AUTHORITY!!!

Man. Right now my legs buckle beneath me as I sink into the chair in front of the computer. My legs, sore and hurting, feel like heaven as I remove the burden of my weight from my feet to the chair. Here’s something interesting: my feet smell really bad. No joke. Just a random thought. Anyways, as I type these words, I can feel my brain preparing to shift out of focus sooner or later. It’s waiting, waiting for the first chance it can to rest. Sleep. That’s what I long for. That free state of peace and tranquility, free from the worries of life or the stresses of responsibilities. I love feeling that. Who doesn’t? Ready to fall asleep right now. And it’s not even late. &:51 my computer says. Dang. My mom says that for optimal growth, a teenager should sleep 9-10 hours a day. Heck, I’m all for that. That reminds me of how drinking a lot of caffeine can stunt your growth. I stopped drinking energy drinks, cause when I did I felt like total poop.

Yeah, now, energy drinks remind me of soda, which reminds me of Jones soda. Jones soda is this reeally good soda that comes in flavors such as: blueberry, green apple, bubble gum, and anything crazy. For holidays, you can even buy thanksgiving turkey flavored soda, along with pumpkin pie and other flavors. Jones soda is great. I remember that awesome summer night, setting off fireworks with cousins, drinking my Jones soda. It’s 99 cents a bottle. And the cool thing is, every label has a different picture. People send in crazy photos of them doing stunts or their pets with weird faces, and if Jones Soda thinks it’s good enough, the will make it one of their labels! Cool, huh?

Thinking of cousins, can’t wait for this summer. I’m moving. So yeah. I’m scared of being in a new school alone, with nobody that I know. But I really can’t wait to make a brand new start and meet new people.

I like dreams. They’re crazy. You know one thing I’ve noticed? In dreams, I have dream memories, like I “remember” things that I remember while I’m dreaming, but don’t know what they are or why I thought of them when I wake up. In dreams, anything can happen. Awesome things. 

I have a sore throat. That sucks. 

Chuck Norris. He rocks.

Well, I’m going to bed. Good night world. It’s “closing time” (by Semisonic). I love that song. It would be cool if somehow I could make it so that when your cursor rolled over those words the music played. Oh well. I’m just thinking of random stuff. Bye.

Since my passion is sort of about cinematography and videomaking, today I will talk some about filming. Filming is great. or me, it’s the one part of the video process where I can be wild and silly. Today I went to the geography fair (which I must say was great) and DJ, Richard, and I had a great time filming. We had been asked to collect footage for the podcast coming out the tomorrow, and we went loco. We were running all over with the camera, stalking Mr. Jobe, “tagging” peoples’ booths, and doing all sorts of fun stuff. We were really having a lot of fun. Each of us at one time was doubled over, his sides splitting from laughing at another’s silly behavior. We realized that we did need to get some real footage or Mr. Katz was going to kill us, so we made somewhat of an effort to go around the fair, interviewing guests about how they felt and getting some shots of the actual booths. I encourage you all to check out the CDS podcast. It is certainly a great time. Anyways, with filming, it’s like you’re just free, free to record whatever piece of time you would like, free to do funny stuff and… I don’t know. Whenever you get a videocamera, you have to film. It’s a compulsion, a longing coming from that piece of electronic genius, a longing to film! Seriously, haven’t you guys ever felt that? Haven’t you ever just wanted to film as much as you can and more? It’s just like something natural, to want to get in somebody’s face and ask them stuff, or to run around recording some stilly stunt. Anyways, more about what we did at the fair. Well, like I said, we “tagged” the booths. That consisted of grabbing the little miniature flags from certain booths and sticking into another country’s booth’s fruits, goods, and just whatever. It was great watching the people’s reactions. Some took them out silently. Others picked them out and threw them at us. The most crazy was the one who said they were actually going to tell Mrs. Porter. I mean we were just joking. Well, that was fun, but we did other stuff too. We went into others’ booths and “helped them out” or even pretended to be them! In conclusion, filming is a lot of fun. 

Well. Through thinking about what I like to do, there is one activity that is always really fun to me. It’s all the stuff that I do in making videos, podcasts, and stuff like that. I’m on the podsquad at school, and it’s really fun. I think I really found out how much I liked it on the eighth grade trip. I was really, really enjoying filming everybody at the fashion show. I mean, who doesn’t like filming stuff? It’s a real blast, because you know you’re basically storing a piece of time to be reviewed at  a later time, whenever one might wish. That’s some pretty amazing stuff. But the best part is the editing.     Yeah, the editing. It’s really a fun thing to do, actually. Before the trip, I had never really liked editing the podcast. I had to stay in at lunch sometimes working on it, and although I didn’t complain, that’s not always how I want to spend my free period. But on the second day of the trip, after the footage from the podcast was imported  into Mr. Katz’s laptop and I started to edit, I was having a lot of fun. Well, everything is probably better late at night in a sleeping bag in a room with your best buddies, but I was having a good time editing! And I couldn’t help but feel proud of the work I had done and how good the podcast was going to be. It was great. Now I can’t wait until the next podcast is ready to be edited, because I’m going to jump right on that. Other stuff besides the podcast is fun too. You all can see the skate video I made somewhere on this page. Just scroll down. I also made a cool legomation video for Literature. I’m looking to buy my own video camera, and do my own filming and stuff, but they really do cost a lot. I want to do video diaries or something of the sort because I think it would be cool to record my feelings on video. I’m thinking just like every week to sort of sum up how my week went and how I am feeling. So yeah. This is my blog for this week.

Man. The trip was so fun, I have to write a post about it. I’m not going to write about everything, just the highlights of the trip.Well, on Wednesday May 7, all the eighth graders went to school early, at around 6:00 A.M. We got to the school parking lot, and we just sort of waited there for a while. After a little while, we got separated into two groups, one for the superman cable, and one for the canopy tour. We started to go, and after a long while of just driving and going all over, we got to Turu Ba Ri. We had breakfast, and some crazy kid put a sausage in a drink. It was so nasty! Anyways, we all went on to do the superman and canopy stuff. Everybody had fun, and it seems like everybody I talked to said that the superman cable was scary at first, but once you started going, they said it was just a lot of fun. The people on the canopy trip also had fun, and so yeah. After Tu Ru Bari, we went on o the hotel. I had a lot of fun throughout our time at the hotel. One funny thing that happened in my cabin was that I was in the shower without a towel. I needed to dry off, so I asked one of my roombuddies to throw me a towel. They threw it into the bathroom, but it landed in the toilet, which had pee in it! lol. We were cracking up so hard that we just couldn’t stop.The next day, we went white water rafting, which was a blast! My favorite part was when we got to get out of the raft into the water and swim around. The water, cool and refreshing, would slowly carry me down the river, letting me just relax and enjoy myself. It was great, and I had a lot of fun. We went back that night, and we had the fashion show. It was awesome, and a lot of fun. DJ was hilarious because he took off his shirt! Richard acted out the airplane crash, and Brady acted like one of the hunters by jabbing at the “pig” (Richard). We all had a lot of fun, and then the winners were announced. Hyerin got third, Marian got second, and Brady got first. They were so lucky because they got awesome piggy banks made out of coconuts! It was a lot of fun. Then there was a “party” on the second floor, which was absically a bunch of people cramped together in a tiny space just standing around, playing music at a really low level. In my opinion, it was sort of pointless, so I left to go chill with my cabin buddies.After that, the next day, we went to Mauel Antonio national park, which was also a lot of fun. We had to do community service, which was really fun too. We chilled in the water for a while, then went back to the hotel and went home. It was a long trip home, like five hours long. However, we all had a lot of fun, and I am really glad I went.

One life lesson I have learned throughout many of the projects I have done for classes and especially literature class is about how not to assume one has more time to work on something than they really do. This is sort of like procrastination, but has more to do with how long I think I will take to finish a task and thinking I have plenty of time to do it.

One example of this happened to me while I was working on my Book in a Bag for Literature class. The first day I really worked on it was a Monday, and it was due about two days later in class. I had already written most of the things I wanted to be on my bag, but on Monday I worked for about an hour or an hour and a half. After that time, I believed I had a good start and that I would be able to finish it on the next day. I went to go do something I wanted like watch T.V. or play videogames, and then I wento bed, with sweet dreams and barely any worries. The next day, however, as I worked on my book in a bag to be turned in the next day, I realized that I might not finish it and that I was running out of time. An hour since my bedtime had passed and I still hadn’t done all my stuff. I was worried, and, although I wanted to finish all my stuff, I decided to just finish it on the bus and at school. However, I didn’t end up finishing it all the way. I made a few silly mistakes, including not even putting the author’s name on! Wow! That was a FREAKING EASY point just lost. If I had just had a little more time and I had done more the first day, then I would have been in a much better condition and I would have gotten a better grade than I did end up getting. Not that an 89 is really bad, just that I know I could have done a lot better.

The same things happened to me while working on my shirt for Literature. I did a lot of painting the first day, and I thought I would be able to do it the next day with the time I had in class and after school to work on it. However, I didn’t make it, and I ended up not exactly having to rush, but to work longer than I normally would have in order to get it all done and ready to hand in.

Now, in all of these situations, I didn’t procrastinate exactly, seeing as I spent time to work on it days before it was due and not just on the last day. That is a step up for me, because before this I have had problems due to procrastination. I guess I just need to plan better. I can’t assume I will be done with something in a certain amount of time or that I will be able to do it in time. I should just do a lot more than necessary that first day. That way, I can be carefree and  ready to turn in the day something is due.

Wow. Well, the other day, I had a day where I did really nothing but enjoyed myself. Being completely carefree, I really  was able to feel happiness pulsing through my veins like juice. Just kidding. Anyways, on Wednesday, I got together with two of my best friends, DJ, who goes to my school, and Jonathan, who used to go to my school, but moved away a year and a half ago. We left school, got in a car, and headed down to a special movie theatre called the V. I. P. theatre. It’s an awesome place, where all the seats recline. The “concession stands” are really a sushi bar, a bar for sub sandwiches, and another with slushies, donuts, and other sweets. Seriously, it was awesome. After we all got some really good food at the food court in the mall where the V.I.P. theatre was located, we mosied on down to the theatre in which we were going to see our movie, and got ready to watch it. We were planning to see “The Bucket List,” a movie about two old guys, who, diagnosed with cancer and given one year to live, decide to make the most out of their time left on earth. They make a list of everything they want to do before they “kick the bucket,” including such activities as, skydiving, driving Shelby Mustangs on the racetrack, and going to the Great Pyramids in Egypt. In the end, they manage to cross off everything on their list, and have a lot of fun while doing it. They are both changed for the better.

          After we finished that movie, Jonathan, DJ, and I decided we weren’t done hanging out together and we wanted to have a little more fun. We went to the arcade in the mall, which turned out being a small, dark little room with many games not working and a shabby feel to the atmosphere. Although it might not have looked good, we managed to have a blast in that little place. We each bought 40 tokens, and we went to work using them on the various games. One good thing about the arcade was that most of the games cost one token, even the motorcycle ones and the driving shoot’em up games. We even all got together and played teenage mutant turtles together, which was a blast. Although the game was probably one of the stupidest I’ve ever played, just being together with my friends made it fun, and we played that one until we got sick of it. There was a basketball game there, which was also fun. In the end, I ended up standing in it and cheating to get more tickets. It’s not like there were any good prizes though. Although there were some pieces of candy, plastic pieces of junk, and a pack of yu-gi-oh playing cards, I don’t think I would have wanted anything besides the awesome sticky penguin I got. You know, one of the ones on a rubber strings that you swing into stuff. Anyways, we eventually ran out of all our tokens, and it was time to leave and go somewhere else. After wandering about the mall for another half an hour, Jonathan had to get back to his dad, and I had to get back to my house. We got in the car, and drove for a while to Tony Roma’s, where we dropped Jonathan off and then kept going to drop me off.

           Overall, this was one of the most fun things I’ve done all year, something that lightened my day and that would keep me feeling good throughout the week. And I missed two hours of school for it!

I know that in my last post, I talked about how I usually make up my own life lessons and that although my Dad started the whole thing, I made them up too. However, recently my dad talked to me about one that is bigger and more important than others have been, and I know it probably can help me out a lot. It’s mostly about humans’ reflex to get into their “fighting stance” when they are threatened or wronged, and why that reflex is bad.  I’m not talking about actually getting your body in a position to punch or kick someone, but when you react in a certain way to stuff.  If we all could learn to chill out, then we could stop problems before they start.           At school, there is one teacher I have had some squabbles with. One day in his/her class, I was having a bad day, and because of that, I had been behaving poorly and was ready to just get out of there as soon as I could. When there was about 1-2 minutes left of class time, the teacher gave us time to work on an assignment for homework. I decided not to work on it and to clean up my things to get ready to leave. This particular teacher had had problems with me staying too long in her class trying to clean up my stuff. I thought I was doing something nice, but she didn’t like it and thought I was just wasting her time. This is when I got really mad, and started to yell, saying that I was trying to do something nice, and stuff like that. She got really mad and yelled at me too, and I was thankful when the bell rang a second later.         Well, I know that acting like that was not good, and that I was the one at fault in that situation. By letting anger seep into me when the teacher said something to me, I reacted in a violent way, which only led to a worse situation. After other situations where I felt bad because something had happened where someone had been mean or something, my dad helped me realize that, although I wasn’t blatantly trying to start a fight, if I could just calm down, I could stop these kind of things before they happened.       It is all human nature to be angry when we are threatened or in an uncomfortable situation, but since we are civilized, we need to “put off the natural man” and control ourselves. I need to keep working on that, because if on that day with the teacher I had sat back, calmed down, and done what she had said then we all would have been happier and in a better place then we are now. In other times, I just need to sort of breathe deeply and/or think before I do what it is I want to do or say. If I think about most of the things that have happened to me, I can understand and realize that if I had just calmed down, and responded in a way that was not aggressive or meant to hurt the person, then the conflicts could have solved in a relatively easy way, and all of us could be happier.          Now, I don’t just want to be a preacher, because that’s something I also hate; I really don’t like it when people talk about something and how we can all be better and they don’t do it. No, I’m seriously going to be doing this as well, because I know that with it I can be a lot better and a lot happier. So yeah.  

Okay here goes. This is my first life lesson I’m going to talk about, and I hope this sort of like works out for what I’m trying to do. Well, for anybody who doesn’t know what a life lesson is, it is like sort of a little thing that you remember that will help you in life. My dad always used to tell me, “This is a life lesson,” and stuff like that whenever I got in trouble or was mad at someone. One time I got in trouble not for doing anything but for being with someone when he did something bad. But now, I make up my own life lessons, mostly from mistakes I make that I don’t want to make again.  Okay, here’s one that I hate. It just really bothers me and I don’t like it. Lots of times, when I used to eat in the cafeteria, I would put my lunchbox down on the table in front of the place I wanted to sit, then go wash my hands, so they would be clean before I ate. Then, when I get back to the table, there are more people sitting there. One is sitting in my seat, and my lunchbox has been pushed all the way to the end of the table. I haven’t ever been bold enough to say “Excuse me, but I was sitting there,” and I really should.  When I end up at the end of the table, I end up not being able to hear anybody else talking, because the discussion is in the middle or the end of the table. I hate that. So here, the lesson is, “Guard your spot until there are everyone else is seated.” Or else you’ll end up away from everybody, stuck in a seat you hate. 

You know, since the last time I posted about that great day of skating and fun, there hasn’t been a lot of skating or skating thinking, and I’m starting to realize that skating for me isn’t like it used to be and that I don’t know if it ever will be. It’s sad, but I’m just not into it. I’m sorry to anyone who wanted my blg to be about that or the topic of skateboarding, but it’s just not me. These are my last words about skating for the time being. I may, at some later time, go skating again and have lots of fun, but it will never again be a passion for me like it used to. That time in my life was a great blessing, but now I have other interests and hobbies. I have new friends, and it’s just not really a part of me.

For me, skating was life, and it’s funny how much I loved riding around on a little plank of wood. The whole art of skateboarding is using your muscles to make that board do stuff. It is a simple idea, yet so complex when actually tried and tested. It brought so much joy to my life, and I was immersed in the cultural aspects of the sport as well; I read skate magazines, watched skate videos, and talked about it with my friends. It was a great activity that kept me fit and healthy, and that allowed me to have fun when I had nothing else to do. I loved it, and I’m sure it loved me too. One can never forget the feeling that comes along with landing a new trick for the first time. Just knowing that you landed back on the board after your first sketchy kickflip ever makes you want to yell and scream with joy.

As ironic as this is, all of this makes me just want to go outside and skate. However, I know that won’t las for long and the longing will soon fade into the back of my mind. I wish I loved it like I did, and I will still skate from time to time. I heard somebody say once, “Once a skater, always a skater.” It may have been someone on the skateboard-city website. That is so true. I will always respect those who participate in the activity and, like I said, it will still be fun for me to go out and do with friends. But for now, my blog doesn’t realy have a topic, just a sort of mash of stuff. It’s more about life. And the life lessons that I learn. Oh yeah! There’s my topic. I can’t wait to post on it.

Well, I’m not exactly sure what freedom means, but to me, it is a certain idea. Here goes. I think that freedom is being able to do what you want, but with reasonable restrictions that prevent one from going TOO far. I’m so grateful for this freedom, especially the freedom of speech we’ve been talking about in English and Social Studies. Having freedom of speech, I can say most anything I want, as long as it is not affecting others in a negative way. I can go on and on about basically whatever I please, and that really is a great blessing. I can give my opinions, my beliefs, and my feelings to others freely. The one part of speech that can be bad is when you threaten someone or make up lies about them, which is called slander. We are not free to do those things, and I believe that to be good. Those hurt people and are not something we should be able to do freely, because these rules to freedom are to help, not hurt.  However, us students in Ms. Rumford’s class need to remember that those rights are the rights of adults. Being students in a school, we have less rights to do what we want and we must be careful. For instance, students have rules against swearing. People could say that that is unconstitutional, but, since we are kids, it’s fine to have those rules. If we went up to a teacher and said “You are a hag,” we would get in big trouble. Although we have freedom of speech, we are not allowed to do that. Just recently I got in trouble with one of my teachers. I was trying to do something nice for her, but she didn’t like it and got mad at me. I didn’t really yell, but my voice got more emotional and angry as I told her I really was trying to do something nice for her, to help her with something she needed help with. Then she yelled at me even more, and I left. I’m freaked out to go to her class, and I have it today. Yikes :( Also, all of this stuff really pertains to bloggers and our blogs. We have somewhere we can post whatever we want, but that doesn’t mean it will come without consequences.  Ms. Rumford told us about a kid who got expelled from his school because he wrote on his blog that he was going to (Listen now, this is funny) that he was going to hire a *hitman* and kill his teacher. lol. That is just funny to me. I mean, who would ctually put that up? Later he said he was “joking,” but it was too late. I mean wow. Try to think about what you’re actually saying, eh? Like that boy/girl (I’m not sure), we have to be careful about what we say. Like Ms. Rumford said “The Internet is not something you can hide behind and flippantly cock your head and shrug you shoulder in a sign of arrogance.” We really do need to think about what we are posting, ad make sure it is appropriate for everyone. Think about it. Is it something you would say to your grandma? I don’t really know what we’re supposed to be talking about now, but yeah.