14 Things I Want my Brother to Know at 14

Your birthday is less than a month away. Next week I'll be taking you school shopping and expect "No, that's gay" in response to everything I suggest (by the way, I don't appreciate you using 'gay' to refer to something negative. RUDE)! You're growing up and I hate it. But since it's bound to happen and I can't afford to cryogenically freeze you until I am more fit to handle the change, I thought I might give you some tips that maybe I would have liked to know at 14.

Inspired by a Facebook post:
http://maryschmidt.tumblr.com/post/58728762311/25-things-i-want-myself-to-know-at-25

1. You are NOT stupid. You are nothing LESS than SMART. In fact, you are so incredibly, outstandingly, surprisingly brilliant sometimes that it scares me. So doctors have told you that you have ADHD? WHO CARES?! Go on a run, ride your skateboard around, listen to music. Anything that works to calm your body and mind. Once you're calm, do some homework. If you have trouble, ask for help. There is nothing wrong with you except that you let other people tell you that there is something wrong with you. You are strong, you are funny, you are intelligent, you are impressive. Now convince yourself of that.

2. Don't let yourself look like a greasy trouble maker. In the long run, everyone will appreciate you more, and you will appreciate yourself, if you give yourself the care you deserve! Cut your hair, wash your pants, and disinfect your shoes/socks sometimes. Don't worry, I looked like a greasy trouble maker until high school. It wasn't pretty. :)

3. I know how much you want to grow up, fit in, feel valued, and get away. Slow down, you're only a kid once. Slow down, let Mom worry about the bills. Slow down, and do your job: do well in school, have fun, be carefree. Trust me, that luxury goes away pretty quickly and you're not helping yourself by trying to speed it up.

4. Find a hobby BESIDES skating and driving Mom crazy. Discovering things you like leads to finding a passion in life.

5. School is important. I think I've said that before? Go to school, do your work. You won't regret that later! What you will regret is NOT going to school and NOT doing your work. Especially when you have to start paying for it.

6. Video games are a good form of stress release. Play them often, but not when you have other responsibilities that you're avoiding. Das bad, bro.

7. Life is hard, money sucks, yet everyone wishes they had more of it. Don't focus on what you don't have. Instead focus on what you do have. However, don't be afraid to ask family for things you need, such as clothes, school supplies, and other such necessities.

8. Be a little nicer to Chawnie. And when she isn't being nice, be a little more patient with Chawnie. She's your sister and she's most likely to be your long-term friend, through thick and thin, when no one else is. That goes for me too. No back talking. And call me more, you poop.

9. Remember grandparents too. If I give you Papa's number, will you call him more? He's a good friend to have.

10. I'm glad you're not a Facebook fiend. Don't change that.

11. Look to the future more, and be excited about it. Think, "I'm SO going to get an A on this test!", "Hmm, where could I venture to next summer? Hopefully somewhere new!", "What classes will I be interested in high school?", "What sports do I want to play?", "What do I want to do after high school?"And if any of that is too expensive, come talk to me. I know how to work the system, plus I have extra money to spend from time to time.

12. Stay weird. It's a family trait we have to pass on.

13. Girls are icky until you're in college. Just think of girls as succubi. Run away from them, quickly.

14. I love you very much Col-luh-lin. You're pretty cool, I guess. Though not as cool as I am. 'Cause I have a pretty kitty and for that reason I am the best in the world. Observe:

The Q Word

A poem I wrote.
*WARNING* There is 1 swear word.


'Twas a quiet, peaceful night
at the hospital, there
All the nurses were working
without a care
Till I came in, triumphantly,
for a coffee I had just bought
and my name I wrote on the
volunteer's slot
"Good evening!" a tech said to me
with joy in his eyes and a jump in his feet
"Good evening.." I replied,
with a quizzical look
"There's been no crazies," he whispered
"No criminals, no crooks!"
"Ah-ha!" I laughed, realizing his aim
"So today has been quiet and tame?"
All at once, I heard gasps all around
Some nurses ran out the door in a single bound!
"What?!" I shouted
"What did I say?"
"You just ruined our wonderful, peaceful day!
We will have a sore, pitiful night, it's true!
Oh, but perhaps it was my fault for not telling you.
You see, we share a suspicion, the staff and I,
that if you say the "q" word during your shift, past five,
your peaceful night will be disrupted for sure
By criminals, druggies, and crazies galore!
All of which have no viable medical emergency
but simply want a fix or some food for free!"
I nodded my head, mildly concerned.
"You're not taking this very seriously." The tech discerned
"Unfortunately not. I mean, what's the big deal?"
"Oh, you don't even know the feel..."
Just then the ER burst with commotion and chaos!
An old man came in screaming
"I LIKE SPACE BOTS."
Another sauntered in while defecating himself.
A ragged woman yelled
"I'M GOING TO KILL MYSELF."
I jumped to work immediately, trying to keep up with the crowd
when I heard a patient in another room thinking out loud:
"I'm going to kill that son of a bitch, Jason, for what he did
I bet he's still at his buddy's house where he hid."
Just then the patient emerged from his room
as I braced myself for some kind of crazy-guy doom
"Nurse, please, may I call my wife?
I wouldn't be so persistent, but I'm afraid for her life!"
"I'm sorry, you'll have to return to your room, Mr. Giff.
It is none of our concern who your wife has sex with."
The rest of the evening lagged on and on
It was so long it felt almost dawn.
Before I left I checked the rooms one last time
and found an old asian woman, about eighty-five.
She smiled at me, though her face was pained.
Just then, the doctor said,
"Well, it obviously isn't a sprain.
What you've got here is a dislocated wrist."
"Great!" The woman replied,
"Well I'm pissed."
She laughed warmly with the doctor, simply teasing,
as the nurse filled her IV and soon, she was sleeping.
As the doctors massaged her bones back into place
they whispered, "she must have fallen off of that ladder with some grace!
What a tough woman, I must say,
and to be able to handle pain this way!"
I moved on with a smile,
but certainly felt bad for what I'd done!
Needless to say, if you ever hear the "q" word in a hospital,
just run.

Katarina the Beautiful

FINALLY, we made it out to take pictures. We may take more while we're here, so don't think this is the only post that will occur! For now, I want to share some of my favorites. I posted a lot of them on facebook but there are some I won't post there. So, here we go.

 

 These first 6 are edited. Some obviously, some not so much. I love the first picture because it was really foggy and made the picture look kind of creepy.
The picture with the quote is really scary. We looked at it and decided Katarina looked unnatural and just really creepy. Like The Grudge status. So I put a quote on the picture from the horror movie Candyman. It says "They will say that I have shed innocent blood. What's blood for if not for shedding?"
So that was something a little different to try.
The second picture with the street lamp was Katarina's idea. It's pretty because she's doing this dancer-looking pose. I tried to take the graffiti off of the street lamp, but it wouldn't let me and it doesn't ruin the picture, so whatever.

Oooh, a nature photo! This was on our way back to the apartment. It was really pretty. So I shot it. 'Nough said, yo.

I love these two pictures. I think they're really pretty. It's just her sitting on my bed. Simple and gorgeous.

This is edited and actually looks a lot cooler than the original. I tried some highlight/shadow effects and some fill light effects to get the stadium to kind of stand out behind the fog. I think it looks cool..

Lalala, pretty smile, unedited. 

Lalala, sassy face. The poster in the back is really annoying and ruins the picture...

Kat hates this one. I love this one. I think it's pretty adorable.

I didn't crop the posters out of these, just because I wasn't thinking about it, but I think they're worth including. The lighting is better in the top one. Again, not rigidly posed and there's really not a theme to these. Just natural, pretty photos.


Let me know your thoughts. If you have suggestions for themes/clothes/locations for today, I welcome them.
Peace out homies.

Self Portraits: My Attempt at Modeling

WARNING: This post is admittedly a little self-centered... I think? Probably. Anyway, we all have a right to be self-centered sometimes!

Katarina and I were supposed to do a photo shoot this past weekend in Hawthorne. It was going to be so much fun, Katarina is really pretty so the pictures were to be gorgeous, but this air-headed dweeb left her camera battery charging in Vancouver. So.. that's rescheduled to the middle of January. And my Nana bought me this wonderful tripod for Christmas that I've been trying to find reasons to use! Well, today, it miraculously started snowing (and hasn't stopped) in this wonderful place of Vancouver, so I decided to take crazy weird pictures like this one: 

Hair not did. Make up not on. In the clothes I slept in. Oh so charming. So, I then put a few on facebook and immediately thought "people think I'm weird, lazy, and uninhibited," which is generally all true, but I felt the need to get pretty and take some photos of myself. I was not at all hopeful that they'd turn out okay. I've never "modeled" in my life and just don't really know what to do in front of a camera except put a huge smile on my face or look really... really weird. So, I shall share a few of my favorites. In an amateur photographers perspective, I like the angle and location that I set my camera up and I didn't edit any of these because the lighting was either pretty okay or pretty good and I actually liked the unfocused falling snowflakes. Sooooo. Here are some.
SECOND WARNING: Some of these pictures clearly expose my stomach. If it offends you, scroll past them. It wasn't quite intentional. Also, my stomach looks less than attractive in at least one photo. It's the season of "eat so much more than your body can accommodate," so get over it. :)

So.. easy on the criticism. ;) But let me know what you think! And tell me your favorite!

Why I Question Media, Teenagers, and Humanity

I feel the need to vent. If I keep posting Facebook statuses in order to vent, I'll just annoy. So here is my full vent, unedited, all out. Here are the reasons I am completely livid with humanity at the moment:

1. There are some cold, heartless people out there who simply disgust me.
2. The media, and the news specifically, employs some of the most vulture-like, fame hungry, money-grubbing, completely thoughtless individuals I've seen in my experience.
3. As a country, we need to figure out this gun control issue. 

In detail:
1. I don't consider myself the most emotional person in the world. I consider myself compassionate and caring, but on "normal" levels. As soon as I heard about the shooting, I wasn't quite scared or worried at first. I was disappointed. My first thought was, "Another one? It is really unfortunate that I react to a shooting with 'another one?'" Immediately after this thought, and as soon as I heard people had been shot, I began to worry. I have about five or more friends who work at the town center, let alone about a dozen who are still young enough to be addicted to frequenting the town center daily, whether that be for shopping or just hanging out. Oh, and this is Christmas season. A season I usually spend locked in my house because I know the amount of people out and about buying gifts and such. The point being that there are countless amounts of people who could have happened to be at the mall who would have been in danger. Not just people I know, but people my friends know, and people their friends know, and their friends, and so on. We are all connected and related and similar and are all effected, in however large or small a way, by what one of us does. As such, neurologically, we should respond by subconsciously mirroring the emotions of those around us. This is called empathy. 
As I read through my Facebook newsfeed, I became increasingly concerned with my friends, family, and the members of the community who had gone to the Town Center today. Most statuses were shocked exclamations such as "there was a shooting at the town center!!!!!" or concerned statuses such as "I pray that everyone gets out okay!" but one status stopped me in tracks. A girl who is about my age, who I've maybe talked to once or twice (we share a mutual friend), to her eternal credit said,
"Can we stop posting about the mall now? Everyone knows not to go there, someone's shooting people. We get it."
Now, this would have been easy to ignore, except that upon reading her justification for saying such a thing,
"I'm not talking about the people who were shot or killed. But everyone is blowing up about the same thing. It gets old. There are shootings all the time. Just because it's at the mall, people are freaking out."
Umm...
Excuse me?! OF COURSE people are freaking out, you self-absorbed teenager. People were hurt, people were scared, and a status like that demeans the compassion the rest of us decent people are trying to express.
I scrolled up from her status, completely disgusted, only to find another, closer friend with a status near verbatim to the last. So I posted a polite, but hopefully pointed paragraph on how I felt. Several more from other friends of mine showed up so apparently I wasn't the only person with cold, disrespectful friends, which makes it all the more heartbreaking.

2. I was watching Fox 12 covering the shooting this evening. They said the same things over and over: "shooter at large, 2 dead, 1 injured, the situation is contained but no further information."
They started interviewing witnesses after they said the same thing in a loop a few times. The first witness was calm and collected. The first interviewer was concise and didn't ask stupid questions. The second interviewer, however, didn't know how to lead the interview and was completely fake. The interview I witnessed went a little something like this:
"Did you see the shooter?"
"No, I was on the other side of the mall."
"Could you describe the shooter?"
"No. I didn't see him.."
"How did you feel when you heard the gunshots."
"Well.. I was scared for my life."
There were two interviews that went like this. Again... OF COURSE people are scared, you thoughtless newscaster. May I mention that before the first interview started, it looked like he was declining to speak on camera, to which she shook her head, waved her arm, and introduced him anyway? I could be wrong, but it looked pretty suspicious to me. And during the press conference, all of the news people would not let it go that the police officer would not be more specific. I realize it's their job to get information, but it's his job to keep sensitive and/or questionable information to himself. Their pretty reminiscent of  vultures, in my opinion. Hey, I have an idea! Instead of sending pointless interviewers out to bombard and practically coerce poor fresh-out-of-tragedy witnesses, let's put a few trained counselors/psychologists on the site. Let's offer, say, fifteen minute counseling and a referral outside of the crime scene. It may not be practical, but it would be so much more helpful than some interviewers looking to get a raise.

3. Okay, I'm not very educated on this gun control issue. However, it's obvious that if unstable individuals can easily get their hands on firearms, something needs to change. And that really sucks for everyone else, but it's better safe than sorry. I'm not saying make it impossible to get a gun, but maybe require a psychiatric evaluation first.. Which of course would be impractical, but would we rather have people shooting up our malls some more? I don't think so.

Experimental Art

So finals went okay, yes I'm glad to be on break, last term was extremely exhausting. But I don't want to talk about school! Instead, this is another post of new photos.

Now this time, it wasn't exactly planned. I went to Levi's Christmas concert at George Fox and decided to take pictures just to try to catch Levi in one of them (remotely successful, as the only Levi pictures were too blurry to be good pictures). So, I ended up taking pictures of pretty lights and decoration. One of the photos is actually of the band as well as decoration, but the three others I'll put on here are just different lighting affects and/or decoration. So I refer to them as my first "experimentally artistic" photos.

Here's the photo of the band+decorations and such. They really go all out. It isn't just a choir concert, it's definitely a full-on show!

Lighting affects. Kind of cool. 

This one is my favorite. The ceiling looks like clouds and stars (which, if I remember correctly, was the point).

Pretty colors!


Thoughts? :)

ERMAHGERD PERPEHS ERND STERF

So there's a popular meme known as the ERMAHGERD meme. Here's what it looks like:

 Basically, this is actually some poor girls nerdy 6th grade photo. People take it and write things like "ERMAHGERD MAH FRAVRIT BERKS" - it's meant to be in a lispy, nerdy, braces voice. So, I made my own. Enjoy: 

Thank you Connor for providing me with a FANTASTIC face to use. ;)I edited more photos of nature and PUPPY. ERMAHGERD. Enjoy those to - I command you!!

 

Thoughts in the form of comments are appreciated. 

Farewell!