven't been able to frolic around outside getting a tan. because of my paleness it is obvious that i do not go fake tanning and i have no inclination to do so.

i tried to show you a picture of fake tanning gone wrong but blogger does not want to cooperate at the moment. so i'll just link it instead. she is orange. nice tan right there. what is the point of fake tanning-- especially during the winter. everyone can tell that you have been fake tanning because you are unnatural shade of orange during the winter. all you are doing is killing yourself.

fake tanning causes skin cancer. i will not feel sorry for you if you get skin cancer because you're the one that chose to go tanning. do you know what a nice tan is? a nice tan is a whole bunch of dead, damaged skin cells. so please, continue to go off and get your wonderful tans. according to cabrito my information up there is wrong but hey you know what? that's okay. no one reads my blog. and anyone that happens to stumble upon it probably won't care that my information is not correct.

the american society is too obsessed with looks and looking "perfect." and cabrito is obsessed with his xbox. but to the american society you are accepted if and only if, or iff as my calculus teacher writes, you are thin and tan. and to them, thin is a size 0-2. if you aren't those sizes you are fat. sucks to be you. we live in such a messed up world.

i have ran out of steam with the pale people, unite! post and i have about 100 words left. embroz is watching elmo vidoes. cabrito is word counting and getting very excited about his two blog views. rbetta is fanning herself with her ap bio prep book. speaking of ap bio, we're taking our FINAL exam today and tomorrow. we have 30 days left of school. and we're taking a final. the ap test isn't until may 11th. i cannot wait for may 14th, you know why? because as of may 14th i will be done with ap tests for the year!

huh?

2009-04-29T10:55:00.003-05:00

today is physics we were in a computer lab. as we're working on our lab some kids decide to be real cool and play some ultra sonic sounds. for the most part i couldn't hear them, they were much too high for my ears. but a lot of the class could and there would be a constant grumbling every time one went off. now i have a headache. cooool.

it's no secret that i'm very likely to ask you to repeat yourself. my hearing isn't the best. especially in the morning. and when people are mumbling. my dad also has not good hearing. he's even worse than me. he used to drive the open cab tractors around without earplugs.

bucket list?

2009-04-28T19:13:00.002-05:00

before i die i want to travel. the whole planet. minus antartica, i don't wanna go there. it's cold there. there are penguins though; i like penguins. i want to visit the states, just kinda drive around the country side; see the sights; get lost in the hustle and bustle of downtown.

i want to cross the border and go to canada; struggle with the french/english language barrier; find the beauty of the land. to mexico and not drink the water. not going there until swine flu is no longer an issue though. the carribbean islands. swim with the dolphins. south america. i wanna go to bolivia. i wanna explore rio. climb some mountains. go to peru.

europe. stay the summer. or maybe a whole year? spain. las fallas. el prado. barcelona. france. paris. the efile tower. the city of lovee. go see some german castles. laugh silently at all the angry sounding germans. berlin, the site of the wall. italy. rome. florence. eat some good italian food. explore austria. off to england. pretend i'm british. pick up an accent. big ben. walk in the rain. drive on the wrong side of the road. sweden. visit toby for real. hahahaha.

asia. see the wall. and the rest of china. india. gandhi. experience buddhism and buddhist teachings. the flea markets. the traditions. japan. vietnam. korea. i could go on and on.

australia. the coral reefs. the outback. kangaroos. new zealand. indonesia.

i just want to explore. escape from america and see how the rest of the world lives. i want to get out of my box and broaden my horizons. the world is such a big world.

my brother

2009-04-23T07:05:00.004-05:00

my brother has an unhealthy love for his xbox. i think he loves it more than life. it's the first thing he does as soon as he gets home and then you never see him again. even though you don't see him you know he's home because of all the yelling your hear bouncing up the stairs. yes, that is right, yelling. cabrito also has this strange obsession with the xbox and xbox live.

yes, i have played xbox before. yes, i had fun. no, i was not any good. but i don't understand why this is all some people do. my brother is addicted to his xbox. he needs his xbox like a heroin addict needs heroin. if he does not get to play his xbox he throws a fit. he is as sullen as the little kid in the candy store who can't get any candy. he pouts. he complains. so what does he decide to do? he goes to sleep. he does not know what to do with himself when he can't play xbox.

when he goes to over to a friend's house you know what they do? they play xbox in big groups. they have no concept of how to spend their time. it's all they do, stare at a TV and yell at the random kids from all over the world. they waste their lives sitting in front of a TV.

he is supposed to only play xbox for two hours after school on weeknights. do you think he follows this rule? nope, everyone else has to keep a watch on the time for him. he is incapable of making sure that he only plays for two hours. then on weekends he can play for as long as he wants. meaning he tries to play all day. and if he's not at a friend's house friday or saturday night then he's in the basement playing xbox. he will play until 11:30 or 12 at night and then come upstairs and go to bed. my parents go to sleep between 9 and 10. my dog barks every single time he comes upstairs. my parents yell at him for waking them up. yet, every week the same exact thing happens.

xbox live is over the internet, meaning when he's playing xbox the internet in the rest of the house moves impossibly slow. no one can use the internet when he's on the xbox. if we get on this is what he does. he sends you a text message. he's in the basement and i'm upstairs. if i get on the internet when he's on the xbox he sends me a text message. i have to have my parents forcibly remove him from the xbox when i have homework to do. otherwise he just keeps telling me that his game is almost done and he'll get off soon but he never does.

i never see him do any homework at all. maybe that's why he doesn't get good grades and often gets his xbox taken away from him because of bad grades.

***an update***
the xbox red ringed of death. i'm heartbroken. not. for all of you that don't know what the red ring of death is, it means that the xbox is broken. oh darn. too bad for him.

earthh :)

2009-04-22T20:32:00.003-05:00

happy earth day! today is the day where there is actually a big focus put on helping save our planet. i don't know if i like the idea of earth day or not. now, i'm not saying that i hate the planet and do all i can to ruin it; what i'm saying is do we really need to devote a single day to focusing on saving our planet? why can't this be an every day focus? nonetheless, i do like earth day. in the spirit of earth day here's a few tips for you:

lower your thermostat. you don't need to have it up around 80 during the winter or down around 60 during the summer. every year our air conditioner stays off until the temperature gets around 90. you have windows, open them. turn on a fan, but don't leave it on when you're not there

reuse water bottles. avoid buying bottled water, keep one good one and reuse it.

switch your lightbulbs to compact flourescent bulbs. opt for energy efficient appliances.

when you're not in a room the light does not need to be on. the fan does not need to be on. unplug your outlets, especially at night. not only does this save energy but it saves you some money too

recycle all you can. especially newspapers

drive less. carpool to work. walk, run, jog. there's a reason america is the fattest country and it's because we eat fast food and drive everywhere. short rant coming: two houses down from me is the Bills family. two houses up and across the street are the bills' grandparents. it is common to see the big white escalade drive up the street and park in grandma's driveway. the whole family except for mr bills is fat. they have two kids, do they need an escalade? really?

reuse your plastic bags from the grocery store. they're great doggie poop bags. they're great trash can liners. at the grocery store, pick paper bags. sure they may be an inconvience to you at the time but in the long run they're so much better

go paperless with your paycheck. direct deposit. talk to your managers and get your paperstub switched to online only.

shorten your showers. only do full loads of laundry. run the dishwasher when it's full. and for pete's sake turn the water off when you're brushing your teeth

plant a tree

instead of google, use earthle

reduce, reuse, recycle

work

2009-04-19T16:25:00.002-05:00

my new address is 345 collins road. please come visit me. okay, that is not where i live it's just a reference to something one of my friends said to me. he told me i worked so much that i basically live there. i, of course, protested and said that i did not, but truthfully, at the time i did. now i work one to two weeknights and saturday and sunday. it's roughly 15 hours a week, 30 hours per paycheck. oh shoot, i forgot to pick up my check. i'll get that one of these days.

i like work. it's not hard work once you know what you're doing. i have worked since school started so for 8 months at the end of april. but my favorite part of work is the people i work with. when i first started i was the only one from my school that worked there. then over the holidays kate got hired and we're the two kennedy kids. my first day was a scary experience, i do not like being thrown in to situations where i know no one. but now that i have been there for eight months basically, i'm glad i knew no one when i first started. it forced me to open up and meet new people. strangely enough, i love meeting new people but it's not something i like to do. if that makes any sense. let's try this, i don't like being in a group and not knowing anyone and having to make all the awkward introductions but in the end meeting new people is one of my favorite experiences.

i have made some of the best friends i could ask for at work and if it hadn't been for work i wouldn't have known them or made friends with them. a few of them i probably wouldn't have talked to if i knew. here is one specific example, we will call him larry. larry goes to metro high school. for those of you that don't know, metro is the school where there are plenty of drug addicts, public school drop outs, pregnant teens, those who flunked out, and those who had attendance problems. i do not normally associate with people like that. i used to see that they went to metro and immediately stayed away with them. why was i so quick to place a label? because past experiences had all resulted in that label so it was easiest to lump the whole school together. meeting larry has been an eye opening experience for me. he was originally sent to metro because he never went to school when he was in the public school system. for the final trimester of his senior year, he is taking half of his classes at wash and the other half at metro. larry is nothing like the kid i expected him to be after i heard he went to metro. i'm very glad i was wrong about him, i wouldn't trade his friendship for the world.

done for the year

2009-04-18T16:50:00.000-05:00

i am done with contest for the year! you have no idea just how good it feels. now i can kinda slack off until all state starts coming around.

i was in five events at state contest. i am extremely happy with most of them and just happy with a couple. my piccolo solo was just okay, and i'll be surprised if i got a one. i feel that it shouldn't deserve a one, i could have played it better. the duet markus kritzer and i did went well and i am pleased with how it went but we both agree that the best we ever played it was when we ran through it on friday. woodwind choir, eh i don't really care, we got a one. celtic celebration was good. really good. but my favorite performance was the very first of the day; my flute solo. i played the first movement of martinu's sonata. i am in love with how the flute and piano sound together. of all the pieces i have played before that is my favorite.

contest is a day that makes me extremely nervous. i have a nervous habit of biting/tearing at my fingernails on my pointer finger on both hands. i am proud to say that i did not bite or tear my nail once on saturday. that doens't mean that i wasn't nervous, it just means that i have a greater exercise of self control than i used to. why does contest make me nervous? i was playing pieces that i had practiced for months and was ready to play. okay, so my piccolo solo may not have been as ready as it could have been, but it was ready. the only people that were going to hear me were my parents, my lesson teacher, pianist, and a judge i didn't even know. my parents know what i sounded like when i first started playing and are subject to all the wrong notes and rhythms of practicing. my lesson teacher is the same. she hears my play for an hour every single week. she knows that i'm not perfect and little things always happen when i'm playing. my pianist also knows that i make mistakes. i know that if i mess up in front of those people they will not have that as their only image of me. they have all seen my highs and my lows. it's the judge that i have never met before that gets me. how i play in front of them is the only thing they have to know me by. i try to tell myself that i don't care at all what people think about me but you know what, i obviously do. my nerves show that. i think everyone cares just a little at least.

barack obama. shut up, spencer!

2009-04-16T07:40:00.005-05:00

i may have my ipod in but i still hear tamara and spencer talking. so my title is one of the random phrases they've been throwing out. by my rough count i need three more blog posts with over 400 words. well then. this might get interesting. phrophase. i need some more weapons too. and shoes. more stuff from tamara and spencer.

i will describe the scene here. we are in zero hour, the 7am class. because it's thursday we are in the lab. the cave to be exact. we all thought that because we were in the lab monday and tuesday while mr ayers was gone that we wouldn't be blogging today, but guess what. we are. the three people sitting across from me are blogging, revising an essay, and watching person two reivse the essay of person three. the person sitting next to me is pretending like he's going to hit the escape key. and asking me why i'm wearing my glasses. guess what, cabrito, i can trype with your covering my eyes. i dont need to see the screen to type.

we have orchestra today during band. meaning, i don't have band! but i do have contest groups stuff to do. celtic needs to rehearse. woodwind choir is going to rehearse. the duet should probably rehearse. my solos? maybe they should too. there won't be enough time for all of that. oh well.

next topic. in 74 days cabrito is going to costa rica. he had to get all these shots so that he doesn't catch some strange costa rican disease while he's gone. i wish i could go to costa rica. actually, i really wish i was going on the spain trip. that would be fun. but, i'm staying in iowa for my summer. i will now outline the details of my summer plans. so from may 11th through somewhere around the 4th of july i will be playing softball. softball will take over my life and that's all i'm going to be doing. i'll be trying to work at old navy still because i like getting a paycheck every two weeks. after softball i will go back into the corn fields and detassel. and do some rougueing, which is basically being racist against the corn. anything that looks different i get to cut out with a shovel. around july 19th rbetta and i will be traveling to iowa state for a few days. we're going to learn about being an engineer. fun stuff. we're staying in martin. for all of you that don't know, martin is the dorm at iowa state with the suites for rooms. and then when i get home i don't know. then in august it's back to learning the marching band stuff. sad face, that means school is going to be starting soon.

really? whyyy?

2009-04-16T07:13:00.003-05:00

my computer at home has caught a virus. real cool. i have all my work saved on that. all my music is on that. all my pictures are on that. and there's a good chance that my hard drive is going to have to be erased. not cool. i'm going to hope and wish and pray that jerry can fix my laptop without having to clear my hard drive.

the virus i have is called spyware protect 2009. it is a scam. scam, i say, it's a scam. it's telling me that i have 34 very serious threats attacking my computer and that i need to pay $50 to download this. it's also affecting my internet; every website i try to go to is secruity blocked for microsoft's reasons. so i couldn't even google this stupid spyware protect 2009 to see how to remove it from my laptop. so i called my uncle bob. he gave me the website to give to jerry so that when jerry comes on saturday he can fix my laptop.

how did i get this virus, you ask? apparently my antivirus didn't update fast enough and the sneaky little virus managed to wriggle it's way in. stupid virus, because of you i have to leave my computer shut off until jerry comes to fix it. my revised essay is on that computer. my revised essay was supposed to be turned in tomorrow. but thankfully mr ayers has changed the due date to monday.

and now onto a completely different topic-- state solo and ensemble contest.

contest is on saturday. at linn mar. city contest was here at kennedy. it was nice, i knew exactly where everything was. now i have to go to linn mar. there's a very good chance that i'm going to get lost, wandering around linn mar high school. i have two solos and three ensembles to play on saturday. at the current moment i'm only nervous for one and that's my piccolo solo. it's high and squeaky at times and it's fast with a lot of notes. i'm kinda nervous.

el cabrito is lame. first, he skipped city contest. now he's skipping state contest. he also has lost not one, but two of the originals for the woodwind choir. i do not envy him. the directors are going to kill him. you see, he's supposed to be a SECTION LEADER. he's not being very section leader-ish at the moment. okay so he wasn't a section leader this year but that didn't stop him from putting all these section leader activities on his NCYL application.

iamafan

2009-04-15T02:03:00.001-05:00

i didn't feel like using the space bar i guess. but that's not the point of this. the point of this post is that it's major league baseball season again. of all the professional sports, baseball has the longest season. there are major league games on from april to october. 162 games in the regular season. i am a fan. one of my very first blog posts was about major league baseball if that puts the lenght of the season into perspective for you. i am a minnesota twins fan. it's a family thing. my dad, two of his brothers, and both my brothers are all twins fans.

i have seen countless baseball games on tv and been to kearnels games, but i have only been three live major league games. my first major league game was in colorado with my relatives there. i was staying with them for a little bit and they took me to a rockies game. even though the rockies lost and we left after the seventh inning i was glad to go. the other two games i have been to were both in the hubert h humphrey's metrodome up in minnesota. love. twins won both games that i have been to.

i was watching a game the other night with my dad and i started to wonder as to why the twins were my favorite team. they haven't won a world series since 1991. they're not seen as one of the major powerhouses of the baseball world. they lose their fair share of games. they have good players but their roster isn't chock full of superstars. why do i like the twins? because they're an honest team. it's easy to like the yankees; they're one of the most well known teams in baseball. they are almost always in the playoffs and have plenty of talented players. and money. the yankees have all the money. i do not like the yankees. the yankees buy all the good players and try to make themselves team superstars. they also have some steriod troubles, most recently a-rod.

one thing i don't understand, though, is the ridiculous amount of money that baseball players are paid. it's a ridiculously outrageous amount, especially the yankees players. it's not just the baseball players that get paid this outrageous amount, it's the whole entertainment industry. every professional sport, the singers, the movie stars; all of them. ridiculous amounts. how is it possible for our economy to be bad when endless amounts of money are being paid to all of these people? i don't understand it, but maybe that's because i haven't taken economics yet. the professional athletes, the professional musicians and the tv and movie actors have more money than they know what to do with. why don't they fix our troubled economy? why don't they help give the bailouts instead of increasing our federal deficit?

an update. skip it.

2009-04-14T18:12:00.003-05:00

this post serves one purpose and one purpose only, a grade. it is required to post at least three times a week with 400 words per post. i have ran out of possibly interesting things to say so i'm going to ramble on and be done with this as soon as i get to 400 words.

i am kind of beginning to like blogging. hmm. when the blogs were first assigned i was not a fan. blogging used to bring the mental image of creepy old men who lived in the basement of their parents' house still. blogging is kind of growing on me.

when i have something to say blogging is very easy. right now i don't really have anything to say so getting to 400 words is a struggle. right now is a struggle. a struggle of pulling those non loose teeth proportions.

i have had my braces off four four years. whoa. i have gotten so used to wearing my retainers at night that it feels weird to not wear them. like last night, i was up late doing homework so i didn't want to wake my parents by going and getting them. sometimes i sleep with my contacts in. like last night, i was up late doing homework so i didn't want to go wake my parents so i just went to sleep with them in. i woke up with some blurry vision but after some intense blinking i could finally see again.

i have really bad vision. really bad. without my glasses or contacts i don't see very well up close or far away. and even with my glasses and contacts seeing slightly far away is an issue. there is a very good chance of me getting glaucoma when i'm older. my great grandma and my grandma both have it. i also have astigmatism. that's why i can't see perfectly with my glasses or contacts. for those of you that don't know what astigmatism is, it means that my eyes are shaped abnormally. so even when they give me the abnormally shaped contacts to fit my abnormally shaped eyes things still aren't always a good fit.

random acts of kindness make my day. they really just do. i have been told that i am too nice of a person and that i'm going to wind up hurt because of it. well guess what. you just gotta keep on going. don't let those debby downers get you down.

i get by with a little help from my friends :)

i can't think of a title

2009-04-14T07:21:00.005-05:00

life is what you make it. so when you're feeling sad, just pick yourself up and keep moving forward. put one foot in front of the other and go with it. everything will get better, it's just going to take a little patience. i was talking to one of my friends this weekend and he gives surprisingly good advice. why do am i slightly surprised about this? oh you know, because he's a 19 year old drunk but whatever. anytime i'm ever stuck i know that i can just tell him what's going on and he'll have an answer for me. this is what he told me over the weekend.

life is about being happy so do what you makes you happy and be ready to deal with it the next day.

do you know what makes me happy? i'm still figuring it out myself but here's a list of some things because i'm a fan of lists.

my friends. i love my friends with all my heart
my good friends that i can tell anything to.

ice cream.

the comics.

jokes on the nesper sign.

jokes on laffy taffy wrappers.

music.

the simple things.
random acts of kindness
nice weather
driving with the windows down

this past weekend showed me that no matter how bad things get, someone will always be there for you. i had eleven someones that i wouldn't trade for the world. we may not always get along, sure we may fight and we get on each other's nerves but they're there when i need them.

well. i have nothing left to say that relevant to that post right there but i still need about a hundred more words. so, off on a random tangent i go. because i had a list of things that make me happy i'll also include a list of things that annoy me

little kids screaming in public and parents doing nothing about it
bad grammar. i know i may not capitalize words, but i spell them correctly.
the temperatures of this school, i'm freezing cold right now but i bet that in fourth hour i'll wish it wasn't so warm
teachers making students do busy work
teachers giving assignments and then just checking for completition only
lab 67A. we're crammed in here like sardines and i can't help but hear the conversations around me.
extremely loud ipods. i do not need to hear what you are listening to on your ipod.
extremely loud subs in the parking lot. really.. is that necessary? can you wait until you're out of the parking lot?
screamo music. what's the point if it can't be understood?
people who kill themselves.
people who say like all the time
the dyed black hair, all black wardrobe, emo screamo music, and the i hate my life i'm going to kill myself people.
stewart sankey always playing drums.

closet sized classrooms

2009-04-14T07:06:00.001-05:00

this room is tiny.

the outside world

2009-04-12T20:17:00.003-05:00

on friday i went to chicago. it was a very funfilled day spent with my friends. it was a field trip to go see some spanish paintings in the art institute and then go eat at cafe iberico, an authentic spanish tapas (roughly translated to appetizers) restuarant. i tried every single one of the spanish dishes they brought out, even the octopus. and i liked almost all of them. we also went to millennium park and stared at the bean for a little while. i spent about nine hours on a bus and that got to be a bit long to be sitting on a bus but we had fun. kro brought her super nice expensive artsy camera and we filled her memory card. most of the pictures are random and only have meaning when watched in continous motion like the police officers crossing the street, the random people crossing the street, spencer traveling through chicago, spencer sleeping through chicago, and other random pictures. we also drew a picture that brightened my morning. it involved spencer's bird metaphor, some decoy birds, a specific bird, a gun, and kro driving the car. but this is not the main point of this post. i'm getting there though. this is all just backstory in attempts to make my post seem less random.

chicago is so different from cedar rapids, and all of iowa in general. chicago is exciting, big, windy, bustling and shiny. the buildings downtown are huge and beautifully architectured. i could spend a whole day just wandering around downtown looking at all the buildings. getting out of cedar rapids, and iowa, even for just a day makes me realize just how small my little world is. i live in the sheltered world of north east iowa. not much goes on here. chicago is so full of life. there is a constant bustle of activity.

my sheltered life has lead to limited travel opportunities so when i do get out and see that the world is always bigger than i thought it makes me want to travel more. i want to explore the whole country. i want to leave the country and explore the world. there is so much more out there than just where we are now. i want to stay up all night in the city that never sleeps. i want to see the fallas celebration in spain. i want to see the cold beauty of russia and the sweltering deserts of africa.

somewhere i diverged from the main point that i wanted to say and now i have forgotten it. it was something along the lines of the world is so much bigger than i can even comprehend. something like that.

HENRY!!

2009-04-09T07:46:00.001-05:00

my friend, cabrito, has a cat who looks just like that cat.

grin and bear it

2009-04-09T07:05:00.002-05:00

i don't care anymore, i am going to complain and complain a lot. you have been warned.

i am, and have been for the past week, overwhelmed. this week just needs to end. i need a break. the homework keeps piling up and when you think that your teachers couldn't possibly put anymore more work on the ever growing pile that's threatening to tip over and bury me they find a way to add more to the pile. i'm then left to move things around and make sure that when i take something off my pile of things to do it doesn't upset the delicate balance and come tumbling down.

it gets harder and harder to wake up each morning due to the late nights. the only thing i want to do is sleep. and somehow magically make the pile of homework go away. a spring break would do nicely right about now. the two kids blogging next to me, rbetta and cabrito, are rambling on about college. cabrito is going to go to kwood so he can continue to work his wonderful job of salad bar king at hyvee. rbetta on the otherhand is going to go to kaplan. that's the online university, so she's not going anywhere except her kitchen computer. don't worry my dear readers, they're just kidding. both are extremely smart and will end up at very respective colleges, like luther and iowa state, and will probably not have to pay much at all. they're smart little whippersnappers.

cabrito is now rambling on about vista. some computer thing. and how on vista you can publish a blog post straight from microsoft word. neat stuff right there. but, really, i don't care. [these next few lines are a conversation between me and cabrito] life is stupid. you know how last year we hardly had like any homework ever? and now we have homework all the time and we have jobs? YES IT SUCKS. FML. so i was going to make a nice link for you all there but i'm the school computers and apparently that site is not school appropriate. whatever, i'll just be sneaky and find a way around it. look at that, i did it. go me.

cadavers are dead bodies. rbetta visited one yesterday. no thank you. i don't wanna see any dead bodies. or touch them. or their organs, like their hearts. not for me. cabrito is looking at gross autopsy pictures and hitting me in the arm making it very hard to type.

don't you just hate it when the stupid insert button is turned on and you don't know it. so then if you happen to decided that you want to add something to a paragraph up above you just start typing away and then realize that the more words you type, the more words go away. that makes me sad.

because laughter is the best medicine

2009-04-08T07:29:00.000-05:00

pay no attention

2009-04-04T20:20:00.002-05:00

well, here i am sitting here staring at my computer hoping that 400 words will just appear so i can click publish post! and go on with my night. i apoligize for the weak analogy here but blogging is like walking the dog. it's something that i enjoy but don't do near as often as i should. it's one of those things where when i just do it without thinking everything works out well. okay this analogy sucks. what i'm trying to say is, i think the fact that i have to blog is what makes it so hard. i am required to post three times a week with four hundred words per post to get a good grade. you could try to tell me that i actually don't have to do this but i don't want to fail.

hmm. city contest. bleh. it's just something you have to endure. think back to middle school, city contest was scary! what if other people outside my family listened to me as i played my solo? what if i mess up? why does my mom have to tape this? why do i have to do this? can i just pretend that i played my solo? needless to say, i got over all of that and now just look at city contest as just another day. woodwind choir, piece of cake. flute ensemble, easy as pie. duet? not bad. flute solo, pretty good. piccolo solo? didn't play it. why not, you all are anxious to know i'm sure. it wasn't all ready. parts were ready but not the whole piece. city contest rarely runs on schedule. why is this? i'll only tell you because i know you're all dying to know. because five minutes is not enough time. five minutes for playing is ample, but five minutes for playing and judging is not enough. i'm sure this all fascinating to you. i told you that you shouldn't've read this.

i have two fish. their names are tucker and jaws. i did not name them. one of my friends who names pretty much everything did. tucker is the algae sucker fish and jaws is a gold fish. they live on top of my bookcase during the winter and outside during the summer. every year without fail there are many, meaning four or five six at the most, fish in the pond and when we go to take them out at the end of summer it's just those two. i'll let you draw your own conclusions.

well, i got to four hundred words. it was a struggle that's for sure but i made it. yay me? sure. let's go with that.

sorry if you're offended.

2009-04-04T07:35:00.000-05:00

Saving Lives

2009-04-02T07:05:00.004-05:00

yesterday i saved up to three lives by donating some blood. my time to donate was 10:40 and i was anxiously awaiting all day. three of my friends were supposed to donate during first hour and all three came back not able to donate. el cabrito and rbetta and adam, he doesn't have a blog for me to link you to, all came back because they weren't able to donate. cabrito is a sickly child no matter what he tries to tell you. rbetta had too high of a pulse. so did adam. that made me nervous, what if my pulse was too high,i don't want to be turned away because my pulse was too high. off to math class i went, still worried that my pulse would be too high. onto physics and then finally it was 10:35 so i got all my stuff together and left. filled out my paperwork and joined the line waiting. while in line i saw my brother, he was just finishing giving blood. while waiting in line i was joined by rbetta and adam, they were going to try again. and then it was my turn to go get screened.

finger prick. this was an evil fingerprick, and it is still kinda tender. blood pressure, fine. heart rate, a okay. hemoglobin, little low so let's try again, second try was great. and then my finger didn't want to stop bleeding so instead of just a bandaid i got the cotton swab wrapped under the bandaid, rendering my right ring finger completely useless. okay cool. wait in line some more and then it is my turn to go sit on the chair and actually give blood. she didn't miss my vein and it suprisingly didn't really get hurt to get stabbed in the arm by that needle. after finishing i ate my cookie, drank my juice, grabbed another water bottle and went back to class. i started to work on my assingment and then i started to get really, really warm. uncomfortably warm. and kinda dizzy, so i got up and told my teacher that i was going to go to the nurse. apparently i was also really quite pale so she told me that i better get someone to walk to the nurses office with me. well, stumble stumble, hit a chair, run into haley and then i passed out. oops. so not only did my whole class see that, but so did all the people in the library. embarrassing.

turns out i wasn't the only one that passed out so i don't feel as embarrassed. i just had to drink and eat a lot of sugary foods for the rest of the day to keep myself standing upright. i was also not allowed to do any strenuous activity. unless i have some super rare blood type, or just one in high demand i'm probably not going to be giving blood anytime soon. but i did save up to three lives and i fufilled my SNHS servie project. happy face. : )

hmmm..?

2009-03-19T07:13:00.004-05:00

my break from blogging seems to have caused some bloggers block. wonderful. 400 words is a lot to get when you can't think of anything to blog about. today is the last official day of winter. yay!!! spring is coming! spring is coming! i'm not complaining here but didn't it seem like january was just yesterday? i mean, it seems like just a few weeks ago that it was too cold to even go to school and we got a five day weekend but in reality that was actually two months ago. where did the time go? out the window of course. same with sophomore year, that one kinda flew by with not all that much happening. next year is senior year and then it's off to college. too bad i don't know where i want to go or what i want to do with my life. i'll figure it out one of these days?

random.
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a few days ago, tuesday to be exact, the fire alarm went off during first hour. this wasn't one of those planned drills they have where the teachers tell you beforehand and then everyone moseys on out of the building, this had potential to be the real deal. after maybe three minutes of standing outside we went back it. i'm going to go with someone pulled it. what i don't understand is why did the portable classrooms have to evacuate? they're not connected to the main building and the fire was obviously not in there but they had to evacuate anyway.

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hahahaha. i love cyanide and happiness. i'm going to use this to ramble on about something i have already blogged about, PDA. i'll give you some background so this isn't as random as it actually is. so, a few days ago, monday to be exact, i got music for the orchestra concert that is today, thursday. but that doesn't really have anything to do with this story. for the concert we're playing a song with the middle school orchestra meaning we had to rehearse with them. there are a lot of them meaning we ran out of chairs. some of the high school orchestra kids had to stand while playing. the kid right in front of me conveniently blocking my view of the super soft spoken director was basically petting the head of the girl he was standing behind. for the whole half hour that we were rehearsing he couldn't keep his hands off of her. seriously, for a half hour you can't keep your hands to yourself?! lame. gross. ewwww. to top it off he looked like he hadn't showered in a year and judging from the amount of clothing she was wearing it must've been 90 degrees yesterday. too bad it wasn't. which leads me to my next topic.

on tuesday, st patrick's day, we experienced some great weather. it got up to 75 degrees. it was such a nice day. i understand that it was warm and that people are sick and tired of the cold because i am too, but just because it's finally warm doesn't mean you can wear whatever you find in your closet. especially if you're going to be leaving your house. do you look in a mirror before you leave? i don't think you do. it's obvious that you didn't on tuesday. someone should have grabbed you by the hand and drug you back to your house and not let you out until you were dressed respectably.

hop skip and a jump

2009-03-16T17:01:00.003-05:00

and we're working our way back into the swing of things now that it's third term. do you know what third term means? i certainly do, it means that there's ball park 60 days left of school. that's it. doesn't it feel like the school year just started? to me it does. school is like work, no matter how much i complain about it and wish that i didn't have to go, i actually don't mind it for the most part. but enough of this nice little random tangent and i'll attempt at finding a point.

due to the fact that i work in a retail store it is required of me to be nice to people and greet them and help them and this doesn't bother me, it's usually easy to be nice to people. sometimes after getting off work i'm still stuck in the world of i have to greet everyone and be nice so i'll end up saying hi and such to random strangers. you should see some of the looks i get, they are hilarious. what i really like though is when they say hi back, or even just acknowledge that you said something to them. we are too obsessed in our own little worlds to look up and see what's going on around us. i dare you to at least attempt at a random act of kindness at least once a day. hold the door open for someone. hold the door open for someone with their arms full. acknowledge those around you. if someone does something nice for you, say thank you and actually mean it. don't just say it to say it.

pay things forward. if someone does something nice for you, return the favor to someone else. who knows if they'll keep the trend but i promise that you'll feel good about yourself. make someone else's day just a little brighter, it's worth it.

this kinda goes along with the topic of this so i'm going to include it because i like gandhi.
an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. --gandhi

whaaat..?

2009-03-13T07:32:00.001-05:00

dear mother nature,

can you please take a look at your calendar? it's march 12th and freezing cold outside. i do not like this. i managed to go through the last half of february without wearing my winter jacket but today i had to break out the winter coat. it was 5degrees before the windchill. if i remember right it was somewhere around 60degrees for two or three days of february and then after that it was consistently in the 40s.

i would much appreciate it if this nasty cold wintry weather was replaced by some nice semi warm spring weather.

sincerely,
me

let's try to be productive

2009-03-12T07:05:00.000-05:00

i suggest not reading this. really. please don't. just skip it. there is nothing important in this.

there's five minutes left of class. what just happened to the past 50 mintues? i was reading blogs all class. hmm. why was i reading blogs instead of doing work? maybe it's because my game theory book has gotten repetitive. maybe it's because whenever i try to research some game theory examples none can beat or even come close to the dark knight example i found thanks to embroz. i would ever so nicely link it here but i doubt that any of you really care seeing as how i can probably count the number of i readers i have on one hand. so why did i not work on my portfolio? i refuse to admit that it's almost time for finals.

that was me a week or two before finals. i'm a slacker. i put off studying for all my finals until the last minute, and then i didn't even really study at all. but that's okay, i don't mind. and now it's third term, four days into the term to be exact and i'm already behind. i have some pages to read in the us history book, a lot of pages to read in the bio book, and other various assignments that are never going to be due but will help me learn. so i should probably do them? i might try to do them. but they more than likely won't get done.

i told myself at the beginning of the term that because it's now third term i should really try to focus. ap exams are coming up. eeeek! why am i signed up to take three ap tests? who knows but i am signed up to take three ap tests. sad face. last year i read my ap textbook religiously and got kinda nervous when i didn't read a chapter. this year, i am lucky to have read a total of three whole chapters between my ap bio and ap us history textbooks. oops. why have i not been doing my reading? because i have been getting somewhere around a 90% without reading and reading those books a-takes too much time and b-puts me to sleep without fail.

but back to my third term goal, i really really should attempt at staying caught up for the term. no promises, but i'm going to try.

buying happiness

2009-03-09T07:47:00.001-05:00

read this. or you don't have to, i'll be providing a nice summary here. it's probably not a summary, more just my thoughts on the article. kinda like as if we had read this for class and this would be my reading notebook entry. only i'm hoping this will be better than my reading notebook, my reading notebook is all caught up!, because my reading notebook entries are kinda bad.

conventional wisdom is that when you're rich, you are happy. don't ask me, i'm not rich, but on most days i am happy. what makes me happy? living life makes me happy. seeing my friends makes me happy. seeing hard work pay off. stuff like that. money doesn't matter and there is no price on my happiness.

if you're still hoping for a summary of that article above you probably shouldn't hold your breath. i've decided to go on a tangent and i don't want to summarize the article. but it is a good one and you should probably go read it. really.

because i am a high school junior something that's always on my mind is college. where am i going to go, what am i going to do? endless questions like that and oh how i wish i could answer them and make them go away. i don't know where i want to go to school. i don't know what i want to do with my life once i grow up. i'm not going to lie, i'm a little freaked out about that. what if i don't like whatever i choose? yes, i know that i can change my major and all that but what about the time i just spent pursuing that? is that now time wasted? what if i don't like the school i pick? how am i going to afford college? seriously, how the heck am i going to afford this. i can't expect my parents to put me through school, i have two brothers too.

i can only hope that whatever i choose to do with my life makes me happy. it's not about what i'll do or things like where i'll live or how much i'll make or what kind of car i drive, for me i just want to be happy. we get one shot at life, so why should we do something that makes us unhappy? too many people only care about a salary and end up hating their jobs and dreading the day.

i kinda strayed from my original point so i'll attempt at summing things up. basically, the most important thing to life if happiness and you can't buy happiness. you and how you live your life determins your happiness.

why, just why?

2009-02-13T19:03:00.007-06:00

you all know the story of the summer. michael phelps dominated the olympics. 8 gold medals, that's a record. the sport of swimming was brought into the spotlight, people began to take interest. we had something to be proud of. all that has literally gone to pot. everything is now tainted and will never be looked at the same. photos of mr superstar were smoking marijuana were leaked. the whole world saw them. i just want to know why he did it in the first place.

he was on top of the world. everyone knew who he was. 8 gold medals. a hero to a many young swimmers. and what does he do, he goes and smokes some pot. real cool. reaaaaal coooool. yes he's young and yes, he's a superstar athlete, but when it comes down to it he is no more above the law than anyone. marijuana is illegal, end of story. i don't care what you have to say to try to argue why he shouldn't get punished or whatever, illegal is illegal. he deserves whatever he gets.

alex rodriguez. arguably one of baseball's best. nope, not anymore. reputation tarnished. he admitted to taking steroids from 2001-2003. why did he do this, because he felt pressured to live up to his all star reputation. once again, i don't care. illegal is still illegal. he should not get off the hook just because he's some superstar. i'm tired of seeing articles trying to spin it off as it being not such a big deal. he also deserves what he gets, he knowingly took steroids.

roger clemens, barry bonds, the list goes on and on and on. all i want to know is why? they have effectively made it impossible for me to hold any respect for them. this goes beyond the range of just sports, this applies to everyday life. why do we feel the need to cheat? i know there are kids who are just skating by, cheating off every assignment and test. they do because they are lazy. they have better things to do with their lives, duh.

these people are supposed to be role models. they're supposed to show us what we can accomplish we a lot of hard work, dedication, and a little talent. today's role models are cheaters. or in the case of michael phelps, i'm not even sure what name to give him. these people are not role models. the only thing they're telling us is that it's okay to cheat to get ahead or it's okay to smoke marijuana. why should we have to work hard? there's always going to be someone finding a way around doing the work, that's the message i'm getting.

do you know what today is?

2009-02-12T07:35:00.002-06:00

february 12th? yes, that's the date. but what's so special about today?
two days until valentines day? nope, that's not it.
IT'S CHARLES DARWIN'S BIRTHDAY!!! he's 200 today. Happy Birthday, Charles!

blogging

2009-02-12T07:03:00.004-06:00

we have been given an assignment as to what we're supposed to blog about. we're supposed to have one post, at least, about blogging. now i'm stuck, what is there to say about blogging? i think i'll make a list about why i like prefer i blogging to the reading notebook and why i prefer the reading notebook to blogging.

why i like blogging as opposed to the writing notebook:

it's something new and different. i have never blogged before. the novelty of it makes seem much more exciting than it is. i mean, c'mon, it's so much more exciting to say 'i updated my blog!' than it is to say 'i did my writing notebook entry!'
everyone can see it. when we had just our writing notebooks the only person that could see what we were writing was mr ayers. now my classmates, the other ap lang kids, and even the perspectives kids can read my blog. not to mention any other random readers who have somehow stumbled upon this.
i don't realize how much i have written. i was looking at all my blog posts earlier this month and i didn't realize just how much i have written on this. i sit down and just type and type, unless i can't think of anything of course, and before i know it i'm somewhere in the neighorhood of 400 words. in the writing notebooks it never really seemed like there was a lot of writing.
i can add cool things like pictures and videos, something i definitely can't do with a writing notebook. and i can link stuff. seriously, click on it.

why i kinda liked the writing notebook:

it was easier to catch up if i got behind, mainly because i was in charge of putting the dates on the pages i wrote. with this blog i cannot change the date. the day i start a post is the day that it posts under. so i could just start some posts earlier in the week, but then i usually get three posts all in one day. so really, the only thing i can do is just keep up with it.
everyone can see it. my ramblings are here on the internet for everyone to see. that's kinda weird when you stop and think about it. with the writing notebook i got to choose who could read what i wrote. now it's open for the general public to read. ahhhh.
one page in the writing notebook definitely was easier to write than 400 words on a blog unless i know exactly what i'm going to be blogging about.
reading other people's blogs makes me feel like a creeper if i'm not exactly sure who they are. to combat this is stick to my blogs of interest list and read just those.

also, blogging gives us an excuse to go to the lab for a day and just sit here on the computers free to blog. which of course means that we can go anywhere to look at things and give us ideas to blog. or go find funny pictures or videos to link or even embed in our blogs. it's a break from class that we all enjoy and we get work done without fully realizing it.

shorts?

2009-02-09T17:10:00.003-06:00

i wore shorts over the weekend. it was a balmy somewhere around 50 degrees. granted, i was always in my car either before of after softball when i had shorts on, but still. it's february in iowa and i'm wearing shorts. and driving with my windows down. it rained today. rained! not snowed, but rained. this weather makes me love lifeee. that's how much i love it, i added some extra e's to the end of life.

small town, iowa

2009-02-09T16:47:00.005-06:00

story time. it's kind of a tear jerker in places, so you have been warned.

over the summer my cousin joe and his wife had their second baby, a little boy named Brekin. they found out over the course of the pregnancy that little baby Brekin was going to be born with heart problems that would require surgery. they weren't sure Brekin would even survive the first three months, let alone make it to christmas or through his first surgery. the most adorable baby ever is still alive and his little heart is still beating.

he went through his first surgery in december and made a short visit at the family christmas. he's such a happy little kid and oh so cute too. the chambers of his heart aren't in the right places. his first surgery was a success, but unfortunately poor little Brekin isn't done. He will need either two or three more depending on how successful the next surgery goes.

as you all probably know, surgery isn't cheap. joe and amber are a young family, both are around 30 and both are teachers. both have taught and joe has also coached in the springville school district. over the weekend the town of springville held the Big Hearts for A Little One fundraiser for the family of four. the fundraiser included a soup supper, silent auction, live auction, and dj/dance. over $16,000 and counting was raised just from those four events alone. they're still counting the extra donations people made throughout the night.

over 700 families were fed at the soup supper. who knows if any of you know where springville is or the size of the city, but springville is a little over 1,000 people. the whole town, plus others from various other towns, are here to support them.

i have done a lot of thinking about this over the weekend and i have wondered how successful this would have been if it had been held in cedar rapids. i don't think it would have been as successful. cedar rapids may not be the largest of towns, but it certainly lacks that small town feel that towns like springville have. in a small town everyone knows each other and it's a very close knit community. the small town of springville has warmed the hearts of many with their participation in the Big Hearts for a Little One event.

10:10

2009-02-04T21:15:00.004-06:00

i heard freshman year that clocks and watches that you see in tvs commercials and movies are usually set at 10:10 because when people see that it makes them happy. strange, huh? well this really isn't going to be about 10:10, it's more along the lines of time so i felt that the title was semi appropriate.

along with time this is going to be about distractions because they seem to take up a lot of time. i know this firsthand. every day as i'm driving home from school i'm usually thinking about the amount of homework i have and what absolutely needs to be done for the next day. i then guess an approximate amount of time that each is going to take and start with the shortest assignment that absolutely needs to get done. only, i don't start as soon as i get home. instead i sit down, read the comics, and maybe watch a little TV until either 3:30 or 4. then i start on my homework. on somedays though i have to go to work so then all my homework gets pushed off until i get home. so that's distraction number one.

distraction number two; sleep. i love naps and seem to have no problem falling asleep. reading textbooks slash just doing homework in general makes me sleepy. this is an every day occurrence no matter how much sleep i got the night before. i have given up on taking a nap that's under half an hour and whenever i try to i always fail at waking up. i just shut off the alarm, roll over, and back to sleep i go. nowadays my naps are at least an hour.

distraction number three; electronics. more specifically my laptop, cell phone, ipod, and ihome. i think that's really all i need to say here. it's pretty self explanatory.

distraction number four; the internet. and facebook. and strangely, blogging. i never thought that i would enjoy reading these things as much as i do. this one is my fave. i spend far too much time on the internet while i should be doing things like my homework or studying. i do feel very creeper-esque when i'm looking at the blogs of people other than my friends though.

and it's gone? probably not.

2009-02-03T15:20:00.002-06:00

public speaking.

i dread public speaking.

this is pointless

2009-02-03T07:33:00.002-06:00

so my friend ima lemon and i are in this club here at school. i'll refrain from calling it by it's full name and just shortening it to c club. i don't really like saying the acronym for it because everytime i say it people ask me to explain what it means and i really just don't know. but i was kinda roped into this my freshmen year and here i am, still a member. my section leader freshmen year really wanted me to come to a c club meeting because she was going to be graduating and wanted to make sure that the club would be able to continue after she had graduated. what about the juniors in the club? the only one that was a good member was moving to california after the year ended so i guess they were getting desperate. ima lemon and i were elected to co-presidents for our sophomore year, meaning we were going to be running the show.

we didn't really have any idea as to how to run a club and kinda did a lot of nothing while figuring it out. we got the main goals of the club accomplished but it wasn't easy and definitely didn't run very smoothly. everything got done very last minute and wasn't always all that organized. the number of members is never very high and our enthusiam isn't either. but we still come back, week after week because we feel obligated to. we don't want to be the ones that let the club die.

our teacher advisor, leader, or whatever she's called, has a heart of gold. but at the same time, she's kinda scary. ima lemon and i are often scared that she's going to be extremely mad when we tell her that we won't be able to make it to various club functions. i'll finish this later.

and it's back

2009-02-03T07:21:00.004-06:00

i guess my bloggers was was only temporarily gone because i don't have anything to say anymore. but look at what i did, i put a picture in my last post! my friend rbetta helped me remember how to. go read her blog. it has more of a point than this one. i kinda just ramble on with some randomness.

i have developed this really bad habit of putting things off until the last minute. i always tell myself, "oh, i can just do it later." and then you know what, i just keep putting it off. i had a project to do for today and i think it was assigned at least a week ago. i kinda did some work while in the library when we had classtime to work but i didn't really get much accomplished. then over the weekend i kept saying, "i'll just work on it later." later eventually became monday night. the day before it was due. so i worked frantically for about 2 hours and completed the project. it is nowhere near as good as it could've been but it's done and that's all i really care about.

i seem to do this with all of my classes nowadays and the result is most of my homework only being half completed at best. strangely, this doesn't really bother me but i'm beginning to realize that it should. i really need to be doing my best in all my classes. i am one of three kids and my parents can't afford to put us all through college so the better i do in school the easier everything will be later. i just need to find my work ethic when it comes to doing my homework.

no more blah?

2009-02-02T19:12:00.006-06:00

my bloggers block may be gone. but i'm not sure. hence the question mark in the title. as you all know, because if you're reading this then you have to know who i am, otherwise how the heck did you stumble upon this? but anyways, as you all know i am in band. why? you ask, i am in band because i like to play the flute and my cute little piccolo. i'll put a picture in here as soon as i remember how to. as much as i like playing, i do not enjoy band most days. one reason is the director. i like his music choice but i'm the biggest fan of him. i like the other director more. i think that my director can choose good music because he is the director of the top band, whereas the other director is the director of the middle band so her music choice is a little more limited.

enough with that rambling and i'll try to get to the point here. one of our songs for the upcoming concert is a brahms piece called how lovely is thy dwelling place. it's originally meant for a choir, we even listened to them and i have the sheet music as if i was going to be singing instead of playing but that's not going to be happening, but one of the area directors so kindly arranged it for us. it doesn't look complex, and it's not complex rhythm wise, but there is some complexity while playing it. but this is still not the point. my point is this morning when we were rehearsing, while playing the brahms i looked up at my director to make sure that i was still on the beat and not behind or ahead for some reason. i have no idea what he was doing but i couldn't find the beat for the life of me from his directing. he might have well been just standing up there waving his arms at us becuase there was no familiar 3/4 pattern going on there. because i could't find the beat i just kept with my section and it was all good. the band was then stopped and mr bird told us what to do to make the piece sound better. this was his great little tid bit of information; just pretend there are only two measures in the piece. the first measure is the pickup note at the beginning and the rest of the song, 175 measures mind you, is all one measure. hence the arm waving. okay cool. it is a very pretty piece though and its probably my favorite.

blah

2009-02-01T14:34:00.003-06:00

i knew it would happen, it was bound to. i have writers block. cleverly renamed bloggers block because i'm a blogger not a writer. and i have run out of things to say. this could pose to be an issue for me. good thing these aren't graded on content, they're more of a completion grade. i really am stuck. i looked at the blogs of others in my class and it didn't really help. i still don't know what to blog about.

i'm really going to try to stay away from reviewing a song or book or movie. i personally don't like to read those so i'm not going to make you few readers suffer through it too.

i wish weekends were longer. or that we had less homework over the weekends. i go to school five days a week and i think i deserve these two days off that we get. too bad i have homework. and because teachers seem to think that we have ample time over the weekends they give us a larger than normal sized assignment. i really don't want to do any homework over the weekends. these two days are supposed to be my break from school.

my physics teacher told the class to never complain, not even to yourself because it gives you bad karma. i guess i'm going to have bad karma then because i'm complaining. i'm going to complain if i want to and i'll find some other way to fix my karma. sounds good to me.

i am getting a headache. but i don't have time to take a nap. i like naps. i'm not even to 300 words yet. stupid block. i wish i could think of something to write.

sometimes i get sick and tired of people. especially when i've been subject to them while at work. and because i'm at work i am not allowed to do anything but smile and answer all their stupid questions. here's an example of my favorite question; while i'm folding shirts or doing something that only workers do, and i have a visible name tag on, customers will come up to me and ask if i work here. when people ask me this i just want to say no i don't. i only wear the name tag for fun. another frequent question; how much does this cost? so i look at the price tag and tell them what it says. they ask if it's on sale. i ask if there was a sign by it saying it was on sale. they say yes. i ask what did the sign say. they give a price. i say that price back to them. last night it was day care, or at least that's what it seemed. little children were running around everywhere with no parents in sight. i'm sorry but i'm not going to watch your kid and make sure he or she doesn't run into anything and hurt him/herself. that is not my job. as the parent that is your job. but all in all, no matter how much i complain about my job, i love it.

kicks and giggles

2009-01-29T21:59:00.005-06:00

please excuse this interruption; richard please call jim at 341.

oh my god, i forgot my mustache!

quiero tener una coca cola contigo.

let's just tell everyone we blew the circut because we had four microwaves and the vacuum plugged in.

can we just lock the doors and go home early?

the color blue

2009-01-28T16:33:00.004-06:00

note: title has nothing to do with the post, i'm just not good with titles.
the second note: i'm really quite proud of myself for keeping up with this all week

i know that the purpose of these blogs isn't to be a here's what happened to me today story but i'm going to break that rule today and tell all maybe five of you about my day. so this morning i was running kinda behind just a bit. but that's okay because i give myself about 10 minutes of extra time so that when i do run late i make it to school on time still. i don't like arriving late, it bugs me. but that's not important. i pull into the south lot and park my car in the usual row and then wait to exit my car while a car pulls in next to me. of course i glance up to see who it is and i don't recognize him. i gather all my stuff and then brace myself for the chilly walk to the school. we both leave our cars and then speed walk to the school. he either gets cold easily or just walks super fast and was soon a little ahead of me. i'm thinking this is nothing out of the ordinary, just because i go to school with this guy doesn't mean i'm going to talk to him as we walk to the school. i don't even know who he was. but when i get up to the school i see him walk up to the door and then hold it open for me. and it wasn't one of those hold it open from the inside until i grab the door things it was the all out he stood outside and held the door open for me. i said smiled and said thank you. he replied with a you're welcome and a smile as well. we went our separate ways and i still have no idea who he is. for the purpose of this i'm going to call him...jim.

today jim kinda renewed my faith in humanity. he showed me that not everyone is wrapped up in their own lives and that people out there still are willing to lend a helping hand, even if it's to a perfect stranger. so what did i do? i paid it forward and lent a helping hand today. the wind symphony traveled to one of the area middle schools today to play a recruiting concert. while walking to the car of the band mommy i was riding with i see the string base player trying to get his monstrously big instrument into the back of his truck. it was one of those trucks with the cover things making it not really a truck and, wow i'm not good at explaining cars so bear with me here, the window that is actually like a door didn't want to stay open and was causing troubles with the whole getting the big string bass into the bed of his truck that isn't actually a truck. so i held it open for him. he got the string bass in, smiled and said thanks. i played the part of jim, smiled back and said you're welcome.

life as i see it

2009-01-27T17:03:00.003-06:00

it's your life, do what you want to do.

forget regrets or life is yours to miss --RENT

siiick

2009-01-26T10:18:00.002-06:00

i don't like being sick. i feel like my stomach has grown its own brain and it has now decided that it doesn't like food. water is acceptable and that's about it. i am now confined to my bed all day. the only upside is that i can sleep all that i want to.

i try not to miss school for being sick because two days worth of homework and then having to make up any tests or quizzes only puts more strain on me. it's kind of a sad story. but hey, maybe i'll think of something else to blog about and then i'll have two of my three posts for the week done. let's not get too far ahead of myself now. i probably shouldn't even count this as one seeing as how it's not even going to be half of the required amount.

jefferson: please stop trying

2009-01-25T22:17:00.004-06:00

dear jefferson high school:

hello. i have a big problem with you. namely, you suck. at absolutely everything. sports, the arts, academics... you're awful. you think you're good, but you're really not. every school in cedar rapids has a reason for its existence. prairie is for the farmers. wash is the original school so it's legit. kennedy of course needs to be there for the northsiders. gotta have linn-mar and marion of course as well, i mean marion has high schoolers too. and the catholics need a place to go to which means xavier is necessary.

but that leaves that one ugly, dirty, disgusting joke of a school that they call Thomas Jefferson High School. the main reason that it sucks is its location. if there is a definitive center of the "white trash zone" in cedar rapids, it is jefferson. it is also impossible to get to. but this is for a good reason. when they first built it, the architects realized that they had made a terrible mistake in even first building it. they begged the school district to let them tear it down, but the district said "no, we have to have at least one school that just really, really, really sucks." so to prevent anyone from the horrors of actually having to go there, they tucked it away in one of the least accessible spots in the whole city. then put it on some hill. then made it into 2 different buildings so you could escape more easily! but it wasnt enough. today, hundreds of high schoolers are forced to suffer in the dungeon-like conditions on a daily basis.

another reason why jeff sucks an obscene amount is the smugness of their students as well as their parents. for example, jeff beat xavier in football this season. now this is also legit. i mean xavier is a fantastic football team. [to make things clear, oliver jorge doesn't actually agree with this. oliver jorge still believes in the kennedy football team even if they got beat by xavier] but you would have thought that this meant jeff won state. they won 4 games the whole year! finishing the year 4-6. but it was still a success for jeff. for the record xavier finished 8-4. moral of this story is: jefferson is the best if by best you mean worst possible ever of all time in history.

also show choir. now im just ranting but bear with me. jeff beat xavier last saturday. by one point. and you would have thought again that jefferson had returned to their glory days when they were the best show choir in the country. but no they still got 7th place. AKA they still do suck even when they get lucky. not to mention that last year, jeff beat xavier at Benton and talked a ridiculous amount of trash about it for two weeks, only to get dominated by xavier at the Kennedy competition later on. then they shut up. at least they can still do that. their parents are much worse though. see, i think this can mostly be attributed to the fact that jeff used to be good at stuff. i mentioned show choir already... band too right? i think so... basketball to a certain extent. now they blow at absolutely everything.

i honestly consider myself to be a lesser person because i have simply set foot inside of jefferson high school. if there is an opposite to a Chuck Norris joke, it is a Jefferson High School joke. travesties such as global warming, the economic slowdown, and mandatory pep band can all be attributed directly to jefferson.

so like the title says, quit now and save yourself. actually its too late. but still, quit now. youre embarassing us.

sincerely,

-the whole world

this has no point what so ever.

2009-01-25T20:38:00.003-06:00

for the maybe five of you that actually read this, don't expect too much out of this. i'm just doing my assignment of three posts a week. so this is a random third post of the week. nothing more, nothing less. that's it. fourty four words down just three hundred and fifty six left. see that neat little trick? i spelled out the numbers so that i would have more words. i know, i'm slacking but i can't think of anything to post so what else can i do?

i tried to put a picture into that last post. as you can tell, it didn't work. i forgot how to. but it was supposed to be of the green m&m lady. yes, i know, green m&m lady and valentine's day don't really correspond but if you ate lunch at my table in eighth grade you would understand.

secret secret, i got a secret. mr. roboto anyone? did you get it? it's okay if you didn't. but anyways, a secret is a secret and they should probably be kept. especially if you say you're not going to tell anyone. your friends won't like you very much if you fail at keeping secrets. but whatever, you do what you want because it's your life.

elf! i love, love, love elf. because we have it in the break room at work i'm working on memorizing it, but not line for line because i don't work that much. [nor do i want to] but i am getting pretty good at quoting some of the major parts of the movie. like this one for example "SANTA'S COMING?!? I KNOW HIM!!!!!!!!" and my personal favorite "you're not santa, you stink. you smell like beef and cheese. pulls off fake beard and a fight then ensues." i love elf.

obama is officially president. i do kinda feel bad for him though, everyone is expecting him to fix everything. that's a lot of cleaning to do, it's kinda a big mess out there. so, good luck mr. president, i'm rooting for you.

lookey there, i figured out how to change the font size. yay me. too bad i'm still fifty words away from the assigned number. boo expectations.

so to make it to the expected number i'll leave you with a list of things

i don't like monday mornings.
or sunday nights for that matter either.
school and homework take up far too much of my time.
pep band ruins my friday nights, but i would rather go on a friday night than a tuesday
i think i might go crazy next year
i'm running out of things to say
my car always needs gas and i never want to get it.
only some of these things have periods others are left without punctuation
i still have some uncompleted assignments that are due tomorrow.
i don't plan on doing most of them.
don't worry mr. ayers, i'll write my final draft.
i'm not a big fan of other people's feet.
i get cold really easily.
i like making this list.
i love all my friends and i'll love them forever
next week is winter spirit week.
i don't like winter, so i don't plan on participating.
monday's theme is career day, i spun the spinner one of my friends made and i'm supposed to dress up like a mail lady. not going to.
i guess i'm no fun. but i don't like winter so i'm not participating.

i'm done spewing randomness now.

holidays. continued?

2009-01-25T20:14:00.003-06:00

about one week ago, january 19th to be exact, i had a dentist appointment. fun stuff. for some reason i always get to be the trial run for the new girl, i know i know, it's always a girl never a guy. but anyways, i always get the new girl so my routine appointments always take forever! and she tends to usually stab me with the pointy tools, squirt me with the water thingy, and cause my gums to bleed by attacking them with floss. it's not that my gums are just weak and unused to flossing, i do floss my teeth like a good little girl, but i don't use the force that the new girls always use. my poor gums. but anyways you're all, who am i kidding i doubt more than 5 people read this, probably wondering why is this post titled holidays? don't worry, i'm getting there.

as i walk into my dentist office on january 19th i see pink and red everywhere. and hearts and balloons. and twirly things hanging from the ceiling. one of those banners where all the letters are connected reads happy valentine's day! it's january 19th. basically a month away, and my dentist is already celebrating. they even gave us wonderfully sugar coated cookies as we walked out the door. shaped in a heart of course with a heart shape in the frosting as well. i don't know how most people view valentine's day, but to me it's not really worth a whole month of preperation. sure you get all the warm fuzzies as you spend your day with those closest to you all that jazz, but really? a whole month ahead of time? kinda makes it seem like february 14th is going to be the best day of the year. maybe it is to some.

after working in retail over the holiday season i have come to this conclusion: america over celebrates the holidays. as soon as halloween ended we were preparing for thanksgiving and as soon as thanksgiving ended up came the christmas trees. is our world really that bad that we need to look so far ahead to find something worth celebrating? i sure hope not. celebrate the small stuff, don't take it forgranted.

microbes...!

2009-01-22T07:32:00.003-06:00

for my biology class we are reading non fiction books and then book reporting on them. yes, i know, ugh. science-y non fiction? sounds like a bore fest to me. only it's not! i am reading Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease. it's fascinating, for the most part, and it's certainly not the bore fest that i thought it would be. here is an excerpt from my book report...

"Chapter five talks about microbes, more specifically host manipulating microbes! The nasty human affecting microbe, the Guinea worm is one crafty little guy. You’re only at risk if you spend a lot of time with contaminated water so we should all be good, but if you get one it lives inside you and grows to about, oh, three feet long. Then its actions make you think that it’s decided that you’re no longer a good enough host and wants to come out. It does this by giving you painful blisters that burn with a fiery sensation so you automatically think, okay let’s just submerge my arm in some nice cool water. DON’T DO IT!! By submerging you arm in water the little Guniea worm let’s all of its little babies out into you. So now instead of having just one wormy living inside you, you have many, many, many. The only good way, that’s been found, of getting them out is wrapping them around something like a toothpick and slowly pulling them out bit by bit. Unfortunately this usually takes more than one day. Just one more host manipulator microbe example is the Dicrocelium Dentriticum. Basically, it’s a parasite that lives in sheep, but the thing is that it uses ants as a Trojan horse to get into the sheep. These little guys mess with the brains of the ants making them suicidal; once affected the ants go hang out on the ends of the blades of grass just hoping to be eaten by a sheep."

there's also one more type of microbe mentioned in the book that i didn't put in my book report and it's the Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga. because no one in their right mind knows what that is, i will call it the parasitic wasp that messes with the mind of Plesiometa Argyra, a spider. this spider is just a minding it's own business weaving its orb shaped webs all over the places in hopes of catching the little bug that blindly walks into in and then becomes lunch. to rain on this nice little parade, out of nowhere comes the parasitic wasp and he/she stings the spider. okay it's a she, because when she stings the poor little spider she deposits her eggs in it. after a short stint of being paralyzed by the sting from the evil wasp, spider wakes back up and goes about his/her business not knowing that his/her days are numbered. all the little wasp eggs living in the spider soon hatch into little wasp larva, and they're hungry. so what do they do? they suck the blood of the spider but for some reason the spider can't feel it so it just keeps on spinning webs. once this gets boring for the larva and they decide it's time to cocoon they inject some chemicals into the head of the spider. so now the spider is all drugged up and can only remember how to do steps on and two of its web making. after repeating steps one and two about fourty times, and this usually happens at midnight, the spider just stops. no more movement from mr. spider. the larva then kill motionless mr. spider and use the product of repeating steps one and two fourty times to have a nice place to hang it cocoon from. give it a week or two and you now have some more wasps. nasty little guys aren't they.

so, where you going to go to school?

2009-01-19T23:21:00.002-06:00

i dread this question. unfortunately for me, it seems to be the staple now when i see people, mainly adults, that i haven't seen in a while. most of them have forgotten my age and seem to think that i'm going off to the wonderful world of college next year. sorry people, i still have one more year of high school to go. hopefully i'll get something figured out before next year is up.

i kinda think i know where i want to go to school. but then i think to myself, how can i pick a school when i'm not sure what i want to do? i really can't. so right now the tentative ISU pick is just something i came up with, with basically no good reason to back it up. maybe i'll decided that i wanna go out of state. but probably not because out of state costs are horrible.

i have recently started to just throw out random majors when i'm asked what i want to do. it'll be a while before i see these people again and i hightly doubt they'll even remember what i told them last time. so then if i ever decide on what i'm actually going to major in i can tell them that one for real. recently i have been telling people that i'm planning on majoring in big smart sounding things like biochemistry. or bio medical engineering. or just plain medicine. or chemical engineering. or micro biology. seems like i really like biology? meh, i don't know.

the outside world

2009-01-12T21:28:00.004-06:00

the outside world is very cold. and snow covered. well at least right now it's snow covered. but that's not what i'm meaning when i say the outside world. by outside world i mean the world outside our our little sheltered life that we like to call high school. we live in a box. really, we do. a cardboard box, just kidding, it's actually a brick box. my box has a name, it's kennedy high school.

let's compare my box to um, i don't know, something that has many little boxes connected together. because i have other little boxes that i live in outside of my main brick covered box. this next box is a metal box. it's where i work. i don't live in this box very often. though i tend to enjoy it when i do, i actually like my job no matter how much i complain about it. i like the people i work with. we all like our metal box. it has a name too, old navy. then there are random other boxes that i visit from time to time.

so now that i've spent some time comparing my life to boxes i kinda feel like explaining why. here is why, we are extremely sheltered people. and by extremely sheltered i mean EXTREMELY SHELTERED. seriously, my idea of the outside world is anything outside my box. i think. okay, i'm pretty sure. i live in a world surrounded by these nice four walls. i rarely have to leave my world of boxes. a traumatizing story would fit nicely here but i don't have any.

i just wonder if my world of boxes is going to come with me when i move away and go to the wonderful world of college. i'm guessing that it probably will, and my green and gold brick colored box will probably change colors to show that of the school i'm now going to. //i still do not know where i'm going to college. i do not know when i will be deciding this// but i'm guessing that my box won't be as, i don't know, boxey? my new box probably won't be the sturdiest, it is closer to the outside world so there's a good chance that the cardboard won't be as thick. or maybe it'll be missing chunks in the sides. i don't know.

now that i have you all thinking i live in a carboard box i should probably end this post.

PDA

2009-01-12T21:27:00.002-06:00

stop! seriously, just stop. the whole world does not need to see you make out. did you forget that you are in public, in school to be more specific? sure you like each other but really, i don't think you'll die if you go one whole day without making out in the school. you should really try it. it would be greatly appreciated. i don't care what you do at home, just please don't do it at school.

we all make fun of you in our classes. think of things to do to either make you stop or move away from our classroom so we don't have to see you every day. i really don't see why the teachers don't do anything about this. they complain about it right along with the students, yet they do nothing to try to put a stop to it.

i think we should all be able to have those little squirt bottles and a be able to shoot water at anyone we see making out. that would definitley brighten my day. too bad people would abuse this and just squirt whomever they wanted to.

it's not like this is the only time you are going to see each other, i'm sure you spend ample time together outside of school. so why don't you just wait until you're not surrounded by 1800 other people? i suggest doing that. you should try it, okay? okay good.

and today i did...

2009-01-12T21:26:00.003-06:00

absolutely nothing. just like every other day at school. okay, not every other day but most of the days. we do nothing at all. nothing that amounts to anything i should say. sure i'm learning, but it's not stuff that i'm going to remember. ask me about some math formulas in two weeks and i'll have no clue. they won't be of use to me anymore.

school seems to be kinda pointless to me these days. we do the same stuff in every class with the only difference being the subject material. homework is rarely ever checked for a grade and if it is checked it's checked for completion. meaning i can just scribble some stuff down and i get full credit. why did i have to even attempt at this, i know there are some kids in my class who wrote down nonsense, yet they're going to get the credit just because it's only for completion.

after taking a test i promptly forget everything i have just learned and i do not look at any past material until finals time. and then i only have to look at the main idea because so much is shoved onto those final tests that you can't really go into much depth on anything for fear of leaving out some other important topic. every class is the same song just a different verse.

memorization

2009-01-08T07:05:00.004-06:00

i have an essay quiz today in ap bio about transcription and translation. i'm not a fan of either of those and they just get all jumbled and mixed up in my head. or i just completely blank and nothing at all comes to mind. i have found that the more i write something down, or type it up for this case, the better chance i have to remember it so today i'm going to be running through the processes of transcription and translation.

transcription is the synthesis of RNA, specifically mRNA under the direction of DNA.

translation is the synthesis of a polypeptide chain and it occurs under the direction of mRNA.

((the base sequence of mRNA is translated into the amino acid sequence of polypeptides at the ribosomes))

some stuff to keep in mind...

DNA splits into two separate strands, the coding and template strand. the template strand provides the sequence of bases while the coding strand just kinda hangs out and sits there. the coding strand does do one thing though, it has the TATA box which shows the prompter where to attach and then start scanning for the start codon, AUG.

a codon is an mRNA triplet written 5'-->3', AUG is the start codon. it codes for methionine. redendancy is when multiple codons code for the same amino acid and wobble is when the third nucleotide in the sequence doesn't matter.

specifics of transcription:

step 1. initiation: RNA polymerase II binds to the prompter (the TATA box on the coding strand) and begins to unwind the DNA. RNA poly II then initiates RNA synthesis by finding the start codon AUG.

step 2. elongation: RNA poly II moves downstream, continually unwinding the DNA and elongating the RNA transcript. the RNA transcript is built 5'-->3', which means the nucleotides are added to the 3' end. confusing, yes i know.

step 3. termination: RNA transcript is released and RNA poly II detaches from the DNA. elongation continues for a bit after RNA poly II transcribes the termination sequence.

RNA processing because the mRNA just transcribed is not yet good enough to be used for translation

a 5' cap consisting of a modified guanine nucleotide is added to the 5' end of the pre-mRNA transcript. a poly A tail consisting of multiple adenine nucleotides is added to the 3' end. these caps serve three purposes. 1- they facilitate the export of the mRNA from the nucleus. 2- the protect the mRNA transcript from enzymes. 3- they aid in the ribosomal attachment of the 5' end.

the RNA still isn't ready, it now has to go through splicing. RNA splicing is the removal of the noncoding segments (introns) so that the transcript only contains the coding segments (exons). EXONS-GOOD. INTRONS-BAD. these nifty little things called snRNPs (snerps) are needed to remove the introns and then a snRNP and protein combo form a spliceosome form and they reattach the exons back together. then there are these ribozymes and they're just RNA molecules that act as proteins and i'm not really sure what purpose they serve. TADA YOU HAVE JUST COMPLETED TRANSCRIPTION. FEEL FREE TO MOVE ON TO TRANSLATION NOW.

some more stuff to keep in mind...

in translation the cell is interpreting a gentic message from mRNA and using it to build a polypeptide chain. it's tRNA [transfer RNA] that is used to interpret the codons on the mRNA.
anticodons are found on tRNA and they're complementary to the codons found on mRNA. this is how the tRNA knows which amino acid comes next in the sequence. the amino acids attach to the 3' end of the tRNA when it pulls them to the ribosome from the nucleus.
a nifty little guy called aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase is what attaches the amino acids and little tRNAs together.
ribosomes are made up of rRNA [ribosomal RNA]. they have three binding sites, the P site, the A site, and the E site. the P site holds the tRNA carrying the growing polypeptide chain. the A site holds the tRNA carrying the next amino acid. the E site discharges the tRNAs.

specifis of translation:

step 1. initiation: mRNA, tRNA (with the first amino acid in tow)and ribosomal subunits are brought together. the mRNA and tRNA are bound to the small ribosomal subunit and then scans downstream until the start codon (AUG) is found. transcription starts here.

step 2. elongation: amino acids added to the polypeptide chain one by one as tRNA anticodons match up to the mRNA codons. there are three steps within elongation: 1- codon recognition 2- peptide bond formation 3- translocation. elongation continues until the stop codon reaches the A site.

step 3. termination: UAG, UAA, and UGA are the stop codons. release factors bind to the stop codon, adding a water molecule to the polypeptide chain. this causes the peptide chain to be released.

AN EXTREMELY SHORT VERSION OF WHAT HAPPENS ALL IN FIVE STEPS

RNA transcribed from DNA template
pre-mRNA spliced and modified into mRNA (eukaryotes only)
mRNA attaches to ribosome in preperation for translation
amino acids attach to appropriate tRNA anticodon
tRNAs and their amino acid meet the mRNA codons at the ribosome and polypeptide chain grows.

um, uh, so yeah

2009-01-05T19:41:00.002-06:00

the word like is quickly becoming my least favorite word of all time. it is fine when used in moderation but when you use it at least once a sentence it's just too much. i dare you to count how many times people say like during class. it's best to count during an LA class because that's where the most discussion usually goes on. i have personally counted 15 likes from one short comment all coming from one person. why do we use the word like so much? it surely doesn't make us sound any smarter.

saying like can be compared to saying um, uh, so, yeah, and words like that; they're just filler words. our attempts at filling the silence while our brain is still thinking of what to say next. you should really stop and listen to your fellow classmates and hear what they're really saying. i betcha you will find that you hear a lot of likes, uhs, ums, and blah blah blah the list goes on and on, you all know what words i'm talking about.

where's the holiday spirit?

2008-12-24T21:15:00.002-06:00

so, today is christmas eve. the day before christmas. would you agree that it makes sense for there to be some visible excitement in the air? i can't find it in the levels i think i should be able to easily find.

as you might know, i work in retail so i talk to plenty of people all day. today, there were a lot of grumpy people. yes, you heard me right, grumpy people on christmas eve. and you know what they did, they took out all the grumpy-ness on me and my fellow co workers. i'm sorry but it is not my fault that you pushed your christmas shopping off until the last minute and no we no longer have your size. what did you expect me to do, save some just in case? it's christmas eve, we should all be excited. tomorrow is the day where you spend it surrounded by the people who matter most in your life. that's good enough reason for me to look forward to it.

but what i've noticed this year is that there's really not a lot of christmas spirit going around. i have come to two reasons as to why i think this is true. reason number one: high school. in elementary school there was always a lot of hype coming into the christmas season. we had christmas parties and did christmas activities all day. we used to look forward to christmas and having break was just an added bonus for us. now in high school it seems to be the reverse. everyone is looking forward to break with christmas being the added bonus. teachers are rushing to get assingments and tests in before break, hoping that we won't forget what we've learned while we're on break. reason number two: political correctness. we're so obsessed with political correctness that we are now scared to say things like merry christmas while out in public for fear that we're going to offend someone. we are on winter break, because christmas break is for to politically incorrect and holiday break just isn't correct either. p.s. i don't care. i told everyone have a merry christmas today and if they didn't like it too bad.

the holiday spirit is missing. i'm not a fan of this. i like the holidays.

laughter and brain strain

2008-12-17T07:31:00.006-06:00

lemme know if you can figure this one out, it may be just a little bit tricky.

YYUUUU. []hint the answer is four words[]

and something that could possibily make you laugh

two peanuts walked into a bar and one was a salted.

i can't seem to make this fit on my little blog space so just click here to see the full comic. or is it here? how about over there? just click on them all : )

due to massive amounts of snow...

2008-12-17T07:10:00.002-06:00

the weather forecast always makes it seem like we're going to be getting so much more snow than we actually do. i suppose it's better to prep us for the worst so that it's never as bad as we think it's going to be. and then we can always make that awkward conversation starting with, "at least it didn't snow as much as they said it would."

currently my hometown area is expecting some serious winter weather starting on thursday and going into friday. i have heard everything from some freezing rain to a half inch of ice and snow flurries to oh 10-12 inches of snow. no big deal. what these forecasts do is create panic in the minds of many and hope in the minds of all the little school children. as they sit and listen to the forecasts, or hear exaggerated versions of the forecast from all their little friends, the notion of snowday pops into their heads. snowday! snowday! snowday! and then the weather actually comes through with minimal damage and no snowday. too bad all the kids didn't do any homework expecting a snowday.

take yesterday for example. the forecast told us it's supposed to start snowing around noon and last until around midnight with a total accumulation of around 4 inches. well all the high schoolers were thrown into a tizzy expecting an early dismissal. guess what, we didn't get one. we stayed in school the whole day. everyone was complaining that we should've gotten an early out, but it really wasn't that bad outside. sure you had to drive slow but that won't kill you. driving fast will though.

we're all so tired of school already that a snowday is a welcome break. we get a day to to just do nothing, or catch up on schoolwork if we needed to, but most people don't get too much done on snowdays. i know that i don't really get much done on snowdays. the real kicker is that we either tack them on to the end of the year, or take away the random days off that we have for possible days off. even thought i hate winter and winter driving i would much rather go to school in the winter and stay inside all day, rather than spend those nice summer days outside rather than stuck in school.

are you serious right now?

2008-12-03T07:24:00.003-06:00

one of the things that annoys me most is when people don't differentiate between your and you're. THERE IS A DIFFERENCE. please use them correctly. you are insulting not only your intelligence but the intelligence of everyone around you making our whole population look stupid because you don't know the difference between your and you're.

i don't know if it's because you're lazy and don't feel like typing the extra -'re- or you just don't know the difference. i don't think most of you care. if you cared you wouldn't make this mistake. but whatever, you don't care so continue on making yourself sound stupid because you cannot make a simple contraction of you and are. ps i hate you all. well, maybe not hate but i'm extremely dissatisfied with all of you who make this mistake.

so, because we seem to need to go back to elementary school and learn how to use contractions i will teach you now in hopes that at least one of you decides that you're going to finally use your head and not look so stupid.

okay, your is in the possessive pronoun [i doubt that if you can't tell a difference between your and you're that you're going to know what a pronoun is]form. This form is used to express that something belongs to "you." you use 'your' in sentences like "can i borrow your book?" simple huh? yes. very.

you're is a contraction between you and are. you use 'you're' in a sentence like "and you're sure that this door will be unlocked?" it's really that simple. if you're ever not sure which form to use just take the contraction apart and see if inserting you are makes sense in your sentence. example: you're not sure about which form to use in this sentence: is this you're truck? so you take the contraction apart and read it like -is this you are truck?- and obviously that doesn't make sense.

sadly, the mistake is usually using your for you're because we're such a mass of laziness or stupidity that we just find it impossible to use you're. i do not have a fun little way to remember how to use you're instead of your except for use your head people. it's not that hard. or don't and just let all the little fourth graders sound smarter than you. it's your choice.

respect

2008-12-02T16:37:00.002-06:00

where did it go? and why is it gone? not going to lie, i miss it. and it need to come back, seriously. why did it go away? really, why?

today's generation seems to be very disrespectful, and it's only been getting worse and worse. words that our parents would not have been caught dead saying back when they were the age we are now are common in our everyday conversations. we are becoming desensitized to these "naughty" words.

the mr. and mrs. or ms. have been dropped off of our teacher's names, i'm not saying that i don't do this because i know that i do and so do the rest of you, and we now just call them by their last name. that's it, just their last name much like what you hear when, mostly guys, are talking to thier close buddies. teachers are our close buddies? when did that happen? last time i checked they weren't and they still demanded our respect.

the joys of snow

2008-12-01T19:07:00.002-06:00

so, unless you live under a rock, or not in the certain town where i live, you should have realized that there is in fact, snow on the ground. and if you didn't, it's the white stuff that's covering the grass. and making the trees all pretty. see it now? okay good. btw that's a picture of a lake in idaho which may or may not be the state i live. i guess i just gave away that i live in the united states. oh well. back to snow.

the snow used to provided me with hours of entertainment. now it's just an annoyance. there is snow on my car, usuall with some frosty stuff under it imparing my vision through the windshield. yay for ice scrapers! i recommend one with a brush on one of the ends, makes for very easy snow removal. this one appears to be of real high quality. not only is there snow and icy stuff on my car, but it's on the roads as well. yay... my wheels just start spinning then finally find purchase and cause my car to jerk in the general direction in which i want to go. and due to the fact that my driveway is basically a hill i tend to just slip right on out with these snowy mornings.

here are some hopefully helpful winter driving tips because i don't want you to get into an accident. that would suck.

give yourself plenty of time. you, well maybe not you but the cars around you, will be driving slow due to hazardous conditions. don't be the loser who insists on driving the speed limit, or over, when the roads are covered with snow. all you're going to do is kill us all.
have an ice scraper, or be super prepared and have two. i have two. three if you count the broken one that is still sitting in my car. one is a nice one with the brush on the end to easily sweep off the snow and the other is a little mini one that works really well at scraping the ice and frosty stuff. there is almost nothing worse than being without an ice scraper. then you have to resort to either just waiting for your car to warm up and the defroster to kick in or use something like a cd case.
find a shovel that can fit in your trunk. plastic please, you don't want to be the crazy person carrying a metal shovel around in their car. might look bad if you ever get pulled over. this will come in handy if you ever get snowed in, or if you're parked along the road and then the snowplow comes and blocks your exit. unless it's just a tiny amount your car probably won't be able to get over it.
finally, keep an emergency box in your trunk. fill it with warm clothing and blankets and gloves and hats and scarves and boots and stuff like that. nobody wants to get into an accident, but this way you're prepared if you do. or if your car dies, which is always a possibility with mine.

p.s. it takes longer to stop. your car will slide if you try to slam on the brakes. and no one wants to slide through an intersection. especially if cars are coming.

Christmas

2008-11-19T21:19:00.007-06:00

christmas time is a great time of year. there's all this happiness, joy, and great spirits. families are gathered together, shoving unusually large amounts of people into one house and basking in all that joyfullness. it's one of my favorite times of the year. all that happy music and the fresh blanket of light fluffy snow just put a smile on my face.

christmas holds a special place in my heart, and my calendar. that special place is december. not november which seems to be the current trend. i heard christmas music november 1st. that is over kill. i'm tired of those peppy little christmas tunes after two weeks because there's a very limited number of them. christmas music is now interspersed in with the cd that plays in old navy. i personally laugh as we go from songs like 'hot n cold' by katy perry to some rendition of so this is christmas. i swear we have three different renditions of that song. we also have the christmas trees up at old navy.

what happened to thanksgiving? oh, i know it was over shadowed by christmas. we skip from halloween to christmas with a day of stuffing ourselves, thanksgiving, thrown in. november is the month of thanksgiving, not the month of christmas and we do not need two months of preperation for christmas. two months of it kills it for me. i'm sick and tired of christmas and all the decorations before it's even christmas. all the happiness and joy of this wonderful time of year is sucked out because over the overdrawn preperation. by christmas time i want to shoot someone if i have to hear grandma got run over by a reindeer one more time.

yep, i'll probably shoot someone if i have to hear that multiple times from now until christmas. i can only take so much of grandma getting run over by a reindeer.

election 2008

2008-11-05T18:23:00.003-06:00

so, as you all know and would have to live under a rock to not know by now, barack obama was elected to be president of the united states last night. that's right, we have elected an african american to be our president so we made history last night.

fun fact, obama's first stop on his campaign trail was my high school. that was two years ago. can you believe that this election process started two years ago? i cannot. i am not sad to see it over with though. by september i was sick of hearing about it. we received countless 'vote for mccain/pailin' and 'vote for obama/biden' phone calls in the past few weeks. for the past months i have not been able to turn on the tv and not see a political ad. you know what? i'm done with it.

why do our politicians feel the need to tear down the others? weren't we all taught to treat each other with respect? what happened to that. now it is just all negative campaigning, with some sprinkles of here's what i'm going to do. and most of those 'promises' are said just for the campaign months and never talked about again once in office. i'm sick of it.

this was my last election of not participating and you can expect me to be casting my ballot in 2012. which means that i have some learning to do. first off i will have to register to vote and decide which party ideals i like. do i stick to with what my parents are registered as? no, not unless after gathering information and deciding that the party they're registered with is one that i agree with. one of the thing that bugs me the most is when the political views of kids my age are those exactly of their parents. actually, i take that back. that's not the thing that bugs me the most. i find it particularly irksome when people are uninformed voters and they're just voting for that candidate because their parents are, or because their friends are. seriously, take some time, research the candidates and formulate your own opinions. it's okay to have a different opinion than the person next to you. really, it is.

another thing that irks me is those who don't vote and then complain about who got elected. shut up and vote. i know plenty of minors who would have jumped at the chance to vote and there you are just sitting there not voting.

the art of dance

2008-11-05T17:59:00.003-06:00

i myself am not much of a dancer. by the time i decided that dancing may have been something i was interested in, kids my age were already miles ahead. i would have been the giant in beginners class and that didn't sound all that appealing to me.

dance is a great form of self expression. it also have the ability to help you grow in group situations and helps give you the confidence to go at it solo. it takes some serious self confidence to be able to stand up and start the dance party. for example, this clip here. i don't know too many people that are completely okay with dancing to Thriller infront of others.

to me, dance is one of those things that you're either good at or not. and i fall closer to not. perhaps this is due to high school dances. what goes on for the most part of these should not be considered dancing. we're not even going to talk about what's going on there. it's just not dancing. when i think of dancing i tend to think more along the lines of either studio dance, the dancing you see in the movie Pride and Prejudice, and then the dancing from the movie Step Up and Step Up 2. that is dancing.

i do not dance that often, but when i do it doesn't usually last too long. nor is it something that i do in front of many people. but when my friends and i do decide that we want to dance around like crazy fools we crank up footloose and go to town. but what we do isn't what i call dancing, it's more of just letting your limbs go and doing whatever you want.

it's a very good stress reliever though. just go crazy. let your hair down and bust a move. i'll try to avoid the over used cliches from now on. but no promises.

on being being happy

2008-10-30T07:14:00.007-05:00

yesterday i attended a short presentation on being happy and how to achieve happiness. he gave us a few examples of what makes us happy and what makes us unhappy; having lots of money does not make you happy, but having more money than your neighbor does. having less money than your neighbor surely will make you unhappy if you dwell on it. getting into a great school makes you happy, but leaving all of your friends and family behind to attend this school makes you unhappy. but according to mr fong the number one thing that makes you happy is being able to do something that you love. for him that is corridor recovery after the flood. "the best way to cheer yourself up is to cheer somebody else up." --mark twain

according to wikipedia, happiness is an emotion associated with feelings ranging from contentment and satisfaction to bliss and intense joy. i think that short term bursts of happiness are more along the lines of intense joy and the overall state of happiness is contentment and satisfaction. for example if you were to get into a great school, your number one choice, more than likely you'll be feeling that intense joy and with that if everything was just going well for you lately then it's more of the contentment and satisfaction.

everyone wants to be happy but you can't just focus all your goals on being happy. you have to let happiness come to you, not you chase it. you can chase happiness all you want but it'll come faster once you stop chasing. if you're stuck feeling unhappy and don't know what to do to get yourself back on track try these nine steps to happiness. i seem to be on a wikipedia kick today so don't trust everything that i've linked to. it is wikipedia afterall.

warning: being happy all the time is not a good thing. for one, it annoys everyone around you. if you are always happy go lucky every single day of the year it gets old..fast. secondly, if you're always happy then it makes the low points seem even lower which then brings you down even more. this is why you have to take the good with the bad and have the smiles outweigh the tears. sometimes life just sucks but it does get better.

...marching band

2008-10-29T19:29:00.002-05:00

...yes, i am a member of the marching band here. it's not exactly something that i announce to people when i first meet them, but it's not something that i try to hide. it's very much a love hate relationship, with a lot of hate and a lot of love.

the beginning of the season is just painful. 'band camp' is not an enjoyable experience. for five days of our summer we are forced to spend 8 hours at the high school, usually four morning hours spent outside and four afternoon hours spent inside. outside we learn how to march. the the underclassmen are always pitiful, but so are some of the upperclassmen which is even more pitiful. it is always unbearably hot during these five days but we're outside anyway. spending four hours outside under the beating sun sure makes me love life. we rarely learn any of our actual marching show during band camp, it's just the basics. so you think that after roughly 20 hours of learning the basics we could march forward, backward, left, and right pretty well right? nope. some of us just can't. it's not that hard.

then we move into the school year and there is band from 7am-9am daily with a great three hour rehearsal every thursday night. some kids get out of an hour of band by taking an extra class therefore filling their schedule. i highly suggest it. from my experience 90% of the time nothing extremely productive gets accomplished in that first hour so why not just sit inside and take a class? and anything that we do learn we'll go over it again so you have plenty of time to learn it. then it rains. and rains some more. and we're stuck inside. well the directors start to get antsy so out we go, as long as there's no lightning. we also get threatened with push ups, often. and have done many. it's a time consumer this marching band is.

the last two saturdays of september and the first three saturdays are competitions. those aren't too bad. the first one not judged, it was just a simply show us what you've got and we'll give you helpful suggestions. but the second one was my favorite, sarcasm-please pick up on it, we went to marshalltown. and marched in a parade all morning and then marched on the field during the afternoon. let's see we won 4A parade competition, 4A marching competition, best winds, best colorgaurd, best percussion, and overall grand champions. what's wrong with that you may ask? we were the ONLY 4A school there. everyone else was a little 1 and 2 A with maybe two or three 3A schools. we did not belong there. not at all.

after all the competitions are done, overall i'm happy with our show and what we accomplished. it was my favorite show of the three i've participated in. we played stars wars music, ya know, the new stuff. so it was kinda recognizable. the crowd kinda knew what we were playing which made it a little easier for them to get into it.

sure i may want to make a few people disappear so they don't come back to marching band because they obviously suck and need to be removed but there's nothing i can do about them. these people generally tend to be the ones who aren't really on the better end of the spectrum playing wise so after marching band i'm never forced to see them daily and i do not mind at all. ...i do prefer marching band to concert band though...concert band gets old fast. even though i'm usually fed up with marching band half way through the season i know that i'll be back next year.

auditions

2008-10-29T18:56:00.002-05:00

this past weekend was all state audition weekend. it's one of the most nerve wracking weekends of your life, your fate in left in the hands of judges who hear you play for 5 minutes tops. after that short incriment of time they decided who is apparentley the best of the best and select them to get a coveted spot in the prestigious all state band.

thousands of kids across the state have been practicing the same etudes over and over since the first of august until the third weekend in october. this sure seems like a lot of time to learn two or three one, or one and a part, page pieces and get your thirteen major scales up to tempo, 88 beats per minutes scales played in a sixteenth note pattern (which is four notes per beat), but in reality the time just flies by. these etudes and played over and over and over and not only are they engrained in their heads, but in the heads of all their family members.

you have to be perfect for these auditions just to get a call back and then you have to play impeccably to make it. i'm not perfect. which means no call back for me. i may have been happy with my audition but it wasn't perfect. i could still just hope that maybe, just maybe, when they put that sheet of paper up on the wall my name would be on it. it wasn't. over fifty flutes auditioned in the northeast iowa audition center. can you guess how many were selected? five. just five. one tenth of the auditioners were selected.

phenomenal players auditioned on saturday and did not make all state. it is entirely possible for them to have made it the previous year and then not even get a call back the next. it all depends on how you act under the pressure of these auditions. people stand outside the door and listen, silently critiquing your perfomance mentally comparing themselves to you. everyone may be wishing you good luck as you enter the room but it's in the back of their minds that they don't want you to do well, they want themselves to do well. the worst feeling ever is walking out of that room knowing that you have played better than you just did but that doesn't matter because all the judge knows is how you played just then.

after three years of auditioning i have not gotten a call back. every year i hear the same, "there's always next year."

obesity in little kids

2008-10-24T10:44:00.004-05:00

i honestly find it just heart wrenching to see a little kid who is already suffering from obesity. for the rest of their lives, they will be suffering from this unless they start a work out plan to start losing the weight. the longer they wait to start trying to shed the pounds the fatter their going to get and then the harder it will be to lose the weight. as i've stated before i work in retail and i was recently helping a customer find clothes for his granddaughter. the poor girl was between 7-8 years old and nothing in the girls section fit her. she would've needed an XXL in girls and we do not carry that in store, i'm not even sure if they make an XXL for girls. i just felt so bad for the little girl because we had no girls clothes to fit her so all i could do was point her in the direction of womens.

i blame the parents. sure some babies are just born chubby, but they only stay chubby if they are fed to much and for the first two or three years, just a rough estimate there, parents are the ones spooning the food into the kids mouth. though they are responsible for the portion sizes for the kids for years and once they form the habits, have fun breaking them. as a parent why would you want to see your kid suffering through obesity. they would be the butt of many jokes in their lives and would be made fun of on the playground. what do you do when you take them to an amusement park and they're too fat to sit in the roller coaster seat? what do you say to them, what can make that not hurt as bad? how are you going to make that less embarrassing for them?

today's world makes it so easy for people to become obese. we're the fast food nation and we run on tight schedules. the fast food companies have taken advantage of this and now offer a quick and easy breakfast, lunch, and dinner. it's so much faster to just run through the drive thru rather than actually making yourself a meal. c'mon people, it's not that hard. unless you don't care if you're obese and that most clothing stores do not carry your size because you have expanded so much. you just drive up to that mcdonald's, burger king, wendys, kfc, or whatever your favorite greasy meal comes from and enjoy all those unnecessary calories. maybe you'll even feel yourself getting fatter as you sit there in your car and shove your face as you drive to work or home or where ever you're going.

i honestly have no sympathy for obese people. it's your own fault for shoving your face with food every chance you get. go work out, i don't care if all you can do is walk. you'll work up to excerize that will steadily burn off your fat. the only people i have sympathy for are those who have that disease that affects the brain so they don't get the impulse to stop eating because they're full. well they could just portion out their food and say i'm only going to eat this much so it's still their fault if they're obese.

essay blog

2008-10-23T07:53:00.000-05:00

interesting stuff here people, interesting stuff.

attempts with videos

2008-10-23T07:36:00.004-05:00

we're learning how to embed (spelling? not sure) videos today so i'm practicing as he shows us how to. enjoy!

if you ever feel like a failure this will certainly make you feel like lessof a failure. though i do feel bad for this little kid because i can't help but laugh at this.

and this is just sad. really really sad. i blame the parents.

hey there

2008-10-23T07:20:00.004-05:00

random place.
(click on it, you know you want to. it really is exciting, okay not really but it's the idea behind it)

i plan to road trip here after senior year. mini goat is going to be joining me.
you may ask why i would want to go to such a place, and i'm not really sure.
it'll be an adventure!

this goes hand in hand with college and leaving home. as of right now i have to ask permission to do most things, and if i wanted to road trip to a random place this year the answer would be a no. there is no reason for me to go there. why would i want to waste my gas on a trip to go there? why, simply because i can. i'm looking forward to being the boss of myself and making my own decisions in college.

nothing against my parents or their rules, but sometimes i just want a little more freedom. i know they trust me, and i think now they just have to trust themselves and what they've taught me. sure, i'll make mistakes, they're an unavoidable part of life, but i'll learn and grow from them. you learn so much more from failure than you do from always succeeding. and i bet once you make that mistake you won't make it again. that's growth right there. mistakes happen and the only productive thing you can do about them is learn from them and move on. don't dwell on them or cry over the spilled milk.

i'm not asking for complete independence here because i know that i am not ready for that. i could not handle it, i still have more learning and growing to do before even attempting getting rid of the crutches totally. i'm just asking for maybe setting down and going around with one less crutch every now and then. it'll be a strengthening exercise and i'll end up going back to two but eventually setting down the second one more permanently. this way when i do stand up on my own two feet i'll already have a little experience and the transition will be so much smoother with less chance of falling backwards.

college will be here before we all know it and then it's only a few short years until we're out in th real world. i feel that the more preparing we do now while we're in a more sheltered environment the easier it will be for us to stand on our own two feet without the support of crutches.

employment

2008-10-16T07:28:00.006-05:00

as of august 28th 2008 i have been an employee of gap inc. gap inc is the gap, old navy, and banana republic. i work at old navy. it's been a very exciting experience. my favorite job is probably working up at the register because it's the most exciting. my least favorite would probably have to be fitting room unless there's a steady traffic of people, otherwise it's just boring back there.

the worst part of working in retail is when customers ask if the clothing they tried looks good. or if they should try it in the larger size. the goal is to make the customer happy, but you don't want to send them home with something that doesn't look good. and you never ever want to say that they need a larger size, that just makes them angry. i try to deflect these questions by asking if they want me to run and get the larger size just so they can compare. i do not directly say that they need a larger size. i would fear for my safety if i did.

being employed sure makes me work harder on time management. on some week nights i have to somehow find a way to complete my homework and work for about 4-5 hours. it's a stretch sometimes but i get it done. my time management skills are greatly improving due to me being employed. i have also started to become more focused and get my work done in shorter amounts of time. and i'm starting to do the assignments that are actually due before working on the longer term assignments. and i somehow manage to practice my flute in my limited amount of time.

making your own money is a very satisfying experience. nowadays i do not feel that i have to rely on my parents to get money because i have a job. it gives you a feeling of greater independence. i also have to learn how to manage my money and balance a checkbook. all this is new to me and it doesn't alway go so well. it's very common for me to forget to enter a purchase and then my balance is always off from the balance that the bank gives me which makes we wonder where my money is going. but i haven't forgotten to enter a purchase in a while so my balance and the bank balance match.

old navy is my second job experience. over the summer i worked for spencer rougueing and detasseling. strangely i didn't mind either of those jobs. it got hot on some days but i don't ever remember it being horrible. the people i worked with made the job a lot better too. though i didn't really like working with my brother. that got annoying. he always gave my food away. so i was a problem solver and didnt put my food with his. then i always had my own food and none of it was given away.

baseball

2008-10-09T07:53:00.001-05:00

boo chicago white sox. i am not a white sox fan. i am a minnesota twins fan.

really now?

2008-10-07T07:41:00.002-05:00

i recently had an argument with my brother about 'bad' teachers. we both had the teacher that we were discussing and we weren't exactly in agreement. he found her to be a bad teacher, well maybe he didn't but he only talked about how his friends called her the worst teacher ever. i had her and she definitely wasn't a bad teacher. plenty of kids, including me enjoyed her class. sure the workload was hard and there was a lot, but that doesn't qualify her as a bad teacher. her due dates were strict, but it was ap so that's kinda common sense. i have also had friends who have had her class and they had no complaints about her teaching. but the one who stated that she was the worst teacher ever didn't do his homework. ever. and expected that to fly. and just because he got in trouble he labeled her as a bad teacher. seriously, you cannot expect the outcome to be good when you don't do your homework in a class where homework is one of the main ways of learning.
i have no sympathy for those who don't do their homework and then whine when they get in trouble for it. we were always given ample time to do the assignments and if you felt crunched for time it's because you were procrastinating. just because you don't do your homework and then not learn from it doesn't make the teacher a bad teacher. it makes you a bad student. so suck it up and do your homework.

numero dos?

2008-10-07T07:38:00.003-05:00

i'm still new at this so bear with me here. i'm going to go on a small rant about cell phones.

it seems like everyone today has a cell phone. i've walked into an elementary school and seen kids with cell phones. what the heck? why do they need cell phones? they're in elementary school mommy and daddy do everything for them and plan out their day. they do not need cell phones. for me cell phones in middle school is iffy. i can understand it if you have an extremely busy schedule but not many middle schoolers do. so most of them do not need cell phones. mommy and daddy still do a lot for them, but not everything.

i got my cell phone when my brother turned 16 because the deal was buy one get three free. that was when my parents both got their first cell phones also. if the deal was buy one get two free then i would've been outta luck until my 16th birthday. my belief is that if you drive you need a cell phone. that is your lifeline if something were to happen to your car. and i know that most of the world's first cars are not the greatest and sometimes prone to breaking down. i know mine is.

today's world has become attached to our cell phones. they are on us constantly and more often than not are on and in use when they shouldn't be. one example that just bugs me is texting in class. what is so important that it can't wait a few hours? omg jane likes joe! omg!!! wow, seriously? put the phone back in your backpack.

it seems like at the beginning of every year the teachers go over their cell phone policies and then they never stick to them . i've heared countless versions of 'if i hear it/see it it's mine for the day', yet all of my teachers just say turn it off when they hear a phone go off in class or catch someone texting. techers should not be able to hold phones overnight though. for those of us that drive, our cell phone is our only way to call for help if something were to go wrong.

hi!

2008-10-01T07:36:00.001-05:00

first posting, how exciting!