46 Days, 13 hours....Not That I'm Counting or Anything...

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46 days.

2 months.

7 weeks.

No matter how I word it, it's obvious to see that my long awaited trip to Dublin, Ireland is coming up very soon and I’m not going to lie and say that I’m not doing flips on the inside...because I am! The three Cedar Rapids schools are going to march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin over spring break. We will be gone the whole week and get back just in time to go to school the next Monday. Yippee. This will be my first trip out of the country and it just so happens that I’m going to the land of the most attractive accents EVER! But there is more to Ireland than those beautiful accents and I am so excited to see everything and anything that I can!

Right now I am starting to think of my packing list. There will be some things that I will need to buy, like a nice jacket (because in Ireland it can go from nice and sunny to wet and rainy throughout the day) and a pair of good (but cute!) walking shoes. I also need to make sure I pack an adapter. Electrical outlets in Ireland are different than they are here so if I want to plug anything from back home in (hair straighter, phone charger, camera charger etc.) I will need to find some sort of adapter to do so. I will need to pack light-ish because let’s be honest here: there is no way that I’m going to come back without buying at least a kajilion things that I have to fit somewhere!

Another thing that’s really important is memorizing our music! Luckily (or unluckily. Call me a nerd but I kind of liked memorizing music) I don’t have to memorize the music because I happened to be the ONLY drum major from the three schools to sign up so I am going to be the drum major. But as for the rest of the band, they are working on their two pieces (America on Parade and Sweet Caroline) that we will march in the parade.

I am really excited to see the castles and Trinity College in Dublin! Some of these buildings have been around since before the U.S. was even a country! I honestly don’t even know what to expect except that I know it’s going to be absolutely amazing! (please excuse the excessive amount of exclamation points…I’m just really excited!)

Don’t worry! I promise to keep you updated about my trip when I get back. And maybe while I’m there! Ya never do know!

~Skooogster(:

Take AP!

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It’s that time of year again to start registering for classes. This is my last year doing this and it’s somewhat of a bitter sweet situation. Everyone is excited to get out of high school yet no one wants to admit how close they are to leaving home. As a junior, I have to decide what classes would be best for what I want to study in college (for me, its special education).

At my school, we really push students to take as many AP classes as you can. When I graduate I will have taken six or seven of them. Only two of them will probably help me in the future. (AP Psych and AP Econ, which I will take next year).

Taking AP classes are really helpful to getting ready for college. They help you learn study habits that will help you and help you learn time management. For me this is the hardest. Most times I don’t want to sit down and read ten pages of my AP US History book but if I space it out right I can get through it.

AP classes also help you to possibly get out of those classes in college. If you get a three or higher on the AP Exam, the college that you want to go to may say that you don’t need to take it. (Honestly, this is the incentive that I use to get me through my classes. I really don’t want to take these classes in college where I will probably want to take classes that help me to my major and or minor).

Another thing I like about AP classes is that most of the people in those classes are hard workers and WANT to be there unlike other classes that are required and half the class is just half-heartedly going through the motions to scrape by with a passing grade. No, students in AP classes are usually the good students who work hard and genuinely want to succeed in school and in the future.

So if you are wondering about if you should take an AP class or not next year in high school, I would definitely recommend it to everyone! It is such good college prep that once you get to college you will be glad that you pushed yourself now. (Or so I hear….)

~Skooogster(:

Boys Have Feelings Too!

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All of this talk about women in the media has me thinking. It’s obvious that women are portrayed in a negative way in movies and advertisements and so forth but what about the guys? I can honestly tell you that from walking down the halls at my school, not every guy in the world is a male model or looks great in a Speedo. I mean let’s be honest, not every guy has a body like Tom Daley.

In my opinion, I think that guys are portrayed just as negatively as girls in the media but we are just not focusing on it as much. And not just in the media. I mean if you think about it, Victoria’s Secret’s goal is to sell to women, right? They even have a fashion show! But I bet that if I asked a group of people from my school, more guys watched it than girls.

If you look at an Abercrombie & Fitch advertisement, you see guys with their shirts off and their pants hung so low you honestly can’t even see them. What’s that selling exactly? Is it selling anything? Or is it just subliminally telling boys that’s how you’re supposed to look? If I was a guy and I didn’t have all of those muscles that they have, I would feel very self-conscious about the way that I look. It isn’t just a girl thing.

 People who create the media stereotype guys thinking that they enjoy watching that stuff. Well, I’m sure they do I mean, they’re guys and why wouldn’t they? But sometimes I think the media goes way overboard. I even had a classmate say that to him, some of the ways that women were portrayed was a complete turnoff.

Also, the media gives boys the impression that they have to have an awesome six pack and be scary buff and all that jazz so now they focus on working out. I mean, to me, and this is my total opinion, really muscular guys are gross. If your shirt sleeves are on the brink of tearing I find it totally disgusting. Don’t get me wrong! Guys with muscles are extremely attractive (just look at Chris Evans! Dang!) But too much is just….ick. And I think that guys think they have to be really muscular. One of my classmates actually said that he sometimes is self-conscious as well because of the ways that guys are portrayed in the media. For every sexy woman in the media there’s a sexy man. That’s just how the media works I guess.

Boys are stereotyped just as negatively as girls but we don’t always see it. Maybe it’s because girls somehow have more of an image to uphold than guys but either way we are both seen in negative ways in movies, on TV and in advertisements.

 

~Skooogster(:

It's Goin' Down at Downton

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If you’ve never seen Downton Abbey, first of all, you need to see it. You are wasting your time doing anything but watch this show! Second, since you probably have NOT seen it, I’ll give you some background information to spark your interest so you’ll have to watch it anyway!

The show is set in the early 1900’s in England with the sinking of the titanic. The show is all about the life of the Crawleys and their maids and servants. I just finished the second season and so far there have been five love stories; not one of them involving a werewolf or a vampire. How refreshing!  It is so hard to try and tell you what it’s about without revealing everything. I could easily sit here and write out a summary of the entire show so far with every detail but I don’t want to ruin it for you!

This show plays with my emotions so much that before I can comprehend how I’m feeling about one situation they throw an equally yet different emotional scene at you so you honestly don’t know how to feel. Last night when I was watching there were fifteen minutes that I went from crying to pure hatred to crying my eyes out again. ALL WITHIN FIFTEEN MINUTES!

I have cried, I have laughed (Maggie Smith is probably one of my favorite actresses after watching this show. Sometimes I think she just improves her lines because they are so much like her!), and I’ve felt so angry at a character that one time I actually threw a Kleenex box across the room.

I have this connection with each of the characters and I feel like I know them personally but obviously I don’t because they are British (and Irish and I do have to say that his accent is just beautiful!). But the storyline is so intriguing and compelling that I can’t take my mind off of it.

So if you like romance and war and irony and history and beautiful British and Irish accents and if you’re okay experiencing every possible emotion within the span of one hour, then I recommend that you take Downton Abbey for a spin. I have always been interested in the lifestyles of people in history and my mom recommended that I watch an episode with her and I was hooked and well, you know, now throwing tissue boxes in frustration.

 

 

~Skooogster(:

 

If You're Not a Hollister Model, Don't Expect Me to be a Victoria's Secret Angel

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Teenagers are self-conscious. It’s as easy as that and as a 16 year old girl I can completely understand why. Just look at what is splashed across billboards, shown on TV, in magazines, and in advertisements! The first thing you see when you walk into Hollister is a topless guy showing off his six-pack and his swim shorts hung low; walk into Victoria’s Secret and you see nearly naked women on every wall. What kind of message is this sending to kids these days? They are so surrounded by this that they have become brainwashed into thinking that this is what you’re supposed to look like. No wonder teenagers feel so self-conscious about the way that they look. Even though I know that these pictures that I see in magazines are photoshoped for the desired look I still look at someone on TV and wish I looked like them. It’s just the way that I grew up in society.

When I was little I went to a small Lutheran school and my family tried to protect me from these influences but every now and then I would see something and I remember telling my mom how uncomfortable it made me seeing things like that. Now I am in a public high school and went to a public middle school and I remember how one time I realized that the things that used to make me uncomfortable I had now just accepted. I’m so immune to things like this yet it still puts that message in my head that I need to have perfect skin, have perfect hair, and have that perfect thigh gap. I’m not overweight, far from it, actually, yet at times I feel like I need to go running or I need to go on a diet. I will spend hours in front of the mirror criticizing everything about my appearance and at times I hate myself for not being ‘perfect’. But in this society we have lost what the meaning of ‘perfect’ is.

In November of last year the thing people were talking about was the human Barbie. Even though she denies having a lot of plastic surgery, no woman is born with the same proportions as a Barbie Doll; it’s so unrealistic! Take a look for yourself here.

 

This is what the media does to us. It makes us believe that we aren't perfect enough. It shows us what they think is the desired look for women and here guys are subconsciously thinking that this is what women are supposed to look like. That’s why I say to a guy if he doesn’t look like a Hollister model don’t expect me to look like a Victoria’s Secret angel.

 

In today’s society it is so hard for girls to look in the mirror and tell themselves that they are pretty with all of these media influences blinding them. For a lot of girls, they won’t feel pretty, no matter how many people tell them that they are, until they see it themselves and thanks to photoshoped models that is getting harder and harder to do.

 

~Skooogster(:

A Techie's Gotta Do what a Techie's Gotta Do!

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Sometimes things don't go exactly as planned and then you have to figure out what the heck you are going to do in order for things to continue to run smoothly.

This happened to me just yesterday. I am in the tech crew for my school's prep show choir and yesterday we had a competition. We performed well enough to make it to the finals. This meant that we got the opportunity to perform again and that it had to be virtually flawless. My number one job is to get the cellist's microphone out on stage for the ballad then take it back to mic the Congo drums for the closer. The stage was extremely small and cramped so when I took the mic back there wasn't any room to set it down where it wouldn't fall over. So I quickly thought of what I could do so I eventually decided that I should just sit there behind the risers squished in next to the drum set and hold onto the mic. My hips and legs started to cramp up but I didn't dare move. (I also think I messed up my left eardrum from the drums). If I hadn't done that the audience wouldn't have heard the drums and I would have felt horrible that I let the group down.

Another example is last weekend, our keyboard player pretty much saved the show. Technically, Happiness Inc., our varsity choir, is supposed to go straight from their second song to their ballad but the audience kept clapping and if they would have kept going the judges wouldn’t be able to hear the soloists. So the pianist thought fast and just kept play8ing the same chord over and over until the clapping died down before continuing the rest of the song.

When we do these things, we don’t ask for recognition. Some people do but I don’t. I do it because it is what I have to do. When they told me that I had to mic the drum I would not let a cramped space stop anyone from hearing them so I did what I had to do to let them be heard. It was just job that I had to do. Maybe I had to take that extra step to get it done but it still got done. I don’t want recognition because, honestly, no one was supposed to know anything went wrong. And since they didn’t, that is was made me proud of myself!

 

~Skooogster(:

School Traditions

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It’s that time of year again when you start seeing the traditions of show choir and men’s swimming. If you’re walking down the hall and you see someone with his hair bleached to a blinding white, nine times out of ten he will be a swimmer. We don’t really have anyone with that as their natural color so it’s pretty obvious. A lot of girls teams will color a strip of their hair but it isn’t as obvious as the Barbie blond (sorry guys I couldn’t think of any other way to describe the color!) you see now. This happens every year. We expect it. If suddenly one year the boys didn’t bleach their hair we would all be taken by surprise and wonder what was going on. People accept it as ‘tradition’, as what just happens at Kennedy.

It’s also the season for Happiness Jackets. Happiness Inc. is our varsity show choir. They have competed all over the state and last year won Nationals in Nashville. They were voted America’s Favorite Show Choir a couple years ago and every day live up to that title. Every member of Happiness receives a Happiness Jacket. It isn’t hard to miss the sea of bright yellow walking down the hallways, arms swishing by their sides. At my school owning a Happiness Jacket is the thing to have, your crowning glory of sorts. As a freshman in Chanteurs, it is your goal to own one for your own, it’s a really big deal.

These traditions are what make Kennedy so unique. Call me sentimental but I am proud to say that I am part of a school that holds onto those traditions that make us who we are as a school.

The power of tradition is a funny thing. It brings people together who normally might not come together as one; it gives people a sense of pride for their school or organization. It tells people who you are, who we are.

~Skooogster(:

Zumba!

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For those who want to stay fit but don’t want to go to the gym and climb onto one of those sweaty machines that probably have the sweat of twenty different people sprinkled all over it but prefer to actually enjoy themselves when they work out I encourage you to try Zumba. Zumba is a dance inspired by those of the Latin culture and includes hip-hop, soca, and samba, salsa, merengue, mambo, martial arts, some Bollywood and belly dance. It also incorporates squats and lunges that you sure as heck feel the next day! I’m not exactly interested in gym time but I wanted to find a way to stay fit during the cold of winter and Zumba was my answer!

 

I first tried Zumba at the Mini Dance Marathon that my school had about a month ago to raise money for kids with cancer (see Mini Dance Marathon/How Dances Should Be). One of our French teachers teaches it and so for about an hour we did some Zumba dances and I have to say, I’ve never had so much fun working out!

 

Later I found out that my school has a Zumba Club taught by the French teacher so on Tuesday I decided that I would try it out again. I invited some friends and my sister and I had such a fun time working out and dancing all at the same time! I could really feel it in my legs but sometimes there were some dances that I could feel my arms getting a good work out!

 

When I tell people what Zumba is I say that it is kind of like any of the Just Dance games. Personally I love Just Dance and whenever I have friends over we pull it out and go crazy. However, this is a bit different. Instead of killing your precious brain cells by watching a TV screen you’re out of the house dancing (even though I’m pretty sure they have a Zumba Wii game too but that’s a different story!). For me, there was a different sense of accomplishment when I left Zumba club than when I get done playing a round of Just Dance. I guess there is something to say about actually getting out and doing something instead of doing it in your living room!

 

When I asked my sister how she liked it she responded by saying that she likes to dance and since that’s basically what it is she really enjoyed it! Really! It’s just dancing; dancing that is meant to keep you in shape.

 

So for anyone who is looking for a fun way to work out I would definitely try Zumba. It gets your heart pumping and muscles working in a fun way that your brain doesn’t even know you’re working out.

~Skooogster(:

Overconfidence Can be a Big Problem

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Everyone does it and as an athlete, I am guilty of this as well: when you win a game you have a feeling of unexplainable pride. You want to go tell everyone you know and share your experience with your friends and family even if they could care less you just NEED to tell people!
There is nothing wrong with being proud of yourself and being happy with your performance but when it gets to your head that's when it becomes a problem. You think that you're all-that and the best of the best, big man on campus. Stuff like that. Honestly, no one wants to be around people who are like that. At least I don't. Because I know that one game doesn't describe your playing ability just like one mistake doesn't define who you are as a person. Then what usually happens is the next time they have to play a game they don't try as hard because they already have it in their mind that they are better than their opponent when in reality they aren't better and they get their butt kicked and after that they aren't too happy. But what really gets me is when the next day they go right back to their big-headed arrogant selves. Why don't those people learn?
The reason I am saying this is because this last weekend I had my first volleyball tournament and my team, luckily, won first place and I have to say I am very proud of my teammates. We all worked together to pull it off but it was a very small tournament and unfortunately probably one of our easiest this year. What I don't want to happen is for us to think that we are one of the best teams and go into our next tournament when in reality we probably will have to fight really hard again. So next time you or your sports team or anything really remember that nobody likes people who are full of themselves. In my past experiences I've noticed that sometimes it pulls teams apart and when it comes down to it that really hurts the team cuz ya know! Teamwork works!

~Skooogster(: