My Issue

I have an issue with the Internet and boys. Separately the two are perfectly fine, but together, I can't control myself. It's not really that big of an issue, but I know that I should stop. I go on the Internet and start talking to guys that I find, and sometimes they become something more serious. I mean, I've met some great people through this, and a lot of the time there are guys just like me on the websites. That's what happens a lot within the teenage gay community. There are no options anywhere for us. As a straight person, you have half the school to choose from, but as a gay student, you have that one other gay guy who seems like a jerk and then you find out that he is but you talk to him anyways because you're lonely and you think that there is no one else out there and fear dying alone with cats... I've collected a lot of stories in that past seven months, and i wouldn't feel comfortable sharing them here. Anyway, as a gay guy if you go to the Internet and google a couple of easy phrases you can find a bunch of websites. I've had my fair share of unsafe encounters on the websites, but generally the fake people are pretty easy to spot, and I have a rule that I don't meet the person until I have seen his Facebook and have video chatted with him. I joined this new website that Grace told me about. It is interesting, but it is for older guys. I lied about my age just to try it out and see what'd happen. I like maturity, not necessarily in physical stuff, but of the mind. And older guys have that maturity more often than younger guys. I meet this guy, and I started to like him. And then we talked and I really started to like him. I started to imagine a life together with this guy, what we'd look like when we'd be old, and how we'd raise our children. I created an entire life for the two of us in my mind. Then I realized that I didn't know his name. I have issues. I realize this. Thank you for reading.

I had an idea.

I had an idea.
I was reading my old blog posts from a year ago, and I had the idea to respond to them. I remember that in elementary and middle school we used to do a bunch of projects where we'd write a letter to our older selves, but I don't remember my older-self ever actually getting any letter. My blog is my letter to my future self. And the future self is me right now, and what I am writing now is a letter to the even more future me. The internet is forever, and this blog, even if I don't touch it for thirty years, it will probably still be exactly where I left it, and that is the best letter to yourself, because one day I'll come back to this, and read all the stuff that I used to write, I'd be able to see how my mind used to function and how my views are so different now. When i come to believe something, I commit to that belief, and that has always been the way that I have done things, so my ideas don't change as much as they are added onto. For example I used to believe that living with inner peace was more important than happiness, and that could justify my quest to get rid of my emotions entirely, but I have since left the idea of trying to control my emotions, I believe in the same things, but not to the extreme that I used to, like I don't get angry very often, and it is hard to piss me off, and even if you do you hardly see it because of what I used to do. Before I wouldn't allow even the thought of anger enter my head, and now I do, but I let it flow through me, I let myself get angry, feel that emotion, but never hold onto it. It passes through me fast enough so that people don't have to witness me being upset. Things like that change about me, and the things like that are what I want my blog to record. I want to be able to see my evolution as a person, and revisit the old me.
I want to comment on my older blog posts someday in the future, and try to explain to my old self how their view is going to change, and then eventually, the even older me will comment on a blog post like this one, and we'd have a nice little conversation, spanning through the years.
Tomorrow I plan to continue to work on the scenes with Katherine, today I started, and I realized that I know very little about directing acting. Last year the only exposure with directing was the scene i did with Andrew, Grace, and Alison, which was probably one of the best experiences I had in STAC, because it was something that was genuinely fun for the entire time. We would go through it over and over again, and I was able to tell the actors anything I wanted to. Any thought that entered my mind I could just scream at them, and I miss that. Matt is much better at this than I am, he was with me as i was working with Emily and Peter. I get caught up in details a lot of the time, and I am ignoring the core of the issues that I'm having. I know what I want to see, but I have a difficulty in getting the actors to do understand what it is that I want, but I am learning and that's what matters. I the directing too literally, for example, today, there is a scene where Peter has to be disinterested in Emily, and he wasn't doing it the way I had imagined, and so I had little notes about how to change specific things to make it better, but Matt was able to get Peter to do it by giving direction that is much more broad and allowing him to understand the character better, and that is something that I want to learn how to do.
I miss a simplicity of life that I remember in middle school. Eight grade was a fantastic year for me, and most people hate middle school, but eight grade was incredible for me. That was the year that I truly "found" myself. I didn't discover everything about life in that moment, but eight grade mark when I first started to change everything about myself. I lost a tremendous amount of weight, and I started to question everything. It wasn't the most important year of my life, but it was the easiest and the first of the rest of my life. This is weird to say, but most of the gay teenagers I have been meeting are extremely mature, even the ones that I personally do not like. Finding a teen who is out of the closet nowadays isn't a child anymore. Or at least is less of one. We are a special breed of people because we have all been through so much shit, and we're not tougher than others, but most of us have stories. I was introduced to a kid that lives in Manhattan who was sent to gay treatment camp in the midwest, and who lives an extremely sad life, even though he is the son of an EXTREMELY wealthy business man. He is a total idiot, spoiled brat, and he dropped out of school and spends his days shopping with his friends and getting high on drugs that cost more than some the monthly salaries of some people I know. But even he is mature, he isn't a child anymore, that innocence was taken from him, and even though I can't stand him, there is no denying his maturity. He is an adult, or as much of an adult as he will ever get to be given the fact that he never has to worry about money for his entire life. Most gay people don't come out until they are in college, and now they are the awkward kids that you disregard as you walk through the halls. What I did, what any kid who is out does, is something that is extremely difficult at our age, because sexuality isn't something that set. I came out as gay when I still thought I was bisexual, and I had this misconception that if I came out as bi then no one would want to talk to me, because of the fear that I would be sexual attracted to them. A lot of the time, with the rest of the gays who don't come out, they don't have that dialogue in their heads. They refuse to even think about sex in some cases, so that they aren't hiding anything because they refuse to think about it.
There are two stages of being in the closet, the first is being in denial to yourself, by refusing to think of sex, or forcing yourself to think of the opposite sex, and then there is the next which is knowing who you are, but not telling anyone. I talk about wanting a boyfriend a lot, but recently that dialogue within my mind has slowed down, and so people come up to me and try and tell me about boys who they think are gay, and I tell them that I don't care. If a boy isn't out to himself, then he isn't dateable, and there is nothing you can do about that, and you're not going to wait, because you could find yourself waiting for a lifetime. And also people, especially my mother, like to tell me about all the "gay" news that they hear. The other day my mother was telling me about how our neighbor's daughter, who is the same age as my sister, is lesbian. She looks at me waiting for some sort of response, but I could honestly care less. I think that we should be spending less resources here to get things like gay marriage passed, and more effort in Africa, to feed the starving people, and stop the murdering. I am fine here. I really could care less about my own rights, when some people don't even have the right to live. Like the only gay issue that is worth addressing at this moment in time, is the murders of our people by governments and by individuals. Other than that nothing else matters right now. Nothing. Not my right to get married or anything like that. Not when people are being denied the right to life in parts of the world. I think it is great when a new gay marriage law is passed, but what I can't stand is when millions of dollars are spent when there are bigger problems that need to faced. The world doesn't think in the sense of "world" it thinks in the sense of "country". We care about the state of our own country above the state of any place else. I am totally okay with living with less if it means that a family in Kenya can have the same right to life that I do here. I am not saying that we shouldn't be pushing forward in these issues here, but the majority of our resources should be sent to fix the areas of the world where people are denied the most basic right of all, the right to live. This right is being taken away from people who didn't commit any crime, but we are punishing these people more harshly than our terrorists in some cases, and that is the worse injustice imaginable. Thanks for reading.

Scripts with a Kat

Scripts

Today Katherine and I worked on our scripts. We hasn't given it much thought when we started and the piece that we are making has started to evolve. I don't like the idea that we had at the beginning of writing scripts and then cutting them up and giving them to the actors, it seems cool for a moment but recently I have really disliked having to cut up scripts that I wrote to be spoken normally. I think Kat agrees with me and we have decided to put on the scenes more traditionally. We have three that we want to put on, and we've asked Andrew and Sabrina to help us, already giving them the scenes to memorize. As much as Katherine may disagree with what I am about to write, this is a teaching opportunity for me, and a learning experience for her. I taught her the method that I start writing when I don't know what to write, which is to start off a scene by setting up the characters and have them each be performing an action, and then once dialog starts, you start to discover within yourself, where you want your script to go. What we did is that we set up three scenes, each no more than two pages long, and each starting with the same introductory stage directions, two people sitting on a couch, one is nervous about something, bitting her nails, and the other calmly reading a book, and from there we created three totally different scenes. And from that we also decided to have Sabrina and Andrew act each character of the scenes, the same, so the plays have more of a reason to be presented together. I'm exciting to write theatre again, I missed it from last year, and I'm exciting working with someone because it makes the project feel more legitimate, and gives me more enthusiasm to continue to work on it, because if I dropped out of this now, I would be giving up on Katherine. I also plan to refilm my movie, and I don't know why it has taken so long, but I plan to get that done this week as well. For STAC night I want to have my movie done and this piece with Katherine prepared to present, and I think that it is all very doable, the scenes Kat and I have written aren't too hard to pull off, and after reading them today with Andrew and Sabrina, I am positive that all of this can be done, mostly because just them reading the scenes was already satisfactory acting and there would only be a couple of things that we'd have to rehearse. There is this one scene where the two are talking and then the lights go out and one of the characters gets raptured and I had an idea of leaving clothes behind and that could be a little work, but it is all doable. Katherine doesn't think in the same sense of doablitiy as I do, which I think might be a good thing, in my mind, if I can't actually pull it off in real life, then I don't bother working on it. Katherine was writing this movie script about fire breathing farm animals, and it sounded like a fun idea, but in my mind I am just thinking of ways to actually make it work, like buying stuffed animals and cutting out little pieces of red paper to look like fire. I have never written a movie or play script that I couldn't pull off, because my mind can't focus without that limitation. If you tell me to make a film about a rocket ship going to Mars, I would have it be a film about a rocket ship school going to Mars, and you never see outside a window. 

American Beauty

American Beauty 

This is a fantastic movie. It is rare that I watch a movie that has as much of an emotional impact on me personally. I don't ever cry because I feel bad for the characters, I would only ever cry when something makes me feel something. I haven't cried in months, and the tears that are falling from my face now aren't tears of sadness. The movie is sad, but it isn't. I am crying because of a happiness that is so perfect that I wish life could always be like this. I'm not giving a review of the movie, I'm not going to criticize it, and I honestly couldn't care about anyone's opinion on it, good or bad, because this movie is having an impact larger almost any movie I've seen.

Everything is beautiful. Even typing that makes me tear and I don't know why. I think it's because I believe it now. Everything is beautiful. Everything is beautiful. Even the shit on the street. People don't realize this, they get too caught up in their lives to realize that. They think that beauty can only exist in a painting or a model. I've spent the last half an hour starring at my hand. Every pore and  every tinny hair, all of it is fantastic. I feel it, I feel something right now that is so unexplainable that I wish someone could just tell me what it is I am feeling. All I know is that my life is perfect, even though lots of it seems shitty and pointless, life is perfection. I sound like I'm on drugs, but I'm not because I doubt any drug can make you feel the way I do right now.

I have discovered the secret to life. This movie that I saw is just reinforcing that discovery. The main character in the movie, his life sucks. His wife is cheating on him, his daughter hates him, and he is in love with his 15 year old daughter's friend. But he knows the secret, but it's more than just knowing it, it's feeling it. Me and him, we get it. Our lives can be crappy but we are still happy, we are still in perfection within our own lives. He dies, which isn't a spoiler by the way, the movies starts off with him saying that he'll die by the end, and when he dies he has accepted it, he had accepted his death and he didn't even realize he was about to die. I feel that way right now. If I were to die I couldn't be angry, I could think that I was too young and haven't experienced anything, because the happiness and perfection within my life at this moment, is enough to make me feel that if I left this world right now then I couldn't possibly be disappointed because life had already given me so much to be thankful for. I love life. I love being alive enough that I have already accepted my death. I can live the rest of my life in total happiness now. I can't fear death anymore because life is too perfect and it would feel like a sin to be alive forever. 

The universe is going to make my life shit, it does that to everyone. But the secret of life is to not let that get to you, it's to be able to view life as a wonderful and beautiful thing, it's to be able to see the beauty in the shit and admire everything about life. I've been living happy for six months now, and this movie just made me realize what I had already known. 

Life is beautiful, it is amazing. Never forget that. Ever single moment that you live is perfection, and if you can accept that, then you have won. 

Being Human

I am in serious pain right now. I got my braces off yesterday and I have been ordered to wear a retainer. The retainer hurts, but it isn't as bad as the braces felt after I got them tightened, but this pain is worse. It is a natural human reaction to avoid pain, and I have the opportunity to get rid of the pain very simply, all I have to do is pull out the retainer, and that's that. With the braces you don't have that option, so you just deal with the pain, but this is worse. I am being tortured on a physiological level. This retainer is testing my humanity, my ability to overcome the naturally human instinct to avoid pain. This situation I'm in reminds me of the flinch game that kids play. The idea is that if you flinch as someone is going to punch you then you end up getting a worse punishment, but that in essence is such an awful game. You are reward kids for not flinching, and punishing them for an instinct that comes naturally, and is actually useful in our lives. I flinch, and I am proud of that. I know that if some day a mugger tries to punch me, I can use my flinching ability to avoid the attack and run away. We, as a society, are trying to distance ourselves from our humanity, because it limits us from achieving all that we can, but without those limits, we'd all die. If you can deal with the pain in your mouth, then you can achieve more in dental science, and if you don't flinch, then you seem brave, and can reflect the idea that because of our advanced human societies, the natural instinct of flinching is no longer needed because of our dominance of the physical world. But at the same time there is a reason why we feel pain, and why we flinch. If pain wasn't uncomfortable, then we'd all kill ourselves accidentally, and if flinching didn't exist then we'd all be eaten by bears. I'm going to bed now, and am going to continue in my crusade to defy my humanity, because in the end of the day that is a part of being human, trying not to be.
Thank you for reading,
Julian Vargas

It's normal for people to observe others. We are constantly looking at each other, making judgements and creating opinions based on them, but it is rare that we can actually do this with ourselves. We rarely see ourselves for the people that we are. Sometimes when I am laying in bed I kind of detach myself from my body. I forget who I am because I am thinking about something so much bigger than myself, but that is the closest I've ever got to lot being me. The other day I was watching the footage from the day I spent filming randomness with Katherine and Matt that I talked about yesterday, and I realized that I am a weird kid. I was looking at all of he mannerisms that I have, and that I don't notice that I do. I was critiquing my whole essence and it was today, as I'm sitting in chemistry writing a blog post that I start to pay attention to everything I do. I started to imagine what if a camera was watching me judging me the same way that I was when I looked at myself on camera. I think I'm weird, and when I looked at myself I felt that I don't really know who I am. This is going to be a short post, I just a thought I'd type in between periods because there was nothing better to do.
I'm in Spanish class now. I've been noticing that I bite my pen a lot, I wonder if it looks weird when I do that. Other people do it and I don't notice it as something weird on them when they do it, but maybe I knaw on my pen, because I was chewing it pretty vigorously in math. I'm not trying to change myself, but today I'm just going to observe myself.
In social studies I realized that I don't talk much. I used to talk all the time in the past in social studies, I remember calling out all the answers and I felt so smart when I would, but now I don't anymore. I still know all the answers, but I don't get that satisfaction of answering a question correctly anymore. And I never had any questions, and if I did I would just answer it myself. So now I barely say a word in soc.

My Day with Kat

I worked on editing a movie with Katherine. Last week we had decided to film everything that we saw while with Matt. Most of it didn't make any sense but the idea is that we have an hour of footage to make something out of. There are actually a lot of good idea within what we shot. We have beginnings and endings to probably a dozen movies that could be made, and I think that what I want to do next is continue with an idea that we had within the hour. We have these wonderful shots of me and Matt bouncing a ball with each other and we talked about things. I like that idea a lot, two guys casually talking as they bounce a ball between each other. I want to re-film that, more cleanly but still being loose like we had originally done it. There are some great little pieces of dialog without the hour but if we tried to recreate that then it wouldn't have the natural feel that it had the first time. The issue with the first time was mainly that it was unclean and very rough. It we could get the same footage, but with more attention to quality, then we would have a great project. There was an hour of footage, and Katherine and I didn't watch it all, but I think that just having the footage is an amazing pool to get ideas from and keeping that with me can be extremely useful for me in my life. 

I've been watching a lot of Game of Thrones episodes and that is thanks to Katherine who has also been watching it. I had been on episode seven for over a month because I wasn't motivated enough to watch it, but now Katherine and I are at the same place in the show, so the next day we can yell about how much of a dick Joffrey is and how awesome dragons are. This motivation that I get from Katherine can be more than just in a tv show, she had become a huge part of my artistic community and I enjoy talking to her about my own artistic endeavors. And she talks to me so I would imagine that she views me in a similar way. 

Cousins

I have learned to tolerate people. A lot of the time I don't actually find certain people stimulating, but I talk to them and converse with them and act a certain way around them because that let's me navigate life successfully. Yesterday night I was at my cousins house. I haven't seen that side of my family in over an extremely long time. The last time i saw them was before my hair was red. I like my cousins, they can be fun people and I used to love playing with them when I was younger, but now as I get older, and as I don't play much anymore, I can really connect with them. They have created their political view and I have mine, it makes me upset that I can't share mine around them but they can share their ideas around me all the time. They are hardcore Christians and there is nothing wrong with that, but when they found out about my religious beliefs they all kind of freaked out. I never even told them, it was just a slip up on Facebook. They don't know about my sexuality, and I don't plan on telling them anything. What I hate is how I have to hide being gay around them, but yet they can lecture on Jesus. If they knew my sexuality then they wouldn't talk to me and family get togethers would be extremely awkward. I don't want that, so I am the one who has to sacrifice. They only joy I get from going to my cousins house was that I am smarter than them. I present myself much better than they do in an intellectual sense. My aunt compares my cousin in our intellect but I am much more mature, even if we were the same age (he is 14 and i am 15) and we know all the same information but I can pull it out of context and relate it to other things. For example, my cousin and I both very much enjoy social studies we both get the same grades in the class and my mother and aunt never did so in the car yesterday we were trying to explain why we like it so much. My cousin couldn't say anything more than that it is a fun and interesting class, and even when he said that it was filled with "likes" and pauses. I started to go off into how social studies is what makes our societies function and it teaches ideas and concepts and even morals, to the population of the people. If humanity as a whole doesn't remember its history then how can we progress? My aunt and cousin were speechless for a while, I don't really know why, but I'd like to believe it was because I stunned them with my awesome intelligence.

I have been blogging everyday for a while now and I like it. I like seeing how the page views increase and the folders if posts gets larger and larger. I'll probably keep blogging like this from now on. It isn't hard, and I can write a blog anywhere, like right now I a m writing this on my phone, and that makes it easy and I don't have to finish is all in one sitting. I started this post last night while I was at my cousin's house and I finished it when I woke up the next morning. And I find myself very often just waiting around for things, a lot of the time I'll do something stupid on my phone so that I don't look weird just standing and waiting, but now I can write a blog post, and I like where all of this is going. Thank you for reading. 

I fell in love with a girl. I am also an Ecuadorian.

I have spent the last hour or so at the Ecuadorian consulate. I remember coming here when I was younger and applying for my citizenship. My mother is renewing her Ecuadorian passport because she is going to Ecuador this May for my cousin's wedding. I never got my passport from Ecuador, but I haven't been there in over five years. When you say that to a normal person it sounds like a short amount of time but I have only been alive for 15 years so five years is a third of my life. My iPhone is running out of battery and that is what I am writing this blog post on. I have a triple citizenship. I think that having that makes me special. Many white people don't keep up with their families at home, and this isn't something that is their fault, it is just because when they immigrated to the US they didn't have the technology to be communicating with their families. This generation is seeing another wave of immigration, but a key difference is that there is communication within the families, so Latinos keep their ties with their origin countries. Facebook is huge is Ecuador and before that existed MSN messenger was huge. And everyone uses Skype down there. White people nowadays can't get their citizenship to their origin counties because their ties were forced to be broken. I have my citizenship, and it is pretty easy to get it. All I needed was to have my mother be a citizen of Ecuador, so when I grow up and have my children they can have their Colombian and Ecuadorian citizenships. And then they can pass it down to their children and this can continue on and on. 

The field trip yesterday to the city was fantastic. I don't know really what to say about "Old Hats" other than that it was amazing. I was surprised with the amount of music that was in the show, and it was a pleasant surprise. If I liked girls then I think I would fall in love with Nellie  McKay. It was her voice. Not just the way that it sounded but the things that she said. During the intermission she walked around the audience and sang a list of important things that happened today in history. She read of the page and she would make mistakes because this haven't been rehearsed, but you wouldn't care because she was that adorable. She is confident and outgoing, and you can tell that just through her voice. I feel like I know her. I never talked to her, and I can barely remember her name, but I feel that I know who she is. You want to be her friend, and she probably has boys falling in love with her constantly because she is just that likable, you want to love her. When they hired her they probably realized this, and she was just as important to the success of the show as the actors. I have two percent battery left so I'll end this here. Thank you for reading. 

I Don't Sleep Like A Normal Person.

I don't sleep like a normal person would. I think that my method is better. I procrastinate and I'm not going to pretend that I don't because the sooner I can accept that I do, the sooner I could fix it. I go to sleep at seven or eight or nine every night depending on the amount of homework that I have that night. So if I had a lot of work I'd go to sleep at seven, and if I had less then I'd go to sleep at eight and if i had even less then I'd sleep at nine. Then every morning I wake up at three. And depending on what time I had gone to sleep the night before, I would either stay in bed and go back to sleep, or I'd do my homework. Like I said before, I procrastinate, but I have created a method where I can do it more responsibly. I make sure that I have enough time to finish the work that I'd have to do, and that way I don't fail school.
I put a lot of effort while I'm in class. During school I actually am almost always focused. People don't realize this, but if while you're in class you are focusing, then you don't have to study enough. So many kids complain about how they have to study so much, but if you understand the information as the teacher is teaching it, then you don't have to spend hours trying to teach it to yourself. I'm mainly thinking about my chemistry class. It is extremely easy to lose focus while Mr. Arralde is talking. The guy isn't the most interesting fellow in the world, and what he is saying is normally very confusing, so most kids would just take the notes and not be trying to understand what he is saying. I never did this because I never knew that you were allowed to. I thought that as a student, your job was to pay attention, and so I always did that. Kids in my chemistry class are constantly texting while Mr. Arralde is talking and they aren't focused at all, and then they would complain when they get a bad grade. I don't have to study much to get the grade that I want in that class, even though it is very hard, because I can retain most of what my teacher would teach. Last year I had an issue in my social studies class because my class last year was one that was heavily based on the work that you did outside of class. My teacher would assign textbook reading and then sometimes in class she'd never finish explaining what we had read. I can't learn very well that way, and so I didn't get the normal A+ that I'd get in social studies. I still really liked my teacher last year though. She is a really cool lady and I would love to discuss politics with her sometime. This year my social studies teacher isn't liked by much of our class, but that is because she doesn't give notes on everything like we are so used to, but she talks a lot about the information. She likes to lecture and I like listening. So I remember most of what she says. And other people could too if they actually paid attention like I do. Even in classes that are boring to me, I'd still pay attention, and I never put much effort into my notes, because I know that if I can understand the information as my teacher is talking, then I wouldn't need them later. The point of notes should be to remind yourself what you had been learning about, not to teach yourself the lesson again. A teacher's job is to teach you, but if you aren't paying attention, then it is your own fault. I don't talk much in class, but that doesn't mean that I'm not focused. My social studies teacher this year doesn't really know me and that saddens  me because I want her to. I have had a close connection to every social studies teacher that I've ever had. I remember eighth grade I had Mr. Nahoum. He was an incredible teacher. Mr. Nahoum put extra effort into teaching. He had this thing that he made up called Nahoum's American Legends. He made movies and every topic he'd have a new movie that would star his buddies and they would act out the stories we'd learn about. Mr. Nahoum was laid off because of the budget cuts. Our schooling system is screwed up, and I first realized this after I heard he would get laid off. He was one of the greatest teachers I've ever had, and ask anyone one else in his classes, and you will probably get a similar reaction. He was a weird guy, but after spending a year with him you learn to love him. My grade was the only grade that got to experience the awesomeness that is Mr. Nahoum in Herricks and that isn't fair. What is even more unfair is that Mr. Nahoum might be jumping around from school to school because of the current system. I saw the movie called "Waiting for Superman". I was a great documentary that explains why the education systems are failing. There are a number of problems, and basically everyone is to blame. First is the teachers union. I am liberal, so I am supposed to be in favour of things like unions because they protect workers rights, but the teachers union has come to the point where they are taking advantage of their power. You can't really fire a teacher if they have tenure so bad teachers are kept in the system, and if you try to then the union will get mad. People forget that the focus should be on students, not on anyone else. When I criticize the schooling system to my father he gets defensive because he is a teacher and the things I say would threaten his job. If a teacher like Mr. Nahoum is constantly getting laid off because the system won't let anyone else get laid off because the older teachers have tenure, then the students are suffering because you are denying them the right to a better education. At the same time you can't have teacher grading in the way that currently have now because then you put good teachers at risk of getting fired.
I want to write blog posts like this more often. I've done it for the past four days now, but I don't want to start to say that this would become a 365 because then I'd probably stop just because I wouldn't be able to commit and then I'd end up hating it. I have a lot of thoughts about a lot of things, and I never really tell many people, and having them recorded on the internet makes me feel better about myself. I could go on for hours about everything I have an opinion on, and still have more to talk about. I started this blog post at 4:50 in the morning and it is now 5:50. I have been writing for an hour, and I could still keep going. I don't really care if anyone reads my blog, I'm doing this more for myself, and that is all that should matter. I'm not making art as I'm writing, but I am recording my mind, and my mind is something that is artistic.
Today we have a field trip. I'm excited. I read some reviews on the show we're seeing, "Old Hats". It seems like a pretty cool show. My sister has a show today, and my mom is going. Her show is in Boston. Freshman aren't allowed to be in the shows, but she isn't in a normal show, she is part of this senior's final piece. His thing is lighting and other tech stuff, so he got a bunch of people to put on a show so that he could light it. Then he presents that to his teachers and that is his final. I was supposed to go, but then I begged my mother to let me stay home and go to the trip. I don't like going to Boston, I've seen it enough at this point. It is a pretty city, and I feel awfully bad about the bombings, but it gets pretty boring. And I don't like that it isn't as diverse as NYC. Boston isn't racist at all, but like in Queens, I go to my grandma's apartment, and in that area, everyone speaks Spanish, and you go a couple blocks down the you'd see a bunch of other races of people. I was drinking coffee in a shop with my grandma a couple of Buddhist monks where just casually walking around. You don't really see that in Boston, and that is what upsets me. All the cultures of the world are within a few blocks in NYC and that is something amazing to me. It is an American city, but it isn't at the same time. It was founded by the Dutch, and has always stood out as an individual. I like living around a city that is so influential in the world. It isn't the biggest, it doesn't have the tallest buildings, but it is still one of the greatest cities in the world. Boston isn't on that list. I think I'll end here because I have to get ready for school. Thank you for reading.

Another Thing. This is Going to Become a Normal Thing So Yeah

My draft folder in my blog is getting progressively larger and larger. The same thing used to happen when I was in middle, except it was with bad poetry. I used to be signed up onto this website where a bunch of people shared their poetry. It was mostly middle aged adults but I participated in that website. I forget the name but the last time I check the website was deleted. I remember actually being part of that community though. Random people would read my poetry and comment. Mostly they just said how amazing it is that a twelve year old could write like I did, but honestly what I wrote wasn't that great. I remember that the website gave out prizes to certain poets. If you got a high enough score, because the viewers could score your poetry, and if enough people bothered to score your poem, then judges would read them and then give out prizes. I never actually read the other peoples poetry though. I would give everyone a 10/10 that would comment on my page because I felt special that they bothered to look at my page. I remember bragging about my "followers" to my sister because should would envy me because on her blog for STAC, no one would read it. Later that year I tried to start a 365 after watching Julie & Julia, where Julie Powell cooks every recipe in Julia Child's cookbook in a year, and I wanted to do something like that, except with poetry, so I did. I lasted about a month before I forgot a day, and then I would forget another and another and eventually I just stopped completely. I don't even remember the name of the page. I do remember that I would pressure all of my friends to read it and comment because I wanted to become Internet famous.
I sent in my application for an internship with an organization called Transportation Alternatives. You could Google them to find out some more info about what they do, but they seem like a really cool organization, and I'm not just saying that because they might eventually read my blog, but I seriously think that these guys are cool. Anyway, I really want them to give me an interview because I know that I could dazzle them if I don't get too shy. I really want that interview though. It would give me an opportunity to try and show off how awesome I am. I always wanted to be in a situation like an interview because I know what to do now. I know how it is I'm supposed to present myself and I know not to say "like" and I know how to dress.
When my mother drops me off in  morning she normally tells me some advise the pertains to me doing better in school. They always sounded the same, except this morning she said "do well in school, it is your ticket out of here". I am very public with my dislike of suburbia so my mother knows and she is trying to convince me that the only way to not end up in the suburbs is to study. I don't why this struck me but it did. I don't want to stay in the house when I get older, but I don't think that studying will ensure that. It isn't the first time she'd said something like that. I really want to yell out that I'll find a man to support me. It would piss her off so much. That is the only issue that my mother has with my sexuality, I mean she doesn't like it when I talk about drag, but I'm not a drag queen so there isn't much argument because I'm not constantly dressing up like a woman. My mother hates the idea that I am a bottom. Tops and bottoms are more than just sexual positions, they're a lifestyle. Every relationship needs a "top" because he or she is the one that takes charge. Most of the time in straight relationships the man is the "top" and the female is the "bottom" and so my mother had been raising me to be a good "top". She always emphasized making sure that I help doors open for women and treated women with a lot of respect.  The reason she did this is because she was trying to morph me into the husband that she'd want for the next girl. So now that I am gay and a bottom, all of my mother's efforts had been destroyed. This isn't because I'm gay though, it is because I like the idea of having a boy hold the doors open for me and it is attractive to me to see a guy who takes charge. I never discussed sex with my parents. They have been talking about it with me as if I had known what it was ever since I was born. They had been telling that if I ever had sex to use a condom, before I knew what a condom was. I used to get condom and a condo mixed up. I thought that  they were the same thing for a a little, so imagine how confusing when my aunt is telling me that she is considering living in a condo. I knew that a condom was used for sex so I was really confused why she would tell me this. I had to learn sex on my own. I had to figure out what it was all by myself. I never had a relationship where I could talk to someone about my sexual issues because there was never anyone close enough that I trusted. I think I might have some attention disorder because I cant focus on one thing before I just jump to the next. I am honestly just writing down everything that I think about in my head. As I type it all of it becomes way more clear. I don't really read these over for grammar or spelling mistakes and I know I should, but if I do then I just get discouraged about writing. Tomorrow is the field trip to the city, so tonight I don't have to do any homework. So I might just type all night. I could. It isn't very hard. I am thinking about things constantly, especially on days like this because I don't have anything better to do. Ellen's blog posts are really long so I never finish reading them. I have that issue with things. I never really get into books because my mind can't focus on the same thing for too long. I like to read articles though. I have the NY Times app on my phone and I read a lot of articles from there. I get alerts from it whenever something important happens in the news. I knew about the Boston Bombings a few minutes after it happened. The thing is that I never take any of the news alerts seriously until everyone starts talking about them, because I get an alert almost everyday about some place someplace in the world getting bombed. I read an article about 200 civilian dead in Africa this morning and no one is talking about that the way they did for the Boston Bombings. I think I'll end this here. Thank you for reading.

I Had Time So I Wrote Another Rant, My Blog Is Going To Become My Journal At This Pace.

I have a number of friends that I don't see very much. Text messaging holds up our relationships. This is going to sound very weird, but sometimes I don't think that the people I am messaging aren’t real. I know they are because I've meet them and hung out with them, but for some reason when I'm texting them it seems fake. These people have become my imaginary friends. They exist unlike actual imaginary friends, but I know them as people that I text with, not as actual people. It's weird but I think I actually prefer having friends like that in some cases. If I want to talk to someone about something awkward it is easier to tell it to someone whom you hardly ever see because then you are spared the embarrassment of having it come up in real life. I can talk and complain all I want to these people without worrying about embarrassment of any kind because if I just stop messaging them then they basically stop existing to me.

I joined a dating website a couple weeks before I came out. And about a month ago I deleted that account. That website was my place to vent about anything. I would start conversations with random people and just complain about all of my issues. I also learned how to act when you are flirting. Most people suffer through embarrassment while they are talking to their actual crushes, but I was able to do this with Internet people, and now I don’t embarrass myself as much. The thing about Internet people is that if I turn off my computer, these people stop existing. It is the same with my text friends, except my text friends are more real. These Internet were totally temporary. I would flirt with a guy from California and then just forget about him for the rest of my life, and that made me feel good. When you're going through self-image issues this site can actually be extremely useful. I didn't think I was attractive but when guys on the Internet are calling me cute, then my self-esteem grows. Things got weird with the website because I wasn't using it for the right reasons. I always tried to make things real. I wasn't content with just casual flirting and I brought my own downfall. I ended up meeting a guy from the website. He turned out to be very odd, and I had never had any experience with a guy before, so I fell for him. He said that after he knew me better we'd date, but after a month I saw that he was really weird. I told him that I'd just want to be friends. Then he introduced me to another guy, and instantaneous I fell for this new guy, and not for the same reason that I liked the first guy, but because this new guy was actually fantastic, and I still think that he is a great guy, but I'm not into him like I was before because of my current relationship status. I joined another dating website where I meet another guy and I was not attracted to him at all, but he and the guy that the first guy introduced me to had dated once. Things between them were starting to bubble again and I put myself in the middle of that because I was emotionally weak and I needed someone to be happy if I couldn't be. So I put actual effort into making the two a couple, and then I realized that the third guy was doing the same thing to the second guy that the first guy did to me. He was teasing him with the possibility of becoming something more, but not really attracted to him the way he was to him. They never ended up together. The reason I'm explaining all of this is because I wanted to make an analogy but I didn't think you'd understand it unless you knew the whole story. But now that I think about it the analogy wasn't too good but I'll say it anyway just because then this whole rant will feel like a waste of time. My relationship with these boys is like the Cold War. Nothing really happened in real life, but it impacted my life very much. I met them all in real life, but in my mind I know them as text messages, but those text messages changed my life.

I have gone through a lot of shit this year, and in this case “shit” means good and bad things. I am experiencing things, but I'm not just experiencing, I'm learning from them, and I am truly happy. I am living in a point of my life where I am happy almost always, I might get sad, or there might be an issue I have with someone, but generally everything in my life is good. I remember two years ago I had only a couple of friends, and I never really talked to them much, but now I have so many friends, and even more acquaintances, and I can honestly say that I have no enemies that I know of. You can't hate someone who doesn't get angry, because then in the end you just seem like a jerk. That is how I normally get out of any trouble. If you can make yourself weak then you can manipulate people from that position. I used to do it subconsciously and so do many people. People don't like to think that they are being manipulated though, it makes them seem stupid, and I understand, so I try not to talk about this much. I realize things a lot. I remember that last year I was learning about how in acting every character has an objective in a conversation, and they want to accomplish this to feel satisfied. If you can identify what someone's objective is in real life, then you put yourself at an advantage in life, because you know exactly what the other person wants. Even if you're wrong, you still have an advantage in general, and then you also have to try and understand what it is you want exactly. Sometimes you might say you want something but actually not, like I might yell at you because you ate my cookie, and I say that I'm yelling because so that you wouldn't eat my cookies anymore, but in reality I could just want to assert my own power over you and see you fall. That situation happens very often, most of the time people can get satisfaction if you just fall to their will. I understand that I am not a take-charge type of guy, but that doesn't mean that I can't manipulate people like everyone else does. I know that I sound like a jerk when I talk about this, but I just think about things like this more. You probably do the same thing, but you don't realize because you are too busy focused on your emotion or something else like that. I'm reading East of Eden now and there is this character named Cathy. The first thing we learn about Cathy is that she is evil. Cathy is evil, but one of the reasons John Steinbeck gives for why she is evil is because she manipulates people, but that isn't so evil, what makes her evil is that fact that she killed her parents and shot her husband and left her children to work in a brothel. Cathy is a smart girl, and I respect her for that. I see a lot of myself in her, even though I probably shouldn't because she is evil and crazy. Cathy doesn't talk much while she is with others, and I do the same. Cathy observes people and she thinks about things and plans out in her head. She examines people like I do, except she does it with they intent of creating chaos, while I just do it because I use what I learn to give myself a better life.

I guess that I'm done ranting. Thank you.