Why would we need to excel past an absolute threshold when the highest we can achieve in this subject is at that same threshold? In non psychology terms, I am speaking about our own personal energy use.

In a response to Mikey's blog post, all I need to say is why would we even want to do more if we are not required to? If someone is going to do my own work, I will gladly allow them to do it without any regrets whatsoever. Call me lazy, but call me conservative. I see no reason to waste this superfluous energy.

I did have a job, but I did not enter it with a normal attitude. I did not acquire this job for financial reasons, I only applied there because I was bored. I needed something to occupy my time. Even when I spoke to my coworkers and told them I worked here only for fun, they gawked at me with their jaw open. But luckily for me, I did have a fun job. When I was working in the kitchen of the fast food restaurant, If I was enough of a sleuth, I was able to munch down on grilled cheeses, cheeseburgers, and chili cheese fries. Of course I was not being paid to eat, If and when we had customers, I always got their food out just as fast as it would have if I was not eating. Like I previously stated, I see no reason to give more energy then what is the lowest amount needed to fire a stimulus.

So is it being lazy? No, only being efficient. If I work harder and sweep the floors more throughly, clean the toilets so they shine bright white, and make sure all those french fries are golden crisp (and not have fallen on the floor) who notices? Most likely, no one even notices. At 6 monthes working there, I did get a raise though. I guess all of us see this as the 'benefit for working hard' But so did half the other employees. But again, this did not even matter to me. I was not working for pay, but for fun so I could talk to my friends that also worked there.
So I see no reason to need to be in a hardworking environment. Good morals are self taught, and self opinionated. When a quota is put, why should I be expected to pass it? I am going to meet it, but with a photo finish.

Cell phones are a form of communication. And unknowingly to some people, it is rude to communicate when someone else is trying to communicate to you. I almost get pissed off when I see someone in class blatantly texting their hearts out. I see it as such a form of disrespect. The teacher is giving their own personal time and devoted their life to, in a radical way, the listener. So why can't the student focus for 55 minutes without this one distraction? I do not understand.

In 1984 (I think it was this book... to be honest I never finished it) they had a concept of humans language becoming quicker and faster to use. The words were slurred together so that the laziness was able to overcome and they were not required to use any energy to convey their forms of communication. It saddens me to see that this insane prediction has become true, just in another form. Texting. No longer are we needed to converge ourselves in entire conversations that we are able to explore each other as we share our feelings and thoughts. Now we are able to suffice with a simple "k" or "c u later". It is a destruction of our language as we know it.

So I admit, texting might not ruin society... soon! but as I look at it right now, people are miss useing it in innapropiate places. At a party I was at, a girl took out her phone and started texting when my friend came up to her. My other bud said "ouch you got the phone taken out on you." Cellphones are merely a form of disrespect. I approve of texting in entire sentences and in solitude. If you are trying to speak to someone verbally, and they attempt to text someone else, it can obviously mean that they are not interested in what you are trying to speak to them about. I know how these teachers feel.

So yeah, I do feel that texting can be appropiate, but only in the correct place, time, and diction in order to avoid the downfall of a language. Maybe this is a rediculous claim, but there is no way to what could be appropiate in a possible future etopia. Maybe responding to a teacher with 3 letters could be the correct way to do it some day.

There should not be a drinking age.

The current drinking age in the united states is 21. Everyone knows that, it is a huge year for most. Finally, the age I am legally aloud to get hammered at a bar... right? While many feel this is the age that we are able to make mature choices, and that is when excessive alcohol consumption will not effect our bodies as much as our frontal lobes finally mature, I still feel that the alcohol age should be lowered or even abolished completely.


Picture from Prime Events and Rentals

If this just instantly happened, mass chaos would occur. 14 year old kids all over the country would go and buy a 24 pack of beer and go crazy in celebration. If anything like this would actually happen, it would need to be a slow drawn out process. Maybe the first step being lowered consequences for underage drinking, but a higher consequence for the higher Blood Alcohol Levels for underages. The next step could be lowering it to 18, then possibly 16, and then completely getting rid of it. Now I am sure you are asking, why would we even want to do this? I feel that with this current restriction on alcohol to minors, they feel the need to rebel and binge drink their livers out. Underage Binge Drinking is really an extreme problem. They do not know their limits, and purposely attempt to pass them. Sometimes to the extreme. I feel that if the kids were not given a restriction to begin with, it would avoid their need to rebel against this line. But like I said, it could not even come close to happening correctly if we just opened all their ties to beer instantly.

I think that the kids would learn responsibility without a drinking age. They have time to understand how to self help themselves, rather than listen to a judge tell them what to do and stuff. Parents should also step in on this, teaching that it is not wrong to do, but just wrong without consideration and responsibility. It is true that binge drinking can stunt the frontal lobe development before the age of 25, but what makes my plan plausable is that it is only binge drinking and drinking in excessive amounts. That is why I feel that if these kids did have responsibility, they would avoid binge drinking. This is a problem that leads to many worse things. The worse being even death.

That is why I feel there needs to be a change on this current law. Many problems come up from it, and kids directly disobey it. That is why over a long process of time I think it should be abolished, with little tiny baby steps along the way towards this goal of a better horizon.

So I volunteered at Usher's Ferry's Safe Halloween and I got put in the 'Scary Story House' (that was haunted by boxelder bugs and lady bugs... seriously they were everywhere). Luckily I got to make up a scary story and scare little kids all day. It was fun. Heres the story i told;;;

So about 40 or 50 years ago, all these houses used to have families living in them. And on one halloween night, all the kids were out trick or treating. When they came up to this house and looked up at it, all the lights were off. But these kids wanted candy. So they went up and knocked on the door. knock knock knock.... and no one came to the door. These kids were brace though, and the bravest of the group decided that they wanted candy so he opened the door with a screeeeeeee. it was a screechy door. (i try to teach kids to enter random houses when trick or treating)

As they walked in the house, it was empty. No one was home. So they were standing right about where you guys were.. and they started hearing footsteps up and down the stairs right here. (here is when the girls i was volunteering with in the other room started making noises like footsteps.. they had the easy job). The trick or treaters decided to check out what that noise was, because someone might be upstairs. So as they started to go upstairs, at the top of the stairs was a door. Under the door in the crack they could see a light was on. But on the other side they heard voices. (again the girls made ghostly voice noises). The kids thought someone must be up there so they opened the door. But again, the room was empty.

At this point, the trick or treaters were freaking out so they left the attic. As they returned to the living room where they heard the steps, a man was standing there turned around with a broom. He slowly turned around and looked straight at the trick or treaters and said....
























BOO!!

That was the end of the story. I scared so many people it was halorious. I almost felt bad because pretty much all the kids there were like 6 or so years old. The funniest part was the person that jumped the most out of all the people that I yelled that too, was a mom.

It was fun scaring the little kids, I can't wait until I get to mess with my own kids.

Being social is easy. I like doing it also. Just recently I started talking to anyone who is around me. Because recently I was at a concert, and the older brother of my friend was randomly talking to the people behind us, and it was cool seeing how some random people who have never met each other interact when one is super friendly. So I took this initiative and starting being randomly nice and social to random people whenever I have the chance.

Like just last friday, while I was waiting in line at lunch to get those mediocre school burritos, I overheard the two girls behind me wondering if they should get this burrito or king chicken. I butted in and told them deffinetly the burrito, specifying it was no panchero's, but still pretty good. Later they saw me and thanked me for helping them make the right food choice decision. I felt really good, not that they choose the burrito, but that I influenced a random person merely because I was social to them.

I feel bad for people with these so called 'social disorders'. People that are just shy I guess. I think they are missing out on important things, and are relying on others to give that to them. They are missing out on social connections. Maybe it is a lack of serotinin or dopamine, I don't know, but what there really is a lack of are those social connections. I wish that everyone could be as social as me.

Sometimes when I try to talk to random people about something, I get weird looks. They think it is awkward that this random dude is talking to them. Nothing makes me more angry than these people. They treat me like crap only because I am being friendly. If they had their way at this time, there would only be like 3 people in the entire world, so no random people could come up and talk to them. For someone like me, that is the opposite of what I could ever want.

Sometimes I almost prefer being around people I have never met before. People that know you have all kinds of false pretenses and already have a set of impressions they put towards you. Maybe that is why I had such a great time at this random xavior halloween party I went to. (or maybe it was because there was like 5 dudes and 25 girls) but I was talking to almost everyone and it was really easy for me to go up these people and just start talking. I even talked to a german foreign exchange student and pretended like I understood what she said!

Maybe the reason I like talking to random people like this is because I like making good first impressions for myself. I am not sure, but either way, I just like being open.

One of my favorite shows growing up was Even Stevens. Like the only episode I remember was when ther older 8th graders had an annual day that they would pick on the 7th graders and put them in trash cans and stuff. louis, the main character was a 7th grader and organized all the fellow 7th graders to stick up to the bullies. He was being very inspirational and he led them against the 8th graders. He had a lot of courage with his posse with him. When he stood up to them he said that they were not gonna put up with them this year, the 7th graders cheered for him as he was their leader. But then the 8th grader antagonist of the episode told him that they wern't gonna pick on all the 7th graders, just one. Him. Louis laughed because his he knew his horde of 7th graders wouldn't stand for it, but when he turned around, they were all gone. This made me so angry, it did not have the comical effect on me. It makes me think that the world is selfish.

I also think of a line in one of the songs by one of my favorite artists, bob marley. He says that "is it a sin for a man to condemn all mankind to save his family"? I don't think that people are able to use their abstract reasoning to see the views of others and walk in their shoes. People tend to save their owns kin when given the possible risk of it being damaged. I do not feel anything is more cowardice.

I feel that the 7th graders could have taken on the 8th graders, not in physical combat, but something funnier like negotiating. It would have made me happier at the end of the episode if they were able to all work together to avoid having even one 7th grader put in a trash can.

When these kids decided to choose louis as their leader, they should have followed him till the end. General Patton in ww2 told his troops that individuality is crap. And no man is left behind, and other motivational stuff that in general said that when all these people were going towards their cause, they are one big wave of movement, and this unstoppable force doesn't leave anything behind. The only 7th grader who should have earned the purple badge of honor was louis in this episode.

I have very lucid dreams. My dreams are vivid, and I can swear I actually feel physically what happens in them. I recently had a project about a famous psychologist in AP psychology, and I chose Sigmund Freud. Of course he is mainly known for his thoughts on a persons ego, superego, and id, but my favorite part about learning about him was his dream analysis. He claimed that our dreams were all forms of what we were unable to attain in consciousness. Normally I would have just thrown this into the barrel of thousands of psychological theories that I hear everyday, but I had just had a dream that proved this to be exactly true.

My dream I had was about this girl I had a crush on, and we were watching a movie and i kissed her on the cheek. I had just hung out with her when I was awake, but I knew she had no interest in me. (Scandalous! I know right!) It almost creeped me out how accurate this seemed to me at the time. So my entire life honestly nothing had bewildered my more then dreams. How do these hallucinations happen? Why do they happen? No one had ever given me a straight answer until now. When we are unsatisfied or unable to do something in consciousness, our brain takes over and does it's job in unconscioussly conforting us. With our brain at true rest and 100% satisified, we are now able to sleep with all the physical uncomforts such as having to go to the bathroom and a temperature of a room.

I feel that we are held back by our desires. That is why people such as me have these lucid dreams. Us dreamers have too many desires, that we can only dream of. Is that why we are called dreamers? Not because we are trapped in hallucinations in our sleep, but we are trapped looking at these desires and only thinking of how we want them, and not achieveing them. But for a person who has no desires, do they dream? if they did, what would they dream of? Nothing more than an image of theirselves. Desires and dreams, are they interchangable? I abstractly imagine a world without any desires, what would it be like? What would a dream be called? I don't know these answers, but I can only dream of what they are.

When I seperate myself from something, it tends to make me just want it all that more.

Every time I entered my sister's car, I was always forced to listen to the same crappy music. It was always Dave Matthew's Band or John Mayer. I hated it. I made fun of their voices and made fun of their lyrics. My sister told me how that on facebook there was an application that said that the most favorite band of washington was Dave Matthew's band, and she promised my something; that I would sometime throughout my high school career learn to love them. I laughed at her hypothesis because I knew it wouldn't be true. This music was crap, come on. I liked way better music.

So my sister got a new laptop and I got hers, and all her iTunes was on it. I swear my sister had the entire discography of Dave Matthews band and John Mayer. I did kind of like her taste in music, it was chill and differnt then man because she had all these kinds of bands like oasis and stuff. So I would put it on shuffle and listen to random songs of her catalog. When I landed on Dave or John songs, I never went to the other song. Almost every time these came on I thought of her saying I would like these songs, and how I said I would never listen to them. I liked them now, but only because I was in secrecy. Maybe it was my stubbornness, because I would never admit to her that I listened to them while I blogged and did homework.

To me this was a forbidden pleasure. To the one person it concerned, she was not aware of my diverging in the music that I had told to her face that it was crappy. I don't know why I like it. I still think dave has a bad voice, and I still think john is gay. but I still listen to them. Like I said, i would never listen to them when she was even in the house. I can't help but think that imt is a form of my stubbornness attempting to show guilt and respect for her being right about me wanting to listen to them.

I think this can apply to anything someone tells you about yourself that you stubbornly and embarressingly defy. When someone brings up these things and we push it away verbally, it only comes up to us mentally even stronger. I guess it is that push and pull method, as the further away a pendulum swings away from you, the further it is going to come back.

I decided to cut myself off from video games recently. I went into my account management on world of warcraft, and into the parental settings. I changed the times I am allowed to play to only fridays and weekends. I do like being able to limit my time, but I hope that I don't realize can change it back at anytime. Desperate times call for desperate measures! (cliché line right?) But doing these measures to myself seems to work.

Many times I have cut my mmorpg (massively multiplayer online role playing game) addictions in an impulsive cold turkey manner. Why I do this is because so many times when I have just quit a game I still want to go back and play it, so I do. I am not able to quit things fully on my own. So many times I have resorted to getting my characters "banned." That is when a game master or admin freezes my character or account from being playable anymore. So what I do is diverge in my own guilty pleasures and try to disrupt the enjoyment of others.

I don't know why I really do this, maybe it is a form of going out with a bang? regardless, it is a pretty immature thing that I am accustomed to doing. But that is always following another thing I always do when I force myself to quit cold turkey- give away all my items in a video game. Countless times Ive held stupid trivia and other stuff and gave away all my virtual belongings. All these hours ive spent on some game and what ive earned I just give away for free and then following it, I just commit virtual sacrifice by doing selfish pleasures.

It is almost as if I live in a social balance. First, I do such nice things to random people I have never met before on these games, but when I am out of items to give myself the joy of giving, I immediately follow it with the joy of making other people internet rage. I guess it makes me feel as if I equaled them out. I think I have some growing up to do.

I bring you 2 ideas construed really badly together! Peace in Government and Peace in Mind!

In a country of 300,000 I am a nobody, but let me tell you, in the place of my mind, there is no one more comfortable then myself. I am happy, I am content, I am enthusiastic, I am grateful.
The government is great really for an individual like me. I see a place of anarchy would not benefit anyone, because I feel mob rule would probably overcome all. The government has done a lot to me, it has put me in public schools. It gave me an education, which I feel is more important then anything. Some say ignorance is bliss, but in this situation, I love knowledge. That is not all I have benefited from this. I live carefree, and I could not see myself living any other way. This is not an I LOVE CAPITALISM post, it is a mix of I love sitting in my place in the world post, and how others have gone to such great lengths to put me here. I am content where I am right now in the world. I like having health care, I like being able to go to the doctor when I am sick or when I break an arm. Imagine having to just tough something like that out. It would be terrible!

I never really appreciated how well set up our government was until I learned about it in AP Us History. An Executive branch to tell me what bad guys to hate, a legislative branch to tell the bad guys what not to do, a judicial branch to choose what to do to the bad guys. All these people making my decisions I get to be passive in all of it. You don't see me hopping on the 'I hate terrorists' bandwagon. I sit in my home doing homework and facebooking. ignorance is not bliss, being passive is. In my grey chair I sit on in my basement, content and happy are interchangable.

In a James Bond movie, there was a scene where Bond called the main bad guy insane. The man was attempting to gain world wide coverage of himself as a peacekeeper by starting a false war, and then stopping it. He replied to Bond, "Mr. Bond, the difference between insanity and ingenious is only measured by success."

Alexander the Great took over most of the known world back in the years of 334 BC. Is less then 10 years his perfected battle technique helped him conquer lands beyond lands, and went down into history as one of the most ingenious conquerors of all history.

Adolf Hitler is considered a sick and insane tyrant whose attempts to take over the world and create his master race doomed the memories of him in the future as a disgusting German. He is known by his failure and loss at the battle of the bulge where the Nazi Party was forced to resign and admit defeat.

Alexander and Hitler were both leaders and led their forces through many military victories, but Hitler's history was ended with a loss and a suicide, but Alexanders was finalized by an unknown illness, presumed the common flu. The History books wrote one as a cowards death, and the other the unfair fall of a champion. These history books are all full of opinions and governments words. If books are forced to be burned and rewritten, no one knows what was in the old ones. The new ones are known as history.

edit;:
That is all old, and it is history. We do not live in the past, we live right now, in the present. We must write our own history. There is a story to everyone that is written on the inside. People may burn the past, but no one can burn the present or future. This is surely a tangent, but I had a change of heart. Who cares about the past? Everything someone has ever done in their life as lead up to where they are now, so as I see it is that everything you have ever done is not as important as where you are right now as you read this blog. Everything is influential. A butterfly effect is that a butterflys wings can cause a typhoon across the world, or whatever. I don't really know, but I do think everything we do affects everything else we do. All we have is our choices, and there is nothing I believe stronger than that. We write our own history because we are always living in the moment. And that is all for my caffeine induced rambling tangent.

Why would someone such as myself do work without pay? Because I am a volunteer. I use my own time to benefit others.

With my own time given towards these causes, the only gratitude I can achieve is a sense of selfgratitude. The concept of volunteering is destroyed with a reward of something with physical value, but how far does this definition run? It cannot run there and back from mental gratitude to physical. If someone buys someones your lunch for the laborous unpaid hours of work that they have given, is it still considered volunteering? And how broad can this concept go? If a man spends many hours a day working for such little pay in no ones eyes he is considered a volunteer.

So why do we volunteer? It seems easy enough to say because we feel the need to use our time to benefit others, but why would we do this? I think it is because deep down in all humans, we have this need to feel good about ourselves.

Everyone likes to feel good, it is in our nature. How we acquire this feeling is different for everyone. We all gain these warm fuzzy feelings in different ways. I guess some people just have an unnatural unspoken association with others, that we are able to gain their feelings. We live off their happiness and in return we give out more happiness. That is why we volunteer.

Railroad Problem

While editing my opinion post I spoke about psychology. It reminded me of a classic psychology debate, the railroad problem.

A train is moving down the tracks at an unstoppable speed. There are 4 railroad workers on the track that are going to be unknowingly killed by the train. But you have the option of pulling a switch that moves the trains tracks that it only kills one person. What would you do?

I had my answer to this easily, pull the switch.




Flickr.com

My first justification for this was a simple math problem. 4 is greater then 1. This point is not easy to make at all because it requires you to make the barbaric thought that all these lives are equal, but when can one persons life be compared to others? Sometimes a thought that if you personally knew the person that was alone and to be killed if you pulled the switch, would you? Then as you see it the one person would have more value to you, I do not know if I would still pull it.

When I was arguing my points to people of the other view, a common trend came from them, saying that they would leave and choose not to pull it. It was not their choice to make decisions about others lives, and out of sight, out of mind. I had to decline the thought of just running away. I remembered a movie I had just recently watched and at the climax when the hero was going to run away, the heroin reminded him that "You are the one who has the power to do and change something, sometimes you can't run away rely on others to do it" (this was from Team America, World Police, I learn my morals from the creators of South Park). When the power is in our hands to change something for the better, we must do it. But again this goes down to the basics of the problem to what is better.

This is not an easy problem to counter and fight for my side because the psychology of someones nurture really affects their decision, like most opinions. I just feel that being able to get 4 hugs and hearing thank you for saving my life, 4 times rather then once it justification alone.

No longer are we competing with the people of our backyard. We are now setting our sights on a new horizon, the whole world. It is obvious to say that there is now a global market. I feel that something more important then health care, more important then global warming, is our education.

When I was talking to a teacher about my thoughts on the subject, he started to get into global education. How other parts of the world not everyone has the privilege to attend school and get an education. So why do kids feel they are being forced to sit in school? I wonder why kids that do not want to be at school should be required to stay here. I just imagine how all these funds being essentially wasted on these individuals could be rewired into helping further the education of someone like myself. I just think that if people do not wish to be at school to learn, they shouldn't come.

The most vital part to our education is our the teachers. I feel being a teacher should be one of the most prestigious jobs imaginable. One time someone asked why doctors get paid so much, and I heard someone respond that 'It is such a high paying job because it is such an important profession that is vital to our lives, and in order to keep up with the changing times, and to only have the most skilled workers in the area." I feel the same principles should apply to being a teacher. I have had unskilled teachers, but also I have had fantastic teachers. Keeping a better eye on all the teachers to sort out the good from bad is important in my view. I just feel a lot of this rewireing funds or even just more funds to public education is so important. I think the teacher job should be more sought-after profession where only the best survive so it reflects on us students directly.

It has been said that the amount of students in america is roughly equal to the amount of honor students in India. This fact alone terrifys me. I feel that if we are able to specialize the educations of our individual students we would be able to actually contribute to the technological and philosophical expansions of the future. In order to stay inpar with these forign affairs, we need to stay at their level or even past it.