Technologically-Challenged Parents

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Technologically-Challenged Parents

                When I was in seventh grade, I started asking my mom and dad if they would consider adding texting to our cell phone service.  Every time, I was instantly shot down with a firm “No!” and given endless reasons why not.  First of all, they said, it is a waste of five dollars a month that we don’t need in any way.  Second, it encourages social isolation.  Third, it is annoying for the adults and too slow.  Fourth, it would give you arthritis in your thumbs.  Fifth, it would make our grades suffer.  Sixth, it would lead to drugs and alcohol.  The list goes on and on.  However, when they finally gave in and accepted texting, they quickly realized how great it is, and now they constantly rave about how they should have gotten it earlier.

                My mom especially loves texting, because it is the fastest way to communicate with a teenager, it is very quick and convenient, you don’t have to talk at length with people that you are trying to deliver a short message to, you don’t have to worry about disturbing a silence with a phone call, bad service doesn’t garble letters like it does spoken words, on and on and on.  However, ever since the whole smartphone with internet thing came about, I have been trying to convince them that this is another necessary addition to our cell phone service.  Again, I have always been shot down, because it was too expensive and all the same reasons they shot down texting.  I tried to tell them that they would finally get it and would love it just as much as they loved texting, but they just wouldn’t hear it.  Now, they have finally warmed up to the idea, and three of us will be getting iPhones within the next month, and my dad will when his contract is up. 

                My mom is raving about how great it is going to be before we have even gotten them, just like texting.  I swear, parents just don’t understand technology.  They sarcastically talk about how they are so stupid and need the kids to figure out all the technology, but it really is true.  They truly don’t understand their slowness and tardiness with the new great technology.  I will admit that having internet on a cell phone at this point is still a bit excessive, but as most people do now, they expect you to have it too, and it will probably become more or less a necessity within a short period of time.

Back to Kindergarten

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Back to Kindergarten

                I am currently enrolled in six AP classes, participate in marching band, have a decent social life, and have numerous other activities that don’t come to mind at the moment.  I’m generally not opposed to doing hard work, and can do it under stress and extremely limited time.  But for this reason, I have little patience for homework ‘projects’ that are basically art projects that the average second grader could construct.  They are a waste of my time, and I have yet to find any benefit that comes along with them. 

                For my AP Psychology class, I have to somehow build a model of the brain.  This isn’t totally useless, because it will probably make me think a little bit about the different parts of the brain and what not.  My problem with this assignment is that half of the points on the grading criteria are based on ‘creativity’ and ‘colorfulness.’  I will have you know that I successfully graduated from kindergarten in one year; isn’t that enough of this kind of nonsense to last me my whole life?  It is these kinds of major time-consuming projects that really get on my nerves.

                Another, more infuriating example of this kind of assignment that comes to mind was last year in my tenth grade language arts class, in which I had to make a giant collage of words and images cut out of magazine pages that I thought ‘described’ me.  If you can’t already tell, I have no tolerance for this crap, and my mom generously offered to do it for me.  I’m not going to turn down that great of an offer.  In contrast to the brain model project, this one truly had no purpose or benefit to me in any way. 

                In conclusion, I personally believe that I go to school to learn a few relevant facts, in addition to learning ‘how to learn’ in preparation for college and the rest of my life.  If I wanted to learn how to color, draw and be artistically creative, I would go to some kind of private art school.  However, since this isn’t what I desire, I just go to a normal public high school.  I would much appreciate if my homework were limited to things that have some use in my learning, and will be advantageous to me in the long run.

Adventures at Walmart

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Adventures at Walmart

                Earlier tonight, I went to Walmart to buy some supplies in order to make a model brain for AP Psychology.  At first, I had imagined that I would get a styrofoam head and shoulders, and then cut open the head and somehow make a brain to put inside.  However, these apparently don’t exist, so I decided I would settle for a plain styrofoam ball, but this also didn’t work out, because there weren’t any of reasonable size to represent a head.  In the end, I bought six small tubs of play-doh to mold the brain by hand.

                During the time between taking the play-doh off the shelf and getting back into the car, I developed a hypothesis as to why some people are tempted to shoplift.  I had always thought that these people had backwards morals, thought they would get away with it, had a serious shortage of cash, and such.  Many people probably do steal for these reasons, but tonight I learned another possible reason, and that is lack of unlimited patience.  It was only about 7:30, and as Walmart is a twenty-four-hour store anyway, there was no reason behind their excessive slowness.

                The five or six open checkout lanes in the entire store were totally packed, so my mom and I went to one of the two open self-checkout lanes.  There were about eight in the area, but God forbid one of those lazy-ass workers would have to go through the labor of opening another.  Everyone knows that those self-checkout machines are pieces of trash that need constant maintenance and never work without assistance, and this particular employee was taking full advantage of it. 

                There were two half-naked riff-raff stoners in front of us, and they literally needed help after scanning each one of their fifty to sixty items.  This female employee seized her opportunity to flirt with them during each one of these encounters, which I wouldn’t have even noticed if my mom hadn’t pointed it out to me.  She also brought up another great point.  The comment she made was only half-sarcastic:  “This is the reason why people steal.”  Just the amount of time wasted in line to purchase goods may be enough of a reason for some people to justify their shoplifting.  The sad thing is that I don’t blame them.  It was absolutely excruciating.  To top it off, once it was finally our turn, the girl gave us rolled her eyes and gave us nothing but sass when the machine acted up for us.

Family Discipline Dilemma

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Family Discipline Dilemma

                A couple of weeks ago, my dad put a punishment on my sister for not getting her work done.  However, she isn’t the only one that is ending up being punished.  My mom, my sister and I are all off our contracts for our phones, and would all like to get the new iPhone 5.  However, since my sister has been behind on her schoolwork, my dad told her that she doesn’t get a new phone until she catches up on all her work and demonstrates that she can get it done on a regular basis for a month.  He then set the date in stone, October 31^st.  Since she doesn’t get a phone, we all don’t get our phones, because we need to buy them all together in order to save anywhere up to one hundred dollars.  Therefore, we are all being punished for my sister’s problem.

                My sister finally got caught up with all her work today, and normally my dad would be happy enough and lighten the punishment almost to nothing.  However, he is very serious this time, and won’t budge.  My first thought was, ‘damnit, _______, why can’t you just get your freaking crap done?’  Then, I grew indignant toward my dad, who invented this whole stupid deal.  Keep in mind that I haven’t said anything yet.  To any normal person, this would be an obvious total burn to my mom and me, who aren’t involved in the situation.  My dad isn’t punishing us on purpose, but that’s just the way it worked out, because of Verizon’s discount when buying numerous phones at once.

                Most teenagers would explode at this unjustified catastrophe, quickly suggesting that my sister should pay the difference that we would have paid if we all got our phones together, so that my mom and I could get our phones immediately.  But let’s be reasonable here.  My sister has developed this bad habit of not getting her crap done, and realistically, she needs this.  I ask myself how much I really need this phone, and it’s not very much.  It definitely isn’t going to kill me to wait another four or five weeks.  And maybe this will get through to my sister and break her bad habit of extreme procrastination to the point of lateness.  Any normal kid in my situation would be furious, but I’m not a normal kid.  Maybe I should just wait this out.

Pinyin

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Pinyin

                Most people look at a language such as Chinese or Japanese and wonder how you would type characters of these languages into a computer.  Luckily, I have studied Chinese for three years, and can answer this question, for Chinese at least.  Common belief is that in these countries, there are giant keyboards that consist of every possible character in the language, but this is definitely not the case.  The most common input method for Mandarin Chinese is Pinyin, pronounced peen-yeen.  It directly translates to ‘spell sound.’  Basically, it uses English letters to spell out how the Chinese words sound, with some letters assigned different sounds that aren’t really used in English or other European languages.  When a word is typed in, a box with characters that correspond to that sound pops up, and one must select the correct character he/she intends to use.  Again, this is the most common input method, and is the method taught at most schools around the world. 

                Pinyin is a phonetic-based input method, meaning that it uses sounds to input characters.  There are at least ten other phonetic-based systems like this.  Phonetic-based methods are easy to learn, but limit speed, as the correct character must constantly be selected after each character.  However, there are also dozens of stroke-based or shape-based input methods, which assign each of the different strokes or radicals to keys on the English keyboard, and these are sequentially typed to literally ‘write’ the word, in a sense.  Although these methods are more difficult and take more time to learn, people that use them are much faster than those who use phonetic-based methods.  The most common stroke-based Chinese input method is called Wubi, pronounced woo-bee.  I would assume that Japanese and Korean input methods are similar to the Chinese methods.

                There are a few different ways to gain the ability to use Pinyin or other systems onto your computer.  First of all, all Windows computers come with CDs that contain software to install East Asian, Arabic, and many other character-using languages onto your computer.  Macintosh computers probably have a way to install this software also, but I am not familiar with them.  Also, there are hundreds of websites on the internet where you can type in Pinyin, and it will display characters which you copy-and-paste wherever you desire.  Basically, if you have internet, you can type in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, or any language you wish.

Movies in Schools

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Movies in Schools

                Yesterday, we had two marching band competitions.  I know you automatically think we’re not cool, but get over yourself, because we’re a lot cooler than you think.  Anyway, the second competition was two hours away, so we took three charter buses to get there.  People can bring movies for us on the way, and we vote on which one(s) we want to watch.  Last weekend, we watched the entire first season of the Big Bang Theory.  However, this week, someone brought The Hunger Games, and one of our directors said we couldn’t watch it because it was too violent.  Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, on the other hand, was fine.  She obviously hasn’t seen either of these movies within her period of memory, so we were subjected to her whimsical assumptions.

                The Hunger Games was made so that a considerable amount of the violence present in the books was not shown, because they wanted it to be PG-13, as most people reading the book were from junior high through college, and if it were rated R, many possible viewers would be turned away.  There is still some violence, but nothing you wouldn’t see if you were leisurely flipping through the channels on regular TV.  Transformers, if you don’t know, is constant violence and clashing of metallic robots, and also happens to be one of the loudest movies I have ever seen.  It is also rated PG-13, but in its explanation, it warns about violence and crude and sexual content.  It is safe to assume that virtually every high school kid has seen movies that are more ‘unsuitable’ than this, and just about any movie that someone brings would be fine for us to watch on the bus.

                Our director is overall a good lady, and very skilled at her job, but in my personal opinion, she isn’t familiar enough with popular movies to make judgments about what we can and can’t watch.  She would be better off just asking a few of the parents what is okay.  Literally everyone on our bus was screaming and chanting for Hunger Games, and started booing when one of those poor moms went against their will and put in Transformers.  Hardly anyone stayed awake to watch it.  I just think that Michelle Obama is influencing our lives enough with this new healthy food nonsense at lunch, and that the rules for movies and films in schools and school activities need to be lessened.

No Cheating

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No Cheating

                The media and thousands of food companies have convinced the public that it is possible to be a healthy person and to obtain all necessary nutrients from a few little trick foods and products.  However, the statistics they use to back up their data are almost always misleading and flawed, and therefore shouldn’t be blindly believed.  Three examples of this I will discuss are hand sanitizers, multivitamins, and cereal.

                First of all, hand sanitizers, for all we know, could lead to the extinction of mankind.  Some people use hand sanitizer in a religious manner, believing that all of the germs on their hands will magically die and not be a threat to them.  This is definitely not the case.  Although most hand sanitizers claim to kill 99.99% of germs, in reality, they only kill about 30-40% at their peak performance.  Also, since bacteria reproduce so quickly and easily, the few individual bacteria that are resistant to the active ingredient in the hand sanitizer will thrive, and we will soon have billions of bacteria on our hands against which our sacred hand sanitizer is useless.  This concept also applies to the overuse of antibiotics, so within the next 20-30 years, we may have no way to fight against an epidemic, as all of our drugs have been rendered worthless by our abuse of them.

                Secondly, multivitamins aren’t really all that they are cracked up to be.  While they technically contain much more of our vital nutrients than we need per day, we don’t know enough about how these nutrients and vitamins are absorbed into the body to determine whether or not we are actually getting the benefit.  Therefore, as Sheldon in the Big Bang Theory says, we may be just paying for a lot of very expensive urine!

                Lastly, cereal.  While dozens of cereal brands boast that they contain 12+ essential vitamins and minerals, the reality is that these too cannot be used by the body.  For example, a given cereal brand may claim to contain 200% daily value of iron.  However, this iron comes from metal shavings that are mixed into the cereal, and this form of iron cannot be absorbed and used by the body.  Therefore, this iron is just transported out of our body, with no benefit to us. 

                In conclusion, there is no way to cheat nature in this regard, and the only way to stay healthy and obtain all the needed nutrients is to eat a balanced diet with plenty of fruits and vegetables and to exercise regularly, as our ancestors have been doing for tens of thousands of years.

Capital Punishment

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Capital Punishment

                In my opinion, the strong arguments for imposing the death penalty outnumber the arguments against it.  For starters, it is a good mental threat to prevent people from committing horrible crimes such as murder.  Also, it helps with the prison overcrowding problem, as people that would otherwise stay there for the rest of their lives would just be removed.  As these felonies are often very easy to prove to a jury, these terrible people would no longer be a part of society, giving the public some peace of mind.

                I recently visited the department of corrections in my town in a youth leadership program, and the district attorneys explained to us that there are so many crimes committed every day that many criminals are given shortened sentences and early departure from prison in order to have enough space.  As there are budget cuts in almost every company and program throughout the country, most cities and communities cannot afford to build more housing for criminals.  As some are doomed to prison for life, many of them would rather just have their life ended than to spend their miserable existence in prison.

                Some people are just so crazy that it wouldn’t make a difference, but most people would be very quickly scared out of committing a crime if they knew that death would be a possible consequence.  Primitive as they may seem, executions have always been a warning to society to follow the rules and behave.  This is still the case today in places where capital punishment is legal.  Also, the current method of death penalty, the lethal injection, is hardly unconstitutional and has been ruled to be in sync with the right against cruel and unusual punishment in the Constitution. 

                Despite the numerous good arguments in favor of capital punishment, there is one thing that keeps me from agreeing with it.  This is the fact that if the death penalty were legalized, an innocent person would be executed sooner or later.  Taking the life of a person that has been wrongly accused of a crime is totally unacceptable, and I believe that this is enough of a reason to disallow the death penalty.  Also, I don’t think that humans should be able to decide whether someone deserves to die.  For these reasons, I am against the death penalty, as I want it to be impossible for an innocent person to be executed unjustly.

Curiosity Killed the Cat

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Curiosity Killed the Cat

                I’ve heard many people say, “I’ve never broken a bone before.  Sometimes, I just want to so I can see what it feels like.”  I can tell you right now.  It feels terrible, and it is one of the most annoying things that could ever happen to you.  About six weeks ago, I flipped off my bike and broke my radius near the wrist, and the end broke off and dislocated to the bottom of my wrist.  I will have my cast taken off in three days, and it’s going to be comparable to getting braces off, if you’ve ever experienced that. 

                In my opinion, the worst part of having a broken bone is taking showers.  You basically have two options.  The first is to wrap a garbage bag around the casted area and use duct tape to make sure no water will leak in.  The second is to buy one of these bags with a plastic ring and rubber that squeezes around your arm and practically cuts off your circulation.  I used the second option.  The biggest problem is that it is hard to reach the shoulder and arm opposite of your broken arm, so it is very difficult to wash it and to dry it off.  I’m sure that taking a shower with a broken leg couldn’t be very exciting either.

                Before I broke my arm, I didn’t know that bone fractures very often cause permanent distortion to the bone.  The doctor told me that he had a hard time deciding whether to put a metal plate in my arm, or to just move the bone back into place and hope that I had enough growth left for it to heal back together.  We ended up not putting in the metal plate, and I am very fortunate that my bone has grown back extremely well.  One of my classmates told me the other day that he broke his arm, and it never really grew back right, so now his arm swells up when he uses it too much.  I’ve also sat next to a guy in Municipal Band that broke his arm in a similar way that I did when he was twenty-seven, and he has a metal plate in his arm, and has some restricted motion.

                Anyway, breaking bones is not nearly as fun as it looks, and I will do everything in my power to never break a bone again.  If you wonder what it’s like, just keep wondering.  If you ever find out, you will regret it.

Double-Nine Day

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Double-Nine Day

                I looked at the calendar this morning to see what day it was (I knew it was Sunday, but I just didn’t know what number day), and it said ‘Grandparents Day.’  I choked up a little bit, having lost both my grandma and grandpa within the last year.  It wasn’t easy and quick, either.  The fact is that I was actually kind of relieved when they died, because I knew they would feel so much better in Heaven.

                In China, it’s called Double-Nine Day (9/9), and it’s a day to celebrate old people.  That’s right, they do that there.  It makes sense to me, but in America, people get so embarrassed about their age, and I just don’t understand why.  Sure, it sucks getting old, but why would you be embarrassed to tell people your age?  When I’m old, I’m going to be like, “Hell yeah, I’m 96!”  Anyway, I think it’s cool how they honor old people with a special day in China.

                Both of my grandparents lived good, long lives, and were a huge part of my life.  I’m very thankful to have had them for as long as I did, and I can’t wait to see them again when I die.  I miss them so much; I’m on the brink of tears just writing this.  I love them so much that I can’t even put it into words.  I hope I can be as good of a parent and grandparent as they were.

Pure Goodness

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Pure Goodness

                One day last school year, one of my teachers wrote a question on the board and had us write and answer it for about ten minutes at the beginning of class.  This was the question:  “Do you believe that anybody is all good or all bad?  Why or why not?”  For the first split-second, I quickly realized that the preferred answer of society would be:  No, no one is perfect, and no one is completely evil.  However, I then quickly realized that yes; of course there are people like that.  Have you ever heard of Jesus?  There are few people (or beings) like this, but they should not be overlooked.

                As I mentioned before, the first person I thought of was Jesus.  Jesus was God in the human form, and God is all good.  Therefore, Jesus and God are two people that are without a doubt all good.  Also, it says in the Bible that Mary, the mother of God, was sinless, and that was why she was chosen to give birth to Jesus.  On the other end of the spectrum, the obvious person that is all bad is Lucifer, the fallen angel, Satin, the devil, or whatever else you prefer to call him.  He is the source of all evil in the world and anywhere else, and he is not good in any way.  At the end of days, he will disguise himself as a perfectly good human (the Antichrist), who has all the answers to the world and is on the same level as Jesus, and anyone that follows him instead of Jesus will go to Hell.  These are just my religious beliefs, but I also believe that the gods of all religions are the same being.  Therefore, I believe that God, Allah, Brahman, and the Supreme Being in all other religions are the same thing.  That Supreme Being is all good, and the devil of every religion is also the same being, and is all bad.  These are the only people that are undoubtedly all good or all bad.  Beyond them, I do not know for sure.  However, I know some people that, if they are not all good or all bad, then they are very close. 

                On the good side, the first person that comes to my mind is Pope John Paul II.  He is widely regarded as one of the best examples of a true Christian, and just a truly good person.  He dedicated his life to the service of others, and I am unaware of anything that he ever did wrong.  Another example is Mahatma Gandhi, who successfully used nonviolence to drive England out of India, and fasted for arguably impossible amounts of time.  He is another one of these perfect or near perfect persons, but in another area of the world.  I know hardly anything about the Islamic prophet Muhammad, but I imagine he was probably very comparable to these people.  Yet another person I can think of is Mother Theresa, who travelled the world doing good things for all kinds of people, and she will certainly be ordained as a saint within the next few decades.

                On the bad side, besides the devil, I could think of fewer people that I think are all bad, or very close.  The first people are the 9/11 terrorists, and Osama Bin Laden.  I believe that no matter how nuts you are, you could not possibly misunderstand a holy text so badly that you find it acceptable to violently kill huge amounts of people for no real reason.  In the play Macbeth by Shakespeare, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are shown to be not all bad, as they felt extreme guilt during and after their murder of the king for their own benefit.  I don’t believe that Osama Bin Laden or a majority of the suicide bombers feel any guilt for what they do, and for this I believe they are purely evil.  They say they are doing it because Allah wants them to, but I think that they were created by the devil to try to turn people away from Allah (or God, or Brahman, or whatever).  I don’t believe that Adolf Hitler was all evil.  I believe that during WWII and at the end of his life he was very close, but I think that earlier in his life he had some good intentions, such as bringing honor and goodness to his country.

                In my opinion, there are far more people that are all good than all bad, and this is because God (Allah, Jehovah, Brahman, etc.) is stronger than the devil because of his people, and despite Satin’s constant attempts, good always prevails in the end. 

                In conclusion, the answer to the original question is yes.  There are a few people that are all good or all bad.  There are also people that are very close, and then a little less close, probably distributed in a normal curve.  This is the first time I have ever thought of it like that, but it might be how it is.  However, most people have some mix of good and evil, and that is generally one of the trademarks of being human.

When Will I Ever Need To Know This?

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When Will I Ever Need To Know This?

                Quite often in middle school or high school, a student will not understand some material, grow frustrated, and then start to question the purpose of the material.  In socially acceptable speech, he will say to his classmates, “This is so stupid.  Why in the world do I need to know this garbage?”  It may be the makeup of a cell from biology, the significance of the Proclamation of 1763 in U.S. history, the integral of tan(x) in calculus, or infinite other topics from numerous other subjects.  At first glance, the student has a good point, as he will probably never need to know about something that happened almost 250 years ago.  Every student will quickly agree with you.  Why do they teach this kind of pointless material in schools?

                Teaching a student all the math in existence up through calculus is probably excessive in most cases.  However, there will probably, in most cases, never be a situation where the student wasn’t taught enough math to perform a task in the workforce.  Even in very high-education fields of study, such as medicine, it won’t matter what happened on the other side of the globe, one thousand years ago.  The more you think about this, almost everything learned in a high school education will have no use to a person in their real life.  What then, is the real purpose of the K-12 education system?

                A common debate among educators and curriculum developers across the country is whether this ‘useless’ material should be taught to students, or if they should only be taught information that will directly benefit them in their life beyond school.  The next question is what material is important for all students to know?  How do we decide what should be taught in this ‘purpose-driven’ education system?  The answer is that the only thing students really need to know is how to absorb and truly learn information which they will learn in college and on the job.  As there is no way to know exactly what field a particular student will go into, it is best to simply prepare him for whatever will come his way in his life.

                I believe that the purpose of high school is not to learn actual information and knowledge, but rather to learn how to learn.  In my opinion, high school is really just a long sequence of seemingly pointless courses which are really geared toward teaching students how to study and succeed in college and in their lives.  This worthless, useless, pointless material should be learned not for practical use, but for the sake of learning itself.  No matter how impractical a piece of information seems, an effort should be made to learn it, as the experience of learning this frustrating information is where the real learning occurs.

A Little About Me

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A Little About Me

                Hello, internet strangers!  I’m currently a junior in high school, and this is my blog for AP Language & Composition.  Don’t write me off yet; just because I’m doing this for a grade doesn’t mean that I’m not trying to do a good job and really get something out of it.  I consider myself a relatively interesting person, with much to talk about.  Most of the other people in my class seem to be having quite a bit of trouble thinking of something to blog about, but I don’t share this problem.  My head is just teeming with great ideas! 

                I’m not a total nerd, I promise.  Outside of school, my activities include playing French horn in band and orchestra, basketball, swimming, track, studying Chinese, and having fun while doing all of it.  My only real job was this summer, when I played in the city municipal band three to four times a week.  After eight weeks, I racked up a considerable amount of cash.  I have an older sister, an older brother, and a younger sister, and two nephews.  At this moment, I am at my sister’s and brother-in-law’s house in Illinois, seeing my younger for the first time out of the hospital.  He was named after my dad.

                I would love to hear any ideas for things to write about from anyone that happens to read anything on my blog.  I’m open to writing about pretty much anything.  I hope you enjoy reading my entries.

You Never Know What Happens

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You Never Know What Happens

                I read a book recently called Iron & Silk.  It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read, and it’s about a young white American man in his twenties that loved China and Chinese culture, and he went to China for two years to teach English at a college.  The book is an autobiographical novel in which Mark Salzman, the author, describes his many experiences in China.  This is my favorite part of the book, in which a Chinese man tells Mark an ancient Chinese proverb:

“Don’t worry about it.  Do you know the story of the old man and the horse?  It’s a famous Chinese story, we all learn it when we are children.  An old man’s horse runs away one day.  His friends all say they are sorry to hear about the horse, but the old man says, ‘I’m not worried about it.  You never know what happens.’  Sure enough, a few days later the horse returns, leading a whole heard of wild horses back with it.  Everyone congratulates the old man on his good fortune, but the old man just says, ‘You never know what happens,’ and doesn’t make a big deal out of it.  And sure enough, his only son becomes crippled in an accident while training one of the horses.  Everyone says how sorry they are to hear the sad news, but the old man says, ‘You never know what happens.’  And not long afterward government troops pass through the village looking for healthy young men to recruit for a border campaign.  Of course, the old man’s son is passed over because of his injuries.  This is the Chinese way of thinking.  Speaking honestly, it seems to me that you foreigners get terribly sentimental about little things.”

                This is one of the things I love about Chinese culture.  They stress moderation, which many Western people lack.  We are too extreme, and it would benefit us to just go with the flow more often.  I think that people worry too much about things that aren’t worthy of that much worry, and they need to learn to just move on, and things will get better for them.  I personally believe that God always does what is best for us, even if it doesn’t seem like it at the moment, and billions of people in the world would agree with me.  Even tougher things like illness and death follow this, and many people respond by going into a deep depression.  It’s okay to cry and feel terrible for some time after these unfortunate occurrences, as this is not the time to hide how much you love someone.  However, after this period of mourning, people must know that they need to move on, as God still has more plans for them in their life.  I can personally relate to this, as both my maternal grandmother and grandfather died within the past year, after years of illness and degrading health.  My mother, family and I were very sad, and it took a long time for us to return to our normal lives.  But, we know that God has much more for us to do, and that’s why we’re still here. 

A Love/Hate Relationship

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A Love/Hate Relationship

                It all began in third or fourth grade, when the teachers started giving long-term assignments and projects.  I would say, “This is nice, I have three weeks to get this done!” and then forget about it for twenty days, until my teacher reminded us, “Don’t forget, your project is due tomorrow!”  That night, I would tell my parents about this project for the first time, and they would scold me for a half hour about why I must tell them about these long-term assignments on the first day next time, and not wait until the last minute to decide I was going to get my crap together and do it.  I would finally begin at around seven or eight o’ clock, and finish three or four hours later, barely having enough strength remaining to crawl up the stairs to my bedroom.  For the first few years, I didn’t even know this sequence of events had a special name, but since then, I have learned that it has been dubbed ‘procrastination’.

                Since then, this same long, drawn-out process has recurred numerous times in my life; I would guess at least thirty to forty.  This tradition haunts me to this day, as I must write two more blog posts after this before midnight.  I have less than six hours, and this is the first blog post I have ever written.  I am generally regarded as a very smart kid, number one in my class, two or three years ahead in math and science, the top .01 percent of the population, blah blah blah… but I am somehow not smart enough to plan out how I am going to systematically work on an assignment throughout a week.  However, unlike most, I don’t believe it is ineptitude or even a terrible habit.  I think it is an addiction.  I seriously think that I am addicted to the stress and rewarding feeling I get after finishing this seemingly impossible task, defying all odds; it gives me a sort of high that I cannot resist.

My mom tells me every time, “One time, something is going to happen that you can’t control, and this is going to seriously burn your ass.  Then, you’ll learn not to do this.”  I agree, and every time I finish one of these Herculean efforts, I tell myself that I will never let this happen again, and every time I am assigned a four-week project, I firmly tell myself that I will not wait until the last minute, and that I will get it done early this time.  And every time, I end up waiting until a day or two before it is due, and then usually do the whole thing in one night.  Everyone tells me not to do wait: my teachers tell me not to wait until the last minute, my parents tell me not to wait until the last minute, my friends tell me not to wait until the last minute, I even tell myself not to wait until the last minute.

However, most people don’t realize that this severe procrastination does have its few benefits.  First of all, when your back is pressed against the wall, you aren’t going to waste any time, and you are going to be more productive than you ever could be otherwise.  Also, in a work environment in the future, I will know from a huge amount of practice that I will always meet the deadline as long as it relies solely on my shoulders.  When they assign a project, I always jokingly tell my teachers, “This might as well be due tomorrow, because I’m going to do it all on the last day.”  In my mind, it’s a joke, but it always turns out not to be.  I tell myself that I have plenty of time, I have three weeks, I have another two weeks, I still have another entire week, I still have four days, I still have tomorrow.  And then, it is tomorrow, and there is no more waiting.  It is then that I sit down and get it done, and done well.

Although many people my age procrastinate, I believe that my process of procrastination and my reason for it is unique.  I seriously doubt that anyone else feels good before, during, or after their horrible nightmare of procrastination.  However, after finishing a huge project in three hours and knowing that it is still better than anyone else’s gives me a great feeling of accomplishment, and it just makes me feel really good.  Don’t get me wrong, I never do it on purpose, and I hate myself for it, but it gives me this weird feeling of satisfaction.  Despite my thoughts to never let it happen again, I always end up waiting until the last second, and experiencing this feeling over and over again.  I really do believe that I am going to stop my procrastination eventually, but I’m just not sure if it’s going to be anytime soon.  I’m pretty sure it won’t be before I finish high school.