sometimes.... (emo rant, please, for the love of all that is holy, ignore this post)

sometimes i realize how much my parents are messed up, and how it's rubbed off on me

i've come to the realization that i'll never be happy unless i can get away from my parents. they are so emotionally dependent on my, that i can't stand it, and i'm sick of acting like their emotional cushion for all their worries and problems.

like, it's impossible for me to be happy with myself when they're around, because their presence reminds me of eberything that's wrong with me and everything that i'm afraid of becoming.
in other news, i think i've forgotten how to love. not that corny falling in love crap, but i mean like, love. i don't think i love my parents anymore. i respect, appreciate, and care for them, but i don't think i love them. i mean, i throw the word love around a lot as a colloquial thing, but seldom does it express that ultimate state of being of unconditional love.
i partially blame my parents for this i guess. i mean, i am so afraid of that emotion. becuase "love" drove my parents to be married, and look how horribly that turned out.

my soul is growing colder, my heart is growing farther. after so many years of searching, i've recently found myself. however, i am so afraid that i've let myself begin drift away again, and i'll have to start that whole journey to self thing again.

darn
it was annoying enough the last time.

i'm so friggin lost right now i want to retreat back into my little world, but this whole "life" thing keeps getting in the way. i've probably said this before, but i feel so alive in my dreams, as opposed to real life, where i feel dead on the inside.

i just want to live in my dreams. so badly. where even if things don't really make sense, they make sense to me. and everything is so much better. the nightmarish creatures that rest at the border between the world of dreams and this world are attempting to separate me, my body, and my mind from myself.

when i'm not around my parents, life just seems so much different, you know? maybe not.

*sigh*
it's hard to explain. i mean, i care about my parents and all, but i really want to get away from them before i lose myself completely. hopefully i can hang on until college.

objective essay about the legality of the iraq war

note : sorry i don't have a bibliography or a source list, but the infornmation is out there if you look for it. i wrote this essay in the 10th grade as an essay showing our use of ethos, pathos, or logos.
i chose to use mostly logos (logic)
this essay looks at the iraq war from a legal perspective, with some added personal reactions to the information i found.
again, i apologize for the lack of a bibliography.

The Iraq War: Legal or Illegal?

“War should be the politics of last resort” is a quote attributed to Colin Powell and is the general consensus when talking about grand scale conflict. Although in some cases the use of war is justified, the Iraq war is not one of these instances. According to Article 6 of the US Constitution; any treaty signed by congress becomes a part of the “supreme law of the land”, such as in the case of the UN Charter. Any breech of this is a violation of the US constitution. I believe that entering the Iraq war and its continued occupation are illegal acts of aggression as it breaks the UN Security Council charters and by doing so, defies the US constitution. This is because invading Iraq was not self defense or authorized by the UN, in addition to the fact that that the US has been continually been partaking in war crimes and inhumane activities since it entered the war.

This war cannot be justified by self defense, which is one of the instances in which the UN charter allows for force (article 51 of charter). The administration used Saddam’s supposed link to Al Qaeda as one reason because Al Qaeda is the group linked to 9/11. No such evidence has been found that Saddam and Al Qaeda are connected. Another claim was that Iraq had and/or was acquiring weapons of mass destruction. This is also untrue. Even if there were WMDs, potential threats do not justify self-defense unless it is in response to an attack or IMMENANT threat. The infamous “Downing street memo"[1] to the prime minister of Britain indicates the Bush administration was fixing facts around the intended policy in Iraq. This shows that bush was intentionally misleading the public into a war.

The use of force is also allowed if authorized by the UN Security Council. Only the UN has the right to call for the use of force in Iraq if it was UN orders it had breeched. Even if Iraq hadn’t been abiding by the UN’s orders regarding weapons, the US had no authority to invade. The US invaded before UN inspectors had a chance to finish their search. The US and UK did not follow procedure when using force. The United Nations had not authorized the use of force in Iraq (although Bush and Blair tried very hard). Because it was not authorized, it was illegal in the eyes of international law (Article 2(4) of the UN charter).

The continued occupation of Iraq is unlawful and, to say the least, immoral, and the consequences of said occupation will shock and appall because of the inhumanity going on. The “official” estimate from the British government (65-70,000) only includes violent deaths reported by the media and is considered a gross underestimate, and the US government has not (as of recently) tried to keep an accurate count of civilian deaths. According to a British medical journal[2], which gives a closer estimate, the # of civilians killed is 655,000 including innocent men, women, and yes, children. Almost 700,000 people are DEAD because of an illegally fought war (2.5 % of Iraq’s population). Imagine what would happen if a foreign land brutally bombed/killed off 2.5 of the American population, including our own friends and family. There have been many instances of torture and inhumane treatment of detainees, for example, the Abu Ghraib prisons, executions without trial and of the wounded, unlawful and indefinite detentions, and so on. In addition to the large loss of life, the Iraqi people are being forced to endure inhumane torture, beyond that which is considered decent towards our fellow people. “That it is better that a 100 guilty person’s escape than one innocent person should suffer…” is a quote said by Ben Franklin [3], which describes that predicament. Iraq is the geographic location of important sites in human history, including Assyria, Babylon, Mesopotamia, and the World Capital of knowledge of knowledge in the middle ages (Baghdad). This country is being constantly bombed and destroyed. This in known as cultural genocide, and is considered a war crime.

The illegitimacy of the war in Iraq is defined by the lack of permission from higher international powers; it is not self defense, and the criminally wrong things that have been taking place because of this war. The Iraq war is a morally wrong war of aggression, the ultimate war crime. According to the international military tribunal at Nuremburg, when they tried the Nazis, a war of aggression is “the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that in contains within itself the accumulated evils of the whole”. The vast implications of this would be that our leaders are war criminals, a presumably frightening thought. With all this going on, it’s seems to me that everyone loses, both the Iraqi, and American, peoples.

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[1] The "Downing Street" memo was a formerly classified British document released to the public that has to do with information regarding the Iraq war that was passed between the prime minister of Britain and President Bush.

[2] “The Lancet” (October 2006 issue) - they gave had an independent cross examination of the official death count. They did a study of 50 random clusters in Iraq and calculated # and percentage dead.

[3] Webster’s Dictionary of quotations

Today was a nice day

yeah. in other words, nothing went wrong!!! ^_^ (which like, never happens)

one odd thing did happen today (flattering?).
i was walking down the social studies hallway with a friend and there was a group of guys walking in the opposite direction. when we reached them one of the guys pointed at another guy and told me " the guy in the blue shirt thinks you're beautiful" and they kept walking while me and my friend walked to her locker. my goodness i didn't know any of the guys. and like, he said it again later, like while we were standing at her locker, that the guy in the blue shirt said i was beautiful...
there were 2 guys so i didn't know which one.

eh, it was pretty random. i was so shocked that i didn't even think to say 'thank you' (i don't exactly get those kinds of compliments everyday from complete strangers)

so yeah. weird. somewhat flattering. interesting?
your comments on this event?