Dole!

I've said this to a bunch of people already, but I still find it fascinating thinking back to our group picture at prom and how much of an influence I must have been on them to have them all say "dole!" instead of "cheeze" without me even asking them to. Sometimes I forget about how I'm a part of so many people's lives until something like that happens.

I am blessed. Thanks, guys.

Read Dylan's post from May 18th first.

"And those of you who refuse to try something because it's supposedly
hazardous to your health, those straight-edged attention whores,
those fearful little lemmings, they are the true imbeciles of society.
Denying yourself an experience and therefore, wisdom, is aboutas stupid
a thing as you can accomplish."

You asked for it.

Supposedly hazardous? Is supposedly the right word? I don't think the
tobacco industries are forced to put a warning label on the side of the
pack just because there's a myth out there that smoking is bad for your health. I doubt you could prove every Surgeon General Report since 1964 to be wrong with what you know. I doubt you could look someone in the eye who lost a parent or someone close to them to lung cancer and tell them that they're just believing a lie.

But hey, I could be wrong.

So I refuse to smoke or do drugs. Does that makes me an attention whore? I think of making posts insulting religion or writing pieces that make people angry on purpose as being an attention whore. You want them to react to you, so you say something that's sure to grab their attention . I just have a basic idea of what I want out of life, and drugs and alchohol happens to not be a part of it. That doesn't mean I'm going around telling people about it like the cheerio's guy talking about his low cholesterol to someone on the elevator.

But I shouldn't take offense. After all, you didn't mean imbelicle as an
insult. You only meant that people who share my feelings have the mental capacity of a seven year old despite being over twice that age. I guess because I'm so stupid I just couldn't see what you were really trying to say. My mistake.

I'm so stupid for denying myself the experience of sucking on death, how
could I be so unwise? Does that mean I'm less wise than someone who
decided to try alcohol and drive at the same time, killing an innocent
driver as a consequence? After all, he was just trying to get the
experience of it. Of course, you specifically aren't killing anyone but yourself
with this, but that makes absolutely as much sense to me.

You can try to tell me that the habit won't take a hold of you, but that's
what most every addict has said to themselves before they got hopelessly
hooked, and you're no psychic.

I have no way of stopping you from doing this to yourself, nor
do I have the right to. Just don't give me this wisdom bullshit so
you look like you're making an educated and experienced decision to throw your life away.

I don't think you're evil or should be wiped off the planet, otherwise
I wouldn't be so upset about your new hobby. Just have respect for
us who don't like drugs or alcohol if you want the same respect toward
your life style.

Do I care about school work anymore?

It depends on the class. I care about classes that have teachers that care to teach me something. I say this because there's a big difference between keeping the work coming for growth and keeping it coming for busy work.

In here I've grown an appreciation for how vastly different people's writing styles are from each other. I've had the honor of seeing into experiences of my classmates in these blogs. Besides that, I've been challenged to think about different topics in class discussion that I never would have thought of on my own. This blog has never been a source of busy work for a second.

Also, taking a fourth year of italian has been the best thing to ever happen to my speaking ability in the language. I've had a different teacher for all four years, and they all did their best to teach us. However, I didn't truly have a great understanding of how to speak until I walked into my current class.

Why? The first three years it was enough to be able to copy down a sentence from a story book or end the verb with the right letter for the tense. Now, we are challenged to produce coherant sentences on the spot in class, write compositions that become covered with red ink, and understand the teacher as she actually speaks to us in italian.

Italian has felt like a drag almost all year, with all this pressure to look forward to daily. I can't say I didn't grow from it, though. In fact, it helped me catch up on the growth I missed out on the last three years. Some people are happy to not have taken a fourth year, but I've found that it gave my first three a purpose.

I guess I care too much about how hard I've worked these last four years to slack off and let my grade slip for no reason.

Sorry.

Just posting to say I thought about it. I just spent 4 hours in front of the computer working on english and I can't stand it a moment longer.

Struggling to make a post

I've been thinking about art after our discussion in class today, but I'm still not sure what to say about it even after ten minutes of thinking around the topic.

I can say, however, that I agreed with Dylan when he said that works of art that are made just to be works of art tend to be bad. One of the first things that came to my mind here was the alternate ending of dodgeball.

Incase you haven't seen it, basically the alternate ending is that Avergage Joe's gymnasium loses at the dodgeball finals to the purple snakes, and the movie just ends like that. In the commentary, the director said that he wished he could have used that ending because it would have been the more artistic way of ending the movie, but the test audience hated it and they had one day to reshoot the end of the movie that you see in the original film.

I can't really understand why he would want to suddenly be "artistic" with this movie. The whole presentation is filled with slapstick humor and gags that are there to just make us laugh. Why at the last minute would he want to change the whole attitude of the movie toward ultimate failure when everyone is awaiting the polar opposite? That's like almost finishing "Dumb and Dumber" and then deciding in an instant to have Jim Carrey to make deep political arguments in the story because nobody will see it coming.

I don't really have a strong argument with this alone, but I wanted to post to show I thought about it. I just wasn't going to be satisfied with myself today if all I wrote was that I thought about it.

I would move on, I've got nothing here

Blogger was working at the speed of sloth today, but now I think it's just my modem's fault that it took ten minutes to post something as small as this.

Like I said, I've got nothing.

A thought

"12 days left until school's out!"

"No it's not that short"

"Yeah it is!"

"naw uh"

"yeah huh!"

"No, maybe it's 18 days, but it's not 12"

"Yeah it is!"

Why are we keeping track? Or trying to, in the case of this conversation I overheard at lunch. Is Prout such a bad place to be?

This campus has been great to me overall, and I've made great friends that I would never have been blessed to have if my parents didn't force me to come here five years ago. At the time I would have done anything to stay at chariho. Going to a new school with uniforms and prayer appeared foreign and frightening.

The experience here was anything but. I was immediately accepted as one of the students, starting with being greeted by a polite and funny looking kid with curly hair and glasses. Soon after that I became inseperable with his group of friends, and aside from the college prep-honors/IB segregation, we're still together.

However, we are now down to mere days in which we have time to spend together. Having said all this, it's hard for me to understand the great urgency to leave it all behind. My attitude is that I don't have time to waste on anticipating escape. I'm going to appreciate the time I have here while I can.

Question

I didn't even have access to the computer last night, so I have no real post to show for it.

However, I was thinking about the haiku stuff yesterday. If english haikus can't hope to do the same things that japanese haikus do, then is there a point in writing them? Or are english haikus meaningful as well?

If they are, then what makes a good english haiku?