I just got back from having lunch downtown, and let me tell you: Christian’s tastes soooo good during the school day… I love having two “free” periods…

Anyway, I was walking down Garrett St. and noticed all this random graffiti on the backs of signs. They’re like, little squiggles that aren’t a letter, aren’t a consistent symbol; they’re just slightly curvy lines in spray paint. I can just picture the kids that are doing that: 12/13-year-olds, they’ve never vandalized something in their lives, standing at dusk shaking a spray paint can with a big grin on their faces. They’re so excited to do something illegal, that when they press the trigger on the can they let out giggles of joy. “Ahh, delinquency,” they sigh.

They don’t do anything more than a little squiggle on the back of a sign - one squiggle’s enough excitement for one day.

First I should say that I hope I don’t get in trouble for this. My teachers have been known to stumble upon my blog every now and again…

I am sick and tired of teachers who don’t fully understand what they want kids to get out of the work they assign, and thus don’t assign grades based on those expectations. They’ll grade according to one set of expectations about an assignment, while the explicitly stated reason for the work is entirely different.

Example: Reading quizzes. Reason given for them: To ensure the student has read the book. Actually tested: Student’s retention of certain facts about the book which may or may not have been considered “important plot elements” in the opinion of the student. The teacher doesn’t realize that they aren’t testing what they want to, and in the process are giving students faulty information about what to study.

But my big complaint is with how my Calculus homework is handled. We get a set of homework on day 1, go over it in class on day 2, and it’s due on day 3 (and will be graded for correctness). The logic used here is that, if we go over it all in class, you can simply wright down the correct work, and you’ll get a perfect score on the homework. But if you wright down everything that’s going on on the board, that takes your full attention - you end up simply blindly copying down work without any chance to think about what’s going on. Excuse me for trying to use my time in class to actually understand the material we’re covering… If I just copy down the work, I’m not going to be able understand it later, and I won’t get anything out of it.

If a grade is based off attempt and not correctness, more effort can be put into the actual understanding of the material. Let quizzes and tests be judged with the red pen. Effort should still count for something, and homework’s the perfect place for that.

Well readers, today I started my internship at NBC29, and I must say I think I’m going to love it here (I’m still in the newsroom, actually). There are stretches where I’ve been sitting at the computer for 90 minutes doing nothing - like now, for example - but I think I’ll be getting some other things to do during the downtime in the future.

First day on the job: Sat around. Met people. Sat around. Walked over to the courthouse to talk to a judge about getting Nathon Antonio Washington’s records released. Sat around. Drove to the water treatment facility to observe an interview. Drove to the reservoir to observe collecting misc. footage for a piece (about water conservation, of course). Sat around. Excitement on the police scanner. Sat around. Waited for the endless football game to be over so we could start the 11. Still waiting.

God, I’m hungry…

I’m gonna like it here.

I written about the iPhone before - speculated about its success, even defended its $600 price tage. But, amazingly enough, in a move I doubt many expected, Apple has decreased the price of the 8GB iPhone by $200, brining it down to just $399 (they’ve stopped selling the 4GB version).

People, you can’t complain about the price any more. I still reserve the right to lament about how 8GB really isn’t enough for a video player (4-5 movies?), and how the keypad can’t be as easy to use as [actually, only Apple] says it is. But the price is right. If I weren’t still paying off my video camera, I’d have no excuse not to get one. Well, other than the fact that is still wouldn’t fit in my pocket.

You’ve gotta feel sorry for all those poor souls that just bought an iPhone, though… True, Apple will refund $100 to previous iPhone owners in store credit, but still. I just wish people would learn to stop buying Apple products in the week leading up to their press conferences.

I was driving home from school last Friday, when I decided to stop by the Giant on Pantops to pick up some food (by “food” I of course mean ice cream). So I park my car and begin the exhausting walk up an entire row of the parking lot - there was a big truck parked at the head of the row, taking up a bunch of spaces and forcing everyone else to park further down. As I got closer to the truck, I realized that it was a blood donation truck from Virginia Blood Services - that annoying jingle from their radio advertisements immediately entered my head.

I gave a sigh of semi-disgust as I walked by the truck and towards the sliding doors of the grocery store. But then a woman stops me before I can reach the safety of the air-conditioned produce isles; “Do you want to give blood today?” she asked.

I struggled for an excuse not to give blood… Ah, my age! “Sorry, I think I’m too young.”

“Oh, are you seventeen?” I nodded. “Well that’s not too young!” the woman exclaimed with a smile.

Damnit, I should have said I was sixteen… You see, despite my becoming increasingly extroverted over the past few years, I still felt it a tad bit extreme to reply with, “Well, I may not be too young, but I am too gay.”

Guidelines that the Food and Drug Administration have set down to blood collection centers seem to have a problem with homosexuals. Virginia Blood Services, in particular, will not let “any man who has had sexual contact with another man, even once, since 1977″ donate blood. This provision was added in the 1980s to combat the growing HIV epidemic, and in the 1980s, I may have been understanding of it. But all blood donated in the united states is now tested for HIV.

To put this in perspective of how discriminatory this really is, let’s look at some of the people who are allowed to donate blood: people who have had syphilis or gonorrhea (as long as it was over 12 months ago); oh, and people who have sex with prostitutes, given that it’s been at least 12 months since they’ve done so. In other words, someone who has had sex with 50 different prostitutes can donate blood, as long as they wait a year, whereas a homosexual male who has had sex with his long-term partner, even if they used protection, and has never had an STD, could not.

People, that’s utter crap. And collection centers know it. But even VBS hides the language about gays under a section called “Lifestyle choices.” So despite all the advertisements the Red Cross and other centers put out there about how important it is to donate blood, how you could save a life - they’re excluding a fifth of the population over assumptions of promiscuity (I’m sorry, do we need to review how people who have sex with prostitutes are still allowed to donate, or blood drives in the sexual hotbeds that are high schools?).

Well, if you guys don’t think our blood’s worth it, go ahead and bar us from donating. But don’t complain about blood shortages when you could have had ours.