Blog No. 9: Fright Night

Fright Night

In my life, I have had very few experiences with Halloween. I can only remember going trick-or-treating twice and the first time was many years ago. I was so young that I cannot even remember anything about the night, except my costume. I was wearing a full body Superman suit complete with bright red boots and a cape! It was a good costume and I remember that it made me feel like I could fly if I really needed to.

The last year that I went trick-or-treating was the fall of my seventh grade year. I went with a group of friends in Minier. The group was: Ashley Mehl, Kassi Schroeder, Kent Graber, Ali Needles, Eric Smith, Lyndi Leesman, and I. Jonathon Gordon was supposed to come, but he couldn’t make it for some reason. When we weren’t trick-or-treating, we stayed at Lyndi’s house.

Everyone had a costume on that night, except me. Luckily someone had a Clark Kent costume that no one was wearing, so I wore that one. Kent wore a Superman costume, so it was cool because he was the hero and I was the hero’s secret identity. I really liked Eric’s costume because Pirates of the Caribbean was popular at that time, and he was dressed as Jack Sparrow. Ashley’ costume was Wonder Woman and Kassi was Super Girl. Lyndi dressed up like a cowgirl and Ali used makeup on her face to make her look like a cat.

On that night I was given many valuable things, but I did not realize what I had learned until a much later time. First of the valuable things was all of the candy that we collected. I think that we trick-or-treated too much because I didn’t eat all of my candy and the amount that I did eat was enough to make me feel sick! Then another thing happened that made me feel really awkward and confused. Someone was pressuring me to do something and I wanted to, but I was too scared. Now that I have a few years distance from the situation, someone else has taught me about what is really important and I am glad that I didn’t give in.

Blog No. 8: Bad Habits

Bad Habits

When I was younger, I had this bad habit that I could not get rid of. Even now, I still do this occasionally, but not nearly as bad as I used to. This bad habit is chewing on my shirt collar. I don’t know why, but I always chewed on my collar when I was concentrating really hard. This habit was so bad that I chewed through one of my shirt collars! I have trained myself to stop chewing and I have trained other people to tell me to stop if they notice, but I still do it sometimes. I wish that someone would invent something that I could put on my collar to make it taste bad!

Procrastinating is another bad habit that I have. I usually turn my homework in on time, but sometimes I don’t do things until the very last minute. This has caused me a lot of unnecessary stress at school. I usually don’t procrastinate when I have math homework because I like math and it doesn’t take me very long to get done. I procrastinate with the other subjects (English, science, social studies) because it requires more thinking and I want to stay away from it as much as possible. I guess that means to fix my bad habit of procrastinating, I also have to fix the bad habit of being lazy.

Projects are the part of school that makes me procrastinate most. Projects are supposed to be a visual way to reinforce the information that has been learned. Usually, this serves no purpose for me because I learn the information without the extra work and it forces me to do things creatively. Creativity is not a great talent of mine, projects cause a lot of stress for me.

Blog No.7: Time Traveler

Time Traveler

It is really hard to choose a time that I would like to travel to because there have been so many awesome things that have happened that I would like to experience. I would rather go to somewhere backwards in time because I want to have control over my future. My decision will depend on what I want to be part of. Do I want to see a spectacular moment in sports or would I rather see a great battle in a great war? Or should I just travel to meet some great person to see what it was like for them to live?

If I wanted to see a great moment in sports, I would travel back to 1950 World Cup in Brazil. I love to play soccer and the World Cup is not only the greatest soccer event in the world, but it is the greatest sporting event in the world. At this time the United States was not supposed to do any good in the World Cup and England was known as the best team in the world. The roster for the US soccer team wasn’t even chosen until two weeks before the World Cup began! The United States first game was against England and no one gave them a chance. Then we shocked the world after we beat England 1-0! This was the greatest game ever played in the history of US soccer and I would have loved to have been a part of it.

I would want to meet any of the players on the soccer team, but there are a few that stand out the most. Joe Gaetjens is the man who scored the goal for the United States. I want to meet him because he wasn’t even an American citizen, but he was a great player and he really understood the game. The other player that I would want to meet is Frank Borghi because he was an amazing goalkeeper and he was the team leader.

Blog No. 6: Analysis of Being Frightened

Being Afraid

When I was younger, it wasn’t very hard to find stories that scared me. I could never watch a movie that is supposed to be a scary movie because I would stay up all night thinking about it. If I remember correctly, the movies that scared me most were about animals doing bad things more than humans because I understood that it is very rare for a person to hurt someone without a good reason. Animals were different though because they don’t think the same way that we do and that made me afraid. I like scary movies now because I am more aware of what kind of things can happen or what is just made up for a movie. Now it is fun to laugh at the stupid things that happen in scary movies!

I don’t get scared as easily now that I am a 15 year old freshman. I’m not afraid of being murdered by some crazy person or getting chased by a wild animal anymore. Even though I am afraid less often now, the fears that I do have are more real. Now I am afraid of hurting people’s feelings or being hurt by someone else, being diagnosed with a terrible disease or someone close to me having a disease, or hurting my physical body. The greatest fear I have today is telling someone that I have done something wrong. That is the hardest because I am afraid that the other person will be mad or I will be embarrassed.

There aren’t many things in common between what I used to be afraid of and what I fear now. The only link that I can think of is that many times, they are unnecessary fears. I think being afraid is almost the worst possible thing that you can do to yourself because we can’t even control most of the things that we are afraid of. Then people can waste their time worrying about what could happen and then they miss what is happening now. I try to deal with fear by not worrying about what I cannot control. If the fear is telling something to someone then I tell myself that no matter how they respond you will feel better if you get this out. Most of the time, everything turns out the way that it should.