Her eyes follow the swirling circle in the middle of the pending video until a 19-year-old boy, staring into his webcam, greets her. She smiles and waves to the familiar face; he does the same as she types “wassup OG” to the boy, Lukas Kerner.

Gessese and Kerner have only known each other for three months, yet they discuss their insecurities, their religious beliefs, and their family situations openly. They’ve already seen each other’s houses and had dinner together; Kerner even knows the password to Gessese’s Facebook account.

“We have an incredible trust,” Gessese says. “We can say ‘I love you’ and mean it.”  

However, the relationship that Gessese and Kerner enjoy isn’t exactly conventional: they’ve never actually met in person. Kerner lives 5,300 miles away, in Mannheim, Germany.

Kerner, who Gessese first met on Chatroulette, is one of 13 contacts on Gessese’s Skype that she’s never met in person. Of those 13, Gessese has met 12 on the video chat room site Chatroulette.

“Chatroulette is wonderful because I can talk to all these great people without having to leave my room,” Gessese says.

After exchanging usernames, Gessese and her Chatroulette video partners generally continue their friendship via Skype. Gessese has made friends with people living in Italy, Chicago, North Dakota, Germany, and Norway.

Though using the Internet as a source of friendship can seem risky and even demeaning at times, people who partake in doing so often argue the opposite.

“I think online friendships can be just as good as real-life friendships,” said Garfield junior Max Kee.

A few years ago, when Kee was an avid Rock Band player, he would visit forums on Scorehero.com, where he would discuss the game and share tips and information about upcoming events. It was on the Scorehero website that Kee met a boy going by the username ‘Arte.’

Kee continued chatting with ‘Arte,’ who later revealed his real name to be Rylie Nelson, on AIM. Then Kee found out that that he was only one year older than Nelson, and that Nelson lives 50 minutes away in Lakewood, WA.

 “We’re a lot alike, even though we rarely play Rock Band anymore,” Kee says. “I’d say he’s one of my best friends. We talk about everything.”

When it comes to making friends online, Kee and Gessesse agree that sharing personal information is easy.

“I think [online friendships] have a much different dynamic than real-life stuff,” Kee says. “I tell Rylie stuff that I don’t tell anyone else because I know he won’t tell anyone else.”

Not only can online strangers offer unique opinions, but simply holding conversation with friends online can be easier than doing so in person.

“I feel like talking online is so much easier because you have time to think about what you want to say and also there are no awkward, silent moments,” says Garfield senior Tracey Wong.

In sixth grade, Wong entered a World of Warcraft chat room and met a user by the name of ‘Anal.’ After a successful conversation in the chat room, ‘Anal’ asked Wong for her ASL (age, sex, location), and from there, their friendship expanded.

“I would always log on hoping he was online,” Wong says. “We’d have endless conversations about anything and everything.”

Wong and ‘Anal’ eventually decided to take their relationship a step further, when they started using webcams.

“I stopped talking to him after he asked me to show him my boobs,” Wong says.

Though friendships are made easily online, there will always be a few bad seeds.

“I mean sure, there are a lot of creeps online,” says Gessese. “On Chatroulette, they’re the ones who ask for your age right away, or are rocking out with their [insert name of male sex organ here]. Yeah… ‘next’ for days.”

Though online chat room sites that host strangers are notorious for user “secrecy,” such sites offer a unique medium for conversing with other people.

“We naturally judge people based on their characteristics, but it’s hard to judge people when all you see are their words and a picture of a flower,” Wong says. “We get intimidated because ‘he’ seems smart or you think that a girl is really hot (but you’re not trying to come off as a creep.) Talking to people online just eliminates these obstacles.”

When it was apparent that the explosion had failed to happen, seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold armed themselves with two shotguns, one handgun, and one rifle, yelled “Go! Go!” and proceeded to kill 12 students, one teacher, and themselves.

Seventeen-year-old Rachel Scott was the first victim in the Columbine High School shooting on April 20, 1999. A week after her death, her family had found an essay she had written month before, titled “My Ethics, My Codes of Life” conveying her views on kindness and the potential chain reaction it can create.

Rather than resenting her untimely death, Scott’s family created a program teaching students about compassion and kindness.

Rachel’s Challenge, so named for the call of action in Scott’s essay challenging readers to look for the best in others, has been presented to over five million people in audiences around the world.

The speakers are personally trained by Scott’s father, Darrell Scott, and tell audiences of Rachel Scott’s compassionate acts: befriending a new student whose mother had just died in a car crash, and stopping students who had bullied a young boy who planned on committing suicide the very day Scott had intervened.

They also tell the story of an African American student who had been taunted with racial slurs just before he was shot and killed next to Scott’s brother in the Columbine library.
The speakers challenge audiences to set goals, be aware of their influences, and teach them that the little things can do more than expected.

One of the tools of Rachel’s Challenge is a 10-foot by three-foot banner that’s placed inside the schools after the assemblies.

“You should just see the kids rushing up to the sign,” Craig Scott, Rachel’s brother, had said in an interview. “It’s so powerful, because by signing it, they’re saying ‘I accept Rachel’s challenge and I’ll treat other people with kindness.’”

Scott’s father has been featured on numerous programs including Larry King Live, Good Morning America, and The Today Show, and has also addressed the United States Congress and had met with President Clinton several times to discuss the frequent issues of violence in schools.

“I have this theory that if one person can go out of their way to show compassion, then it will start a chain reaction of the same,” Scott had written in her essay, the focal point of the presentation. “People will never know how far a little kindness can go.”

The wealthier population of the world pities the people living in third world countries, but by our creation of businesses and schooling, aren’t we the ones who have thrust them into poverty? It was only likely that part of the world would fall behind and not have the same access to opportunities when we gradually started to raise the bar. We’ve made it so that the only way to succeed in this world is making money, which, most of the time, means it’s necessary to attend college.

I’m surrounded by friends and family members with amazing academic resumes to flaunt. They’re sitting on 4.0s, and yet still frantically worry about getting into “good” universities. They sign up for hard classes they don’t want to take, and spend time over achieving on assignments that, I’m sure, they already would get As on. There are many instances when I know they sacrifice their adolescence and put school before making memories. We’re always told to put work before play, because we make ourselves believe that if we work now, we can play later, and even though this is the case sometimes, it is never always true; we will never stop working, and even though we complain about homework and bosses, few people ever deviate from the norm and take their life into their own hands.

We refuse to slow down. We refuse to give up. Even though that might sound like an encouraging television commercial for Microsoft or Nike, it’s the reason we’re ruining ourselves. The world is so competitive at this point that in a few decades the difference between rich and poor will be even more drastic than it is now. We suffer, working so hard, either in school or with our jobs, and for what? Earning money gives us a few pleasures, but when we’re on our deathbeds and look back at the times when we were truly happy, I’ll bet money will rarely play a part.

For the past few summers, I’ve been taking family trips with my cousins to Oregon, where our extended family lives in a simple log cabin nestled humbly in, basically, a forest. We spend one night of our trip on top of a small mountain. Our Oregonian family lives so far away from civilization that the entire sky is luminous not by city lights, but by stars. There aren’t any trees at the top of the mountain to block our vision of the sky; they were torn down by a logging company.
I literally feel like I’m on top of the world when I spend the night on that mountain. The only things visible to me are millions of little lights. It makes everything we do here, the choices we think are so important, seem undoubtedly arbitrary compared to the infinite amount of space that lies beyond this planet. We’ve created a pointless system for us to live up to, and the only good resulting from it is our material happiness. My Center School friend was correct when she said “college is stupid” because it’s trapped us: without it, we’ll fail. We’re trapped by our own device, and most of us don’t even realize it.

The majority of posts on its wall either share the names of bars, where happy hour prices are steals, or the names of restaurants, said to have “fantastic” and “astounding” food. Some users inform others of venues offering free admission, or up-and-coming local indie artists, such as Sad Face, Dudley Taft, or Lushy.

Secret Seattle offers “the best places” to smoke a joint, to see breathtaking views of the city, and to go to get drunk during the day (the downtown library), but what seems to be missing amongst all these posts are the locations of strange nooks and crannies: places which make people think “why would I ever go there?”

I started my quest for such places after school on a Monday. Most of the restaurants I came across on the group page seemed ordinary and were only mentioned because they were favorites of the group members. However, as I walked past Julia’s on Broadway, it reminded me of the wide variety of affordable restaurants when Garfield was in Wallingford, when I could get a full cup of soup and a piece of bread for only two dollars, or a container of teriyaki and rice for three dollars.

The first location on my list was 14th and John, said to be an amazing viewpoint. After pondering about where this cross street was in relation to where I stood on Broadway, I started walking east along John Street. I had doubted there would be much of a view of anything because I had never noticed one the many times I’d driven by on 15th, until I realized John Street was a hill parallel to the Olympics and the Puget Sound. I turned around, and saw one of the most amazing views of blue, snow peaked mountains and glistening water. The Space Needle, visible from top to bottom, was artistically placed off-center to the right; it almost seemed like it was built there to be visible from this view. What made this viewpoint distinct was that it was a place definitely easy to overlook while driving by.

I walked back down the hill towards my next location: “the most attractive and dangerous” fire climb on an apartment building on Thomas behind QFC. I walked along Thomas and immediately I spotted the fire climb that the group member must have had in mind.  It was attached to the side of an early 20th century beige-bricked three or four story building: a simple, straight ladder traveling all the way to the roof of the building, encircled by two decks with curly heart-shaped designed railings; a tempting climb, but definitely not in broad daylight.

My quest that day anticlimactically ended there, but the following day I decided to visit Liem’s Pet Shop, a (very) small, privately owned fish store tucked away in Maynard Alley in Chinatown which the Secret Seattle group member explained smelled “like dead pigeons and peanut butter.”

When I passed through the door, a waft of pungent air hit my face. The walls of the aisles, which were barely wide enough to walk through, were made up of dozens of fish tanks stacked on top of one another, each filled with hundreds of different types of colorful fish. Fish bags and tank pumps hung from makeshift beams a few inches above my head. The ceiling, which was the only visible part of the actual building I stood in, must have been 30 feet high.

I walked out the door, intrigued. Liem’s Pet Shop was located next to what used to be the Wah Mee Club, before it was closed down after 13 people were killed in what’s considered to be Seattle’s worst massacre. I stood there looking at the black doors, bolted and chained shut, covered in graffiti, and wished I had enough guts to break into the place. I wondered what it would be like inside, after no one had been in there for 27 years now, and considered how many places we never really see as we unknowingly walk past them; secrets, hidden behind closed doors.

It seems like an entire world of opportunities instantly puts itself at your fingertips when you turn 18. The term “illegal” becomes a little less applicable, while the term “responsibility” either earns immense respect or gets completely ignored. At the age of 18 one is granted a running list of legally viable activities to be conquered without parental consent.

You can go skydiving

When 18 rolls around, all the years of annoyance and resentment that have been built up against curfews and the Seattle Public School system can float away with the clouds as skydiving becomes legal to do without parental consent. Jumping out of a plane can relieve the stress of everything you’ve grudgingly done for the past 18 years, and no parent has to be there and remind you dinner is at seven.

You can sext

It’s seen nearly every day on the news. More and more teens get in trouble, sometimes even arrested, for sending risqué pictures of themselves via picture mail on their cell phones to their significant others. Before they know it, their naked bodies have been seen by their entire school’s student body, thanks to forwarding. It’s called sexting, and is considered child pornography, making it illegal for anyone who’s considered a child to engage in it. However, sexting can’t be child pornography if the picture is of someone over the age of 18, so when this birthday comes, the virtual world may open up a little more.

You can get pierced and tattooed

There are a good number of people under the age of 18 who already have bodies covered in piercings and tattoos, which are probably envied by the teens who have to buy nude colored nose studs to hide them from their parents. The opportunity to desecrate your body will be completely legal when you turn 18, no matter how much your parents swear they’ll disown you.

You can buy products off of informercials

How many times have you been watching late night TV and seen an ad for something you just have to have? The newest three-armed Snuggie, say, or perhaps Tracy Jordan’s “Meat Machine” from “30 Rock.” Before you turn 18 you can only dream of these useful and fun products, but now they can be yours for only $19.95 (plus shipping and handling).

You can buy salvia

Proposals to make Salvia divinorum illegal in the U.S. have failed to pass so far. It’s not regulated under the Controlled Substances Act, but certain states have passed their own laws concerning this psychotropic plant. Most states have no age restrictions whatsoever, but many vendors refuse to sell it to anyone under the age of 18.

You can sell your sperm

Women have to wait until they’re 21 to sell their eggs, but men can start selling or donating sperm at 18. If you’re a man and don’t mind seeing numerous random children at the park who have striking resemblances to your own, donating sperm is something to consider. If done every week, maybe to multiple sperm banks, a reasonable, secure monthly income can be established, though prices on sperm donation differ depending on location.

You can become a porn star

You’re 18, you’re out on your own, and you need to find a way to bring in the Benjamins while trying to stay focused on college. Luckily, the government has made it legal for you to make big bucks starring in some of the most captivating movies of all time. When you turn 18, not only will you be able to star in porn movies, but you’ll also be able to go to the adult section of the movie rental store and buy the movies you star in, if you’re into that.

You can get married

There are the few that end up marrying their high-school sweethearts after (or during) college, but imagine being able to tie the knot while still in high school. Getting married while simultaneously writing college essays doesn’t seem too realistic, but if Nathan and Haley were able to pull it off on One Tree Hill, it might as well be a reasonable decision. Marriage is a contract and once you’re 18, contracts and binds are yours to sign.

You can buy cigarettes

But why would anyone want to do that anyway?

You can stay out as late as you want

Even though they don’t necessarily cut down youth crime, many cities across the U.S. impose youth curfews, which state that the youth, sometimes under 16, sometimes under 18, can’t stay out after a certain time and before a certain time. These curfew laws are rarely ever enforced, so most teenagers aren’t even aware they exist. When you turns 18, however, it’s just a nice feeling to know that another law doesn’t apply to you, even if you don’t know it ever did.

You CAN’T rent a car

At 18 you can die for your country, you can become a pornstar, and if you’re a boy, you can sell the DNA of your future kids to strangers. Three years later you’ll be able to go into a bar and buy alcohol. But you’ll have to wait seven years in most cases until you’ll be able to rent a car. Cars are dangerous.

“A member of S.W.A.G will paint a large bulldog face on a 10-foot by 10-foot canvas,” said Emily Proulx, founder of S.W.A.G. The club plans on then cutting the canvas into square foot pieces, and offering them out for token fees (probably around 50 cents) to students, providing paint and other materials needed for each student to contribute to the mosaic. Once the individual canvases are completed, they will be put back together.

“The finished mosaic will reflect Garfield’s diverse and united student body,” Emily said. S.W.A.G. hopes that the unified piece of artwork will be displayed in the staircase across the hall from Mr. Mandelman’s room, near the alder street entrance, though S.W.A.G first needs approval from the administration. Ms. Hungate-Hawk, S.W.A.G.’s club advisor, acts as their official liaison.

S.W.A.G. has also come up with the idea to recreate the mural that was in the parking lot of the old Garfield on the cement wall near Alder. The original mural consisted of a Spiderman-bulldog, a painting of The Messenger, and a bulldog playing a saxophone, amongst other things. The project was put on standby due to the cold winter weather, but once it warms up, it will be resumed.

“We are hoping to incorporate a lot of the old mural into our new piece which will also consist of new ideas from the Garfield student body,” Emily said.

To fund its student-run projects, S.W.A.G has collected money through its bake sales and an ink cartridge drive which is currently underway. “We have to work for the money to buy the paint and supplies for the projects,” Emily said.

Having the student body brainstorm ideas for murals at Garfield won’t be a hard task. S.W.A.G.’s wall on Facebook is full with people’s ideas for separate projects, such as purple doors, painted bathrooms, and an entire wall free to anyone who’d like to tag it. Currently the only student created piece of artwork on display is the ’09 mural on the third floor, and students want more. Our school seems to be plagued with bland, beige walls, but at the old Garfield, artwork was abundant.

“It improved the spirit of the school,” junior Alec Marten said, “because when a sweet mural is around, you just feel happier.”

I hear that phrase a lot, especially when I express my views on the death penalty. I’m “so Republican” because I’m a pessimist about giving rapists a second chance. I’m “so Republican” because I think Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood murderer, should die.

I agree with the death penalty, though I like to leave politics out of my arguments. When it comes to the death penalty, I’m a realist, not a Republican.

My opinion in this article doesn’t take voluntary or involuntary manslaughter into account, (voluntary being intentionally killing after provocation, involuntary being due to criminal negligence) which are completely different from murder. I don’t believe manslaughter, in any form, deserves the death penalty.

I know it’s a hard subject to discuss. There are so many factors to determine whether someone deserves death or not. What did they do? Do they have a mental condition? Were they getting revenge for a terrible crime committed upon them first? Have they committed a crime before? That last question is what mainly guides my belief.

Statistics from Washington State Sentencing Guidelines Commission surveys in 2007 showed that murder had a 52 percent recidivism rate, meaning 52 percent of the people convicted for murder are repeat offenders. Doesn’t this virtually mean that if every person convicted for murder is given the death penalty, crime decreases by 52 percent?

I don’t agree with the thought that if a murderer gets the death penalty, then we’re just as bad as them. No, we aren’t. We didn’t kill anyone first. We aren’t teaching killing is good by killing; I’d call it more like teaching justice. Whatever happened to an eye for an eye? Shouldn’t that saying be taken even more seriously when it involves murder?

I know I’ll sound bad disagreeing with Amnesty International, a worldwide movement dedicated to the protection of human rights, but I do. The group has been quoted saying “The death penalty is the ultimate denial of human rights. It is the premeditated and cold-blooded killing of a human … it violates the right to life … it is the ultimate cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment.” Well, if human rights are what guide your opinion on the death penalty, consider this: I think a lot of people would rather have a quick death than to be locked up in a cage for the rest of their life. In prison there is an 80.4 percent chance of dying from an illness, a 5.8 percent chance of committing suicide, and a 1.5 percent chance of being killed by another inmate according to the Bureau of Justice (as of 2002). Life imprisonment is much more inhuman and degrading than the death penalty. How can the death penalty take away the value of life any more than life imprisonment does?

I believe in second chances when a 10-year-old boy beats up his classmate. Fight hate with love, and the 10-year-old boy most likely will grow up to be a nice young man. I don’t, however, believe in fighting hate with love when it comes to a murderer. We all get one chance at life, and if someone has taken that chance away from a victim, then their chance, too, should be taken away. Our justice system is way too relaxed for our own good, and it doesn’t seem like anyone notices. Soon enough, it’ll result in this country falling through the cracks, if it hasn’t already started to.

Austria

Neaer the border with Hungary is Baden, the home town of Bianca Dopplinger, a senior at Ingraham. Compare any small European town to Seattle and the primary difference will be obvious—size. “Everything is bigger. Even the streets are bigger,” Bianca noted. “Schools … are huge [in the United States]. In Austria we don’t have sports fields or auditoriums.” Bianca explained how the way people present themselves here is different than in Austria. “I don’t understand how some people here dress,” she said. “Some people wear dirty clothes … and look really gross. It seems to me that they don’t really care about how they look.” Despite this unflattering observation, Bianca said “there’s nothing I hate here.”

Italy

“I think Rome and Seattle are two different worlds,” Valentina Manzini, a junior at Garfield, said. “Everything is big and new here! In Rome, we have ancient cities and ruins instead of skyscrapers.” Coming from Italy, she hates the lack of sun here. “The first day I came here it was August 15, and I got such a bad cold even though it was summer,” she said. “I was the only one with winter clothes and scarves.” Though the weather in Seattle isn’t the type to rave about, Valentina loves the difference in people. “In Italy we are all white with brown hair and brown eyes. Boring! Here there are so many different people, different colors, different styles. It’s so cool.”

India

Thanks to Slumdog Millionaire, India is portrayed as a country of poverty-stricken shanty towns, which 22 percent of it is. But India can also be envisioned as an overpopulated country of geniuses. Karan Kukreja, a junior at Federal Way High and originally from New Delhi, pointed out the numerous differences between our school system and India’s. “Teachers come to our classes rather us going to theirs,” he said, “and we’re made to study the subjects that are selected by the education board until 10 grade, then we have five to seven options of subjects to choose from.”

“You people waste a lot of paper here, too, at least in schools,” he explained. “You use technology excessively, hence wasting electricity.” He went on to point out that everything in the U.S. is recorded. “Why do so many things have self service? Why not employ people for those things?” That wasn’t his only question, though. “Why are there so many people who look mysterious and dangerous and have tattoos?” he asked. “And why are people kissing everywhere?”

Befriend an exchange student at Garfield. Not only can they become a close friend, but spending time with an exchange student is like watching the travel channel, but without actually being in another country. You get a taste of what it’s like and what makes it different.

He’s a star student in school, but his abilities don’t stop there. Charlie has one more: he can accurately predict atmospheric conditions based on raw numerical weather models, the alignment of winds at different millibar levels in the atmosphere, and the distance in feet from one pressure zone to another. Yeah, I know—what? It means he knows the weather.

One day, long, long ago, young Charlie was but six years old and in New Mexico on a vacation with his family and friends. It was around 6 a.m. when they encountered a thunder storm, complete with lightning, hail, and an entirely dark, black sky. For six-year-old Charlie, this “intense” encounter was awe-inspiring.

Ten years later, and Charlie is a spitting image of his former self, still contemplating weather patterns in wonder. The only difference? Now, Charlie can thoroughly and confidently explain everything he observes.

He started out learning about the atmosphere from websites, and by watching KOMO 4 and listening to their “fantastic discussions.” From there, he shifted his attention to the national weather forecast discussions, He then started experimenting with the forecast models at the University of Washington (computers which take data, put it through complex equations, and result in a prediction).

Charlie makes his weather predictions by combining and interpreting all of the raw data he receives (such as information from satellites, radars, and weather stations).. As scientific as this may seem, Charlie stresses that it’s “still very important to look at the sky.”

His freshman year, Charlie made a group on Facebook for his followers called “Charlie’s Weather Predictions.” The group started with only 20 members, but when winter rolled around the count had boomed into the 300s.

He then englarged his group of followers by making a blog, charliesweatherpredictions.blogspot.com, on which he gives explanations to his procedures. He’s made such a reputation for himself that random, middle aged people have bumped into him in cafés and recognized him.

Charlie has recently made his way into Garfield’s morning announcements, broadcasting his five-day weather predictions for that school week. “[Predicting weather] is definitely an innate quality,” Charlie jokes. “Just like all gifts it must be cultured and refined into something much more beautiful.”

Charlie is extremely confident in his predictions, unlike the media forecasts which predict snow on a day that turns out to be sunny. Though the media always seems to have exaggerated predictions, Charlie says “they have to play the safe road,” just in case there’s any chance at all that their hyped up prediction might come true.

Charlie isn’t informing a city full of people, and therefore, he doesn’t have to play the safe road. He’s allowed himself to take more risks in his predictions which still usually turn out to be correct. It’s difficult for him to make exact predictions months in advance, but he can predict trends. For example he can’t predict what the exact weather will be during spring break (hopefully sunny), but Charlie says that late November is usually the stormiest time of the year, so he can predict that Thanksgiving weekend won’t be too sunny (though what does it really matter, when there’s turkey to eat).

After Thanksgiving break, winter break will quickly be approaching. So, the big question is, how much homework can we put off in confidence that we’ll have a few snow days? Charlie says this year is an El Niño year, meaning the Pacific Northwest is warmer and dryer than normal. Because of this, he doesn’t think there will be any snowball fights or sledding in the near future, though Ms. O’Sullivan predicts two snow days this school year, one before winter break, and one after.

“I’ve talked about weather in her class a few times and I can tell that she’s not just throwing random weather predictions out there, she also has an interest in it too,” Charlie said. “Just imagine what she could accomplish as a weatherman!” (Exact number of snow days have yet to be decided).