Friday, December 30, 2005

I have too much free time

I know I have been going crazy with the postlately, but it's vacation, my sleep schedule is fucked up, I'm bored and it's my blog-- I can do whatever the fuck I want.

After a conversation with Jeff I have gotten a good idea for a poem. I am posting a very rough draft (the Kerouac draft, if you will) here since more people can see it this way. I need suggestions. I like this and I think it could be good. Withno further delay, I present:

HIDE
I have seen the best minds
of my generation blown away
by RPGs.

Not rocket propelled
grenades.
the online kind.

I have awaken
to simulated shots
and screams

of a pixelated marine
falling to the ground
and moving no more

then being reborn
to do it
all over again.

I have seen rooms
over flow with crushed
coke cans, filled

with ants and gnats
buzzing around pizza
boxes from weeks ago.

I have watched friends
drop out and drop off
the face of the earth

because they were killing
terrorists. Practicing
for the real thing

as their bodies
turned to play dough
and faces grow stubble.

Entire lives have changed
during twenty-six hours
in the same position

in another land
another time
another life.

People for pixles(?)
friends for firewalls
life for death.

A new generation
needs a new addiction.
Not a physical escape,

a mental one. To change
into a dwarf or a cyborg
making corpses, becoming one.

Alone, content, docile.
Why fight for your life
when your online one

is more fun? Why stand
up for freedom
if you can sit down
and play it?

Why ask questions
about another person
when everything

you need to know
is summed up
in a profile.

A box.
A glare.
Electrons.

If you date
online
are you dating?

If you fuck
someone online
are you fucking

anyone
besides
yourself?

Constructive criticism is always welcome.

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Another 4 a.m. Post

It's four in the morning and the coffee is wearing off. I should stop but I won't. I never do. In that short state between the caffiene stopping and the sleep starting I find my best ideas.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about change. Everyday it happens. Everyday is something horrendous or beautiful or appaling or fulfilling for so many people. As I go about my daily routines, sometimes I can't help but wonder...

Everyday thousands of people die. Everyday thousands of people are born. People are raped, beaten stabbed mugged and get in car wrecks. Everyday people fall in love, achive their life's goal or simply find something that makes the next day worth living. People go to wars and people come home. Iraq, Germany, America, Columbia or the Congo. At any given moment somebody's life is shifting.

These people have daily routines. They have hum drum activities. Everyone does. Yet everyday, somewhere in this little blue ball something is happening that changes uncountable lives.

And here I sit.

Today wasn't life changing, but tomorrow my car could get T-boned. The day after I could get shot. Here I sit droning through life (sometimes) and maybe just down the street somebody's life has been completely shifted.

The obvious answer: enjoy life now. Cliche, I know, but remember tomorrow it could all be a diffrent story. Today somebody welcomed a new child into the world and somebody else put his cancer-ridden mother into the ground.

Sometimes the effects are direct. An old friend will comit suicide or get his girlfriend pregnant. However, I can't help but wonder when I walk down the street or see someone at a bus stop when the most recent major life change happened to them. We are completely oblivious to each others changes but they're still there.

As for now, I'm going to bed. Whatever tomorrow brings I'll deal with it when the time comes. As for my readers, I hope you enjoyed my ramblings. I know I did.

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Why Sixteen Year Olds Make Me Laugh:

This is a blog posting from a sixteen year old girl I met at the rock:

Saturday, December 24, 2005

To the moon....DAN IS COOL! and YOUR NOT! haha
Current mood: rejected
Category: Parties and Nightlife
yeah John's older bother Dan thought of and idea to go to the moon!

to get the Fuck away from are Bull shit government! Yeah you hear me
FUCK BUSH! I FUCKING HATE BUSH! and if you think it b/c of GREEN
DAY! YOU FUCKING SUCK I HAVE ALWAYS HATED BUSH. HE'S A
FUCKING MONKEY!

Oh YEAH DAN HAS TO BE ONE OF THE COOLEST GUYS I KNOW!

UHM FUCK. IDK ANYMORE!
CHRISTMAS IS IN 1 DAY!

Currently listening: The Misfits
By The Misfits
Release date: By 01 July, 1991

Friday, December 23, 2005

2005: The Year in Review

It's four in the morning right now. I'm severeally bored and have been doing a lot of thinking about the past year. I have decided to come up with a random series of lists of shit that was important to me this year.

Top Ten Events of 2005:

10-Filling my ex-roommate Brian's room with rotting cheese, old boxes and anything else I could find as a going away present to the biggest pile of shit I ever met in my life.
9-Greenday Concert. This changed my views on a lot of things. Although the concert itself wasn't amazing, it inspired me to look into a different way of life.
8-Telling my Journalism advisor that I was switching majors.
7-Moving into my apartment: After months of waiting I finally got to live on my own terms. This is also the day I met Jessica.
6-The Eiffel Tower
5- The Car Jacking: Of course this was going to be on here
4- Doing shrooms
3- All nighter with Jeff
2- Yelling Op Ivy lyrics with my friends at the most recent party I threw
1- The First night of Tag

Top five Quotes:
5-"and...IT'S A CAN"
-John
4- "Dan, I've found the meaning of life: Robocop Pinball"
-JJ
3-John:"Close your butt cheeks"
Jeff: "I CAN'T!"
2- "Fuck! Tag rules!"
-Mark Holland
1- "It's like church, but awesome"
-Jeff

Top One Person I Wish I Hadn't Slept With:
1-Fio

Top Five Best Parties:
5-Jessica's post-house show party
4- JVA/Same Old Crap/Boycott house show, but only because Boycott kicks ass
3-Third Tag Session post-party
2- Second Party at my place
1- Jeff's HALL-o-ween party

Top Five Things that Will Kick Ass in 2006:
5-New Lincoln Fraternity: Tau Alpha Gamma
4- Living with John, Jeff and JJ
3- Going to bars
2- The long awaited return of tag.
1- sweet adventures with good friends.

Monday, December 19, 2005

Why I Want to do Acid

So I went o Village Inn to day with an associate of mine. I was asleep for about four hours when he came to get me. It took about thirty minutes for me to get rolling, but once we did, I had a good time.

After drinking two pots of coffee and bidding him good-bye, something interesting happened: although my caffiene-soaked brain was raceing at super human speeds, my body was completely worn out. Eventually my body's trys for sleep took precedance and I took a nap.

Then things got interesting.

For an hour straight my brain was running a head full speed, completely unencumbered by my wakeing conscience. I saw spiders and snakes, friends and enemies. It was like a forty-five minute trip of awesome. The things I saw I can't even describe. I do remember at some point asking myself if I was on acid during my power-nap of doom.

Oddly enough when I woke up I had been more recharged in the three-forths of an hour on a caffiene sleep than any other sleeping period I've had in the past two months.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Twenty One

I can buy beer now.

I know that sounds like a stupid thing to be hung up on, but it is just such a shock to realize that right now, or at almost any given moment, I can go to a store and get tanked. The days of scrambling for buyers or hoping to god someone at the party has something for sale are gone.

This is the first birthday since I turned sixteen that I have truely felt like a different person after it happened.

It's just shock. Eventually it will wear off and it will become as mundane as buying a pack of cigarettes. On the flip side though, there is a huge amount of responsibility that comes along with being twenty one, and I hope I'm strong enough to handle it.

The first big thing I need to keep tabs on is providing for minors. I don't mind doing it for people I trust, but what happens if I got a providing for minor charge? That would severeally alter who I hope to be in five or ten years. I have been given a gift to work with children. I would like to be able to use that gift to help as many of them as I can. Nothing will end an interview with a prospective employer in this field faster than a providing for minors conviction.

The second is driving. As a firm opponent of drunken driving, I need to be aware of how I am getting home and how much I should drink before it happens. I would hate to be responsible for someone's death because I drank too much.

The third, and biggest thing is that alcohol can be fun, but could it end up being too fun? Alcoholism runs in my family. My grandfather was a horrible person when he was at the peak of his addiction. I would hate to follow in his footsteps. There are too many people who care about me to throw my life away like that, but sometimes you can be so into something that everyone else and everything else ceases to matter.

I'm sure I'm being over-analytical. I have a reasonable grasp of what is important to me, and I know that this could end up being a very positive thing (I sound like Penelope). These are just a muddled version of the thoughts in my head right now. Now that I can legally drink, I need to be careful.

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Depressing

I've been kind of burnt out on writing actual things this week. Something of substance will return, but as for now I want you two to see the most depressing thing I have ver looked upon:
http://www3.state.id.us/oasis/HCR029.html

Friday, December 09, 2005

PARTY:

BOTH OF YOU ARE INVITED!

My apartment. Saturday. 10:00 p.m. Call for details.

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Resistance Paper

I don't actually expect anybody to read this, I just wanted to have it online so I can get access to it anytime I want.

High school is an intense time for everybody. From the captain of the football team down to the most uninvolved C student, everyone struggles with growing up. Some students handle it constructively by joining groups, making friends and gaining a sense of self. Other students fail to cope and fall into dangerous and destructive behavioral patterns such as drug or alcohol abuse, sexual promiscuity and violence. In my senior year of high school I displayed my frustration at having lost faith in God and at the rules and regulations of my Catholic school through aggressive behaviors.
The summer between my sophomore and junior years, I lost my faith in God. I was the first in my class to do so. My first job exposed me to a world outside my comfort zone of Catholic students, schools and suburbia. My co-workers smoked pot, drank heavily and did crank. Drugs were a distant concept to me and I was shocked when I saw first hand the negative effects they had on people’s lives. I saw people using drugs to make life livable while I was guaranteed a secure life after high school. Instead of seeking guidance I chose to be alone with my confusion and bottled up my concerns.
In his book, “Dear Josie,” Joseph Featherstone suggests that a student’s resistance begins at an early age. When crossing from the connected and safe environment of home to the judgmental and unfamiliar environment of school, kids become frightened and will lash out at other students or authority figures before they can be attacked (43)
My resistance began when I crossed from the safe world of suburbia to the volatile world of working. I was unable to cope with my new found knowledge and believed I was the only one who saw how bad the world could be.
I reacted to this exposure by questioning the core beliefs I accepted for so long. Papal authority, a just world, and the very existence of God seemed hallow because my real world experience countered these concepts. I had trouble understanding the school’s desire to make a point that God was real. The distance between what I felt was real and what the school told me was real helped spur my frustration. I needed to express my problems and I picked inappropriate and sometimes dangerous ways of doing so. I sought respect from my peers but the attention I received came because they were entertained by me, as if I were a clown.
When I decided my values didn’t match my peer’s I further isolated myself from my community. I created an outside image to hide my insecurities and to protect myself from how I thought people viewed me. I presented myself in school as a pessimistic Atheist. I consistently attacked the beliefs of anyone who tried to make any connection with me. I kept myself emotionally distant and attempted to shock people into recognizing my individuality. As my shocking behaviors became accepted I found I needed increasingly outrageous means to maintain my reputation.
Often, a simple greeting from a casual acquaintance would yield an attack from me on their beliefs. My response was often irrelevant to their question:
“Hey Dan, how’s it going?”
“God is dead!”
Dennis Stevens, in his article “Student Traffic Control and Resistance in the Corridors of a Prestigious High School,” says that students respond to a school’s dictates based on their own self image. If a student sees himself or herself as an A student who is working toward a bright future, that student will be more likely to be in line with the school’s goals and less likely to resist. However, some students see themselves as deviants and respond in a manner consistent with that image. This leads to students being treated differently by teachers (68).
This difference in treatment from the authority of the school leads to daily reinforcement of the student’s self-image. Students in the deviant category tend to believe what they think about themselves and what the school thinks about them. Acts of resistance come from a combination of self image and imposed image.
As these behaviors continued, school authorities contacted my parents and set up a conference. I was shocked. I felt my parents viewed me as an uncontrollable animal incapable of rational thought. During the discussion I broke down in tears and confessed to my parents and principal that I felt alone and could not identify with the ideals the school promoted. My principal suggested I try counseling but I swore I would change my behaviors. I said I would give them an example at the Senior Retreat.
The day of the Retreat I awoke with a feeling of dread. Despite my promise, I had spent the past week trying to convince anybody who would listen that Jesus was a liar, that God was dead and that retreat would be a waste of time. My assertions had been met with passive nods or silence. I was angry that I had to go and made it clear to everyone around me.
As I was getting ready for school my dad came into the bathroom to talk with me.
“Dan,” he said “I want you to promise me that you won’t do anything bad today. I know you’ve had a tough year, but please just be good.”
“Okay, dad.” But I was not.
During the bus ride I got a different reaction to my statements. Whenever I spoke, my peers gave me a knowing smile. Something was going to happen.
At the Retreat a surprising number made an effort to get to know me. When asked questions about my family, what I wanted to be and why I felt like I did about God, I would feel cornered, turn red and sheepishly explained my arguments. After I mumbled my theories, my classmates would debate with me. When they discovered my theories were largely unsubstantiated they would change the subject to alleviate my embarrassment. They were getting to know me and I got scared.
I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with people reaching out to me and asking me to back up my beliefs. I felt vulnerable and exposed, so I decided that people needed to be reminded of how much of a rebel I wanted to be seen as.
The opportunity came when the Retreat was almost over. With two hours left, all two hundred and forty two of us were brought into a gym with chairs lined up like pews in a church. The Retreat leaders asked us to get up in front the entire class to speak about what we had learned that day about our faith.
As I walked up to the front of the class, I carried a chair with me. I was given a microphone in front of the entire Skutt Catholic class of 2003. There was a buzz in the air. I was on everyone’s lips and I enjoyed it. I was going to remind people of my reputation. I was scared all day and wanted to scare them so I wouldn’t have to be vulnerable.
As soon as I got the microphone I yelled a PG-13 version of “Fuck the Police” by NWA. Instead of using the actual profanity I held the microphone to the crowd. My peers responded by cheering and chanting my name. I enjoyed it too much. In my mind I was a god. I can’t believe, to this day, the teachers didn’t cut me off.
I expressed how the six hours we had spent under the school’s rules didn’t match what I felt. I launched a massive assault on the Church, God, and anything I could think of that was faith-related. I insulted the faculty, calling them ‘puppets of their depraved and pathetic notions of humans being more than dust.’ “I am more convinced today then ever before that god is dead,” I said, “and I can thank this retreat for that.” I finished my speech and brought my tantrum to a violent climax. My name was chanted louder. The moments began to blur. I saw the chair I carried and recalled images of famous rebels like Kurt Cobain, Joe Strummer and Pete Townsend. I saw myself as one of these icons and I decided to follow in their footsteps.
I pulled the chair from the ground, lifted it over my head and without any hesitation smashed it into the ground. The chair remained in tact so I slammed it to the ground again. This time the legs were bent. I threw the chair at the crowd, nearly injuring a classmate. I then ran at full speed toward the nearest wall. I jumped as high and hard as I could, turning my body so I struck the wall at a ninety-degree angle and bounced off. I landed ten feet away from the wall. I was a legend for a day.
My English teacher, Ms. Upton, escorted me away from the gym. When we were alone, she yelled at me. She said I was acting like a child, I was better than that, and none of those people respected me. My adrenaline was flowing too hard for it to sink in.
The teachers and Retreat leaders assembled to discuss what to do. I sat in a chair and smiled to myself. I didn’t feel any remorse until I was told my punishment. I was to call my dad, explain the situation and ask to be taken home. Somebody gave me a cell phone and I dialed my dad’s work number. I began to cry while talking to my dad and could not finish the explanation, so my Principal did. They arranged for my Mom to come pick me up. To this day I can honestly say that was the only time I truly wished I was dead.
The drive home was the most awkward thirty minutes of my life. My mom refused to acknowledge my presence. When I asked her how her day went or if she still loved me, she remained tight lipped. Her face was set in stone. She acted like she was the only person in the car.
After yelling and questions my parents and I determined I needed to seek therapy. The conversation is one of the most memorable of my life. It was the start of the healing process for everyone involved.
“Dan,” he said “I think therapy will be good for you.”
“Why do you care? I’m such a bad person. Why do you even let me stay around?”
“Because I love you, and I always will.”
My behavior at the retreat and at school was not justified under any circumstances. My actions were destructive, unnecessary and immature. However, there was a rationale behind each one, an underlying thought process that determined how I behaved. I was aware I my behavior was harmful but chose to act out in spite of the consequences. Stevens notes that sometimes what is important to the school in terms of order and discipline is not what is important to students. When this happens the school punishes the student for what he or she may honestly think is the right thing to do. This leads to feelings of forced conformity on the student which can result in more frustration. If someone feels their deeply held beliefs are wrong, they will make a point of resisting. (Page 64)
Being the first to lose faith in the Church and God is unnerving. I denied the things my life was based on and felt isolated for it. This isolation bred fear. I wasn’t sure who I could talk to. I felt my parents were rigid authority figures, the school was maintaining the status quo, and my peers didn’t feel as I did. I felt I had nowhere to turn and was afraid of being vulnerable. I used my extreme actions to scare people away. The frustration at my situation is reflected in a quote from a journal entry I wrote in February of 2003:
“They (students/teachers) only spit out what their parents tell them and are completely incapable of thinking for themselves. Like a tape recording, always spewing out other’s thoughts, never their own.”
I also felt isolated by the administration. The rules that were in place had been there longer than I. I felt the rules weren’t in line with my philosophy at the time. I felt that since I didn’t have anything to do with their creation they should not apply it to me. The rules were a daily reminder of what I was no longer part. I felt like the administration was mocking me by telling me I was part of a group I didn’t like.
According to the article” the author, Dennis Stevens, offers an explanation as to why students feel the need to resist. “Student resistance is a product of a compelling institution’s nature, since a compelling institution establishes the policies, enforcements and goals for its members without their consent” (73).
Feeling isolated caused me to crave attention from others. I wanted to be recognized so I was not by myself. I had no sense of community in my life and needed to draw it from my classmates. They gave it to me, but only when I was acting as their source of entertainment; the rest of the time they left me alone.
I felt alienated by the institution because I couldn’t find something that was for me. I felt I was being controlled and looked over. The policies seemed so inflexible that my choices were to bend and conform or try to break them.
How does the institution remedy this problem? Can it even be fixed? I believe it can be, but as with all cases of help, the other person needs to meet the institution half way. The best thing to do is to encourage students to get involved. Explain the benefits of being around like minded people and try to get feelings of isolation to a minimum. The isolation is where it starts, but frustration is where resistance begins. If students can feel connected to others then resistance won’t seem like a viable option.
In class Stephanie Clausen brought to my attention a boy named Pete. Between in-class discussions and blackboard posting she painted a picture of a student who was frustrated with school, but enjoyed the connection he felt playing sports enough to do the minimum amount of work to graduate. Pete would tolerate school in order to gain a sense of connection. If I had found a way of connecting with others then perhaps I might not have acted so violently.
When students who already feel frustrated internally have an external mechanism like school enforcing and reinforcing a negative image of self then resistance is often only a natural reaction to feelings of forced conformity. I can say that my frustrations were often an emotional reaction to feeling trapped and isolated and I am sure that is the case for many students who resist.






BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stevens, Dennis. (1985). Student Traffic Control and Resistance in the Corridors of a Prestigious High School. Education. Vol. 108. Issue 1. p62-75.

Featherstone, Joseph. (2003). Dear Josie: Witnessing the Hopes and Failures of Democratic Education. New York: Teacher’s College Press.

Clausen, Stephanie. (2005). Pete. Retrieved December 2, 2005, from Blackboard Discussion Board Story on Resistance. Web Site: http://my.unl.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_200625_1

Monday, December 05, 2005

Question:

Did you ever work so hard that the very idea of masterbating makes you physically ill?