Saint Saens Piano Concerto in G minor 3rd Movement (Paoley Tjia)

Why I Will NEVER Go Bungee Jumping

Okay, so for today, I’m going to tell you a short story. Yes, I wrote it myself, but I do have to give my sister Julia credit for the crazy – yet amazingly wonderful idea.

So here it goes!!!

It was just a normal, stinky day at prison camp – oops, sorry, I mean Fairfield Junior High. Teachers were grumpy (the majority of them loosing their temper and indignantly chucking pencils at students – YES, this has happened before…), students’ eyes red and swollen from lack of sleep, the cafeteria overflowing with students and permanently stained with cheap ketchup and the stench of rubber hotdogs. Flies buzzed around the heads of the pencil-chucking, frizzy-haired teachers, and students bounced the rubbery hotdogs on the lunchroom tables (I did this today!!! Shhh, don’t tell the lunch lady – the one that always seems to be watching me…). While I was at lunch today, picking hairs out of my practically frozen pizza, a girl with a pointy nose like a witch and earrings the size of a watermelon bumped into me as she strutted past my table.

“WHATTHEHECKISTHATHARDTHINGONYOURBACK!!!!???” She screamed in my face.

“Excuse me?” I asked politely.

“What the heck is that hard thing on your back!?” She repeated, after swallowing a ton of air and catching her breath.

Long story short, I ended up having to lie down on a cot in the nurse’s office (I’d virtually passed out), all at the thought of my dreadful memory.

THE STORY BEGINS HERE:

       Flashback to April 1904. I can remember vividly that gloomy night in Paris, France at about midnight. The sky was dumping its’ rain on the city, and I was in the act of hurling myself off the Eiffel Tower.

STOP! I know what you’re thinking, and no, I was NOT committing suicide! Don’t interrupt me. Now, back to the story.

       Picture a billion, golden, glowing city lights zoooooooooming towards you. That’s what it looked like, the Eiffel Tower growing taller above my head, and the city swelling below me. Without warning, the bungee chord snapped in two. The Eiffel Tower flashed once in my memory, and the ground literally smashed my face - the hardest punch anyone could ever imagine.

And that was the last thing I remembered.

At least, that was the last thing I remembered until September of 1978, when I vaguely recall waking up for a time. Everything was blurry, but I registered that I was positioned on an operating table with something hard and metallic shoved up my spine. And that was the last thing I remembered.

Just kidding, that was only the last thing I remembered until May of 2001, when I was brought back to a new home, safe and sound. Well, sort of safe and sound. It was safe and sound besides the random hard and metallic thing shoved up my spine.

Then came the tricky part of rehabilitation. I couldn’t figure out what had happened! One minute I was in euphoria land, bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower experiencing the ultimate thrill, the night that was supposed to be the greatest night of my life. The next, everyone was saying it was the twenty-first century, and talking about mysterious gadgets called  “computers” and “iphones” and “X-Rays”.

Eventually, I caught on and tried to live my life as if it had been this way forever (to tell you the truth, though, I never quite caught on to the “Don’t worry, darling, you were just paralyzed for a few years,” and “you’re a normal person now,” and “actually, we froze you for a hundred or so years, that’s why we’re in the twenty-first century now….”, therapy and so-called “help” from doctors). I attended middle school like all the other kids, even though I was approximately hundred years older than them. Yeah, I had a hard time explaining to everyone that somehow my age had been frozen for a century….

No one believes me yet.

But maybe they will now, after the incident in the lunchroom that the whole school has definitely heard about by now. Maybe even that bratty girl who just HAD to ask about that hard thing on my back will believe me .

But whatever happens, I know that my life will never again be the same. And I will NEVER repeat my mistake bungee jumping, not even off the Eiffel Tower ……

So, did you like my story?

You don’t need to tell me. I know it’s weird. J

The Eiffel Tower

Okay, so everyone has seen my profiles on websites like Pinterest, The Mnm (this one!), Facebook, etc…. , and each of them have been the Eiffel Tower at one point. Can you guess why!?? I love the Eiffel Tower!!! I love it because it is really old, unique, famous, and France absolutely intrigues me! So today I went onto the internet and looked up cool facts that most people don’t know about this famous work of art, the Eiffel Tower:

Why is the Eiffel Tower called the “Eiffel Tower” Because it is named after one of the most influential people in it’s construction, Gustave Eiffel. But its’ main architect was Stephen Sauvestre, and there were around fifty other engineers, and 121 construction workers.

When was it finished being built? The Eiffel Tower was completed on March thirty-first, eighteen eighty nine (03/31/1889). It took about two years and two months to build. So the Eiffel Tower is one hundred and twenty three years old as of 2012.

Did you know that one person died from constructing the Eiffel Tower?!

How tall is it? The Eiffel Tower is approximately 984-990 (depending on the temperature) feet tall!!!!

How much does it weigh? It weighs approximately 10,000 tons, and 7.3 thousand of them are from the metal it is made out of!

The Eiffel Tower is mostly made of iron, and it is coated with a dark brown paint. Did you know that it is repainted every seven years? This year, (2012), it will have been painted exactly twenty three times!

What is the Eiffel Tower used for? It is famous worldwide, and about 6.8 million people visit it every year! Over a quarter of a billion people have visited it in its long history. The Eiffel Tower is also used as a radio broadcasting tower and an observation tower. Not everyone knows that it has an antenna 24 meters long!

The Eiffel Tower is so huge, it has 1665 stair steps and 108 stories!

*I got my information at www.eiffel-tower.us/Eiffel-Tower-Facts.html

How Long Can You Live???

How long can you live without these important things? Read on and find out!

1)  FOOD: This depends on a lot of things. Your weight, age, gender, height, body composition, and tons of other things influence how often you need to eat and even how long you could live without food. It’s said that one guy named Gandhi fasted for twenty-one days straight! He didn’t even die! But most people aren’t normally like that. Doctors say that the average human can survive without food for about eight weeks (but that’s if you drank water like you normally would).

2)  WATER: How long you can live without water also depends on many things. A baby locked in a hot car or someone who is physically overexerted in the heat without hydration can actually die within a few hours. But the average person in normal temperatures and conditions could live about five days without water. If you didn’t drink anything for a really really really long time, scientists say that your skin could turn a cold, blue-grey color.

3)  OXYGEN: Those who are in very good physical condition can survive without oxygen for a longer period of time than those who are not. Also, smokers and obese people generally have a harder time holding their breath than others. There have been rumors of people holding their breath up to eight minutes, but  most people can only go for a minute or two. How long can you go without oxygen and still survive? Let’s not test it!!!

4)  SLEEP: One experiment on this was by Peter Tripp in 1959 who stayed up for more than eight days! A few days in, he began to hallucinate and said he saw things like cats, mice, cobwebs. A few years later in 1964, seventeen year old Randy Gardener wanted to break the Guiness Book of World Records. He stayed up for 11 days, but didn’t have any hallucinations. But it was reported by doctors that he couldn’t focus his eyes had slurred speech, and had a very short attention span by the last day. Studies have been done on rats and they can live about a month without sleep. Scientists say that humans can live just a few days shorter.

* I found my information at: http://adventure.howstuffoworkds.com

10 Things You Must Do Before You Die

Here are some extremely important things (well, sort of…) that everyone should definitely do before they die:

1)  LEARN ARCHERY: They’ve been saying that the Hunger Games really sparked something here. Archery has been a popular sport! Plus, it’s not your average basketball, soccer, football, blah blah blah. Those are cool too, but archery is so much more unique!

2)  SURF: Just because you don’t live by an ocean that doesn’t mean you can’t take up surfing! (Just watch out for sharks……they are my worst nightmare!)

3)  GET A BLACK BELT IN KARATE! Martial arts are awesome! It’s a great way to be active, and they say that wherever you live, you’ll need to use some kind of defense/martial arts (Karate, Kung Fu, Jujitsu, Tae Kwon Do, Judo, Aikido) at least once in your life! That’s kind of scary, but it’s true!

4)  LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: You never know when it will come in handy!

5)  LEARN TO PLAY A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT AND TAKE LESSONS: Music will change your life. It influences the way you think, act, and even learn! Classical music increases intelligence!

6)  COMPOSE SONGS AND RELEASE AN ALBUM: This is how some famous people start out, right? If you’re good, your musical career could take off!

7)  GO ON ADVENTURES: Here are some ideas for your next grand adventure: ride in a hot air balloon, go sky diving, swim with sharks (again, my worst nightmare!!!), learn to fly a plane, go on a cruise, watch a rocket launch, live, break a Guinness world record, jump from a cliff into deep water, climb mount everest, ride a mechanical bull, fire a pistol, go scuba diving, go to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans

8)  VISIT FAMOUS PLACES: The Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon Rainforest, the Grand Canyon, Victoria Falls, Egypt Pyramids, Eiffel Tower, all 7 continents, the Terracotta Warriors, Notre Dame Cathedral, Mount Rushmore

9)  DO RANDOM THINGS: Play the kazoo in a public restroom, juggle in front of an audience, put a message in a bottle and throw it into the sea, hop on a pogo stick all the way to school/work, burst out into song in a grocery store (very loudly!), have a paint ball war, break dance on a cross walk in front of everyone, pretend to faint in the mall

10)               AUDITION FOR SOMETHING: Audition for a commercial, a rock band, America’s Got Talent, a movie, a Broadway play

FACEBOOK OR FACEDIARDY?

 Yeah, so Facebook can be a great thing. It’s a mind-blowing idea that you can talk to and connect with someone on the other side of the world! It allows you to socialize, let people know what’s happening in your life, and follow others’ posts. But Facebook can also be a bad thing. Instead of explaining why it can be a bad thing, I’m going to tell you a story that I think will illustrate my point very clearly. And just so you know, this is a TRUE STORY. Yes people, no matter how out-of-this-world it may seem, this story is very true and very recent. So brace yourselves. Here goes:

Once upon a time, there was a happy family. It consisted of a mother and a father and a couple children. Anyway, one day the father got in a very serious car accident and had to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. The police that had arrived on the scene called the wife (who was at home with the children) to inform her of the accident her husband had been in. Immediately after receiving the phone call from the police, she hurried to the computer and posted the following on Facebook: “[Jeff] has been in an accident! Gotta run to the hospital ASAP!!!” A little while after the accident, the husband passed away.

Seriously, people!!? Who has time to post on Facebook that their husband is dying when he was rushed to the hospital thirty seconds ago!? Facebook has become a diary to some people. I’ve seen posts on that thing like “eating an apple right now”, then two minutes later another post comes up something like “mmm, that was a yummy apple”. I mean, people put their entire lives on Facebook! Do you see what I’m saying?? I don’t know about you, but to me it seems like people just have too much spare time, so they end up writing down every little thing they do and posting it online for the whole world to see!

Wow. Facebook. More like Facediary.

My Feelings About Math

My brain is a knot

Of numbers on paper.

All tangled together, combined into one.

My brain is confused

I can’t get it right,

These mathematical equations

Are crumbs of knowledge

Rolling around on my plate.

My brain is an amoeba

Of cells squished together.

I’m left brained –

Not right –

Maybe the other way around!

You know, I really hate math

But I love words.