Confusing

Why must life be so confusing? I know what it is that I want or that I need to do, but when I finally do it or get it I don't want it so much anymore. Or even when I do like it I still dread having to do it. I am going about this in a round about way but what I am mostly talking about is my job. I really like it, I have had fun so far in this week of work, the other employees are nice and it is fun talking to all of the different people I am helping. Some of them are nice and talk to me like I am actually a real person, but, others seem to be under the impression that I am a stupid humanoid that is only there to cater to their every whim and be blamed for the bad day they are having. But overall I like it and though I am only making minimum wage it seems worth it. So, the question is that if I like my job so much, and I do, why do I dread going every time I have to go? Well I really don't know. It was the same way when I worked on a farm over the summer, I loved it (I really did Aubree, so don't laugh at me) but I never wanted to go in the morning when the time to leave had come. I think that it has to do with the fact that going to work is required, I can't just skip because I am tired or just lazy, I have to go. That is a responsibility that is hard for me to accept I want to be free and able to do anything that I want to do. It would be so much easier to go if I could decide to skip out. I want to go to work, but I don't want to HAVE to go. That is my final and conclusive analysis, I don't want to have to do anything, that is how I get my blog done on time I pretend that it is just my for fun weekly thing that just happens to count for English credit.

Christmas

It is Christmas eve, all is well, and I am so freaking excited. I apologize for the bad language but I am. The best part of Christmas eve is, that it means the next day is Christmas. On Christmas I always get insanely excited, you know, the kind of excited where you can't sleep, think, or even, well I guess that's about it, properly. OK please excuse any nonsense-making I may have caused you because I am at the moment suffering from that particular type of excitement. Right now I am thinking to myself, "Why am I so excited?" Well let's face it, the truth is that my excitement comes from the insane desire to receive gifts. I am greedy like that but at least I am honest. Well I cannot let gift receiving take all of the credit, I do get some small amount of joy from seeing others opening the gifts I have for them. Alright by this point I am probably see, like a spoiled brat of death who doesn't deserve any of the presents she will get, but I'm not, I promise. Who doesn't like presents? Not to many people that I can think of. I hope that you, my oh so loyal reader feel that just the mere act of my writing this blog for you to read is gift enough because that is all that I have to offer to you (unless your name is Aubree, Becky, Kali, or mom.) Anyways that is about as much analyticalness as one Christmas eve and any non-blind reader can take so I am just going to shut my trap and hope that you return again (slightly redundant, but it works) to read my excellent works of writing.

The greatest thing you will ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. That line is repeated frequently through the film Moulin Rouge, and it, at first puzzled me very much. The first part seems to make perfect sense to love is definitely something you must learn to do, but the second half caused me some confusion. How can a person learn to be loved? This idea of learning to be loved did not appear first in Moulin Rouge, before that it was found in the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast. The Beast did not just have to learn how to love another but he had to learn to be loved by another.
After a serious amount of thinking I realized how true that statement is. It is often so easy to love other people, there are so many good things that they have done to make you love them but how could they love you? You know yourself, the mistakes you have made, the thoughts you have thought, and the things you have said. How could anyone love someone so imperfect and mean? But we forget that they too are imperfect. That is learning to be loved, it is realizing that you can be loved. And how important that is, we could of course just live unloved and alone and be perfectly fine. But could we really? We must learn to be loved so we can learn to love ourselves. Being unloved can sometimes lead to some seriously amazing artwork or angry music but that high quality of artwork is more easily repeated when there are people who care to see it. Alright maybe that seems a little too "awe cute, love can fix anything," but that is not how it was meant. Love cannot fix any problem it will not be able stop every misguided person in this world from committing the crimes they might want to commit, but it can make those crimes seem insignificant to those hurt by them.

My best friends

I have two best friends. Together we make an unstoppable trio of crazy teenage swimmers. And there is nothing wrong with crazy swimmers. It is hard to write about my friends because there is really nothing that normal about our relationship with each other. We, for example, are not always the nicest to each other, when one of us does something stupid the others have no problem pointing it out and bringing it up later when we have just began to believe that they may have forgotten, but, it always ends up with everyone laughing, not just those who were not involved. With the meanness aside we are always there for each other, when life becomes too dark and cold for us to handle we always have someone to turn to. That is what friendship is for.
Everyone needs people who can laugh at their mistakes but who can also help you out when it seems that the mistakes are too much to deal with. My friends are here for me at those times and I also am here for them.
I suppose I lied when I said that I have only two best friends, there is a third who I have failed to mention. Her name is Kali and I have known her as long as I can remember. She is a couple of years younger than me and she is one of the funniest and sweetest people that I know. Our families have been hanging out together often for many moons and it seems that we are related. My mom calls Kali’s dad her brother from another mother and the younger kids in her family really believe that she is their aunt Heidi. It is strange that Kali and I actually like each other because we have spent more time with each other than the average friends but some how we always manage to get along and unite against the forces of grouchy younger brothers (who we love.)
Friends are a very important part of life they are the reason behind school being worth it and they create the fun in boring situations. Without friends my life would be rather boring and I would probably live in a slightly darkened room with a flashlight and a couple of books that I can recite without even glancing at a page. Thank you friends for preventing me from becoming a hermit, that means all of you not just the ones I mentioned by name or in secret code.

People

Each person is different and though I have always accepted the differences of others it amazes me that what I find to be beautiful can be seen by someone else as insignificant and meaningless. It seems that what I see as beauty should be beautiful for everyone but, alas, it is not so. I am a great lover of art; I can spend a very long time staring at a "beautiful" picture or sculpture or anything really, trying to find out why I feel such a connection to it. That is the way I am and I often find myself expecting everyone else to be the same way. If all people were just like me I would blend in and just be another face in the crowd of corinnes but instead I stand out, I am an individual, and I in some small way am important. The things that make me myself are the things that set me apart and those same things cannot be found in anyone else. There are some things that I do not see as beautiful but somewhere else there is someone who sees the beauty, that is why we are here: To find the beauty in the things we love and to show that beauty to others. The beauty others see may at first seem alien and bizzar but it is beauty and when you find it it makes the difference. This beauty is ofcourse subjective but that is the point, to make everything seem beautiful in some way so we don't have to worry about the superficial.
The world does seem to be a very superficial place, every one is so worried about what is going on with Jennifer Aniston or Tom Cruise or where they should go to get their new nose that they forget about their friends and their lives. It seems that high school should be the main location for this problem but it stretches beyond that. Appearance is everything, if you are not pretty enough you are probaly not smart enough either. It is amazing that our world is at this level. This is not to say that everyone is like that but there are many people who feel that the most important thing is the image they create with their slimming clothes and anti-aging make up. The famous do not wrinkle, they do not grow old and they would never ever feel bad about themselves. Celebrities are real, they are not as they seem: perfect skin always smiling and unreachable. Instead they are just llike you and me, they have days where they hurt so bad all they want to do is cry and they have those moments where they are so blissfully happy that they want to live in that one moment for the rest of their lives. We of course are not allowed to see this more personal part of the people we watch on our television and in movies in our own homes. They are just like us.
We are sometimes blind to the realness of the famous. They do not show us how they feel so we believe that they do not. They cannot seem so perfect and still be like us. Every day we experience things that no one before has ever quite experienced, we feel alone and cold and, it seems that we must be. Everyone does such a good job of covering their pain that no one feels comfortable sharing, we think to ourselves, "They will not understand," or "There is no way that they could acually want to know." But they do want to know those people who you can really trust actually do care. As people we are faced with trial and feelings that are strong and controlling. We are not alone, there is always someone who is willing to try to understand. Their feelings may not be the same as yours, and their experiences certainly won't be but they can help. Empathy is the great strength of humans. Others can care about things that seem to only affect you.

Thanksgiving

This thanksgiving was a new experience for me and it did not feel like Thanksgiving. It wasn't that I didn't have fun or I didn't completely overload on food but it was different. We, first of all ate at a restaurant (Golden Corral) and the food was good and there was plenty of it for all of the 21 people I knew and approximately 300 people I did not know. It seems that this year everyone decided to become lazy and go out to eat. Maybe that is the problem, when people become lazy they do not work or exercise, that exercise creates endorphynns and endorphyns make you happy and give you energy. The lack of energy could have been the difference for the adults but it was not the case for the kids. My cousins Ryann and Abbie were the people I spent the most time with, Abbie is 4 and Ryann is 5. They like me, although the first many times I asked Abbie she said that she didn't know. Finally she said yes that she did in fact love me. That was the good part of thanksgiving: My family. Though thanksgiving this year was different It was still one of the best because my family was together. Over this almost a week in Idaho I have nearly forgotten how to act around people who I am not related to. Thanksgiving is a holiday that can be celebrated in many different ways and though it will not feel the same at first soon you will realize that you can be thankful anywhere, whether in your grandma's house or at the local buffet.

Bookstore

When given the choice between a library and a bookstore, no matter how little money I have, I will inevitably choose the bookstore. There is something about the combined smells of coffee and new books that makes my head happy. Libraries are fine but they are lacking the smells and comfort of the bookstore. Libraries for example tend to make you feel like you need to be quiet and leave as soon as you have chosen a book, but a bookstore provides you with music, cream frappucinos, and comfortable places to sit, read and observe. There definitely are many things to observe in bookstores; in the coffee shop for example you can watch the slightly punkified teenagers perform what they think to be the most rebellious job available in Utah. The sheer thought of selling coffee is enough to make many Utah mothers cringe. In order to fit the rebellious coffee shop worker stereotype they feel that they must have their hair in many lengths and even more colors all on the same head. As fun as they are to observe it is also interesting to see which people look at which books. Who are the chefs, historians, and Elvis lovers of the world and which people are reading the comic books or the oh so intense romance novels and are they really reading or are the trying to find out who you are by what you are reading? In the movie "You've Got Mail" Tom Hanks explains how the owners lure people in with cheap books and overpriced but perfectly aromatic cappuccinos, and it most definitely has worked on me. I hate to think of myself as a mindless consumer but I break the number one book reading rule "Don't judge a book by its cover." That has always been my ideal way of choosing books I want to read: if the cover looks interesting the book probably will be too. And it has hardly ever failed me. There have been a few times where I have ventured to read books with covers that absolutely bored me, and for the most part the book followed suit. If the author did not care enough to make a nice cover he probably did not write it very well either. I seem to have veered slightly from my original topic so in conclusion: This was an analytical blog written on why I personally prefer bookstores to libraries, I apologize to any librarians I may have wounded emotionally in the process of writing this, It was merely a childish but fact based analysis on my own opinion of libraries and it did not reflect any bad thoughts towards librarians specifically. Thanks for reading and please continue to do so.
The Turquoise Tiger

Why I Swim

Swimming is a sport that is difficult tiring and at times painful. It is also a sport that I am not particularly amazing at, nevertheless I continue to go through practice every week day trying to improve myself. I often find myself thinking about why I go through with the taxing practices when I can see everyone else getting better than I can ever seem to get. When my thoughts come to this I get discouraged and angry at myself for not being good enough. Then I remember the feeling I get when I let myself become a part of the water, the euphoria of having my bad day washed away, my worries forgotten, and all becoming right with the world, if only for the time I spend in the water. I also remember the adrenaline that accompanies swim meets and the thrill I get when I have swam my best time. My times may not be the best out of everyone but each time is the best for me. The feeling I have, down in the depths of my stomach and quite possibly in my soul, every time I get up on the blocks to swim is irreplaceable and consuming. What it really comes down to is that I love to swim, I love the connection between me and the water, and I love the freedom the water gives my mind. When I swim only my body is occupied with the strokes, my brain is free to roam and to discover and solve the mysteries of my life. The water around me becomes an outlet for my anger, each stroke tearing away the pain until I am completely and blissfully myself, no longer just a mass of confused emotion, but me, just me. That is why I swim, That is why anyone should do anything. Not because they feel they need to or they have no choice, but because when they do it they find a part of themselves that was lost or that they had forgotten long before.
People of course have obligations, things they must do despite any effort to get out of it. Life is not perfect and no person can love everything they do (if you happen to be a counterexample for this thought please comment and tell me how you do it.) My plan is to do my best to find everything I love and allow those things to become more than the things I must do. Life is for loving and laughing and though the tears will inevitably come the laughter can overcome. It is each persons duty to find the things, or maybe just one thing, that gives them bliss, that makes them forget about how big the bad may seem. When you have found the good you can overcome the bad no matter how huge and invincible it may seem. Maybe this is a bit of an over-dramatic reason to jump in a pool and move my arms and legs repeatedly but it works for me and that is going to have to be enough.

Analization, I don't do it on purpose

Recently I have began to actually think when I am watching movies, reading books, or just hanging out. This is not something I am proud of but it is true. Gone are the days when I just took things as they came, now I actually care about what is going on around me. I suppose this has happened because I have been awakened to the fact that life and movies are made with a purpose. Cinderella Man for example was not just made to make me cry it was in fact made to show me how people had to live and how anyone can do anything they want to with their lives. Analyzing is actually very fun and as much as I hate to admit it, I find myself doing it more and more every day. I might be analyzing because I really like the warm fuzzy feeling I get when I find something out for myself or maybe it is just because I have no life. Not that it really matters why ( I guess it does matter why, since why questions are the only thing behind the success of analyzation) I am analyzing, the point is that I am. Now that my Eyes are open it would be really hard to go back to sleep, so I won't. I analyze because I can that should be enough of a reason for you.

Halloween

Halloween is coming up and I for one am excited. Why am I excited? Well I'm pretty sure that it has something to do with the candy, but, the element of disguise has the most appeal for me. There is something very desirable about being some one besides yourself even just for a minute. When you are in disguise you feel free to do things that you would not normally do. Disguise, no matter how little it actually changes your appearence makes you seem powerful and crafty. When I am in costume I feel like I could go do crazy things like go ask the good people of the world for candy at their front door. I f I was not in costume and it wasn't halloween that would most definately be on my "top ten things not to do if you want to live list." halloween is glorious it gives people the power to be someone they don't seem to be.

Chocolate Milk in a carton

Chocolate Milk:The gift of life. Alright so it is not quite the gift of life, but without it there would probably be a lot more death. I personally am a firm believer of the joys of chocolate milk in most instances. The one exception is when the chocolate milk is tainted by being inserted into an unholy container commonly known as the carton. The carton may seem to be an innocent liquid holding object but really it's intentions are quite evil. The point of this carton is to contaminate all of the chocolate milk in the whole world with a flavor not unlike that of paper. When I want chocolate milk I do not mean I want a cheap paper flavored replica of chocolate milk, I mean I want chocolate milk. The chocolate milk manufacturers could possibly be using this paper flavoring to cover a lack of actual milk and chocolate products or maybe the insertion of strange chemicals known to cause cancer in certain more cancer skittish states (possibly California). The paper flavoring, possibility of cancer, and lack of actual chocolate milk ingredients is enough to make the average me cringe at the thought of swallowing such a thing. Many, (such as a friend of mine named Aubree) feel the need to look beyond the paper flavoring and find the real chocolate milk within, and so I will not try to halt their paper flavored milk eating habits. If you are one of those people, please forgive me if I have offended you and continue to drink your milk as irresponsibly as you usually would. Good luck with the Milk Poisoning.

sandboxes

A sandbox, known to some as a pile of dirt contained by walls of wood or some other material commonly used in building. The purpose of such boxes is to keep the minds of children away from their obviously busy and overworked parents. And believe me, it works. Yesterday night for example I spent about an hour and a half in a sandbox with two little boys and time flew. There is nothing like a huge stretch of sandy nothingness to keep you occupied and away from making dinner.

The question of course is what a person could possibly see in an oversized bucket of sand. I mean if we were to see a huge man in a suit playing in a pile of dirt everyday we would: First probably question his sanity, and Second wish that we were out there spending a blissful hour building and destroying sand castles. There in lies the appeal it is of course human nature to want to crush the living daylights out of someone else's intricate and beautiful creation, which they had spent at least several hours on. Why is it that people have a strange need to destroy what others have worked so hard to attain? Well I suppose it has something to do with their pride. Everyone wants there sand castle (mansion, paycheck, vehicle, or fancy helicopter) to be bigger and better than the one belonging to the pompous guy down the street. Your sand caste is guaranteed to be better if his has been demoted to a flat pile of overrated dirt. That is the joy of sand boxes; you can completely destroy the happiness and hard work of another without ever touching anything they spent money on (therefore avoiding any lawsuits they as Americans feel it to be their duty to claim.) Sand boxes are great things, with them you have the opportunity to teach your children a) the joys of nature that can be found in your own back yard, and b) the joy of completely destroying the pride and self-esteem of the child playing in the next spot over.

Change:the money kind

A week or so ago I went to Wendy's with a friend and noticed something that is true among most people: when you have to pay a full dollar amount and a few cents we have an unexplainable desire to pay the change in coins to avoid receiving more coins. Now as I noticed this I had to ask myself, why? If you use all of your change paying for Items you buy, you are bound to eventually run out of spare change; and when you reach this point you should have achieved your goal of changelessness, but, instead you are stuck. If you spend more money that is not in exact dollar amounts, you will have change again.
So why do we as human beings need to get rid of all of our change when we KNOW that it is inevitable that our change supply will be replenished? After much thinking I have come to the conclusion that we only care about what is happening now, we do not have the foresight necessary to see that our attempts are futile. The fact that our purses are too heavy right now overtakes our common sense and we do whatever we can to get rid of the extra weight. This vicious cycle is obviously responsible for any muscle deficiencies we may be guilty of having. If we would just keep that extra change in case of an emergency, our bags would be heavier and save us from many boring trips to the gym. By working out, outside of the gym, you not only gain muscle mass but you also avoid embarrassment. For example, you wont be found "running" two miles an hour on the treadmill next to the wonder woman on the elipitical trainer with twenty pound bags of flour in each arm who defies all impossibilities by actually getting somewhere. As humans we want to avoid immediate discomfort whenever possible, ignoring the fact that it probably will lead to a more public embarrassment later.

Marriage

What is going on with marriage nowadays? There are Brad and Angelina, maybe getting married but not so long ago it was brad and Jennifer. There are Nick and Jessica who each have found new love after the seemingly blissfully beginning of a marriage and even a TV show about how great it was to be newly weds. Marriage has become disposable, like a stinky diaper you can ditch in the nearest trash can. I mean after all there are so many eligible bachelors and female singles, hanging out in this world that you might as well try them all out. Alright so not every marriage is bad in fact most of them are good but still there has been growth in the divorce rate everywhere not just in Hollywood. The problem is that when things get hard newly married people aren't prepared. Life is fairly easy in high school, your parents pay and you only need to take care of yourself. Instead of staying together to solve problems people get away from each other to avoid problems. But the avoided problems are not gone forever they come back just to remind you how good things could have been. How can a person be happy in the good times if they never experienced the bad? Life is weird, and things happen that are hard and unexpected but that doesn't mean that they are unsolvable or that you are stuck. When you try until you can try no more, that is when you can give up and stop fighting, only when you are so tired that you realize what you fought about doesn't even matter any more. I don't know, I have never been married before, I do know that it must be harder than it seems to me but, I also know that love is something that is terrible to lose. Is quitting worth it?

this is not for english

LaDeeDahDeehDah

Matilda

Why have I always liked the movie Matilda so much?
Well in order to answer that question I watched Matilda this weekend. The first reason I like it is because it shows a family with a relationship that is not ideal in any sense and demonstrates the ability of anyone to escape it. My family has always been great and I like to see people who were not born into a loving family find one for them selves. Another important element in this movie is that family is not necessarily the people who you are related to by blood, family is the people who love you and who care about you whether you are related or not. Another thing about this movie that I liked was that they displayed a relationship between a young girl and a woman who is not her mother; that is something I always wanted when I was little, someone older than me that I could look up to outside of my family. The main reason for me loving the movie was that I felt a direct connection between Matilda and myself. I was not by any means spelling my name in spilt baby food when I was a year old but I have always had the desire to learn. I myself didn't learn how to read until I was in the middle of first grade and before that I was always embarrassed to go to tutoring but as soon as I started reading I couldn't stop and I got beyond any reading I ever thought I was capable of. When I was little I always wanted to be Matilda for Halloween and my mom always said no because no one would be able to tell who I was and on the outside that was true but internally I was much like her and seeing part of me inside of her made me love the movie.

Analytical Mind Part Two: Denny's past midnight

How could going to a breakfast restaurant in the middle of the night be better than any other time? That is a question that has been asked by all of the top scientists in the world. It has never been solved until a recent discovery was made by an extremely talented and promising young scientist...Myself. When a person enters a restaurant at 1:30 in the morning they are exposed to a completely different environment from the typical daytime crowd.
That is shown by the people's quieter and slower pace in the nighttime. When you are already where else is there to go. When you don't have anything to be late for it gives you a chance to slow down and just breath. Everyone needs an opportunity to take a break from life and drink unlimited hot chocolate for as long as they need. That is another reason for eating in the wee hours of the morning. Hot chocolate always tastes better when it is cold and dark. Something about the comfort of the heat in the night brings many people. The night time crowd is much larger than the afternoon it gives you an outlook on different people who you don't usually see. Obviously the people who eat breakfast at 3 in the morning are different from those who eat it between 7 and nine.
Anyways at night people are in different moods than they are during the day. You can tell a lot about people by the time they eat there pancake breakfast.

Analytical mind part one

Why is running in a Five K easier than running 3 miles?
This weekend I ran in a five k and I will tell you I am not in any way a runner. But when aperson runs on their own for no real reason there is no reason to run faster and no other people that you must beat. Everyone needs a little competition to keep them going and improving. I have experienced this first hand and this are my reasons:
First of all on a normal run you are not surrounded by more than a hundred other people who actually enjoy running without those crazy people inspiration is hard to come bye.
Second when you are running on your own you are not as prone to noticing that you are being beaten by a speed walker and in a race when you see that a walking person is beating you, a running person you are given an excuse to actually try, at all, especially if that running person happens to be around 76 1/2 years old.
All right the last and most important part of this is that if you are running in a race wearing a shirt with a monk on it you have to feel a certain ammount of duty in winning the race I mean if you lose you are on one pretty important guy's bad side.
O.k. so really running a five K is much more appetizing to one's legs than hitting a track and running around 6 or 7 times with no one around, no monks in sight, and no sign of a finish line. Do you agree? If you don't you have never ran a five k in the same proximity as a monestary. I promise it's quite the moving experience :).

The official testation of my blogliness

this is just to see if this works so don't pay any attention to it