You know, Donald, I used to be a dancer...

I have some time to kill while I wait for the shower to be free, so I figured I'd post song number three.

"Never Been to Spain" by Three Dog Night.




This song was first discovered by my friends and me in eleventh grade, when Mr. Downey (the best English teacher I've ever had) had us watch Scotland, PA after reading MacBeth. It stands to be one of my favorite movies ever still.
For me, being in eleventh grade English Honors was a huge deal, and the most academically exciting thing for me up to that point in life. You see, previously I'd been placed in the regular CP level English and to word this as politely as I can, I'll just say that it was filled with morons. And I mean morons. One girl, in a tenth grade English class, was reading out loud one day and pronounced the word "yacht" as "yat-chet."
I needed out.
More than simply being stuck with idiots that drove me insane, English was my favorite subject (save for photography when I took it). I was still writing then, often. I cranked out poetry and stories like a machine... man, I miss those days.
Anyway, I requested to be moved in English Honors. I had straight A's in English, my placement testing scores were in the 99th percentile. I belonged there.
I needed my current English teacher to sign a slip saying that I was up to par for EnglishH. I'd had the same teacher for freshman and sophomore year, who constantly praised my lack of retardation in comparisson to that of my class mates. I went to ask her to sign the slip and she said she would love to, and thought I really did belong in the honors class... "but if you do poorly, it'll be on my head."
So she didn't sign it.
And the school decided they wouldn't allow a parental override for me (while I know one other girl who had the same exact problems I did, but they let her in without a problem). Instead, they told me to right an essay. It could be on anything I chose and as long as I wanted.
I churned out an eight page essay about the different European myths that Tolkien based the Lord of the Rings on. It was awesome.
Instead of welcoming me joyously into the honors class, they accused me of plagiarism because "it was just too well written."

I know: isn't that sort of the point?

Well, I managed to get them to let me write another fucking essay. This time, they gave me a topic based on books we'd read in class and I had 45 minutes to write it. And my current English teacher had to watch me write it.
After writing a kick ass essay about Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird) and John Proctor (the Crucible) in which I managed to quote them exactly without the book there, they decided my skills "would do" for English Honors.


I had to fight so much and went through a lot of bullshit red tape that existed only for me in order to get into English Honors my junior year. And it was totally worth it.
I had class with my friends, which was nice. But the best part was I had great teachers for the next two years; Mr. Downey was amazing, and Mrs. Fernicola was just as fantastic. But Mr. Downey will forever my favorite because he was my rescue ship after years trapped on a desert island with morons.
When I hear this song, I remember junior year English class, and though it may be weird, I get very happy. I am reminded of the first time I ever really tried for something and succeeded, even after so many setbacks.
I wonder if I still have that determination somewhere in me? I haven't seen it again since.

A Brilliant Man

"I thank you for hearing my words...
They're my work, they're my play, they're my passion.
Words are all we have, really."

- George Carlin
1937-2008

Believe, believe in me...

You may have gathered from the fact that I rarely post here but am now posting twice within two hours that I am quite bored. Which would be an accurate observation.
I'm in my house after a lovely weekend with Boy and am already counting the hours before I can return. Mostly to see him again and also mostly to get the fuck away from my parents. You can figure out the math of having two "mostly's" in a single sentence.
Anyway, all I really have to do right now is to gorge myself on M&M's and Jelly Bellies from my cousin's wedding while I listen to my iTunes and contemplate watching Funny Games, though I don't really want to watch it by myself. As a result of this boredom and newfound ability to use Imeem correctly, I decided to make a playlist only with songs that describe my personality, an event I went through, or contain so sort of significance to me.
The play list is 30 tracks, and I will try to put one track up here every now and then as well as some sort of description about why it's on this play list. It's not in any real order, and I may change it as time goes on, but I tried to more or less put them chronological order of my life (while still trying to make the tracks run into each other relatively smoothly... I mean, having Iron & Wine being followed by Circa Survive is a bit jarring, y'know?)

At any rate, the first song on my list has already been discussed briefly in my last post; "Tonight Tonight" by the Smashing Pumpkins. Because of that, I'll blabber on some more and give the second song on my list.
When I was little, probably about second grade, my older sister ripped a Hanson CD from my hands and handed me Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by the Pumpkins. While it's certainly not their best album, it is my favorite. I always have a special place in my heart for the first songs I hear by an artist. My first Pumpkins exposure was "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" (unless you count Lauryn singing "We Only Come Out at Night" to me in the dark with a creepy voice). In high school my senior year, it was a mandatory project that all senior's make a "Senior Scrapbook" in their English classes. I was lucky and my AP English teacher was mad chill about them; all she did was say we needed a certain number of pages and different topics in it and that was all. My good friend Aleks had the good idea of making the first page of her book the lyrics to a song that was important to her. She chose "Back in Black" by AC/DC (for damn good reasons) and after much deliberation I decided to copy her idea and use "Tonight Tonight." One of the best songs by my favorite band, with lyrics that perfectly describe the sensation I had leaving high school and moving onto the college. I mean, come on:

"Time is never time at all,
You can never ever leave
Without leaving a piece of youth.
And our lives are forever changed,
We will never be the same;
The more you change the less you feel."


If those lyrics don't provoke a sense of a fear of time, of aging, of leaving everything and everyone you have ever known behind you to move onto your next stage of life, I don't know what would.
I love this song so much.

So, I'm sitting here listening to the newest Girl Talk album, which rocks, and have decided I wanted to conform to Jon's blog and post a playlist! This is just a random list I made one day when it was gorgeous out and I was lazing around my room with sunlight streaming through the window... it was good to listen to then and I hope you like it to. And by you I really mean Jon, since he's the only one who reads this thing.

In other news, I'm trying to seriously think of ideas for a zombie movie. Fortunately I am taking a screen writing class in the fall and get to write a movie script about whatever I damn well please. And I suspect that I will damn well please write about zombies.

Brrraaaaaaaiiins!

I've never been huge into zombies. I mean, I fucking love Shaun of the Dead, and I always enjoy the classics like Evil Dead... but I've never been one of the people who are literally prepared for a zombie apocalypse, with exit strategies and survival bunkers in their basement. I know people like that, and let me tell you those psychos are scary.
But a few days ago, my friends Lyndsey and Brandon somehow started getting into an intense conversation about legislative zombie rights. They discussed the different possibilities about legal rights for zombies should there ever actually be an onslaught on the creatures on society. I was distracted by texting Jon at the time and could only half listen, or join into the conversation with a comment they already discussed or one that was utterly irrelevant. However, now that I am back home after a busy weekend of rehearsal and matrimony (my cousin, not me!) I've had time to sit and think about useless topics. So, while surfing the Grindhouse Pictures website, I decided to Wikipedia zombies (not sure why, I guess it was just the whole "horror movie" mindset). I've been getting more and more into the horror scene lately, a mixture of being back home and thusly on the look out for shitty horror films to watch as well as dating a hardcore horror-film buff, and it's getting to the point where I really want to write/be in a horror film. Preferably a terrible one, but if I ever have a chance to be in a good one I guess I'll take it, heh.
Anyway, as I Wikipedia'd "zombie" and followed the bajillion links from that single article, I wound up on a page discussing philosophical zombies, or p-zombies. And I think it just may be that I have found my calling in life. Or at least in the field of philosophy.
P-zombies deal entirely in thought experiments, and the questioning of whether or not physicalism is true. My thought processes when dealing with any sort of philosophy in regards to human beings, animals, plants, etc. boils down to sentience and the presence of the mind versus the presence of a body and what is or is not significant about those things. When arguing about pretty much anything from abortion to torture to the existence of pleasure and/or happiness, you have to decide where you stand in regards to the mental and the physical, their impact on the situation, whether one matters more than other if either matter at all, etc. etc. etc. Even as a child I remember contemplating an argument very similar to Decartes' in his Meditations (mind you that doesn't say much about Descartes if a seven year old is coming up with theories he thought to be groundbreaking), which brings into question the impact/existence of the mind over the body. And p-zombies is an entire field of philosophy that is pretty much dedicated to that!

I have also decided I really want to make a zombie movie which deals with p-zombies... perhaps some sort of post-zombie apocalypse film, when society has nearly attained total victory over the walking dead, and the few remaining zombies are being wrangled up by authorities. It could be awesome, perhaps some sort of radical zombie-rights group breaks them out and chaos once again ensues... I don't know, I literally just made that up now as I type. It's lame. But whatever, I have time to work on it, heh.

Zombies!

A Quick Lesson in Social Etiquette

Boys are assholes (not you, Sweetie).
This is generally widely accepted as fact, I know, but clearly some people have trouble understanding the concept of common, human decency and need to be reminded of it.

You do not hit on the best friend of a girl you just hooked up with.
It's simply not done.

For one thing, once a guy hooks up with a girl (any manner of hooking up; making out, fondling, sex, whatever) all of that girls friends are off limits. Only the bitchy ones would touch you after that, unless they didn't know. And let's face it; they'll know. We don't keep quiet about thing, for serious. And, if they did touch you after while knowing what went down, they would then be ostracized from that circle of friends afterward for pretty much all of eternity.
Another thing is, it is really just mind bogglingly rude to hit on someone after hooking up with a girl while she is still there. Even more important to understand is that you do not ask that girl about someone else. Especially her best friend. Any guy who does that is automatically labeled a douche bag, and I guarantee you won't be hooking up with that girl again; and probably not her friends once they find out (bitches who aren't really her friends are excluded from that probability, since odds are they're simply looking for a way out of that friendship to begin with).

I'm sorry this is such a random and incoherent entry, but I am literally shaking with rage right now over this.
URGH!

Or as J. Jaques says: "Aerodynamically Curvacous"

Not the most creative of the "motivational poster" themed pictures, but it made me happy to be reminded that not everyone is into stick-thin, anorexic toothpicks like the media constantly tells me.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go throw-up so I can rock my bikini at Wildwood in three weeks.

I'm Slow with Old Age!

Man. That whole "reading for pleasure" thing is amazing.
Although, the enjoyment I once got from sitting down with a good book is a bit marred now. I've grown a lot as a reader and a writer since my care-free days of reading Animorphs and Baby Sitters Club with blissful ignorance of structure and whatnot. Now, everything is too predictable. I pick out the choice of plot/character development the author is going with and then I figure out the whole story too quickly. I try not to; maybe that's why I read books so intensely. Try to not give myself time to think about it so maybe I can race my brain and be surprised by otherwise predictable plot-twists.
The other problem I have, is because I love fantasy so much and I'm such a geek, I am bored by any slow-paced explanations. For instance, I started reading Twilight by Stephanie Meyer yesterday (I finished it and read half of the second book, which I finished today... I am now half through the third). It's fantastic; I love her writing which is shocking because I normally hate stories told in the first person. But she does a good job (she's no Stephen Brust, but her narrative style is still pretty good). The characters are great. The story is fantastic; it's not super exciting to me though. That's only because I pretty much grew up reading Anne Rice and Laurell K. Hamilton novels, so the whole vampire-werewolf thing is dull to me.
Nothing super unique is out there, that I've found at least, so while the story is probably more exciting to someone less familiar with vampire-werewolf culture, to me it's a little old. I enjoy the way Meyer tells it, but it's not new, and that upsets me.
You see, I used to have such a clear, innocent pleasure in reading a book. I just liked escaping reality, dissociating into the fantasy worlds that I wished I could live in, filled with magic, vampires, elves, etc. All that good, geeky, Tolkien-y/Anne Rice-y stuff.
I used to stay up all night, not sleeping a wink for several days, to finish an entire series. I remember reading all of the Sweet Valley High books (I know, right?) in fourth grade in the span of days. A book a night. I used to not to be able to sleep unless I'd read, and I used to find it impossible, literally impossible, to stop reading until I finished the book I was reading. Seriously. I still get that compulsion now; I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in a straight 19 hours, non-stop. No food or anything. I used to read much faster... It's terribly embarrassing at this age to admit it, but from sixth until seventh grade I read one of the Harry Potter books every night. I have literally read some of them over a hundred times. I love reading series' over and over again because I always find something slight I missed the other times. I make new connections throughout each book in the series and I love it when that happens. That's another thing I adore Stephen Brust for; his plots, characters, histories, etc. are all so detailed and vivid and intricate. Every time I reread one of his books I make a new connection to something totally awesome in the story.
In case you didn't know/can't tell, Stephen Brust is my favorite author ever. Like, if I could read only one author for the rest of my life, it would be him, hands down.
Anyway, I was getting at complaining that my reading has slowed down considerably in recent years. I can still crank out a pretty heavy book in a single night, but it takes longer. It took me 8 hours to read roughly 700 pages, and back in middle school I easily could have read probably two or three hundred more than that.
I miss the days that all the stories were brand new to me, when nothing was old or over done. When I would lay in bed after finishing a book at four in the morning on a school night, and stay awake the rest of the night rereading the book in my head, but taking characters from the books I tried to write myself and sticking them into the plot. It was fantastic fun.

But I haven't had any new characters to do that with in years.
I have too many other, more adult-y things on my mind at night that keep me from sleeping, instead of simply using my hours to sleep bidding my time till I could go back to the computer and write more.
Now, I stay up all night unable sleep because Jon isn't there, or worrying about getting a job, whether to change my major, wondering what life would have been like if I had gone to American University like I was supposed to, wondering how I'll afford my medicine after I graduate, why my parents are the way the are and how it's affected me, trying to form a coherent career path, trying to decipher what I even want to make of myself... so many worries, fears, anxieties.
When I was a kid racked with insomnia, my thoughts were only filled with trying to think of cool names for the characters I'd made up earlier that day.


I miss those times. The days I didn't know any better.
The days I could write.
They were fantastic.

Mislabeled

I'm no music expert. I listen to a lot of music, but I'm actually fairly ignorant of much of it. I can recognize lots of famous songs when I hear them, and I know the choruses to many, but I have trouble naming them or their artists. I honestly blame it from growing up listening to my parents play records all the time. I'd hear the same songs over and over as a child, but never who they were sung by. For example, I knew the song "Mrs. Robinson" but I had no idea who it was by until probably junior year of high school. All I knew what my parents told me not to point out that there was a song with her name in it to one of the first grade teachers in my elementary school.
But since going to college, my taste in music has expanded significantly from just listening to the Smashing Pumpkins and Bjork. I've been trying to catch up on everything; classic rock songs I never knew the name of or the artist, 1990's pop/grunge songs everyone else knew because they listened to the radio growing up while I shunned it and just played Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness or Les Miserables on repeat. That sort of thing. I missed out on a pop culture childhood because I was too busy trying to impress my older sister.
Anyway, this whole rambling entry was originally just going to be me posting this and commenting on how, while I'm not a music expert, this list is more of a "100 Greatest Hits" than "100 Greatest Rock Songs." I mean, yeah, "Hotel California" is great and all, but I don't think it ought to be placed in a list of the best 100 rock songs. It's a good song; but not one of the best. Or hell, "Stairway to Heaven" is rated number 1. Yes, it's a damn good song, but not the best rock song. Zeppelin's got other songs that are better than it; but not as famous (then again, all Zeppelin songs are pretty much greatest hits far as I'm concerned).

This entry was most likely brought to you by the letter I, for Insomnia.
...which I am fairly certain is not common for those inflicted with mono, so I am confused but also joyful, since that might mean I don't have it.