Genuinely Giancarlo

Several weeks ago as I was sitting at lunch with my friends, I asked them for an idea for a blog post. After a brief moment of consideration, one of them said "the importance of relationships in the developmental growth of students". My other friend summarized by saying simply, "the good, the bad, and the ugly of high school relationships". So here it is. To be clear: when I say "relationship" I mean to represent the situation in which two people have collectively and mutually decided to be "together" as a couple (as "boyfriend" and "girlfriend"), committing to love, support, and care for their partner. Obviously, different couples have different expectations and standards in their own relationships, but I just wanted to clear my own definition up first. Here's the thing: I've never had a problem with relationships in high school. I'm no idiot, and I understand that most of the relationships that people partici...

I usually hesitate to assign "favorite" or "best" or "happiest" labels to thing in my life because I am always unsure if there is simply something better in my life that I have failed to consider. But here, I break that trend. Because here, I say something with absolutely no doubt in my mind: 2015 was the best year of my life. And there are probably a lot of reasons for that. Maybe it was due to all of the friends I made this year. Maybe it was because I really enjoy high school. Maybe it was all caused by the new-found responsibilities and privileges I took up this year. In reality, it was probably a lot of things. But here, I won't talk about general classifications of memories. In this post, I'm talking about the things that happened to me or the things that I did last year that made it so great. January January 1: I went to a fun New Year's Eve party to ring in 2015, and I had a blast. I was surrounded by friends and I made a coupl...

AS A NOTE: I wrote this post yesterday and intended to post it yesterday for "Best Friend Friday" but the spacing and the formatting of the pictures were both way off so I just decided that rather than waiting for a full week, I'd just post it today. As you'll remember, a few weeks ago I tried to institute something new into this blog. I called it "Best Friend Friday", generally meaning that I would simply write a post about one of my friends each Friday. Clearly, my follow-through on that idea has fallen pretty short. From now on, Best Friend Friday will not be an occurrence that repeats each and every week, but something that happens every once in a while at my own judgment. That way, I won't feel like I've failed if I miss a Friday, and I won't rush and post something lazy just because I feel like I have to. Cool? So this edition of Best Friend Friday is pretty special. It's special because I'm not highlighting any one person, but...

As I think about it, I realize that this month is going to be a very busy one for me. Of course I am involved in the regular school, church, and social activities that I usually am, but there are going to be so many more things coming my way during December. I'm trying to be as involved as possible in True Blue, my school's annual December charity drive (which you can learn about here  or by going to the  True Blue website ). I want to go on several dates this month. I am going to serve as a stat-keeper for Bingham's boys basketball teams. Plus, I think I might also get a job before the year ends. And of course just the normal excitement of the Christmas season is unique and thrilling all on its own. But with all of these various activities going on, I had to ask myself: is it all worth it? And the conclusion I came to was a convincing and absolute yes. So here's the thing: I'm not a big fan of being busy. I enjoy living without a schedule and I think it's fu...

Dear Reader, I'd like to begin by thanking you for reading my blog. Thanks for the support, the compliments, and the love. I cannot emphasize enough how much it means to me when I am told that someone appreciates the simple posts I publish here. With that said, I would like to apologize. I have kept you waiting this week for some new material that never came. I always make an honest effort to post at least twice a week, and I'm sorry that hasn't happened this week. The thing is, I put a lot of effort into each post I write. I don't ever want to rush to post anything or post something simply because I feel like I have to fulfill some sort of arbitrary quota, because I know that that would result in a lower quality post. That's not how I do things. I would rather write a few good posts than a lot of poor ones. So that's why my posting has been absent this week. And I'm sorry for that. I make no excuses. I can't say that I couldn't have wri...

This post is the beginning of a project I've been planning on for a while. I call it "Best Friend Friday" (yeah, I know the name is pretty lame but the alliteration is quite nice). Essentially, each Friday, I'll write a post about one of my friends, just giving them a personalized shoutout and showing all of the readers of this blog how awesome they are. Let's hope this works out. This first post is going to be about on of the coolest people I've met in my brief time at Bingham High School so far. His name is Antonio Dedić. Antonio is a foreign exchange student at Bingham this year. He's Croatian, but his family lives in Germany. He is super cool. I met Toni in my technology class this year, where we partnered up and we've become pretty good friends. I really enjoy learning from him. He has a lot of perspective that I find really cool, because he has grown up in such a different way than I have. Toni speaks Croatian, English, German, a decent ...