Genuinely Giancarlo

Yesterday, I had the chance to watch my school's basketball team take on the Copper Hills Grizzlies (an all-too-familiar foe) in the Utah 5A state championship game. It was an exciting game, and I enjoyed every minute of it. The best part was when the final buzzer sounded, and it was truly official: We were state champions! And it was sweet! As a school, we were just so pumped and so happy and, for a minute, the cliques dissolved and we became what we should always be: a family. We were so overrun with joy and thrilled with the electricity of victory that we didn't care about social circles. For that moment, we were all friends, and it's a moment I will try to never forget. So yeah, you could say I was pretty happy. But yesterday, I discovered that along with utmost jubilation comes the inevitable heartbreak. While we were celebrating the win, the students and the players at Copper Hills were feeling the depths of frustration and sorrow and sadness and everything el...

This post was one I started late last year, just after the terrorist attacks in Paris, France. I never finished it because I couldn't make it sound how I wanted it to. I think I fixed it now. (Note: I didn't change anything from the original, I only added to it. Because of that, the tense in this post shifts from present to past as the post progresses. I kept it like that because thought it sounded better that way.) Over the past week, I've been thinking a lot about Paris. I've always had a pretty strong desire to travel, and Paris was always high up on my list of the places I wanted to go. But this week, I didn't think about the Eiffel Tower, or the Louvre, or the Notre Dame Cathedral. I thought about the terrorist attacks that were performed in Paris on November 13th. I thought about the people, the innocent people , who left their house that day, never to return. I thought about the children who lost their parents. I thought about the parents who lost the...

This post comes from an experience I had last semester in seminary. We had a sort of "battle of the sexes" activity thing going on, but before we started the activity, there was some stuff shared from both sides of the room regarding some things that a large number of the opposite gender did that was frustrating or bothersome (for example, a lot of the guys expressed frustration that a lot of girls dress immodestly. Classic seminary answer, am I right?). One of the things that a lot of the girls complained about was that it was annoying that a lot of guys act differently around different groups of people. And I completely understand that this is bothersome. I totally get that it wouldn't be cool to be with the sweetest person in the world, only to find out that they're a major jerk in another situation. And I can totally validate this. I see guys all the time act differently around different people. But what bothered me about this whole thing was that there seemed...

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...