Thursday, December 25, 2008

"Christmas Bells, those Christmas Bells..." *sings*

Today... is Christmas.
Christmas is here,
Christmas is there,
Christmas Time is Everywhere,
And that means that I got presents. Alas, I shall wait to tell you about them, and when I do I will ignore all but my most favorite.. so far. For now you shall have to listen to my description of my morning in script format.

INT. BOY'S ROOM - DAY

Young teenage boy, STEPHEN, is sleeping in his bed to the left of the door against the left wall. Older teenage boy, JOEL, is sleeping in his bed to the left of the door against the left/back wall. Young girl, HANNAH, sleeping on the floor to the right because of family-that-doesn't-usually-live-here overflow.

Two parents, MOM and DAD, enter room and walk over to Hannah who is just waking up.

MOM:
Hey Hannah,
Did you sleep well?

HANNAH:
Yeah... It's Christmas!

DAD:
Yes it is!

MOM [To dad]:
I still have a few presents to wrap.
Should I wrap them now before everyone
gets up? Or should we just wait until we
get together with our extended family
tomorrow?

DAD:
(Goes off talking about the situation
for a few minutes)

JOEL:
(Sleepily) Do you actually have to have
this conversation somewhere where it
will keep me awake?

DAD:
(Sarcastically) Yes, actually..

They leave, Joel goes back to sleep. Hannah follows them downstairs.

Well... That was more or less my morning. Then I went downstairs about an hour later, we hung out, passed out stockings, opened presents in our own fashion which I shall not go into detail about here.

My favorite present that I got was from Jared and April, "The Tea Companion", or "The Guide for Becoming the Ultimate Tea-Snob" as I like to call it. It's pretty much awesome, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wishes to enjoy their tea-life a little more than they do. It talks about more than just the taste of tea, but everything from history of tea to the time of day to drink certain kinds.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

*sigh* . . . "kids these days"

I was musing over this blog post by a friend of mine, where she was talking about chivalry and how annoying it is that it has all but died.

Reason: Respect

Or lack thereof. The reason that chivalry is all but dead is that no one has any respect for anyone else. Period. They do not care about the other person's opinion, as seen by the all too common:

"You can believe what you want, but don't try to change my opinion."


This statement might, to some people, sound as if the person is accepting the other person's opinion. But it is really just the opposite, there is no more rude way to deal with another's opinion then to say it does not matter to oneself.

They do not care about the other person's parents. This (to me) actually sounds odd but is very true. How many times do you hear "Oh, common they'll never know" or "Psht, they don't mean that" or any sort of statement bearing the "Who cares what your parents said? They don't actually care.". In actuality, they do care. They care if you are watching a movie they said not to. They care if you are hanging out with people they don't want you to. They care whether you do that they tell you to or not.

Do NOT tell yourself "Well they told me not to then.. but it is later now." You know what? Maybe things are later. So go ask their permission now. Just because they say you can now does not mean they are letting you do it in the future. The biggest deal here is not "can I handle the R rated movie?" but "I am disobeying my parents." and do not tell yourself that you are not in the wrong, because then you will soon lose the ability to see the difference between right and wrong.

They do not respect anyone's integrity. Even if they say: "You can think what you want, I won't try to change that..." How many times does someone try to get the other to do something they do not want to do. I would be willing to bet that most of the relationships that end with the boy moving on to another girl, and the girl left with an unwanted pregnancy, would not have ended up that way if the boy (and maybe sometimes the girl) had not asked more than once and respected the initial response and not pressured again and again to get the person to do what they did not want to do.

That is forcing your opinion "that it is okay" or "good" or "best" or (God forbid) "my right" onto the other person, c-o-m-p-l-e-t-e-l-y disregarding the other's opinions, integrity, and moral convictions.

A HUGE problem with the internet is that people can find someone SOMEWHERE that agrees with them exactly on one subject or another. So they feel as if they do not need to communicate with their family, and who could have otherwise become local friends, beacuse they feel that their opinion is accepted by someone, probably many people, so they can't be completely wrong . . . right? Wrong.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

This sounds preachy, but I'm only writing this because most of these problems are things that I deal with myself.

-Joel Watson