Wednesday, October 31, 2012

I sit and wonder why-y-y oh why you left me, oh Sandy

while sandy was busy ripping apart buildings, flooding cities, and tearing out power lines and trees like some sort of temper tantrum, my husband, brothers (who were sleeping over), and i sat in our apartment with full electricity and made spaghetti and meatballs and pull apart garlic bread and watched the master of disguise. we were bundled up with blankets and hoodies because our heat had a cold, but apart from that we just listened to the rain and went to sleep and woke up to some cloudy skies and drizzle. (well, this was after spending monday morning at an almost empty chuck e cheese's.) yesterday we went bowling and aside from some puddles, i didn't see many after-effects of the hurricane, so i think it's safe to say that it passed us by without doing much of anything. if this wasn't such a good thing, i might be a little offended by the idea that hurricanes just do not like us. i mean, first irene and now sandy... they just really don't want to visit us at all.

this morning we woke up to sunny skies, but it's gradually getting cloudy again (which is kind of sad) and now i have to do the homework i've been putting off in gloomy weather. (it sucks that the class i like was cancelled on tuesday and the due date for the paper i had already done was pushed back a week but i will still have to be in class on thursday with the homework i have yet to look at.)

but enough about the weather. 

tomorrow is the first day of nanowrimo, and i still don't have a plot line for one of my characters who just needs to walk around the pages and have the readers like her until the end where she plays her part in the over-arching plot. i just can't find a situation to put her in that earns her the reader's sympathy without doing something that messes up the big plot of the story which is really not a very big part of the novel itself if that makes any sense. hopefully she'll work herself out because i have sort of started to dislike her a bit. she has fifty thousand words to try and fix that. 

*Sandy - John Travolta

Sunday, October 28, 2012

i've got nothing to say

the past few days i've been depressed and whiny and obnoxious (and busy) and decided to spare you all. i mean, i was getting sick of myself, but i was operating on little sleep and that somehow made the part of me that can put things into perspective shut down. so a limping bug deserved the same reaction as a fifth grader not getting voted in to student government as a natural disaster killing thousands as a fictional couple breaking up. and yesterday morning i was having one of those days when you can kind of sort of understand the people who suddenly snap and just kill everyone around them. or at least you get a feeling of where their head was at at the time.

so instead of doing my homework for the class of the exam that i may or may not have failed on thursday, i decided to make a list of things that do not suck in my life right now. but then i decided that i didn't really want to do that because, well, i dunno why, so here are a few of the things that were going to make the list that will never be made: we had a cow pinata on eid, nanowrimo starts in a little over three days and i'm starting to feel like my plot is the worst thing since stubbed toes so i'm right on track, i water marbled my nails last night, and we have chocolate cake in the fridge. oh, and my professor spent ten minutes talking about oxford commas and, being a strong advocate of the oxford comma myself, i may have just fallen in love with him. i'm nothing if not a sucker for grammar.

also, i went to my first ever nanowrimo event thingie yesterday (the nova kick off party to be exact) despite the fact that my social anxiety had me wanting to not go from the minute i said i would, and i met a couple of cool people which was fun. i also realized that there are many people that are much more creative than i am and that the only option for me now is to learn how to hijack their brains to get the awesome ideas that i could never think up on my own and then become a famous person. at least now i have a plan.

*Ask Me Anything - The Strokes

Sunday, October 21, 2012

something very wrong with you

so there are ten days left until nanowrimo, and i have a minor story line, a major character, and a big hole where everything else should go. so much for trying to actually plan ahead of time this year. also, my keyboard is being stupid today, and i'm hoping it gets unstupid before nano starts because i don't feel like having to pound repeatedly on certain letters to get them to work. it completely throws a wrench in the whole write really fast without thinking about how much it all sucks approach. maybe being too lazy to copy down a recipe and accidentally spilling powdered sugar all over it was not the best idea.

i made a pumpkin roll last night (like a jellyroll but with pumpkin cake and maple-cream cheese frosting). it was the first time i had made any roll thing ever and it looks way harder and so much more impressive than it actually is. i think they may be my new favorite thing. i'm on a pumpkin kick right now and planning on eating so much pumpkin this season that i turn orange.

i also wrote a paper yesterday for one of my classes on this child pornography case from a couple of years ago. and oh. my. god. some of the most disturbing stuff i have ever read ever. they mentioned in the notes that this guy went far beyond the normal standards of messed up - even for a child molester - but i could barely handle reading about it. i don't think i would be able to actually look through the images or watch the videos to do a real investigation. i'm too squeamish for my chosen career path.

*That's Just the Way It Is - Phil Collins

Friday, October 19, 2012

i am flattered by your fascination with me

so of course my complete disenchantment with my life and my total disregard for school has led to the fact that i have a ten page paper due today that i just found out about yesterday (and that was just by lucky chance). i mean, i've recycled one of my old papers for it so i didn't actually have the jolt of productivity i thought i was going to have, but i recycled one of my old papers for the first paper in this class, too. so now i feel like a worthless student. probably because i am. instead of productive i feel guilty.

in other news, i've been getting a lot of those spam comments that try to flatter you into going to their website and buying furniture? or something? i dunno since i've never actually followed the links, but they're pretty ridiculous. for example, on a previous post where i mentioned a few of my guilty pleasures, a cigarette website posted this:
What i don't understood is in fact how you are not actually a lot more smartly-appreciated than you may be now. You are so intelligent. You realize thus considerably in relation to this matter, produced me individually consider it from so many numerous angles. Its like men and women are not interested unless it is one thing to do with Woman gaga! Your individual stuffs great. At all times deal with it up! 
now let's ignore the typos and grammar mistakes and the fact that he referred to lady gaga as "woman gaga" for a moment. not to toot my own horn or anything, but there a few posts that i have written that i think should be "more smartly-appreciated" than one where i admit to eating a bag of nutritionless candy in one sitting. i mean, come on cigarette people. if you're going to try and flatter me into buying something that will probably kill me, at least make it look like you put some thought into it.

a wicker furniture company thanked me for my post on how annoying it is when people replace letters of bad words with punctuation. he's "not sure where [i] got my information," but it will apparently "help him on his mission." on my infomercial post about post-grad school, a weight loss food site told me that it was "amazing" and "the clearness is excellent." it also told me that i seem like "an expert on this subject" which made me laugh, though i'm sure that was just coincidence.

i went years and years without getting a single spam post on my blog (unless you count anonymous commenters that enjoy insulting me and my family which, oddly enough, i don't). and now i'm getting them almost daily. since they are automatically shipped off to the spam folder, i often don't read them until, like now, i have a moment where i wonder if i'm the only person left in blogland. and though some of them can be slightly amusing, i would much rather go back to the days when actual people commented on what i actually posted instead of spam bots throwing up a jumble of misworded phrases.

*Uninvited - Alanis Morissette

Monday, October 15, 2012

together we can take it to the end of the line

the subject for blog action day this year is "the power of we," and though i'm sure that it was originally intended to celebrate the people who work together for disaster relief and charity drives and historical movements and the like, i'm deciding to celebrate a different group of people.

when i was little, i wanted to be a writer, and that dream has never really gone away. but there have been times when it was pushed to the back burner while i tended to more immediate needs. there have been times when it was shoved so far back in the closet of my mind that i could barely even remember that it existed, and i was certainly not working towards it in any way.

and then i few years ago i stumbled upon nanowrimo, and it opened me up to a huge group of people all over the world that were connected by one thing: a love for writing. some of the writers were published, but many were not. some had been writing for years and others had just recently decided that they liked it. some were young and some were old. some liked mystery, some young adult, and some fanfiction. it didn't matter really, what or where or how. one month a year, these people came together and by a mixture of encouragement, guilt, and moral support helped members of the community to complete a fifty thousand word novel in thirty days.

i credit nanowrimo for helping me realize, again, just how much writing means to me. but it would never have worked without the community of writers that come together every november to work towards a common goal. sure, we may not be curing cancer or feeding every starving child in africa, but we are still doing something pretty amazing. and at times i think that it may have just saved me.

*Total Eclipse of the Heart - Bonnie Tyler

Thursday, October 11, 2012

i thought i was smart

thursday nights i get home before my husband. i usually just make myself dinner and read or sit on my computer with the tv off (my husband likes to have the tv on almost all the time) and relish the alone time. (i was born a hermit in a society that is too technologically connected to allow for hermits, but i do the best i can.)

tonight i got a text from my husband asking me to make chicken and corn soup. while i was rummaging through our pantry that is too small, overstuffed, and unorganized (especially now that i have doubles of a lot of baking things because my sister left the country) i hear a whistle from behind me. remember, this is during my i-have-the-house-to-myself time. remember also that i scare easily.

anyway, i of course completely freak out. i yelled really, really, really loudly, dropped everything i was holding, and made an even bigger mess in the pantry than before. with my heart thumping wildly, i turn around slowly to see who the whistler is.

there's no one there. (which freaked me out more than if i saw someone. my imagination can be scary.)

then i notice that my phone's screen is lit up on the counter. i had just gotten a text message and, idiot that i am, completely forgot that i changed the ringtone to a whistle.

needless to say, i felt ridiculously stupid, silently thanked god that no one was around to witness my scare, and then decided to post it on my blog for all of you.

lesson learned: never change my ringtone again ever. and i should probably get started on resuming my exercise because i don't think my heart can handle many more of my dramatic scenes.

*Fight Test - Flaming Lips

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

i just don't see why i should even care

everyday i check my gmail, open my blog, read whoever's posted anything new, and then click on create new post. and then... nothing. i will leave the page open and go look at random stuff online. i might check facebook or watch random youtube videos. i may read articles or movie reviews or recipes. but the blogger page is always open, always waiting for me to write something in it. it stays that way until i close chrome and get off the computer. i'll occasionally go back and stare at the page where not even a cursor blinks yet, but i don't write a single word. there are not even any drafts of half-finished thoughts piling up. i think the only explanation is that i'm in love with the possibility of something great filling the page and overwhelmed with the fear of not making that a reality. either that, or i'm just too lazy to think and my life has been really uninspiring lately.

one of our neighbors just got a puppy. or, i think it's a puppy from the high pitched barking. and i think it's new because the barking just started a couple of days ago. and it does not. shut. up. ever. like, ever ever. i don't even think it breathes because i've yet to hear it pause for a breath. it just barks and barks and barks and barks. and i can't even muster the energy to get annoyed by it because i'm just really apathetic at the moment. but if i was a dog, i'd get tired of nonstop barking after two days.

i just read the house by the side of the road by sam walter foss and am newly obsessed with the lines:

There are hermit souls 
that live withdrawn
In the peace of their 
self-content. 
There are souls like stars,
that dwell apart
In a fellowless firmament;

there are twenty-one days until nanowrimo starts up again. i think i may have a story idea that combines computer forensics with growing up as a saudi-american in america because i am uncreative and am deciding to just write what i know. either that, or i'll write out a mermaid war. my brother is lobbying for the mermaids. 

*Not Dark Yet - Bob Dylan

Saturday, October 6, 2012

the right way to go about this

i was sitting there last night pondering my future, wondering, perhaps a little late (read: way late) in the game if i really wanted to be a forensic examiner, and suddenly i thought that kirk from gilmore girls had the right idea. now kirk was an idiot, there's no debating that, albeit a very lovable one, but his career choice was genius. or his lack of a choice was genius, i should say. in the show, kirk held fifteen thousand jobs. fifteen thousand. for someone who still harbors the secret desire to be twelve different things, the idea of having that many jobs is awesome.

i mean, okay, you probably don't have much, or any, job stability, but you can actually be everything that you wanted to be. when you choose to walk through one door, you don't have to close all the other ones. they'll stay open for you to walk through each of them in turn. see, this is why i should have been born into a fictional world. the real one just does not work for me. at least with all the things i want to do, too many of them require years of learning/training that would make it impossible instead of just slightly ridiculous. 

speaking of fictional worlds, though jk rowling's book was a little slow to start, it ended up being really good. her writing style and use of language is the same, but that's all you should expect to transfer over from potter. she is one of my favorite character writers, and she did not disappoint in this one (though i really thought she was going to from the first hundred pages or so.) she once again made you like characters whether you wanted to or not. and then she tore out your heart and spit on it, as per usual. anyway, i'm not going to say that you should all go out and read the book because i realize that a lot of people may not like it. but if the synopsis sounds at all interesting and you can go into it with an open mind, you should totally go read it. 

*Give - Relient K

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

i wanna know why

we are in the middle of banned books week (which is from september thirtieth to october sixth). this means that you should go out and read a banned book. (i think banning books is one of the stupidest things the human race has accomplished so far. stupider even than the decision to put yogurt in tubes. years ago, i posted a mini-rant about this and declared that i would be honored if i ever wrote a book that ended up on a banned list.) since i just started a book last night that is too new to be banned and i am busy enough to think that a five hundred page novel will take me almost a week to read, i probably won't get a chance to read a banned book this year. i've read enough of them that i'm okay with that, but you should still read one or two for me.

i just started jk rowling's new book, the casual vacancy. i went into it expecting the worst. i had read a few reviews of it and it seemed like no one was able to get through the first few chapters without putting it down forever. it was too dark, too explicit, too depressing, too crude, there was not one likable character, and the writing was bad. or so i was told. i dunno if people are just prudes or if i've read just read too much trash, but i have yet to think a book described as too crude was in fact too crude. i'm not far enough in the book to give it a fair review yet, but the only thing that i don't like so far is that she switches between different characters so much that i don't feel that i've had the chance to sit with one long enough to like. i'm thinking that this will change later on. oh, and she named a character barry. and he's married to mary. and reading their names together in a sentence completely jarred me out of the reading experience because barry and mary? really? that got me wondering whether she wanted them to rhyme on purpose or if it was a coincidence. which led me to think of the similarity between barry and harry and wonder if that was on purpose. basically, it took me a while before my mind was able to focus on barry dying in a parking lot.

the other thing, which has nothing to do with the story itself, is the decision to put her name on the cover with a lower case i. why are all the other letters capitalized if the i is not? is this her way of distinguishing between her children's and adult writing? because it seems like a stupid decision to me.

but enough about that. my sister and her family left to the desert again. this time without a return date in mind. this was originally going to be its own post, but it was turning out good and i decided to use it for something else. so yeah. it's sad.

*I Wanna Know Why - Aerosmith