I hate graduation.

rephrase that.

I hate the big deal everyone makes of graduation.

it's a mediocre accomplishment that thousands of kids all over the US do every year. I can't take pride in that. When I get out of boot camp, and eventually BUD/S, then I'll be a proud graduate. Until then, I don't care, it's not special.  I hate making announcements, I hate the ceremony, I hate the senior sob, i hate the senior trip, and I hate most of the seniors.


leave me alone about graduation, and I'll leave you alone when you're trying to sleep.

Today I wrote a paper for English.  A paper on how much the educational system sucks and how useless it is.  Here it is, in all of its glory.

oh, and I tread the line for a while, but eventually break the rules about halfway through in honor of the paper itself.


enjoi.

Hollow Congressional Applause:

The Truth About the Education System

            "Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a    conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die."

 

           

            Above is a quote from New York State's Teacher of the Year, 1991, Mr. John Taylor Gatto.  After thirty years as a school teacher, Gatto wrote several essays and speeches, one of which was his acceptance of the aforementioned award, which railed against the system he had been working in, and seeing from the inside out.  He knew that today's schools don't educate with knowledge, but rather, they systemize children and mold their impressionable, capable, curious minds into nothing more than order-following robots with one sole purpose: to work.

            Although Gatto sounds like a crazed leftist with a tin foil hat, he is probably one of the best spokesman for his cause.  He has the experience, plenty of time to have thought it out, and he has seen the inner machine of what the world calls education.  Gatto breaks down the system in one of his books, Dumbing Us Down, as he outlines the seven universal lessons taught by public school systems:

 

1.      Confusion.  Teachers teach too many facts and not enough connections.  They don't show enough of the larger picture or how things work together.  It's like handing car parts but no instruction manual to a kindergartener and telling him it should work.

2.      Class Position.  Children are grouped into classes based on "intelligence" – special needs, average, and gifted – and that's usually where they stay.

3.      Indifference.  Teachers demand that students get highly involved in a lesson for around ninety minutes, and when the bell rings, forget about it and go to the next class.  The poet in the middle of his sonnet packs up and goes to learn about a frog's anatomy.  "Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care about anything too deeply?"

4.      Emotional Dependency.  Teachers and higher authorities decide everyting for students, from what they are allowed to say to who may use the rest room.

5.      Intellectual Dependency.  Teachers decide what will be taught and when and how it will be taught.  "It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for another people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meaning of our lives."

6.      Provisional Self Esteem.  Students are constantly being judged and evaluated.  Their feelings of self-worth depend on how an outsider rates them.

7.      You Can't Hide.  Students have no private time or private space.  They are encouraged to snitch on each other, even their lockers are subject to random search and seizures.  "I teach students that they are always being watched, that each of them is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues."

(as summarized in Psychotropedia)

 

So, in short, students get the idea that they need to be on time, prepared for the day's work, and silently obedient beat into their heads from the time they turn five until the time they graduate, most often at seventeen or eighteen.  Why would any society willingly do this to their future?  Their children?  The people who will one day take care of the world?  It's very simple.  It all started in Prussia in 1819.

            The structure of 20^th century American schooling began in 1806, when Napoleon's amateur soldiers with little or no combat experience beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena.  Almost immediately after the embarrassing slaughter, a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous "Address to the German Nation," which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect, he told the Prussian people that their way of life was over, and the nation as a whole would have to undergo a new Utopian institution of forced schooling, in which everyone would learn to take orders.  From there, the world was mandated to compulsory schooling at the end of a government bayonet for the first time in human history.  This "modern" forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:
            1.Obedient soldiers to the army.  "Keep us free."
            2.Obedient workers to the mines.  "Keep us warm."
            3.Well subordinated civil servants to government.  "Keep us safe."
            4.Well-subordinated clerks to industry.  "Keep us producing goods."
            5.Citizens who thought alike about major issues.  "Keep us informed."

Overall, it sounds like a good idea, for some.  The ruling class, who can think for themselves, has little to worry about.  They'll have workers and politicians to keep the pockets of the rich full and the people happy, respectively.  The masses don't know what's going on, and no one will tell them.  Why spoil the Santa Claus/Easter Bunny-type surprise?

            Since the days of the "education revolution," the original upper class has died and all that's left is the worker class, who taught their children in the same way they were taught.  History repeats itself, and a sick-cycle carousel spins around and around while nothing gets fixed and no one learns who they really are.  Which means that today, millions of students are sitting in classrooms in desks assigned to them, with teachers assigned to them, and classmates in the same rotten predicament.  On time, prepared, seated, asking permission before doing anything and quick to finish the task given.  Attendance in mandatory, and if a student doesn't spend an allotted amount of time in his accursed desk, he'll never learn a thing.  Whether the student was in class but not in the assigned seat, or sleeping at home, an absence is recorded.  An amount of time in the seat is required, whether the student learns the subject in ten minutes or ten hours, and they will all spend at least an hour and a half in each class.  If a student misses class too many times, he is assigned mandatory "seat time make up sessions," during which students sit in a room in complete silence until the minutes they've missed have been taken away and given to a system they don't want to be in anyway.  They aren't even required to do anything while they're there.

            What does that teach the youth?  To either take as much time to do as little as possible, or to do the minimum asked, on time and no more or less.  Often, teachers will assign a paper length of maybe seven to nine pages, but if a student writes a twenty-page paper, the teacher doesn't read the whole thing.  Sometimes, they don't even read the full thing when the assignment was a smaller paper, perhaps as little as five pages.  But that's not the point.  Students will do as little as possible until they can do nothing at all.  Enter, the weekend.

            The designers of school were clever.  They laid the foundations that said five days a week would be mandatory, one day for the Sabbath (don't want to upset those religious types), and one day off.  Luckily, the day off was easy to pick.  Jewish Sabbath is Saturday, whereas Christianity's Sabbath is on Sunday.  Two days, back to back, in a seven-day week.  Both factions feel their religious rights haven't been infringed and they get a day off to relax and get away from the enclosed walls and cameras that pervade schoolhouses across the world.  However, this alleged day off and the evenings that accompany it are little more than clever ruses.

            School seeps into the home life, and takes the reigns of the horse-drawn buggy that is a child's personal life.  Homework was designed to extend the surveillance farther into the lives of the youth, to take time away from discovering themselves or finding something new.  Time spent on homework slashes the hours someone could be learning from an older member of the community, or perhaps the hours spent at a job apprenticing for one of these older and wiser craftsmen, even just an elderly person.  Kids spend hours by themselves reading and filling out worksheets designed to keep them from experiencing their own lives.  Without a fully active role in community life one cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that, and science and arithmetic have accredited him to knowing what he was talking about most of the time.  It's no wonder most students don't do the homework.  Some don't even need it.  They coast along, barely listening in class, and then pass tests.  How does such an oddity occur, when the other 95% can barely pass a test after all the homework and reviews and notes taken ever so tediously?  Ambition and thought.

            Not all students are the same, and that's can be attributed to schooling, but for the sake of argument, it's because everyone perceives differently.  Some students will take detailed notes on lined paper in different colors of pen and highlighter for easy referencing.  Some students will scribble bits and pieces of phrases on a blank sheet of paper entirely in black ink.  Other students take no notes at all.  Oddly enough, tests prove, all that writing makes little difference.  Students who have taken no notes at all and rarely show up to class on time (if at all) can get the same or better scores on tests as those that scribbled furiously for ninety minutes a day, every other day, for eighteen weeks.  Part of this lies in the fact that some students care about a real education so they research on their own or think logically.  Some may lie in the fact that "mandatory attendance" is another way of saying "learn to go to work every day."  But mostly, it shows that if people would learn to teach themselves, school would be unnecessary.

            Many believe that it only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on.  "School" is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. "School" is an artificial structure which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic, the world had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. People turned their backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly stated in The Republic when he laid down the plans for total state-controlled society of human life.  John Taylor Gatto sent a short essay to The Wall Street Journal titled "I Quit, I Think."  In it, he describes his reasons for retirement from teaching, citing:
                        Socrates foresaw that if teaching became a formal profession, something    like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be "re-formed." It has political allies to guard its marches, and that's why        reforms come and go without changing much. Even reformers can't imagine           school much different.

            

            The next section of this paper is the one that will get the author's points deducted.  Why?  He slips into first person, disregards the fascist formatting fallacies, and gets more personal in his subjective opinion on his thirteen years in a social farm covered in weeds and pesticides.  Sheldon Stetz takes the spirited philosophy of his paper and applies it to a real-life situation to prove a point.

 

            I took Psychology my junior year, second semester.  I probably only went to class maybe eight times the entire semester, but I learned far more than the kids who showed up every day, and in far better detail.  We learned the babinski reflex, but not why or how.  I'm not saying we didn't have a good teacher, but the educational system needs serious revamping if anyone ever wants it to mean anything.

            Here I am now, almost done with my senior year after a minimum thirteen years of public education, and I've desperately wanted out for the last five.  Here's why:

            Pre-Calculus, junior year.  I didn't do any homework.  Any.  Ever.  Then I took the final exam and scored a 98%.  Plainly stated, understanding doesn't always come with practice.  Homework and notes are great ways for some to learn, but what of those of us who don't need either to grasp a concept?  What do we few do?  We fail.  We learn the same material, often better, according to test scores, but as far as the grading scale is concerned, we fail.  As it looks on paper, we didn't learn anything.  Nothing sank in.  Yet somehow our tests are higher-scoring, our conversations richer and more intelligent, and our applications of what we learned perform better, more efficiently.  Is that really fair?  To hand out a free boost to those who need it and a hindrance to those that don't?  Grading these things called notes is the worst idea I've ever heard of, and most of it is purely political, so that if a child fails, the teacher can pull out paper in the student's own hand saying "look, we went over it, it's his fault now."

            As little as my opinion counts (I can't even vote quite yet), I'd say throw out the grading system.  Grade tests.  Homework is completely optional, but if you don't pass the class, you will take it until you do.  Classes such as "study skills" and "power math" shouldn't even exist, and if the school is going to offer a class, it had better make sense.  Pre-Algebra as a freshman or higher?  That's pure, unadulterated laziness and a product of American society today.  I took Pre-Algebra in seventh grade and got an A, but you're telling me a sophomore can't pass it?  Ridiculous.  Throw him out.  If he's not going to learn, why is he there, taking the seat of someone that may want to learn, wasting the time of the teacher paid to instruct?  "But it's a math credit."

            Credits are required to graduate.  Most of the time, one passing semester of a class means one credit for that class.  In most cases, passing is a D.  If I pass Algebra 2, but need one math credit, I can take pre-algebra and get a credit with my eyes closed, and then graduate with people who took AP Calculus.  Is that right?  Apparently it's acceptable.  I know people who have done it.

           

            One day in English, we sat in a big circle and told ghost stories, most of which turned into jokes and made no difference.  Then we read a ghost story as a class aloud.  What did I do the whole time?  I wrote this paper.  Would I be okay on the test if there was one?  You bet, thanks to another glorious feature of the star-studded "educational system:" the review.

            I can waste as much time as I want, because I know that as soon as the story's over, we'll all talk about it and basically re-tell the story.  Enough to pass the test anyway, because that's all we need to be able to do to get out of it.  Forget deeper thinking, analysis, and finding deeper meaning.  Rape your education time by working the situation so you didn't actually have to do anything.  No thoughts went through your head.  Thousands of kids have figured it out, and thousands of kids have graduated because of passing multiple choice tests.

            That's all they ask, really.  In math I can understand multiple choice.  You work a problem, get an answer, and there it is.  You know you got it right.  If not, you can go back and see what went wrong.  It makes sense.  But English? Government?  History?  Shouldn't students be knowing the answer, instead of recognizing when they see it on paper, or worse, the ISAT?

            The ISAT is a big fat standardized test designed to tell authorities if students are at a level they should be at regarding their age and rank.  If you look closely, you'll find that when kids aren't passing, the overlords lower the standards until enough kids are.  Funding goes around, money is spent, and kids get stupider. No one complains because their little factory workers were still there on time, prepared, and silently obeying.  Thank you, No Child Left Behind, for teaching us all we need to know.  Oh, in the right format as well.

           

            Writing papers is easy.  It's just like thinking but one writes it down before one moves on to the next thought.  As long as a student can think, the paper turns out well.  The idea of writing a paper is to teach the student something and have that student prove that he knows what he's talking about.  He researches a topic, writes a paper, and turns it in.  But, in order to "teach us responsibility," teachers drag out due dates and invents parts that are "required to write a paper."  Note cards, rough drafts, working bibliographies, special formatting…all just ingenious ways to baby-sit kids who can't be responsible enough to remember that their success hangs in the balance of a single day.

            Formatting was invented by an elite group of button-down, Oxford cloth Ph.Ds  so they'd get paid and teachers would be fooled into thinking it was all necessary.  I can understand margin sizes and font sizes, but even the font has to be exact, the spacing doubled, and the title page perfect.  Some kids try to get out of note cards and rough drafts by writing a single paper and turning it in very early, to prove that the inventions of teachers are unnecessary and a complete waste of time, effort, and supplies.  This paper was written in a single draft.  Even though it's easily possible, the simple idea that a pupil can write a paper without note cards and a rough draft seems impossible because teachers have little faith in their students.  With today's students, it's understandable.  They're not too bright and not too motivated, but why punish those who are obviously different?  They complete the requirements for the paper itself, sometimes more than required, but still receive serious cuts for not having note cards, working bibliography, note cards, and first-person references.

 

            Is any of that fair?  Hardly, but that's the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints.

            The world doesn't need state-certified teachers to make education happen - that probably guarantees it won't.

Up yours
Stop your whine
Feelin' swell
And I'm doin' fine

Yeah, fuck your suicide
It's all bullshit cuz I tried
And it really don't
impress me all that much

Up yours
What'd you find
Sit right down
I got time

And you say here comes the end
And you haven't got a friend
And I'm standing here
just screaming at the
wall

Up yours
Stop your whine
Whatcha ya got
I got mine

And you shake your stupid head
And you wish that you were dead
And I swear sometimes
you're happier than me

And you know it's hard to be
All the things you want me to be
And you go and make it hard on me
But I swear that
anything you could
be, I could be, can't
you see

Up yours
Got no mind
That's too bad
You got time

Yeah, fuck your silly game
Cuz it's driving me insane
And it really doesn't
matter much to me

I have this friend.
who's not terribly bright all the time, but tries ever so hard to be.
and she likes this guy, who I've known a long time.
who I've seen change a lot, and not really for the better.



I almost hope someone gets hurt 


.......is that sadistic at all?

with Tim O'Connor, professional skateboarder.



Top 5 things people would be surprised to learn about you
1. I've donated serious amounts of loot to charities.
2. I read a lot about science and different religions. The more info I have on religions makes me more and more of an atheist.

or warm, soft truth.
either way, truth.


"You are the best man I know, Sheldon Louis Stetz.  Any woman would be blessed by God himself to have you.  You are selfless, fearless, and have a heart of gold.  Granted, you like people to think you're hard as a rock.  You truly are one of a kind and whoever she ends up being...god she had better be special."


thanks....I try, I really do.  Sometimes I still wonder if I've made any difference in this world.  I guess I just have to keep going until I can see it physically happen in front of me.

most of you have no idea what this is about, and I probably won't tell you (because it doesn't matter why I'm such a great guy).
I just...
give until way past hurt.
As long as she's happy, everything's fine.  A few months of the only girl I'll ever meet like her is nothing compared to a lifetime of her happiness, and who am I to mess with that?  I have no right.  Despite what she said, I don't think I'm quite worth that.

she still loves me, that's what's important 
whether I can be with her or not, that's all that matters.  I didn't fuck it up entirely.

you came looking for a blog.
I disappointed you.



how's it feel?

I can't remember how long it's been since I had a blog that actually followed my thoughts and went into some semblance of detail.
I also can't remember how long it's been since I promised I'd list what I wanted in a girl.
the idea still seems pretty retarded, but know what?  I don't care.  It's about time I figured it out, so here goes.

Emily said I'm just picky enough.  I want the best girl, but I'm not going to pass up several good options in the pursuit.  I suppose she's right, but I also heard that I can be disinterested and argumentative.  Also that I can fool around without blinking an eye, but when it came to an actual girlfriend I close everyone out.  I'm not sure about the last one.  The last two times I've just wanted to be the only someone for her and we went on dates and we sure fooled around but she wasn't in the relationship boat.  I can't seem to figure it out, but here's a decent description of what I'd want.  Tell your friends

• I guess she's blond.  I've kinda always had a thing for blonds.  I do enjoi a brunette here and there, but we'll go blond for now.
• She's gotta be the cutest thing I've ever seen, but at the same time turn me on like no one else.
• I want her to piss me off and make me wonder why I'm with her, and then she does something to completely redeem herself and I say "oh yeah, that's why."
• She's gotta drive me to do better, be better, and go somewhere.  Not that I need help with that, but it'd be nice to have a cheering section for when I get frustrated.
• She's smart, witty, clever, and leaves me speechless.  I want her to be able to kiss and make conversation.  Normally I get one or the other, but dammit I want both.  I can get one or the other most of the time, and I think I explained to Emily that I had contacts for both, but I want it all in one.
• I need her to make me laugh.  Someone to laugh at me.  I mean really laugh.  Not just "oh my god he's gonna kill me if I look at him wrong" or "god that's pathetic, but here's a bone" kind of laugh.  I want her to light up my day and dammit I'll do my best to light hers. I wanna make stupid jokes and she doesn't care about it.
• I guess she's gotta kinda be that classic romantic girl.  I'm kinda that guy, so it'd be nice to have someone who really appreciates the little things I bust my ass to do that normally go unnoticed.
• I wanna just sit there and not say a word and it won't matter.  I want our thoughts together on a park bench under the stars to be the greatest things we never say to each other.
• I want her to do some of the work to keep us going.  I want her to call me first every now and then. I want her to call me at 2 AM and tell me she can't sleep cuz she's thinkin about me too much.  This goes along with what I said about me doing little things to bust my ass that go unnoticed.
• I wanna feel like she's lonely if I'm not there.  I want her to miss me when she's with her best friends.
• I want her to be honest, faithful, and completely open with me.  I don't know if I have the patience to go through any more of that again.  Any of the times it's happened, most specifically the last two.
• I don't want her to have the idea that it's either her or my skateboard.  I'll pick the board every time if she gets that way.  She needs to know that I have three great loves and they're equal.
• I want her to tell her friends that they're wrong about their boyfriends being the greatest guy in the world.
• I want her to be able to shut out other people's opinions and crumble under mine.  I seem to always do that for them, and I'd love some of it in return.

I'll think of more later, and I'll put it in, but...I'm just not gonna finish it right now.

this isn't my work.  I didn't write it.
I've never met the guy who did.  But I do have respect for him and his opinions.




From redwoodpecker:


This is a reply to a reply to one of my blogs wherein the blogger in question, homeschoolblog (I hope I spelled that correctly) assured me that soldiers who kill themselves do in fact go to heaven, which was suggested in all innocence by her and with no ill intent or aggression towards me, which of course infuriated me.

She suggested that God helped her through a suicidal period despite her own Pastor killing himself, which was the result I guess of God either not caring about that particular pastor, or perhaps he just wasn't paying attention. 

Anyway, here's the reply my narcissism prompted me to post.

I have a question on the subject, you say god got you through it, but did he?  What's your proof?

I say so because MOST people are suicidal at some point, and most don't kill themselves.  Even those who don't believe in god.  Does that mean that you are somehow inferior to them, that you needed god's help?  Why did god help you and not all the people who believed in him but still killed themselves like your pastor?  How many people would you guess killed themselves after many fruitless prayers for some kind of help?

It would be more accurate to say that your belief in something greater than yourself looking over you helped you get through your suicidal thoughts, while that same belief isn't sufficient for others.  This is a much more rational and realistic interpretation than the idea that God is like some kind of lottery , who may or may not help you depending on whim.  In addition, either he helps those who don't believe in him, or it's just possible to forgo killing yourself without god's help, in which case even if there was a god, and he did help you, it would only show that you are weaker than those who required no help from him.

The soldiers are simply dead.  They were used by other men in pursuit of money and power, killed themselves, and now their families will never see, talk to, or hold them again.  While it is impossible to prove one way or another whether something happens after death, it can be said that without any information, anything is possible.  Since there are infinite possibilities, and your heaven is just one, to determine how likely it is you divide the number of possibilities you've suggested, one, by the number possible, which is infinite.  One divided by infinity is so close to zero as to make no difference, and so is essentially zero.  That means there is a zero percent chance that heaven as you imagine it exists. 

I hate these fairy tales because it allows you to dismiss the loss of human life like it's nothing, like it's a trip to the store, which no doubt while reassuring to you, and your particular fears, leads to a general lack of concern over the greatest atrocities in the world. Even when people are being horribly slaughtered you believe it's just a transition period to a bunch of shiny white clouds and harp music, or whatever equally stupid thing you picture when you think of heaven, and so their deaths are not taken as seriously as they should be, nor will you or most of the generally brainwashed religious population do anything to stop it, because basically you no longer think death is a bad thing anyway.

Why stop the killing of children and housewives if you think they're just being sent to eternal paradise?  Hell, why even go that far, why help someone who doesn't believe what you do?  After all, their differing beliefs ensure they'll go to hell anyway, so what's a little murder next to eternal damnation?

Having faith doesn't automatically make you retarded or callous.

But it helps.

hey...

mom.
dad.


havin fun?

She's right you know...breakin up with her was a mistake.

love how that slapped me in the face, too.  let me tell ya  

"That's probably what I miss the most.  The tone of your voice and the look in your eye."
I had it man....I had it and I threw it away.

google goes to my page like every day.


why don't you just memorize the URL?
It's gotta be someone lookin for my page every day, right?


retard.

I was at this club minding my tea
I saw this fine young thing so I thought that I would see
I don't smoke but I asked her for a cigarette
I know it's lame but I haven't got a better one yet
You guess the rest I'm not the type to fess
I sing this song because I tell you she's the best

That slinky girl is in my brain
Now I'll never be the same
No one can ever see
What that slinky girl means to me

So I'll just pretend
But I feel like

Mackadocious she's sweet and precocious
She's the one girl that I just dig, love, yes I'm not above this
You think that's wack then bro you lack
You bore me that macho crap makes me snore, see, me,
I'm all about the females, the women, the jewels of this world
Those flowers like that slinky girl

That slinky girl is in my brain
Now I'll never be the same
No one can ever see
What that slinky girl means to me

So I'll just pretend
But I feel like

Well I met her one night I'd seen her before
She stole my brain then showed me the door
Girls that do me like that there's not many
But I've met one, that's plenty
I'm glad to say that she gets her way
She can move me and that's okay
Has the power to turn paper inky
The girl has me and she's so

That slinky girl is in my brain
Now I'll never be the same
No one can ever see
What that slinky girl means to me

That slinky girl is in my brain
Now I'll never be the same
No one can ever see
What that slinky girl means to me

I just told Christine I found the pictures of her and me and I told her about how I miss her.


this ought to be interesting.

Did god really create people in his own image?

If so, god must be a complete asshole.

All my bloomin' life.
Me mother was a mermaid.
Me father was King Neptune.
I was born on the crest of a wave
And rock the cradle of the deep.
Seaweed and barnacles are me clothes,
The hair on me head is hemp,
Every bone in me body's a spar,
And when I spit, I spit tar.
I'se hard, I is, I am, I are.

"I want to let you know, that you never disappointed me once, never made me think i was stupid or that i didn't know anything.  and you're here right now when i've let everyone down without most knowing it.  i lost my best friend to another girl, and i'm getting to be okay with that.  i lost my family to drinking and babies.  i lost myself to an unfamiliar situation, but you didn't put me down once, like every other god forsaken human being on this planet."

"I don't puss out" 

"No, it's not that you don't puss out, you're the kind of person people need to be, tough when weak, and decent.  and occasionally I know that being an ass isn't what you're all about.  you're a nice guy sheldon, and i know you'll be happier than you are now.  But if you die or something in the navy, i want you to know that... you didn't fail your country...because you helped someone on the inside of it get themselves back on.  and you never had to learn how to swim to do that.  Being a nice guy isn't always bad. it's what some guys need to learn to be, and also some girls. it's people like you who teach the bad to be better. and maybe one day, good.  so keep up the good work. and thanks for going with me tonight."

"you really don't have any idea who much you just affected me."

"You're right i don't.  Probably never will, but i just for some reason needed to tell you that....you're doing good."




guys....I needed that.

today I talked to four people whom I've not spoken to in months.

randomly.

all four found a way to get a hold of me.
all four were ladies.




does the good guy finally get some recognition?

A marketer's report on Sheldon Stetz would read something like this:
Smart.  Privileged.  Future doctor.  Future lawyer.  Future somebody.

It would be accurate, but it would also be incomplete.  It wouldn't include:
Confused.  Indecisive.  Lacks confidence.  Cynical.  Spiteful.


    I'm going to be a Navy SEAL.  No questions asked, that's what I'm doing.  I'm gonna make it or die trying.
The weird thing is that the same kid who wants to go through the toughest mental and physical training in the world so he can more effectively and efficiently kill people has an incredibly artistic side that wants to play music and take photos and do something beautiful.
    This is the same kid who doesn't take notes, reads magazines, and sleeps all hour but still gets near-perfect scores on tests.

    The same kid who could use a little potential-guiding light.  I can do anything, I just need to know where to go and how to put myself to use.

I really think I actually loved her for at least a few months if not more, but since then I've grown and changed.  Since then I've just grown accustomed to caring for her, like I feel an obligation or like it's a tradition and that's the only reason I put myself through hell every night trying to make something out of something that could laughably pass as a conversation with her.