16 years of........ I'm not quite sure

Well, tomorrow is the big day-- I turn 16. However I find my life has been too menial so far to earn such a title as "16". When I was a little girl, I always pictured myself as this beautiful social-butterfly who partied every weekend, was top of her class, had an amazing boyfriend, was the captain of some beautiful sport. I would get my licence on my birthday and then go out to eat with friends and family in a beautiful dress that complemented my blonde hair and perfect skin. I would then proceed to have an amazing party the following weekend where at least 50 people would come and it'd be formal and in a dining hall.
Yeah... I put a lot of thought into this. Alas, I will not have fulfilled any of these dreams, nor be celebrating as lavishly as I had dreamed. On the weekends I do homework. I only have 4 A's to show for these weekends of hard work. I don't even want to get into the fact that I don't have a boyfriend and all prospects are sex-obsessed douches. My sport of late: Cross Country, which I am only mediocre at and it certainly is not a beautiful sport. Licence-- yup, I'm still working on those 40 hours, but hey I have to wait another month anyways! The celebration tomorrow: Practice, where we will prepare for the region meet on Thursday with 400's and then a pasta dinner so the coach may dictate what we eat before the big meet. This will be with my team-mates, whom I love dearly, but I would like to see my other friends on my birthday. I will most likely be dressed in jeans and a t-shirt that clashes with my hair, but highlights my horrid skin that hasn't stopped breaking out in 3 months. My party: It's in two weeks. As of right now, I have 6 people coming and I have no clue what we are going to do. I just love my birthday!

Lesson of the day: You learn a lot about a person when they have no one else to talk to.

Well that day was a waste....

Yesterday was pretty much a waste of 13 hours. I woke up at noon to eat a GIANT bowl of Magic Stars ( Kroger brand Luck Charms: Ten times sweeter and double the marshmallows!) and then I made a Carmel macchiato on my new espresso maker. After eating was complete, I cracked open the new Guitar Hero 5. I never expected it to be as good as it was! Lemme tell you, the graphics were amazing and the story line, superb! Plus the song choices are very interesting. Finally someone decided it would be a good idea to include Jack White in Guitar Hero! The next step: Jack White as a character on Guitar Hero! Unfortunately, I had too much homework to get far enough into the game to play the Nirvana songs. The controversy unfolds as to whether it is an injustice to have Kurt Cobain as an unlockable character. I think it for sure is! Here's a link to an article on it .

Once my dad got on my case about playing Guitar Hero, I dug into my 12! assignments that I have due on Tuesday. I failed to complete all of them in the 5 hours I was working on them! When dinner time rolled around, I stopped with homework, made some Ramen Noodles and watched Fight Club, which is probably one of the best movies ever made. Once my dad got back home, he stopped me from playing Guitar Hero, again! and we watched the fight that was on HBO. Klitchko v. Areeola I think it was. Well anyways, it was really interesting. I never really got into boxing, but when my dad turns it on, I can't help but watch. I mean boxing just brings out the mortality of the people in the fight-- it really just shows, no matter how strong you are physically and mentally, you can only take so many hits. Upon deciding that midnight was too late to be working on homework on a Saturday, I called my dear friend Sam to see how her birthday went. We talked for an hour, and then i got my pjs on and watched Food Network for some time, eventually falling asleep.

Around 2:00, my phone rings. It is the familiar ring of my best friend Jenna Hall, who is in New Orleans filming a movie right now called the Pregnancy Pact. Boy am I going to laugh when she gets fat! Anyways, she was calling so her buddy, Max, could sing me a song. It was pretty good for a 2:00 in the morning spontaneous serenade.

Lesson of the day: Staying up too late can get you good things. And fighting brings out a lot in people.

Trying this again

Coming back from the Georgia Scholastic Press Association Conference at UGA this past Wednesday and Thursday, I have had the urge to start again expressing my thoughts to whomever would read them. Excessive, I know, because no one wants to read the thoughts of a high schooler who simply has too much to say about nothing important, but hey its what ever, its chill.
So last night I had to write an essay for my Analysis class-- "Analysis Meth" as it is called on my schedule-- about how line of best fit can be applied to mile times and when certain times could be run. Being in cross country, the last thing I wanted to do was expound upon how people of the world can run a mile in half the time I can. Just when I was between the stages of "Man I need to get off Facebook and finish this paper" and "I am going to kill myself if I have to write one more sentence on how to extrapolate"(Note to reader: extrapolate is one of my favorite words, despite its negative mathematical connotations.), I came up with this brilliant equation to determine how miserable an assignment was. This grandiose discovery would be: stress level (on a scale of 1-10) + sleep loss ( how many hours you stayed up past 9 o'clock ( because that's when you'd have to go to sleep to get the full hours for teens)) - how much creativity you had to employ with the assignment ( this may be none if you are writing a math essay :P) X how many times you would have rather stabbed your eyes out with plastic spoons than do the assignment a.k.a. suicidal thoughts. Ex. This math paper caused me to be very stressed, about an 8, during the trip to UGA, cause I knew it was due the day after I got back. I stayed up till 12:30 doing the blasted thing and it had no room for creativity, besides my last line where I said there may be robots instead of humans in 3000. and I would have rather plucked my eyelashes out with scissors or killed myself 3 times during that assignment than finish it. So numerically this is 8+3.5-1X3= 31.5. Yeah that's pretty miserable. However, for things such as the whole IB program, the miserable levels are heinous, for they make you so stressed out, cause you to loose years of sleep, make you just want to kill yourself and, in the process, allow you to employ little creativity(my biology teacher is concerned for my mental health because I attempted to incorporate talking moosen into my presentation.) These levels could go to infinity and beyond.

Lesson of the Day: You are masochistic if you put yourself through miserable things.

The Urge to Blog

So something random told me to blog today. I have now not been in Economics for about 4 months, so there is no more economic stuff to write about. So.... now I just get to babble about my unimportant life.
Well today Hannah and I went to the mall with my mom in an attempt to get new summer clothes since the majority of my clothes from last year don't fit me any more. It was quite unsuccessful. I ended up only getting a purple shirt and a two tank tops, one black and one blue. nothing to out of the ordinary. Oh I also got some purple mascara which was pretty exciting. My brothers are coming home from camping as I type, and that is something that is very depressing. My house is always quiter and cleaner with out them. Hannah slept over my house last night and after 3 hours of Guitar Hero World Tours, we decided to eat an entire bag of gummie bears, which proceeded to make us sick. We then attempted to watch Milk, but fell asleep two minutes after we started it.

What to make of all of this: Green gummie bears are aliens not to be messed with.

Finally Done With Freakonomics!

I have finally finished Freakonomics and I can honestly say that I enjoyed reading this book. It was very interesting and put an... interesting perspective on everyday life. So Chapter 6, A Roshanda By Any Other Name, focused on how what a child is named correlates with thier parent's income and what hopes they have for the child. It told the story of a father who named one of his sons Winner and the other Loser, just based off of feeling he had during the pregnancy. In the end, however, Loser became a cheif policeman and Winner became a criminal. Then the chapter listed the popular names based on income and education and which names were correlated with high income and success in the future. It explained name trend cycels, where the names the high end people use trickel down to the low income people and then go out of style.

I could draw some parallels from this chapter and some of the stuff that we learned in class, like how as demand of a product, or name, goes up, the price, or "quailty" of the name goes down. All in all, I felt that he book helped me to look at everyday choices and see how that when you choose, you loose.

Freakonomics Post 5

Alright, so after my Spanish final today, I finished the Fifth Chapter of Freakonomics ( What Makes a Perfect Parent). This chapter discussed the fear parents have of raising thier child "wrong". The topic that was discussed first was that people often fear the wrong things, such as not letting your 6-year old daughter play at a house where there is a gun, but letting her swim frequently in her other friend's pool, when more children drown yearly than by playing with a gun. The second thing the chapter addressed was how important parents are in the outcome of a child. After assessing a list of 16 items that were often thought of as things that helped children succed in school, the eight that were true statements were: Having highly educated parents, Having parents that had high sociceconomic status, Having a mother who was 30 or older at the time of thier first child's birth, the child's birth weight, If the child's parents speak English at home, Wether or not the child is adopted, Wether the child's parents were involved in teh PTA, and How many books the child had in thier home. These eight topics trupmed stuff like wether or not the child went to Head Start and cultural expierences, which leads to the conclusion that it is not what the parents do but who they are that influences the child the most.

This chapter was semi-interesting. I failed to see how it related much to economics other than the choices the parents could make.

Freakonomics Post 4

Chapter 4 (Where Have All the Criminals Gone?) explored the reasons previoulsy given for the drop in crime in the 1990s after people said it to be "apocolyptic". Levitt and Dubar seemed to find something wrong with each one. One problem was with the "the stong eoconomy" theory.The flaw was many things, but praticularly that the unemployment rate v. crime rate ratio did not match up to its past numbers. You see, in the past, with a 1% drop in unemployment, ther was a 1% drop in nonviolent crime, but in the 19902, there was a 2% drop in unemployment and a 40% raise in nonviolent crime. The conclusion that the authors came to was that the legalization of abortion led to the drop in crime. With the passing of Roe v. Wade, many women who felt that they could not support a child for various reasons just simpy did not have the child that they were already impregnated with. The result was that all of those "uncared" for kids did not grow up to be troubled teenagers looking to cause trouble, which studies showed that most teenagers growing up in the enviroment provided my most women who would have had an abortion, end up doing.

As someone who is pro-choice, reading this chapter gave me another reason to back up my belief. Honestly, abortion and crime are two things that i would never connect, but upon completeing this chapter, the connection is promenint.