Freshman year: A time when I had a fear of teachers and upperclassmen. I was overwhelmed by faces I didn’t recognize and friends that I didn’t know yet. I tried out for my first play and got in. Drama became a huge part of my life and the people I met because of Drama would become my friends forever. I worked really hard on my homework and found school to be a breeze. I excelled in everything I tried to do and ended the semester taking journalism.

Sophomore year: A time when I wanted to get on everybody’s good side. I knew a lot of upperclassmen from plays. I added newspaper to my schedule at the very last minute (just the day before school started). I started out on the newspaper staff and right off the bat I’m given the title of an editor–something that usually doesn’t happen to sophomores. I continue my involvement in drama and make it to All-State….twice. This is also the year when we all discovered that Mr. Hildreth would no longer serve as a drama teacher. Everyone involved in drama worried about the future of the department. I continued in newspaper, becoming the number one staff member in the class. At the end of the year I was awarded co-editor in chief with Bea Rendon

Junior Year: Newspaper took over my life. I started working at Carlos O’Kelly’s and was in the fall play. My workload went on overload and I tried my hardest to keep my grades up. That didn’t work out so well. My perfect GPA went on a decline. The newspaper looked good….most issues. And it ended receiving a gallup award. That was cool.

Senior year: It’s all a blur.

Today: Is the beginning.

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“I just got a call from Danielle from church. Becky had been missing for about two hours. She committed suicide…” my dad told us.

Just the thought of death is something I don’t wish to talk about but the fact that someone I knew, someone close to me had left me for good just scared me.

Death. The only things I have ever become so emotional about were my great grandmothers, my dog, my grandfather and now Becky.

And for that matter: suicide. Suicide is the most selfish thing in the world. The fact that someone thinks that their life is not worth living and that others will not care confuses me.

Becky was depressed but never showed it. Every time I saw her, she was always smiling and making sure my theatre and band activities were keeping up. During the holidays, she would make different things to make people go “awww” when they saw them.

She must have been so lonely and scared about what she may have to do. I still don’t understand why she did it but there must have been a reasoning behind it. Whatever the reasoning was, I hope she found it under the water where she was discovered.

Someone will always care for you. No matter if you leave someone with infinite amounts of debt, someone will still care for you. If you feel like everyone around you does not like you, in fact someone still will care about you.

Rest in Peace Becky Herring wherever you may be.

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All the time and work people put into pulling something like this off is tremendous. Stage management must sit through all the rehearsals and production meetings. It’s fun though because we get a dose of everything. When the actors are missing we get to fill in for them and we also get to help out the production team when they are working on the set.

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You can text and harass Katie Steingrabe at 202-9926

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I’ve been dating my girlfriend for coming up on a year and a half. Without question I love her, and I have come to love her family as well, even looking at them as a second family of my own.

When her grandmother died last year I was genuinly saddened. I attended her funeral and reception, feeling the same kind of pain I feel when I’ve lost loved ones in the past. I’d known her grandmother for some time, and she really liked me, and it was truly like losing a family member to see her just go away.

Whenever I’ve heard of her or her family suffering from health issues, I feel myself becoming overwhelmed with fear and worry. I’m scared because I know that even if you haven’t known someone as long as another person, it is still so easy and so common to love them.

Friends, after you truly know them, do become like family. I’m glad I’ve made a new, true family around my friends, and, even knowing how much it can come to hurt, it can also feel so amazing and wonderful to have another family by your side.

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So I went tanning today. It was nice and relaxing. Yup! Hopefully spring break doesn’t go by too fast but I’m pretty sure it will. Aw sad face. But i guess the quicker it goes by then the faster summer will get here. WOOT WOOT!

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I’m so bored it’s 10 at night on a Friday and I have nothing to do. I’m going on a trip to St. Louis for Gear Up and everything is paid for. I go on Monday and get back Thursday it should be fun for the most part even though some people I don’t like are going.

 After I get back I might go to Carroll, IA to visit my grandma which will still be boring.

I’m still learning how to play guitar; I haven’t had any lessons but I’m in guitar club at school so hopefully I’ll get better as I practice more. I know how to play the beginning of Day Tripper by the Beatles, and I know how to play a little of Lithium by Nirvana.

It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday night and I have nothing to do….

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As I pulled to the front of the left turning lane, everything got quieter. I looked at my dashboard and all my lights suddenly turned on. When the light turned green I released my brake.

Nothing happened.

This had only happened once or twice before. I stayed calm and attempted to restart the car. The engine started, the radio played and the heat came on, but the car would not budge. That’s when the cars behind me started to honk and yell at me and there was nothing I could do.

I looked over at my girlfriend and we both knew we were going to be stuck there for a while.

She called her mom to try and figure out what to do. When she was done I reluctantly called my own. She wasn’t mad at me, but was frustrated by the situation and comforted me, saying she was calling a tow truck and she’d pick us up so we could finish our date as soon as she could.

After about 20 minutes a cop knocked on my window and wanted to know what was going on. When I told him I couldn’t get the car to move, he called in a high priority tow truck so we just sat there and waited.

The car’s heater, radio and hazard lights soon went out as well.

We were now trapped in a car in the middle of winter without any heat, entertainment or any way to let anyone know there was danger. To add insult to injury, my hood was frozen shut. I couldn’t even pop it to let other drivers know not to enter the lane.

Eventually another cop arrived and instructed me to put the car in neutral so he could push me out of the lane with his car. It was only after he was gone that I found I couldn’t shift the car’s gears.

I became frantic. If he pushed us and we couldn’t move at all on our own, my girlfriend and I could have easily been tossed into oncoming traffic and killed.

The moment his covered bumper hit mine was easily one of the scariest moments of my life. Both of us screamed in fear and hoped that he would hear us. When all else failed, I ripped open my door and screamed at him to stop.

When the officer demanded to know what was going on, I said the gears would not shift and invited him to try himself. When he came up empty handed he walked back to his car frustrated.

After an entire lifetime adding up to one hour, my mom and the tow finally arrived. My girl and I were both freezing, terrified messes. I remember we both embraced close, both about to cry in terror and joy.

We finally made it to the mall, exchanged our presents, ate dinner and saw our movie, not forgetting how lucky we were we’d made it. It made the date all the sweeter to finally enjoy.

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Zach Braff plays the part of Andrew Largeman, a mentally drugged up young adult, ready for something more in his life. He returns to his hometown for his mother’s funeral where he meets all of his old high school friends who haven’t seen him in quite a long time. Andrew messes around with drugs and parties to pass the time and reconnect with his old friends.

Back at home, he meets Sam (Natalie Portman), an eccentric young girl living with epilepsy, at the psychiatrist’s office. After his appointment, he realizes how different and strange Sam is and offers her a ride home on his sidecar bike. Andrew finds such an interestingly odd lifestyle Sam lives in when he starts to get to know her even more than what’s on the outside.

Garden State is a movie with many credits to Zach Braff such as COFCA Break-through Film Artist, CFCA Best New Director, Empire Award Best Newcomer, Pauline Kael Breakout Award, Golden Trailer Best Music, Grammy Best Complication Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, NBR Award Best Debut Director, Sandance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize Dramatic, and many others.

Altogether, I was never disappointed in the movie. I was always entertained and the indie camera style just added to the effect that this could be real life. Garden State deserves the 9.5 out of 10.

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It’s way to0 cold as well it was negative seven degrees today and with the wind chill it was negative ten. I hope we don’t have any more snow coming but it’s still Feburary and the weather is unpredictable. 

I wish we would get up to 80 degrees but I know that isn’t going to happen untill at least June and that’s still 3 months away. God I wish it would get there already. We have had five inches of snow or more for eighty consecutive days setting a record and the negative seven degrees today was a record as well.

We are almost at the record of 72 inches of total snow over this winter which is way too much snow. This week sounds nice, there is no snow in the forecast and the only thing that will bother me is that it is still going to be cold but at least not as cold as it has been.

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            I however, like many others, think I spend too much time on these things.

            I wake up and log on every morning before school. I check my facebook page, usually not expecting much, see if anyone has responded on any of the various forums I’m a member of, and read scans of my favorite manga if I have time.

            I get home later that night and repeat the process, sometimes for hours at a time. Sometimes I spend more time with the amateur comedians on YouTube then I do with my family.

            People said years ago that television was good for rotting kids’ brains, even if there was some educational content on some channels. Computers are the same idea, you can learn some things from them, but often you just get swarmed and caught up with all the junk that’s out there.

            Recently, I quit one of the main forums I posted on and have slowed down on some of my spriting (and art of simple, 2D gaming design) and now I’m finding myself spending less and less time on it. It’s pretty radical how much more time I’m spending with my friends and family since I caned the junk.

            So I urge anyone else out there whose spending too much time on MySpace, playing games or anything else, check out for a while every now and again. Have your fun online, but keep things in perspective, there’s a lot more to find in the real world then cyberspace can ever offer.

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                The journey to state speech contest had started about six weeks earlier when the IHSSA speech contest groups had been posted on the drama board. I eagerly peered through the rows of names looking for my name to appear. It appeared along with three others, Kayleigh Wren, Drew Davis and Cassie Tant. We were paired together as an ensemble group, performing a scene called He Said and She Said.

                Rehearsals soon began, and we quickly realized how twisted the plot of our scene was. Just reading through the script made me stop to try and comprehend what was going on. The scene was centered on a friendship between two women, Enid and Diana that was manipulated by an older woman, Mrs. Packard, who spent her days gossiping about others’ personal affairs. The scene gets twisted when Mrs. Packard accuses Enid’s husband, Felix, of secretly having an affair with Diana. From there it becomes a story of exactly what the title says- he said, she said.

                I began rehearsals thinking that it would be a piece of cake- I would read through the script, get an understanding  of what kind of person my character was and add some emotion to fit that character. I soon realized that I was 100 percent wrong with my outlook. 

                One of our first tasks was to map out our character’s life, even before the script began. I had to know Diana’s past, her relationships and her outlook on life. In other words, I had to become Diana. I spent 3 hours reading through the script, looking for hints of why she said every word she spoke- where it was coming from.

                As we were discovering our characters, my group, along with our coach, Chelsea Cunningham was starting to bond as well. I didn’t really know my group members before this experience, but I came out of it with three people I can call good friends. We would spend more time talking about the scene than we would actually run it. We would get caught up in our characters and have continued dialogues, past the written script. As we came close to districts, our characters had been shaped and as a group we had a connection that showed during our performance.

                I remember leaving our districts center so ecstatic and just overwhelmed after one of our best performances to date. The icing on the cake was our perfect score of one. We were on our way to state, with two weeks left to paginate our scene.

                The two weeks I spent at rehearsals after districts, I think I learned more about acting than ever before. Cunningham had pages full of notes after repeatedly watching our scene. We were now focusing on the details that would separate our performance between good and pure quality. We had to build to a climax and we had to actually listen to each other, like living the scene instead having it memorized in our head. As we became more aware of what we, as real people would do in that situation, we brought life to the scene. I could feel the intensity rise in the room as the highest point in our arguments was expelled.

                There was a point in which it really hit me that we, as a group, were truly committed to this scene. There was a point in the scene in which Enid and Diana (Kayleigh and I) had a final, desperate plea to save their friendship. We had run the scene dozens and dozens of times, but this time there were tears in Kayleigh’s eyes during that moment. That’s the moment that I realized that we had taken a script, written 90 years ago, and made it ours. After running the scene for what seemed like the millionth time, we still found a new emotion that came from our character.

                The day of state started at 4 am for me, and I could not stop thinking about our performance until the moment we were set to perform, 11:15.

 It had to come to us naturally, because once we hit that stage, everything went blank, and it was up to us to have the instinct to know what our character would do. What we would do.

                We spent the next fifteen minutes giving a performance that had been dissected and analyzed, and had been turned into our own. The script only gave us the dialogue, but we added the pain, the confusion, the innocence and we were our characters.

I remember leaving the room ready to burst, until we reached the door and rushed out. We quickly came together in a group hug, one that felt so familiar. I was on top of the world because I knew that the four of us had spent the past several weeks working to put on a quality show, and we achieved that. We were given fifteen minutes to give each audience member a chance to relate to our characters in some way.

                By then, scores meant nothing. A number could never represent the feeling I had after our state performance; a feeling of accomplishment that I got to share with four really great people.

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I was at the age of three when my life suddenly took a twisted turn, my parents think it’s important for me to know what occurred during my time in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. Throughout my life they have told me detailed stories about the war and their life changing decision. With my own memory and their words I have painted a picture of my childhood and where it has gotten me today.

The person who meant the most to me in this world was the most reassuring person. My grandpa held back his look of uncertainty whenever I was around. Every night before bed he would tell me stories about a world in which there was no hatred and little girls went out and played and their parents kept a watchful eye as they sipped coffee with friends. I didn’t know of this life.

The life I knew of was no electricity, having to travel down four flights of stairs and five blocks to get water in buckets, and not making a single sound after ten, when police were on guard.

 I formed a fear of shadows. Our house was dimly lit at night with a few candles. And when my shadow would appear on the wall, I would become terrified. But my fear turned into a fascination, and my nights would be spent putting on shows for my parents forming characters with my hands and making them come to life on our kitchen wall.

 As my parents laughed at my new-found creativity, their minds were focused on escaping.

My mom’s family, the side I hadn’t met yet, had taken action a few months earlier. They packed their bags and moved to America.

And now my parents wanted to follow in their footsteps and go to a place where they didn’t have to deal with the struggles of war, a place where they could start over and possibly create a successful future for their daughter. They didn’t want me to have to grow up with a paranoia of my surroundings. All they wanted was to live a normal life.

My mom’s parents sent over immigration papers for a permanent visa. The day and time was set for the plane to take off in Zagreb and land in Des Moines, Iowa. Over 5000 miles in distance.                                                  

The day came to leave my current life behind and start over, this included leaving my dad’s family, the only family I knew of. This is the part of my memory that is strongest, but so hard to look back at.

I was wearing a red velvet dress, with red stockings, red dress shoes, and a red bow in my hair. The hardest part of that day was saying bye to the most important person in my life, my grandpa, knowing that this goodbye was permanent. I wouldn’t let go of him as my eyes gushed out tears. And I kept begging, don’t take me from him, anyone but him.

He sang me a song, with the chorus line translating to: “Airplane, I will break your wings off, not to fly away.”

There was a room full of aunts, uncles, cousins, friends not one without a tear. My dad was hit hardest, he was leaving his family and he had no idea what life was throwing at him next. He had my mom, me, our plane tickets, some cash, and homesickness.

My parents had made this decision to live a better life, but they were ruining my life because I couldn’t imagine my life without our small candle lit apartment, my grandpa.

We traveled across the ocean without a word. And there weren’t any more tears, they dried out.

When we first touched American soil it was at the John F. Kennedy airport in New York City. It seemed like there were a million people and each one of them was speaking English, a stranger to us. It was like we were on another planet, and there was nobody who cared about us. We were alone.

I wanted my life back. Yes, it was a hard one, but I wanted my family. Even though I lived in a war zone, I felt unsafe and alone in this country that was supposed to be our security blanket. Everyone was a stranger, they didn’t understand me, I didn’t understand them.

When we landed in Des Moines, our new home, we were greeted by unfamiliar people who were eagerly awaiting our arrival with tears in their eyes. This was the family I had never met. And instinctively I let go of my dad and rushed to hug my other grandpa. Words can’t describe the feeling of having someone that loves you hold you for the first time.

We were in a place where a new life would have to be built from the roots. We were in for a wild ride, but once again, we had family.

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