Jewelry Joy

I have way too many necklaces at home because I like to make them but there are only so many a person needs, yet I still like the zen of making them. Thus, I have a plan to sell some of them on a site, etsy.com, so I can make room for more. The problem, is that in order to sell them, I need to be able to produce good quality images of them.

First, I tried my scanner. While it's good for flat pictures, it sucks at anything vaguely 3-D. Then my guy lent me his digital camera. No dice on that one either because it's designed for general picture taking, not close ups. Then I looked at some jewelry images I made while I still lived with mom and dad, and their scanner works beautifully for necklaces. Thus, today while I renewed my FAFSA, I also scanned a few necklaces. I feel like I've been very productive.

Dichroic glass pendant with crystals and silver

Howlite, "Indian Glass" and silver

Sodalite, ocean jasper, and silver

Movie Review: Cool World. Talk about a weird flick. Think Who Framed Roger Rabbit, except it's all about sex. Brad Pitt plays the tough cop, Kim Basinger is the "doodle" broad making trouble, and Gabriel Byrne is the cartoonist she plans to seduce. The only problem is that once a doodle and a "noid" have sex, things start to go wonky. It goes from comical to cheesy and back again. Though I give the movie big points for the funky cardboard cut-out "scenery" which is featured when a noid is in Cool World.

Cool

“May peace find you tonight
Like a breeze through your window
And sit by your light
And let it warm by your fire
And laugh with delight”
Reckless Kelly, “May Peace Find You Tonight”

Today I sent an e-mail out to the Writer’s Group e-mail list to announce my July goal: write at least 2,500 words each week. Hell, if I can do that in a day, a week so be manageable, right? Yesterday I buckled down and started a new chapter. I struggled trying to decide how to start it, but then told myself just to start someplace, and I can always fix it later. That helped, and I ended up with eight hundred words and change.

A while back I found a country band called Bering Strait made up of Russians-weird, huh? They’re rather good, and the gal who does lead vocals has a great voice. Today I decided to see what other albums they had, only to find out they’re now defunct. The self-titled album is apparently their only one.

Alas, I have no movie review today as all I watched last night was Angel. I’m at the end of season four now, and Gina Torres has officially made her entrance. She’s wonderful as Jasmine.

Connor: “Where are those people?”
Jasmine [smiling]: “I ate them.”
Connor: “Cool.”
Angel, “The Magic Bullet”

June Meeting & Movies

New Guy: “When can I submit?”
Jayne: “Next meeting, but it better not suck.”

Granted, Jayne’s comment might seem a bit rude out of context, but last night everyone was rather entertained by it. The new guy is, I'm guessing, about seventeen-ish and a bit of a punk, so he took her comment in stride. I was looking forward to the Writer’s Group meeting for a while. It’s always nice to go to the meetings, but especially to go to dinner afterward. Almost inevitably, it comes down to Jayne, Sean, Debra, and I after the others have gone home.

Besides gossip, we also talk shop-like how Debra met Jayne’s three rejection slip challenge, or how Jayne’s working on a short story collection. Jayne’s challenge, by the way, was that each person in the group should submit their work to magazines, agents, etc. Everyone who gets at least three rejection slips within the year wins baked goods. The idea isn’t that rejection is what we strive for, but rather to get our stuff out in the world. A rejection slip at least proves that you submitted something. Of course, any acceptance counts as two rejections.

My status in the challenge is as a slacker, I did my first submission and have yet to get moving on others. First, though, I’d best get my financial aid paperwork in order because no student loan means having to drop a class for fall so tuition’s not so expensive, and I really don’t want to do that.

Movie Review: Pulp Fiction. It’s a pretty famous/infamous movie so I decided it was time for me to watch it. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this flick surpassed it. Let me preface by saying I haven’t been overly impressed with other Quentin Tarantino work I’ve seen, so to watch the snappy dialogue and clever plotting of Pulp Fiction impressed me. I like the knot-work of it, all the separate threads meeting up together, and it was very well done with respect to not getting confusing. My only criticism is that the story titles did nothing for the movie.

Movie Review: Perfect Blue. My pen pal recommended this one to me a while back and, after being on hold in my Netflix queue for quite a long time, it finally arrived in my mail box. Now, it’s Anime and generally, I’m not too interested in the genre. However, I thought this one was pretty good. Granted, most of the gore is cheesy and superfluous, but the suspense worked well. The story gets a little muddled toward the end, and the twist didn’t satisfy all of the questions that crop up about the main character’s perception of reality. So, while it was pretty good with some elements, others left me hanging.

Movie Review: Bettie Page: Dark Angel. I came across an article about the other movie, The Notorious Bettie Page, and thought I’d look at this one while I waited on the other. Oh boy, I should have saved myself the trouble. The script is poorly written, the lighting and camera angles make it look like a home video and the “videos” of Page doing her thing are much more boring than “risqué.” Sure, a minute or two of “Whip Dance” might have been interesting as a look into the life, but when it goes on and on for ten minutes of nothing but her shuffling about with a whip it gets really tedious really fast. There were two good points in the movie though, the costumes and the music. Even so, I found myself skipping ahead a great deal, trying to find the interesting part. Sadly, there was none.

Super Girls

Giles: [inspecting an axe] “In addition to being ancient, it's clearly mystical.”
Buffy: “Yeah, I figured that one out when I King Arthured it out of the stone.”
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "End of Days"

The other day, I finished watching Buffy. The last episode (dum dum dum) and all that. It was strange because on one hand, it was all done very well, but on the other I didn’t have much emotional reaction to it. I think it boils down to the fact that after seven seasons, the main characters were too familiar to me. I already knew what they were going to do and so the suspense of it all was gone. Still, the grand finale was very fitting to the show’s mission and themes. Lots and lots of feminism, big scary monsters and comedy sprinkled all over it.

My big deal of the past few days though, is that I got my butt in gear and as of today (two days before the meeting) I’ve got my submission for the Writer’s Group all ready to go. Considering my more normal pattern of printing my submissions out the day of, and about an hour before, the meetings, this is an accomplishment. More importantly, since I just came off of my wonderfully time consuming class I was figuring this month’s submission might be a bit thin. Well, yesterday I spent a lot of time on the computer and added over 3,000 words all together to what I had up to then. Today I spent some more time on the computer and added another 1,000. Grand total: 5,300 words for this month. Considering most of my submissions average around 4,000 words, the fact that I beat my average this time, and did it in about two days, makes me very pleased with myself.

Cry Baby

"The only gossip I'm interested in is things from the Weekly World News - 'Woman's bra bursts, 11 injured.' That kind of thing." Johnny Depp, from imbd.com

Yesterday, I did no writing because I was a tired bum. Today I got about 700 words typed up and I’m going to do some more when I get home. First I have to go to the financial aid office and see what they can tell me about paying fall tuition. It is a meeting I am not looking forward to because it’ll be a lot of waiting around and/or them telling me I have to fill out paperwork. Oh joy of joys.

Movie Review: Cry Baby. This is one of Johnny Depp’s earliest movies and it’s interesting to note how similar he looks between now and then. There is something disturbing about how he doesn’t really seem to age. For the movie itself, I have to say that when Neflix describes the director as “the king of kitsch” the description applies to the film pretty well. It’s a musical with a high cheese factor. Think Grease with fat girls and horrible makeup. I have to admit, the weird and dorky in this movie is a bit charming, when I wasn’t too distracted by the intentionally gross teeth many of the actors sported. Unlike Pirates of the Caribbean, Depp wasn’t one of them. So, in the end the big hokey music numbers, oozing melodrama, and stereotype hyperbole are fun, but I don’t think I’d watch this movie twice.

Money and Glass

“I wanna be consequence free, I wanna be where nothing needs to matter, I wanna be consequence free, just sing Na Na Na Na Na Ne Na Na Na.” Great Big Sea, Consequence Free

I’m feeling a bit depressed today, because yesterday I went to the bank and almost completely wiped out my savings so I could pay my credit card bill. On this month’s statement was summer tuition, an airplane ticket to Pennsylvania, the down payment for my car, and a list of regular expenses like groceries and gas. One month’s total was more than the previous two, or possibly three, years combined.

Three years ago I spent the summer in Arkansas running my own office for a company I then worked for. While I won’t say anything bad about the company, I will admit that summer was a disaster for me. Between office rent, receptionist payroll, and personal expenses, I ran out of money. I ended the summer $4,000 in debt with thirteen dollars cash to my name. I got to the point, during those months, where five dollars was a week’s worth of groceries, and where spending a couple of bucks on a matinee ticket to see Pirates of the Caribbean was a big splurge. In short, by the time I got back to Colorado, I was a wreck and I had money issues.

When I got back I took out my first student loan to pay for my third semester of college and put almost every cent I earned working at a dry cleaners toward paying off the $4,000. Since clearing that debt, I’ve developed a habit of saving compulsively. It paid off and I grew a comfortable amount of money in my savings, still not enough to pay off my growing student loan, but student loans are common and I didn’t worry. Now that savings has been severely dented and it’s got me nervous. Add to that, my summer class conflicted with the job that was my primary income, and so I don’t have that job any more. I didn’t like it much, granted, but losing the money from it makes me antsy. While that job has somewhat been replaced by working as the Writing Project Assistant, the pay is less and it’s only a sporadic job-I won’t be needed for most of July and August.

Right, the point is I’m feeling more financially vulnerable than I have in a while and it’s bringing on unpleasant memories. The fact that paying tuition for fall semester will effectively clean out the rest of my savings doesn’t reassure me either, because then I’ll have nothing left for spring semester, not to mention any personal emergencies. Time to talk to the financial aid office about more student loans.

Not helping my money anxiety is the fact that I didn’t go to bed until almost two o’clock last night, so I'm tired and a little grumpy. No, I wasn’t partying or anything like that. I was reading a book. I’ve been a book worm since I learned how to read and when I want to, I can get through a lot of pages pretty quickly. Every now and again I go on a reading binge, and yesterday was a mini one. After I got off work and finished watching the last three episodes of Buffy, I started a book I got from the library. When I went to bed, I had read it completely. That leads me to talking about it.

Book Review: In the Company of the Courtesan, by Sarah Dunant. I found it coincidental that after just having watched Dangerous Beauty, the book I picked up a few days ago happens to take place also in Venice, about twenty years earlier than the film and works on the same theme of prostitution. Aside from one chapter, which I still don’t know why it’s in third person, the novel is narrated by Bucino who is a dwarf and a pimp. When Rome is sacked, they run to Venice to escape and have the challenge of rebuilding their business from scratch. Overall, the historical details were interesting and the story was pretty good. Yet, when a significant character died, I didn’t worry too much about it. So, the emotional dig wasn’t quite there for me. Still, it was an interesting enough read to keep me up late.

All this talk of Venice makes me think of when I was there the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school. We only stopped there for an afternoon, but the glass… I wish I had bought more. I only have one strand’s worth of beads from Venice, and that’s really depressing since there’s no time in the near future I’ll get a chance to go back.

"Never fall in love with a woman who sells herself."

“Please tell me you're not one of Toulouse's oh so talented, charmingly bohemian, tragically impoverished writers?” Satine, Moulin Rouge

I did it. I got my butt in gear yesterday and did some writing. Mostly I transcribed from my notebook, but then I added a bit more and ended up with a word count of 627. Nothing awe-inspiring, I admit, but a heck of a lot better than nothing at all. I’ve got about 3,500 more words to go by this weekend so that I can turn in a decent submission for the Writer’s Group so Jayne doesn’t get mad at me. She said she would have a submission this month, too. I hope she doesn’t wimp out on me, then I’d have to give her a lot of grief.

Speaking of Jayne…Jayne (not my friend) is a character from the show Firefly. He’s an uncouth mercenary type who is designed to always do the wrong/inappropriate thing and who people immediately love because of it.

Jayne: "Well I don't like the idea of someone hearing what I'm thinking."

Inara: "No one likes the idea of hearing what you're thinking."

Last night my guy called me and said that on the game GuildWars there is a special baddie named Jayne who drops a unique item, a hammer named Vera. How do ya like that, Browncoats?

Movie Review: This post definitely has a prostitution theme. I promise, it wasn’t intentional. Adding to it, the movie I watched yesterday, Dangerous Beauty. It’s about a courtesan named Veronica Franco (played by Catherine McCormack), a real woman who lived in Venice from 1546-1591. The plot starts with introducing the love interest, a senator named Marco Venier (Rufus Sewell). She’s not rich enough to marry him, so her mom suggests another way of having him. The setting is gorgeous, the costuming well-done, the acting is good, and there are wonderful lines, like when Maffio Venier (Oliver Platt) says to Veronica, “It must be interesting to be in a room full of men, most of whom you've seen with their pants down.” The big climax gets a bit cheesy, but they earned a bit of melodrama there. The historical details are interesting, as are the bits of Franco’s poetry they use as voiceover.

Land Ho!

“And I know those earrings, And I have seen parts of that dress, And her hands sparkle with promises, Secrets I'm never gonna get to keep.” Russell Crowe/Billy-Dean Cochran, What’s Her Name

I read once, I think on gruntland.com, that Crowe thinks of all of the songs he writes as being love songs in one way or another. As someone who’s heard a great number of those songs, I can see where he’s coming from. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all cheese and mooning, but there’s definitely an underscore in each song. As a philosophy, I rather like it. I also rather like Crowe’s gravely cigarette smoker’s voice and the music that goes with it. His ex-band, TOFOG, had a lot of good musicians, including a trumpet player which is something you just don’t see every day.

In other news, I watched The New World yesterday with my parents. I remember seeing the previews, and I remember hearing bad reviews. Then, I watched it and thought, “Oh, I see.” Let me start by saying it’s a lovely movie, the lush Virginia background, pretty actors, and costumes are all nice to look at. It’s just the plot that hurts. When both my mom and I are lost in scene changes and time lapses, not to mention dialogue, you know it’s bad. While the film finally falls together a bit toward the end, the truth is that if I hadn’t been watching it with other people I never would have watched to the end. Sorry, this movie just doesn’t work. I can understand the artistic impulses behind the choppy cutting and the voiceovers, but in the end they lost me instead of captivated me.

I’m watching the end of season seven Buffy, and just got to the part where Nathan Fillion makes his appearance as the Big Bad. Oh boy, I love watching that man. Sure, he’s good looking, but more than that he can do both humor and the big creepy oh so well. I can’t wait until the next disc gets to me in the mail.

Personality & Procrastination

“Extroversion results were moderately low which suggests you are reclusive, quiet, unassertive, and secretive.” – My Big Five Personality Test

After I caught up on my copying work I decided to make the best of my remaining time by taking personality tests, hanging out in a chat room and browsing another blog, http://extremecraft.blogspot.com/.

My Writer’s Group meeting is in about a week and a half (last Sunday of the month) and I need to turn in a submission this go ‘round. I slacked last month because of my class, but now it’s over and Jayne even said, “When I said you might think of taking a month off, I didn’t mean it.” My goal is to submit at least 4,500 words or so, if not more, and right now I’ve got two handwritten pages that have yet to be transcribed and edited. Time to get in gear. Of course, I am an English major (read: procrastinator) so the whole getting started thing may go a bit roughly.

I make a formal statement now, though. I will turn in a submission this month.

How I Spent My Weekend

"Some people are heroes. And some people jot down notes." – Terry Pratchett, Truth

I have a bit of a voice back today, a horrible croaky voice, but at least I can finish sentences without it quitting on me. I’m still cranky though, last night I was in bed for an hour or so before I could actually fall asleep, thanks to all the coughing. The up side is that I brought some Mark Knopfler with me to work today, so it helps mellow me out.

Yesterday I watched Dirty Pretty Things. They call it a thriller, but I don’t know that it’s all that thrilling. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the movie, but thriller implies lots of “Oh no, don’t…Ah!” That comment aside, it was really good at being dark, and at showing how far people can go when they’re pushed. Chewitel Ejiofor got some recognition for his role as Okwe, and rightly so, he did a wonderful job. Note: Chewitel also did beautiful, disturbing acting in Serenity (which everyone should see). Audrey Tautou co-stars and also packs a lot of punch in her character, Senay. There’s a twist at the end, which I have to admit I didn’t expect. Since I expect a lot of things before they happen, I was pleasantly surprised when I was watching and thought “Oh my, that’s what they’re going to do.”

Saturday I read Without You, a memoir by Anthony Rapp who originated the role of Mark in Rent. It was interesting to learn that the guy who plays one of the few straight characters in the musical is, in fact gay. I liked the book and although I think this guy definitely has issues, I liked how up-front and honest he was. Another book I tried was Spin Doctor by Leslie Carroll. While it had some good points, there were redundant “Progress Report” sections and a lot of sentences and paragraphs that left me confused as to what was going on. I blame the editor more than the author, these are things that he/she should have caught. In the end, I stopped reading about half way through.

I notice, of late, that my nit-picking has been coming out more strongly than usual. I don’t know if this is a temporary change, or a more permanent one. Time will tell, I guess.

"They steal all the voices, so no one can scream"

Giles: {written, not spoken} “Who are the Gentlemen? They are fairy tale monsters. What do they want?”
Willow: {points to her chest}
Xander: {cups himself, and you can read his lips} “Boobies?”
-Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Hush”

Widely acknowledged as one of the utmost creepy Buffy episodes ever, “Hush” has only something like five minutes of speaking in the whole forty five minutes or so of the episode.

This episode has particular bearing on my life today, barring the horrific mimes, of course. Last night I went to work at the bar and spent five hours talking over the jukebox in my scratchy voice to ask people what kind of alcohol they wanted. This morning the best I can manage is something that makes me think of what it might be like to be a pubescent boy with a bad case of the voice change. Sometimes I can croak out words, sometimes I can only get half way through a word before it disappears. Great fun.

Speaking of horror, I watched Mary Reilly this morning. Good creepy fun. There were a few moments, though when I wanted to shake Julia Roberts because she was doing the “I’m scared out of my mind, I better go check out the freaky noise” thing. John Malkovich as Jekyll/Hyde was a great casting call, that man can be very scary when he wants to. It’s the way he smiles, I think.

July 8th wedding

“Clearly you’ve never been to Singapore.” – Jack Sparrow

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, opens the night of Jayne and Sean’s wedding rehearsal. Jayne said something about having a rehearsal movie viewing instead of a dinner, which is totally fine with me. I don’t know that it’ll actually happen that way, though.

I’m excited about this wedding, it’ll be the first wedding I’ve ever officially been in. Of course there’s also the fact that these two people are my friends and I’m excited that they’re getting married. They’re good people and they make a good couple.

Last night after my last Flash Fiction class, most of the class went to the bar and a lot of the old English majors met up with us there, including Jayne and Sean. I brought the necklace I made for the wedding and Jayne quite liked it. I was a bit nervous about that, since I couldn’t find the right beads to do what we had originally talked about, but she’s pretty laid back about the whole thing. In fact it was only last night that they got a singer for the wedding, Judy, who’s another English major. It’s funny, too, how when we all get together it takes people forever to leave. Judy came in, said she could just say “hi” because she had to get home to take care of her injured dog, and stayed for two hours.

The downside of the evening was that while the group of us were sitting at the table chatting, some random guy came up and joined us. He was pretty drunk and kept asking someone to repeat what was said and mostly sat there trying to make conversation and failing miserably. As Sean commented later, the consensus was “Who was that guy, and what the fuck was he doing with us?” While I like the bar, there is a definite downside in that people like to get annoyingly friendly.

Europe and "Literature"

“Terrified of the open road. Yeah, where it leads ya never know…Rebels are we, though heavy our hearts shall always be. Ah, no ball or chain no prison shall keep. We’re the rebels of the sacred heart” – Flogging Molly “Rebels of the Sacred Heart”

No, no particular reason I started with that one. I’m not going to talk about rebellion or prison. I did visit the Chapel of the Sacred Heart once, though. It was during a trip to Europe with the “Colorado Ambassadors of Music” when I was a junior in high school. They had an orchestra (in which I played violin), a band, and a choir. We toured seven countries in ten days giving performances and touring the sights. In the chapel I lit a candle for my friend Tom who has multiple mialoma-a very rare bone cancer. Maybe the candle worked, he’s still alive and relatively healthy these days. His original prognosis was phrased in weeks and months, not years.

I’m getting sick, and it’s unpleasant. I woke up yesterday with a clotted feeling in my sinuses and it’s gotten worse since, so now I have a perpetual sore throat. Tonight is my last class for the summer Flash Fiction course I signed on for, and that’s a relief. It’s a graduate level workshop, technically, but half the people in it have never been in a workshop before and half of those have never written creatively before. I’ve been a bit frustrated with it. Not only is there the discrepancy with experience, there’s also the fact that this is a literary environment.

Literary = “I have to show the deep psychological issues of life, as exemplified by trauma and introspection.” Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of wonderful literary work, but it has a trend of making writers freak out and put too much pressure on themselves. I just prefer a commercial mentality.

Commercial = “I have to write an entertaining story.” Wait a minute before you call me shallow or superficial, I can explain. Writers who genuinely want to entertain readers will, as a matter of course, write interesting and human characters with naturally developed plots. These are most interesting to readers (read: intelligent readers). Sure, there’s a lot of fluff on the Bestseller list, but there’s also a lot of good stuff there too. As a for instance, let me cite Joss Whedon. Folks who haven’t watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer often have a bias that it’s teen fluff. Yet, the show deals with real issues: teen sex, natural consequences, relationships, trust, power, self esteem, and many others. The actions characters choose to take on the show have natural (or supernatural) consequences and no none gets off “easy.” Still, at the bottom of it all, is the desire to entertain, not “think deep thoughts.”

This was supposed to be a short post. *Sigh.*

God, Mark, and Writing

Mark: "To days of inspiration playing hooky, making something out of nothing. The need to express, to communicate, to going against the grain, going insane, going mad..." From Rent, “La Vie Boheme”

It’s a pretty appropriate quote for an English major blogger, don’t you think? I love the idea that you can start with nothing, think of a character, an event, a setting, a plot and write them all down then end up with a story. Making stories fascinates me, especially at times when I read or watch one that sticks in my head for days/weeks afterward. To think, if that person, say Jonathan Larson, never wrote it all down, I would have missed out.

That’s why I write. Not so much for any grand philosophical reason, but because I like the idea that if I do my job well enough, I can entertain people. Last May I started writing a novel. It’s called Oracle. Working on this novel has been like running a marathon, and I’m not even half finished yet. The experience has been very educational. Before last year, I had never written a novel. I was strictly a short stories kind of gal.

I handed in my first submission to my writers’ group and waited nervously until the next month when we’d have another meeting and I’d get my critiques. The consensus: “I’m interested in what you’re doing, but you need to write it like a novel, not a short story.” My pacing was way off and my world-building needed work, and I had to spend more time with my characters so people could actually get a feel for them. Okay, it needed work. Okay, it needed a lot of work. The last submission I handed in got few major critiques. It only took me a year to get to that point.

Maybe you’re curious, now, about my novel. Let me explain it a bit. It’s a fantasy set in a world that is somewhat similar to what it would be like in the late 1800s if there were mystical happenings and no gun powder. I have a handful of main characters who all end up getting together to fight off the “big bad.” They’ve all got their own problems, and they all decide to fight the good fight for very personal reasons. That part is the most important part to me because I got kind of fed up reading books/watching movies where the hero saves the world just because he/she is the hero. Come on! People are selfish. I don’t buy “I have to save my country because I love my country.”

Another important thing in Oracle is religion. I’m struggling to flesh it out in the story without just info-dumping, and I need to figure out some way to make it happen because it’s the basis for the plot. So, kind of essential that I write it so people can understand it. I’ve got a big To-Do list for this book. The good news is that Jayne is supportive. I first met her when we took the same classes, and she’s the leader of the writer’s group and a writer I admire so when she said “If you die, can I finish the book?” it gave me a fuzzy feeling. I’m a dork, I’ll admit it right now.

Introduction

I decided some time last week to start this blog and when I thought about it last week, I had these wonderfully entertaining and witty things to say. Obviously, I remember none of them now, when I'm actually posting.

I'm an English major, or I was, now I have my Bachelor's. Then again, I'm starting graduate school, so I guess that makes me an English major again. I'm not sure how the technicality works there. My undergraduate emphasis was Creative Writing and I minored in Anthropology. I think if I could have, I would have done a double major-English/Anthro. but alas, this school is too small to have a large enough department to allow for Anthropology as a major. Ultimately, my minor is useful in that I can bitch about movies/books/stories/etc. by saying "No, that's not the way cultures really work, I don't believe your fantastical nomadic tribe is realistic." So, it's been very useful on a practical level, as you can tell.

My birthday just passed by recently (May 26) which happens to always fall on Memorial Day weekend. This means that for much of my life I spent my birthday camping with my family. Note: I strongly dislike camping with my family. This is not to be confused with camping with English major friends, which happened on Memorial Day weekend this year. The main difference is where my family insists on doing stuff, (like hiking up a mountain all afternoon), English majors are just in it for the chance to be bums all weekend. On the day of my birth itself, I spent the morning babysitting, the afternoon at my on-campus job, and the evening (until 1:30 a.m.) working at the bar. Hooray for me. Can you tell I'm pessimistic about my Birthday? So, now I'm twenty two and I've passed all of the interesting mile markers for good. The only thing I have to look forward to next is the big two-five when my car insurance rates go down.

My only other relevant news is that I spent five hours last Tuesday at a car dealership. My first ever car was a 1994 Suzuki Swift that had 133,000 miles on it when I bought it from a local guy in 2002. Tuesday when I traded it in, the car had 167,000 and was worth exactly $163. That, I have to admit, was depressing. Less so, was when I got the keys to my new car, a 2002 Chevy Cavalier which is far nicer than my old Suzuki. The problem, however, is that I am now paranoid about the Chevy. I'm paranoid that it'll be stolen. I'm paranoid that someone will break in and steal the stereo. I'm paranoid that someone will slam their car door into the Chevy's perfect finish and scratch (or worse, dent) it. I'm paranoid that I'll have a blonde moment while driving and do something stupid like back it into a light pole. I'm paranoid that while I'm carting kids around during babysitting, one of them will do something awful like spill on the seat or they'll still be wet from swimming and bleach out the upholstery. A new car is definitely a mixed blessing is all I can say.

Alright, a note to finish on. I realize that all the important blogs have a mission of some variety. I'm not saying that I plan for this blog to be important, but I figure a grand scheme can't hurt. People want a reason to read my ramblings, and who am I to deny them that? So here it is, my mission statement:

As a Netflix addict, I will post movie reviews. I’ll talk about my goal to set up a way to sell my beadwork. I’ll track my progress on my novel and talk about writerly things, including pet peeves. Last, but not least, I’ll talk about graduate school and working toward a “real” job.

So, for a final note I think I'll leave you with the news that it is currently freakishly hot in my hometown and my house tends to act as an oven. Tonight, when you get home and turn on your AC, think of me because my AC sucks and my house will be at least eighty for the better part of the night. Summer in a prairie town isn't always what it's cracked up to be, I'll have you know.