I went down to the mouth of the kern canyon earlier this week and Look What I saw.

Defining Friendship

What is Friendship?
It seems that I am at a crossroad in my life and I am forced to redefine what friends are and should be. In basic terms a friendship is a type of relationship that involves two or more people that contains the following traits and attributes. The world is obviously not black and white and there are different levels of each of these trait and attributes, however when any of these reach a level of 0 then it is no longer a friendship and would become more of an acquaintance. This is what you get from me when I consider you a friend.

• Respect:Positive feeling of esteem and actions that represent that esteem.
• Trust: Reliance on a persons integrity, strength, ability.
• Honesty: If your not honest with someone then you do not trust them. A friendship must contain honesty and trust. This does not mean that they have to agree with you all the time but there should be some similarity in values and morals this is important as it can cause a friendship to diverge.
  
• Loyalty: faithfulness to commitments or obligations such as one's word.
• Self Discloser: having someone to confide in is very important and is the expression of trust by disclosing information you normally would not disclose to others. There is some respect here that needs to be identified, when someone confides in you its not because they want the whole world told,
  
• Altruism: principal or practice of unselfish concern for the welfare of the other, this is the opposite of selfishness and this needs to be maintained by both sides of the friendship and needs to constantly balanced, however in times of need this can change for a short periods of time without any consequences and not change for long periods of time with direct consequences.
• Sympathy and Empathy: harmony of or agreement in feeling, as between persons or on the part of one person with respect to another. The intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. This does not mean that your values are the same as the other persons.

I don't think that any of this is too much to ask. And many people who know me know that these are traits that I exhibit for friends. I am changing since certain events and personal growth have triggered a lot of changes in my life. Before this year I would have considered anyone I know a friend, just like I would have pretty much considered any movie I saw was a good movie. My problem is I would give everyone priority over me all the time, the results were not good. I realize that I need to take care of myself and set proper boundaries. You would think that I would have figured this out already, and I did but not for people I considered friends. My other decision is to shy away from getting into a click of friends.

REV 1.0
3/19/2010

School

I definitely will be challenged to grow this session with school.

COM/150 - EFFECTIVE ESSAY WRITING:

• This course will be a huge challenge because writing is a weak point for me and something that needs working on.
• I chose my final expository essay topic "Calorie Restriction and increasing ones longevity"

CRT/205 - CRITICAL THINKING

• This class is fascinating. Its about critical thinking which I attribute to self awareness we will see where this takes me
• I definitely need to work on this also!!!

Needless to say this session will be challenging. Critical thinking will be easy, I used to do a lot of it and got out of the habit of doing it!!! That was a bad move!!

Moving

So I will be moving soon, my father is talking about walking away from the house. I don't blame him, I was going to give him a couple of months notice when my current roommates on January 9th. I gave them 2 months to make arrangements for a new place. They should be moving out by March 9th.

I don't want to rent a house. I want to be near work and I don't want to pay as much as I am paying now. I need to save up some money.

I have found a few places on the east side and I am excited I will be going to look at them this week or next week.

A concern I have is my dog Kira and being inside all day. If i do get a place near work I can come home at lunch and let her out.

School

Well I have great news now. Here are my grades from my last Classes

GEN 105 "86.6%"
COM 150 "97.8%"

I would have had an "A" in GEN 105 however i turned in an incorrect assignment. I was pissed that it happened but I learned my lesson.

Dreams tell the tale!!

So I know I have issues everybody does. I somehow ended up suppressing part this particular issue which made things worse. I don't remember weather it was a conscious decision but I do know it was not the right one to make. The dream I had was a good dream, I felt happy and lets me know i need to get some closure. Basically I have abandonment issues. My father, my step dad and someone that I loved. I have dealt with My Father and step dad and gotten a lot of closure from that. But the one I have not been able to deal with and was a person that I fell in love with, his name started with a "P" one day everything stopped and he disappeared. I guess I really did not deal with it. It was after that I got on my antidepressants. Later I started dating again, however I never let anyone get that close to me. Don't get me wrong I cared about my boyfriends but I never really let them in to deep. This was not a conscious decision and it bugged me because I wanted to let them in and it just was not really happening on the level that I wanted or on a level I knew I was capable of. Over the last year I have ran into his name a few times and it invoked some really sad and painful feelings. So I think I am going to write a letter to help get some closure.

School

So I have been working on my life getting things together to reach my goal. I am going to school at the university of phoenix getting a degree in IT/Programming. I am getting an A in one of my classes and a B in the other. My finals are next week I am going to start working on them Friday and have them done by Monday.