my english class

So I realized that it sucks having your least favorite classes also be your first classes of the day. Extremely bad luck that out of 5 classes, I really only dislike 2, and one is my first class on MWF, the other if my first class on TR, lucky me.

So my English class which is on TR is my definite least favorite, it's pretty much stupid. Like, I liked it at first at the beginning of the semester...before it got stupid lol. We even played fun little 'get to know each other' games on the first day of class (probably a bad sign). I've realized this class is so stupid because it's a lot like high school, and even though I've never been to high school, I somehow still know...

So we played a 'get to know you' game on the first day, where we all arranged our desks in a circle and the first person said their name and something about themselves. The second person had to repeat the name and the thing about the first person, and give their name and something about themselves, and so on. I mean, it worked, I know everyone's names in the class, but it felt juvenile even then, and especially now looking back on it lol.

We spend probably 10-15 minutes at the beginning of each class talking about irrelevant things to the class. The professor makes minor attempts to control the class and start the lesson plan but the students end up running most of it.

It is my highest maintenance class, and by high maintenance I mean we have an assignment due every class, lots and lots of busy work. A lot of it is just that, stuff to keep us busy even though we don't really learn anything from it. Frequent quizzes, righting assignments, editorials, etc. It's unproductive in my opinion.

The only thing I've really learned in this class is that I hate doing rhetorical analysis es and that research papers suck, but I do enjoy writing when it's something I want to write about...but I already knew that. I ended up writing my research paper on the federal government, basically copy and pasted everything I blogged about, rearranged it some and turned it in. lol sigh...we'll see.

Anyways I won't be sad when this class is over in 2 weeks.

katydids

So in Texas we have a bunch of Katydids, which are a close relative to the grasshopper. They make incredibly loud noises for insects, mostly at night, however the noise I can deal with. Katydids and grasshoppers are, in my opinion, the ugliest insects I see here in Dallas. I'm sure there is uglier, but for some reason I've harbored this personal vendetta against grasshoppers and katydids since I was little. I just think they're so gangly and disgusting, ugly little heads and spiky stick-life legs, yuck. Probably one of the few insects I make a point of going out of my way to kill.

Today I had the immense pleasure of killing 42 katydids while mowing my parents' lawn. I've never seen so many in such concentration. I guess they were just kind of hanging out in the leaves covering my parents' lawn and when I turned on the mower the vibrations must've stirred'em up because I could almost always see one or two jumping around ahead of me trying to get out of the way of the mower. A few of them weren't mobile enough to get out of the path of the mower, and even a few that did I hunted down to run over. Most of them, however, I left the mower and had to go stomp on. Call it cruel, call it hatred, it's probably a little of both but I don't really care. I don't even know why I hate them so much, there definitely are uglier insect. I think it's just that every time I've gone to pick one up, especially as a kid when I didn't know better, they would maneuver their disgusting legs around to latch onto you and then proceed to 'spit' or bite you with this ultra-disgusting mouths. Anyways, it was fun for me to have the opportunity to destroy so many of these hated insects, including running 20ft chasing after one flying away and doing a hop, skip, jump right onto his face, hah.

regretable moments

One of my most regrettable moments, this one involving a girl, was when I was 17. I was 7 months into one of the least satisfying and most complicated relationships of my life, but I'll explain that at another time. Anyways, so I was looking for a reason out of this relationship with this girl Sara, even though I kind of still liked her deep down. So I broke up with her and started seeing this other girl I met in another stake (stake being a boundary of church members), Julia. She lived like 45 minutes away so I didn't get to see her much, and that was a complicated relationship in and of itself, but it didn't last long. Over a month or two I started realizing I didn't like her as much as she liked me. She would sometimes get upset at me for not calling her much or not necessarily wanting to talk to her all the time either. I was perplexed why I didn't like this perfectly wonderful girl who appreciated every aspect of me more than I did. I just couldn't figure it out, then one day I figured it out. We were talking on the phone about our relationship and I had an 'epiphany' and, in all my teenage wisdom, thought I'd share it with her. I told her that I was becoming less interested in her because I realized she was only a rebound from Sara, the previous girlfriend. Yes, I told a girl she was a rebound. Yeah...that relationship didn't end well...

"the spirit"

I was talking to a friend of mine recently and he had something very interesting to say about what Christians would call 'the spirit' or 'the holy spirit' or 'the holy ghost' or whatever. Basically, you've got tons of people out there claiming to have these feelings, feelings they claim are from God or Jesus, warmth of the heart, a soothing of the mind, 'spiritual demons', 'being struck by the spirit of god', overwhelming happiness, spiritual epiphanies, etc. I'm going to specifically tune this musing towards Mormons because thats almost all I know. So basically you've got lots of Mormons out there with these claims that they've felt the holy ghost, that it has testified to them that the church is true, that they've experienced undeniable feelings to their very being that testify of the truthfulness of their church. How do you explain it? What is causing these people to claim such things? The answer, and although I'm no expert in, I believe lies in biophysics. Allow me to explain as my friend did.

When you go to a movie, for example, if the imagery is powerful enough, if the music is fitting and moving enough, if the cinematography is good enough, your brain will take in these perceptions, analyze them, and physically create feelings of sadness, anger, peace, happiness, terror, or many others. These are just examples of course; sight, sound, smell, and our other senses. Any one of a hundred other types of perception can play different notes on the instrument that is our brain. Point is, the human brain is among the most powerful and most complicated things known to man, our brain can make our bodies feel ANYTHING that we are capable of feeling. It's all based on physiological reactions and brain synapses or whatever. Like I said, I'm not an expert, but it's undeniable that music, imagery, smell, basically anything that we as humans are capable of perceiving, can cause our brains to make our bodies feel certain things, powerful things, undeniable things. It's something you KNOW you felt. Agreed?

So when someone sincerely believes that reading scriptures will allow them to feel 'the spirit', is it really divine intervention when that person experiences physiological feelings? Or is it just a complicated mix of their upbringing, the shaping of that person's mind and beliefs, and what that person considers to be 'powerful reading', or perception? When someone says they "know the church to be true because of feelings they've experienced", could it just be because that person is told that if they do certain things they will feel certain things, and then when they do those things and feel those things, they chalk it up as a 'spiritual manifestation' because that's what they were told the feeling is and that's what they believe?

When I watched Gladiator, at the end when he dies and the movie goes through the scenes of him in his field again, I cried. I was overcome with feelings created by my brain because of the powerful things I was perceiving. However, if I feel similar feelings but in a religious setting, suddenly those same types of feelings are 'of a divine nature'? I was told all the same things as I was raised and when I was younger, in a certain few religious settings, I felt strong undeniable feelings, and my mind put 2 and 2 together from what I'd been taught and said "hey, you've been taught that powerful feelings in spiritual situations are 'the spirit'!", but upon reflection, I've realize that those same feelings can be explained in many other ways. The most recent 'spiritual experience' I had was almost a year ago, I had watched some mormon propaganda film and had decided to turn my life around and was thinking about what I needed to do to be able to attend my sister's wedding in a Mormon temple a few months away. As I was thinking about what a sacrifice I would have to make and why it was important to me to do it for my sister's wedding, I had this overwhelming feeling of happiness, almost euphoric, and the feeling lasted for about 15 minutes while I rolled the idea around in my mind. Was it the spirit? You could chalk it up to that, if you believed in the spirit. It could just as easily have been my mind realizing deep feelings of love for my sister and the things I knew I would have to sacrifice in order to do this thing for her would have been a huge expression of my love for her, and who wouldn't be emotional if you were planning to make a huge sacrifice for someone because of how much you loved them? Of course, since the idea was of a spiritual nature, I naturally assumed at the time, 'hey this is the spirit'.

I guess I had never really attempted to explain the whole 'spirit' and 'personal revelations' thing, and when I talked to my friend he mentioned these ideas and just makes sense. These feelings are biological reactions. Perception is one of the greatest forces we know, our perceptions shape every facet of our beliefs, moral, spiritual, or otherwise; and indeed perception shapes every facet of our existence. It's that very reason that makes drugs so appealing to some people, they become bored of the way they perceive the world, and through certain things like drugs, they can alter their perception and experience old things in a new way. But rest assured, drugs aren't the only things that alter your perception of the world, perhaps religion does as well. I personally believe it does, and that people who proclaim divine feelings have merely had their perception of the world shaped in a manner more desirable to the religious community. So obviously I don't think someone is lying when they say "I know this church is true"; I have no doubt that through means I've explained, they can honest to goodness believe it, and have felt real things, physical feelings that reinforce their beliefs, based on their perception. So it's not that they are lying to me, they just have a different perception of the world than I do, and that's fine. It's a different world to different people, I understand that. I just wish that more of them could understand that as well.

::edited on nov.12::

potato gun fun

So when I was a teenager, or more specifically 15-17, me and my friends found plans for and constructed a potato gun made out of PVC piping. We were met with success. We did lots of fun things with our new instrument of entertainment, often destructive things. The gun could shoot a piece of potato about 2 in. tall/wide and about 3 in. thick at about....1000fps? Definitely we could shoot holes through wooden fences, 4x stacked drywall, aluminum mailboxes...in any case it was a force to be reckoned with.

On one such particular night of youthful delinquency , we were driving around in my old Nissan late at night, looking for things we could shoot our gun at. We were driving through a neighborhood and drove past an elementary school. The school had a simple lit sign in front by the street used to display announcements. We thought it would be great fun to shoot the sign, see what kind of damage we could inflict. Well so we pulled up to the sign planning to fire the gun from inside the car, but just then we noticed a car in the distance pull around a corner and was heading our direction so, in a spur of the moment decision, I pulled into a nearby alleyway and turned my lights off. The car was a little ways off, but close enough to see a stopped car quickly drive into an alley and turn the lights off (almost certainly more suspicious than just sitting in front of the sign would've been...). In any case, the car passed by us a few seconds after pulling into the alley, and I pulled out and started driving down the street away from the school, planning to drive around the block and come back. Well, so this car turns around and starts following me! I was certain it was following me because I made a point of taking frequent sudden turns around this neighborhood.

After about 2 minutes of this car following us, and us trying to figure out if we should be threatened or not, decided it was probably some nosy neighbor following us because we looked suspicious and wanted to see what we would do. So what DID we do? We stopped, they stopped about 15 ft behind me, and we loaded up the gun and my two friends got out and aimed it at them (it took two people, one to aim and the other to ignite the fuel). The car didn't do anything while they were positioning (about 6-7 seconds) and so we decided to fire it at them. However, we didn't want to get into criminal offense just yet, so they aimed high, above their car into the overhanging trees above. What proceeded was nothing short of hilarity.

The shot fired off (it had a pretty deafening boom when we did it right, and we did it right that night) and streaked through the trees above the car, causing leaves to fall down around the car. At night you could see the exploding fuel (flammable aerosol) shooting a little ways out from the barrel as the shot went off. The car immediately begins to back up quickly and attempts to turn around and go the other way, however the street is a small 2 lane street and the car is a suburban with a poor turn style so it would have to do probably a 5-point turn to turn fully around. So once it backs up as much as it can, and the people inside realize they can't escape quickly, whoever was driving just hits the horn and holds it. We jump back in the car and speed off while the car continues holding it's horn. We sped home, just dying over the whole ordeal. What I would've paid, even to this day, to know who was inside of that car, and to be able to see their reactions. What they were thinking when they began to follow us, and what they were thinking after they saw that shot go off over their car. Oh man...those were good times.