Metaphorical Roses and Life

So.. this isn't right, and I don't think it's wrong, but it's an opinion.  The beautiful- and terrible- thing about people is that we all have our own opinions.  And this causes a lot of conflict.  Sometimes I look at the world, and I think to myself "how the hell do people's brains work like this?"  But then I calm down and remind myself that my views may not necessarily be right either.  But anyway, the point of this post is to talk about how I live my life.

The funny thing about me is that I am very easily amused.  I find a lot of things to be hilarious, so I laugh a lot.  The tiniest of things have the ability to make my day, such as a funny joke, a silly prank played on a friend, an adorable song or poem, the list goes on and on.  Sometimes people ask me why I laugh at things that aren't really all that funny, or they give me weird looks when I'm having the time of my life reading a children's book- by myself.  My answer is that I enjoy the little things in life.  If you find joy in those, then life is good.

"I walk slow so I can smell the metaphorical roses of life"

Here's another thing about my life.  And about how I wanna run it.
Student Council elections came up, and I've decided not to run.  Why?  There's a bunch of reasons.
1- It frees up my lunch
2- We hardly do anything
3- I don't believe in it, and I don't want to support something I don't believe in.

I don't believe in it because the election process is basically a popularity contest.  Here's how it works:
People hang up posters with corny slogans like "If voting for me is wrong, don't be right!" with shiny bright colours and plaster these on every yellow tiled wall of the school.  The people running tell all their friends to vote for them, and then it's Friday and everyone votes for their friends.  No speeches, no campaign.  Just a bunch of pretty posters and it's won by whoever has the most friends.  Now personally, I don't see the success in that.  It's not a legitimate win, if you win you're not implementing anything other than school spirit, and I feel like Student Leadership should actually be making changes in the school.

Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against school spirit.  Or StuCo, but it's just not my style, and out of everything in my life, the thing I feel strongest about is doing what you want because you want to.  I was talking about this with a friend today, and this is how I basically outlined life.  I think the biggest thing with society is how it tries to make everyone conform to some sort of normative mold.  The media creates expectations, society upholds these expectations, and people, in order to fit in with society, bend into these expectations.  Here's the thing though- I don't want to be like that.  I want to adhere to my own values, my own idea of life.  And I know that this is hard to do in society, but I'm going to fight as hard as I possibly can to try to achieve this.  In my eyes, society works out like a big conveyor belt.  Everyone starts out as their own shape, some lump of deformed metal.  Time goes by, and the machine throws new obstacles at them.  It gets harder and harder to stay true to their original form as more things get thrown at them and slowly they become pounded down, rolled out and shoved into some little box.  Society beats the willpower, the dreams and goals out of people and forces them into a corral they disguise as "life".  But it's not really life.  "There's a difference between surviving and living" and that's not living. It's merely existing, and it's running through this maze society puts us through, with only some misperceived goal in mind.  No one pays attention to the journey anymore, because they can't afford to.  If you take the time to stop, and marvel at the everyday journey of life society will cut you down and overpower you.  But maybe, just maybe we can fight this.  If only someone took the time to find the beauty in these misshapen lumps of metal, unique and beautiful in their own way, maybe we could see that there are so many small treasures of life waiting to be found.  There is a hope for the future, and there is a way to look back on your life and realise that you never lost sight of your values.  You stayed true to yourself and the machine was unable to beat you down.  Those are the people worth admiring, and that's who I am going to be- now until forever.

          “Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.” 

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” 

― John Lennon 

Katherine Kiss Me- Franz Ferdinand
Make It Stop- Rise Against
Honey I Sure Miss You- Daniel Johnston
Did You Ever Doubt Yourself?- The Pharmacy
Get It Faster- Jimmy Eat World
Mr. Maker- The Kooks
Give Me Novacaine- Green Day
Bulletproof Heart- MCR
Death and All His Friends- Coldplay
Tubthumping-Chumbawamba

Can I Get A Check Please?

So I've achieved something.  A big accomplishment.
I performed at an open mic night at a local coffeeshop by the name of Waldens!  Isn't that great??  Really I can't take full credit for it, because after all, it was Julie's idea after all that got us out there!

It started with a Facebook message, throwing the idea out there.  I mean, we were already planning on going to open mic night, but just to watch.  Performing?  Now that's an entirely different objective.  But sure enough, we did it!  Gold Lion by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, featuring Julie on the guitar and Sierra with vocals!  And of course, just our luck, we ended up playing dead last for an audience of maybe two people.  But that's perfectly alright, because the two people who stayed for us are oh so lovely and nice- Daniel of CRUSH and his friend Matt who is a talented Cage the Elephant player.

Overall, it was a fantastic experience.  There were obnoxious drunk people, people our age, over the age of 60 comedians, some guy who looked like Andre the Giant who serenaded us with flamenco guitar, a crazy friend of our friend who was basically like a hyper hamster on crack, some college kids, and everyone in between!  Needless to say, I've come away from Saturday with at least a basic experience of live performing, plus tons of great memories and little jokes to brighten my day!  Plus I can check this off my life list!  However I definitely want to do this again- way too much fun to miss out on in the future!

Anyone reading this, overcome your fears and get out there!  Not only is it tons of fun but I'm sincerely glad I went through with it because it is helping me slowly but surely destroy my shell of shyness.  Did I mention I was super shy in elementary school?  Not anymore!  New Sierra is the complete opposite of old Sierra.

Lots of Love!

Tigers- Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks
Welcome to the Black Parade- MCR
Us- Regina Spektor
Sleep- The Smiths

Leaping Around In Pajamas

To quote my magnificent friend Julie: "Only two blog posts for Feb? :'((((((("
     To quote my reply: "I know, I'm a failure to life. I'll make one right now."


Anyway, that being said, I realise this is only my third blog post.. for the month of February... minus 20 brownie points!  I do feel bad, I truly do.  But, I mean c'mon.  It's freaking February 29th, so that's one thing to be happy about!  Did you know that on the 29th of February people hug each other?  I didn't.  And yet, I got hugs! Cool!  But now it's time for a history lesson, some amazing facts, and traditions!! Yeah!!


Did you know that roughly 4 million people were born on February 29th?  You do now.  I'm not gonna lie, I think as like a five year old maybe I would've been pretty upset to be born on the Leap Day.  But now, I think it'd absolutely awesome to be born then.  So jealous.


Leap Years are only the years divisible by 400.


So basically, the only reason we have an extra day in February is because some OCD calendar person really really reallly wanted our Gregorian calendar to match the solar one.  Simple as that.  I guess I shouldn't be giving them a hard time though.. Apparently, if all the slackers in the world had had their way, after long enough Christmas would be in the middle of summer.


Julius Caesar invented the Leap Year!  And his homey boy astronomer, Sosigenes.


Except.. We don't use the Julian calendar.  We use or Gregorian one, invented by Pope Gregory XII.  He also sped up the calendar 11 days, so basically one day in March 1582 everyone went to bed on the 11th and woke up on the 22nd.  And we think Daylight Savings is challenging to adjust to... 
Anyway, along with this crazy 11 day speed up thing, the Gregorian Calendar isn't perfect, and some day 3,000 years in the future we'll be screwed up by a day.  "So astronomers have a few years to figure out how to deal with that one."




Thank you Huffington Post for this information!  Don't you all feel so much smarter now?
Happy 29th! 


Brought to you by...
Wake Me Up When September Ends- Green Day
Christmas Lights- Coldplay
Ready To Start- Arcade Fire
3 Libras- A Perfect Circle
Joy Ride- The Killers
Gratisfaction- The Strokes

Burning Water

I am so glad you can't burn water.  And trust me, I know.  If it was possible, I'dve  already done it.  I am so, so kitchen challenged, and so, so prone to danger/failure when in the cooking zone, that I consider it a wonder my mom hasn't banned me yet.  Getting on to my original point, I was thinking this would be a random, love all, go with the flow post.  I'mma tell you about the latest things that happened to me in a span of thirty minutes.

The first on this list is me leaving the kettle on.  Something I'm guilty of all the time.  I think it's because I'm not great at focusing on one activity at a time.  So I'll walk in, put the kettle on, walk away, get involved in something else, and then fifteen minutes later I realise I'm missing my tea so I run back into the kitchen, turn off the heat, grab multiple ice cubes and laugh at my ineptitude.

This brings me to my next point.  Ice cubes.  I love- water- on ice.  Regular water is alright, chilled water is pretty fly, but the one, the greatest, is water on ice cubes.  Nothing else is so fresh, so cool, so refreshing and damn tasty as that.  Oh- also, one fast fact about me.  I always drink ice water in a mug.  Not a glass like normal people.  Mugs are where it's at.  So at night, maybe like ten, eleven o'clock, when the rest of my family is asleep, I sneak into the kitchen with my mug, snag some ice cubes and pour me some water. Then my dog comes out and asks for ice, because she's cool like that.

Nextly, real quickly, in one sentence.  I hate long fingernails.

And with that, my final thought for the evening is about writing.  I love writing.  A lot.  I love to read, I love to create stories with fancy, magical words, and I simply love everything about writing.  But it's getting late, so I'll come back to this later.  Night!




and hey!  so The Pharmacy.  Here's a wacky, gotta-love-it video from them! check it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UGsvR4b1Q4&ob=av2e

Catfish

Damn!  It's been so long since I blogged that I had to sign in again.... *pathetic sigh*.

SO- what's up blogger community?  What's crackalackin?  I have been crazy busy recently with concerts, and debate tournaments, and life, and school, etc. etc. etc.!  As of lately, I've been thinking of classes to register for next fall, hip hip hooray, and yeah!  Right now I'm looking at four honours classes, (math, english, spanish and euro minus chem) and I'm also thinking of cutting back majorly on my extra-curriculars.  Speech and debate and newspaper are probably going to take up all of my life anyways, so I would just be majorly screwing myself over if I decided to do more.  Otherwise, I am of course, super psyched for next year, not forgetting summer though.  I love summer.  I need summer.  Yes.

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Anywho, what else was I going to mention... Ah yes!  Concert! Southpaw Stranger, Memory Motel, and The Pharmacy!  Brought to you by The Holland Project!  Excellent!  It was a fantastic concert, neat hipster people to see, great music to listen to, and new bands to discover!  SS was one of my favourite, and it was, of course, always a treat to watch MM, plus they announced that they are trying to release a seven inch, and what's better than vinyl?  As for The Pharmacy.. let me tell you.. They are fantastic.  I really love their sound, and it is my great pleasure to be enjoying a brand new CD of theirs at this moment.  I strongly advise checking them out, they're this sweet rocknroll band from Seattle, so they've gotta be cool.  Plus they get about 100 brownie points on the grounds that the pianist had an amazing sense of style.  I was jealous.  Plus the drummer looked like Mark Foster.  Just sayin'.

Well, that's all for now folks!
Lots a love!



(PS-  I bet you were wondering when I was going to mention catfish.  Well I'll tell you.  NEVER!  HA!  Teaching you not to become so freaking dependent on titles... jeeze..)