The grinding that students partake in at our high school dances is much too sexual and should not be so openly accepted. Take a step back and observe the dancing for what it is. Even Wikipedia points out the inherently sexual nature of grinding saying: “grinding is a type of close partner dance where two or more dancers rub their bodies (especially the genitalia) against each other in a sexually suggestive manner.” If you take away the music it’s just people rubbing their bodies on each other. The fact that it’s being done in a public school setting makes it unsettling to me. Have we come to a place where grinding is socially acceptable action even though it is about the most sexual thing you can do with your clothes on?
Teenage guys deal with an immense amount of sexual desire and grinding is a way for guys to release it. I have participated in grinding and will argue that it is indeed nothing more than such a release. However, what concerns me is what kind of message that we, the men of this school, are sending to the women of this school when we participate in a form of dancing where the sole purpose is to fulfill our sexual desire. I feel that any respect for women that we bring to a school dance doesn’t make it though the doors of the school on those late Friday nights; it is left outside and meets back up with us as we walk out. In an over-sexed world it has become difficult to find men with integrity who respect women. As Terrace men, I feel that we could be an amazing example to others by treating women well.
Many girls look at grinding as little more than “suggestive.” I want the girls to understand what it means to a guy. Most girls cannot comprehend that a guy can visualize a girl with her clothes off and engaging in something sexual with them at any time they want. It sounds unbelievable, but it is so true.
What is a fun Friday night for a girl is a sexual fantasy come to life for a guy. So, many girls I have talked to look at it as an innocent form of entertainment, but it is not. Going to dances and having multiple guys wanting to dance with you, hold you close, it all makes you feel wanted. The one thing a high school girl wants more than anything else is to feel wanted and loved; I can’t express how much I have come to understand that.
So, this is my suggestion to Terrace girls: Ask yourself what the intentions are of the man that I am trusting myself with?
If we can all come to the understanding that school dances are much too sexual and should not continue in the way they have, then that may other problems. ASB and other organizations profit greatly off of these dances. My call to action is that we as a student body can recognize the need for change and make dances friendlier to different kinds of dancing.
I am not alone in my opinion.
There are many students who agree and are discontent with going to dances because of grinding.

By Michael Londino

Hawkeye staff

Perhaps the most versatile type of food sushi can make anyone happy whether you are a vegetarian or a seafood fanatic you can always find some kind of sushi that works for you. Out of all the sushi places I have been, Blue C Sushi has to be one of the greatest. But what makes them stand out amongst any other sushi place is how they serve the food.
The restaurant does have servers that bring you your drinks, but the food is brought to you by a giant conveyor belt that stretches around the restaurant. What isn’t on the conveyor belt is made and handed to you by the two to three chefs that stand at the center of the belt keeping it stocked with gourmet seafood and sushi.
The part that attracted me though, had to be the interior itself. On the left hand side of the restaurant there is a giant screen that shows Japanese TV shows and on the center wall are pictures from Japan. Even though the waiters don’t do much but bring you your drinks they have the duty to help the “first-timers” get into the feel of how things work. I would have to give the service four stars because my waiter, Chelsea, was a great help to writing this article by giving the layout of the place and how you can tell how much a item is by the color of a plate it was on.
The food I tried was some classics and I tried to have a little bit of each group. For those who are vegetarians and love tofu they have a plate called Inari that is sweet-roasted tofu wrapped around rice which tastes a lot like teriyaki chicken and there is also the kappa maki which is simply cucumber wrapped in rice and seaweed. People that like cooked sushi instead of its raw brethren will die for the shrimp tempura a fried shrimp that you dip in a sauce called tempura which has a slight kick but also sweet to give you that sweet and tangy flavor. Also there is a chicken katsue which tastes very similar to fish n’ chips that goes great with a wasabi/soy sauce mix.
Then there is the unagi nigiri my favorite of the night which is raw eel covered in unagi sauce on a rice bed that also goes well with wasabi and soy sauce for those that like the original type of sushi: raw.
The last food item I tried was the albacore tuna on rice which was a little too bland for me because it reminded me of a tuna sandwich.
For those that have a sweet tooth they do have a dessert that resembles a cream puff or éclair and to drink they have soft drinks and some imports including a drink called “Ramune” that is sweet and smells great.
Overall the price for a good meal is about $20, but for that price you get the food, the experience of trying new things and a truly wonderful atmosphere of a restaurant.

As some of you may have noticed there are a few coffee stands down the street from our school. One such coffee stand is the Blendz bakini barista stand. This bikini barista stand is an absolute disgrace. Not only is it degrading to women, but right down the road from an educational building full of young adults.
After a very entertaining interview with one of the nineteen-year old baristas, it could not be clearer that this coffee stand is entirely immoral. When asked about what her family thought about her job, all she could say was: “they don’t know, because they are really religious.” It was obvious why the barista did not want to tell her parents, because it is wrong to sell her body to desperate men. She also had a boyfriend who did not want her working at the stand.
Besides the fact that this coffee stand being all around degrading for employees, it is just down the street from a high school. Students constantly have to drive and walk past the stand to get home or to school and it sickening for the students who do not want to see a half naked woman standing by a full body length window on their way to school. The Blendz coffee stand reveals their employees, allowing the little kids in the back of a car, to the old married men to stare in and fantasize.
After ordering a tall iced caramel macchiato from the stand for four dollars, and then comparing it to a Starbucks equivalent for three dollars, it was obvious why the coffee stand tries to use hardly dressed women to gain customers. The coffee from the Blendz stand was smaller than the Starbucks coffee and it did not taste as good as the Starbucks coffee.
These stands are a bad influence and are destroying the minds of men. They are corrupting society and turning it into “a man’s world.” It is disgusting to watch all the women give up their dignity so a man can have his thrills.

Approximately 3,000 students in the Edmonds School District were left searching for other means of transportation to school this year as the news of the loss of state funding for bus services was spread. Families living within a one-mile radius of their child’s school received a letter in June, stating that “you live within a one-mile radius of your student’s school, which is recognized by the state as a no-bus-service zone.” This part of the budget cuts for the 2009-2010 school year is said to “free up approximately $500,000 annually that can be used to support students in the classroom.”
The district offers up other means of transportation, such as walking to school, a parent driving them to school, or walking to a bus stop outside of the one-mile radius. But is this fair to those thousands of students left behind? “They come through the one-mile zone, so why don’t they pick the kids up along the way?” states junior Joe Muriekes. Bussing kids who live miles from the school is reasonable, as they would have little to no other means to get to school, but to pass up the many students who live a reasonable distance from the school seems unfair. If they are in a direct route, why not pick them up as well? Here’s another suggestion: why not make the radius smaller?
Michael Ward, senior, states “getting kids to school is a necessity.” The President of the U.S. is pushing to get more kids to go to school, as an education is probably the most valuable thing you can have in this country. And with budget cuts, we are making it less possible. What about the students who were reliant on the bus services? School should be made more accessible to students, not harder to attend, and what good is saving funds to support the students if we are taking away the one main source that gets them to school? None whatsoever.
While Ward states to the opposing side, he also adds, “that’s fine and dandy for me, cause I drive to school.” There are indeed many students that already drive to school, and many who also already take community transit or get a ride by a parent or with friends, as well as still take the school-provided bus. For these people, the one-mile rule does not affect them. However, everyone should be concerned for the students who are affected. And who says that more won’t be affected as time goes on?

A lot of work has gone into suppressing stereotyping at this school. The funny thing is that many people don’t understand that a stereotype isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The negative effects only start to show when a derogatory value is assigned to groups of people. These types of assumptions are unfounded and sloppy. When this happens at Mountlake Terrace, students tend to change their ways for fear of fitting into these stereotypes. This is a terrible environment, where people have to think twice about being who they naturally are.
The first step to defeating these effects is to understand stereotypes and where they come from. People tend to make characterizations about their environment, even without noticing. It helps them deal with all of the information coming in through their senses. The process of taking data and making justifiable assumptions from it is done with a type of math called statistics. Ms. Paine, who is a trained statistician and the AP Statistics teacher at MTHS, says that stereotyping people is so popular because “Most people find it easier to work with categories than with the variability you find in individuals.” This explains why stereotyping is so common, even while most people agree that it has negative results.
When a student reinforces a stereotype that insults a group of people, they do a little bit to hurt the cohesiveness of the entire school. Every single one of us has unique strengths and weaknesses. When someone says a thing like, “Jocks are dumb,” they are potentially making the talented athletes at the school self conscious about their abilities. Athleticism has nothing to do with intelligence, but now some of these athletes aren’t as proud as they should be, because they think that others are assuming they are dumb. In a survey conducted at Mountlake Terrace, 24 out of 34 students answered yes to this question: Have you ever let a desire to not fit into a stereotype affect your decisions? This shows how many of us are affected by this issue, and how much room for improvement we have. School is a nicer place when people embrace who they tend to be naturally; it puts us at ease, makes us more productive, and helps us grow into interesting, vibrantly unique young adults.
The students out there who find making this school a better place an attractive pursuit should help to stop the negative assumptions being made about groups defined by race, gender, sexual preference, body type, economic status, style of dress, or any other attribute. They should acknowledge that people will always tend to make assumptions about each other, but what needs to end is the fostering of stigmas over the heads certain groups, and the fear this creates.
In the words of Yoda, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

For a couple years now Terrace High School students have felt belittled, violated, and even betrayed by teachers and administrators when our personal electronics are taken away in classrooms. Students don’t fully understand why the abduction is occurring, so an explanation of the situation is in order.
Many students think that taking our electronics away is a violation of our rights. We bought these products and now a third party who had nothing to do with the transaction of the device is taking them. It is very important to know that nothing angers a teenager more then taking away their rights, either real or perceived. Sure, the teachers can ask us to turn them off, but to confiscate them is a violation of our freedom. It also insinuates that we are not mature enough to decide when we need to listen and what conditions we need to learn.
Most high school students should know their own limits about what distractions they could handle. High school students are supposed to be preparing for college and the real world; let them learn from the mistakes that are made. Our generation believes that we can multi-task with everything we do and using our cell phones or iPods during quiet study does not distract us from our work.
I agree we shouldn’t be listening to music while someone is teaching. Why shouldn’t we be able to use our iPods or send a text? There is nothing stopping our ability to focus on many things at once. Things may not get all of our attention and we might get bored or distracted more easily, but we can get five things done at once if we put our mind to it. High school students have so much incoming information all the time that we pick out the information needed and everything else becomes white noise. White noise such as a song, can still be pleasing to the ear yet not focus is needed to make it enjoyable.
The main reason high school students don’t understand the strict policies for electronics is because it is not an iPod or phone to us. It’s not instant messaging or surfing the web or even texting. To us it is just a way of life. Technology has become increasingly advanced to the older generations but being born into it and growing up being able to get a answer to every possible question in an instant changes how we think.
We communicate through our phones and iPods. Without the devices, we feel cut off from the world.

The grinding that students partake in at our high school dances is much too sexual and should not be so openly accepted. Take a step back and observe the dancing for what it is. Even Wikipedia points out the inherently sexual nature of grinding saying: “grinding is a type of close partner dance where two or more dancers rub their bodies (especially the genitalia) against each other in a sexually suggestive manner.” If you take away the music it’s just people rubbing their bodies on each other. The fact that it’s being done in a public school setting makes it unsettling to me. Have we come to a place where grinding is socially acceptable action even though it is about the most sexual thing you can do with your clothes on?
Teenage guys deal with an immense amount of sexual desire and grinding is a way for guys to release it. I have participated in grinding and will argue that it is indeed nothing more than such a release. However, what concerns me is what kind of message that we, the men of this school, are sending to the women of this school when we participate in a form of dancing where the sole purpose is to fulfill our sexual desire. I feel that any respect for women that we bring to a school dance doesn’t make it though the doors of the school on those late Friday nights; it is left outside and meets back up with us as we walk out. In an over-sexed world it has become difficult to find men with integrity who respect women. As Terrace men, I feel that we could be an amazing example to others by treating women well.
Many girls look at grinding as little more than “suggestive.” I want the girls to understand what it means to a guy. Most girls cannot comprehend that a guy can visualize a girl with her clothes off and engaging in something sexual with them at any time they want. It sounds unbelievable, but it is so true.
What is a fun Friday night for a girl is a sexual fantasy come to life for a guy. So, many girls I have talked to look at it as an innocent form of entertainment, but it is not. Going to dances and having multiple guys wanting to dance with you, hold you close, it all makes you feel wanted. The one thing a high school girl wants more than anything else is to feel wanted and loved; I can’t express how much I have come to understand that.
So, this is my suggestion to Terrace girls: Ask yourself what the intentions are of the man that I am trusting myself with?
If we can all come to the understanding that school dances are much too sexual and should not continue in the way they have, then that may other problems. ASB and other organizations profit greatly off of these dances. My call to action is that we as a student body can recognize the need for change and make dances friendlier to different kinds of dancing.
I am not alone in my opinion.
There are many students who agree and are discontent with going to dances because of grinding.

By Cassandra Soriano & Antonia Rovig

Owl City, a solo project by artist Adam Young formerly of the Christian ska band Five Iron Frenzy, will be playing at Neumo’s  in Seattle this Friday October 16 for his 2009 North American tour.
Young’s music is classified under the electronica/pop scene and is sweeping individuals off their feet with his “happy go lucky” feel containing metaphorically appropriate lyrics, along with a sparkling electronic beat. He has several side projects, including electropop band Swimming With Dolphins with Austin Tofte.
In being apart of Owl City, Young has produced several EPs, which began in June of 2007. Following that, his first official album “Maybe I’m dreaming” caught many fans’ eyes and revealed a new side of Adam Young that people have been looking for.
Since his newest album “Ocean Eyes” was released, more and more are attracted to the talent that Young displays both on- and off-stage as a lyrist and musician.  The album consists of mostly new songs with a few remixes of his indie tracks, such as “Hello Seattle” and personal favorite “The Saltwater Room.”  His most well-received track “Fireflies” can be heard on 107.7 The End as a top hit, according to their web-site. “Ocean Eyes” takes a slightly different route than his days as an unsigned artist. Now with Universal Records, his music contains a more electronic feel.
In “Maybe I’m Dreaming” he released a song that many have come to know and love titled “Hello Seattle.” The title basically says it all, but the lyrics explain the perks of Seattle along with the fascinating geography, which truly gives anyone who’s curious, a feeling about what Seattle is all about. According to www.absolutepunk.net, “It [the album Maybe I’m Dreaming] kicks off in dreamy fashion with “On the Wing” and “Rainbow Veins,” two beautifully flowing efforts which carry the listener away into another world”.
Owl City is touring with the Scene Aesthetic and Brooke Waggonner, who will be opening for him.
The concert has been sold out for a month, and the entire tour is now sold out. For more information about Owl City, see his website at www.owlcitymusic.com.

The cheerleaders have had a bumpy road these past few years. They lost the majority of their squad two years ago after an incident that led to the termination of the program. Now, the somewhat newly assembled team is ready to pump some spirit into the stands at the Homecoming game at the end of the month (see above).

As what might have been witnessed at previous games, the cheerleaders have a little something new this year that has been lacking in past – skill.

“With the combo of our tumbling, lots of practice, and stunting it has made everyone at Terrace take the team more seriously this year,” Jenna Donahue, senior newbie and one of the Tumbling Duo, said. “I think everyone is taking more interest.”

The other part of the Tumbling Duo is Marissa Danekas, junior newbie and retired gymnast.

“There isn’t a [gymnastics team] here. This is the only way I can sort of get back into that,” Danekas said. “It’s a lot of fun.”

Though the tumblers bring a certain flair, all of the team’s new found success is not solely their doing.

“I don’t think the tumblers have been the defining factor in what has improved the team,” cheer coach Kacee Jensen said. “I think overall, each member has added and worked really hard to make the team what it is; the tumblers just add the frosting on top.”

Another season begins for the women’s volleyball team and as the crowds flock to each home game, hopes of a winning season fill the Terraceum. In the first match of the season on Sept. 10, Hawk fans came out to support the girls as they took on the Jackson Timberwolves. By the last buzzer, disappointment set in, with Jackson taking down the last three of the four games played that night. But no matter how unfortunate a loss, the women stay positive and encourage their teammates to play at the best of their abilities.

One particular player, who has stepped up her game as a major point contributor, is sophomore, Shawna Pung.

“[Shawna] is only 5’6” and she’s playing the huge middle.” Coach Marietta Snyder said of Pung. “She’s got 4 block kills. That’s big. Usually 6’3”-6’4” girls are the ones doing those.”

But Pung doesn’t let her height hurt her game and shows that being 5 foot, 6 inches is not a hindrance to her ability to kill as middle. Pung said, “I want to show the tall girls that I can beat them and they’re not better [because they’ve got a little height on me].” She accomplished just that during the first game, where the Hawks came out victorious with a close 25-23 win, Pung surprised even her team mates, by blocking hit after hit. “[Playing middle] is fun,” Pung said. “I like blocking. [Getting praise from the team is] really exciting and makes me want to work harder so I’m consistent and get more kills.”

Pung, who started playing volleyball in fourth grade, has had a lot of time to work on her game, and is said to have an amazing work ethic. Coach Marietta explained that, “The team really appreciates and likes her. She works hard, doesn’t screw around, and is totally focused.” Coach Marietta said. “And she’s only a sophomore!”

The affect of Pung, one of the youngest players on varsity, and her having a higher maturity is not lost on Coach Marietta or the team. “She has a great attitude. Never goofs around.” She said. “I love this team.” She laughs. “I don’t have to deal with a bunch of cattiness.”

The lack of cattiness can be credited to the amount of talent and the bonds of the team. “The seniors especially like [Shawna] and Leah Lechtenberg.”Leah, who was hurt at the beginning of the season was thought to be out for the duration, but will come back after training with help from Marietta. “[Leah] has worked really hard to get back into the game. The young girls have real dedication.”

Shawna acknowledges Lechtenberg as a positive contributor to the team. “All the seniors encourage me a lot. Leah too. Even though she can’t play right now, she keeps the team pumped up. She can see what you’re doing wrong, and help you out.”

Just as Lechtenberg brings dedication and determination, Pung brings a positive energy to the court that makes her stand out. When asked about what she thought of Pung, Senior Captain Stephanie McGee said, “When things get rough in a game, she stays positive. She has that kind of mindset where, if she makes a mistake she doesn’t get pissed off.” McGee said. “She lets it go and gets it the next time.”

Shawna is not the only Pung expected to do great things for MTHS Volleyball.

“Shawna has a little sister, [Sarah], on the freshman team.” said Coach Marietta. “I’m looking forward to [her] coming up and to watch her grow as a player.”

Much like the Seidlitz sisters (Kori & Kelsi), who played together in previous volleyball history, the team will see a new, possibly strong family duo; The Pungs.