This I Believe

You’re driving down a country road and it’s about mid-night. There isn’t another car in site. You have the radio playing your favorite song and your feeling pretty good. You glance over a little to your left. You see the other lane for the opposite traffic. It’s all alone, no one to ride it. You ask yourself, what would happen if I drove over there? “I better not, what if a cop is watching, or what if another car comes out of now where and hits me head on” you think to yourself. Your hands drift to the left a little bit and the car is half way into the left lane. You immediately correct yourself and put the car back into the right lane. You do it again, this time the car is almost all the way in the other lane. Again, you correct yourself. You just want to know what it’s like driving in the other lane. I believe you should drive in the opposite lane.
Ever since I was a little kid, I would get pressured into doing stuff I didn’t want to do. Parents, friends, and teachers would tell me how fun it was, how everyone else was doing it, how it would help my future. “It” is the word for the list of stuff I dreaded doing while growing up to try and please other people. Baseball, piano lessons, Jazz band, Track, Cross Country, Basketball, classes I didn’t want to take, etc. I would have to do all this stuff and rarely ever do anything I actually wanted. I say do what you want. Don’t let other people tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. Now I’m not saying to go out and start driving in the other lane of traffic, but do what you want and not what other people want, even if it does get the same reaction out of people as driving in the opposite lane.
Driving in the other lane also brings up another topic, risk. People always make the word “risk” sound so bad, but how are we supposed to live our lives without it. Risk is how our ancestors made it over here hundreds of years ago. They risked everything they had to come here for a better life. Risk is how we made it to the moon in 1969. How are we supposed to live a fulfilled life if we don’t take a few risks every now and again? If you don’t take risks, you might as well be some 10 year olds pet hamster sitting in a cage all day with nothing to do, but at least you’ll be safe.
I like to skateboard for fun and people are constantly pulling over to tell my friends and me how unsafe and irresponsible we’re being. Cops pull us over on our skateboards and tell us not to ride at night and threaten to give us tickets and take away our boards. We just tell them we won’t do it again and go out the next night, because we know how big of a risk we’re taking. I think that some people need to take at least some small risks or there lives might get dull after a while, I know I do. Skateboarding is the thing I do to get my daily dose of risk and adrenalin everyday. Without it, I feel like that pet hamster stuck in a cage all day.
Driving in the opposite lane is a metaphor for two things. Doing what you want even if that raises eyebrows from other people. It also stands for risk taking and how it’s not always a bad thing. I believe that everyone needs to take risks to get what they want out of life, or you’ll regret it when you don’t have the chance anymore. You may never regret not driving in the opposite lane of traffic, but maybe there’s something else you’ll regret if only you had taken the risk.

School and Christmas

School is almost done. Only one more week left and then we're done for a month. I'm super excited. This is going to be the best Christmas break ever. I'm only a freshman so I haven't had a Christmas break a month long for about 13 years. So far we've had a good amount of snow for winter so I'm going to be doing a good amount of sledding and skiing and hopefully snowboarding. I went cross country skiing once since the snow fell and it was pretty fun. Hopefully I'll do it more this year than last years. I always say to myself that I'm going to go a lot, but I only go once or twice a year. I haven't even gone snowboarding for 2-3 years, Probably because its so expensive if you don't have your own board. Even if you do have your own board its really expensive. The down side of Christmas, though, is Christmas shopping. Although I love to buy people presents, it gets to be to stressful and expensive. I try to keep my budget in between $150-$200. That's about 20 dollars per person. My two sister, parents, brother-in-laws, and girlfriend. I don't work that much in the winter, so I try to spend as little money as possible. I'm not trying to be cheap, it's just the way it is when you don't work. My birthday and Christmas are less than a month away, so I kind of get a bad deal. My parents usually get me something small for my birthday, and focus more on Christmas. It used to bother me when I was little, but when you get older you don't care about presents as much as when you're a little kid. I really shouldn't be complaining at all because I just got a flat screen T.V. for my birthday/ graduation present yesterday.

Well I only have to worry about two more classes now. I have my Adobe Illustrator final project done, and my Design Fundamentals project done as well. All I need to worry about is Written Communications and Intro. to College Math. I am kind of worried about next semester though. Mostly because of speech though. I can't stand speaking in front of people. I always start stuttering and stop making sense. But I have to take, so I'm going to stop thinking about it. Well this has been my final blog post. I hope you have enjoyed reading about my life and life problems, the few of you that have read them. Fair Well.

Running

I liked running when I was in elementary school. About third grade we used to get prizes for running laps during recess. Me and my friend, Jacob Rieple, would run at least a mile every day, but it got old after a while so we stopped doing it. I didn't run long distances again until 7th grade track. It was a nightmare. Running two miles in the hot sun every day, and just to get trained to run 400 meters in a race. I didn't join track the next year because I hated running. But in the beginning of 9th grade, something horrible happened. For some reason I joined the hardest, and most disciplining sport known to man. I joined cross country. Why did I join, I don't know. I did feel pressure to join from some of my friends, but I usually don't get sucked into the shenanigans that they get into. I didn't think it would be that bad. A few miles to run everyday after school, how bad could it be. Well it ended up being the worst time of my life. It wasn't just the distance that hurt, it was the speed of the distance. "Ok, today you'll be running for 10 minutes at a fast pace, then 10 at an easy pace, then 10 at a fast pace again. Then finish up with a two mile cool down." That's my coach Mr. Wenthe. That was one of our workouts we would have. The worst one was a workout called a fartleck. This odd French named workout goes; run 2 minutes hard, 2 minutes easy, 3 hard, 3 easy, 4 hard, 4 easy, 5 hard, 5 easy, then the same pattern gone back down to 2 minutes. Adding a mile warm up before we do anything. It was a horrible time. But after cross country got done, spring time rolled around, and guess what comes during spring time, track season. And for some reason I felt enormous pressure to join that too. I thought to myself, "Well track races are way shorter than cross country so it won't be nearly as hard as cross country." Well that wasn't the case at all. Track was equally as hard, if not harder than cross country. A cross country race is 3.1 miles. The longest track race is 2 miles, so I thought the races would at least be easier. They were probably harder than cross country races. I ran the 800 meter run, and sometimes it was way harder than a 3.1 mile run. As much as I hated track and cross country, I still had a lot of fun too. You would think the kids that do long distance for fun are incredibly big nerds, but that's not the truth at all. Although some are big nerds, most are awesome kids who have the most fun out of anyone. When the coach wouldn't run with us, we had a lot of adventures that if the coach found out about them, we would have been in a lot of trouble. It was a hard 4 years of track and cross country, but with all the things we did, and people I met, it was well worth it, and I might have done it again if I had the chance.