Post

I have opened this window half a dozen times since my last post with the intention of writing something. Every time I do I mostly stare at the screen, check facebook, stare at the screen some more, read through my twitter feed... needless to say I don't write anything as I'm sure the two or three people who might read this can attest. I do think up witty things to write, but at inconvenient times... like while I'm crawling along in rush hour traffic or when I'm in the shower. (And no, there isn't time after the shower... I'm usually rushing around with my head cut off in the morning anyway.) Even now I feel like surely I should be better spoken then this... surely I should be more eloquent.

And with that I'm off to bed. Maybe not eloquent, but perhaps next time I'll actually write what I sat down to write about.

Interesting

So I have recently discovered Twitter. So far the majority of people I am following are Twilight related or bands that I like. Also Greg and Chris in their awesome technology-ness. Out of curiosity I went searching to see who Twitters and found that the folks from NaNoWriMo are on Twitter. Of course I promptly subscribed because I am slightly fanatical right now and find the whole thing interesting.

Anyway, I was looking back through recent NaNo Twitters and stumbled across the NaNo blog with info on the current search for November pep talks. On the blog they ask you to post who you'd like to receive a pep talk from. The number of folks who distinctly requested that Stephenie Meyer not be asked surprised me. I mean, honestly, how many people who do NaNo and aren't professional writers could actually write a best selling young adult novel in 3 months? Did Meyer do exactly what all of the Wrimos want to do... break out and get mega famous for the work we love? It struck me as incredibly hypocritical of fellow writers to say that they wouldn't want to hear from her as though Meyer was somehow a lesser writer for her overnight success. Whatever you may think of her writing isn't it better sometimes just to not say anything?

I don't know.

I guess I was just a bit shocked by the arrogance of the other Wrimos. Twilight may not be a literary masterpiece, but I'll take an e-mail pep talk from Stephenie Meyer any day if it gives me any insight into the kind of massive popularity that she's managed to acquire with her amateur 3 month novel.

And the 14 year old girl in me says...

So like an addict I am reading stuff about Twilight. Mostly I'm curious about the new movie and also about any upcoming releases. For example, I learned tonight that they have pushed the Twilight Saga Guide back to June. It was coming out this month. I'm a bit on the disappointed side. That said I found an interview with Joss Whedon here: http://twilight-movie.org/

This is the best quote:

Mr. Whedon: I saw “Twilight.” And it’s—what can you say? It’s absolutely like crack. It strikes a tweener chord that’s just as loud as the apocalypse. You cannot deny the power of it. It just works. And I sort of like that.

So true.

Unfinished Business

I have started this blog entry multiple times in my head over the last several days. Usually in the car. In fact I have rehearsed that first sentence in my head for the last half hour while putzing around the house. Other first sentence contenders (that I can remember) where:

- Many people may not know that I was once diagnosed with carpal tunnel.
- I hate driving away from someone I love. It never feels like enough time.
- The best way to guarantee that I will read a book you recommend is to lend me your copy. Then I will feel obligated to read it next for fear of never returning it to you.

These are all things that I considered blogging about. These and more although the things I think the car are often so fleeting that by the time I get home that great line is miles away. (Possibly trying to hitch a ride with the next nice brain that comes along...)

I actually was diagnosed with carpal tunnel. Not full blown, out right, but a minor bout of it. Normally I don't think much of it. I've had it since I was a senior in high school. Recently, however, now that I have a job where the major focus is typing I find my hand doing annoying things. As I type this my right hand is in a wrist brace. It's much harder to type with a wrist brace on and so I hit backspace a lot. Instead of the normal carpal tunnel things it does (numbness, tingling, pain...) it is sending random and ridiculously uncomfortable sensations through my hand. I almost prefer pain. At least then I feel justified complaining about it.

On Saturday I spent the day with my mom. We made a crazy amount of cookies all of which are delicious. It takes an incredible act of will not to eat one (or one of each...) every time I walk into the kitchen.

On Monday I got to spend the evening with one of my closest friends, Bethany. We made bread. It was awesome. There is nothing so comforting than spending an evening with a friend just chilling and not worrying about what you'll say or what you'll do.

The hardest thing about leaving both times was that it felt like I just hadn't been there long enough. I knew I had to leave. I have a 1 hour 20 min drive (w/o traffic) back to my house from my parents and from Bethany's it's about 50 minutes (w/o traffic). The responsible me goes home. The reality is that I can never get enough of the people I love. I could spend hours with them. I could never go home. It is always hard to leave and I find that I am very bad at saying good bye. I can always think of one more thing I didn't tell them about... one more joke... one more hug... I could do that all day.

This is particularly pointed with writers group. We will all stand there in our coats holding our respective empty food containers and still it's hard to go. Same with Bill and Betania and so on and so forth with all of my dearest friends and family. I hate to go. I hate for them to go.

Currently I am reading the 4th book in the Tales of the Otori series by Lian Hearn. I am borrowing it from my brother who speaks very very highly of these books. In fact I was really flattered when he lent them to me because I know they are important to him. I must admit that I liked the first 3 best. The 4th is finally picking up, but it took longer to draw me in. There is still one more.

Those of you who have been to my house and in my office lately know that I have a book shelf which doubles as a Twilight shrine next to my desk. Almost (but not quite) all of the books on that shelf are books I haven't read but intend to. There are roughly 50 books which I have to read. I am reading books which were lent to me instead.

It's true that the best way to get me to read something you recommend is to lend me your copy. I'm not talking about offering to lend it... I'm talking about walking up to me and putting it in my hands and saying "here, read this." Because you have handed it to me I probably won't turn it down. Because it is yours and does not belong to me, it gets an automatic bump to the top of my list of things to read. I am deathly afraid that I will lose it, hurt it, forget to give it back... This is in part because I cherish my own books so much and don't usually lend them lightly. When I was in high school there was a girl in a grade ahead of me who had very similar reading tastes. I remember lending her one of my favorite books. One that I bought in England, actually. I never got it back. I have no idea where that person is. I also haven't been able to get a new copy of the book. It's out of print. So partly I am afraid of doing that to someone else. I'm not offended by the loss of that book. I know that eventually I will replace it because I will want to read it again. But I cherish books and I expect that people lending them to me feel the same way (whether they do or not).

All that said, I believe I will sign off now. I feel a little better now that I've gotten those thoughts out of my head.

Besides, there is a possibility of writing tonight and I should go eat dinner first if that's the plan.

Grr... I can't think of a witty title

I have a Beyonce song stuck in my head. Before that I had a Linkin Park song stuck in my head and before that I had a Mutemath song stuck in my head. And now that I've mentioned them all they're all playing in my head.

For those of you who are not aware of this I am something of a mild hypochondriac. This isn't to say that I find death in every cough. More that when my body does things that I don't really understand I fear a problem that will only go away with the attention of a medical professional... or that it is the Bubonic Plague. (Okay, I've never thought I had the Plague, but still...) Right now my left leg is bothering me. It is mildly reminiscent of a frustrating issue that happened to my right foot not too terribly long ago which caused me to require a medical professional (and an x-ray for that matter although the x-ray was pretty much pointless). Being the determined person than I am and because House constantly makes fun of people who do this, I refuse to look up my symptoms online. It will likely say something like this:

You have one of the following:
A pulled muscle
Hypothyroidism
The Bubonic Plauge

None of these things make sense except the first one, but as the Plague is clearly a runner up according to whatever online thing I may be looking at it clearly must be what I have.

Anyway, in reality I am going to go take some Aleve... the same thing my doctor told me to do for the foot... and hope that it goes away.






P.S. I do not have fleas therefore I do not have the Plague.

T-shirts

Okay, so recently I came to really love t-shirts. Cute ones that are girly shaped, not the kind that I vaguely remember wearing in middle school which sported cavorting kittens and were entirely shapeless. (Not to say that there isn't a time and a place for such a shirt--like to wear to bed at night, but they aren't very flattering on me...).

Anyway, so this new found love of t-shirts has spawned a desire to own several. For your amusement and because I like to make lists of things, these are the t-shirts I currently own which fit my criteria:

Several Twilight t-shirts (White Logo Shirt, Black Shirt w/Edward, Black Shirt w/Cast, Black Shirt w/Silver Cullen Crest.)

and then there are these 3 most recent additions to my collection:







These last three t-shirts came into my possession thanks to Think Geek

I don't know which I like the best...

P.S.

Tonight I learned the following:

- How to become an Alpha Male
- Some female betta fish masquerade as humans.
- Eyelids can slam shut. (According to certain works of literary fiction... okay maybe not literary so much as just plain fiction... and not great fiction at that.)
- I wish I got to laugh like that more often.

Blank

I logged in with the intention of writing something. I can't think of anything to write. Instead I am going to go snuggle up in my warm bed and read. I suspect that I am not going to get enough sleep tonight.

Hodge Podge

This post will be random. I don't mean random in the sense of talking about unusual stuff. I mean random in the sense of bits and pieces. There is not real train of thought to follow. Consider yourself forewarned. Some of this post will be composed of snippets of things found on my computer stashed somewhere in My Documents with the intention of bringing them out later and cleaning them up for something. I make no claims to whether they currently reflect my feelings nor that they are any good. What you are seeing is not the cleaned up version.

This first bit is part of a much longer document. (It's about 2.5 pages total.) I'm intrigued by it but as I note to myself later in the document: "Two pages filled with nonsense that I may never look at again and that I will be too embarrassed to show to anyone." The document is entitled drivel...

--insert--
My fingers are cold. And being cold makes me mistype things. The sort of things that you have to back space two or three times over just to type the word right. But it’s in my head to write. To write something. To write anything damnit. Not to edit for a change. To put words on paper and caress them into something worth reading. As I type I beg for warmer fingers to type faster with less errors. To make the words smoother and to stop writing TO instead of To. What does TO stand for anyway?
I blow air through my hands and it whistles loudly. Not the sounds I expected. Enough to draw my husband out of his game to comment without blinking an eye. Should I write at this point about Martians? About aliens landing in our parking lot quashing that annoying car whose alarm always goes off late at night? Perhaps I should pretend that it is post nuclear winter. Maybe it’s something else. Who knows. They’ve all been done before anyway and who am I to think that I could put anything better on paper. What was it that Heinlein said? Write about people? But I was. About me and my husband… basically doing nothing. Me railing against my lack of creativity. My husband buried in whatever world of shoot-em-up his game created.
--end insert--

This next document is called rivets.

--insert--
Mary stared at the rivet inches from her nose. Examined it. Traced its rough curve with her eyes and caressed the place where it met the bulky metal wall with her mind. It was all so perfect. So ideal. The only seams on the entire wall existed where the rivets were and even there were patterns. And then there were the lights. She looked up. Encased in plastic sheaths to deflect the light making the dull gray metal walls glow dimly with small radiating light blobs where the rivets were. The whole place was plastic and rivets and she hated it.
Somewhere deep down she knew that the rivets held her world together like a safety belt locked tightly in place when you stepped out of an air lock. In fact she had been told by Frank only two days earlier that there were matching rivets on the outside of the small station where they lived. Holding the space out and the false air in.
--end insert--

This file is called Jane Austen and dates back to sometime in April of last year.

--insert--
Whomever should find the time to read this—whether I post it on my blog today or it is uncovered decades down the road by some accident off of my hard drive—be warned that I am on a Jane Austen high. I have just finished watching the movie Becoming Jane. I cried like no one’s business. How unfair that Jane Austen’s books should have such beautiful happily ever afters and yet her life should be denied that love which she writes about so frequently. How cruel. Granted it’s a movie. I don’t know how it actually happened. It is… extrapolation I am certain. Still, my heart absolutely bleeds over the truncation of such passionate love. Isn’t that what every woman wants? A man who looks at her and is inspired? A man who sees her and loves her beyond all of her faults as numerous as they might be.
--end insert--

I've entitled this document "thingumie"...

--insert--
Golden air blown about by torrential wind…

Painting the sky gold and gray in an almost sickly mixture as though the world was fighting to feel better after dropping so many tears. It was that feeling of relief mixed with the fear that the grief would come back.

The wind was less than a howl and more than a sigh as though it knew that the golden light was delicate and could be blown away with too much force. Still the trees were bending with the weight of wind and rain.
--end insert--

This is a text document of a verse from Hebrews 11... I really liked this translation.

--insert--
"What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we want is going to happen, that what we hope for is waiting for us even though we cannot see it up ahead." - New Living Bible, Hebrews 11:1
--end insert--

This one is ensconced in a special folder entitled "Nick Knacks" which probably means it's older. Dating back to college or earlier.

--insert--
What about the heavens makes us look up to them and see not a simple black void, but significant meaning in our lives? Is it a reminder that we are small? Is it a religious experience perhaps akin to enlightenment? Is it the connection we feel between ourselves and the potential millions of people looking at the same stars? It seems like a mixture of all of these things. We stand there, shrouded in the night sky. Maybe we’re alone, maybe we’re not, if the moment is right it doesn’t matter.
--end insert--

This was in a text file which I found in a folder called "Stuff That Was on my Desktop"

--insert--
Little Things:

I like to drink out of glasses because they make me feel grown up.

I wish I had the kind of skin that lets me wear cute dresses.

I hate being tailgated. If I can't clearly see where your tires meet the road, you're following me too closely.

Spending holidays with my family is very important to me.

I love our big down comforter, because it makes me feel luxurious.
--end insert--

Finally I tie this all up with some excerpts from a file called "Dr. Jim quotes." What is great about this file is that these are things that one of my favorite professors once said in one of any number of philosophy classes I took. As per the usual these are really strange taken out of context.

--insert--
" The cow suddently, in a burst of cow like athleticism, jumps over the fence." - Dr. Jim on sudden unexpected movements

"Like the people up at Princeton are going 'muahahahahaha'" - Dr. Jim on whether or not the SAT's are biased

"Cow proofed fence? We call that barbed wire, we've had that since the 1880's." - Dr. Jim on state of the art fences

"Who knows what's around the next corner? I suspect not a god, but who knows?" - Dr. Jim on agnosticism

"Do you people know anything about science? No wonder you're in a philosophy class!" - Dr. Jim on our class's lack of response

"No, because that doesn't jive with what I know about you and what I know about unicorns." - Dr. Jim on a story told by one of the students

"How much per pound of snow did we pay for Alaska!?" - Dr. Jim on Seward's Folly

"Ah ha! So we shall have a class called critical thinking to teach the dirty masses this important thing." - Dr. Jim on why we have a critical thinking class

"I see a lot more tables than angels, and I expect that's typical of everyone." - Dr. Jim on what makes things weird
--end insert--

Okay, that's enough digging around in my My Documents folder. I told you it would be random. G'night.

Reflections

So I get an overwhelming urge at this time every year to write a post, or a journal entry, or to scribble on a napkin, the happenings of my previous year. You can find last year's entry here:

http://lanvalsmaiden.blogspot.com/2007/12/2007-in-review.html

This year while I did get said urge I did nothing to write things down. Usually this writing impulse happens sometime between the mid afternoon and midnight on December 31st. In fact, this year didn't feel much like New Years to me.

Here's the thing... I associate certain times of the year with a feeling. It's not necessarily a strong emotion. More of an undercurrent that I don't notice unless I actively think about it. For example, the first time it smells like spring outside I've got an incredible amount of energy that I simply don't know how to burn. I want to go outside and sit on the grass and breathe it in. I always do. It doesn't matter where I am spring just happens that way...

Fall is similar. Fall reminds me of going back to school. I feel like I should be buying school supplies and trying on jeans even though it's still far too warm to wear them. (Actually this summer I wore jeans quite often... it's a noted change in my life that I don't wear shorts with the exception of an extremely infrequent basis.) I believe Tom Hanks in "You've Got Mail" captures this feeling in this quote: "Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address."

Christmas is usually a very reflective time for me. A time to think about people that I love. A time to reflect on my faith and on life and all of those sorts of things. I have always found Christmas to be magical. I realize this makes me a ridiculous romantic. (I am using romantic in the philosophical sense, not the inflamed by passion sense... I will happily clarify the difference, but it's too much to write out here.)

Finally there is New Years. There is a sort of slow descent from a high after Christmas to New Years. I have never experienced New Years as a frenzy or high of excitement like some do. I grant that there is an emotional and philosophical significance to passing from one year into the next. (Perhaps it's a psychological significance more than anything.) But I have never felt like this was the last hurrah of the year and that I needed to really just kick back. The undercurrent emotion of New Years has always been one of excitement, of possiblities, and of moving forward. Determination even. But never one which makes me want to party (or at least I do not need the day to enjoy a good evening with my friends).

This year I didn't get that so much. I didn't really feel a significant gap between 2008 and 2009. I don't know if this is a sign of getting older, or more cynical, or both. Either way the only change that I notice is that there's a different number on the end of the year and that I'm going to spend a month accidentally writing out '08 on all of my documents.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this thought honestly. I could just make a list of everything significant that happened last year. I may still. I guess all I'm saying is that it wasn't as big of a deal to me this year... and I'm not sure why.