Fuzz

My brain feels a little staticey right now. Deal with the disorganized post that is to follow.
I'm reading Empire Falls. It's okay. I need to finish reading it soon so that I can stay up all night to finish reading Guns, Germs, and Steel. I saw this map of societal advancement and everything clicked. It was magic.
The novel is...still going. I'm questioning necessary length, mostly because editing is possible.
I went to the hospital today and...it was boring. It's always kind of boring, I feel like I should be leading the conversation but I have nothing to say and there's never enough chairs and...yeah.
I'm thinking more and more about culture and how maybe nothing is original any more. Still, with the lack of originality, people want to be active creators of culture and not just consumers, we're asked more and more to take the bits of culture that we like and remake them in our own way.
It would be awesome to be on the radio if I could be a combination of Ira Glass and The Tappet Brothers.
The more I think about it, the more I want to write for the rest of my life.
This blog post doesn't make any sense to me, and it probably doesn't make any sense to you either.

...

I just read Outliers. It was good. Really good. One of the few times in my life that I've actually enjoyed a non-fiction book. It challenged my world view, and that's what books are supposed to do, isn't it? They're supposed to make you question everything that you've taken for granted, and, well, change things. That was deep.
It made me question my attitudes towards school a lot. I remember, the last time I could have been considered to be good at math was 7th grade. I would always finish my tests and homework last, and I kind of thought that it was bad, that there was something wrong with me because it took me so long. That was addressed in the book. I remember some teacher (okay, I'm 95% sure of who it was) saying something about student's motivation and rice paddies, and there was a whole chapter devoted to that. There was a lot about the lucky break, and how sometimes the lucky break isn't just one thing, it's a lot of things that happen to line up. I remember reading something about how babies born in November and December tend to be less successful later in life, and the article I read attributed it to the number of babies concieved by younger parents on prom night. This though, said that it was the number of January 1st cut off dates that made the difference. Since the cut off date for starting kindergarten in Michigan is December 1st, my brother started kindergarten a year later than I did, and he went to school all day. I started kindergarten when I should have and went to school for a half day. If we follow the logic in this book, it's no wonder that it took me so much longer to learn how to read.
In short, this was awesome. I read it straight through, except for the three times when I thought I should go to sleep, turned out the light, rolled over, closed my eyes, decided that sleep wasn't going to happen any time soon, and started reading again.

Remember

I got my I-Search paper back on Wednesday. I got a 93% on it, and my teacher wrote a really nice note on it, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. When I went to the reunion for my elementary school last night, I said "Hi" to my third and fourth grade teacher. It took her a second to figure out who I was, but then she reminded me of just how disorganized I was (and, er, still am) and said "But you were always such a good writer. Are you on yearbook or something now?" and I told her about NaNoWriMo. When people who don't have to say that I'm awesome say that they like my writing, it makes it much easier to write a novel in a week. I also told my elementary school art teacher about Art School plans.
Yesterday was pretty great. I got out of school (a little late, because I had only written two of the three paragraphs I needed to write on my French final when school was over) and went to a quizbowler's house for what was billed to be an end of the year party. We had pizza and watched some soccer, but it was pretty awkward and boring. Also, his house has the exact same floorplan as my aunt's house. Weird. To avoid playing monopoly, some of us decided to leave. I think the origional plan was to go to Target. We went to the mall because someone needed to look for shoes, and then we spent some time in the Apple store. Then we went someplace else where people actually did buy shoes, and where I contemplated interpersonal relationships. Then we went to see toy story. It was awesome. The monkey scared the shit out of me and the strawberry bear started out as friendly black optimistic advice and turned into like, crazy mafia/Voldemort dude. Rex is my favourite character, btw. And then we went to Target. I love Target. It feels like happiness and perfection is something you can buy, which basically transports us to 1950's consumer perfection. Sometimes, I feel like I should live in the 1950's. And have boomerang formica countertops with steel cabinents. Is that weird?

What?

As you may have noticed, my most recent post was my 400th. I could take this opportunity to reminisce about the past three years of blogging and how it's changed my life in ways I couldn't have imagined, but I don't really want to. We'll save that for graduation or my 500th post or something. Really, I'm just thinking about the fact that I have 100 drafts floating around on blogger.
As for the Next-Week-Novel, Ixente and the steampunk world have been ditched. You could feel it happening, couldn't you? There was just less and less love with that story, and I knew that I would go crazy if I tried to write it when there was a new, shiny, wonderful story idea sitting in my notebook.
I have a page and a half planned out, compared to the 11 pages I have of the steampunk thing. This story is current and it involves death, two things that I require when writing. I'm going to aim for 8k every day, and I think that it should be attainable, given my lack of social life. If I can just get off facebook, I should be fine. On that note, if you want to talk to me in the next week and a half, you should call me. If you don't have my phone number and can't get it from someone else, you probably shouldn't be talking to me. The way I see it, 8k seems like a lot, but 2k four times a day doesn't seem too bad. If I want to, I can go to the new shiny wonderful library and write there. The only possible problem with this plan is that my hands may give out after a certian point, as they've done during previous NaNos. Well, they haven't given out, but they've started hurting in a way that says "Samantha, now is the time to stop writing and lay on the floor in the fetal position if you want to be able to use your hands in a week."
So yeah, that's my life.
I've been studying for finals too. And talking to someone about the ridiculousness of the possibilty of someone else being pregnant. Yeah, gossip.

Quote of the Month

"So now you must choose… Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so? To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable - bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder…"Jostein Gaarder

Spiral

I just saw Sweeny Todd for the first time. It was awesome. Ahhh, handwaving awesomeness. It's the kind of awesome that requires me to invent words.
Among other things, I've been doing an awful lot of thinking about the steampunk novel thing lately. This involves a bit of writing and a lot of imagining what the world should look like. For instance, I realized the following in a burst of awesomeness: The mayor is Edvard Vossa, he was elected on something of a populist platform, against the world that Ixente and her family is a part of. There's about 400,000 people in the city, there's bunches of crumbling gothic architecture, the mayor and the council of seven are elected by popular vote. Legally, all adult males can vote, but measures are taken to prevent "gypsies" from voting. They constitute about 1/4 of the city and are very segregated.
Gee, does this explain my current lack of understanding in Algebra II?
In other news, I quite like this house and this bit of happiness and these videos and this ideal of the Black family* and this drawing and these illustrations and frankly, pretty things make me happy, and I just want to make pretty things. Is that too much to ask? I just want to make people happy with pretty things.

*No blog post is truly finished without a Harry Potter mention.

Grr

I was late to school today because I was having an issue printing the introduction to my I-Search paper.
When I got to school, the teacher was letting everyone print out the introductions to their I-Search papers.
Yeah, I ask myself why I'm a fuckup quite often.

What? Why do things need titles? That's so arbitrary and meaningless!

I am feeling a little bit at odds with the universe right now, like I want some things but I'm not really sure what things they are, and the universe doesn't think that I should want those things. We have different agendas, and they never seem to coincide. I don't need them to coincide. I don't want them to coincide. I don't want to be like you, because I'm not like you.
That made no sense.
I'm okay with that not making sense.
I'm starting to think that nothing I think makes sense to anyone else.
I feel more and more obscure.
I want to run away.
I want to hide in the corner and tell stories that no one is listening to.
The people in my head, they want to get out.
They want to save the world.
I can't save the world.
I'm only expressing myself to myself.
I don't have anyone else to express myself to, do I?
You don't want to hear it.
I can hear you saying so.
Is that healthy?
I need to write more.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.