Badminton Tournament

Okay, so we had another badminton tournament. It was out-of-town, only by fifteen minutes though. It was purely doubles and the girls went to one school while the boys went to another. Both of us got second place.
And something really funny happened. It's one of those things where you probably had to be there to truly appreciate how funny it was, but the people I've told who weren't there found it at least kind of amusing.
So me and my partner were playing this team and we knew that they hadn't lost yet. It was pretty early in the tournament, but that was still a big deal. So these people were both really happy and hyper (as people on a winning streak often are) and the match started out in their favour. They won the serve and got... I think four points on us or something like that. Then it was my serve.
Apparently my serves are very intimidating to recieve. What I do is that I stand there, ready to serve, adjusting my hold and flexing my fingers on my racket and glaring at different spots on the court, looking for my opponents weak points. Whether they're trying to cover up a back hand or if they're too far back I notice and use it to my advantage, not only in the serve but in the game as well. I usually do this for about ten seconds, and that may not seem like much, but with the pressure of your parents and half your team and your coach and the other team watching you, it seems really long 'cause not returning a serve is like fumbling the perfect rebound shot in hockey or basketball.
I honestly didn't really realize I was doing this until my coach commented on my excellent serving strategy. I mean, I look for weak points on purpose, but he told me that it was genius because I was freaking out the other player. People never react to them well. Of course, I'm aiming for what I think is their weakest point, so they can rarely return it well. What I didn't realize is that ebcause I was tkaing so long and giving their position and court the "death stare" I was causing the other player to:
-Loose confidence
-become intimidated
-Miss it because they've stopped paying attention
-Get out of their ready position
-Get annoyed and try to smash it even though it isn't a lift and hit the net
-Just plain old not hit it because I'm good at getting it barely past the service line
- And if nothing else they lift it and my partner smashes it or otherwise hits a good shot back at them. She's really good at stuff like that, so we're a good team.
So after I realized that I was accidentally intimidating the krap out of the opponent I took a second to look one of them in the eyes before I served it to them and was surprised to see an expression displaying something close to fear. It was kind of weird, I almsot felt bad, but I remembered we were trying to scare them so we could win.
Other teams in the tournament, just didn't say anything about the serves or left, definitely showing signs of being motivated to work on their serves. One team even complimented me several times, during and after the match on my serve.
This team we played though didn't take it that well.
Everytime I served, one girl on the opposite team would get SO impatient. She usally ended up dropping her racket (not literally, this just means she's not standing in her ready position), stomping her foot and yelling at me to hurry up. So of course as soon as she did that, I served it and she either missed it or hit it really horribly. Several times she almost stormed off the court she was so mad. Not to mention she asked me "politely" to hurry up with the serve. I "politely" reminded her that I technically had thirty seconds.
Constantly she would complain about how unfair it was, but my partner reminded her that she also had the right to a thirty second serve, but she, nor her partner decided to take it.
We ended up winning by two points. I felt really bad for making her so upset (you should have seen her, she was about to hit me over the head with her racket) but I had my right to the way I served. In fact I was only usually using a third of the time I was allowed to.
So we shook hands and she tried to crush my hand, but being mormon I was just flat-out a better handshaker than her and she failed miserably. So I apologized to her, not wanting her mad at me. I didn't realize how angry she was until later on because people usually try to get me to hurry up or try to distract me while I'm serving so I've trained myself not to look at them unless completely necissary.
So as soon as we finished she stormed up to the officials and her coach and started ranting on-and-on about how horrible I was, that I was cheating and stated plainly that her goal was to get me disqualified. Of course I had followed her to make sure she told the score keeper the right score because she was so mad I didn't know what she might have done.
My partner (behind really protective of her friends) was about to punch her and was fuming about it for the rest of the tournament. I just felt bad, I swear I was about to cry I was so sorry I had made her so upset. I wasn't sorry I had taken so long to serve(I -along with her- had a right to serve like that) it just bugs me when people are upset, especially when it's caused by me.
So her coach was trying to calm her down, not completely sure of the facts and whether or not I had been taking as long as she was saying. By the way she was swearing that I had taken over thirty seconds, which was ridiculous. Over twenty witnesses said that I had not even come closeto that. My coach talked to her coach, telling him that I rarely took more than ten seconds and they both agreed that she was being unreasonable and that I was not to blame, nor was I in line for any punishment.
All the people who were watching and had unbiased opinions knew that she was being an idiot. Getting so upset about something like that is like getting upset at somebody for smashing it because it's hard to return. Guess what? That's the point. We want to do stuff that makes it hard for the other team to return it, without that competitive badminton wouldn't exist.
She was just trying to justify why she was loosing and make it my fault. It took me a really long time to realize that, but yeah, she was just blaming me for making her loose. Of course that's the stupidest thing ever, because your opponent is trying to make you loose. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
To sum it all up, she was getting mad at me because something I (her opponenant) caused her to loose. Oh yeah, that's a such a huge injsutice when playing a sport.
Most of the people watching thought it was hilarious. It kind of reminds me of when I was a kid and my sister and I were doing something and she ended up winning and I got mad at her, complaining that she was "winning on purpose". My team and coach were especially amused. My coach was almost crying he thought it was so funny. At the time I thought they were being mean. She was really upset about it, but looking back I have to admit it was pretty funny.
She thought she had been the victim of some horrible injustice and the entire time refused to accept that she was not. The officials told her she was being unreasonable and to take a seat and calm down or else she would get kicked out. At this she finally shut-up, well kinda. She spent the entire rest of the tournament trying to make me mess up on serves. She would sit on the side lines with as many of her teamates and family members as she could and never failed to point me out whenever and wherever I was was serving. Once I messed up and she laughed hysterically, trying to make me feel bad. I was hardly even paying attention to her though, I'm good at tuning out stuff like that. Although after a while it got annoying and I was about to tell somebody about it because what she was doing was definetly very worthy of being disqualified.
After a while I stopped feeling guilty and accepted that an hour after the match it was no longer my fault that she was so upset.
So anyways, her school ended up winning the tournament. I have to admit that as a whole they were pretty good. The winners got T-shirts and nobody else got anything.
Afterwords my partner and I were sitting on a bench in the playground at the school holding the tournament and she walked by. She stopped to smugly inform us that her school had won the tournament and I calmly replied "Yeah, okay, I hope you have fun with that T-shirt,"
She was trying to make me jealous or something I think, but I'm not really the jealous type, so it didn't work.
My partner was absolutely furious and I actually had to grab her arm to silently remind her that her superb sucker-punch was for self defense purposes only. She admitted later that she was just glad I had come up with a good come back.
Other than feeling sad that somebody was having such a horrible time and I was to blame, I was just glad that I had a partner I enjoyed and that we both played well and got our school a good amount of wins. In fact I think we only lost three out of our fifteen matches, so nothing to be ashamed of.

Difficult Story and Career.

Gosh this is hard! I've discovered something recently and that is that I am not a depressed person. I never have been, and never could be. It's impossible for me to truly be upset about anything for more than two minutes and even though I understand the horrible things going on in the world I can't fathom myself not believe what I always have. I've always been of an opinion that all-in-all the universe is a decent place and that the potential for good is greater that the potential for bad.
You cna call me naive if you want, but as far as I'm concerned that's not the case.
That is why I am struggling so deeply with this story I'm writing. It's called 'The Unknown Artist' and it's about a 13 year old girl with the worst of circumstances imaginable for modern North America. I won't go into details, but basically her mom died when she was eight and since she's been holding together her household while her father abuses her regularily. He leaves her siblings along however (they don't even know about it) and poses their family kind of as the modern day Brady Bunch.
This 13 year old girl is the angriest, most depressed and self-isolating person known to man and although I'm pretty sure I'm pulling it off, writing through the first person perspective of such a person is very difficult for me.
I'm doing this because I've been having some difficulty creating characters for my stories that don't resemble myself majorly. It's not noticable, but I need to be able to convincingly write through the perspective of some one much unlike myself and this is how I'm going about it.
In the end the story is happy. She finds an old notebook under her bed while attempting to kill herself and ends up calming herself down by sketching her heart out in the pre-used notebook.

And at school before Easter Break we took a career test. This was the first one I've ever taken and I answered it as honestly as I could. The end result was that we got fourty different jobs listed in order of which ones you were most likely to suceed at. To my surprise over half of the results were different kinds of doctors. Other than find out what kind of doctor each of them was (there are some weird kind of doctors with weird names out there) I didn't pay much attention to any of them.
The reason this surprised me so much was becuase I had meantioned not really wanting to work constantly with people, not caring about being involved with medicine, not caring about making much money and not wanting to live in the city.
Apparently I have the determination, people skills, lack of comfort zone, ability to keep cool under pressure and intelligence to be pretty much any kind of doctor I want to be.
At first I wasn't even considering this. Being a doctor involved too much schooling for a lot of money that I don't care about getting and a little too much everyday chaos for me to find it an enjoyable life path.
Lately though, I've been thinking about one of the types of Doctors it suggested. A Naturopath.
A naturopath is basically a modern day medicine man (woman). Instead of convering up symptoms with drugs and surgery, a naturpath finds the problem and solves it using all-naturl means. The crazy thing is, is that this works amazingly, although it's a little on the expensive side and still viewed as kind of urban mythology. It'll probably begin to become more popular and accepted along with the whole enviromental thing.
Targetting the problem instead of temporarily covering up the symptoms is something I believe in strongly.
Even since I developed a temporary and mild depedancy to ecinatia (sorry, don't know how to spell that) I've hardly ever taken any pills or medicine for anything. When I have a headache, instead of taking an advil I eat and apple and take a nap or meditate.
ever since I've been getting sick half as much and my migranes have turned into mere light headaches.
Suddenly, in the past week or so, the idea of dedicating my life to helping people become healthy the right way just kinda almost seems like something I might consider. Although I did spend six months of my life convinced I was gunna be a firefighter (which I still think would be cool) so I'm not sure if this is leggite this time.
Of course, I'm always going to be a writer no matter what. Even if I have to make like Mary Higgins-Clark and get up at four o'clock in the morning to write for two hours before getting ready for the day and driving my kids to school becaus eI don't have any other time I can do it at because I'm juggling two dead-end jobs because my husband died then so be it. My love of and dedication to writing are only rivalled by my religion.

As intense as that may sound, I think having one or two things that you care deeply about is good.
As much as I love Weezer, I don't wnat to end up like them.

(In case you didn't know, Weezer is a 90's alternative rock band which is known for being built up by those nerds you knew in hoghschool who hung out in their garage all day, not doing anything until somebody handed them a guitar and they just kinda rolled with it)
If you need more of an understanding listen to the songs 'In the garage' and " dreamin' "

Ask a Mormon #2

I think it's about time I do another one of these.

Why are you called Mormons? The name Mormon is an unofficial name that both member and non-member people have been caling us for I don't even know how long. I'm pretty sure it was a misunderstanding of the title "Book of Mormon". People must have thought it was a book written to explain the church, not the other way around. The church is based on the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon was composed somewhere around 400 A.D. and the Church was built upon the finding of it by Joseph Smith under the direction of the angel Moroni.
The reason the Book of Mormon is called what it is, is becuase it was composed mostly by a Man named Mormon who lived obviously around the time the book was created. He wrote very little of it though, in fact only 20 pages were written by him. What he did, is that he took multiple, ancient scrolls from times before and after the birth and resurrection of Christ and assembled them so that only the important parts were contained in the book. He mentions several times in the parts that he wrote that he was solely under the direction of God.
He ended up dying before the book's completion and his son Moroni finished it and added his own words to the end of it. He named it after his Father, probably a mixture of honouring his memory and acknowledging that he did most of it in the first place.

How can you stand to live like that? Yes, it's true, Mormons do have a fair number of rules we are oblidged to live by. Some think this is brain washing, but they don't understand that every single one of us has the choice to quit anytime we'd like. That (I think) is what is so amazing about our church. Yeah, sure it's hard sometimes, but even though we're in no way being forced to follow Gods comandments most of us still do.
I'd also like to throw in that God doesn't randomly put restrictions on us because he thinks it's funny or something. There are reasons why. The Word of Wisdom for example tells us not to smoke, drink coffee or tea or do anything else that is unhealthy for us. Although we are not being forced to abide by these rules, we understand that everything we're not supposed to do will keep us healthy.
Oh yeah, and I can live like this because I know it's right. Nothing in the world could prove to me otherwise and I know for a fact that being a part of this church has blessed me deeply. To be honest with you, if I hadn't been taught to live by the rules of Mormonism I'd be one messed up kid.
Some say that plenty fo kids grow up just fine without those rules and restrictions. They live and learn. I'd like anybody with that view to take a look at a good mormon and compare them to just another random person.
If you could compare me to one of my friends you'd notice that I'm probably happier, more patient, more selfless, more determined, more understanding and whole bunch of other things.
Although I am just one person, it could just be chance that I have abided by the rules of the church my entire life and that I'm probably the most content person you'll ever meet, but hey, I'm only one person.
Besides, I'd rather learn and then live than live and learn.

Badminton Tournament.

Okay, there was a Worldwide Conference yesterday and Saturday. I'll have my thoughts on it soon, but I only have a few minutes here so I'll write on a less expandable subject.
Last Saturday our school hosted a badminton tournament. I was in girls doubles and me and my partner only made it to the quarter finals. This was because she only showed up to half the practices because she's also in choir and we had just started playing together for a week (two practices).
She's not that good and by the end of the round robin games I was so frustrated with her that I wasn't even bothering with trying to hit any difficult shots. So yeah, by the end I'd say it was half my fault. Plus she managed to stay positive the entire time since she was just pleased to even be on the team. So I'd have to say she was the better woman in the situation.
The coach saw how horribley we were working with each other and put us with other people. Thank heavens. Now I'm with my friend who I play really well with (and vice versa) so I'm looking forward to the next tournament.