all of our plans have fallen through

i used to sit in the same spot in my apartment for days, barely moving, staring at a screen of some sort nonstop, and if a bird flew by my window i would think, "wow! a bird! just flew past my window! this must be magic! something has happened! i should blog about it! amazing!" now that is obviously an exaggeration, but at the same time, it really isn't. how many blog posts have i written that ramble on about nothing? dropped contact lenses and boring grad school lectures and lunch dates were all things that, at one point, deserved to be preserved in writing. and now... nothing. things happen and all i do is get through them and never look back. i don't like it.

one of the points that i seem to whine about repeatedly is how much i don't like the hype about new year's. i just... don't like it. it's always my birthday that feels like the fresh start for me. that deserves resolutions and looking back and a clean slate. new year's has always just been the sign that the vacation is nearly over, that projects need to be completed and work needs to be done and oh my god how did i let myself procrastinate this much? 

but maybe i need a stupid day that has been given a false sense of importance right now. maybe i need a january first to get myself back into writing.

(but, really, i may have a lot of posts about new year's and even more posts about nothing, but those are nothing compared to the number of posts i have where i declare that i am going to do something and then never do it. a lot of those declarations have to do with writing. and who am i kidding? what makes this any different? although, i would like to say here officially that despite the fact that my word count tracker didn't appear on my blog this year and i didn't blog about nano, i did write consistently every day for the month of november (better than any other year) and ended the month with over fifty thousand new words of fiction to my name, but that's neither here nor there.)

i feel like i am overusing the word "but." 

in the spirit of writing about what happens in my life, even if that "what" is nothing, my siblings minus the one living with her family halfway across the world all came to stay over at my house for christmas break (basically wednesday through this morning). we had a bunch of plans for the weekend. we were going to have fun. and then two out of three of my siblings were hit by a stomach bug (i'm guessing the same one that cricket and then my dad suffered from in the past couple of weeks) and suddenly the weekend turned into delivering gatorade and chicken noodle soup and doing laundry. the best laid plans and all of that... 

*The Way It Was - The Killers

close your eyes, clear your heart, cut the cord

i was originally going to have this post be published later and just pretend that i wrote it tomorrow. but then i thought that we know each other well enough that lies and tricks aren't necessary, right? right. tomorrow i'm thinking i'll be much too busy to type up a post and well, what's a couple of hours anyway?

being an avid lover of words, it always surprises me when words fail me. to be completely honest, though, i could write pages and pages trying to describe the thoughts running through my mind right now and i still wouldn't even come close to making you understand. i would write in circles and jump through loopholes, write myself into corners and then fly off on random tangents. i would contradict myself with every sentence and make barely enough sense to buy a gumball.

so you know what? i'm not even going to try.

why'd i bother writing a post at all if i'm not going to write anything of meaning in it, you wonder. well, i'm getting married. me. and i felt like this should be documented somewhere. so here i am. documenting this. the next time i write in this thing, if everything goes according to plan, i will be officially married. i still think it's crazy and probably one of the hardest things i've ever done.

wave goodbye, wish me well, you've gotta let me go.

(i almost put that lyric as the title, but felt that the one i chose was more about me and this second one is more like to my family. you know, just in case you were wondering.)

*Human - The Killers

i've got so much left to say

after sitting at joe for nearly four hours, i have just finished my fifty thousand words required to win nanowrimo. i still haven't finished the story, though. i'm only about three quarters of the way through and am actually contemplating leaving it at that. i mean, if you heard some of the stuff that is going into that wannabe novel, i think you'd kill yourself laughing. seriously. my sister almost did when i was telling her of some of the more pathetic ideas that crept into my brain and onto the screen in my desperate attempt to just make the word count. you, though, won't get the chance to laugh at me because i have too much dignity for that.

this nano was nothing like last year's, and though there were points when i seriously thought i should probably stop wasting my time spewing crap into open office with all of the other stuff going on in my life that actually required time and attention, i'm glad i didn't. the month was filled with random spurts of writing that may have kept me sane throughout everything else. plus, i got a bunch of really cool postcards from the nano postcard exchange.

ash, if you are reading this, then this is me cheering you on from the other side (of the finish line. i'm not a ghost or anything. nano didnt kill me i promise). you can do it!

now excuse me while i run off to bed. i'm not really tired, but i think i should be.

*Hey There Delilah - Plain White T's

we lost track of time

hey guess what?? it has officially been one year minus a few hours that i started my blog, and i for one am very surprised that not only did i keep it up for so long but i have not yet grown tired of it and plan to continue it for another year despite the lull in posts over the past week. and this year has totally flown by without my noticing it which i'm not sure is that good of a thing because it means that an entire year has disappeared from my life. i was originally going to plan some great special post or something to celebrate the occasion but i have not been in a posty mood as you have probably figured out so instead i'm apparently just celebrating by unintentionally writing run-on sentences instead of fragments. amazing, is it not?

anyway, creepy dude was super creepy tonight sooo expect a post tomorrow with a combination of last week and this week's creepiness because i don't feel like typing it right now because i am in a rambling mood so it'll get way too long.

instead, i'm going to finish this episode of gilmore girls and then try to get in a solid four hours of sleep before breakfast with the parents in the morning.

*Smile Like You Mean It - The Killers

the best reward is earned, and i've paid for every single word

I FINISHED!!

exactly three weeks since i started, and not quite 52k words and 84 single spaced pages later, i have finished.

sure, i dont really like audrey as much as other characters i have written. i dont even really feel that i made her up. i just told her story. and crappy or amazing, polished or not, it is done. and at the moment, i am very fond of it. even if it is complete crap, it's complete. i did it even though it seemed impossible.

aah im excited!

i should probably get over to some of my school work now, but i'll email it out to everyone who asked in the next day or two for you to read whenever. i think i should probably wait a bit to reread it myself though. maybe i'll wait for december which is technically editing month anyways.

i cant believe i actually finished this!

*Chase This Light - Jimmy Eat World

you change your mind like a girl changes clothes

i have this problem with commitment. actually, it's not so much a problem as it is that i simply cant do it. i cant commit. to anything.

i cant commit to people. close friends and family aside, i tend to get sick of people fairly quickly... usually they're fault though. for some reason i attract those people that like to smother you, and they fill their lifetime quota of friendliness in a few months. after that, you are so sick of everything even slightly associated to them that every time you hear their name you are tempted to throw yourself out of the nearest window. i'm pretty patient though and can handle people like this for at least a year before i completely shut off. i cant see myself married to the same person - seeing them day in and day out - for the rest of my life. it'd end with either homicide or suicide.

i cant commit to ideas or decisions. i'll have this project idea for example and be all happy with it. the minute it starts to become more concrete than a pretty idea floating around inside my head, i jump ship. i switch over to a completely different idea. this is one of the reasons why all my work is done at the last minute, besides the fact that the last minute was created for exactly this of course.

i can't commit to a web browser. most people i know are either a firefox person, an ie person, a chrome person, or a safari person. they have their preferred browser and they stick to it, through thick and thin. i cant. i generally do my blogging and stumbling on chrome, my email and digging on ie, and my college stuff on firefox - key word being generally. there is no hard fast rule for this.

in the stories i write, i always bail out after a few pages. i might write the first few pages, skip ahead to more interesting parts, write an ending, and then not have the patience to go back and fill in the blanks. i might also just write the beginning or the end or one scene and then switch over to a completely different thing.

i cannot, for the life of me, commit to any diet or exercise routine. i simply do not have the will power. i'll start it out fine, and by the end of the day, weeek, or month, i will have abandoned it so completely that i will not even remember what it was to start with.

this commitmentphobia of mine may come from my fear of failure. if you never commit to something, you can never truly fail at it because you had not given your all. or it may just be that when the will power was being passed out i was too busy getting extra helpings of laziness to pick any up. i may not have the ability to commit because i am more of a journey than a destination type of person. once you actually get some place you're just counting down the minutes till you leave, the getting there is where the fun is. whatever it is, me and commitment go together almost as well as oil and water.

*Hot N Cold - Katy Perry

look how far we've come

being the mother of all commitment problems, i never thought i'd stick with this blog long enough to get to a hundred posts. but i guess i've proved myself wrong. remember back in elementary school when you would celebrate the 100th day of school by counting to 100, making a chain with 100 links, bringing 100 objects to class... yeah this'll be something like that:

100 is:
the number of years in a century.
how old a centenarian is.
the number of US senators.
the number of subunits into which many of the world's currencies are divided.
the number of tiles in a standard Scrabble set
the dollar bill with Benjamin Franklin's portrait.
the American savings bonds with Thomas Jefferson's portrait .
the American treasury bonds with Andrew Jackson's portrait
the police phone number in Greece, India and Israel.
the ambulence and fire fighter phone number in Belgium.
the operator's number in the UK.
the HTTP status code indicating that the client should continue with its request.
how old Abraham was when his son Isaac was born (according to the Bible at least).
the square of 10 .
the basis of percentages (literally "per hundred").
the sum of the first nine prime numbers, as well as the sum of 4 pairs of prime numbers (47 + 53, 17 + 83, 3 + 97, 41 + 59), and the sum of the cubes of the first four integers (100 = 13 + 23 + 33 + 43). Also, 26 + 62 = 100, thus 100 is a Leyland number.
an 18-gonal number. It is divisible by the number of primes below it, 25 in this case. But it can not be expressed as the difference between any integer and the total of coprimes below it, making it a noncototient. However, it can be expressed as a sum of some of its divisors, making it a semiperfect number.
a Harshad number in base 10, and also in base 4, and in that base it is a self-descriptive number.
the temperature in degrees Celcius needed to boil pure water at sea level.
the atomic number of fermium.
the number of episodes at which a TV series becomes viable for syndication.
the number of yards in an American football field (not including the end zones).
the number of runs required for a cricket batsman to score a Century, a significant milestone
the record number of points scored in one NBA game, set by Wilt Chamberlain of the Philadelphia Warriors on March 2, 1962.
the minimum distance in yards for a Par 3 on a golf course.

the 100 most often misspelled words in english include: acceptable, atheist, believe, calendar, cemetery, foreign, harass, height, jewelry, library, misspell, publicly, questionnaire, recommend, separate, until, vacuum, and weird.

the 100 most iconic internet videos include: charlie the unicorn, where the hell is matt, david at the dentist, leave britney alone, and the star wars kid.

new yorks's 100 most wanted fugitives include: Osama bin Laden, Raul Castro, Michael C. Jameison, Ralph Paladino, and Haddon Miller.

the 100 most likely people to die in 2009 include: Andy Rooney, Tom Sizemore, Senator Robert Byrd, Amy Winehouse, Patrick Swayze, Barack Obama, and Pete Doherty.

the 100 most commonly used english words include: the, of, at , be, there, use, it, word, if, will, to, he, your, them, way, made, said, so, people, part, long, and down.

*You're Still the One - Shania Twain