Where would i rather be: Culture shock and the things that come with...

So I know this is supposed to be persuasive yeah? but I mean...you gotta start from 'A' to get to 'Z' aye?
 ...

So I have always envied you Americans. Honestly! I grew up with the knowledge that you guys were so perfect…and safe. I had always dreamt that one day I would come to the United States…even if it was for trafficking (Oh geez! God forbid. I’m just kidding). But now that I’m here, I don’t know…it doesn’t feel like a dream come true. It doesn’t feel like that wish at the top of my wish list has come to pass. I don’t feel like I have accomplished a life-long dream. I just feel…lost and alone.

My country has never been the safest place to reside. No matter the direction you run, there is always danger coming behind you and then when you think you have found a safe place and finally decide to settle down, you realize that you may have just made the worst decision of your life. Still, I never left. It’s not like I didn’t want to, I just never had the chance to. When I finally became old enough to travel, I had to go to school…High School. Wait hold up! High school???I mean Boarding School, run by Sisters! What we know to be Gaol (what you call prison here), and then I go “Why did Britain have to colonize us?” They school system was so mean. They made us girls cut our hair…gave us metal buckets to use and my oh my…there was nothing like you can call the police if you feel your parent is maltreating you. In my country, if you have done something stupid and an elder person or your parent decides to flog you to correct you (which they will), if you call the police for something like that, I can bet you on my dog that the police will not just collect the cane from your parent flogging you, he will assist your parent to flog you. So you can imagine how many times we were flogged.

The bullies in my boarding school were almost unbelievable. If you think I’m exaggerating, watch my bruh back me up. Boarding school is not a joke!

 Now, I’m not saying we were maltreated, we were just disciplined. And I can only say that now because I have passed the age of doing stupid things so Glory be to God, my parents don’t flog me anymore (I hope). But even if you were not flogged, you were given punishments that were paralyzing. You would be in a position for hours and you may be bawling your heart out. Nobody cares. That is why children of nowadays are so lucky. When children who were disciplined the hard way grow up to be parents, they try to make it easier for their own children to the point that these children become so spoiled. They don’t want to discipline them because they are afraid. So the number of undisciplined children who roam around like free-range chickens has drastically increased.

(to be continued again =)

I could write a book about this.
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I kinda miss being the only girl...

Once upon a time, hour after hour day after day I would wish I were the only child; and even if not the only one. I wished my parents had stopped at me. I would ask my mom why she wasn’t happy with just my elder brother and me, why she needed to get three more. “They are just so annoying” I would always say.

I can’t remember when last my brother and I laughed over the same issue. I’m not even sure it ever happened. Right from my birth, only one of the two of us was entitled to the first and last laugh. He was either laughing and I was crying or I was the one laughing and he was crying which I can tell you didn’t happen very often. However, sitting now and talking about the things we did when we were younger was definitely worth both our laughter. He was two years older than me (he still is) but I always wanted to do what he was doing which annoyed him more than anything. We argued over anything and everything. For two good years, I was the cat and he was the dog and I was just okay with that until another dog came along. My struggle hadn’t even begun until the third boy came. At this point, my misery was at its peak. They became a group. They did everything together leaving me to wallow in my loneliness and gloom.

“Boy to boy--girl to girl.” This was the rule they lived by. This was what they said to me anytime I wanted to play with them. They interpreted this to mean whenever a boy owns something, only boys will partake from it and whenever a girl owns something, only girls will partake from it. They were very aware that I was the only girl and so they made this up to keep me from doing anything with them. It was at this period I became “Daddy’s girl.” I never had anything to do or play with so I always stayed with my dad. He was the one who I played with. Day and night, my brothers teased me with this. It was never so horrible when one person said it, but when the three of them came together to mock me, then it was like hell.

The only thing that kept me strong was the fact that I knew their weakness. I had always been the talkative. I could ask for anything through any means and I didn’t take no for an answer. This was my strong point. They couldn’t ask dad for anything because they were always afraid he would say no so it wasn’t until they began to see that anything I asked for, dad gave me without hesitation that they began to think twice before doing things. Ha-ha! This was the best part of my childhood. They actually calmed down. They would reluctantly beg me when I had stuff saying things like “Don’t you know you are the best sister any boy can ever ask for?” or “I can never ask for any other sister other than you.” Sometimes, if I make them beg me for a long period of time, when I finally give in and give them what they want, they would get mad and change to their normal selves where they would then say things like “With her mighty head! Who is begging you?” or “I’m not saying any thank you! Go and tell the world!”

                                                                                                            (To be continued)

At the end of the day, grades really don't matter

…and not just high school students who are looking to go to college, even us (college students). We need to realize that our grades may matter to an extent but in the long run, they are really not what makes us successful or smart. When we get into a class in school, it is very difficult for us to be calm, relax and allow what we are being taught sink in and be understood. There is always that pressure of the grade and how much it will or will not affect our GPA (Kevin 1).

When we are over-concerned about our grades, we allow the purpose of going to school and getting an education escape us; we allow it elude us. Lauren S., a student in The King’s College states in “Why Grades Don’t Really Matter That Much” that in the “real world,” a college education or degree is often cited by the community as a prerequisite for a “good job” (both terms which he hates) and I can agree that as a result of this coupled with their new understanding of the importance of college, “students get wrapped up in their grades, often taking them as value statements on their own self-worth” (Schuhmacher 2)

The truth is, other than missing the real point of learning, believing that our grades are the only foundation for our future thus making us over-strive for a perfect 4.0 GPA is just downright stressful for us students. If schools were established only with the intention of graduating students with a 4.0 GPA, I for one wouldn’t even bother. What’s the use of going to an institution with hundreds of other people who are just as good as robots, having only four items on their to-do list every day? Go to class, eat, study, and sleep… The fun of college (or high school) is sucked away from it. The joy of meeting new people each day is gone and our social life as students suffers. We become prisoners of our own selves.

There are many examples of multi- millionaires today who didn’t pay much attention to their school work and did many things on the side. Look at the Cowie brothers Mike Cowie and Mark Cowie who didn’t see any point of a school curriculum and emerged from high school with C-pluses and a few Bs. They are now among Canada’s most successful commercial real-estate brokers, making millions of dollars. We talk about Winston Churchill who was famously at the bottom of his class at Harrow, Richard Branson who left school to run a newspaper he founded, Senator John McCain, and even President George W. Bush who was a solid C student in his first year at Yale. See who they became—making history. “A growing body of evidence suggests grades don’t predict success — C+ students are the ones who end up running the world.” (Sarah Scott)

We need to understand and recognize that there we could just as well go to prison if we were looking for a place to be so anti-social and serious. We wouldn’t go to school if we didn’t want to come out of our shells; we wouldn’t go to school if we didn’t want to experience what life is like outside of home; we wouldn’t go to school if we didn’t want to meet different people of different cultures so now that we did go to school (or we are going to school) we just need to know that grades aren’t the point of school; learning is.

What do I like to do?

          In the middle of almost every first couple of conversations with someone new if I’m right, someone almost always goes

                                           "So...what do you like to do?"
This could be at your free or spare time or generally just anytime, and as unusual as this sounds, I usually don't know what to say for the first few seconds maybe even minutes. "What do you mean by you usually don't know what to say" you ask?    What I mean is, I do lots of things in my spare time. I also do lots of things even when it’s not my spare time. However, the fact that I let these things take up my time does not necessarily mean I enjoy doing them. So whenever (and by whenever, I mean almost every time) I say “Oh! I watch movies now and then,” I never really answer the question, because honestly, I can’t stand watching a movie or being asked to watch a movie for an assignment or for an evaluation or something official, yet I watch movies all the time. This is because when I watch movies during my free time, I have the liberty and audacity to divide my attention between the movie and something else. I am allowed to sleep through half the movie without worrying that I might lose track of the message trying to be passed, because I was not watching the movie to gain something from it; I was watching it to burn time.

On the other hand, if I have to watch a movie to write a summary about it or discuss it in class or to a group. It takes me an unnecessarily long period of time because it gets difficult to focus on something you don’t enjoy doing.
I was really tempted to say because it gets difficult to focus on something you couldn’t really care less about, but I do care much about my grade so that’s a no-no.
Other than watching movies nevertheless, I play games, but I get tired of it as soon as I start; I eat, which I only do because I like to keep my mouth busy when I’m watching a movie; I also read; I can attempt to draw once in a blue moon, I clean my room etc. All these things, I’ve done so much that every time I do them now, I get this horrible been there…done that…déja-vu feeling. And it is because of this feeling that I dreaded the Spring break. I couldn’t bear to imagine seven whole days with absolutely nothing to do and nowhere to go (which was not a surprise considering the fact that I was in the all famous Joplin) such that I twitched anytime I heard the words “I just can’t wait for Spring Break.”

          

The Spring Break is over now anyway but if I was offered another week-off, I’d have to be drunk to turn that down (and that’s just an expression, I’m not old enough to drink), because even in my sleep I wouldn’t. It was in the course of this seven days I realized I enjoyed dancing. And I don’t mean moving my hips or nodding my head like all of us popular dancers know how to do. I mean moving to the beat popping and locking hip-hop music dancing. I didn’t even know I had this passion until I started having sleepless nights. Dancing kept me awake. I would be up late into the morning thinking about new dance moves to try and choreographies to give a shot. I had so much time dancing that it was all I thought about for a week, all I did, and for once I was actually very happy, looking forward to every new day that came.

So there it is. That’s what I like to do. It’s definitely going to take me a while to incorporate it into my sentences and get rid of my monotonous “Oh! I watch movies now and then,” but it’s definitely worth the try. A little bird (Yes! That same nosey little bird that never minds his business and always tells our professors to give us pop-quizzes) deceived me and told me ‘A’ for ‘Effort’ because he thought I wasn’t listening when my elementary teacher was teaching us that ‘Ef-fort’ begins with an ‘F’...or is it an 'E'.
(I know right? What a silly way to end a blog)