Why Midterms Suck...

Since I've been sitting on my butt in front of my computer for about.. three hours now doing homework relating to tests and essays and speeches and other fun things. I thought it was prime time to go on a rant about school.. and why it sucks for ever creating the notion that students need to be tested half way through the semester on what they know. Right now I know that I'm going to rip my hair out. However, if i put that on an exam i would probably fail. I want to meet the masochistic jerk who thought that all teachers shoveling tests and essays and speeches down our throat all in the same week was a good idea. Because right about now i'm pretty sure i would do very unspeakable things to him or her. How in the world do people expect us to not drown in all the work they are making us do in such a short period? I mean obviously were going to procrastinate and put it off until the last second and if your one of those people who do all their homework like three weeks before its due; i hate you. I wish I wasn't a procrastinator i really do, but how can you not be in college? There are so many more things that can be done besides homework. Like watching scary movies on halloween (which all my friends are currently doing while i'm holed up in my room like some sort of homework gremlin.) It would be so much better if I didn't live in some state of denial. Oh yeah you can get this homework done if you do it tomorrow.. or the next day.. .or the next day.. I'm pretty sure i'm going to start talking to myself pretty soon and then people will really think i've lost it. 

Another thing that really sucks is my whiteboard list. I swear it grows on its own accord, i'll be doing some homework, being productive and getting stuff done and when i finish i'll stand up and cheer and then remember that i have something else to do. So rather than been excited and throwing a party when i erase something off my list i grab my marker and write something else. What this basically has made me discover is that i need a bigger whiteboard because i could go on and on and on with my to do list. I remember when i was a little kid and i always dreamed of being a big kid and do lots of homework and being responsible. Well now i've officially determined i was crazy for wanting that and curse the day my little lips ever wished for it. At this very moment I am really excited that in a few sentences i'm going to end this and erase 'BLOG POST' from my whiteboard.. hopefully i wont have to add anything else because space is tight guys and thats no joke. Midterms were probably the worst thing ever invented and i'm just thinking that two months i'll probably be thinking the same thing about final exams.. oh joy. 

Not for Women

Lately I've been hearing rumors about a certain soda that had presented a new advertising tactic. However, I did not believe it until this sunday when I was obliviously watching the football game and an add popped up in the bottom of the screen. "Dr Pepper 10-Not for Women." I don't know about you but I think this is seriously offending. I mean seriously, how stupid can you get? How can Dr. Pepper believe that advertising such a sexist soda could possibly go over well with the general public. Especially with all the laws America has these days preventing just that sort of thing. Quite honestly I'm surprised they haven't gotten their butts sued yet. If someone can sue over a spilled cup of hot coffee I'm pretty sure they can take someone to court over a very sexist soda advertisement. Did Dr. Pepper have a death wish here? I don't even like the drink very much (23 flavors my butt, it tastes like cherry coke) but I would still drink it but after their little stunt going on now I'm certainly thinking about boycotting it. Women all over America are pissed and it's not just them. Men aren't happy either.

Since the commercials first started airing at the beginning of October the perception ratings of Dr. Pepper have decreased detrimentally and not just from women although their ratings went from 32.9 to 18.4 (which if you didn't notice is almost a 50% decrease.) Men aren't taking to kindly to the sexist advertisements either their ratings went from 21.5 to 16.4 and this was all on the same day the advertisement premiered. I'm pretty sure as the word was further spread the ratings have probably dropped more. Now of course some people get the 'joke' and say Dr. Pepper is just poking fun. Of course that's what the company itself is saying to. They said before the advertisement even aired they tested it on the two different genders and said they reacted well to it although that seems unlikely now. On the Dr. Pepper's facebook page a few commenters also agreed it was all just fun and games and women would either drink it anyways or drink it just to prove the commercial wrong. Either way it appears to me that the majority of the world is unhappy with this new advertising tactic the suicidal company had come up with and something tells me soon it'll be Dr. Pepper 10 - Not for Sale.

Can I get a PIN?

has anyone ever lost a really important password? Like the password to your computer or a website you hardly check but is still maddeningly important? Thats what I did tonight, well actually it was my mom, yeah I'm going to blame it on her. I'm a teenager, nothing is my fault yet. Anyway, so there is this silly little process getting in the way of my paying for college. And that silly something is affectionately referred to as 'loan counseling' cant you hear the angels singing? No, good cause I can't either. For those who are involved with FAFSA and are receiving loans that will sooner rather than later bury you in the ground you know what I'm talking about. For those of you who don't know loan counseling is the schools way of informing us that sooner rather than later we will get buried under a pile of bills, and then we get to answer questions based on that fun fact, yay! Not really, so anyway since our full school payment is due in around two days I decided i better get my butt in gear and do some fun loan counseling so I don't end up an educationless hobo. So I get to this site and I click the giant neon green SIGN IN button and go about my business. Until that is, I get to this lovely little box that says 'PIN.' Now usually this wouldn't pose a problem if I knew the PIN number in which this little box wanted. Unfortunately, I didn't know this "PIN" and thats where my problems began.

So naturally I called my mother and was like "yo, what be my pin?" and of course she was like "oh sweet child your pin is etc etc etc." But who are we kidding? My mom knew the pin just as well as I know where I leave my cell phone every morning (good thing my roommate always tells me where it is.) Not to be deterred I was like "no big deal mom" and I click this helpful looking 'recover pin' button and go on my merry way. Little did I know I just ejected myself into a chaotic mess of numbers, dates, questions, and the stupidity of forgetting a pin. First I tried to reapply for my pin and that didn't work because of some silly security question (yelling MY MOTHERS MAIDEN NAME IS JAR@#$@SKI at the computer for five minutes didn't help.) So I decided to try something new, aha I said to myself all excited, i clicked the 'apply for a new pin' button like I'm some sort of genius. So I type in my information and click submit and this stupid error message comes up saying that I've already entered that information and they have a pin on record for me. So I click next and get to the same security question, not helpful. At this point in my conversation with my mom I'm swearing left and right and I'm pretty sure if she was next to me I'd have a bar of soap in my mouth. My dad is yelling because he's watching a TV show and he wants to unpause it. My mom is yelling because he's yelling and I think I heard my dogs bark in there somewhere. My life has unfolded into chaos over a four digit number. So I take a calming breath and release my mother from her pin hunting duties say goodnight to my raging father and return to the quest all by myself. I go in to apply for a new pin again and this time I don't request the PIN I want and let fate spin out of control and push submit. After that I get an email notifying me where my PIN is (answer a security question correctly) and get my PIN! Excitedly I go back to where I insert my PIN to successfully complete my loan counseling so I insert all the information and wait for the page to load... but the only thing I get is something saying my PIN is not yet verified and to come back in 48-72 hours. I hate PINs... 

To change a culture...

anyone ever see the movie the invention of lying? If you haven't it's basically about a society of people that never ever lie. However, eventually one person discovers the awesome power of lying. The best part about one person in the world lying when everyone else tells the truth is that everyone believes you. At one point in the movie this guy goes to the bank and even though he has absolutely no money in his account he tells them he has 300 dollars and instantly its there. Anyways this is not the basis of my newest blog post although it is somewhat related. Has anyone ever thought of what it would take to change the culture of america? To wipe out one ideal everyone abides by and completely change it? If it was even possible? 

Think about it, what if tomorrow the government made a new law that made everyone have to tell the truth all the time. Do you think people would actually listen to it? Probably not, unless we had some weird brain implants that made it so the government could hear our every word and thoughts, oh wait thats the cell phone... just kidding. Anyway, lying is so embedded into american culture i think it would be nearly impossible to make people stop doing it altogether. Even things that we dont really consider lies, like telling someone they look great in an outfit when really they look like a wrapped sausage, would be deemed illegal. But if you think about it these lies are really considered social norms and used as methods of politeness. So if you tell your wrapped sausage friend whats on your mind thats considered rude and improper, but lying is technically frowned down upon as well. Its a very convoluted  system we run around here. But to program that out of peoples brains seems nearly impossible. It would take generations upon generations just for people to forget that they ever lied in the first place. And then there might always be that one person who discovered the beauty of lying again that would mess up the whole system once more. 

Obesity linked to stupidity?

Not to long ago I was relaxing on my futon in my dorm room watching t.v and munching on a bowl of cereal. I so happened to have on TLC and was watching a documentary on the worlds largest dad, or something like that. This man weighed almost 1000 pounds! However, this is not the subject of my newest blog post. Before the show changed to a commercial it spewed one of the most disturbing statistics I have ever heard in my entire life. Are you ready for this? Here we go: "Last year Americans spent more money on fast food than they did on higher education." Lets let that sink in for a second..... okay. Any college students who may be reading this, do you know how much you or your parents are spending on college a year? UW-Stout's tuition is around 14,000 dollars a year, thats a lot of money out of pocket for your education. Now lets say there are around 10,000 students that go to this college all paying that tuition. That comes to around 140,000,000 dollars. Now if there are 26 campuses in wisconsin(lets say there are the same amount of students paying the same tuition) that would come to 3,640,000,000. That is a lot of money on higher education and that's just in wisconsin, don't even ask me to to calculate all the states combined together you can do that yourself. Can you believe that americans spend more than 49 x 3,640,000,000 dollars on fast food a year. No wonder why everyone is so fat!

Now don't get me wrong I'm not really calling fat people stupid but think of how the frequent fast food goers money could be better used rather than on a hamburger. If everyone pushes higher education on the new generations of teenagers getting ready to leave college how can we justify spending more money on something as stupid and gross as fast food. No wonder why America is considered the most obese country. Does Japan even have fast food? Their smart and skinny! I think this is saying something. America needs to get rid of all their fast food, eat rice, only have two kids, and get smarts shoved down their throats... Alright maybe nothing that extreme. I'm just saying this statistic is a little ridiculous, can we work on this america?