Netflix

I don’t remember the last time that I watched actual TV. Whenever I have time to watch something, I always watch Netflix. I think this is the same for probably 80% of teenage kids. Netflix has become so popular of teenagers in high school and college.

Netflix is about $8.00 a month, so it is very affordable. There is a huge variety of shows and movies you can watch. Ever few months or so, Netflix puts out different shows/movies, for more options. Whether you want to watch a comedy show, a reality show, horror, mystery, or an action show, I promise there is something for you to watch.

Netflix is great because once you find a show you really like, you can watch as many episodes as you want at one time. You don’t have to wait a whole week for the next episode to come out, you can sit down and “binge-watch” any show you want. Parents probably don’t love this idea of staying in bed all day and watching TV, but kids love it. There are so many great shows to watch and if you aren’t sure where to start, ask around! So many people can give you options of shows they liked and can suggest shows that they think you might like as well.

There are many shows that are a common interest amongst kids our age. One Tree Hill is a widely popular show between boys and girls. There are 9 seasons of the show and they get better as they go. You get to experience the lives of two teenage basketball playing brothers and their friends go through high school and even their lives after high school. I think One Tree Hill is so popular amongst teenagers, because it is very relatable with the characters being around our age.

For girls, 90210 and Gossip Girl are very popular! These are both sort of drama shows, again with teenagers going through high school and their friends. As you watch these shows, you get to know the characters are you feel like you are a part of their lives for the 7-9 seasons of the show.

For guys, Supernatural and Prison Break are fairly popular. I have watched both of these shows and they are both very good! I got really into both of the shows and I would sit down for hours and watch episode after episode.

The four shows that I talked about are my four favorite ones that I have watched, I’ve even watched them all more than once. If you haven’t seen any or some of these shows, I highly recommended you look them up and give them a try!

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"Behind the Scenes"

I know this is going to sound cliché, but treat people how you want to be treated.

A lot of the time we don’t realize the effects that our words have on other people. We say things we don’t mean to be taken personally or we say we’re joking, but sometimes those people really do that our words to heart. Sometimes we say things and it hurts someone, but we don’t realize it because we wouldn’t have taken it personally so we didn’t rethink it before we said it.

The people who often take things to heart are the ones with things going on “behind the scenes”. Think about the things in your life, you probably have something going on that no one knows about and there are probably things you don’t really want other people to know. These things may be sad or depressing things, or they might not be that dramatic. Some people however have more dramatic things going on in their personal life, whether they are fighting depression or don’t have the greatest living situations. These are things that most people don’t just share with anyone, they usually don’t like to talk about these things and avoid the topic as much as possible. It’s none of your business to ask people about this stuff, especially if you heard a rumor about it or you over heard something. Don’t be rude, you don’t need to ask them about it, if they wanted to talk to you about it, they would, but don’t force them to talk about it. If someone trusts you enough to tell you about their personal things, listen to them, sometimes that’s all they need. There is no need to go around and spread around their personal things they just told you, obviously they trusted you when they told you.

I’ve had some people talk to me about some similar stuff to this. I listened to them and let them talk for as long as they needed. I didn’t really know what to say or respond, but I said somethings that I thought would help me if I were going through the same thing. I never thought some of these people would have these kinds of things going on in their personal life. They act completely normal most of the time and if they’re acting a little different one day I just assume they’re not having a good day or something. You would never guess these things from people, but I feel like there is more going on in a lot of people’s lives than they let on.

My point is: be kind to EVERYONE. You never know who is going through what.

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New Year's Resolutions

It’s getting to the end of the year and it’s time for everyone to make a new year’s resolution. Every year we tell ourselves we are going to be better, we’re going to eat better, and be better people, we tell ourselves “New Year, New me”. These resolutions usually last a while, but we’re so used to our old ways, we just go back to them. Every year we tell ourselves we are going to work out more, so January 1^st and 2^nd, the gyms are packed, and slowly as the month goes on, there as less and less people going to them gym. Come February, the gyms are back to their usual amount of members. I know it’s hard to work out all of the time, my resolution was to work out more too, but that didn’t really go as I had planned.

New Year’s resolutions are very hard to follow. I feel like people, myself included, give ourselves these hopes that we will change and be better people and be healthier and happier, but it’s more complicated than that. Unless you make a plan of how you are going to execute your resolution and stick to it, then you most likely won’t see the change you wanted in yourself. Props to those people who can stick with their New Year’s resolutions because a lot of people can’t. Most people will give up because it’s “too hard” or it takes too much time, but if you really wanted to change something about yourself, you could. You are the only one that can change you, whether that means changing your body or your attitude, only you can do that. Excuses are the biggest reason for not making something happen. We use excuses to make it seem ok that we didn’t do something we wanted to do. It takes dedication to change and you have to really want it otherwise you will just give up.

My New Year’s resolution for 2016 is going to be no more excuses. I always find myself making excuses for myself and it’s not ok. You have to really want to do something/change something and be strong enough to carry out that action and not do it half way and give yourself the excuse that you tried, but that’s not good enough. For example, if your resolution was to lose weight and you’re at the gym and you only do half the workout, that’s not going to help you, just do the whole workout now, yes it sucks but you will be so much happier in with your results in the end if you just do everything now. Don’t give yourself the excuse of “at least I did half of it, instead of not doing it at all”, yes that’s true at least you did something rather than nothing, but just do it all right now. Your result will come faster if you do everything.

Reading

Reading is by far my weakest quality. I am not a very fast reader, because I have to read every word in order to understand what I am reading. I am the type of reader that has to go back and reread part of the passage or story if they do not understand what they are reading. I am also the type of person that will be reading and will start thinking about something else but continues to read and then realizes that they weren’t actually reading they were think about something completely different. At that point I try and figure out what I last read and then have to continue from there.

I do not like reading because I am not very good at it. I usually understand what I am reading but I still don’t like to read. My mom always tells me that it just takes practice and that in order to get better I need to read more. I don’t really mind reading books that I chose myself because I get the freedom to pick which ever book I choose. If I like a good and can get really into it, I’ll read for hours!

However when it is a book I have to read for school, they are usually not very good, in my opinion, so I have a harder time reading them. It’s the fact that I have to read that makes me not want to read the book. In middle school we had to read but we go to pick our books and we just had to record the pages that we read each day, I liked that because we had the freedom to pick whatever book we wanted. In AP Lang we get to choose our books, but they are from a specific list of AP approved books, those books do not exactly interest me so I have a very hard time finding one that I want to actually read and it usually takes me longer to read that book. I am a very busy high school student with two sports and a job on top of that. I have to go to practices, work, and still have time to work. I have a hard time finding time to read in general, but when it comes to books I don’t particularly enjoy, I usually put them off longer than I should.

Can anyone else relate to this??? I know I'm not the only one who doesn't like to read!

Christmas

Christmas is the happiest time of the year, everyone gets excited about getting together and celebrating the holidays. Children love Christmas because they get tons of presents every year, mom and dad put a bunch of presents under the tree and Santa bring even more presents on Christmas Eve when everyone is asleep. Seeing children at the mall sitting on Santa’s lap is the most heart-warming thing. I remember when I was young and thought Santa was real and he actually brought me presents, I even wrote him a letter and he signed it for me, granted he had the same handwriting as my mom, but I didn’t think anything of it. It was awesome waking up on Christmas morning and going out to see all the presents that Santa brought. Still to this day, I can never sleep on Christmas Eve. I get so excited to open all my presents and see what I got. I always wake up way earlier than normal that day just because I’m so excited and hardly slept that night.

As we get older we seem to have less and less presents on Christmas morning, but the presents actually get better, they’re more expensive so there are less of them. A lot of the time, year round kids want every cool new thing that comes out and we want them right at that time, but when Christmas comes around, we can’t think of anything that we want. Growing up we realize that we don’t need as many presents as we did when we were younger, but we realize that we want to buy a gift and give it to someone else. I’d rather see someone’s reaction of me giving them a gift and seeing how happy they are, rather than receiving a gift myself. Yes, getting gifts is always great and we should really appreciate them, but the gift of giving is better. Being a teenager myself, I wanted to get so many of my friends presents for Christmas because I love every one of them and I want them to know that, but I don’t have enough money to buy everyone something, but we understand that others our age don’t have that kind of money either, so we all just get together and have our own little Christmas party and have a $10 gift exchange so everyone ends up with a new gift.

I love the holidays because everyone is so cheerful and in a giving mood, it makes things so much easier if everyone around you is happy.

Christmas Kick

The varsity dance team at Kennedy High school preforms at football and basketball game, we compete at four competitions a year, and we also perform at our school pep assemblies. A popular tradition we do occurs every December at a basketball game, our Christmas kick!

The dance team learns this routine the week after we compete at our state competition. Our Coach, Mrs. Arends, choreographs this dance will some help from a few girls who were in a kick routine at camp. We choose a different Christmas song every year, but we wear the same “Santa” costumes. For those of you who don’t know what a kick routine is, it’s basically a dance where the girls are in a line with their hands on each other’s shoulders and everyone kicks the same leg in the air at the same time. There are low, medium, and high kicks, they vary throughout the dance.

The kick routine is very popular because there is a prize involved. The infamous competition is to guess how many kicks are in our routine! The person who guesses correctly wins a prize of $50. It is $1 for one guess or $5 for ten guesses. We dancers do not actually know the correct amount of kicks for the whole routine, believe it or not. Everyone always says just count the kicks and tell me and ill split the $50 with you, but it would take so much time to figure it out. Coach is the only one who knows how many kicks there are and she doesn’t count them until the day before or the day of our performance.

We sell the tickets to guess the amount of kicks at lunch during the school day and before the game before we perform. The money we raise goes to the dance team (except the $50the winner receives). The dance team is self-funded and we really appreciate everyone who participates in our Christmas Kick.

The best part is during our performance when they student section starts counting all of our kicks thinking they can count every kick. They usually get to 15 or 20 kicks and then we start to break off into groups and have girls kicking at different times and it throws of the students that are trying to count. It’s funny to listen to everyone counting while you are kicking and then you start to hear them get messed up and eventually stop trying to count.

Realtionships: Then & Now

Now a days, we wonder how people communicated before there were smart phones and texting. Think about current relationships today and now think about what they would have been like 50 years ago. I would love to have lived back then, things seemed so much more peaceful without all this social media. Everyone seems to know everything and everyone as soon as it happens these days, that’s how advanced we are. If you think about it, it’s kind of sad that we don’t really have a personal life, everything is posted on twitter or Instagram.

Relationships seemed so simple and genuine in the 50’s. Before cell phones you could just call up your girlfriends and ask what she was doing, you would have to walk to her house and actually go talk to her. Not having phones would really improve peoples’ social skills because they had no other option.

Everyone dressed up and always looked nice back then. They didn’t necessarily wear the most fancy clothes all of the time but they looked classy. There were no such things as crop tops back then and “sagging your pants” was a thing either. Men asked women on dates and took them out to dinner as well. He would pick you up at your house, perhaps with a flower, he would visit with your parents, the walk you to the car and open the door for you. Men usually paid for the dinner too.

I feel as though relationships lasted longer in the 50’s than they do now. Today boys will just “slide” into a girls DM instead of talking to her in person and asking her out on a date. Couples today will fight about each other “liking” a certain some’s picture on Instagram or “favoriting” someone’s tweet. Couples will even break up over that kind of stuff. Back then, those things weren’t even around so they didn’t have little things like that to fight about. Yes I’m sure they still had things to fight about in the 50’s, but not something as dumb as liking a picture! Another thing that goes along with this is that you didn’t always know where each other was. You had to true trust the person you’re with, believe it or not.

There are so many things that have changed just in the last 50 years that it’s kind of scary to see what will come in the next 50.