Maria Tells All

Senior Year

2007-09-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

It's so much easier than junior year, I can't even believe it. I'll be updating this blog a lot more often. I wonder if I'm going to go to India this year on the trip.

2 days until Thailand

2006-05-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

Two days left. I've been working my ass off to get all of the work I need done before I leave. In English, we've been doing an assignment where we write one story a week about a character that we invent for 12 weeks. Well I have to turn mine in a week early (this Wed.). It is worth about 80% of our grade, and if you miss even one story, it is worth 0%. Which means you will fail English. And I have never in my life gotten anything lower than a B in a class, so that ain't gonna happen.

So I've been really behind and have been doing about a story a day the last several days.
Today I wrote two stories. Just one left.

Most people are writing 3 page long stories. Mine are about 20-26 each. So people need to fucking stop complaining to me that they have so much left to do, when they have a week more time than me and really short stories. I might just have to go kung-fu on their asses. Or maybe karate, because I actually know how to do that.

I think I'm going to break down from exhaustion.

Day of Silence

2006-04-27T18:58:00.000-07:00

The Day of Silence was simply amazing!

I made a new podcast episode about it at my podcast, Maria Tells All. Check that out!

I will probably blog about it later. In the meantime, here are some of the pictures from it.
I am the girl in the pink shirt with the 90.5% sign.

Day of Silence - Tommorow!

2006-04-25T16:21:00.000-07:00

The day of silence is tommorow!!!
We at the GSA are working hard to make sure it is amazing!
I'm going to bring my camera and then I'll post pictures, blog and podcast about it.
Watch out for that!

Vote!

2006-04-18T16:06:00.000-07:00

I made this for a contest, and I really like it!
And I mean it. If you are of age, VOTE!!!

Also, if it doesn't start from the frame "This is Bob", wait for it to loop back to it.

Comment!

Views (don't know if this works)

2006-04-17T17:37:00.001-07:00

31 days until Thailand!

2006-04-17T17:37:00.000-07:00

In 31 days (May 19th, 2006), I'm going on a trip to Thailand with my favorite teacher ever (I had him last year for a globalization class), his wife (also a lovely teacher, had her for Honors Physics last year) and about 10 other students.

I'm so excited! I went with the same teacher to China last year, and it was amazing!

I got permission from all of my teachers, and over the next month, I need to do tons of makeup work for while I'm there.

I can't wait. Yippee! :)

Re: HR 4437 Bill Protests

2006-04-12T12:58:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks have been insane.

A couple of weeks ago we had a huge student walkout at our school. Of course that was regarding the HR 4437 bill, which will make illegal immigration a felony and helping illegal immigrants a serious crime. Forward, the liberal club, my main club, was support it, but I just couldn't join them.

I've had a lot of people who tell me "Well, you're an immigrant, so you should support them." Well, no. Fuck no. I support anyone who is out there protesting because I believe that people should stand up for their convictions. But I'm not going to protest.

Yeah, I'm an immigrant; I was born in Russia, and my whole family immigrated. But guess what, I'm a LEGAL immigrant. My parents went through insane processes of trying to get out of Russia. The only reasons we were even able to escape that hellhole is because
1. They hate Jews in Russia (and thus wanted us out).
2. My parents have extremely high educations (Ph.Ds and the like) and so America wanted us.

My parents had to go threw tons of crazy meetings, signing papers, etc. They fucking worked to get here. Legally. So don't tell me I should support people breaking the law just because I am also an immigrant.

Imagine there are two very wealthy people. One began a business, worked years and years honestly and ended up making a lot of money. The other one robbed banks, or embezzled money. Is the first supposed to support the second just because they both ended up wealthy, even though one did it fairly and the other did it illegally? Probably not.

Now I do understand why people are coming here. Immigrating here legally is a very difficult process, and there are not the same opportunities for workers in Mexico as there are in America.

I also know that we benefit a lot from having cheap labor. They do jobs that Americans simply will not do, and keep a lot of costs down. But it’s like saying that child labor in other countries is good because we don’t have to pay a lot, and Americans would never work for 10 cents an hour for 15 hours a day. It’s still illegal.

I'm also pissed off because they chose to have the walkout during schooltime. They were offered lunchtime, but they figured they could get the people who actually cared enough to leave class. Well, guess what they got: hundreds of kids who didn't have any idea what was going on, but just wanted to ditch class. Yay for them. I would definitely have gone if it had been during lunch or before/after school, just to get the information.

I did hear that it went really well at our school. Very peaceful, just kids sitting around and discussing. Some crazy shit went down though. As each person went in, they either had to get a 'mugshot' taken, or give their student id. The school admins also did things that are blatantly against the rules. They took my friend Matt's shirt that said "Peace. Love. Anarchy" and his flag that said "No one is illegal" in Spanish. Fuck. There are people who walk around with shirts with beer ads on them which are not allowed, and no one cares. But someone tries to express their beliefs (which is protected by the First Amendment) and they can't!

Bullshit.