I was placed in the middle of a heated dispute this summer. To my left was a boy who explained to the table that his brother was gay and that he had been his entire life. To my right was a boots-wearen Texan who clearly thought gay people were not born with these thoughts. I wasn't about to get in the middle of this world war 3 of arguments, but I did decide to throw in one comment, "What you are both saying to each other are just your own opinions." Of course this momentarily made them simultaneously unite against me saying that their sides were fact and not opinion, and their opponents thoughts were false, incorrect, and clearly not supported by any facts as theirs was. I feel that we all are entitled to our own opinion and no matter what the common 'other' opinions are, an opinion can not be false.

We are nurtured into our opinions throughout our life's experiences. It makes sense that we would often feel very strongly about them, and even try to sway others with these. This is where the term Argument comes in. The goal of an argument is to have your opponent conform to your opinions so we can live in peace knowing they will be on your side when you are forcing the thoughts on someone else.

Everyday in psychology class when we learn I am thinking, "How much of this can be true, and how much is theory?" Of course that is the basic argument of psychology, but when is the line of theory vs. fact drawn? Subjects such as patriotism were once just an opinion that was argued against others to sway their loyalist views in order to back up their cause. Everything we see was once saw from the views of someone else and passed down onto us.

Orbital Alignments don't mean crap

I am a Scorpio. For the majority of my life it didn't matter and I didn't even care. For a while last year, I would read my horoscope everyday. It would determine my entire day because I honestly believed everything some random paragraph of text told me. If it told me that I was going to have a bad day of love, I went to school feeling lonely and avoided love. It was a time in my life when I was looking for guidance and I found it in a paragraph online.

I did find the guidance I was looking for, but it was not on some random hippy website, it was in myself. Some crappy random orbital alignment was not going to help me flirt with a cute girl. I needed to make the decisions myself and learn from them, not base my attitude off my horoscope.

When someone needs to listen to how to live their life from someone else, it could never be the most effective method they give. We all need to make our own decisions, and make our own life path. One of my favorite things I ever heard is, "Take my advice, don't take anyone's advice ever and make up your own."

My addiction to crack.. in CD rom form.

I have an addiction. I self diagnosed this addiction. It takes a told on my health, my social status, and my relation to my family, so it is very serious. Over eleven million other people in the world also suffer from this. My addiction is to world of warcraft. I've been an addict now for almost 4 years. Although I joke about it, there are some honest signs of addiction to it.

Addiction- the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming (dictionary.com)

I play world of warcraft... a lot. Most likely I play every single day. The game is set up in such a way that the more you play it, the stronger of a character you become. There are quests that I am only able to do once per day, and doing these benefits my character as I acquire in game currency or a token of some kind that when I save up enough tokens I am able to spend them on shoulder plates with stronger stats. Everyone always wants to stay on top, and falling behind is always a risk.

I'm pretty much addicted, but some people use WoW like crack. A funny thing I saw once was on one of the world's best guild's websites, (planet earth.. not world of warcraft, and yes, there are world leading wow players) they had a banner on the top that said, "If you are going to try to apply to our guild, you better not have a job or a girlfriend." I was once in an "intense raiding guild". Most likely 5 or 6 nights a week we raided. 24 other people were just as addicted to me or even more addicted. Other people on the server we played on were jealous of our accomplishments. But accomplishments of what? Not going outside for 6 nights a week? I thought it was hell, and I did it for 2 months or more, I can't remember. I was demoted in the guild for not showing up to a 'progression raid' (when actually, I was just an hour late or two). I quit the guild out of rage and I was fed up with all that playing.

I don't know if it has hurt my work ethic, but I think it has stunted its progression. A few nights ago I got home at 9 from a college faire, and I did study for 30 minutes for my AP US quiz the next day, but I got pretty bored and so I logged on. Needless to say, I got an F on my quiz. It makes me wonder if I did not have access to this wow.exe file I would work on my work ethic. I have multiple times in the past deleted the game, even for a few months at a time. But I always end up relapsing again and redownloading it.

The main symptome of this addiction is boredom. Extreme boredom. It is almost pathetic just how bored I become when I do not have access to internet. My mind goes down the list of what to do..
1. World of warcraft
2. X box
3. Warcraft III
4. Youtube
5..... i do not have a long list but all these include internet. I almost go crazy it feels like when I don't have access to my precious bliss that is the internet. Isn't that was the definition of addiction was? Being enslaved to a habit, that habit is opening that wow.exe file and spending my time on it.

"So wait, does that mean....."

Everyday I have to experience the same thing. Someone always has to ask a question that I would consider obvious. I don't understand why someone would need to ask a question to a teacher when if they simply put A and B together they could answer their own question. I have realized that I have a skill some others do not have, a common sense.



friggenrandom.com
I feel like superman, that is if superman could realize common correlations between variables


I have fun trying to figure things out, but not so much math problems. I like to attempt to figure out riddles or even my favorite subject, people. I feel my 6th sense gives me a xray vision that enables me to be able to see through a wall that is, in all ways, blocking all of our other senses from passing. I am able to use my 5 senses to 'read' people. I see their body movements, in order to see if they fidget when I bring up a topic. I listen to their voice, because if I listen for something anything in any other tone than their regular tone. I interpret all these signs to convey what they are feeling at that moment. Whether a girl is trying to flirt with me, or someone is attempting to intimidate me, I can easily understand what they are trying to do. I call it common sense.

I do not understand why people are so blind to this sense. I do not understand why they cannot assume what is on the next page. Using current knowledge to assume future knowledge is what I define common sense as. Some may consider common sense as understanding knowledge and knowing basic principles, but it does go much further than that. Everyone should have the ability to go beyond plain thinking, and use logical thinking to create new thoughts. These new thoughts that I have explained are what I consider common sense. They are not creativity, nor are they just random sporadic thoughts. We all have these plain vanilla thoughts, but putting those A and B thoughts together and even maybe a C thought is common sense.

Smeg

So I was blog browseing last night and I came to a halorious blog, Mikey J in the Morning. He had the great idea of doing a random article on Wikipedia and blogging about it. It was halorious how he got some random chemicle formula that made no sense so he made sense out of it by useing the knowledge he had, as he concluded that in gangster hospitals they serve sugar.

So I think I should do this. My word is.....

Smeg (vulgarism)

Apparently the word Smeg was made popular by some british comedy show that would use the word smeg to replace vulgar words such as curse words, by inventing their own word. They would say stuff like 'you smeghead' or 'you're such a smeg'.

Everyone experiences vulgar vocabulary in middle school and high school, as it is unavoidable. Every I have succumbed to the level of these words. It makes me think how my mom always told me that "People who use bad words only use them because they don't have a broad enough vocabulary to substitute them for other words." Only recently I've start to narrow my vocab into less 'smeg' terms. I was around a guy who used smeg in almost every sentence it seemed. When we were working together he would say really rude things like "thats a smeg idea" or "wow you are really smeg". And I was really, really offended. It was the first time ever in my life I had been offended by noises. I even called him out for it by saying "Do you really need to use smeg in every sentence?" And he responded "smeg yeah". This again offended me. Why could he not see how it was not acceptable by me to talk like that? I understood, no one around him had ever called him out on it. Kids learn from an early age that it is not polite to tell other people what we think is wrong with that, so the kids let them use all the language they want and because of that we hear one person use smeg so much, that we use smeg ourselves.

I agree by what my mom says by saying these people don't have a wide vocab. The problem isn't with themselves though, it is with everyone else. No one calls them out for it, so when I call someone out for useing smeg makes me look like a smeghead. We just need a place for people like me who are opposed to the use of smeg and all smegusers are banned from. So I guess for now I'll just listen to smeg.

He uses buckets as accessories

Normally I wouldn't blog about something like this, but I feel it is necessary because I had such a good time. With my friend we went to the buckethead concert. He is this tall skinny creepy guy who wears a mask and a KFC bucket on his head.

downtownmusic.net
He is even cooler looking in person

The man is a beast at guitar. He goes on the stage and shreds his guitar for about an hour and a half. I moshed my way up to the front so I was pretty much in the front row. My favorite part (besides not being able to hear for two days) was watching him move his fingers. He was in some guitar magazine as one of the worlds best guitarists and shredders. He was amazing.

It made me wonder how someone could be so skilled in one craft. They devote their life to one instrument or something. Am I going to have to do that? I am figuring that I am going to have to do something like business or something lame in the same steps of my father. Trying to compare these two adults is tough. A high respected business man to a mask wearing guitarist. In a way they are the same. I don't know which path I am going to follow.

It scares me that after college or even highschool I will need to find this dedication to something. All through my life so far it has been 'just whatever' and 'i'll start over' but that phase is coming to an end soon in my life. I feel like there is little time left in the 'I still have time to reinvent myself phase'. To get places you can't be mediocre at everything you do, you need to excell in something. You don't see people starting their posts with pictures of Bill Gates saying "Man he is a beast at entrepeneurship" but he really is. I don't even know what is more acceptable today, being a famous celebrity or a top of the food chain businessman. I hear all the gossip about Kanye but I don't hear about all the other stuff going on in the world. The world is obsessed with crazy rapper and guitarists and not by what it should be obsessed with. I think I'm diving into the waters of crazy politicians claiming what's wrong with America and getting a little sidetracked.

This concert wasn't about getting handed an opened beer (which i shouldn't have drank) or all the big sweaty bearded guys around me, or even listening to Buckethead himself shred on the guitar, it was about my future. Am I going to be on the stage one day with some kid staring at my fingers? Or am I going to be the one who managed the rock band's tour? Life is like a big scary hallway that seems to get wider and narrower at the same time.

Dances (not the running man)

Kennedy Homecoming. One of the days of the school year where we get to look nice and sophisticated and go out to eat at a nice restaurants, the boys try to act like gentlemen, and the girls giggle as the boys open the doors for them. Only later as the night goes on that the sophistication turns into mass grinding and mass sweaty bodies all too close to each other.

Every school dance i've gone to I had a date. Almost every single time weeks before the dances I was apprehensive to who I was going to go with. "Well I need someone who is fun.. someone who can dance... someone who I want to go out to eat with... someone who is compatible with who i want to go out to eat with..." all that jazz was incorporated into who i was going to ask. Really this is all superfluous (that is one of my favorite words). I never regretted asking who I asked to the dance, I just regretted asking a girl in general. I feel an obligation towards this person and they probably feel the same way towards me. I can't just leave her cause I'm getting bored of watching a mass of sweaty people moving in unison, I have to stay until the end when it is acceptable to leave. This makes me think that I would have enjoyed not going with a date. Allthough this sounds bullet proof, I have at least one reason why it isn't workable. How can I answer the question, "Who are you going to homecoming with?"

I feel bad for girls that really want dates but no one asks them. My mom tried to hook me up with a date to another school dance (yeah, my mom, really.) because all the young girls friends had dates and she didn't. Her mom and my mom joined forces against me and tried to get me to go with her. I said no (not to the girl, to my mom). The reason why I think I can leave someone hanging like that is because you should not be taught that you should be forced to go with someone who you see once a year rather then go with no one. It is more important to realize you don't need a date, rather then be someones pity date, to be blunt.

All the high school dances are the same to me, except for olive garden or biaggis, and photo pose A or photo pose B.

Facebook Creeping

Almost every single time I open firefox, I do the same thing. I click on my Facebook quicklink at the top of my screen and log in. It is almost a subconscious response I have. Really Facebook is a great thing, keeping in touch with friends, all the great social aspects of it. We all have a facebook, so you know what it can do. But one thing that usually comes up as a joke is an almost "creepy" matter- Facebook Creepin'.

Facebook Creep (verb) - "to look up persons whom you are not related or affiliated with and/or have no intention of being friends with in real life because of some amount of potential weirdness, hotness, lameness or other limiting factor" (urbandictionary.com, one of my favorites)

Even I have constantly pressed the right arrow on my keypad to skip through pictures of people I know or sometimes hardly even know. It seems we are always interested in other peoples lives. They say that every time you get your photo taken, it takes some of your soul, so some of my facebook friends must have little to nothing left of their soul, because their photo counts have surpassed even 2000. This is the worst to facebook creep, because its always just a few girls taking random pictures of themselves usually just next to each other making a stupid face. It is only because they feel the need to make their picture count even higher.
What I consider scary (and I'm sure moms do also) is actual internet stalkers. (a couple steps above facebook creepin') . What facebook has done is just made it a thousand times easier to do. You can view over 2000 pictures of a single person sometimes. Even when they decide to show it, you can see their address, phone numbers, school, and much much more! And who is to say that looking through hundreds of pictures of the same person is ok? Facebook allows us to do that now.
One of my other thoughts about Facebook are some of the things people upload onto it. What I was taught was that if something wasn't appropiate infront of your grandma, you shouldn't be doing it... apparently some people have some scandelous grandmas. Mostly when girls put their profile picture as something revealing. I do always laugh at the guys who are like 'damn girl u so fine in dat bikini' and then her responding "oh hahaha thx~~<3"But it does bring up some 'inappropriate names' to match their 'inappropriate picture' which I personally think fits just fine. They are also showing off to all the stalkers because when you set a picture of yourself to a profile picture almost anyone can see it. They are just baiting themselves as targets to these creepers.

Just like in that essay by Montaigne- "We can only misuse good things"

Handshakes, Seperation, and Conformity

Over the summer I attended a business and entrepeneur camp type of deal at Stanford University in California. I did learn a ton about of business and starting a business, but meeting the kids at the camp was even more fun. The teens here were much more mature then you find at a typical highschool (which I think was due to the high entrance fee). The first two days was good because it was everyone saying "Hello, I'm John. Nice to meet you!" Followed by a handshake. The amount of weak handshakes I got was staggering. It made me think that no matter how confident you are, a weak handshake can totally destroy that swagger you are giving off.
I noticed a interest start to form between two of my group members. (really the whole group did.. we all joked about how they were always together). It wasn't all positive talk. None of us liked this guy because he was a too cool for school boarding school kid who really flaunted his money and thought he was better then us. We devised a plan for the bus ride to Yahoo Inc. One of the loudest talkers in the group was going to distract him about our business plan after the girl had gotten on the bus, and we were going to surround her so he wouldn't be able to sit by her. The plan worked perfectly and he sat alone near the front of the bus. Later on in the week she realized our group dislike for this guy she had been always walking with and chatting to. She started to seperate herself from him, such as saying things like "Oh look whose coming to sit by us" at lunch and "Why does he always come and walk by me?"
I'm not going to try to hint what was happening like in those essays we've been reading. She was changing her own thoughts to the same as the majority of the people around her.
Why do the maturest of kids I've ever met still fall into the catagory of immature? Because I don't think this is a matter of maturity. I am sure there are adults whom have done the exact same thing. I once saw a scientific experiment by Solomon Asch which had 5 people in a room and they would show them a picture. The picture had a line on it with 3 lines next to it, one the same length, and the other two obviously a different length. But the part that made it interesting was that 4 of the 5 people were not actually in the experiment, but were actors that on purpose gave the wrong answer. At least 25% of all the people that were tested gave at least one wrong answer because the rest of the people were.
So why do these people do this? Too be honest I do not know. I'm no psychologist, I just think that they think they might just hurt the other persons hand.

You get the best of both worlds

I play video games. I play lots. It's one true and only past time. I play them all; from World of Warcraft to Grand Theft Auto, to Halo. When I was telling my mom that the release date of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 comes out on November 10th, she asked me how I knew a fact like that. It was hard to explain to her, but video games are my life. I am in the 'gamer world'. The gamer world is a state of mind, because I just am always interested in something that allows me to control with my fingers and will put me in a virtual world of my own.
I am sure an outsider of my world would think that this 'gamer world' is actually only a computer or a xbox in a basement, but it is much more then that. It is distant lands where I can gather other forces in order to slay a giant dragon 200 times my size. Something like this requires a group of these 'gamers'. Common morals lye between these warriors, we understand it cannot be done alone. 'In real life' the only place we can see cooperation like this is on the news. It is always being done on these 'fake lives'.
'Fake lives' is a wrong term to consider these lives. It is not just some computer chips that you control, it is a three dimensional reality. I would not even go as far to say it is a fake reality, but a second reality.
Many times I have been asked the question, "Why do you waste your life on that game?" It's rather simple really, I choose to partake in a second life. "What do you gain from playing that?" This ones a little tougher to answer. I gain nothing really, but let me tell you what a DO gain. My character becomes more skilled, stronger, a more prestigious warrior of his city. "Why don't you just learn something like an instrument?" I could, but my swat team is counting on me to help them disarm the bomb the terrorists planted.
Living these two realities is not always easy. A balance must be formed between the two. While I must attend school, I feel an obligation to help those other 39 warriors slay that dragon. The most obvious way a nongamer would think is that, homework should come first, the dragon can wait. That is not the case sometimes, because when the infestation zombie survivors are not going to survive until the helicopter comes, it appears that homework can wait until after. That is where the balance comes in, and yes, it is sometimes hard to do. I mostly figure out when I am not doing one, I am forced to focus on the other. It tends to work for me.
I think I am lucky to live the lives I do. I know the amount of days I've spent on my second life, and I don't think I've wasted any of them not being in my first life.
Oh you were at football practice? While you were doing that the Titans who created the world I live in sent an observer down to judge whether or not the world was worth having life on, and I was forced to destroy him to save all mankind.

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