Wanna Know Something Cool?

Wanna know something cool?

Well, I can help you with that.

If you’re sick of teen help, you can check out my new blog, where you can learn all that neat stuff you didn’t know before.

Check out the blog here.

A Special(ish) Blog Post for Osama Bin Laden

This just in! Osama Bin Laden, the leading terrorist in the World Trade Center attacks and the leader of the Al Qaeda terrorist group, has been killed just a few hours ago! Don’t believe me? Turn on the news!

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/05/01/bin.laden.obit/index.html?hpt=T1&iref=BN1 Here’s the link to the article on Bin Laden’s death.

Words Can Never Hurt Me, Part 2 (Love Tip #4)

Tip 4: Don’t be afraid to ask someone who they like.

Imagine a chat on Facebook:

You: Hey there! Friend: Hey, what’s up? You: Not too much, just thinkin’. Friend: What about? You: Well, I was wondering if you liked anyone.. Meh, just life.

Boy, if I had a nickel for every time something like that happened, I’d be rich.

Another problem with adolescents these days is their extreme shyness to not only ask out people they like, but even to ask their crushes who they like! Once again, I have no answer for why this is. It’s just how our brains have been wired to think.

My opinion on that? Excuse my language, but I think it’s bullsh*t. Especially since I react the same way. I’ve had so many chats with girls I‘ve liked without asking them who they liked to find out more about it, and frankly, it drives me crazy.

I’m keeping this post short and to the point, too, just to get my point out in fewer words. So, the bottom line is: ASK. THEM. WHO. THEY. LIKE. If you don’t, who knows what could end up happening? They might like you and want you to ask it so they can answer truthfully. They might end up giving up on you and getting with someone else. They might even ask someone else who they like and be in your same position.

But what would happen if you did ask? Nothing, right? If they don’t like you, you can cover it up when they ask why by saying “jw” or something, and if you’re getting the vibe, then fantastic! Good for you!

I really hope everyone is at least taking my advice to heart, because I’ve learned lots of this from personal experience, and I just want to help every reader through the same troubles I had to go through with this.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll hope to see you guys on my next love post. (:

Words Can Never Hurt Me (Love Tip #3)

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.” –Maya Angelou

Tip 3: Don’t be afraid to ask someone out who you like.

I know how you feel, trust me. It’s got to be one of the scariest feelings in the world to even think about asking someone out who you have a crush on, let alone actually asking them. That’s just the way it is; your nerves won’t let you ask them..

Unless you can suck it up and just do it.

Let me ask you a serious question: what’s the absolute worst that you think would happen if you asked this special person out?

Just think about that for a second…

Come up with anything other than “it’d be humiliating if she said no” or “I don’t want our friendship to be ruined”? Neither could I when I was asked this question.

So, why don’t we as male adols just go for it and ask her out?

To be honest, this is one of the hardest questions I’ve ever answered. The way society is structured now, adols are “brainwashed” into thinking that asking someone out will be a terrible decision that they will regret for the rest of their lives.

But at the same time, adols also complain about having a crush on someone all the time. You see it in all these social networking sites: Facebook statuses are updated, Tweets are sent out, Myspace mood emoticons are on lovestruck, Tumblr bloggers post countless photos of sad, lonely song lyrics, the list goes on and on. Stumbleupon has even made an entire interest out of relationships!

All of this depression over how much people crave love has really gotten on my nerves, and just thinking about it makes me think how stupid we all are. I mean, how hard is it to ask someone out? I ask myself that all the time.

So, what I would recommend (to myself, as well, when I get a crush) is to swallow your pride and ASK THE PERSON OUT ALREADY! If they say yes, then fantastic! You’ve gotten an accomplishment and are a happier person because of it!

If they say no, then that’s no worries, either. If they have one iota of common sense then they’ll most likely stay friends with you even after this, because you’re too good of a friend to get rid of for having a simple crush.

Moral of the story: Don’t let nerves get the best of you. If you do that, you’ll regret it, believe me.

Come on back in a day or two (or three) to check out your next tip on love.

Questions? Comments? Go ahead and show me what you got by commenting below! (:

Photo Credit for iPhone screencap goes to: thesinglesscoreboard.files.wordpress.com

Deduction (Love Tip #2)

Tip #2: Think of love as a “process of elimination.”

Think about this: You have five doors to choose from. One of them contains a lifetime supply of anything you want. And guess what? You have five guesses to choose the right door.

If only everything in life were that simple, huh?

Well, the good news is, love can be like that!

There are billions of people in the world. A lot of them are looking for someone like you. But they can’t find you at the moment, so they choose someone who they think is like you.

But, they find that their traits aren’t as perfect as yours, and they have or had a flaw that made them unattractive, so that person breaks up with them.

If that made any sense, then you should understand that love won’t come to you immediately. You have to go find it yourself.

Sounds like a daunting task, but it can be easy if you look at it like a “process of elimination.”

I know what you’re thinking: “process of elimination? Isn’t that what I use when I don’t know the answer on a test?” And yes, that is true, but that’s not the only thing it can be used for; process of elimination can be used to find your soulmate after a while.

Think of it like this: you’re in high school. You’re out there having a great time with life. But somewhere inside of you, you feel a void that can only be filled with love.

So you try to fill that void by getting into relationships with different people and seeing whether they work out or not.

Do they work out? Great! The void is filled!

Do they not work out? Bummer. The void is empty again.

BUT, on the other hand, if you broke up with that person, now you know more about what you like and don’t like!

What made you want to break up with them? Was it their lack of sensitivity? Was it their overly desirous personality? Did they have too much lust and not enough love for your taste?

Whatever it was, now you know you want to stay away from that later on.

Pretty soon, after a few years, you’ll have gone through enough “experiment” relationships to know exactly what you love in a man/woman.

That’s when you can start soul-searching, being as picky as you can to make sure your life is spent well with the person you love, because nothing is worse than starting a family with someone you can’t stand. (Not that I would know or anything)

The bottom line is: Don’t get mad, sad or depressed when someone breaks up with you or you break up with someone. Just realize that that helped you in the long run to find out who you are truly capable of loving.

Come on back in a day or two, and hopefully I’ll have another love tip ready for you. I’ve been neglecting my blogs for awhile, but I’m hoping to begin consistency again soon.

Copycat (Love Tip #1)

Well, it took awhile, but I have your list of love tips. Like our money category, they’re going to be split up into ten “commandments,” except that they’re not going to be commandments; they’re just going to be tips.

Also similar to the money posts, I’m not going to give away all of the tips before describing each one. You’ll just have to come on back each day to find out about them!

Okay, let’s get started.

Tip 1: BE YOURSELF. To all of my girls reading this, what’s the first thing you want for a guy to do?

If you said anything along the lines of “be himself” or “not be fake around me,” then you’re like roughly 95% of all other teenage girls.

Guys, girls HATE when you try to be someone you’re not, even if you think it’s better to do that.

Let’s say Earl is a really funny guy. Every time he tells a joke (which is often), it’s a big hit, and all of the girls want to talk to him, all of the girls like him, they all want to be close to him.

Now let’s say Tyler is one of Earl’s friends who hangs out with him. He isn’t as blessed with comedy as Earl is, and he gets a little put down that Earl has so much luck with being such a charismatic person.

Now let’s say that April is one of those really flirty girls around campus. Tyler has a crush on April, but he thinks that she likes Earl because he’s so funny. This makes Tyler even more jealous that Earl’s getting attention from April.

So, what does Tyler do? He starts trying to be more like Earl. He cracks jokes at every chance he gets, and he spends more time with Earl to get more of a feel of what he’s like around people. Eventually, Tyler will become something of a “clone” of Earl, doing everything that he does.

But April doesn’t like the fact that Tyler started doing that, because she’s had a crush on Tyler for awhile, but not with his new personality, because even though she didn’t show it, she hasn’t taken very immensely to Earl and his assertive charisma.

So if you were able to follow that the whole time, you should know that Tyler f*cked up when he decided to be like Earl, because he could have had the girl of his dreams if he had just stayed the way he was.

Okay, whether that example made an iota of sense or not, the bottom line is this: be yourself. Odds are there are lots of people out there who would absolutely LOVE to be with a guy/girl like you.

Come on back tomorrow/day after tomorrow to check out tip #2 out of 10. I hope I’m helping some of you out with this!

To let me know if this is helping you out, you can go ahead and comment on the post below, or maybe recommend this to your friends who need it. They’ll thank you in the end. 🙂

Falling in Like

“Love is all you need.” –The Beatles

Love, shall we say, is a living, breathing thing. It’s an important aspect of an adol’s life, and even an adult’s life after adolescence. People deal with love, adol or not, every single day of the week, every week of the year, 24/7. Love can be the most amazing thing in the world, allowing someone to reach new heights that they never have before! Love is possibly the most incredible invention nature has given us.

It’s also one of the most dangerous.

Although love can be a spectacular thing, it also invented heartbreak. Too many of my friends have been on top of the world, only to come plummeting down to the ground. They get so used to being up in the clouds, where anything’s possible, that when they come back down to the ground, they feel like it isn’t enough. In that aspect, love is like a drug; you may not realize it, but you get addicted to it.

Don’t get me wrong, becoming addicted to love is completely natural. Who doesn’t enjoy knowing that someone loves them?

I like to think of the game of love as a process of elimination during adolescence; you get a better perspective as to who you want to be with for the rest of your life. It’s kind of like preparation. It’s gonna take you a LOT longer to find your soulmate if you didn’t bother to narrow down your options earlier on in life.

So, whenever you date someone and the relationship fails, don’t think of it as the end of the world. Lots of people in the world, many of them adols, allow themselves to spiral down into depression directly from the happiest moments of their lives. In the long run, it can really hurt them, which is why love is one of the most dangerous inventions of nature.

So, don’t get depressed when your adolescent love ends the relationship. Think of it as a ruled-out possibility; think about what aspect of the relationship caused it to fail, and then try to stay away from that later on.

Boom! As soon as you do that, you learn more about what you like, what you want, and you narrow your options, therefore simplifying the amount of work it takes to find your soul mate later in life.

Lots of times, relationships tend to work out all through people’s lives. I’ve seen this a lot on LGMH (yes, I visit LGMH from time to time) and it’s great to know. And sometimes that happens, and it’s incredibly lucky for who it happens to, since you can’t have a successful relationship without being able to be good friends at the same time.

However, the participants in this type of  relationship have to be aware that love is a changing force. Before deciding to be true to one another, they should be sure that they will still be friends afterwards, if there is an afterwards.

Come on back later on for a real list of tips for love and their explanations. This is just the beginning.

(Falling in like quoted from Sienna V.)

Zzz…

Let’s face it. We’re not little kids anymore. We’re 15, 16, 17. Some of you reading this might have already even left home. And with more freedom comes more responsibility, as everyone knows. But more responsibility also means more required sleep.

You may not believe it, but my doctor told me the other day that a growing adol needs about as much sleep as a newborn baby! I think it’s because we’re growing at just about the same rate as a newborn baby.

Either way, we need that sleep. But how much sleep do you get every night? Five hours? Six hours?

Therein lies the problem. We as adols don’t have a good sleep system. We go to bed late and get up early.

Wanna know something fantastic though?

I was on a website called High Existence, and I found something incredible: alternate sleep cycles.

See, every person sticks relatively to one of a few unique sleep cycles. The most common is the monophasic cycle: one long, eight-hour “nap”. The sleep cycles H.E. had to offer thrived off of shorter naps more times per day.

One sleep cycle H.E. recommended was the biphasic cycle. The biphasic cycle is also called the “siesta” cycle, siesta meaning nap in spanish. This cycle is the chosen cycle for most college students in America today. It consists of “sleeping 4-4.5 hours at night, and then taking a 90 minute nap around noon.” (Source: highexistence.com) It results in 5.5-6 hours a day. Not too different from most of our schedules, except we have all of our sleep in one go.

 

The next step up from the siesta cycle (the rest I don’t strongly recommend to any growing adol) is the everyman cycle. In this cycle, we have one long nap supplemented by a few short naps. Strictly speaking, it’s either one 3-hour nap with three 20-minute naps OR one 90 minute nap with four or five 20-minute naps. With this cycle, you have flexibility, in some form, of choosing when your naps are, and you can even miss the occasional nap. It totals 3-4 hours a day and is still far more efficient than the average monophasic cycle.

 

The next cycle up is the uberman cycle. Not to be confused with the everyman cycle, this cycle thrives off of many short, sparse naps. By definition, it’s 20 to 30 minute naps every 4 hours, which results in 6 naps a day, more or less. What’s funny is that this cycle generally leaves the user refreshed, restored, and with extremely vivid dreams. Some users have also reported to having lucid dreams, or dreams in which they could control everything that was happening because they knew they were sleeping. However, the downside is that, in general, if you miss one nap, you feel awfully groggy for awhile. It totals 2-3 hours of sleep a day.

 

Still not satisfied with these shorter sleep cycles? Then you need the big-boy cycle. Say hello to the dymaxion cycle. This incredible cycle, invented by Buckminster Fuller on the belief that “we have two energy tanks, the first is easy to replenish whereas the second tank (second wind) is much harder to replenish” (Source: highexistence.com) , consists of nothing but 30 minute naps every 6 hours. That’s no more than two hours a day of sleep! Bucky, though, thought that it was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and he only switched back to monophasic because his friends weren’t keeping up with him with their monophasic cycles.

Although for adols, these extreme cycles probably shouldn’t be used since we have school six hours a day, I would highly recommend the biphasic schedule, as it could probably save you that morning grogginess. Hell, you might even feel like having breakfast sooner or later.

Good luck!

A Special Blog Post For Pfc. Rudy A. Acosta

If you’re living in the Santa Clarita Valley, you’ve probably noticed that one of our main streets was closed off for half the day today. If you didn’t know why, then it was in memoriam of a local SCV resident who died in the army recently.

I was on my ride to school with my stepdad this morning and noticed a whole bunch of flyers all around town with a soldier’s picture on it. He looked like a handsome kid, not more than 18 or 19. We were passing by too fast to read any of the text on the flyers except for the name, so I didn’t know what made posting flyers necessary until after school.

My sister picked me up from school late today. She said it was because our main street, Soledad Cyn. Rd., was closed for some kind of funeral. The pieces came together then. I remembered the flyers and realized that he had died. His name: Rudy A. Acosta.

 

Acosta had finished basic military training on August 11, 2009, and was sent to Afghanistan in June of 2010. We never heard much from him until just recently.

It has come to our attention that on March 19, 2011, in the Kandahar Province in Afghanistan, Rudy A. Acosta was a combat medic for the U.S. Army, and died after he and another serviceman were shot with handheld guns by a military security group. He was only 19 years old.

The inconvenience on the roads this afternoon was Acosta’s funeral. There, Acosta’s parents, friends and acquaintances gathered to mourn the loss of a true war hero.

Rest in peace, Rudy Acosta. You died a heroic death, and you didn’t deserve what you got.

I’ll Read This Blog Post Later… (Tips #2-3)

Tip 2: No Reality Shows. Got it? If you watch them, do it with caution. I know how much a lot of you love your Real World, Jersey Shore, 16 & Prego, My Super-Sweet 16, America’s Next Top Model, etc. The problem is that you love them so much, you’re willing to wait through the commercials so you won’t miss a single second, in lots of cases. Therefore, not only do you waste time WATCHING the shows, but you don’t even do productive work during the pointless times!

 

I can only think of one good side to watching reality shows: people say it entertains them. I have to admit, these shows can be pretty entertaining, too. Watching drunken girls pulling each other’s hair out is somehow amusing, which is probably why it gets ratings.

But, unfortunately, this hilarious activity can play a serious part in skipping your work. Like I mapped out in the last post on procrastination, reality shows can take up four hours in an average adol’s schedule after school.

And that’s bad.

Tip 3: Make a system for yourself. My dad is ALWAYS stressing this one. He thinks it’s reeeally important. I believe him, too.

A system is a broad category; it can be a list, it can be a Word document, it can be a reminder binder, it can be alarms in your phone, it can be an app. You name it, the world’s got it.

Now, as far as homework goes, I don’t have a reminder binder (at least, not to my knowledge) to use at school, even though a reminder binder can be anything within reason. Instead, I utilize my memory and my teachers’ websites to get my homework for the day. Then, when I get home, I go to my Gmail account (which has an integrated calendar and document generator) and punch in all of the homework into a Google Doc.

Complicated, right? Not really.

However convenient it may be, you don’t have to use my idea, because, as I keep stressing, everyone’s different. Everyone has their own system that works for them for anything from running to keeping track of homework.

The bottom line is, procrastination needs to be taken care of. You have the power to take the first step.