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.




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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.