Category: by Meghan M ’11

An overweight teenage girl sits with about two other people at a table in a far off corner in the cafeteria. It is obvious she is trying to lose weight due to the “Light N’ Fit” smoothie she holds in her hand. She doesn’t talk with the few people sitting with her, preferring to stare off into space. If you look closer, you will see that she actually isn’t daydreaming, but rather has her gaze fixed on a skinny girl with scores of people laughing and talking around her. She is just a few tables away. Why does the overweight girl feel as though crossing a desert would be easier than walking the few feet to join the skinny girl’s table?
Popular opinion reflects that overweight girls in junior high school and high school have difficulty fitting into the social dynamic that makes up their class. While this does occur on occasion, a recent study published in

On the morning of February 12, 15 year old Lawrence King of Oxnard, California, was shot to death. This statement probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but it means more than words can describe to the people of the community he once lived in. Oxnard, known as a “laid-back beach community” in California, was exposed as something much less than laid-back the morning that Lawrence was shot. As he sat in the computer lab as per usual at his local junior high, E.O. Green Junior High School, with 24 other students, Brandon McIerney, 14, walked in, shot Lawrence in the head, and ran. It wasn’t long before the police caught him a few blocks away, and he is now being held in a juvenile facility in Venura County.
Brandon is being charged with gun possession, and as an adult who performed a planned hate crime. Maeve Fox, a senior deputy district attorney, would not reveal why the authorities added

How many times have you brought up the subject of dating with your parents, and they ended up telling you that you’re “too young to know what love is”?  Did you ever really believe them? Hopefully not, because as we teenagers have always known deep down inside, our parents are completely wrong on that front.
From the day babies are born all the way until their death, they are constantly experimenting with the mystery of love, going through different stages during which they learn details about their emotions towards others.  During the infant years, babies begin learning important life skills that develop during their acts to attract attention; they learn how

Father Christo­pher Okrie, a priest in Our Lady of Mercy Parish, has long been working on plans to provide clean water to what used to be the village he resided in, Obinagu, Nigeria. Everyday, children living in that village must walk miles to a polluted stream to bring water to their families. More than one third of the people living in Africa have access to clean water, and as a result, millions of people die each year from water­borne diseases.

Upon coming to America and becom­ing an assistant at

The attacks on athletes over the past few years, and even months, have escalated to the point of the kill­ing of Sean Taylor, who played the free-safety for the Washington Redskins of the NFL.  Athletes’ paranoia concerning robberies and assaults on they and their families has now hit an all time high.  They constantly feel like prime sources for attack, because their schedules are so well known, and it is obvious that they own large sums of money.  Recently, NBA player Eddy Curry and his family were held at gunpoint while their house was raided for money and jew­elry. Previously, Miami Head forward Antoine Walker experienced a similar robbery, sup­posedly linked to Eddy Curry’s.

What’s more is that unlike Lindsay Lo­han and Britney Spears, these