The HCOS WeeklyEleventh Edition

I.M.O. With Grace: Finding YourselfBy Grace Kelly

So, I was just sitting cross-legged on my bed, minding my own busi-ness, eating my chicken nuggets and working on an extremely over-due English assignment (sorry Mr. Daley) (although it is my education and future at risk I still feel the need to apologize) (because I’m a bad student and you’re very pa-tient). Anyways, my mom had a friend over and I overheard her talking about her son and how he needed to ‘find himself’. And just like that, BAM, my ADD kicks in and I immediately open a new Word document to start writing about chicken nuggets, English assign-ments and me hearing someone vaguely mention their son. Now, before you jump to conclusions, I am not just writing this to procras-tinate doing my English; this is (ex-cuse the word) legit.

Okay, no I’m actually procrastinat-ing, but in my defence it’s for a good reason.Not really.

Oh well, here we go. This is my IMO-ishy rant about ‘finding your-self’. (Actually, that doesn’t even look like a sentence. Probably isn’t. Which is why Microso! Word is telling me that it’s a fragment that I should consider revising. WELL MICROSOFT WORD YOU ARE ALSO A FRAGMENT THAT I SHOULD CONSIDER REVISING, SO THERE.) I think it’s safe to say that I win 0/all

sassy arguments that I get into be-cause my comeback skills are dan-gerously close to nil. Anyways, get-ting back to the point at hand…which is that I really shouldn’t be writing at all because I kind of- OH WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT, I’VE WASTED 256 WORDS ALREADY. Okay, let’s get started.

Finding Yourself is an Irrational TermI.e., kind of stupid. From a very lit-eral perspective, you are where you are right now, where you’re standing (or more likely, sitting), that is where you are. Pretty obvi-ous. If you are aware of where your body is situated, then you have succeeded in finding yourself. There, I just saved you years of worry, self help books, yoga and world travel. You can’t find some-thing when you know where it is, and you know where you are, so vi-ola.

What Finding Oneself IsSo I’ve been looking it up online for about a week now, and I have come across some of the weirdest i d e a s o n h o w t o ‘ f i n d yourself’ (such as but not limited to):

- Run away from home- Get into a doomed relationship just for the experience of it- Join as many religions as it takes for you to feel found- Get away with stealing something- Join a rock band (could actually

be fun)- Stop wearing clothes (one of the weirder ones)- Get really, really drunk and stay that way for an entire week (this blogger had ‘doctor’ in his title, so you can definitely trust his advice)- Make fake people accounts on the internet and try to make friends- Donate an organ

And that’s where I’m going to stop with the weird ‘finding yourself’ advice. The better ideas were things such as world travel, listen-ing to Bob Marley, being kind to people, taking up Karate, spending time with the elderly and adopting abandoned animals. What all of these ideas (both the weird and the better ones) have in common is one thing: they’re something dif-ferent. The idea of finding yourself is basically the concept that by re-moving yourself from your usual surroundings, by starting to do something that you wouldn’t nor-mally do, maybe you’ll happen to find a comfortable way of life that you don’t feel a need to escape from. Finding yourself is essentially finding what makes you happy and doing that thing.

Why it Won’t WorkNot that being happy isn’t a good

2 The HCOS Weekly

Literature Corner:

Life’s Blossoms

A Poem by Jaleesa Taylor

Flowers are like people

They each have different scents

Every bloom’s original

Just like our own intents

We can exude a venom

A sharp hostility

So bitter an aroma

And a liability

But, also like a flower

We can shine a so!-lit glow

As in the morning dew, a bloom

Lets all the grasses know

Sunshine’s comparable to hope

Emerging every morn

And it reminds us every day

In Christ, we’ve been reborn

thing, I mean, being happy is about the only thing in the world that keeps us sane, but being made happy by anything of this world isn’t going to suffice for your entire life. While joining a band, adopting a pet or donating an organ can make you happy for a while, it’s not going to keep you that way, it’ll leave. And when it leaves you’re going to be even emptier than be-fore. Take relationships for in-stance, I know many people that constantly keep themselves in a re-lationship because they’re patheti-cally alone and depressed without having a significant other. This just goes to prove that even people can’t keep you happy for your whole life, because people will al-ways, always, always leave. Which brings us to the most popular way of ‘finding yourself’: having some kind of a spiritual encounter. Hav-ing some kind of a spiritual en-counter usually entails just a lot of meditation. Meditation’s whole point is to ‘find your center’, the point of your psyche that shuts down all negativity and generates nothing but peace. People that have used this method of finding and ‘connecting’ with themselves almost never continue to feel the same peace that it generates in the first years of doing it. Nothing is permanent, so nothing is going to keep you permanently happy. Also, meditation can lead to a lot of weird occultic stuff, so it’s not a hugely good idea to start with. But, essentially, ‘spiritual encounters’ of this sort are also a way of at-tempting to attain happiness. The-sis: Finding yourself is making your life/yourself happy, but no matter what you do, you won’t always be happy. Thus, finding yourself is useless. So is being happy. Kind of depressing, but then again life is kind of depressing. You pretty much have to resign yourself to be-

ing halfway miserable your whole life and meandering through your existence in half comatose state of misery mingled with apathy until you die and your body rots in the ground forever. The end.

But obviously this was coming.

There’s one thing that will work though, if you’re still intent upon finding happiness for some weird reason. And obviously, it’s Jesus.

Jesus is the only thing in this world that is going to keep you happy. You can do everything on earth to make yourself happy and peaceful, you can adopt hundreds of pets (not a bad idea actually), you can donate gallons of blood and back-pack through Europe, you can even fall in love, get married and have a great life, but these things aren’t going to give you joy if you aren’t happy to begin with. The only thing that will keep you above your feelings of being lost, worth-less and alone is the knowledge that you are being held in the hand that made the ground your entire life is situated on. So don’t find yourself, find God. Find him in whatever way you want to, when-ever you feel called to do so, but do it, because you will spend your whole life wondering where you are until you find out who God is.

Oh my gosh Microso! Word, no, I do not care about your green squiggles. Stahp.

I don’t care about your red ones ei-ther.

- Grace

Guys, seriously, I’m terribly alone. You should internet me. Or send me money for snacks because I’M HUNGRY ALL THE TIME. Or Ritalin,

actually. Yes, I would accept Ritalin at this point. I forgot what the point of this was. K, done.

3The HCOS Weekly

Interview with John-Paul Berube

Are you enjoying the hilarious pic-tures in our Weekly LOL column? They are handpicked by the won-derful Genevieve Ward (and a few others)! We'd like to thank her for doing her job because she's quite under-appreciated for what she does. Also, we'd love to feature YOUR articles, stories, poems, re-views, art, etc in our paper! Feel free to email us at hcosweekly@out-look.com. If you are up for con-tributing to the paper more than once, you could apply for the Con-tributing Writers position.- Jubilee, Editor.

By Jennica Wlodarczyk

1. Hello John-Paul! Please give a rough description of yourself for the readers who may not know you.I am nearly 16. I live in a family of nine. I live on a farm. I have a Quad which I use to plow the snow off our driveway in the winter. I have been collecting since I was 6 and I now have over 5 hundred thou-sand Lego pieces. I am in grade 7. I know, a little low for my age. But I plan to graduate in the next 2 years.

2. How long have you been with HCOS, and what is your favourite thing about the school?I have been with HCOS for almost 3 years now. My favourite thing about School would be either writ-ing stories or building large projects in virtual program called Cybernet Worlds.

3. What do you plan on doing with your life a!er you graduate?I plan to become a Police Officer. It’s something I’ve been interesting in doing for the past while.

4. If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be and how would you do it?I would retrieve the cure for cancer. They have said that the doctors have a cure for it but won’t give it to the people because they like making money from people with cancer. I would most likely make a team of people who could break into wherever they are keeping the cure and steal it and give it to doc-tors who actually want to help people and not just making money.

5. Do you have any siblings? If so, what are they like?I actually have 6 siblings. There are 3 older siblings above me and 3 under me. It’s hard for me to really connect with any of my siblings be-cause the order of them goes boy, girl, girl, boy, girl, girl, boy. I’m the middle boy. The oldest is a boy and the youngest is a boy. I all I have around my age range for my sib-lings is girls Ha-ha.

6. If you had been born a girl, do you think your career/future plans would be different? How so?Well I wouldn’t be a cop anymore. I don’t think most women should be a cop. It’s a hard job and should be handled by men.

7. Who is your favourite fictional character of all time and why?Most likely Obi-Wan Kenobi. I am a VERY big fan of star wars. I have a lot of comics from it. I like his char-acter because he always has a sense of humor in the craziest of times.

8. What was one of the best mo-ments of your life?When my dad and I went on a ca-noe trip for my 13th birthday, it was one of best times of my life. But I almost fell off a 500! cliff…Thank goodness there was a tree right at the cliff edge that I hit into keeping me from flying off it.

9. What do you think you could not live without?My friends, they make my life so lively and fun. But I’m also pretty sure I can’t live without food.

10. Thank you again for agreeing to do this interview! As a last question, do you like cotton can-dy?Yes!! I love how it melts in my mouth!

4 The HCOS Weekly

VERSE

WEEKOF THE

The Maze Runner

By James Dashner

Book Review by Grace VaneeRating: 4 stars

Genre: Teen fiction, dystopian fu-ture, science fiction, and post-apocalyptic.

A description:With a lack of information given, you find yourself being carried down in a box with Thomas, the boy that can only remember his name. Eventually you will reach the great expanse called The Glade, where the story really be-gins.

A!er a painful and uninformative beginning, the story finally begins to open up plot-wise. Each week supplies are brought up to the Glade and each month one boy is brought forth to the Gladers, which is a group of 50 or so boys. All the boys can remember are their names. Surrounding the Glade is the Maze, where vicious slug-like creatures live. They have the intent to kill the Gladers, and would suc-ceed in doing so if it weren’t for the Doors being closed every night. Ev-erything seems to be repetitive - a routine - until an unexpected girl shows up. Between the mystery of her message and the strange con-nection Thomas’s mind has to hers, his only option is to unlock the secrets lying within the Maze.

Positives:The Maze Runner keeps you atten-tively planted to the couch, much like The Hunger Games and a vari-ety of mystery novels. This is one book that people will be itching to finish right to the end.

Negatives:The book can be slightly frustrat-ing in some parts where it seems to lead absolutely nowhere.

Personal Opinion:

A!er a long read, I found The Maze Runner had an incredible concept dreamed up by James Dashner. The book held a mystery from the very first paragraph, but even as I seemed to be figuring out what was happening, another mystery popped up. There was a good emotional range with characters I absolutely despised, and other characters that were so much more charming (when I say charm-ing I mean not unkind, seeing as none of the Gladers were all that friendly). Eventually you reach the end of the book, which could defi-nitely leave you wanting to read more. I would highly recommend it, despite the fact that maybe there are some parts that may be slightly creepy to some people.

Are you enjoying our Book, TV Show and Movie Reviews? Email us at hcosweekly@outlook.com and tell us what you want to see more of!

By Megan Ferguson

“A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy person keeps a se-cret.” –Proverbs 11:13

Secrets are a fruit of close friend-ship; they are a sign of trust, re-spect and love. However, the con-sequences are grave when that trust is broken. Gossip is so easy it’s unreal. For most of us, it just slips out and we don’t even mean it to. As men and women of integri-ty, we must do our utmost to be trustworthy.

Another note on that, the sad thing about betrayal is that it never comes from your enemies. Always people you love and trust. Once you break something, you can re-pair it to some degree, but it will never be the same. So before you confide someone else’s secret, think twice and be a trustworthy person.

5The HCOS Weekly

Look It Up

By Jaleesa Taylor

I adore the dictionary. It is so cool to look up a word that means ab-solutely nothing at first, and then to walk away, enlightened. Just think, you’re that much smarter than when you first picked up the dictionary! I have, on occasion, been known to read it just out of sheer boredom-but only when I’m really, really bored…honest. Have I weirded you out yet? Yes, I know, my poor family.

Generally, when I think of the dic-tionary, I think of a dependable, well-founded reference that I can learn just about anything from. It’s widely believed to be a pretty trustworthy source, since it has all of those really knowledgeable peo-ple with fancy degrees writing and editing it. When I open up the dic-tionary, I can just feel the amount of skill and time put into it. And to think they even had it alphabet-ized. How thoughtful of them.

I have to wonder, though, with all of the time and energy put into writing a globally used product, why some of the new words for the 2013 edition were added. Did you know that “srsly” is now in the dic-tionary? No seriously, what hap-

pened to all of the vowels? Let’s throw grammar out the window with that one. Don’t forget “apols”, “selfie”, and “derp”. These are now actual words in the actual dictio-nary. How about “me time”? We could all use some of that…just

maybe not in the dictionary? Then there’s “LOL”. I would love to get that one in a spelling bee. I bet you never could have guessed that the word “twerk” would make itself known to the literary world, but the facts are there. Congratula-tions Miley Cyrus. If you have not already made your mark on this planet, well, I guess you’ll always have that word defined in print…in a highly renowned book…maybe you’ve heard of it…yes, the dictionary, that’s it.

With the way things are going, I wonder what the dictionary twen-ty years from now will be like. Will we all be talking like we text? Is the death of the English language in-evitable? The terrible thing is, that many people don’t seem to care and even support these additions to our beloved word source. I sim-ply cannot find it in myself to join those ranks.

BTW, did you notice how I used the word “weirded” in my first para-graph? It’s not in the dictionary. We’ll have to protest that one.

6 The HCOS Weekly

WEEKLY LOLWEEKLY LOL

7The HCOS Weekly

Late Valentine's - By Joshua Wlodarczyk

Super Comics