Tucker Non-Fiction

  What are your secret survival strategies?  How I Survive It takes a lot for me to survive in today's society. What I have done is improve. Today, I have more people I can call friends than ever before. I have gained speaking skills when I used to stumble through my words, and I’d say I have become half funny. I have learned that it is important to make friends to get through life. At first, I didn’t find the point. I could just drift through school, get good grades, and talk to my parents at home. I later learned that there are some things that I don’t want to tell my parents, some things that they don’t understand, and most importantly, I just can’t be silent all day, keeping what I want to say inside. My unfunny jokes, opinions on teachers, and the upcoming basketball game. Once I learned this I of course needed to make friends, but I did not know how. The way I chose to make friends was through sports. In basketball you spend hours each day with a small number of peop...

I hate lying. It is not due to any parenting choice, I just don’t like to do it. I then take that I don’t like to lie and try to rationalize them, as I think any person would. I am very extreme on the ‘no lying’ side. My dad and I have debated how much it is okay to lie. He says it is ok to tell someone trying new clothes that they look good, even when they don’t, I would disagree. When they walk out and ask me if they look good, I could just say yes and they wear what they have on at that moment, but they pass up the opportunity to look better.  I do think how much you know the person matters. If they are someone I barely know, then I might say that the food tastes good so I can further a relationship with them. But even if they are strangers, then I’ll tell them the truth. I will most likely never see them again, the question is usually something simple ‘How does my music sound’, and I do not know what a lie would entail. What if I lied to someone and said they had great music wh...

  I am the smart kid who does what he is told. I did not choose to be that kid, it just so happened that I got into Uni (thus the smartness), and that after 13 years of not doing what your parents tell you, you learn that there might be a benefit to listening to them.  This was not always true though. I would have fake panic attacks and throw remotes at TVs, I would try to fake a sickness every week to get out of school to the point were my dad read me ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’. There was no ultimate revelation for any of these problems, I just grew out of my problems.  My sister is the most normal or average out of my family, other than the fact that she is adopted. She is the typical annoying, nagging younger sister. She will ask questions till you fall asleep (because she is staying up longer than you), she will always be talking with her friends, and does good in most things except math. She almost feels out of place in this family. If we were a family on TV, she would...

I am Better Than You I like to ‘trash talk’. You may not know that talking to be, but when I see a good opportunity I’ll take it.  One example is during freshman year I would love to google, “IQ test free” “Free IQ test”, and other variations. It is not because I liked taking the tests, although that is part of it, it is because I liked to ‘talk trash’ about my IQ score.  I could easily get a score of 125 and if that is because I am taking the same test twice or not did not matter to me. I just saw the number at the end of the test and thought “aha I need to tell people about this”. I would go to school and tell people my IQ, the same people multiple times. In a cruel act of karma, many of the people I talked to had IQ’s of 130, 140, 150. I was annoyed and a little sad.  I had handaly lost the trash talking battle. In this case it was something stupid. It wasn’t even real trash talk, it was just “I have an IQ of 125, what is yours” “150”, and that was the end of it. There...