Does That Make Me Cra-zy~??

     Today, due to my complete lack of anything of interest to write about, I will be typing up a dream. Yes, I know it's odd my dreams have plots, but it's true. The following one was from Tuesday, and it is my personal favorite of this week.

     I'm at home, talking to my little brother A-ron in his room downstairs. For some reason we're talking about adventure, and how boring our lives had been lately.

"A-ron, have you ever noticed how exciting our lives were before we moved north? Ever since the move, nothing has happened to us."

"I know, right? Time seems to be, I don't know, smooshing this 'time period'-" which he said with his index and middle fingers bending, the sign for quotation marks."-Altogether, making it blend."

Just as I was about to change the subject to something a little sweeter, say cookies, I heard a BANG! From upstairs. Pretty soon I was running towards the stairs, then hesitating and changing direction to grab something, anything, to defend myself with. My Bokan! Perfect. I found it laying across my floor, fallen from the shelf I usually have it on. I turned around swiftly, before my mind could tell me to run and hide. Up the stairs I went, smacking my foot on the last step, turning into the kitchen and almost running into the island. Before I could orient myself with the bang, the ground started to shake. I had read somewhere that you should go into doorways when there is an earthquake, so back downstairs I ran. Or should I say tripped, fell, and overall tumbled.The ground was still shaking when I noticed A-ron a mere yard from where he previously was. He didn't seem to be doing anything but staring with dread on his face into the far corner of his room. I slowly turned to face the said corner, feeling like I was in a scary movie. Crazy maniac? Chainsaw guy?What in the world is in that corner? Only one way to know for sure. . .I looked, and in the place usually inhabited by my brother's dresser was a giant gaping hole. Not just any hole, this one was a large, skinny oval; it had cracks on the edges and what seemed like stairs going down. My first instinct was to run and get someone, my parents maybe, Indiana Jones would have been nice, but no. We were trapped in there. During the earthquake the door had been barred by something, and no amount of pushing and yelling, "We're in here! Get us out! Hello? Anyone?" would get us out. The only other option was down. I glanced at A-ron and met his eye.

"Looks like we got ourselves a little adventure, don't we A-ron?" So saying, I opened the cold storage door to find all of our camping stuff.

"Lucky that it happened in here, or we wouldn't have these supplies. Sakura, grab that flashlight! We need as many as we can get if we're going to survive down there."

"What do you think is down there? I bet it's some ancient catacomb or burial chamber."

"You know what that means, Sakura? That means there'll be treasure, or dead people. Possibly both."

" And if it's like any of you video games, a few zombies." I joked, assured that that wasn't one of the dangers we faced.

"You ready?"

"Yeah, just let me grab my bokan. I snagged it from my room before we were trapped down here."

We descended into the menacing abyss, turning back only to see a slab of rock slide over the top.

"Wait! How is that even possible?!?!?!" I yelled, all bravado gone from my voice. A-ron just shrugged.

"Like I said Sakura, adventure."

     When we finally got to the bottom of the stairs, there was a giant wall in from of us with writing carved all over it, in a language I could not identify. One was centered in the middle and was slightly larger than the others. It read: 

સાવચેત રહો. શું દો નથી નોકરો તેમના મુખ્ય જુઓ

We kept walking and found ourselves in a room with another large wall, only this time it seemed to be divided into rectangular slots, and in the center was a hand-indent. 

"Hey A-ron, try your hand in here. See if it fits." He gently touched it, his hand slightly to thick and to short to fit into the slot. I tried, and my hand fit perfectly. I almost expected something to happen, like open a previously unkown door or something, but all was still. 

"We've hit a dead end. Sorry bro, guess our adventure's over." 

Oh how very wrong I was. It was only the beginning.

TO BE CONTINUED

Waz Up??

Yo, this is a song that I loved at first, and now I'm positively addicted. ~<3

No, I'm not a Mormon...

     "It's not a Religion, its a relationship." ~My Mom
      Lately, me and TIbs have been discussing religion for some odd reason. I thought I'd blog about my church, since it seems to be so different from the LDS church.
     Every Sunday my family travels half an hour down to SLC with our dogs; we drop off Eowyn and Caden at my grandma's house and proceed to church, which is at 10:30. We start service by standing and singing lots of different songs.Once we sang nothing but 'Jesus' for about 20 minutes. I've noticed one of the main points of difference between our churches is that we don't sing hymns. We stand and dance and clap our hands, and lots of people cry out in tongues. It's really amazing when someone else stands and translates, but I'll get into that later.
     Oh goodness- I almost forgot. The church I go to is Salt Lake Christian Center, and I am Assembly of God. (If that doesn't mean anything to you, I'm a Christian that believes in the Bible and nothing more. I believe the Bible is whole and complete as is.)
     Anyway, we then go around and hug people we know, and introduce ourselves to new-comers. Another thing I've noticed that's different from LDS churches is that we are so diverse. If you look around you will see Navajo people, Indians(from India :D), Samoans, Philipianos, and many others. You also don't have to dress up. I believe that God accepts you as you are, and many people who go to our church cannot afford fancy clothes. We have 'hobos' at our church, black guys with low jeans and dreadlocks, white guys with tattoos up their arms, and little old people with bad attitudes. Diversity is the spice of life.
     After that we have a weekly update video, which usually features some kind of odd humor. (On Pastor's birthday, they gave him a handicap sign to put in his car.) And then a message from our beloved pastor, who often interrupts with a, "Tell your neighbor to wake up! I'm preaching some good stuff up here." And we end with more worship, which often includes people praying and dancing down at the altar; lots of people give their hearts to God. Kids church is also going on at this time, and me and my brother usually help out with the other teenagers, but my mom wants me to go to service since I'll be missing a lot for work over the summer. We have a store up at KidsCity (which is what kid's church is called) and we give out Bible-Bucks to those who behave and include others, and for those who bring their Bible, which they spend on stuffed animals, toys, and other odd items. We have a service up there that usually includes puppets, and we once celebrated Hanukkah, dreidels and all. We usually have a certain group of teenagers that helps with KidsCity, including my Philipiano friend Danica and her family, my Brazilian friend Larissa, and my white friend Thomas. Usually I don't dwell on ethnicity, but I feel it's good to mention culture because it gives background.
     Today there happened to be a five dollar lunch special, which featured left over food from a funeral. (Gotta love funeral potatoes!) Me and my siblings helped Marjean out with serving it up, then grabbed our own portions. I got to sit with all my friends and chat about unrelated stuff, which I definitely liked. And so ended the first half of my day. I will skip to when we went back to church at 5:00 for Mpact, for the sake of space.
     Mpact is kind of our equivelent of Girl Scouts. Except we don't have vests or anything, and we are a lot smaller. My class usually only has three or four girls, including me. Marjean is also our leader for Mpact, and my 'group' is called Girls Only. (Kind of an odd name, since all the other groups are also only for girls, except Rainbows.) The groups are decided on grades, and we have six groups, from preschool until you graduate High School. Then you can become a leader, if you so desire. The six groups are: Rainbows, Prims, Daisies, Stars, Friends, and Girls Only. I'm in Girls Only, and you get into that group when you are in 9th grade.
     What I really wanted to talk about is the Gathering. Every other Friday youth gathers together in the gym at our church, and we worship like no other. We also play volleyball and basketball, eat nachos and pizza bites, and witness using dance and skits. When we worship we dance and sing, and the instruments on stage include drums, bass, and an electric keyboard. We give it our all, and although it's rare, we sometimes speak in tongues. As it says in the Bible (Acts 2:4):
      ⁴ All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
      Speaking in tongues is a wonderful thing, where you let the Holy Spirit into your heart and you cry out in tongues of many nations.  When I first spoke in tongues, I found out later that I was speaking Philipiano, and I was completely awestruck. Then we have preformances from our fine arts group, and we also watch YouTube videos, such as this one:

Watch it! It's amazing...makes me feel loved :D. Anyway, that's all I have for today. Peace out!

Purple Streaks and a Yellow Dress

     Good evening to all, friends and enemies alike. The following is a random beginning, a story of immesurable proportions that you shall only see the beginning of. Read before you judge, and judge before you leave, because judgement makes the world go 'round.

     All who've known a crazy person know that to say 'no' is not an option. They also know that crazy people don't stop at 'crazy'. They go beyond all expectation, they even go beyond the expectation of expectation itself. The zaniest of them are locked up, but a good deal of them go under the radar, and cause mischief for all who know what they are looking for.
     Me, I wasn't sure what I was looking for until I found her; she was my drug, my opium, my sweet sweet relief from the pain of the broken. She came to me in yellow, for what other color would contrast so gayly with her remarkable hair? She came barefoot with a small black kitten in her arms, unheedful of the traffic around her, unruffled by the moped speeding towards her.
     I've always believed myself to be a gentleman, a hero, and a doer of good deeds. But faced with a small girl in danger, a kitten in her arms and an angry irishman on her heels, I honestly wanted to keep walking. I wanted to go home and forget all about this crazy incident, make some oolong and relax in front of a nice National Geographic. Two seconds later I was rushing into the middle of the street, telling myself that rushing into the middle of five o'clock traffic was normal, even sane; a swerve here, a honk there and I was through. I finally looked at the girl in yellow and decided she was much older than I'd thought. Of course I'd thought she was a young girl, with her strange outfit and her long, flowing, purple streaked hair. In actuality she was almost my age- her late teens at least. Her kitten was oddly calm, even purring. The girl was staring straight at it, her mouth moving over and over again in the same pattern. Skye. It would be days before I would figure the correct spelling, the 'e' on the end eluding my prior knowledge.
     She shifted slightly: her left arm moved up, deflecting my arm from grabbing hers- her right foot moving forward into a kick that I, her prospective hero, would've never expected. My training kicked in and I grabbed her foot, twisting it with a flick of my wrist. I stopped myself before I broke her knee with my other hand, and used the forward momentum to scoop her up by the waist and run the other way. The angry Irishman swore as he got cut off by another livid car and it's driver, mere feet from me and the girl. I kept running when I got to the other side, ducking behind Joe's Bar and Grill, stopping only when I hit a chain link fence. I dropped the girl and lifted up the spot I'd gone under countless times before, gesturing for her to go first.
     "Why are you helping me?" She asked, her deep blue eyes momentarily softening. I thought about that for a moment: why was I helping her?
     "Because I'm a sucker for kittens." My answer didn't seem to please her and her eyebrows furrowed for a moment before she ducked under the fence, getting mud on her elbows as she did so. On the other side she adjusted her hold on Skye, revealing a large silver locket against her merigold dress. She gave me a worried glance before saying: "I can walk on my own, thank you."
     I nodded before instinctively walking towards my secret place, my home away from home. Little did I know she'd never leave, she'd stay there enchanting the wild ferns. How was I supposed to know that I'd become completely and utterly dependant on her, to the point where I'd rather watch her stare out into the sky than be petted by my rich, loving step mother? That I'd spend the days whittling away while she stayed fair, her purple streaks growing darker and darker, her teeth longer and her mind sharper?  That before I knew it, I was old and weak while she was young and lithe.
     Her cat  would prowl and gave off a sickening mew before she swooped in and stole the life of anyone, of anything. She wasn't evil, I kept telling myself; she just needed life to live. Before I'd even realised it, I was that life.

First chair

 "Alright, next is..." Please not me, please not me, anyone but me... "Sakura"
      This is pretty much the norm for me, always picked at the worst possible moment. This particular moment happened a week ago, when we were doing the seating test for Orchestra and I'd completely forgotten to even go over the expected music. Usually before a test like this I practice something over and over and over the night before, but it just happened that I'd completely and utterly forgotten about the test in general. The piece Mrs. Tuke wanted us to play was only about 6-8 measures, but it was all slurred and there was about fifty accidentals, added to the fact that to play said accidentals I have to switch into like 2nd and a half position. (Not a real position, or something I'd ever done before) Suffice to say, it was challenging.
      Watching my stand partner play, I noticed she slipped in the middle and had to retry, but she did really good compared to some other orchestra students. The rest of the cellos also did really good. "Good job, my friend. The second time is the charm- or is it third? Anyway, you did amazing."
       As soon as Tuke said my name, I picked up my $2,500 instrument, placed my fingers boldly on the fingerboard, and began to slur the first four or five notes; I immediately chastised myself for playing the C#s flat, and rested a beat before beginning the next slur. I smiled a bit as I hit all the right notes, and let myself add a little bravado to the end. Bad idea. The bravado, small as it was, made me lose some essential mileage on my bow, making me hit the frog on my next slur. (Frog- the end of the bow. I didn't have enough space to hit all the notes using an up bow) After that I missed a another sharp, another flat (noticing as I did so that Tuke frowned slightly and wrote something on her paper.) and ended with a nice loud (and maybe a tad obnoxious) open D, my absolute favorite note to play. Well, only when it's in tune, and it was!
       After more dissection and thorough thought on the matter, I realized that I did horrible. I believe some of the eighth grade cellists did better than me, which is really sad. I also had an odd thought- why did I care so much? It really doesn't matter how well I'd done; I was almost sure I would get second or first chair, and both those positions are amazing. Why was I so worked up about this test? To this day I'm still not sure exactly, but for now I'll call it my overly competetive trait showing through a little bit.
      Mrs. Tuke is going to give us our new seats tomorrow, which is what brought on this entire blog post. Tomorrow I'll find out if I keep my position of first chair, or lose it to someone else. And I was also volunteered to play the cello for the french play Cinderella, or the french 3's version of it. And I'm working on my ensemble piece, Rosamunde. Which brings me to ask yet again: Why am I so focused on this tiny little seating chart test? Why, of all the millions of things I'm doing, am I fretting about something that happens to be completely irrelevant? Maybe it's a matter of pride; the first chair is always looked upon with a certain amount of cordial, and maybe even removed, respect. I want to showcase my hard work and my amazing cello,as well as sit in the very front of an orchestra I will soon be leaving. My Orchestra is like my family. Granted, it's a huge family, but we're still close and have fun playing together at concerts and even just in class. I want to be among the few, the chosen, to sit in the front and represent my section. Only time will tell if I get this privilege, or if it's passed on to another cello. 

Proteles Christata

     Also known as an aardwolf, this proteles christata is a little known cousin of the famous hyena. Hyena's are large, aggressive animals capable of taking on wilderbeasts and zebras, while the aardwolf is much smaller and depends on it's coloring and overall appearance to scare away predators. Both animals are placed in the Hyaenidae family, althoug the aardwolf is alone in the subfamily protelidae.
      The most interesting aspect of the aarwolf is that it feeds primarily on termites, with a few larvae and carrion in the mix. The 'aard' part of it's common name is taken from aardvark, on account of it's unusual diet. Aarwolves are nocturnal and 'hunt' at night, eating up to 200,000 termites per night. When hunting, the aardwolf takes special care not to destroy the termite mounds he eats from, ensuring that they will repopulate it, and thus ensuring a continual supply of food for the aardwolf.
      The aardwolf is usually found in brushland, or savannahs and has been reported to live on sparsely populated farmland. Most farmers treat them as useful, harmless animals, but it has been killed for it's fur. These animals live in dens hidden by bushes, and live in packs most like those of wolves. Aarwolves mate for life and often raise their children in dens that their parents used, though they tend to change dens every six weeks when not raising young aarwolves. Aarwolves are solitary when they hunt, creating the illusion that they are solitary 'lone wolves'.
   
     This animal caught my attention earlier today when I was googling random animals. It's odd how close it is to a hyena, yet how very different. My guess is that they have addapted to look like hyenas because of the hyena's reputation with other animals. Kind of like dressing like a big bad biker guy to scare away potential scam artists or pickpockets. I like this animal a lot, even though I've only read about and seen it. It just reminds me of a sweet, mini version of a wolf or a hyena, and I find myself automatically connecting with it. I usually blog about animals that are threatened with extinction, but this animal is totally free from the after effects of deforestation and other usual causes of indangerment. (Except for, of course, the threat of pesticides and poison on farms. Reminds me of peregrine falcons becoming endangered because of DDT.) I blogged about this animal purely because I wanted to, and to show people something they wouldn't see every day.

Zut! Mon Chien monge le devoirs. Si, au lieu...

     I've noticed lately that I like to borrow a lot of words from other languages. My favorites are French, Korean, and Japanese although I've been caught speaking Spanish and Portugese too. (You might even count Shakespearian! I have to memorize a quote from Romeo and Juliet) I love Romeo and Juliet purely because my name is Julia, or Julie. It makes for a lot of entertaining circumstances. Anyway, I've always called people mon ami, or my friend en Francais. (In French) I'm also watching a lot of animes (Japanese) so I'll randomly say Nii-chan or Onee-san. They both mean older brother, but there's about a million ways of saying it. The endings depend on multiple different situations, explained below. Although honorifics are an important part of Japanese, you don't record it when you are writing or typing someone's name. Here's some of the most common honorifics and their meanings:

San-(さん) Is the most common honorific, and its used between equals of almost any age. You would call your classmate Jessica-san, and a distant relative could also be addressed with it. If you use san with an animal name, it is the equivelant of Mrs or Mr and is deemed childish. For ex: usagi-san. (Mr. rabbit)

Sama-(様) The same as san, only more honorable. You might use this to address an elder, or a higher co-worker.

Chan-(ちゃん) Is an endearing honorific, and is mostly used for intimate relationships or teenage girls. It can also be used for a cute animal, but to use it on someone higher than you would be very disrespectful. Also, some girls drop the -ko at the end of their name and add -chan instead; for ex: Kanako becomes Kana-Chan.


Bō-(坊) Is the equivalent of chan, only it's used exclusively for boys and is much rarer.

Kun-(君) Is used to address under-classmen, or students. For teenagers to use this term is almost always disrespectful.

Senpai-(先輩) Is used to address those in higher grades than you, and is slightly less honorable than sama. You would never adress a teacher or a political figure by senpai. Also, it is pronounced sempai.

Sensei-(先生) Is the most honorable of honorifics, and is used to address teachers, politicians, and people who have reached a certain degree in an art. It's most commonly used in America to refer to the head of a dojo.

There's a lot of other honorifics, but I won't bore you by listing every single one. Now do you see why Japanese is so very difficult? I also have a wide vocabulary of Japanese words, but lets move on to Korean. The most prominent words I know is a sentence I learned at the Boys and Girls Club, from a Korean exchange student. 

바보 개 고물 사과나무 

It sounds like: Pabo mung-mungi bongu sagwa-namu. Or in English: Stupid dog pooped on an apple tree. Don't know why I know this exact sentence, but I do know that it's not fluent and it's literally stupid dog poop apple tree. 

      So if I randomly exclaim some odd sounding sentence, don't mind me- it's probably just a French swear word. Or if I call you some weird name, look it up later. (By the way I'm still just an étudiants, so if I screw up just let me know :D)