It's amazing how much free time you have in college. A totally different experience from when I was in my grade school years. Grade school, seems like I was in the 5th grade. It's hard to believe that my high school years were actually my grade school years as well and now I'm in a place of 60,000 people where you're lucky if 50 people know who you are. But with all this free time, it's hard to fill it with stuff to do all the time. Naps are a great way of filling up lots of hours, but you can only sleep so much. I remember laying in bed last night and having a feeling of homesickness even though I only live 20 minutes away and can go home with the push of seven digits. I feel bad for the people who are from small towns a million miles away. Not only are they far from home, but being thrown into the fire that is UT and surviving is a difficult task for anyone, let alone coming from towns 1/30 the size of UT. But I've been enjoying my college experience so far. Being able to sleep late, wake up late, take 3 hour naps, all of it. Not having to sit in a classroom for an hour and half every other day is a major plus as well. Come to think of it, I have no idea how I sat through those days and actually was focused for its entirety. The Xbox is calling my name as I write, taunting me with glimpses of football and shooting. It's amazing how people think that video games are responsible for their child being violent and whatnot. Parents are blaming a series of circuits and programs as the reason their kid is messed up?  If people were being better parents, these kids would have better things to do than rot their brains in front of a TV screen. In today's world of money money and more money, it's hard to find time to put aside what is quite important in the world and spending time with the people that matter most. Not that TV's bad. Heck, I watch way too much of it myself, but my parents also ingrained in me the difference between right and wrong and I was lucky enough to be born right before the start of the technological age, so I get the best of what the world has to offered right now but had my values and beliefs ingrained in me before this ever-growingly corrupt world took over. Growingly, is that a word?  It's hard to write for twenty minutes straight without going off on a tangent and starting to focus on other things, like the Schlotsky's cup sitting in front of my desk that's been sitting there for a few days and is probably starting to be a safe haven for mold. Speaking of which, there is also a box of fajita toppings that have been sitting in our refrigerator since school started, and yet even though I remember, I still don't get off my butt and throw it out. I keep telling myself that I'll do it when I actually take out the trash but heck, we only take the trash out like, once a week. I remember doing a stream of consciousness writing as one of my creative works in high school for a book we read because I thought that stream of consciousness writings would be really simple. Heck, you just write whatever comes to your head. Not too hard right?  But man, I think I've grown up in a very rigidly structured school system and always have to plan stuff out before I actually start writing. So I found myself doing more thinking than writing, trying to find the right words and grammar usages so that my "paper" wouldn't sound like a first grader wrote it. But sometimes that's what a stream of consciousness writing has to be. It doesn't matter if you use fifty letter words or "big," because these writings aren't about the content, they're about collecting your thoughts and putting them down no matter how random they be. I found it funny how when you gave out this assignment and asked if there were any questions, 20 hands shot up in the air. Questions arose like, how many paragraphs? How many words?  What's the structure?  We grow up in a world of rules, where everything is set out before us and we either follow or be considered a problem child. We spend more time defining the box rather than thinking outside it. Heck, we rarely even spend time thinking inside of it. My dad's friend is starting this school in which they let kids pretty much do whatever they want. They provide guidance but not rules, set boundaries but don't fence the kids in. Their objective is to let the kid develop his or her own self-discipline, not letting some adult develop it for him or her so that when they get out into the real world, they don't curl up into a little ball and hide or rebel and go crazy and not know what they're doing. While I think it's a pretty cool idea, others reject the fact that a school like this exists because people are ingrained with rules, their lives governed by the boundaries of the box. So hopefully, someday, people will be able to think for themselves, that we won't become robots that only exist because God told us we could exist at the time that we do exist.