Undesirables

People. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. Whaddaya gonna do about it?

Alright, but seriously, I really don't like some people. The only question is how to deal with them. Do tell them off? Act openly rude to them? Or, do you try to treat them with respect, hoping that they will follow suit and act civil? I believe it differs between each group, let's elaborate!

Let's start first with the hipsters. People who think they are better than everyone else, especially people who endorse pop culture, due to their don't care attitude, modern clothes, indie music, and their blogs. Good lord, how trite do you have to be to have a BLOG. Seriously this behavior has to stop, but, it must be dealt with carefully. First, we have to ignore them. Like, completely blow them off. Don't glance at them, talk about them, or even think about them. Let's say this fails. Now if we have an interaction with these folk, treat them with complete kindness. Greet them with a smile and when they inevitably turn a cold shoulder tell them off. Absolutely rip them a new one. If we can somehow bring them back to reality and show them that they are no better than anyone else, we have succeeded. Of course, this is not a proven method, but a mere theory, however I believe it has the potential to be very effective.

Ah, yes! Douchebags. They parade around in Affliction t-shirts flaunting their bad boy style at every street corner in America. We have to take a different approach to these unfortunate beings because they are a completely different breed. While hipsters may be bothered by inattention, douches don't even notice because their intellect is far too low. Instead, we need to be condescending and make sure they know that they are below us and we do not like the way that they act. The problem is if they catch on, there is a possibility that they can actually kick our asses. That is where our verbal ass chewing commences. Use as many 4+ syllable words to confuse and demean them. If this all goes according to plan, we can not only confuse the shit out of them, but maybe even get across our general message that they need to STOP.

I hope this has been helpful and that someday the world will be full of tolerable people. But, if this fails we can just kill 'em all. The end.

Mediocre Television Programming and LOLs

Big Bang Theory is a good show. I'm not going to deny that, I am always amused by it. But that's usually where it ends. I don't want to shed a bad light on it, but the fact is I rarely find myself actually laughing out loud or even silently along with the crowd. It's because I'm amused by it that I watch the show. I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I guess it is what it is. Big Bang Theory doesn't stand alone; I've found myself multiple other times watching shows that I never really react to, but rather just sit contently and view. It's really strange because you would think if you truly enjoyed watching a comedy or sit com that you would in fact laugh at the suggested jokes or with the laugh track audience. Maybe I'm just settling for sub par entertainment, but I've noticed more people than just myself doing this. On a more broad spectrum, take for example the commonly used texting acronym LOL, or laugh out loud. Now, this is far more severe than my personal experience because it is a direct contradiction because when people, myself included, use "LOL" in their texts, I would almost guarantee that more than 9 out of 10 times the user does not actually laugh out loud. A more accurate, but far more complicated, acronym would be IWSEBTLT, or I was slightly entertained by that last text. Of course it will never catch on because it's over four characters and that itself is a crime in the digital world of texting, but still my point holds true. It seems that we all are faking our own enjoyment anymore, and for what? Why don't we just leave out the unnecessary LOLs or stop watching averages T.V. shows? Well, I'm going to leave it to you to come to a conclusion about this small dilema because, as I have mentioned in previous posts on weeks prior, it is a Sunday night and I am tired. Also, ironically enough, I paused an episode of Big Bang Theory that needs attending to.

You only get out of it what you put into it or something inspirational along those lines

I've been very lackadaisical lately and I'm really not sure why. Instead of doing homework when I get home I just hop on the couch and watch T.V. or video games. I've been skipping lifting and have just been ultimately apathetic. As I've said, I don't have so much as a clue of why I've become like this but I'd like it to stop. This blog is a wake up call for me and me only. STOP BEING A LAZY SACK OF SHIT.

I'm sure that everybody goes through periods like this where they'd like to just drop everything and live without a care, but unfortunately we can't all just bum out. You (being me) need to get your act together. I'm sure that this whole don't care attitude will go away, but until then you just need to fake it. Start waking up early and going to lifting, maybe that'll jump start the day so that you're energized to take on the rest of your classes and homework. Don't even so much as turn on the T.V. when you come home, do all of your homework, including the stuff that isn't even due for another two weeks, right away. Sure, maybe you won't get all of the sleep you'd like or be able to watch as much Big Bang Theory, but summer will come soon enough and that should allow plenty of time for both of those. Also I'd like to add that junior year is "an important academic year," and although schools are looking more and more at senior year and your senior year will have an impressive class load, don't use that as a way to legitimize your poor performance.

Honestly, just suck it up. How hard could it be to do your homework. You have been putting forth the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM effort and still have a 3.3. Your only two AP classes are AP Psych and AP Lang and if you do the homework in either of them your GPA will go up tremendously. This shouldn't be that hard.

everything is complicated

Just earlier today I was reminiscing with a couple of friends about the cartoons that we used to love to watch, and still do. Born smack dab in the middle of the '90s we were able to enjoy many of the wacky shows that aired back then such as Rockos Modern Life, Rocket Power, Catdog and plenty of others. As our conversation drifted into Spongebob Squarepants we talked about how the show eventually just became too out of control and crazy with weird, unrelated plot twists and zany new characters. It made me miss the old days when a Spongebob episode was simply about nematodes or a fancy new spatula, not about a time machine that converts Plankton into a gas who then attempts to steal the coveted "secret formula" yet again but gets blown back into the tree dome. You see what I mean?

It doesn't end with retro cartoons, oh no, far from it. Another thing that has been brought back to my attention recently is the radio. I recently have lost my iPod, tragic, I know, and this has forced me to listen to the radio on my daily ten minute commute to and from school. At first I selected one of my random pre-tuned stations and was immediately immersed in a montage of random pitches, squeals, and noises. Maybe it's just me, but it feels like pop music isn't hardly music at all, more of a conglomerate of random sounds, intricately and digitally enhanced until they somehow make Ke$ha's screaming sound like words and singing. Now, I simply tune into the jazz station and enjoy in a sophisticated solitude the simplicity of real instruments and musicians. It's strange how even music is becoming more complicated, how new genres like techno and dubstep and so deviated from the traditional sense of music that I would hesitate to even address them as such. I'm not opposed to change, it's just that THIS kind of change is just so...unnecesary. In my opinion, music should always at least attempt to envoke emotion or meaning, so I guess this is why I don't completely appreciate the new music era that we're in because I can't see what mainstream artists of today are trying to prove with all of the ridiculous clatter and techno that they feed into their music.

I feel like this entire topic, whether you be discussing cartoons or music, can be one huge metaphor for life. If you look back 50 years ago, people weren't nearly as stressed out about jobs or school or whatever else it may be. America was more American back then because life was more simplistic and the times were simpler. Sure everybody wanted a better education and that next promotion but we also knew what was important. Family values were more intact and there was more a focus on life outside the workplace and school. Now, we wander like lifeless drones, going through school to go to another school to possibly go to another school which can lead to a safe indoor environment that gives us steady pay and security. By WHY?? Why do we want this? What is our motivation, to earn lots of money? To become successful? Sure those things would be great but when your whole life has been a frantic scramble to achieve them, what do we do once we have them? Can we finally start living? I'm just worried that my life will start far too late.

SOPA and/or PIPA

So, I'm a little worried about the upcoming SOPA and PIPA bills that congress with be voting on shortly. I'm also curious as to see, if they are passed that is, what the internet will be like after their enaction. Assuming that they are enforced as strictly as everybody speculates they will be, that is that if there is a single copywright infringement by even a single user on a website that the website will be taken down. This means that some of the largest and most trafficked sites such as YouTube, Facebook, even Blogger would be taken down. We can only hope that our politicians hear our voice and see Google's petition and understand how horrible this would be for the internet and even the economy. I'm not sure that all of these ancient politicians fully understand the internet and the implications this holds but hopefully they will soon enough before its too late.

Lotta Big Ol' Thoughts

Lately, I've been doing a lot of thinking, not that that's uncommon for me to do, but nevertheless I have had some free time on my hands and my thoughts have been free to wander. I've been thinking about a lot of things, but because my next revised essay is going to be about religion, I figure that I might as well write down a few more of my thoughts on that.

So my topic for this upcoming argument essay is focused on how parents should let their children decide what faith or denomination they choose or even if they choose to believe in God at all. Personally I think that every person should be able to choose what they believe in, because it should be a personal thing. You shouldn't have to be forced into believing something that your parents and your parents' parents were forced to believe. Instead, all people should decide for themselves if there is or is not a God or whether or not they are Roman Catholic or Zionist.

Personally, I don't really believe in God or religion, I do have some ideas but for now let's just call me an atheist (I actually hate being referred to as an atheist, it just sound so cynical and sad:(. But what I find more sad is the fact that people lead their whole lives through fear in hopes of something better after this life. I just can't imagine why so many people are so focused on what comes next that they forget to appreciate what is happening now. We only know for certain that this life is real. It's the only one that we get and yet some people reroute their entire lives and center them around a God and an afterlife that was the brainchild of some random "enlightened" men a hundreds, even thousands of years ago. Can you see what I'm getting at? Why would anybody actually want to live their lives like this? If I had a choice between being a free-willed and, relatively, uninhibited person or to be constantly tied down by some fictitious set of rules that dictate and restrict what I know to be real, I think I can guess which one I would choose.

Not only do religious texts dictate the way that people live but they are open to interpretation and lead to some pretty awful things. When people take a version of the bible that has probably been translated over multiple languages and nit pick a passage until the meaning is misconstrued enough to fit what they want it to mean they are then able to justify whatever accusation or claim or action they make. Because of these rediculous conclusions people draw from the bible or the koran, etc., etc., people then are led to terrorism and other awful acts.

Now maybe I'm coming off a bit strong because there are people who are "religious" and "believe in God" but don't necessarily follow their religion religiously, see what I did there? But for serious, I'm not completely convinced those people bought all the way into their faith. What I think is that their parents forced it on them too and all of their lives they never seriously questioned it or thought about it too much because it wasn't that important to them in the first place so they just went along with the whole religion charade.

Now, onto an excellent point Christopher Hitchens made in his book god is not Great about the church, or really any church for that matter. To paraphrase, he basically says that "the church" while seeking salvation in the next life, wants power in this one. I actually chuckled to myself when I read this in class because it really is so true. Even though the church should be concerning itself with helping its members lead pious lives, it will never be satisfied. It will never be satisfied until every last living organism bows down to its almighty power. This is why we see relentless efforts trying to gain converts and people pushing their religions on others because if you don't convert you won't be "saved." That is, you won't have the pleasure of living your life according to an out of date set of guidelines that hold the empty promise of a reservation in the afterlife.

Well, I think that we have established that religion is a complex issue with a lot of different arguments within it. Whether you believe in God or not, whether you think religion enriches society or is detrimental, there will always be somebody that wants to stop writing their blog about the topic and so they end it in a very abrupt and sloppy fashion. 

Speech Season

This past Saturday, I had my first speech competition. It was districts and I didn't really know what to expect. My two performances were one act play and improvisational act. Like I said, I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but by the time the day was over, I had fallen in love with the atmosphere and essence of speech.

I have been preparing and practicing my one act play, The Pillowman, and improv for a couple months now and districts was upon us before we knew it. Not that I was unprepared, but it all happened sort of suddendly. At 5:20 AM my day started and, after getting ready, departed for Monticello at 6. When we arrived at Monticello High, there was a sea of people in the hallways. The whole place was packed with all sorts of different people, some dressed up for thier performances in costume and some in formal apparel and all of them borderline crazy. You read it right, speech competitions are full of some of the most ridiculous, wacky, and just plain insane people I have seen. And I loved it. Everyone was just being themselves; there were no inhibitions, nothing to hide, just nutty people acting nutty. By the end of the day, my friends and I were bouncing off the walls with energy and acting as goofy as the best of them. It was wonderful.

Of course the people were great and the setting was fun but when it came down to it, the performances were what it was all about. To start with, my one act did great. We performed it better than we ever had, it got unanimous 1s from all of the judges and we will be moving on to state. It really was excellent, but it was a drama and we had a small audience so the crowd was fairly tame. However, improv was an entirely different scene. When my group walking into to room we would perform in, we saw rows of people packed in, sitting, standing, even packed in sitting on the ground just to watch improv. Soon enough, we were up and it was our time to shine. During our performance we had the crowd rolling. It seemed like there was never a dull moment and the room was never without laughs. But, what I really want to talk about is one particular moment. One joke that had the entire crowd on the verge of tears from laughing. It was in that moment while we were on the stage with the blaring of the audiences laughter that I felt truly happy. It was if not the best moment of my life, easily the best feeling I've ever had. I felt absolutely incredibly in that one moment and I hope to recreate it at state and again at all state.

All my life I've played football and worked hard in school and those two things, aside from friends, have been my biggest two passions, the things that I've put all of my time and effort into. I know that we weren't supposed to make this blog a diary to pour all of our personal stuff into, but this recent competition has really made me reconsider. I loved that feeling of being on stage and having everyone react in such an awesome, positive way I've began to wonder if I still want to play football and instead be in a fall play. I wonder if I wouldn't like to persue not necessarily a career but more of a future in theatre. Yep, that's it.

Immortality, Completely Irrational?

Recently, I read an article from the Scientific American about how people are living longer and longer and the process of death. Now the title may be fairly misleading, but the possibility to vastly extend the length of our lives is a very real thing. This fascinates me and I hope it will fascinate you too.

As scientists are discovering that humans are continuing to live longer and longer, they are also discovering that there may not be a limit as to how long we can live. As medicine is becoming more advanced, children are living into adulthood, adults are becoming seniors and our population as a whole, today, is older than ever before. Of course, death in inevitable and there is no way around it, but some of our cells continue to live on in the closest form of immortality humans can achieve; our reproductive cells live on through future generations of our children. Organisms are, ideally, trying to achieve survival but sometimes, in periods of excess nutrients, we tend to focus our efforts onto growth and reproduction instead of repair and self-maintenance. Scientists have experimented with mice, fruit flies, and other animals with high metabolisms giving one group of the animal a plentiful amount of food and the other just enough food to get by. It has been shown that the group with scarce food lived longer because it was able to use the nutrients it received for self-maintenance and repair because it couldn’t afford to misuse nutrients. This is not a practical method for longer living in humans because our metabolic processes are too slow. Aging occurs because of the breakdown of individual molecules, cells, and organs and scientists are trying to figure out if there are ways to prolong the function of many of these bodily features. Even when scientists find a way to help our lives lengthen, the end is still going to come and each of us will find our owns ways to deal with it.

This article was very interesting and could have a positive effect on people everywhere. If it is discovered that people will be able to live for longer many people will invest in whatever it takes for that to be achieved. The danger in living longer is that we don’t know how stable we will be at 150 by method of pills to keep our cells alive. This could also benefit the world because, hypothetically, if some great people were to live longer, they could continue to help the world for longer than they naturally would. Although longer living could possibly be nice, I believe that studies in disease prevention and cure are more beneficial. By eliminating diseases that cause suffering the world would be a better place than if people just continued to live longer and are still able to accumulate cancer, Alzheimer’s and numerous other age related diseases.

It's Elementary

Recently, I've began to like school less and less. I understand that this isn't a revolutionary thought or feeling but regardless it's unique for me. I've had a bit of a falling out with my motivation and then with my grades. It's not that I'm challenged, but just the opposite, as I've previously blogged about. It's simply that nothing interests me nearly as much as it did when I was younger. In elementary school, we did so many more fun activities. Watch here as I explain.

First of all, the things we did weren't always even that monumental but they made class more fun in the simplest ways. Take for example anti-cheating folders. During tests in elementary school everybody would pick two or three folders to set up around their test. Now, in high school, we've since abandoned this practice and so cheating infects our class rooms like a parasite. Well maybe that's extreme, but I bet it's a heck of a lot more prominent than it was when we were five and fittingly enough the stakes are even higher now that we allow cheating. The anti-cheating folders were a fun, practical way to discourage wandering eyes. Sometimes I would make a little fort out of mine by putting an additional folder on top and the fun was never ending.

Nap time. Enough said. Although it may be the so highly regarded today by teens, back when we had it we never appreciated it. That is not to say that I didn't enjoy it. For thirty minutes a day, we brought in our towels from home and would lay down next to our pals to talk in hushed tones about Pokemon on dinosaurs, the usual topics of a five year old. My friend Jack and I would always bring in cool things like pop up books and calculators that took things to different powers, of all the crazy things, to play with during nap time. Now, there is nothing that even remotely compares to nap time. And that saddens me.

Finally, in elementary school we always got candy. We got candy for doing well on tests, for answering questions, sometimes I'd just get candy and have no idea why it was being given to me, but that was what made learning so fun! With the promise of candy around every corner, why wouldn't you want to come to school everyday to learn more?? Sure, some may argue that we need to be intrinsically motivated and do things for ourselves and not flavored sugar but I say that's bullshit because sugar was a great motivator.

Honestly, I could keep going on and on about the many fond memories I have of elementary school, but the fact is it's over and nothing will be like it ever again. Sure, it had it's faults and I always dreamt of the day that I would be right down 42nd street at Kennedy, but the funny thing is, now that I've made it here, I want to go back. I guess somethings are in the past, and they'll just have to remain there for us to remember and hold onto. Except for candy. We still have candy and yet I never see it in high school classrooms. 

Hip-Hop and All Other Angry Things are Dead

No, I don't mean that today's variety of hip-hop music and artists fail as opposed to the rappers of yesterday. I'm saying that all rap is dead, to me at least. And when I say all rap, I mean all rap from Tupac to Eminem to the ever popular BANGS, they just don't get my goat anymore. It just feels like rap is too aggressive.

So, lately I've been in this mindset that if I want to be happy I will be happy. So far, this has worked really well and something I have found that comes with this desire to be happy is the disdain for things that are aggressive and angry. Take for example rap. A lot of rap is about bitches, money, drugs, guns, death, etc. and personally, that shit just don't fly with me no mo'. It used to be okay when those songs would pop up on my iPod but now I always seem to skip them because I'm never in the mood to listen about Eminem's whore mother. Now, my iTunes library is full of, not necessarily all happy-feely songs but, music that I can at least tolerate and that doesn't bring down my happy levels.

This new optimistic me doesn't just stop with disliking angry music, but angry anything, really! This especially transfers over into people. When I'm bantering with my friends I'm much less likely now to be mean, even if it's just jokingly. Also, when people are angry I tend to notice it more and stop the hate. I just hear myself sounding like a hippie right now so please don't judge me, some of this may have been tampered with to more effectively get my point across, although the upcoming story is true. I was texting a pal of mine about going out to eat. A group of us always goes out each week so I was texting him right as I was leaving to confirm that he was coming. Instead of answering me like a normal person, he responded with hostility calling me an asshole and a bastard. Normally I wouldn't really care, but because of my new heightened state of optimism I was really shocked by his anger so I asked why he was so mad. We eventually got it all sorted it.

Basically, my new way of looking at things with an optimistic attitude has really let me more easily see the anger and hostility in things. As a tribute to the rap music I used to listen to, I'll leave you with one of the greats. Ladies and gentlemen, the one, the only, BANGS.

Religious Education

Currently I am reading "god is not Great" by Christopher Hitchens and, although I am not very far into it, he has gotten me to raise a few questions. One of which arose while I was reading an anecdotal story in the first few pages of the book. He was talking about how he was raised religiously and how he began to question the reality and legitimacy of religion. This got me thinking, "What is the best way to expose a child to religion?" What I mean by that is how should parents go about introducing their children to religion without forcing it upon them and leaving whether or not they believe up to them. I personally think that people should be able to decide for themselves if they believe in a God or a particular religion of if they choose not to. It's a very delicate thing, then, to educate kids about religion while leaving room for them to doubt it and decide for themselves. They probably shouldn't be told from an early age because children are very impressionable and learn like sponges so if you teach a kid about religion and he doesn't have the critical mind set to question what he has been taught than all you have done is brainwashed another human being. However, if you give it some time and introduce them to religion at, let's say, nine or ten years old (I know, that sounds really late but this is only a hypothetical) than they may be developed enough to decide for themselves. Again this is a very delicate situation with a lot of variables but the main idea is that people should be able to choose their religious beliefs. They shouldn't be manipulated into following whatever their parents or whoever is raising them believes in.

2 Kewl 4 Skool

A few weeks ago, before winter break, there was a lot of discussion in AP Lang about school, education, and about how and what we should be teaching to the youngsters. We talked about creativity and how it is put off to the side so as to let the "important" subjects like math and science get all of the attention. We do this because of the industrial revolution and because most jobs with good job security have to do with facts and figures, not as much imagination. I personally don't mind this system so much because I do fairly well in it. My only problem is that, now, I am not finding myself challenged anymore. I don't say this to sound smart or put myself on a pedestal, I'm saying this because I'm honestly disinterested in the majority of my classes. I've already taken bio and AP Bio and so now my area of interest has already been exploited. There are no further classes in that subject matter and now I'm left with courses that I don't really care about and on top of that are so easy I feel like my time is just being wasted. There are still some areas where I feel challenged, but my apathy for all of the meaningless classes occasionally gets in the way of my motivation for the ones that give me something to work towards. Of course, I'll go off to college in a few years and there there will be a massive range of difficult classes I can take and, at the same time, be interested in. I'm just fed up with coasting through school everyday feeling like I could have skipped the whole day and I would be just as knowledgeable as if I had gone. If only there were some way to get out of high school and take college classes early. I realize that we can't make specialized high schools with a thousand different, specific classes for what only a few people want to do because not everybody know (and also that's incredibly impractical). But what we do have are colleges and universities; places were people have figured out, for the most part, what they are interested in. All that I propose is a system where unenthused high school students, like myself, could possibly venture out into maybe nearby community colleges and study further and harder about the things they are passionate about. Maybe this exists and I haven't looked hard enough, but as far as I know, I'm still stuck in high school learning the same thing day in and day out.

Dirty Little Hands

The past week our school district had Christmas break. My life lately has been spent with friends, downstairs studying, or at speech. This hasn't allowed me to spend as much time with my family as I usually would, but fortunately the holiday season brought us all together just in time. My brother, who is seven, and I have been spending much more time together especially. Whether it be playing Madden 12 or with Lego sets, we did a lot of bonding over the break. All of this time spent together, all of which was fun, allowed me to pick up on certain things about my brother. Certain "traits" or "characteristics" if you will that I have never really been able to notice prior to spending time with him recently. Although shocking at first, I have learned to cope with this new found knowledge and my relationship with him is unwavering.

Perhaps I should elaborate on these said "characteristics" I have noticed and my theory behind them. Being a teenager I am responsible enough to take care of myself. I do all of my grooming whether it be showers, brushing my teeth, getting rid of that stubborn acne and so on and so forth. At this age I make better decisions, for the most part, and do a good job of staying out of trouble. With that said, my brother, on the other hand, is but a child and can't help but go around and get himself into mischief. It is this mischief, I believe, that is causing him to have these undesirable traits. What traits, might you ask? Dirty hands. Grungy, grimy, unexplainably dirty little hands that, no matter how recently his last bath was, are, and continue to be, covered in filth.

It may sound silly and just like a quirky little kid thing but it is honestly amazing how he is able to keep his hands so dirty. Just this break we were constructing a Lego set my aunt and uncle gave me for Christmas (I was an avid Lego-er in my younger days) and as Levi was handing me each subsequent piece I couldn't help but notice that there was some sort of residue on all of the blocks. I was curious and looked for the source of this film that covered my miniature reconstruction of Fallingwater. I checked the pieces in the box, but they were all shiny and smooth. I checked the counter top that they were resting on but it to was clean and smelled of lemon Pledge. As I grew disinterested and returned to building, Levi handed me the next piece. This time, though, our hands clasped when the met in the middle, allowing for me to feel the inside of his waxy palm. And it was then that I realized it was my brother all along that had been leaving the residue and it was he who had the dirty little hands.

This was only the first time that I noticed his grimy little claws and the more time I spend with him the further his dirty hands are exposed. Just the other day we were playing Xbox and when Mom called him upstairs he passed me his controller and it too was covered in filth. It is a struggle, but day-by-day I am attempting to fix his problem. I have cleaned out and trimmed his nails, made sure that he washes his hands before dinner, but the condition continues to persist. It is stunning how one instant we are washing his hands and yet some how from the bathroom sink to the kitchen table a layer of grime has somehow gathered on his hands. And it should be said that this is not only with my brother. Oh no, masses of children have this same problem as I have began to notice. My brothers friends, too, are victim to this uncleanly fate and who knows how many more children are susceptible?? For all I know it's all of them, and we can never be too careful.

I guess what I would take away from this is always be wary of children. Whether they be strangers, siblings, or children of your own you can never be too sure where they've been and what exactly is on their dirty little hands.