VH1 Driven: Tyra Banks

Hey Immacers!!

Our school was in VH1's documentary Driven: Tyra Banks! Mr. Van Vliet & Ruth Anne Murray were interviewed and they talked about Tyra! Mr. Van Vliet was on tv! That is awesome!

Check the VH1.com to check when it's airing next.

Our school was mentioned as "A school for the truly gifted." in the documentary but when I read the VH1 summary about the show/her life, they mentioned how she went to high school at an "all girl's convent school." CONVENT SCHOOL!? WTF MAN!? Anyway, go Immaculate Heart!

R.I.P Doctor Kim

Today I found out about someone's death that I didn't know about and I've been having these sad and melancholy moments throughout the day. I'm still in a state of shock. I've been trying to get my mind off it, but I can't stop thinking about it. It's just a really sad situation. It really is. I'm going to try this to distract my thoughts...

Current Event: KNBC-TV

LOS ANGELES - A Vietnamese refugee is hoping to become one of the 10 million people who pass through Bradley International Terminal at LAX.

The political and religious refugee has been living in the airport for one month after losing crucial travel documents.

LAX police said the case is rare -- the man wants to reverse his refugee status and go back to home country. They noticed the man a few weeks ago. He had a ticket, but never seemed to depart.

"He stood out," said Sgt. Vince Garcia. "He was somewhat destitute with no money and did not understand the language. You want to do whatever you can to help the individual. The problem is he speaks no English and very little Vietnamese."

Airport officials said they have been unable to locate anyone who speaks the same dialect as the man.

LAX was just one stop for the man and two friends. He plans to return to his wife and five children when the travel documents are replaced, a process that might take about three months.

The man has not seen his family for four years. In a scenario similar to that in the movie "The Terminal," many airport workers and city employees have befriended the man. Some even bring his meals.

Editor's Note: The man's identity was not revealed because he might face persecution in his homeland.



It didn't work.

New Friends

I made some new friends. I even got them a present. It says on the box, crawl in to eat, crawl out to die.

rain = homeless ants

Last night I sprayed them with windex (ghetto yes, I know, but that's all I had). It made my walls bluish and the lil suckers stopped moving, but then after the windex dried they resurrected themselves. It was like magic. When I woke up this morning the "dead" ants were all gone. They either all came back to life or fell off the wall. Ew ew ew. Go back outside!

Upcoming Election

The election is in about 2 months.

I'm sure a lot of you aren't registered to vote, and I'm also sure some of you are registered to vote but aren't going to vote.

Even though I definitely don't agree with this I kind of do understand - actually, I'm just trying to understand. I think the problem is when you're so young you don't seem to want care about issues older people might want to care about. Average adults usually have other aspects of their life in check, therefore being able to familiarize them selves and care about important world issues. I'm not saying the youth shouldn't care about these issues, but when you're so young, concerned with so many things, worried about so much, it's easy to forget about the other important factors that affect you. You're clouded by adolescence, dazed by glitterati; you find it hard to care.

But the point is it's going to be important to care at one time or another; why not just start now? Some of you might not feel like politicians aren't paying attention to you. But with fewer than only one in five teens voting would you be confident in today's youth?? Would you really want to address issues if you knew about less than half of teens would care??

It'd be much better if parents took a played a bigger part in informing their children about voting. When parents talk about politics with their kids, when they participate themselves, when they take their kids to vote with them, that all this leads to a higher level of interest in politics among the children. However, even a lot of adults don't vote. This is where I definitely don't have any sympathy. This is where I ask, "Why do you live here? . Some people might respond (this would really piss me off) "I pay taxes. That's enough." If you think paying taxes is enough, then move your ass to Canada where you'll reap great benefits for double the tax amount. You don't deserve to live here. You're screwing voter turnout because your children are probably thinking voting isn't that important either! *angry face*

On the brighter side, they even have the WWE trying to get people to vote through "Smackdown Your Vote! Even wrestlers are trying to get people involved! Woohoo!

One problem though: Voting during normal business hours. Hello? People are working??
This doesn't make it any easier for people to vote. It freaking sucks.

Nostalgia

I miss figure skating. I really do. I remember when I tried landing my first axel and I got a bruise that never completely went away; now there's a discolored patch on my knee and it hurts when I put pressure on it. Those are the memories though you know? What sucks though is that I realized I don't have one single complete video of me doing a program. Everytime I had a competition or something, there would either be no camera guy or one that'll charge like 150 bucks for the stupid video. All the pictures my coach's husband took came out like crap, and the other ones were taken by professionals who happened to be at certain competitions, but a lot of those came out blurry even with their "professional" cameras and their rates were ridiculous sometimes. *Sigh

Hmm. What else do I miss? I miss freezing Capri Suns, cutting off the top, and eating the inside with a spoon. I miss when my mom actually used to cook for me. I miss making barbie clothes out of tissue. I miss putting scotch tape on my skin and tearing it off and examining the skin particles. Oh, wait, nevermind, I still do that. I miss liking art, until I took a particular ceramics class that made me hate it. I miss drawing lands where my little stick figures would have little huts and paved roads and there'd always been a chicken or winged creature of some sort roasting on a stick outside their hut. But then there wouldn't always be something roasting, because at the tender age of 8 I knew that in REAL life food disappears, so at one time or another I would erase the food and draw it in again, if I had already erased the vegetables that were growing in their backyard. Sometimes their huts would burn down too, when karma would come and bite my stick people in the ass because they weren't nice to their neighbors and wouldn't share their water well, where in that case I would draw flames on their straw hut and the stick people would be no more..... EA should hire me. I would create kick ass expansion packs for the SIMS 2. =)

Christopher Reeve

Current Event: This is sad. Christopher Reeve died on Sunday. Well the good news he's not suffering anymore. Living on tubes and getting infections from bedsores isn't any way to live. How admirable and courageous is he to have put up with all of that?

He was a big advocate for stem cell research and was even mentioned by Kerry during the Presidential debate. I support stem cell research all the way. I however, am pro-choice. I don't see a zygote as marking the advent of a human life. I don't think there's anything wrong with using embryos as a result of miscarriage, in vitro or abortion. Embryos from in vitro clinics would otherwise be discarded and could be used instead to benefit people suffering from disease and injury. Of course, there a lot of moral and ethical issues associated with stem cell research, but medicine is a practice, and without practice we would have never been able to get to the medical advances we have today. Since we've come this far, stem cell research should be considered the next step in medical history. Even with the risks, there can be no progress without them.

.....So while we as a society continue to grapple with the moral and ethical concerns, and scientists try to work out matter of safety and efficacy, many people who might be helped by stem cell therapy have to wait. Unfortunately, for many suffering Americans their window of opportunity to stabilize and even reverse or cure their medical challenges will pass them by like Christopher Reeve. It would be best to start as soon as possible.

Anyway, I'm writing a paper on this in my ethics class, so I'm sort of brainstorming. Oh yeah, this topic is another reason I hate Bush. -_-

Criticism

When we judge or criticize another person, it says nothing about that person; it merely says something about our own need to be critical.

If you attend a gathering and listen to all the criticism that is typically levied against others, and then go home and consider how much good all that criticism actually does to make our world a better place, you'll probably come up with the same answer that I do: Zero! It does no good. But that's not all. Being critical not only solves nothing; it contributes to the anger and distrust in the world. After all, none of us likes to be criticized. Our reaction to criticism is usually to become defensive and/or withdrawn. A person who feels attacked is likely to do one of the two things: he will either retreat in fear or shame, or he will attack or lash out in anger. How many times have you criticized someone and had them respond by saying, "Thank you so much for pointing out my flaws. I really appreciate it"?

Criticism, like swearing, is actually nothing more than a bad habit. It's something we get used to doing; we're familiar with how it feels. It keeps us busy and gives us something to talk about.If, however, you take a moment to observe how you actually feel immediately after you criticize someone, you'll notice that you will feel a little deflated and ashamed, almost like you're the one who has been attacked. The reason this is true is that when we criticize, it's a statement to the world and to ourselves, "I have a need to be critical." This isn't something we are usually proud to admit.

The solution is to catch yourself in the act of being critical. Notice how often you do it and how bad it makes you feel or makes others feel. Maybe we should just turn it into a game. We'll still catch ourselves being critical, but as our need to criticize arises, you try to remember to say to yourself, "There I go again." Hopefully, more often than not, you can turn your criticism into tolerance and respect.

Resist the urge to criticize, and the world will be a happier place. =)

I started those new chewable Viactiv calcium supplements. They are awesome! Tastes like chocolate and it's not nasty with an aftertaste. 2 a day and I'll get 1000mg of calcium, the amount every one of you girls should be getting! I do not want osteoporosis when I'm older and I don't want to crumble to the ground thank you very much.

I was at the dentist yesterday in Santa Clara & I was supposed to meet a friend of mine named Flora but turns out one of her friends was going to go kill her boyfriend, literally, so she had to attend to that. Oh yeah and on the way back from the dentist I was thinking of visiting my friend Erin at Stanford but I couldn't find her phone number. Missed out on two friends in one day. =/

Last night Joyce invited me to go to City Nights, but me not being the clubber type and not wanting to spend 20 bucks to get into a stupid club that's probably going to be too crowded and loud anyway, I decided to stay here and study. What a nerd.Okay I'm starving. I'm going to eat my organic noodles now. =)

Why Do We Hate Bush?

I watched the second presidential debate today and it made me wonder about a certain topic.

Any democrat will give you the same answer when asked any question regarding our President Bush, "he's stupid." I mean, you might get Nazi, Hitler, murderer, religious freak, or even daddy's boy. No matter what the conversation is about, it almost always ends up with, "he's stupid."

Pres. Bush has as much of an education than a lot of our other Presidents in the past, if not more. I grant you he wasn't a Rhode Scholar that spent a good part of the Vietnam War protesting the USA at home and overseas, nor did he have the battlefield experience of a former Vice President who photographed real soldiers hundreds of miles from actual combat. All President Bush did was graduate from Harvard with a MBA, fly fighter jets in the Texas Air National Guard and work in the real world of business. Talk about under achieving!!

Other things you hear about Bush is that he's a rich frat boy and/or he's a hillbilly from Texas -that accent of his doesn't really help with the idea that he may not be. So which is it? When discussing the economy he's a wealthy kid with no understanding of how hard Americans work for their money. On the other hand, if the talk's about international matters, he's a "cowboy" a.k.a hillbilly with no ability or understanding of how to make friends with those who hate us, you know, "building an international coalition." It's really time to come to a consensus on exactly why we hate Bush.

Well, since he was elected, or selected depending on the level of hate, this guy has managed to give us Americans a tax cut. Whoop-di-friggin-doo. "Like wow! I got like 30 bucks back! That's 5 more dollars than last year! Our country MUST be changing! Gotta love that Bush!" Yeah, right. He also passed an education bill and somehow has reformed Medicare. In the midst of all this he has successfully executed two wars and captured or killed more than half of the top terrorist leaders while capturing one of the world's most brutal dictators. Oh yeah, and through the actions of this war on terror he's persuaded another rogue dictator with WMD to give up his brutal dictatorship without a shot being fired, all this from a monkey looking guy who takes the "little blue bus" to and from the Oval Office everyday.

When Bush does something wrong he never takes the blame. Those damn excuses: "The CIA made a mistake", "The intelligence was in error", "We got wrong information", "It was the State Dept's fault.", etc. Now when we talk about Saddam Hussein, we never hear, the "Baath parliament made a mistake", The Prime Minister gave out the wrong information", or "It was the fault of a few". Jesus!Saddam Hussein is blamed for everything! Bush doesn't want to accept blame for anything that happens in his administration, which to him means he does nothing wrong. So I guess he's not human because he's THAT perfect. He's good at beating around the bush - no pun intended.

Facts are facts you guys, and this guy, who was designated as the leader of our country 4 years ago, has no friggin idea what's he's doing in that West Wing. I mean, look at the way he talks on TV. I swear that man has dyslexia or something. He always seems to lose battles with the English language every time a word comes out of his mouth, or doesn't, which is always funny, haha. I know what you're thinking, tons of people killed, Halliburton, WMD, war for oil, these are the logical reasons to hate Bush, but I ask you, do you even know what Halliburton does? I know the news, media, and the liberal elements in colleges are convinced we should hate Bush. The problem is, we're still trying to figure out why.

A few other facts...
All of Bush's businesses failed.
He got into YALE with a C average grade because of his father.
He was suspended from the Texas Air National Guard because of refusing to comply with a physical (drugs).
He didnt capture 1/2 of the world's top terrorists. =/ He let Osama get away by leaving his capture to Afghan warlord when US troops had him cornered.

Some of you may run with this but I really don't care. Contrary view more than welcome.

Happy voting!