This whole week, the lining of the inside of my throat has slowly been disintegrating. Or, at least, that's what it feels like. It's an absolutely awful feeling, I could best describe it as if someone took a knife, plunged it into your throat, carved off the first five layer of skin until it bleeds, takes the knife out, replaces it with sandpaper, and rubs all over where your throat touches together when you swallow. Basically I am in constant pain and when I swallow I feel like a part of me just died. Unfortunately, my body's natural reaction is to swallow constantly. I looked this up; your brain things a foreign object or infection is in your throat so it keeps swallowing to make the saliva cover it and protect the area. This has to be wrong because it hurts so very bad. On top of this constant pain, I have to sing a lot. I have two choir classes every day on top of voice lessons. So I was slowly killing myself. Saturday we had a show choir competition in Lacrosse and I didn't speak once until we performed. We won, so I guess that's what you call sacrifice. Currently, my ability to make sound is at a zero. I need something to cure myself.
google images never lets me down.
9 am Sunday Morning. I wake up, still in a lot of pain. My first idea is to go to the medicine cabinet and see what I can do to fix myself. I see towards the back of the cabinet the words "cold & sore throat relief". I grab the bottle excitedly and down a lot of it. Normally I would be grossed out with what I assumed was cough medicine but the upside to having such a constant pain is that you don't really notice the taste of anything. I looked at the bottle to see exactly what it was. NYQUIL. Oh god no. If you don't know already, nyquil is basically a drug of its own. I've seen lots of things on the news about kids abusing nyquil and cough syrup because enough can make you have some hallucinations. I just drank about 3/4 of a bottle in desperation. I went and sat on the couch and waited for it to hit me. About 15 minutes later nothing had happened. Maybe 3/4 of a bottle isn't really that much. I laughed it off. I looked from the door to the tv and noticed my vision wasn't really working normally. I closed my eyes for what I thought would be a second to make it stop.
12 pm. I wake up very confused. With a sore throat.
Are you feeling happier than usual? Does everything seem more carefree recently? You aren't alone, most people this time of year do too. Why exactly, is this happening? It just might by the weather. There are many different explanations to how weather effects our mood.
One such example is Seasonal Affective Disorder (also known as SAD). This usually relates to people who experience normal moods during the year and slip into mild bouts of depression in the winter. This disorder was first considered a myth until studies found that while 1.4% of people in the state of Florida report depression during the winter, over 9% of people in New Hampshire and other northern states report depression specifically during the winter. I know that while I don't get legitimately depressed when it's colder, it does effect my mood to some degree. When it's cold, people usually are focused on getting warm, making every other task they have to focus on very frustrating. Seasonal Affective Disorder establishes a link between weather and mood. I decided to write about this because the recent beautiful weather has really had a profound affect on me.
I googled "gorgeous weather" (I heard Joe Winters use that phrase) and this is what I got. How lame am I?
This Sunday, when I usually dread doing the bulk of my homework, I flew through my assignments early in the afternoon and had the rest of the day to relax, as Sunday should be. I was confused, I usually don't have that kind of motivation and have to force myself to get the work done. Then I noticed that I wasn't constantly cold. In fact, it was beautiful enough to go outside without a coat or jacket. I've always associated the spring and summer with great times, and I was starting to feel nostalgic. Weather really can affect mood.
I think when I'm older, I'll move somewhere warm so my productivity is always very high.
A common trend I've been seeing on the internet is lots of pictures of brooms standing up by themselves. At first I thought it was just a trick; that people would hold the broom up and get a picture of it in the air. I was confused as to why people would think this is cool. But then I saw a comment explaining exactly what it is: that some sort of planetary alignment. I tried for quite a while to see if I could get it, but the broom kept falling over. After I did a little research (which for this generation means searching on google) I read that only a broom with a flat bottom will stand, and that is only at certain times of the day.
not my kitchen, just a random google picture. gotta site your sources yo.
UPDATE: In the middle of writing this post I tried to stand up a broom again. It worked. The broom seemed lifeless, then I felt a little kick when I let it go and it stayed stationary for a long time. When I walked to close to it, it fell over. Apparently, the brooms standing up by themselves have something to do with luck and finding the center of gravity, and less to do with "planetary alignment". Using planetary alignment as an explanation for something just makes you sounds like a crazy person.
PS I changed my background and color scheme.
More springtime-ish. I mean, its brighter.
The most popular hashtag on twitter for the past couple days has been #KONY2012. What exactly does that mean? I overheard a girl in the hallway the other day
"Wait.. so who is that Kony guy? Is he...ummm....likeeeee... running for president?"
No. Joseph Kony isn't a candidate for the 2012 election. Kony 2012 is a campaign calling for his arrest, however. The goal of the project is to make Kony famous, because he is currently unknown.
This is the video that has been becoming immensely popular in the past week. It currently has over 32 million views, when I first watched it on Sunday it only had about 100,000. hi
The campaign is organized by Invisible Children inc, which began working in Uganda to help children effected by the war there. "Invisible Children" are the victims of the war and the LRA, a violent rebel group in Central Africa (led by Joseph Kony). Children are taken from their homes, given guns and forced to kill their parents by the troops to sever their ties to home and make them into hardened soldiers. Currently, the LRA has abducted 30,000 children from Uganda. Children that escape live in constant fear that they will be killed if they encounter the LRA again. The film is the starting point to the campaign, which has been spread like wildfire and brought unbelievable attention to it. This is really a great example of the kind of power social media sites like twitter and facebook have over the world. A project like this could never be as successful without help from the internet.
Invisible Children, inc has gotten some scrutiny, though. Its hard to argue against an organization trying to stop child suffering in a third world country. I don't really understand why someone would try to keep people from supporting something like this, other than a need to be on the other side of the issue. I saw a youtube comment when I first watched the Kony 2012 video:
"Kony 2012 is run by Invisible Children, an organization that pockets 75% of its donations. Think this money is going to stop Kony?? You're WRONG. Let's just hope that instead of donating to Invisible Children, people raise awareness on their own." -BIGBenY
Invisible Children, inc, responded to these criticisms (I've seen many elsewhere questioning how much of their profits go to the actual cause) on their tumblr. They published a detailed account of their spending report and outlined exactly how their money is going to each individual cause.
I respect the organization because of their honesty and immediate response to anyone who questions them. They want to maintain their reputation because they believe in the cause so strongly. I chose to support the cause by purchasing a bracelet from their website.
Kennedy is having a night where KONY 2012 posters will be posted all over Cedar Rapids. On Friday, April 20th, we will cover the entire town with posters promoting the campaign.
When we were all in preschool, naps were part of our daily schedule. For me, nap time was a little after recess to calm us down. I haven't really noticed it until now, but I hardly ever felt tired back then. My bedtime was always 8:30, but I usually stayed awake long after that. Now, I get to bed as early as possible because I'll start fading out around 9:30. Why cant I stay awake at night? In the world of unending assignments and late night practices, my time after 9:00 is invaluable, but not useful. I've had to resort to getting all my work done between right after school and whenever my practice starts, which is not a large window. Once practice is over, I drop everything at my door and pass out. I wake up every morning at 5:30 so I can get ready properly for 0 hour, but it isn't easy. I'm usually miserably tired during the school day, which doesn't make it easy. I've tried coffee, but it isn't going to fix the problem. There needs to be a solution.
Naps. The answer is naps. I discovered this one day after school where I was literally so exhausted I needed to take a nap right after I got home from school. I told myself I would just have to suck it up and do my homework later that night, for the sake of my mental health.
3:03 pm. Pass out on my couch.
5:47 pm. Wake up. I'm confused and a little dizzy, but after that wears off I realize I feel like its about 12 in the afternoon. This is amazing! I hadn't taken a nap in so long, I forgot how useful they are. I went to practice that night and returned home with plenty of energy to do my homework competently. Magic!
Why does this work so well? When we go to sleep at night, the deep sleep we enter that helps us rejuvenate is known as REM sleep. We get a couple solid hours of it at night, and mine is abruptly interrupted every morning at 5:29 (I set all of my alarms 1 minute before the regular time I would wake up. I don't really know why.) That's why its so hard to get up; you've been jolted out of REM sleep. When you take a nap (not a traditional 10 minute snooze, I'm talking over an hour) you get some valuable REM sleep that energizes you enough to make it through the rest of the day. There's a reason we often sleep when we're sick: its a lot easier for you body to heal itself when you are asleep then awake. A nap today can help you tomorrow, too. Because you wont be tired when you go to bed, you wont feel robbed of sleep when you wake up. I noticed immediately it is much easier to get up at the dreaded time of 5:29 am when you snuck in an extra hour and a half of sleep less than 12 hours before.
Getting enough rest is crucial to your physical and mental health, so a nap might be just what you need to feel better.
What is the first thing you think of when someone says Abraham Lincoln? The hat? The civil war? America? Log cabins? How about vampires? It sounds ridiculous, but that's the title for a new movie coming out in 2012, about Abraham Lincoln trying to save the United States from vampires.
I was initially suspicious of this idea for a movie. Something about it just seems... preposterous. (I like that word). We all know Abraham Lincoln didn't hunt vampires, and it seemed at first this would just be a cheap movie designed to entertain a not-so-bright crowd. Then I saw it was directed by Tim Burton, and it got my hopes up. I'm secretly a big geek for Tim Burton movies, the animated ones included. This film is supposed to be a hero by day- superhero by night type of film, following Abraham Lincoln as the runs for president and battles a political group of vampires trying to gain control of the White House. This film features an axe wielding Lincoln chopping up vampires (get it.....because he was born in a log cabin) and apparently quite a bit of danger involved. It looks good enough to watch like a scary movie as well as an action movie, and I'm sure will be very popular in the sci-fi community. My Dad, who really likes history, didn't like the idea. He said it was an abomination of American History. Any Tim Burton vampire movie is sure not to dissapoint. The title is kind of lame and stereotypical, and might turn off some people like it make me feel. Not much is known about this movie yet, only a trailer and some stills have been released, but I've been eagerly digging trying to find more.
This Borrowed Earth is about man-made environmental disasters. The book is broken up into segments, each is about a specific environmental distaster from the past 60 years. Each of these segment describes live in the area before, the events that lead up to the disaster, the disaster itself and then a look at the long term effects of the disaster. The messege that This Borrowed Earth tries to deliver is that if we are not careful, we can do a lot of damage to our earth.
The kind of damage that can come from these disasters is horrific. The nuclear incident at Chernobyl, Ukraine didn't kill right away: it released deadly radiation into the atmosphere that is still around today. Those in the town of Chernobyl, Ukraine developed cancers and their children are genetically predisposed to thyroid problems. In 1986, millions of gallons of toxic chemicals were accidentally dumped into the Rhine River, all because of human error. This book really helps illustrate how we can harm our environment so easily through in-depth examples.
The fact that most of the incidents occured by simple errors at factories really made me think.
Factories that produce harmful chemicals and toxic residue are more common than you would think. The incident at Seveso, Italy involved a shut down in the reactor of the ICESMA factory. The factory produced hexachlorophene, a multi-purpose chemical with a lot of potential dangers. The reactor shutting down caused an explosion, releasing a toxic cloud causing blindness and killing animals. Similar incidents occured at plants like at Times Beach, Love Canal New York, and Bhopal India.
A disaster like this could happen at any moment. People had no way of knowing something would go wrong with this machinery. In Cedar Rapids, we live near a nuclear power plant. If that plant were to have a meltdown like what occured at Three Mile Island or in Chernobyl, we would be at an enourmous risk. This book shows that errors like this could happen at any moment.
This book truely showed me how capabile humans are of destruction of the planet, and that when people say we are destroying our earth, it isn't an exxageration. The in-depth description of environmental disasters paints a picture of how we are slowly destroying our home, and when things go wrong, large scare disasters create widespread misery. This Borrowed Earth showed the relationship between environmental degredation and the government. In Minimata, Japan, the government and Chisso Chemical Company refused to acknowledge that the mercury poisonings of villagers was the result of chemical runoff into the water. The poor villagers lost their livelyhood (poisoned rivers yielded no fish) and couldn't recieve compensation from the government until a 20 year battle and secretive research got the victims the help they needed. In Chernobyl, the Soviet Union remained silent after the nuclear incident. As a cloud of radiation spread all over Europe, they didn't find out until it was too late; many crops had been spoiled and people became sick. This book helped me understand that care of the enivronment is partially business and humans working to stop the destruction of our home.
