To do or not to do...

So. Is secular music bad? Which movies are bad? should I hit my brother? Should I yell at my mom? Is this choclate bar gonna kill me?

These questions are all asking whether something is bad or not. In the modern Christian society, we focus everything on whether something is bad or not. If it's not bad, it's OK. Well, I was talking with my dad, and he had a revolutionary idea (at least for me). We focus on what NOT to do. Instead, we should be focusing on what we SHOULD be doing. What we do, is we look at things and label them according to how bad they are. Then we judge whether we can get by doing the things we like, without those things being too bad. We try to get by with doing as many 'bad' things as we can. Instead of focusing on the bad, we should be focusing on the good we should and could be doing.

Lately, I've also been thinking about giving and not taking. I think we need to stop concentrating on ourselves, and concentrate on other people and God. We have so much capacity to give, and yet we hoard our time, recources and money to ourselves. We need to stop being so caught up in ourselves and let God work through us. Of course I try to do what I just said (and fail miserably) but it makes me so angry when I think about how bad we (Society and even the Christian community) are defocused from God.

Niagra Falls

Today I visited Niagra falls on the Canadian side. It was the first time I've ever been out of the United States. Heh. It was funny, cause everything over there is in metric. Like kilometers p/hr and such. People in other countries are so much smarter... anyways, Wile looking at the falls, I wrote some observations down in a notebook. It sounds kind of cool, so here's me standing over the falls writing.


The water here has a cool color. It's like real aqua. I can hear the thunder of the water going over the falls. Throughout the river are whitecaps of water rushing towards the brink. Seaguls are flying around too. A thick mist of water bellows forth from the bottom, thinning as it goes up and travels from the falls. I can also see big rocks at the bottom.

Now I'm on a bridge over a little stream thing maybe 100 ft. from the falls.

Now I'm standing ten ft. from the brink watching the water pour down into the river. The water looks like liquid glass that's clear. It also smells really salty; almost like the sea. Now, on the Canada side, I can faintly feel the mist.

A Poem

Here's a poem I wrote recently... I thought it was interesting. And, surprisingly, it's not dark. Instead of trying to appeal to emotions, I tried conveying something resembling a message. It's also supposed to be a bit humorous. Not like the laugh sort but maybe more irony... I dunno. As of yet, it is untitled.



Many men live on this earth,
For some great fame is destined from birth
geniouses, warlords, conquerors, and kings
Fill volumes of history and other such things
Their deeds are those of which the bard sings
Sages ponder and think 'bout their lives
Historians compile and write great archives
Of every thing, in life they achieve
Of ever tiny creed they believe

Then there's the average farmer chap
Who's greatest decisions are whether to nap,
Who's jobs require nought but the strength
To plow a field, or measure it's length.

And yet, the geniouses crazily drink
Warlords slaughter millions without a blink,
Conquerors think themselves gods of love,
And kings... well... all the above

So, in the end, is it not much better
To smoke a pipe on the porch, wearing a sweater?
Is it not so much better, in life,
To honor God, one's children and wife?

A Song

Lately I've been doing a lot of piano composition and song writing. I've finished a couple of songs so far. I decided to write all of them under one theme, so kind of like an album thing. The Album is called 'A Darkening World'. Huh. I told you I wrote dark poetry...






By the way, please excuse my terrible singing voice. I know it's bad, but at least the piano and words are decent I think.

The Dark Side of Homeschoolers

I write dark poetry and stories. Death, destruction, suicide, evil, decay... these are the things that are portrayed in my writings. Now I thought that was rather dark. But, as I have gathered from multiple sources, this is actually a common phenomena among homeschooled teens. So basically, all of us homeschooled teens write really dark stuff. Isn't that fascinating? You would think we would write happy fluffy stuff about God and Jesus or something.

Now, I have discussed this, and have come up with a hypothesis on the causes of this phenomena. Alright. So all of us homeschoolers are nice, amiable, loving people (Well, at least most of the time. OK, fine, SOME of the time. Well, maybe not me personally but...). Now everyone gets angry sometimes. We all have dark thoughts. We all think about death and destruction. Now homeschoolers, because of the society they live in, and their own personal beliefs, have a tendency to suppress these feelings. Of course, we can't make them just disappear, so we just channel them into this specific area.

Then again, not all of us show our writings to people (Because they tend to worry about such stuff coming out of such people). So we homeschoolers channel all these feelings into this medium. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, though it may seem like it. This is also a good way to release the emotions without doing potential harm. I guess you might worry some people... (parents for example) but that's about the worst you could do.

The reason I make this observation, is because the more I get into the writings of fellow homeschooled teens--at least their true writings--I find this theme of death anger and hell. It seems so contradictory, and has surprised me, but when you think about it, it makes sense.

Excuses

Well. I haven't posted for a while. And, though you may not believe it, I DO have an excuse. I haven't had internet access for an entire week.

*sits down and breathes deeply*

It was an extremely traumatic experience for me... but I'm getting better. Anyways. I was at the JO's. The Junior National Championships for gymnastics in the United States. It was in Oklahoma city. Man, you wouldn't believe how ripped these guys are... When they're warming up in the side gym, most of the guys don't wear shirts. And man, if you look at the level tens, they are like bulging with muscles everywhere. Heh, sometimes I wish I had done gymnastics...

*smiles ruefully*

Ah well. But hey, at least I'm not fat and I can do a barrel roll on the ground (which, I am proud to say, my brother ((as well as a bunch of the other gymnasts at his gym)) can't do). Many things to be thankful. But then again, if I was a gymnast, I wouldn't be able to do all the other things I like to do. I guess it's a double edged sword.

Speaking of rippedness... I think that looking 'good' or 'fit' or 'muscular' or 'ripped' is highly overrated here in America. Think about it. In school, if your the stupid athlete guy who looks good but gets bad grades, your the super popular guy who everyone wants to be friends with and be like. OK. Now you have the nice, intelligent, quiet guy. He's looked down on as a nerd. Think about that for a moment. Does that make any sense? No. Kids these days are so darn messed up and stupid.

*sigh*

What is our world coming to?

Here's an interesting little thing I found out: people actually come to my blog. Heh. I guess they don't comment, but they actually come and read it. And from random places too! Google has this cool program called Google Analytics. I just put some code into the template of my blog, and vioua-la, I can see who visits my blog. Where they're from, how long they stayed... etc. etc.

'Working Out'

I am just going to randomly throw ideas into this post. Let's see what happens. I suppose it will probably start off bad... like with stuff about me. But I bet it will turn into some interesting discussion or other.

Well. Let's see.

I will probably be up realy late today, cause I have to finish up my school before I leave for Oklahoma city on Tuesday. My little brother is in gymnastics (he' prettiy good too), and this year he's a level nine. That's where national competition begins.

Speaking of gymnastics, I think I found my topic. It takes immense amounts of strength and time to be a competetive gymnast. And boy, gymnastics is *really* tough on your body. I've decided that working out on machines or lifting weights does not really help you in any practical way. You see, when you do those types of excercises, you're isolating one muscle, and working that muscle only. Now think about this. You have 650 skelatal muscles in your body. That's a lot of muscles. And when you're doing anything that has any practical value at all, you're not going to be using one muscle, you're going to be using lots.

For example, say you wanted to be able to lift heavy things. So, you go to the gym every day and do biceps and triceps machines. Now, even if lifting things took only your arms (I'll discuss that in a second), you'd still not be helping yourself at all by just excercising biceps and triceps. Check out this diagram:

http://www4.nau.edu/biology/bio201/images/arm1.gif

That is a lot of muscles. 24 to be exact. And when you lift something heavy, you're not just going to be using your arms. You're going to be using many of the muscles in your chest, legs, abs, and back.

doing things like pushups are much better to develop your muscles. This way you're using all of the muscles in your arms and some of the ones in your chest. Now you may say, 'but I'm basically doing pushups on machines' but that is not true at all; when your'e on a machine, the gosh darn thing even TRIES to isolate muscles. Yup.

Now I do my pushups and sit-up varieties and pull-up varieties, and running, and I'm in pretty good shape. Another thing I do is a little bit of acrobatics. Like flips and stuff on the ground (i.e. backflips, frontflips, sideflips, backhandsprings, fronthalves, backhaves... you get the point). I would like to say that this stuff is also really good for muscle development... but I think it's a bit hard on like your joints and stuff. But hey, it's fun. And it looks cool. heh.

Green Tea

Here we go again on the topic of green tea. So controversial. Well. I hope you know this already (and most of you do but for those of you who don't) I'm an anti-coffeeite extremist, and super-pro-green teaite. Really it's just my personal preferance. But I'm making a website on green tea, and I'm writing a bunch of articles for it. Well, I was doing some research on the health benefits of green tea, and it's actually pretty amazing. Here's one of my articles:


Hmm, sorry, for certain reasons I don not really want to explain, I had to take down the article. It'll be on my green tea website, so you can read it there when I get the site up. I'll put a link to it here.