The end

I think that it is certainly not a secret, by now, that I don't take blogging very seriously. I mean, no offense Mr. Ayers, but sharing my inner-most feelings and daily activities with the world has never been an activity that I had wished to engage in. And so, for the last year I have composed a lot of, for lack of a better word, shit.
My in-depth look at hippie Jesus-looking freaks, my expose on the color red, and reasons as to why I will certainly end up in Hell parts I, II and III, yeah I think you can make your own conclusions. To be honest, I had to write 1,200 words a week, and that's what I did; no more, no less, no effort.
I have learned through this whole experience that I am not as good of a writer on the fly as I would like to believe, and that few original ideas run through my noggin (yes, I did just use that word) at any given time. I am weird and don't like sharing my life, but I didn't need a blog to figure that out. I mean, this has really been a year of my ramblings, insanity and stupidity.
Needless to say, I'm sure, Mr. Ayers, that I'm not exactly the type of gal you are looking for in your masters research, and that's okay, because I think that if my blog has given me anything, it's the ability to voice my opinions and not care what anyone thinks about them. There's definitely something very liberating about putting your ideas in writing; a certain freedom that has allowed me to organize my thoughts and make more bold statements than I would ever make in conversation. For example, I would never tell you off in person, Mr. Ayers, I am far too much of a coward, but clearly here on my blog I have no problem saying that I gave the 80 or so blog posts the collective brain power I would give to making a peanut butter sandwich.
It is with these comments that I say goodbye to my prized 'Yay a blog!' for, certainly, forever; goodbye to incessantly typing at 11:56 on a Sunday night and to changing the posting options when it hit 12:01 and I still had to start another entry; goodbye to the frustration that comes with having writers' block until finally settling on a topic like butter; and finally goodbye to laughing at my own stupidity...but probably not because that is a practice that will likely last my entire life.
And so, to Mr. Ayers, I would like to thank you for not failing me, even after skimming the shitty contents of my blog for the past two terms, and hope that you would do the same this term! I warn you, I will be in your perspectives class next year, and you don't disgruntled Emma around, that is never pretty.
Yay a blog!, goodbye, sorry you suck so much.

Freaks of the world, we're tite

I'm just going to come out and say it, I'm a freak. I mean, really there's no hiding it, but in qualification of this self accusation, I thought I would share some of my many anomalies.

1. I don't eat green candy...like, ever. Really, I hate any sort of green sweet, we're talking Jell-O, Skittles, suckers, Starburst, even M&M's; I really hate the taste of lemon lime, I guess, and even if things aren't that flavor, I assume that they are gross like that, so I just steer clear of them.
2. I get a fake boyfriend everywhere I go. In school, I have about three, for different classes of course. In Czech School, I have Isaac, also known as TeeYukYuk. At the hospital I had a kid from the cafeteria for a while, but then I switched jobs and I haven't seen him since, I think he went off to college or something. And finally, there is work where I have two boyfriends, they legitimately fight, it is really funny. But with all of these thugs hanging around me, I have no real boyfriend, because I obviously attract weirdos.
3. It is a habit of mine to purposely listen to a song so much that I begin to hate it and then legitimately cringe every time I hear it after that, I really have no idea why.
4. I don't invite people...anywhere. I seem to have some sort of irrational hate for having to be the one to instigate a get together, and quite honestly, I would rather do nothing than to have to call people and see if they want to do something.
5. I hate hanging around my family, but I love being at my house.
6. I like writing, but hate reading.
7. I attempt to make every situation sufficiently less awkward for other people by using great sarcasm to shift the attention away from other people. So, when things get awkward for someone else, I will throw in a stupid comment like, my rap album drops next week or tell a horribly embarrassing anecdote about my childhood. Yet, even with all of this making myself look like a fool, if someone catches me off guard or slightly insults anything about me, I get embarrassed really easily.
8. Drinking milk freaks me out because I view it as drinking cow pee or something, even though I know it has been pasteurized and everything. So I have to eat chocolate in order to make myself thirsty enough to stomach milk.
9. I am the only one that is allowed to sing in my car, my sisters are not allowed. However, I serenade them with my less than stellar abilities on a regular basis.
10. I am probably a pathological liar and a hypocrite, and I am really okay with that.
11. I am a stark anti-feminist and don't think that women should hold certain offices and occupational positions. I want to be June Cleaver and not some Hillary Clinton (basically hermaphrodite) clone.

Work, the song ruiner

Now there are a lot of reasons that I hate work; the fact that I have to do something on my Sunday afternoons, the concept that I have to be nice to annoying little kids and the notion that I work with a lot of freaks are all problems. But today I was confronted with one of my greatest problem yet.
Generally speaking, we listen to shit music, can you say techno? Anyway, with a shift in Sunday management as of late, we have gotten into much better music and we currently listen to Sirius Hits 1, which is tite because that's the type of music I listen to in the car and stuff. However, when hour seven or so rolls around and you have listened to Spider Harrison's Weekend Top 45 Countdown twice, it becomes an issue.
Anyway, as I was there I heard the song 'Kiss Me Thru the Phone' approximately 5,000 times, and while I actually enjoy that song normally, Planet X is a song ruiner. For instance, I cannot listen to Poker Face ever anymore because I have so many horrific associations with it, aka the thoughts of being at work. Dear God I hope this video is clean...I didn't really watch it, but it seemed like it would be the safest.

And when I got home this evening, I was a little upset because I had Soulja Boy's voice stuck in my head, and I don't do a very good impression, so it was just a problem. Plus, I had to straighten out some of the words, because I made a bet with my sister, and so I spent $1.29 on iTunes, which was a little upsetting, I must admit. So, with that mentality, maybe we should go back to the techno music, because at least that way work won't have the ability to ruin that shit any further.

Unclassifiable

So my blog was put in the unclassifiable category of the Kennedy Wordpress website, and it's really just not okay. I'm upset that I was not given a category, because surely Mr. Ayers could have just humored me and let me fit in with all of the rest of the blogs. Like, in all honesty, nobody was going to click on my blog to see if it truly should have fit with the 'Fashion and Trends' or 'Life After School' categories or whatever; nobody cares that much. And furthermore, if someone did take the time to read through my ten thousand posts and determine that I should not be under a certain category, they would be a freak and I wouldn't even care, because I am obviously way cooler than them.
I guess I have nothing more to say about this, which is probably a testament as to why I am in the unclassifiable category; everything I write is pure crap. However, I would still like to voice my displeasure with this nonsense, and the other three blogs should be pissed about this as well. So, writers of Nodda Nother Blog, Once Upon a Time, and The Crush we should definitely rise up and take Mr. Ayers down, I think it would be worth it.

Lessons learned from junior year 3

• As far as lessons learned from junior year go, I have also taken some practical ones. For example, I have learned, through the tragedies of my sister, that home hair dye is a really dangerous product. No matter how closely you follow the rules, you will still come out with orange and purple hair. And from the sacrifices of that sister again, I learned the evils of fake tanning, or at least trying to apply the bottle of lotion all at once. Simply put, you end up looking orange, really orange.

• I learned that making fun of people different than myself, is possibly the most fun activity I could ever engage in. This year I have pretended to be a prostitute and in a gang, all which have brought me great joy. I learned how to flash the bloods symbol, which if I ever show to anyone in Compton, I will probably get shot or something, but it's fun to know anyway. I also learned the distinction between a shank and a shiv.
• Another lesson I have learned this year is that I am no good at blogging, because it is hard and I don't have a brain. Ok, tite I think I'm done.

Lessons learned from junior year 2

• Another important skill I have taken from my junior year is the ability to go whole nights without sleeping; it has come in very handy in all situations.
• An important, and responsible, revelation I have come to over the course of the years, is that drugs are gross. Dirties that sell them and smoke them and inject them and inhale them and do whatever else you can do with them...they've got problems. I think that I have a general disdain for these illegal substances, but I know a lot of people that like to engage in them, and I can't stop being friends with them because of the horrible, stupid choices they make.
• Anemia is a disease that never goes away, darn probably should have eaten more meat when I got the chance.
• My parents wont support me if I get in a small plane and fly around with a complete stranger, (even thought I obviously came out of the experience alive, and it was a great way to spend my first ever plane ride). And so maybe, I should have never told them about it, but they are all into letting me make my own mistakes and not making mountains out of mole hills, so it wasn't that big of a deal. All that happened was that my mom freaked out to my sister and told her that she was so afraid that I could have died, but she never even said anything to me.
• I have also learned this year that having my sister away at college is way shittier than I thought. Even though we never really got along when I was a kid, as we grew older my sister and I became basically best friends. And quite frankly, my house was really lonely this year, because I'm not particularly fond of the rest of my family. But I guess, a few positive things have still come out of this situation: first, I developed a better relationship with my parents, second my younger sister and I became better friends, and third I got my own car, and she hated me for it.
• And I also learned that 400 words to write on a blog post is way too many because I really don't have that many things to say. And now I have 30 words to kill and so I will just be talking in circles until I get that far.

Lessons learned from junior year

As the school year is finally coming to a close, I guess I have nothing left to do but reflect upon all of my junior year experiences, and the fabulous lessons I have learned throughout the past eight months. And so, here are my fabulous lessons:

• Approximately 14 months ago, I made a horrible mistake, in the form of making one check; I chose to take AP Chemistry. And if that experience has taught me anything, it is that no matter how smart you are and how hard you work, you will always feel stupid in AP Chem. There is almost no exception to this rule; the lack of sufficient teaching and boring as death lectures make it near impossible to trudge through the work.
• I begged the Editor-in-Chief of our school newspaper for months to allow me to write an editorial, but every time he made a twisted face as he tried to lie through his teeth. He would say, "uh, I don't think we have room this time, but next time...maybe." It was quite obvious: he didn't think I could do it. But when I swindled my way into another girl's spot, he had to let me; there were no more excuses. And so, I wrote the whole editorial, and it was published and everything. The repercussions that came from work, however, taught me lesson number two: everything has consequences, even if you don't think your colleagues can read a newspaper. And furthermore, I learned that you can indeed get fired for publishing anything that could be misconstrued as slander (although I was not).
• This year I also learned some practical lessons, that I can hopefully take over into the real world. First, I learned that some incorrect police officers believe that it is the law that you have to carry ID with you everywhere in public, even if you're not driving. And with that, I learned that there is no way I will ever dispute a cop because I am too afraid, and so it is probably just a good idea to take my licence with me everywhere.
• I learned this year that coming to class isn't nearly as important as I once thought, and skipping is in all scenarios, much more fun. I have skipped so much school this year, like really I may have skipped almost as much as I have attended. And obviously, it hasn't been that big of a deal (except for I would never intentionally skip AP Lang, of course!)

To meet a TeeYukYuk

Looking out across the crowd from atop the miniature Wilson Elementary School stage, I saw a boy named TeeYukYuk waving furiously to me. He pointed at his lips and mouthed the words ‘way to go’ as I passed by. I turned back to meet the principal’s gaze and shook her hand with a smile as I accepted my Czech School diploma. Walking back to my spot on the risers, I stuck my middle finger in the air. That was for Isaac.
It was my mom’s belief that nothing was more important than learning about one’s roots. She, herself, took great pride in having savored the sickeningly sweet taste of kolacky alongside the nasally accordion melodies of the Beer Barrel Polka as a young girl and believed that I should too.
But, deploring the idea of becoming my mother, I decided that if ‘priceless ethnic experiences’ had shaped her life, then I would have absolutely nothing to do with them. However, my resistance to cultural expansion, it seemed, fell on deaf ears.
Throughout my childhood, my mom tried to relive her past numerous times; I was forced into sausage-making seminars, egg painting classes and maypole dances, each with the same inevitable result: expulsion. But by the time the idea of Czech School popped into her head, it wasn’t a question anymore; I was going to be force-fed culture and I was going to like it.
The threat of enrollment didn’t faze me much, though. After all, I was proud of my activity discharges and if there was one skill I had honed throughout my childhood, it was how to get out of dismal situations. At the pork plant, I faked fainting; while embellishing eggshells, I knocked 57 yokes on the floor; during the basket-weave dance, I accidentally pulled too hard on my ribbon and knocked the giant pole onto the choreographer’s car. And getting out of this, I presumed, would be no different.
But while my mother mandated my attendance, another strange force broke down my escape plan and kept me there, amidst foreigners and the lingering odor of meat. This was TeeYukYuk.
At the age of ten, I became the first of the Lehmann girls to be “privileged enough to have the opportunity to learn about her heritage,” as my mom deceptively phrased it. Or rather, I was the first to in my family to be kicked out of the car in front of Wilson Elementary, English to Czech dictionary in hand. Either way, though, I was a Czech Schooler.
My first day of class lived up to all of my expectations; the kids recited lines from The Lord of the Rings, the foreign teachers smelled strangely of bologna and lonely old people littered the hallways, ready to smother unsuspecting children with unwanted affection at a moment’s notice. I held my breath, hoping to recreate the pork plant incident, but unfortunately, it was to no avail; I was stuck there.
To make matters worse, I quickly discovered that I was not a natural at foreign languages and my mail-order teacher’s frustration toward me was obvious. “Can you not make smart?” she would demand in fragmented English. “Cesky so same as English! I learn perfect fast, so too you should!” There was obviously no use in pointing out that her funny odor clouded my brain.
Compounding the whole situation, my desk neighbor, Isaac, would loudly agree with her, in the way that only a serious brownnoser is capable. “Geez, you’re right, she does suck at this!” he would holler. Then, turning to me he would pompously declare, “I can do all of this work, but don’t expect me to help you. You had better start crutching on your looks to get by anyway.”
“Oh, thanks,” I would disdainfully reply. I wanted to tell him not to be bitter because I had the option of using my looks, but I remained silent.
Isaac’s nickname, TeeYukYuk, was of my own creation, based off the sound of hillbilly laughter. I classified him in a strange variety of people: a dweller among the creepy, and apparently putrid, confines of Dungeons and Dragons that one would expect to mature into a Peeping Tom, at best. An unfortunate-looking boy, Isaac was bug-eyed and pale; he consistently looked as if he had come straight out of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. And completing Isaac’s whole package was his uncontrollable jittery and hyper nature, like a nine-year-old ADHD patient on crack. And for this, he was ostracized by the entire school, especially me.
I would mercilessly taunt his bizarre behaviors, hide his Star Wars lunch box and throw his prized Pokémon cards at small children, hoping to prematurely end my Czech School experience. But by the time I had learned my first phrase, ‘My parents force me to come here’, my mockery had proved to be a lost cause. And soon enough it came to bite me in the ‘osel’, as it seemed all of my decisions made at Czech School eventually did.
Within a week of acquainting myself with Isaac, he had latched on to me like a sunburn, the kind that throbs when you’re not thinking about it, and then stings even worse when you finally force yourself to acknowledge it. Every morning, he would slide up awkwardly close to me, still bouncing up and down from, I imagined, his morning caffeine fix combined with a troubling lack of Ritalin. Then he would proceed to say, “You can pick on me all you want, but I’m not going to tell. I know it’s just because you like me.”
Each time this happened, I threw up in my mouth a little and the entire class would look at me sorrowfully as I tried to pawn him off on someone else. “Why don’t you go sit by Triangle-Hair,” I would suggest as I directed his attention to the chubby girl across the room whose black, curly hair looked as if someone had smooshed a piece of geometry right onto her head. “I hear she’s really desperate for a boyfriend!”
Drat, of course he knew that even she wouldn’t settle for a boy that smelled faintly of rotten meat.
“Then maybe you could move by someone, anyone else,” I would plead. But alas my ailment remained loathsomely, exasperatingly loyal.
As the summer wore on, my sunburn became more of a skin cancer, and I was increasingly irritated with each passing day that I was woken up at dawn and subjected to cultural torture. However, it wasn’t until Isaac began singing me show tunes in Czech that I finally snapped.
That morning began like any other: TeeYukYuk jumped beside me, bouncing around in his queer manner; a pop-up book from Hell. Then, the madness began: “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, / a tale of a fateful trip. / That started from this tropic port, / aboard this tiny ship,” he bellowed in Czech while skipping in circles around me. “Emma, I have a question for you-oo-ooo,” he chanted.
“Shut up, you little weirdo!” I quickly barked. “You bug me so much! Why won’t you just tell on me so I can leave this loser school?”
“Oh Emma, the only way you’re getting out of here is by graduating. So, for now, tell me, don’t you think that song is romantic?” he replied, apparently heeding little attention to my rant. “I was thinking, and I wanted to tell you that I like your face. Will you marry me?”
I was fuming, yet poised to fight back laughter at this absurd question if it came. But Isaac pulled out a paperclip, crafted into a ring from his pocket and I couldn’t help myself anymore; I kicked him in the crotch and cackled in his face.
Every girl dreams of being proposed to, and while it was flattering, even at the age of ten, I was expecting something more than TeeYukYuk pulling out a paperclip ring in the middle of an elementary school after verbally trapping me in Czech School.
Just as another guffaw was about to leave my lips, the bell for class rang and I hurriedly made an attempt to salvage the situation. I looked at Isaac writhing on the floor, “Yeah, like I would marry you. Where do you think we are anyway, Podunk, Alabama?” I mused, my words dripping with sarcasm. But as he crawled to his chair, he threw me the sharp, metal ring with a menacing grin on his face.
Isaac had apparently recovered by noon though, “…and it’s only another nine years before we can make it legal, seven if we have parental consent,” he proclaimed to our classmates. I tried vainly to dispel the rumors, but Isaac had already handed out verbal wedding invitations to everyone he knew; as far as they were concerned, I just had cold feet.
But by the next week, all the chatter had stopped; Isaac hadn’t spoken so much as a word to me. I took advantage of his silence as a sure sign that he was ready to break. So, I tried vandalizing under his name, throwing his books through the windows and eventually found myself exclaiming, “Tell on me you little brat!” but he remained silent.
Over the next four years of Hell, Isaac continued planning our wedding. “What color should our placemats be? Is a Star Trek ice sculpture all right with you? Do you have your ring on?” he would query. Each time he asked an absurd question, I would silently stick my middle finger in the air to signify my frustration with him, and Czech School. However, he seemed to falsely interpret them as a sign of affection. “You will be so proud of yourself when you graduate, so don’t be bitter. Plus, we need this time to plan our life,” he would attempt to comfort me. The finger stayed in place.
I continued to test Isaac’s patients for the next four years, expressing myself primarily through hand gestures. But, eventually, the day that Isaac had promised did come; the night that he had promised would get me out of Czech school (and away from him): graduation.
Walking across the stage to receive my diploma that fateful evening, I was elated and flashed my pride to the audience. I was amazed at myself for making it this far, I had never imagined it possible to finish five years of Czech School, and all without murdering TeeYukYuk. Locating his face in the crowd, I got a nauseous feeling. I stuck my middle finger in the air, ring on, and mouthed the words ‘thank you’.

(my only surviving photo of TeeYukYuk)

(my most prized drawing...a masterpiece from the day I first met Isaac)

(a typical love note)

(a more elaborate love note, with a How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days theme, notice Crawl the warrior king and our love fern)

(a last ditch proposal...too bad its not legal)

'A Nation of Whimps'

We’ve all been there--that is, in the living room of family friends who invited you over, without mentioning that it would include a lengthy performance by Susie, their four-year-old Brittany Spears wanna be daughter, who, might I mention can’t carry a tune to save her life.
You awkwardly sit on the plaid sofa and watch as she attempts to belt out ‘Baby One More Time’ and ‘Crazy’. Although the general consensus is that death-by-boredom is an inevitable result of this performance, her parents do not share the sentiment; they, utterly absorbed in their prodigal daughter’s performance clap and cheer, totally indifferent to your suffering.
Hours later, as you leave their house, you vow never to return, at least not until Susie has been sent off to college, and probably not even then.
It wasn’t always like this though; parents used to stop kids before hour three of their concert and they rarely fostered serious ideas that pop star was a realistic career choice. This was a time before hand-sanitizing gels ran rampant in playgrounds and violin lessons trumped having fun.
In the past few decades, overparenting, as noted by the one Psychology Today article by Hara Estroff Moarano, is on the rise, resulting in neurotic parents and a fragile, unstable youth; we are, in all senses of the word, becoming ‘a nation of wimps’.
The effects of this can be found in all facets of child life; school, play and home. “Parents and school are no longer geared toward child development, they’re geared to academic achievement,” child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University, said¾ and it’s true! (Moarano, 61) This can be seen in situations such as the girl that was diagnosed with ‘difficulty with Gestalt thinking’, who essentially ‘couldn’t see the big picture‘. (Never mind the fact Piaget’s stages of cognitive development show that the formal operational stage, in which a person develops abstract reasoning, does not come until around that time.) (Myers, 128)
It is simply the idea that such overprotective parents would take their child in to be tested for this that illustrates the power of overparenting. Now, Gestalt-deficiency girl will not have to take a timed SAT, or any other timed test for that matter. The effects that this will have on her long-term self esteem are yet to be seen, and theories of what will happen to her are mixed, but whatever does result will be from a disgustingly privileged vantage, thus tainting her forever.
This isolated case is not the only instance of wimpifying, though. Throughout schools, inflated grades and decreased expectations have come to increase the self esteem of children everywhere. (Moarano, 62) And while it is known that having a high self-worth is positively correlated with individuals who are less likely to succumb to pressures of conformity, less likely to use drugs, are persistent at difficult tasks, are extraverted and are simply happier, an inflated sense of self-esteem can be detrimental. (Myers, 514) “Kids need to feel badly sometimes,” Elkind said. “We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope.” (Moarano, 61)
Several researchers from the ’90s worked hard to combat parents’ need to artificially inflate the self-worth of their children. They doubted that self-esteem was “’the armor that protects kids’ from life’s problems”. The sixth edition textbook of Psychology states, “Maybe self-esteem is a gauge that reads out the state of our relationships with others. If so, isn’t pushing the gauge artificially higher akin to forcing a car’s low fuel gauge to display ’full’? And will the best boost of self-esteem therefore come not so much from our repeatedly telling children how wonderful they are as from their effective coping and hard-won achievements?” (Myers 515)
More than this, artificially-inflated senses of self have proved to be dangerous in some cases. In the 1998 experiment conducted by Brad Bushman and Roy Baumeister, people with unrealistically high senses of self-esteem were reported to be “exceptionally aggressive”. The researchers concluded that “threatened egotism”, not low self-esteem, is what predisposes aggression, and people with excessive self-regard are prone to excessive risks. (Myers, 517)
Many have tried to tackle the ills of the scholastic system in support of this idea, opposing grade inflation and promoting a high standard of achievement. For example, in 2001, 94 percent of college seniors graduated with honors, and primary schools and high schools are ’arguably just as guilty of grade inflation’. (Moarano, 63-64)
The reason for these inflated senses of ability stem from the need to preserve one major psychological concept¾ self-serving bias, or the readiness to perceive oneself favorably. (Myers, 516) Through the lowered bar of academics, it is important everyone succeeds and their self-concept stays high.
Also, in this idea that school trumps all and everyone is capable of achieving straight As, has come the promotion of individualism, or the giving of priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications. (Myers, 517) A Nation of Wimps blames Dr. Seuss for this; books like Oh, the Places You’ll Go! create false senses that children can do anything successfully, without even the threat of failure. (Moarano, 64) However, when the harsh realities of life hit overparented, wimpy children, the results prove to be devastating. (Moarano, 62, 66)

The importance of being invisible

If I have had one superpower over the past 12 years of school, it has been invisibility. When I walk down the hallways, nobody notices me and when I enter the room there are no repercussions. There's no hiding it, I'm not spectacular or dazzling and I don't command respect; these are qualities that I have honed throughout my entire lifetime.
I used to want all the attention in the world, and I went to great lengths to get it; I was a self-proclaimed eccentric. However, if my progression through high school has taught me one thing, it is the importance of blending in.
This may seem depressing, and as though I have given up on life or something, but it's the truth, and I am very happy with this realization. The fact that I have gained the ability to be satisfied with myself, no matter what others think of, has been much more fulfilling than anyone the feedback of anyone else.

Things I like

I like candy and cookies and cotton candy and puppies and kittens and the color green and tie-dye T-shirts and shopping and driving and my little blue car that I just cleaned out and rainbows and laughing and listening to funny stories and telling funny stories and writing ridiculous blog posts, composed of 400-word sentences and Michael Phelps because he is going to be my husband (never mind his little altercation with the law)...and making fun of the ridiculous drug counterculture and hearing trippy music and asking my parents what they were like when they were kids and Charles Gibson's World News Tonight...and funny-looking people and pretending that I am going to become an estatition and finding kids at school that look like Winnie the Pooh characters...and when my mom says many of the ridiculous things that come out of her mouth (like the time she eluded to the fact that one of my friends was bi-polar or the time that she told me that she thought schools should teach sexual education based off of fear) and I like the fact that I am probably about to be fired at work for something I wrote in the school newspaper and insisting on being called Princess Emma in Torch and the fact that I got the lowest NCAA bracket score (16 out of a possible 150) during the last tournament because I picked the teams with the funniest names (I had Gonzaga, who only made it to the sweet 16 winning the whole thing) and I like pretending that it was my sole faith in Gonzaga that got them to the last 16...and I like watching old movies because it makes me laugh to see weirdo hippies and I love it when strangers come up to me and say that I look like Audrey Hepburn (which has happened twice in the past three months)...and I like hanging around this kid named Michael because he tells me that I'm going to Hell every day and then I make fun of his belief in God...and I like talking to my parents, even when I know that they're not listening and telling them horrible things that I am 100 percent sure they won't remember and I like lying about my whereabouts at every time and I like when I get caught doing stupid things because it genuinely makes me laugh and there are rarely consequences and I like never talking about work again because if I do I am probably going to get fired and I like finishing blog posts at almost exactly 400 words, ok done!

Go ahead, miss class

It brings me constant pleasure to hear people who think that teachers actually care about their education. The other day I was sitting next to a particularly brown-noser-ish goodie-two-shoes type girl who has totally given in to this idea. She had to attend an event one day out of the whole school year, and was supposed to get this ridiculous paper signed saying that she was allowed to leave, which, to anyone who has ever just skipped a class (obviously not her) is the most preposterous thing ever.
"Herk is going to kill me!" she exclaimed at the thought of missing math.
"Why?" I inquired, curious as to why she would think he cared whether she missed one day of math, it's not like she is blatantly retarded and couldn't get the work made up or anything.
She looked at me with a twisted, quizzical look on her face and I walked away smiling. I guess the sooner she realizes that no teacher honestly cares about her individually, as just one of the hundreds of students they see in a day, the better.
And it's not like I expect teachers to care about me anyway. Overall, I just try not to bother them, because in reality, they will forget that I ever existed the moment I leave their classroom, and this is something I am comfortable with. And in the same line of thinking, I totally plan to forget about that class when summer comes as well.
So I would just say, keep on skipping because it's not a big deal; nobody will remember.

You know the economic times are tough when it hurts me

This may sound a little like something that I have written on this blog before, an article entitled 'A place so much fun it deserves its own planet' primarily because I took the inspiration for it from here. This is the editorial that you will find from me in the March issue of the Torch, which comes out next Friday.
My job is troublingly akin to a carny’s; slumped atop a precariously placed barstool, I sit every Sunday afternoon, watching six bumper cars circle a track. I hold a big, yellow controller with two buttons labeled ‘START’ and ‘STOP’; it’s a ride so simple a sleep-deprived chimp could probably run it.
Nevertheless, my manager comes around every hour and reminds me of the importance of my position while correcting me on button-pushing technique. I try to remind him that I have been working in this minimum wage hell they like to call Planet X for the longest eight months of my life, but he looks confused and walks away, the words “Thank God you don’t work at Hy-Vee, you’d never make it there!” hanging from his lips.
Our neighbor Hy-Vee, the great money-making giant, is strangely resented around there. They don’t have to dress up their walls with tacky NASCAR posters and it never smells like puke in there. Hy-Vee isn’t overrun by sugar-rushed first graders and they can afford more than 15 employees. But most of all, they are important.
My managers have only recently come to begrudgingly accept the fact that people need to eat, but not necessarily to play laser tag. They walk over to the grocery store from time to time, attempting to sway busy moms away from the produce section and bribe children with the lure of mini golf (although I warn them of anti-creeper laws prohibiting this) because, when it comes down to it, Planet X-onomics show that the more parents are paying for broccoli, the less they are spending on fun.
Iowa’s economy has been, as of yet, in a virtual bubble; primarily cushioned from the nation’s recession, but as the Planet X-ers will tell you, our entertainment (if that’s what you really want to call us) industry is beginning to feel the pinch, along with everyone else. Now I’m not about to pretend like I know anything about the economy, like some of the Torch staffers do, because, truth be told, I am clueless. However, I can say that as the strains of the recession begin to reach the lowest end of the totem pole, the teenage worker, it is time to buck up and face the times.
It is no secret around Planet X that I don’t place much importance on my job, in fact, I often seem as though I am legitimately trying to get myself fired. However, now as talk has shifted at work, from whose turn it is to sleep in the games to potential layoffs and price cuts, the fact that paychecks are constant has become a selling point for many applicants. So, I guess I can count my lucky stars that I actually have a job in these tough times, no matter how pointless it is, because as the economy tightens around us, even the role of a glorified carny has become sacred to me.

The science of religion

In all honesty, I did not write this essay specifically for the purpose of this blog, but rather to enter in Iowa State University's First Amendment Day Essay Contest. As a disclaimer, as comes with any real piece of writing that I show to people, let alone be on a public forum, I would like to say that I wrote this quite quickly. In addition, I'm not so sure if I was supposed to write more about journalism and the relation to the First Amendment, but here's what I came up with, so I hope that you enjoy:

I hate Christianity for the same reason that I hate chemistry--there is nothing to see. It bothers me that I will never be able to watch a spirit rise to the heavens or examine a photograph of God, just as I could never see a test tube close enough to witness the breaking of Sodium chloride molecules.
It was not always like this though: for the first seven years of my life, in fact, I was a textbook Sunday Christian. Seven ‘Amen’s, nine hymns, 76 kneel-sit combinations each week, and I could guiltlessly forget about the Lord. But as time passed, homes were shuffled, a quarter of the country was crossed in my dad’s effort to find an adequately-paying job, and the issue of religion essentially fell by the wayside.
While it is evident to me now that my parents never really expected me to develop my own radical beliefs, it was not quite as obvious then. With the absence of church, I began spending my Sunday mornings contemplating who and what God was, instead of singing blind praises to Him. And in time I came to realize something about myself: I value the tangible; His abstract notion wasn’t enough for me.
Some may call this a character flaw: the inability to believe in ideals that cannot be seen, however, the idea that I can challenge popular religious beliefs without persecution is supposed to be what our nation was founded on. After all, the First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Nobody, the government says, should be able to dominate my spiritual values.
However, there is no doubt in my mind that if my parents had continued forcing me to attend church through my teen years, I would have become a begrudging member of the Christian community. A blessing in disguise though, they never resumed attendance; the inadvertent absence of religious guidance in my young life has been, in my opinion, one of the greatest contributions to the development of my character.
While I would honestly like to say that my parents abandoned my religious education to enlighten me upon the ethics of the First Amendment (and certainly this would have made for a more powerful piece of wiring,) I cannot. My mother still truly believes that I am headed for Hell and my father doesn’t discuss the subject. However, I can see that deep down they are proud of me for forming my own opinions, no matter how different they may wish they were. Their willingness to do so is a testament to the power of the first Constitutional appendage. This acceptance is all I could ask for.
And this influence is not limited to my parents; it affects every citizen of this nation. Only in America, I am prompted to think, could I be challenged by the government to live by my own philosophies, not just those preordained by previous generations. Only in this land is every citizen promised not only the freedom to form their own theocratic ideas, but the ability to voice them in their own words, by their own means.
Only here can I openly ponder the existence of God, Heaven and acetic acid at the same time, and understand nothing--with the chemistry grade to prove it.

Eating disorders aren't only socially-rooted

If eating was just something that we did for fun, then yeah, eating disorders would be a choice. They would be something that people do just to be popular, 'lets just stop eating' and 'I don't need to eat today' would be common themes of high school conversation. But here's the thing, eating disorders are not just a fad or anything that people do for fun; they're real and they're a problem.
There are two main forms of eating disorders; anorexia and bulimia. Microsoft Student 2006 defines anorexia as:

Mental illness in which a person has an intense fear of gaining weight and a distorted perception of their weight and body shape. People with this illness believe themselves to be fat even when their weight is so low that their health is in danger. A person with anorexia nervosa severely restricts food intake and usually becomes extremely thin.

Similarly, Microsoft Student 2006 defined bulimia as:

An eating disorder in which persistent over concern with body weight and shape leads to repeated episodes of binging (consuming large amounts of food in a short time) associated with induced vomiting, use of laxatives, fasting, and/or excessive exercise to control weight.

Anyway, I got on this topic because in AP Psychology the other day, we were talking about eating disorders. Although our book came to no clear conclusion, my teacher did, and this was what made me mad. He decided that the root of all eating disorders was the need to belong and the desire to be popular. This made me so mad, however, I didn't express my ideas because I rarely speak up in that class.
He didn't even make mention of problems that are obviously going on psychologically. (And by the way, the Microsoft Student definition of anorexia, which calls it a 'mental illness' is out of date because the term was recently dropped.) I know for a fact that, while there are some people that have strange social motivations, not everyone conforms to our preconceived stereotype. It is ridiculous to believe that there is a social root to every problem, because removing them from the social atmosphere and placing them in one that everyone was obese would not solve the problem.
And the National Eating Disorders Association agrees; on their website they posted:

The National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting individuals and families affected by eating disorders. We campaign for prevention, improved access to quality treatment, and increased research funding to better understand and treat eating disorders. We work with partners and volunteers to develop programs and tools to help everyone who seeks assistance.In 1999, NEDA established a toll-free helpline and has assisted more than 50,000 people find appropriate treatment. Tallying more than 50 million web hits each year, NEDA is proud to serve as a clearinghouse of information on eating disorders.

Questions PSA from NEDA on Vimeo.
Most just have issues within themselves that they need to work out, and they don't need people preaching to them about how being popular isn't everything while they are trying to get better. Thus, we need to change our mindsets before we expect the problem of eating disorders to resolve themselves.

Lector, the people-eater

I often wonder the capacity of people to eat things. For instance, the girl sitting next to me in the computer lab right now, and I were just talking about this teacher that we are really afraid of, mostly because we figure she could eat us. And while usually I am not prone to huge exaggerations, this one is true because there is a very real chance that she could swallow me whole.

This is a woman, short in stature, but mighty. Her brash comments frighten everyone and I am usually afraid to go near her, for her jovial nature could switch at any time. Who knows when Godzilla could go berserk and switch to crazy cannibal mode. Let's call this woman Lector. In another connection to pop culture, I would liken the psychosis of Lector to the Flying Purple People Eater.

There is probably no way this this woman could be accurately portrayed. There has never been another person that I have been genuinely afraid to converse with, for fear that I might lose one of my hands.
Yesterday I was supposed to meet her somewhere and, in all fairness, I was 15 minutes late. But that was only because I went to far on the interstate. She called me and was a major jerk about it, which made me afraid to show up at the meeting at all, because I was sure that when she got there, drool would be rolling down her face, a demonic look in her eye. I am lucky I made it out of there.

My homeless scent sweater

My sister goes to the University of Iowa and sometimes she comes home for the weekend so that she can see her boyfriend or whatever. Yeah it's pretty tite when she comes except for sometimes it is a problem. She was home at the end of her Christmas break about a month ago. While there she saw me wearing a sweater, the same one that I am wearing now, for that matter. She told me that I looked like an old lady in it and proceeded to mock me. This was ridiculous because she is the is the most old person-ish person I have ever met. Like seriously, there is no way one can imagine a 19-year-old as elderly-acting as her. She should probably just be shipped of to a nursing home right now.

But anyway, back to the sweater story. After making fun of my sweater, she walked away and made me very self-conscious. However, I wore that sweater anyway because I didn't really care. However, before she was driven back to college she crept into my room and stole my sweater to take with her to school!

I spent days looking for that shirt, I tore the house apart one morning. However, my efforts were in vain because eventually I realized the only logical conclusion: she took it! So I called her and she told me that she did indeed steal my sweater. I was pissed. She had better bring it back, I threatened.

Anyway so she came back this weekend and, as promised, she brought the sweater. I grabbed it from her hands and held it to me. But wait? What was this odor coming from my sweater? The distinct smell of leaves?

Why on earth would my sweater come back smelling like leaves? I inquired, but my sister just gave a smattering of lame excuses. 'That's just the smell of the washing machine at college.' and 'That must be the smell of someone detergent.' Ok, yeah right, like someone else has creepy homeless person scent to douse their clothing in. I don't think so.

Either way though, my story has a happy ending because I am wearing my sweater now, freshly washed, and smelling of regular detergent. She had better not steal it again.

A place 'so much fun, it deserves its own planet'

Slumped atop a precariously-placed bar stool, I sit every Sunday afternoon, watching bumper cars circle a track. I hold the yellow controller with two buttons labeled ‘START’ and ‘STOP’; a ride so simple a sleep-deprived chimp could run it. Nevertheless, my manager comes around and praises me for picking up on my job so quickly. I remind him that I have been working at Planet X for seven months, but he looks confused so I tell him to never mind.

I stop every ride early, hoping to make someone mad, but nobody ever notices. Each time a new group of strangers load on to the six cars, I make my way to the middle of the track and give my well-honed speech. “Put your seat belt over your head and under your arms; push forward to go forward; pull back to go back; left goes right; right goes left; if you push them in different directions you can spin in circles; try not to bump the rails and if you drop anything on the track don’t get out and get it.” I’ve got it down to eleven seconds of talking, because I think that if you can’t follow the basic rules of common sense, you may deserve the electric shock that comes with prematurely exiting the car.
There are signs for Monster energy drink dangling above my head and the Star Trek Voyager video game next to me makes intergalactic noises. The aroma of sweat, feet and stale pizza choke me as I become increasingly angry that this is my job.
Sometimes normal people of my own age, usually forced along by some sort of group outing, come to the line for bumper cars. Often, however, I am too embarrassed to speak with them, assuming that they liken me to a carny. So, I just stare ahead at the big, blue wall opposite my stool and pretend that I have a less laughable job.

I joined the Planet X staff last summer in a last-ditch effort to earn some cash. I knew it would be easy and I was sure that they would accept me; after all I am clean and competent, two qualities that seem to be in short supply in that building. I never anticipated, however, what a life-altering choice I was making. Now I'm not trying to bash my coworkers, because in all honesty, many of them are fine people that I rarely have an ill word to say about, and I'm not attempting to share the plight of the teenage worker in a minimum wage world; because both of those are ridiculous. In reality, I am quite happy that I work where I do, although at times it is ridiculous and I get mad and just want to cuss my manager out.

I have learned so many lessons within the confines of those four walls. Not only have they pertained to how to push START and STOP on the bumper cars, but also many life lessons. For example: the evils of the drug culture, what a crack nail is, what happens when you drop out of Kirkwood, and why it is important to work hard during this stage of my life.

If everyone were a doctor, then who would need them?

I was talking with this kid the other day and we were saying what we wanted to be when we grew up. He eluded to the fact that he wanted to be a doctor and I told him that doctor would never be my profession. "Why?" he sneered.

I told him that I didn't like dealing with sick people and that I really wasn't good in serious situations including death and such. I also said that science wasn't really something that I was interested in and told him that it just wouldn't be a way that I wanted to spend my life. He turned to me and told me that my aspirations were stupid.

"What?" I gawked at his bluntness. First of all, who says something like this? What right does he have to qualify my life aspirations anyway? So, trying to tolerate him and listen to his point of view, I asked him why he wanted to be a doctor. He responded something to the effect of, 'because I will make a lot of money'.

Yeah, that's right. Not because he genuinely wants to help people and not because he likes medicine, but because he wants to be rich. That, to me, was completely ridiculous. However, he continued to chalk it up in saying that becoming a doctor is the only noble profession.

Ok so I'm just saying that it's all well and good for him to want to play God in the future, but he doesn't have to act as though he is as important as God now, because quite frankly he is not. And furthermore, if we all followed the sentiment that doctor is the only job worth having, and we all became doctors, then who would need them anymore? We could all fix ourselves. So yeah, think about that, jerk.

AP-ness

This week is the week that we are supposed to sign up for classes, which is ridiculous to start with because this is January! Yeah, don't we have like six long months of school left to make these decisions, but whatever, I won't even get into that. My main problem came in that I had originally planned to take a lot of super easy classes next year because I will be a senior and it doesn't even matter, plus I don't plan to do any work.

Ok so anyway, with social studies, it is a problem because nobody would even explain to us what this AP Economics junk was, so we just asked Dr. W. She told us about it and that it was a year long, which was helpful I guess, but then it was retarded because I said that I wasn't going to take it in front of her. She turns me around in my lunchroom seat and proceeds to yell at me saying that it is my duty to the school to take that sort of junk; AP econ and AP lit, neither of which I was planning on taking. Anyway, she started screaming that she wouldn't write me college recommendations next year if I didn't take those two and that I would never be a national merit scholar without them.

She came all up and was like, we won't even write you a good college recommendation if you don't take them. Well guess what? If I don't want to take them now then I just won't do the work. Yeah, I plan to do a lot of easy classes and not even take a full schedule. Yeah, I'm going to Capri anyway, which you don't even have to graduate from high school to go to, to become an estatition and it will be tite.

Ok so all of this is so retarded to me and I almost like spit in her face or something. What right does she have to threaten me anyway? She can't even say that I will be a failure without taking these things, because quite frankly I just don't care. Yeah it's all retarded and I suppose that she must get some sort of kickback from the number of people taking AP classes or something, but really, in a year and a half or so I'm going to be peaceing out of Kennedy and it won't even be a big deal, so whatevs.