Positive Energy

1. Process analysis
2. Classification/division
3. Narration
4. Description
5. Definition
6. Comparison/Contrast  

You guys are so smart...

(I can definitely see how #1 could be description. I was a little broad with that one...)

Energy (or lack thereof)

Hopefully most of this makes sense, I'm running on a lack of energy right now from having so much fun at the football game last night. I'm using more of the superficial definition of energy for these, like having a lot of energy and being energized, as opposed to cosmic energy or more of the supernatural type of energy.

1. When someone needs energy, and they don't have time to sleep, they usually resort to consuming a lot of sugar and energy drinks. This usually starts when someone begins to get tired and lack energy, but must stay awake because they need to get something done (i.e. they need to finish a project or do a performance of a show) so they get an energy drink or candy bar, eat it, and then, depending on the amount, go a certain amount of crazy until they crash when the artificial energy wears off.

2. I find that while there are many ways to get energy, people usually go about it in two main ways. I like to call these ways "naturally" and "artificially". Naturally gaining energy involves recharging your body by getting a good amount of sleep every night, and giving your body the nutrients it needs by eating healthy food. Artificial energy is gained when one can't or simply doesn't sleep. One must then rely on manufactured foods such as sugar and energy supplements.

3. At 4 in the morning, most normal people just want to sleep. However, when you have a dozen 13-year-old girls at a sleepover in the middle of August, in a house without air conditioning, sleep doesn't happen. I think we went through a stage of exhaustion that night, but when we just COULD NOT sleep, we just stopped trying and woke ourselves up more. We were all but bouncing off the walls, playing truth or dare, shoving ice cubes down each other's pajamas to cool each other off. That was the only night I've pulled an "all-nighter".

4. When you feel energized, you know it. Your eyes are open wide, you're alert, and you don't feel that need to put your head down on the nearest soft surface and sleep for all eternity. You can actually comprehend what your teacher is saying, unlike those days where you get two hours of sleep and you're physically in class, but your brain is back home tucked in under your favorite blanket. 

5. Most people know of Einsteins famous equation "e=mc^2" (sorry, I'm in a bit of a rush, and I can't figure out how to get the squared symbol) which means "energy equals mass times the speed of light, squared". That is how science calculates energy. They say energy is "the ability to do work", which is very true outside of the science community as well. No energy usually means no work done. 

6. Energy can sometimes be similar to spirit. If you want to think a little more "out-there" and paranormal, a spirit and energy can be very similar ideas. But pertaining more to the everyday definition of energy, spirit is much different. If a person seems to have spirit they usually seem very peppy, and excited, often towards a specific event or idea. Such as spirit days or week at Wayzata, when everyone is so excited for Homecoming that they dress up in different, ridiculous ways everyday (guilty...). Energy is more of an overall feeling, like you can feel energized in general, but not really towards a certain event, person, idea, etc. 

Snow.

I know if you've looked anywhere on social media sites in the last 36 hours, you've probably seen that word about a thousand times, but I'm going to go ahead and use it some more.

Snow and I have a complicated relationship. Of course, it's gorgeous and beautiful and radiant and a whole bunch of other overused adjectives. I really enjoy photography and looking at pictures (even though I suck at actually taking them) and about this time, the internet just explodes with hipster pictures of snow. Tumblr feeds essentially turn into this multiplied by 1000:

(all pictures found here)

Of course, these are all gorgeous pictures, which is why I like snow. It just makes everything seem more pristine.

Until it starts to get muddy.

So in terms of look, snow's great. Other than that, it sucks. It takes me a solid 5 minutes to take off or put on everything I have to wear to school everyday in the winter to protect my nose from falling off it's so cold. You might be thinking "Hey! Don't blame the snow for that. The cold is at fault for that!" Yes, it's true. I don't start looking like Rudolph from just the snow, but wherever there's snow, there's cold weather. That's just how nature works unfortunately. 

Snow also gets in your way. After a few snow falls, my family has to shovel our driveway if we don't want to make an accidental snow angel while walking to the car. (You know, because we would fall because the snow was too deep and when you fall in the snow you make an imprint. I'm ashamed that I had to explain that, but I just read through it again and realized that not a very smooth train of thought.) I'm a lazy person. I would far rather be sitting on my couch drinking tea and watching "The Santa Claus(e?)" than shoveling, but unfortunately snow prohibits me from doing that. Also, snow just causes way too many car crashes. 

Basically, you can't win or lose with snow.

Ok, you mostly lose. 

First person to count how many times I used the word "snow" in this post gets to shovel my driveway. Just kidding, don't do that. 

Totes McGoats

X2, pg. 133

Slang, to me, it simply intriguing. If you listen to any conversation I have with some of my really close friends, you'd be disgusted by the amount of abbrevs (an abbreviation for the words abbreviation, it's like Inception for words) we use. Most of these spawn from inside jokes, and we rarely use them seriously. One of my friends and I actually keep a list of stupid slang words we hear that we want to try to use more often, just because they sound funny. This is some of the "words" we had:

Totes
Maybs
Probs
Fo shiz
Bomb diggs
Cool beans
Awk sauce
Btdubs
True dat
Errbody
Laters
Super-mega-foxy-awesome-hot
Supes
Presh
Bombdotcom
Rofl waffle
Yuppers

Swoon sauce
Dece
Supes awk
Awktopus
Yayzies

I'm sure if you heard me say any of these words, any respect had for me would go out out the window. And that's kind of the point. When I'm talking with my friends, we say stupid stuff like that for the purpose of making each other laugh, because that's what we do when we're together. I understand that there's a time and place for these expressions, though, and that's why you'll never hear me say something like bombdotcom in class. I would try to look into the origins of these words, but I'm not going to for two reasons. One, most of them are fairly obscure and ridiculous, even for slang words, and two, I'm 99% sure they all came from some video or meme somewhere on the internet. 

I asked a few of my friends (not just the ones I use these ridiculous sayings with) what colloquial words they used and what they thought of slang in general. All of them said that slang doesn't really bother them, and they use it a fair amount. Some specific words they use are totes, gonna, wanna, deuces (hahahahahaha) and wtf. I am guilty of using all of these, so......

Moving right along to the second bullet point of this X2, there have been plenty of instances when I have said something and immediately recognized its stupidity and told the person I was talking to to never let me use that again. I mean, if you said anything from the list above, wouldn't you have the same reaction? 

One if the expressions I use the heck out of is "totes". I really don't have an explanation as to why I use it so much, I just do.

Words that are overused just become space-fillers to me. Like my overuse of totes has led it to become meaningless to me. For example, if someone says something in a conversation and I don't really know how to respond, sometimes (if I know them well enough that I find it ok to sound absolutely uneducated in front of them) I'll just say, "Totes McGoats." And I have absolutely no clue as to why I keep using it. I really don't.

On to the final bullet point. I already kind of said this earlier, but all of the teenagers I asked really didn't mind slang as long as it wasn't offensive to anyone. I didn't ask my parents in an attempt to avoid the half-hour lecture I would've promptly been given. 

I guess I don't really know what I'd tell people to allay their fears about their slang use. I mean other that telling them that if you actually have a fear of your "naughty habit of using slang", you need help. 

I know this whole post probably makes it seem like all I do is talk like a twitter-obsessed, uneducated teen girl. I promise you this is not the case. Psh, I don't even have a twitter. But seriously, when I use stupid expressions like that with my friends, it's in a mocking manner. We do have semi-intelligent conversations from time to time as well. SEMI-intelligent.

p.s. When I attempted to spell-check this (ohemgee, spellcheck?! yea, I know it's not going to solve all my problems, but it will catch things like the fact that I spelled "expressions" wrong...embarassing...) the amount of yellow highlighter nearly gave me a heartattack until I remembered half the words in this were not actual words.

Show Week, Ladies and Gentleman.

I feel like at least one of these open-topic blog posts that I write should be about something completely spontaneous and random. I shouldn't just write about things that are happening in my life, even though I'm obviously thinking about them because they're actually happening.

Yea, maybe I'll try that next time, because this week, I feel kind of obligated to talk about what's happening this week for me. Mostly because it's basically the only think that I will be spending time on other than school.

BRIGADOON (that's the fall musical for all of you who pay no attention to school events or the giant posters hung all around the school)

Basically everyone who I tell about the musical has never heard of it, which is understandable. I mean I'd never heard of it until Mr. Doering announced that it would be the show this fall. Mrs. Cardona knew though. Props to her.
Anyway, the story is about a small town called Brigadoon, in Scotland, that disappears every night, and then reappears 100 years later. But that 100 years is only a night for it's inhabitants. I know that's confusing, but stay with me. One day, two Americans who went on a hunting trip to Scotland, stumble upon the town on the one day that it is there for 100 years. They get acquainted with some of the townspeople (some more than others...) and...well... I don't know how much I want to give away, so I'm just going to leave it at that. But there's plenty of amazing singing, fun dancing, and phenomenal acting, so everyone should come see it :) (OH MY GOSH AN EMOTICON!?!@!%*(@%&#!!!)

If you guys want to more about the movie version, click here. There was also an article about it in the school newspaper on Friday. You can get tickets and more info on the school website here. 

This week the cast has rehearsal until sometime after 6:00 tomorrow (I feel like it's like 7, but that's probably way off. I should probably check after I post this),  rehearsal until 9 Tuesday, the senior citizens performance Wednesday, and then shows Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It's going to be a long week, to say the least, but totally worth it. I wish I could tell you about all of the fun traditions we have and what goes on backstage, but I think it's best if what happens behind the scenes, stays there.
I really some of you decide to go, and that I see you in the audience!

P.S. I've been keeping up with the blog I chose to follow at the beginning of the term, and WOW! The photos on the blog have such a spread and are just really amazing. You should look at them here!

I'm Just Like Every Other Teenager.

Focus is essentially nonexistent for me. Always.

It's not just homework, I just can't concentrate on anything. Even if I'm procrastinating on homework on, say, Facebook, after a little while, I get bored of it, and go on Tumblr. Then that gets boring and I check my e-mail. And there's rarely anything exciting there, because lets be honest here, what teenager uses e-mail to connect with their friends anymore? None. So, naturally I get bored of that and go back to Facebook. And the cycle continues.

I'm basically just like every other teenager when it comes to focus.

So on a normal school night when I'm writing a paper, this is how it typically goes. I get home from musical rehearsal at 6. I eat couple (ok, a lot of) snacks, then go on the computer for around half an hour to check all of the social media sites. Then my family eats dinner. After dinner, it's around 7:30. So I go up to my room to do my homework.

Now, going up to my room is really a terrible idea if I'm trying to accomplish homework, because my room is so messy, that the only clear spot to do homework is on the bed, which makes it a heck of a lot easier to fall asleep on my homework. But staying downstairs really wouldn't be the best idea either, because, as anyone who knows my family understands, my family is quite loud. And, sound carries quite a lot in our house. So really, I'm screwed no matter where I go in my house.

After I've got out my homework, found a sharp pencil, and sat down on my bed to start working, my phone usually goes off or I have a sudden urge to go online via my i-pod. So if I'm trying really hard to focus, I'll turn my phone on silent and throw it across my room so I don't get distracted. Also, I'll turn off my i-pod. So I work for a while, trying my hardest not to let my mind wander. If it's 2 in the morning and I'm still buried up to my eyeballs in unfinished homework, I'll take a shower, and if that's already been done, I'll turn on my radio or use my i-pod, and (prepare to judge) dance around my room like a crazy person. This is a daily occurrence for me, and while it wakes me up, it leaves me quite unfocused, because it exposes me to my biggest focusing weakness: music.

I could write an entire blog post (or book, for that matter) about how music distracts me, but I'll leave it at this: IT IS TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO FOCUS WHEN THERE IS MUSIC PLAYING. Any kind of music, whether I've heard it or not. It just doesn't work.

So that's my usual process. However when I was writing this paper in particular, it was quite a different situation because, as anyone who read my last blog post knows, I was in Orlando with the marching band. So most of my paper-writing process happened in an airplane or at 1 in the morning after a full day at Epcot.

On the way to Orlando, I tried (I'm using the word tried loosely here) to start writing my paper, but realized fairly quickly that it was simply not going to happen. So instead, I went insane with highlighters on the original article, and tried my best to make it so writing my paper later would be easier. And it certainly helped, but writing a paper is writing a paper, and when it came time to actually do it, I just had to write. Nothing else, just focus and write like mad.

And that was how my rhetorical analysis paper was made.

Band Zombies

Since the weekend topic is open, I may as well write about literally the only thing that happened for me this weekend. That's right, marching band trip to Orlando, Florida.

And it was sufficiently bomb.

Let me back up and start off by saying I love marching band. I was about two seconds from dropping it after freshman year, and my life would absolutely suck if that had happened. The term "band geek" is totally applicable, but really, it's a compliment. I'm actually a terrible musician, and I don't care too terribly much about concert band, but marching band is indescribably fun. 

To understand what band is like for me, you have to know that I'm a percussionist. This means I am in drum line. Anyone who is actually in marching band and reading this probably just screamed "CULT!" because that's what the rest of the band essentially thinks of us as. We even have matching sunglasses.  We certainly lived up to the "cult" title on the trip, because every moment of my trip was spent with almost all of the drum line members who went. I really don't care what the rest of the band thinks, because I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. They are all hilarious. 

Moral of the story: it you're not on drum line, you're missing out. 

Besides drum line being a cult, normal, tourist-y things happened too. We went to Harry Potter world (yes, I had a butterbeer). I went on the Dueling Dragons ride. Twice. But apparently it's been renamed to something more lame. I took lots of pictures, which, if you're friends with me on Facebook, you'll probably be able to see this weekend. And it was loads and loads of fun. Only bad thing (that is kind of good too): Everyone who went on the trip is basically a zombie, they're so tired. This could be a good thing, because (and I can say this based of personal experiences) band kids get weird when they're tired. Meredith was loopy, the center snare was an awkward kind of grumpy, and rehearsal was basically an inside-joke fest.

Well, I'm going to go attempt to get some sleep, so I don't look like I just crawled out of a grave tomorrow morning. Brainsss....

Welcome to my weekend.