Hi! My name is Isaac Privett and here I am getting out into the world, exploring new things, and establishing the identity I will have for the rest of my life. I am starting this blog to inform people about the trials and tribulations of growing up in todays world and making decisions that will affect me for years to come.

:: Thursday, February 20, 2003 ::

Errr...What Did you say

This school has people that come from all different parts of the country and with them comes the wierd sayings and words. I hear interesting words that I have never heard before almost every day and today was no exception. Well, I was just sitting here surfing the web in the library and this guy walks up. We have talked on occasion, but not too much so he caught me a little bit off guard when he started talking. He came up behind me and said,"Yo Isaac, That web site is tasty. Wait until I get mine jumpin. It will be nirvana." I turned around and stared blankly back at the guy. Now I am no linguist, but this guy seemed to be speaking a foreign language. Maybe it was some remote form of Hebrew. Anyway, since I had no idea what this guy was talking about, I just agreed with him and continued to sit there bored. After a couple of minutes I was just as about as bored as I could get. I flipped my mouse over and started using my finger to move the pointer accross the screen. I didn't even notice that the guy was still standing behind me, but I heard "Stop diddling with the mouse ball like that. After a while that mouse is going to be fubbed." At this point I am pretty sure this guy isn't speacking Hebrew so I tried a different tactic.

I replied, "Dimple on it yo. I jump this way to the frisk." I had no idea if any of the wierd words that I used meant something to him. I just picked these words out of the blue and said them just so maybe he would get just as confussed as I did. To my surprise the guy goes, "Thats cool. I gotta bounce now though. I am gonna get fumped if I don't do my homework." He then walked away! It makes me wonder at what the guy thought that I really said. For all I knw he could have though that I said "Go away idiot." also wonder on how they come up with these wierd words and place meaning to them. There have been many many other words that I have no idea what they actually meant because you can't use them in context. I am starting to think that language just isn't my thing. Maybe I should invest in getting a slang dictionary to go with my german one so that I won't end up repeating the same incident a few more times while I am at it...
:: American-N-Canada 4:46 PM [+] ::
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Don't hate the player...Hate the game

It is 4 am and no one who is totally sane would be up at such a late hour. No one is except me. I am walking through a dark murky sewer and being extra cautious so that I won't run into anyone else that may be using the sewers for some reason or another. I have been sent here by headquarters and I have a special mission to accomplish. Some leader of a gang has stolen a computer disk from my employer and it is my job to get it back and make sure something like this will never happen again. It is a typical assignment and I often find myself wadding through the smelly waters of the sewer to get to my final destination. I don't wanna attract any extra attention or it could get messy and I don't like it when bullets go zipping past my head. Now all I need to find is a ladder... Ah here it is. Now lets take a peek and see if anyone is up top. Crap there are two guards! I am going to have to pull out my silenced 9mm and go to work. I need to make it quick so that the alarm wont be sound. I then jump out of the sewer and fire two shots. I am not fast enough and I take a bullet to the head and the familiar screen shows up on the TV asking if I would like to load my saved game. I then said all the curse words I knew, yanked out my xbox, and chucked it into the TV screen. I had failed and hours of hard work down the drain. I then mumbled several more curse words and go to bed so that tomorrow I may be able to beat the level.

Well, of course I wouldn't chuck a 300 dollar game system into the TV for not beating a level, but games do affect your mood substantually when you get into them. There has been many times where one wrong turn in a video game would put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. It is not only me that gets affected this much from playing video games. I have seen many people get put into a bad mood due to a video game and come back later for several hours of gaming. The first thing that intrigues me about video games is: why video games can affect people so much? Why do poeple get so geared up about beating a video game that they will spend hour upon hours trying to win? Why, if they fail to win, get so worked up about losing?

It seems that the makers of games intentionally make the difficulty of games to make it just hard enough to make it a challenge, yet not impossible. The challenge is what gamers crave. If it was too easy, they would beat it in no time and no longer play it because there would no longer be the challenge that they crave. If it were too hard, the game would seem impossible and most gamers would give up quickly and no longer strive to win. When the challenge is just right, the gamers wil play and play and play and play to win. After spending so much time playing the game, the gamer has invested the alot of time playing and that is what gets hooks them into getting emotional from the outcome of the game. The gamer knows that it isn't real. They just can't help feeling the way they do because so much of their time was invested in the game.

Now there is a new kind of game that is hooking thousands of people around the world to the point of sevier addiction. Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games(MMORPG). These games are just as challenging as all the other games that are out their. What makes them even more addictive then the other kinds of games that are out there is that they add in one key element that gamers have come to adore. They added in a social aspect. People can now play a video game with several thousand other people. Before they would sit in their room and be all alone and the world would go by without them. In these MMORPGs there is a virtual world where they can socialize with out people, kill monster, make money, and solve puzzles without ever leaving their room. A gamer can never win these games either. The game designers desinged the game to take alot of time for the gamers to get the to highest possible levels of achievment and then afterwards add more content into the game so that the players will never actually reach the end of the content. These games have ruined many live because it has taken over the lifestyle of the gamer. Some gamers never leave their room for anything other then the essential for living. Some people take off work because they have something planned on the game. Other people miss alot of school to play. There even has been the occassional suicide because something bad has happened in a game and the person felt they no longer should live. Is it the game makers' fault? I think not. I think that it is the gamer's responsibility to have enough self control not to let the game take over their live. I just send a word of caution when starting to play one of these types of games. Please realize that they are addicting and that you may take them seriously. When playing these games just play to have fun and when they stop being fun; stop playing.
:: American-N-Canada 11:16 PM [+] ::
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The noncreativeness of society

What are the things that stand out when you think of great achievments? Most likely when you think of a great achievment, something will pop into your head that was something totally original and creative. Well, maybe you thought of something that was some monumental human achievment where out of shear will and determination a person accomplished some far off goal. We will save that for another entry and stick with something that was original and creative. If you thought of the achievment from shear will, I will give you a minute to think of one that was creative...Time is up. If you didn't think of one, then I guess you won't agree with me. If you did then keep on reading.

For those of you that are still with me, I will get to the point. I was thinking this evening about the many years that I have been going to school. I went back through all my memories and thought about all the things that I liked and disliked about school. Most my memories were happy meories since I really enjoyed going to school everyday and learn as much as possible. There is one bad memory that does stick out in my mind though. I had thought up something that I thought was very original. It was some crazy idea that Earth was going to flatten out as time goes bye since the inner parts of Earth is liquid and it is spinning. I compared it to being like spinning pizza dough. All my friends after hearing this said it was a stupid idea and wasn't true. I wouldn't have expecting any other response from 7th graders, but it was still a bit discouraging. I never did share any of my ideas with my peers after that and I always kept them to myself. I am not blaming my friends for responding in such a way. That is how most people would have responded.

Many people today seem to frown upon creativity. Little Timmy would like to be an artist and love to draw. Dad loves football and wants his son to be the star of the football team so makes him play football. Dad may not be knowing this, but he is keeping his kid from doing what he loves to do in life; which is drawing. Timmy after a few years gets a little bit older and sees other kids doing stuff that he once wanted to do. His dad kept him from being creative so being creative must be be bad. He then makes fun of the poor kid's picture of a dog. It is scenarios like these that have started a viscious cycle of discouraging people that are being creative and expressing themselves. Do I think it is the parents fault for making poor little Timmy play football? No, of course not. It was no ones fault that this cycle started. We just have to find a way to break the cycle and encourage people to be more creative because that is where real achievements come from. Most people that are concidered geniuses aren't geniuses because they know alot of things. They are geniuses because they are very creative and they can think of interesting ways to find the solution to the problem. I have been fortunate from my parents being very supportive of of all the things that I have done. My dad has listened and continues to listen to all my crazy, whacked-out ideas and my mother has encouraged my painting. I was never made play football like some of my friends were. I doubt the cycle will ever be totally broken, yet there is no harm in trying to encourage the youngsters to be creative and express themselves in the proper manner.

:: American-N-Canada 11:39 PM [+] ::
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Ich spreche kein Deutch

Just about every highschool and many colleges require you to take a foreign language. Mine is no exception. I am required to take two semesters of the same foreign language and it is tough. I had several languages to choose from and it wasn't an easy choice to make. First there is french. I thought about it and said, "Why would I wanna take french? They cant win a war and frankly they are the ones keeping everyone else from being able to bash some heads. Besides, they eat snails." Next there was arabic. That may have been fun to learn except Bush seems pretty intent on blowing up all of the middle east. I would never get a chance to use it by the time I finally learned it. Then we have spanish and chinese. They both wear oversized hats and those ponchos have got to go. I really am not a fan of chinese food either. I was getting pretty bummed, but then I saw german on the list. I thought "Hey that could be cool. I get to spit on people when I talk and I really like eating hamburgers." That is how I made my choice for the language requirment. Well, not really. I just randomly picked german because it sounded cool. I have found german to be very tough and at times very comical from the mistakes I have made.

My most interesting mistake was made right after I got back from intersession. I had studied long and hard all intersession because my german skills were very lacking and I was afraid of not doing well in the class. The studying actually did me some good. It is amazing how some things work and I never expected studying to help as much as it did. Anyway, the first day of class after getting back to school was very relaxed. It consisted mainly of us talking about how our break was and about different little things. I understood most of what was going on for a change, yet stayed pretty quiet. I had the perfect question for my professor and I wanted to spring it at the perfect moment. That moment came at the end of class. I had waited for my professor to stop asking questions and ask if we had any. I worked up the nerve and finally said, "Werden Sie Sie gehen ins Bett mit mir." I got a blank stare for my professor and all the other students were hurting themselves from trying to hold in their laugher. After a moment of silence from my professor and when I thought the other students were going to drop dead any second, I asked what I actually said. She told me that I asked her if she would like to go to bed with me. My face turned instantly 4 different shades of red and everyone else in the room couldn't hold in their laughter any longer. They were at the point of tears from laughing so hard. How could this be. All I wanted to ask if she would like to eat lunch with me to tell me about her trip to germany over intersession. I finally asked a woman if she wanted to go to bed with me and it was a total accident. I wanted to die right there. Class was dismissed after everyone picked themselves up off the floor.

I then walked home in shame. I did come to realize one thing from the incident though. I realized that I am not very good at foreign languages and that I will never make it as a translator. No worries though, I still have astrophysics and I will never have to worry about accidentally asking them to go to bed with me. One good thing can be gathered from this and it took me a few days to figure this out. She never said no. I am sure she would have said no, but the total shock of the moment prevented an answer. I am one for one at the plate and have yet to strike out. Just remeber when taking a foreign language, a dictionary is your best friend.
:: American-N-Canada 2:36 PM [+] ::
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War on Ignorance

Well, I guess it is impossible not to hear about a possible war with Iraq. The whole world is paying very close attention to the events as they are unfolding and everyone has an opinion on the whole situation. Many people agree that we should go to war with Iraq. Just as many and maybe more believe that the US should let the weapon inspectors continue inspecting. The problem I seem to run into is that not many of today's youth don't seem to care what happens or not. I went around and asked five people about what they thought about going to war with Iraq. Four of them said they could care less. The other one said we shouldn't go to war because all we want is oil. I know that only asking five people isn't a sunstantial survey, but it still seems to demonstrate the trend. Why don't they care about what happens?

I think it is a belief that they won't have to deal with the situation. They seem to think that all the adults will take care of it and their won't be any problem. The reality of the situation is that the youth may not have to deal with it now, but ten years down the road they will have to deal with the long lasting affects of an event of this magnitude. If we go to war there will certainly be some sort of economical change that will have long lasting effects on the US economy. Who will have to deal with those effects, whether good or bad? Today's younger generation. When I walk around I see a disconnection from the outside world and they are living in their own little "bubble". Nothing bad can get inside that bubble and they have nothing to worry about.

I think one problem is that today's youth doesn't get much attention when they speak on such matters of politics and the economy. I can see valid reasoning in that. The majority of youthful Americans are very ignorant when it comes to such matters. One thing that is overlooked is, that ignorance will some day being running the country. Shouldn't more people pay attention to the future? If the youth is ignored and no one is trying to educate them, then the generations that live in the US will be progressivly more ignorant as time passed. It is this ignorance that frightens me. I do not want someone that lacks the basic knowledge of past political crisises running the country I live in. Sure history books can teach you the chronological order of major events that happened in the past. What about past events that aren't seen as major events? They can play just as big of a role as the major events. The future is in our hands and what we do with it will all depend on how much knowledge we will posess about past evenst.
:: American-N-Canada 11:10 PM [+] ::
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Girls

Disclaimer: Some of the entries that I write are way exagerated I appologize if some of the statements were offensive.

This is a topic that just about every teenage male has thought about at one time or another. Some of the worlds greatest have thoguht and thought on this matter and never got any closer to the truth on what actually goes on in the mind of a teenage feemale.If only one could figure out exactly what their motives are and tell the rest what is going on. If such a time ever came to pass, we would have women realing. They would no longer be able to play their sick little mind games on us and we would be able to enjoy relationships to the fullest. It make you wonder why they take so much enjoyment in the torture of young men. Do they do it for pleasure or do they just do it so we will never be able to get the upper hand? It is times like these when all the men should band together in the common cause of turning the tides.

It was one such attempt of mine that brought back some very interesting results. I thought and thought about what I could do to gain the upper hand just a little bit and I thought I had a solution. I meticulously planned my little mind game. I thought I had everything in place and there was no way I would fail. I even had my test subject picked out from the massive sea of single feamales that wanted my number. They were everywhere and I couldn't walk out the door without getting mobbed by at least ten females wanting to go out with me. That didn't stop them from trying to play mind games though. There was this paticular one that stood out. She played all kinds of cruel mind games trying to get my attentiopn and I really wanted to get back at her. So, one day I went out and sprung my well thought plan. I showed a little interest in her best friend. This worked well for a while andI thought it was going to work. She showed even more interest in me and yet I turned a cold shoulder. Then one day she stopped paying attention to me all together. I soon found myself trying to her attention. It wasn't supposed to work this way! I had though up the perfect plan. I had executed it perfectly. What had happened? Not only did she stop paying attention to me; all the other girls stopped also. I had been duped! They had all banded together to foil my genius plan and now I was the one left realing.

My only conclusion drawn from this is: women are the devil. Yes thats right. We fumble with our words when they grace our pressence. The whole time they are not really listening and their inner voice is say "I wonder what I can do to make them feel bad today so that they will see how much better we are and how hard we are to please." We do everything we can to foil their mind games, but they know that we will think its a mind game. They then in turn spring a mind game inside of a mind game! I say we should all band together and not allow such things to happen. Let all the men start play mind games inside mind games which are inside of mind games. We must band together to stop such trickery! Grab your helmets and army boots boys because its a war out there and men are on the loosing side.
:: American-N-Canada 5:07 PM [+] ::
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Winter Wonderland

Well, it is 19 degrees outside and the snow is pouring down. The weather men are predicting two feet of snow to fall today and added that to the existing snow; it would mean there will be two feet 4 inches of snow on the ground in the morning. This is a far cry from the occasional one to two inches at most that I would get in east Tennessee. It is snowing so hard that they actually canceled classes earlier today and that only happens once in about six years. I used to love the snow when it snowed only 4 times or so during a winter. Now it just gets on my nerves. What bugs me so much is that I have to walk in it to get to my classes. It gets into my boots and gets my socks all wet and I have to walk around with soggy feet all day. Snow isn't all fun and games either. You have to watch out when you are walking down the sidewalk. If you get caught off your guard for one second you are in trouble.

What am I talking about you say? What could be so dangerous about that white, powdery substance that falls from the sky? There is a fierce preditor that lurks in the snow these days and if you aren't careful you may fall prey to one of its malicious acts. You can be walking around a corner day dream and then WHAM! You covered head to toe in snow. You turn around to see you asailent and you see a small snowplow driving the other way. All you can do is grumble and continue that long trek to your destination. These are only adolesents. If you are walking beside the road, you have a chance in being turned into a snowman. If you are not careful, one of the massive adult snowplows will pile a mountain of snow on top of you and they will have to send out dogs to find under such an avalanche of snow. We also have a hybrid form of the snowplow in the area that can be even more dangerous then its cousins. A few years ago, a snowplow mated with a snowblower to form a very nasty beast. It has the properties of both and it goes twice the speed. Luckily they are isolated to this local area or else the government may have to spend billions on a extermination plan. The natives has learned from an early age how to deal with such dangers, but many outlanders have fallen pray to these creatures. Be very weary if you ever travel to the area.

:: American-N-Canada 2:07 PM [+] ::
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Greetings!

Welcome to Growth Spurt. I know a few people that have something that is similar to this and I thought it was a good idea. I plan on using this blog to inform people of current events are affecting me in today's world and how I feel about them. I also plan on using it to let people know whats going on in my life so that those that I know can have a little more information on my current projects and such. I am not planning on it turning into anything special, but we'll see what it turns out to be. Now for a little background information on who I am.

If I had to decribe myself with one word, it would be normal. I am just a normal seventeen year-old that is getting a little bit of a jump start on life. I come from a family of eight and I am the second oldest child. Being the second oldest is a tough job. All you younger siblings look up to the oldest, so you don't get to be their hero figure. You also have to deal with the times that your older sibling, in my case a brother, decides to unleash his wrath on you. Sure it is tough, but I am able to handle it and am very happy with my role in the family. My parents work very hard. It is not easy to raise six children in today's world and they have done a wonderful job. I really look up to my parents and they are my hero. I couldn't really ask for more in life(Well if I wanted to be stingy and spoiled, I guess I could).

I now am attending a small liberal arts college in south-eastern MA. I heard about this place and I saw that it allows highschool students to leave highschool early and start attending college. I naturally jumped at the chance because I found highschool in rural Tennesse to be very dull and I was very bored. I was well liked in highschool and was the resident "brain" that floated in all circles. I played Highschool soccer and all-in-all really enjoyed highschool. The problem was that I went to school to learn. I love to learn everything that I can and Highschool wasn't doing it for me so I left. I am taking a big risk comming here though. I don't have a highschool diploma so if I screw up; I am in deep trouble. This campus is very interesting. It is full of people that want to be different and they will do anything to stand out in a crowd. This will be the basis for many of my stories I am sure, so you may get a kick out of the mischief these people get into. Well, that is enough background for one day. I could go on for days just talking about my life and what I am doing. Sit back, pull up a chair, and enjoy your stay at Growth Spurt!

:: American-N-Canada 11:25 PM [+] ::
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