All I have to say is

Next time I get home after two, it better be because I've been doing something interesting.
That is all.
Goodnight.

Fiction Friday

I just wanted you to know that I did 81 pushups (well, the knee kind) in a row today. Yesterday. Thursday, whatever. It's worth writing home about.
This is the second part of that one story. Remember?

And there was still a part of me that questioned it, a part of me that wondered if we would want to be there, when the supplies started running out. Did we want to be here now? I had thought that I did, thought that I would be one of the few, one of the fighters.

I'm not sure about that, not any more.

The first to go was an old man. He talked a lot. We all talked a lot in the beginning, but his was different. While the rest of us were trying to decide what to do, where to go, if anyone else was alive, he was telling us about his family. He was talking about people, his people. He was talking like they were still alive, like he was going to see them soon.

One night, we were sleeping in the woods, in lean-to's, before we found our tents. We heard rustling in the trees, but we didn't think anything of it. There were still enough animals out there that it wasn't surprising.

No one was shocked when they heard the gunshots. We just hadn't realized that he had a gun.

There were two others who hanged themselves, only a day apart. That was after we had stopped walking all together, and started keeping our own pace, a snake stretched a mile long. They just couldn't handle being alone, I think.
After that, there was one more. Yesterday, or it could have been the day before, a short woman who I'd never heard speak (except maybe to the one who was first to go) took a bit of tubing out of her pack, sucked some gasoline out of an abandoned car, and lit herself on fire.

I realized how much we hand changed when non of us even looked shocked.

That was when I asked myself if I still wanted to be around.

There were seven of us left. We didn't speak. We hadn't spoken since the first one to go. We didn't know each other's names. I had given them nicknames in my head. The weird, kinda crazy guy who had appointed himself to be the leader, he was Alpha. The skinny guy who hadn't looked like he would last two days when we started out was DeadMeat. All one word. The little one was Diva, because you could tell that she had been one before the incident. She was having trouble adjusting, I could tell, but no one said anything. I wasn't sure that any of us even remembered how to talk. Doesn't the brain just lose the pieces that it doesn't need? Maybe that had happened, maybe we all had words, but no speech. The other girl, the incredibly plain one, she was Wall. I was working on a better name, that wasn't really sufficient. There was another guy who had started out our journey just as horrible as we all did now. His name was Skid. And then there was Raw, who only did things in the excess. He would run fast and then walk incredibly slowly. I might have hated him for it, if I had the energy to hate anyone right now. We didn't have the time to hate any more. There weren't enough people to hate any more. One would have thought that we were better people now than we were before, but I knew that wasn't it. We had just become different...now...that...everything...

I fell asleep, finally. And I dreamed. I never used to dream. I'd go through life, hearing about the way things were in this other dimension. I was jealous, no, more curious about what it was like to dream. What would it be like, dreaming, I asked myself when I went to sleep.

I have dreams now. I have dreams that aren't so much dreams as they're memories escaping, flashes of emotion that I don't want to feel. Fights, disasters, anger, failure. I always dream about things that make me feel like that, make me feel worthless. I'm afraid that I'm dreaming them wrong sometimes, that I was originally a horrible person before, not just the bad person I thought that I was. I wonder how much my memories are addled now. These are the only memories I have, really. Even if I try, I can never remember my past while I'm awake. Maybe it's amnesia, maybe it's because of the bomb, maybe it's self-defence. I don't think I'll ever know why, and I don't think that I'll ever be able to remember while I'm awake.

Before the bomb, I always thought that the cure for all of my issues would be more time to think. If I just had time to look at all of my memories, all my past laid out to examine everything and see where I've gone wrong. Then fix things, obviously.
I've had time to think, now. Not about my past, but about life and decisions and just about everything that was making me crazy.
Surprise surprise, that's not how it worked out. When I had the opportunity to stop and think about everything, things just got worse. Thinking made me into a different person than I'd been before it happened. Thinking about things, it made me kind of deep. I was never deep before. I was thoughtless, and while things may not have been good, they were better, weren't they? Or was it just in my head, a sick kind of nostalgia? I hate that I'll never know.

But I'll get used to it, I know I will. I'll eventually be okay with the fact that I don't know what the future holds, that I don't know enough of my past. It will just take time.

That, I realized, is what we have in common. We're broken. We were broken from the start, but the bomb tore down all the curtains, let everyone see just how broken and messed up we really were.

And that was fine.

I don't really like today.

You should watch this. Yum. I love books.

Also... "I’m really looking forward to seeing Helena Bonham Carter, ‘cause I’m a huge Helena Bonham Carter fan. Yeah, and her and Tim Burton are like my Brangelina. Like, they’re like my power couple." - Chris Colfer
Is it odd that my celebrity crushes have the same celebrity crushes (or...admirations?) as I do?

I am going to write one of those blog posts that reminds me and everyone else that I really am just an angsty teenager. You can stop reading now. I will not be offended if there are no comments on this post. Really. You would be better off reading that really creepy Klaine fanfic that everyone on tumblr is talking about. Actually...no. Don't do that. I've heard about it, and it seems like it would be emotionally scarring.

I was about an hour and five minutes late for school today. Fantastic, right? I missed all of first block (the class that I'm really struggling in) and the very beginning of second block. Why? Because my alarm was turned off and no one else woke up. I woke up at 7:50. School starts at 7:15. I was ready to go at 8:00. I finally got to leave the house at 8:15 because I had to wait for my dad and brother to get ready. Fantastic. I'm a winner.
This was mostly because it was my dad's job to get my brother and I off to school today. He's 49 years old. He cannot handle waking up on time and waking his children up on time. This is a problem.
School was meh. I ran the mile, pathetically slow, as always. Who cares?
Lunch was meh. People were there. I feel like some talk of the upcoming sitcom "Derek and Samantha" may have occoured, but I really can't remember.
The rest of the day was meh. I got a ride home from one of my friends, since I didn't have a car today.
I got home and went on the computer a little, then took a nap. I laid in bed for about an hour. I must have been sleeping for some portion of that time, because I remember dreaming. It was about the blog. I had mistakenly redesigned it. It was light green and tan and white and the posts were only sorted by length, not label or time. It was odd and disfunctional.
I had dinner at some point in there. And I made brownies. I asked my mom to help me with some college stuff. I've been asking her to help me with this for days.
I note that it's 6:30ish. Since my class finished last week, and it ran from 7:00 to 10:00, I had been planning on sort of reserving that time to work on art stuff. My mom pointed out to me that didn't I need something from the store and she was going to the store later and it would only be a half hour or fourty-five minutes so why didn't I just come with her? I figured that would be okay. Three hours later (THREE FUCKING HOURS), we got home. An hour and ten minutes later, she finally found the time to help me with the college stuff, which turned out to not be as complicated as I thought it was. No art has happened. No homework has happened. It's 12:38 AM.
My mom is a good mom when that's what she's doing. When she's constantly at my grandparent's house, she isn't. There's some times when it's fine, and there are some times when I just need someone to help me with things. Sometimes, I just need my mom.
I sometimes wonder how my education would have been different if my parents had pushed me more. I'm not a terribly self-motivated person, but I wonder, if they had treated Bs like they were a bad thing, if they had made sure I did my homework, if they had focused more on that, would I be better off? If they had pushed me at art, would I not think that everything I have in my portfolio is horrible? No, instead, I think they wanted some well-rounded, emotionally stable child. They didn't really get one.
I wonder if I really want to go to college, or if I just want to get out of here. Because I do want to get out of here. I think it's funny that I've never questioned if I could live on my own, but I've questioned plenty of times if I could handle the work in college, handle that pressure. It seems like everything might be more real in college. And art school? I don't know if I want to be an artist, or if I'm just going into art because it's something where I don't have to feel so fucking inadaquate all the time, like I do at school. I don't think it's going to help, really. And apparently a lot of the portfolio work I've been doing is wrong. Great. Really freeking great. I don't know how good I am, compared to other people. And part of the art school concept is that I won't have to compare myself any more, I won't have to care that my ACT and my GPA is so many points lower than everyone else's, that I didn't get a five on all my AP's, that I wasn't as advanced and as shiny and as perfect as they are. I have this dream that maybe, at art school, I won't have to feel bad about everything, that I can just exist and do my thing and be fine with that.
And then I realize that after art school, I'm going to have to get a job and then be competing with everyone else. Even if I got published, I know I would push that competitive additude on myself, that I wouldn't feel okay about being mid-list while there are bestsellers out there, wondering what's wrong with me, wondering why more people aren't reading my book, wondering why they got the wrong message from it. And then, I would have those helpful friends asking "Is this based on real life?" No. It's not. You would like to think that you're him, I know. You're not. It was always supposed to be like that, all along. That's why you're not reading it.
And this, my friends, is what the month after NaNo really feels like. Too excited, too low, too meh. It's slightly worrying that NaNo makes me feel like this, but I can't explain it any other way. I feel good when I'm writing, and when you take away that adreneline, everything is suddenly a lot less colourful.
But I'll be fine, even if I don't see that now.

Go College

So, um, I'm, um, going to college. For real. Unless a deal to control the universe/a million dollar-three-book contract/a gorgeous wealthy man with EU citizenship come my way before next September. And if I'm going to get into college, I have to write an essay. Scary. If you've seen this before, it's changed a lot since then.
AgthisissonervewrackinggahIjustwanttoreadKlainefanfictionalldaylong. That is how I feel. Also, today was a snow day and that was fantastic. Even though my eyelashes froze. And I couldn't feel my thighs.


When I was five, I wanted to be an artist. When I was fifteen, I knew that art was something that I loved, but not something that I could do. A career in art was unattainable. No one ever said that it was impossible, but the feeling was there. I knew there were people who worked as artists and designers, but they were not like me, they were other people. In my junior year, my art teacher pointed out that I had been in his class for three years and asked me what I was going to do with my life. I stuttered out some kind of incomprehensible response involving old buildings. We talked about that for a while, then looked into schools that had programs in historical restoration. Later, I decided that I would much rather make new things. First, I thought that I was going to make buildings. But buildings, after all, have things inside of them. They must have furniture, and without good furniture, no one would appreciate the building from the inside. Without good furniture, the building is just a building; no one can inhabit it and make it into more than just a building. When it becomes something more, it becomes a part of the fabric of our lives, and that is everything to me.
I want to make pretty things. I want to allow people to live with furniture that make their lives easier and more beautiful. But there's more to it than that. I want to create things that work, to design furniture that is effective and attractive without being inaccessible to people. The ability to try and experiment with new things is an important part of my art. I tend to struggle with proportion, but I'm working on making that better. I see this as a challenge that I just need to work to overcome.
My interests other than art are about current events, books, and service to others. I need to know what's going on in the world and I like to be able to intelligently discuss things that are happening in the world. Over time, it seems as though political events have huge effects on the art of the age, and it's very interesting to see correlations between the two. Reading has been a part of my life for as long as art has, and I love the way books can take me out of my normal life and allow me to be a part of something else, to experience a life that I would never reach normally. In the spirit of telling stories that need to be told, I've written a novel every November for the past four years. This is a part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which embraces the idea of being creative without being self-conscious and just making things. My novels aren't good, but that's not the point. The point is to step outside of your box and do something that is crazy and new and fun. I also volunteer at a camp every summer. I find this to be very valuable and humbling. I'm a counselor who is supposed to be teaching campers about life, but I find that they often teach me more than I could ever teach them.
Everyone who makes things has inspired me to become an artist. By making something, a person can add to the material history that we as humans build. That can be your life's work, making things, and each of those things becomes a part of our collective past. To build the future, we draw things from our collective past, and that gives us an element of the cultural future. It's important, and anyone who creates makes a little part of our future.
Most of the art and culture absorption in my life happens on line. I read blogs about furniture and design. Because these are constantly changing, it's much easier to read blogs and see what people from all over the world think about design and trends than it is to try and find current books and magazines that cover the same things. One of my favorite bloggers is Anna Dorfman from Door Sixteen, who blogs about design, mostly pertaining to book covers and furniture. Without the Internet, my view of art would be limited to the things I see in my daily life and the things I can get from more traditional media. Things change fast, but those changes don't always reach my life immediately. The Internet allows these changes to reach me instantly.
While I attend THIS SCHOOL, I hope to gain the skills necessary to succeed in the furniture business while expanding my knowledge of art. I want to improve my abilities so that I feel comfortable calling myself an artist and feel confident about my work. I've been working towards this goal by taking art classes outside of school and practicing my skills. I want to be someone who adds to that vital material history of our culture.

Fiction Friday?

It's Friday as long as I haven't gone to sleep, right? On with the story. This is part one. Part two will be coming at a later date.

Kill me, or something else will. We're running. We might be running to smewhere. An outsider might think that we're running for a good reason, because we want to. They're lucky. I wish we were running to something or from something. We're just running, running so we don't do something worse. Running so we don't just kill each other.

I'm fine with that. I've worn huge holes through my shoes, and then I took them off and threw them into the ditch. We had all done that at one point or another. We had started out mostly presentable, somewhat dressed up. Now we were barefoot and dirty, in torn up clothes. We were the only onew who were left, as far as we knew.
It was okay. There was nothing to be sad about, not really. You were gone, but you had been going for a long time before it happened. We're all going, in a way. It just tore you away, like ripping off a band-aid.

It didn't matter though. I was done dealing with it. We hat all finished dealing with it for what felt like weeks. We didn't really know. .

I don't know when time stopped mattering to us. Probably around the time when dead bodies stopped shocking us, but hey, who really cares? I dont'.

None of us really talk any more. I have a theory about people, and that theory states that there are two ways in which people can become emotionally close. The first is spending a lot of time together. People don't do that. It takes too much effort and we don't know how. We've lost that ability, as a culture. Bits of past get forgotten like that. It's not like it was that important anyway.

The second way, that's what we all have now. It's growing close through hardships, strangers who have this weird new kind of relationship. We don't know what to call it, we don't know what to think about it. It's very foreign to me, but it's still a part of me.

We set up camp at the first sutiable spot we can find after the sun has gone down. We find wood, set up our tents (breaking into that outdoors store really was a fantastic idea, since it also yeilded some freeze-dried food. We were saving it for later, when everything in the fields and grocery stores was gone) start some firse, find some water and boil it. We had decided that, since we don't know what happened, really, we were going to boil all the water we drank. We weren't idiots though. We knew that there was probably nuclear contamination in us, in our food, in our water. We would all die of cancer. It kind of sucked, knowing that even if we lived through all this crap, we'd still die from it.

It had occoured to me that one day, we would run out of stuff. There wasn't food growing anymore, and we would run out, eventually.

Do you remember?

Do we all remember my birthday? Yeah, we do. And do we remember that song that I couldn't remember the name of?
Found it!



Good to know I'm working on getting into college, right? But really, you know that I'm burning CDs of A Very Potter Musical and Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog. And quite possibly some Glee music and Mike Lombardo and everything else that I dont' have on CD. Because A) I am living in the early years of the 2000's and I'm fine with that and B) I don't have a MP3 hookup in my car.
My brother just said that all the music I listen to is outdated. Ouch.
Um...I want to make a movie. And I want it to be about supervillians. Is that dumb*? I will be doing Screnzy now (even though I will be in France (!!!!!) for a portion of the month) because I need ridiculous challenges to keep me sane.
I got 50 seconds on the flex arm hang in gym today. That's an A+. I just thought you'd like to know. This will be the only fitness test that I won't be going for the improvement score on.
We will (hopefully) be having a Fiction Friday tomorrow. Just thought you might like to know.
I need to get my lifegaurding certification. Stat.
*Don't answer that.

This is your life

Yeah, it's cliche.
You get a cookie if you know where that's from.
The last three days have been...well...directionless? Yeah. I've been...reading copious amounts of Glee fanfiction*? I typed up a little of the novel. I read like ten pages of the book I'm reading for IR. I've started a new short story. I went to youth group. I've gotten some ideas for my Screnzy. I've figured some people out. I created something of a college essay and got edits on it (thank you so much, Lemonlime!). I read a little bit of Madame Bovary**.

IN THREE EFFING DAYS.
THAT IS PATHETIC.

Okay, I think we've all gotten our capslock out for the moment.
I think this feeling, this loss of motivation (under normal conditions, I lack motivation. This is worse than normal) is due to things being done. NaNoWriMo is done. Harry Potter excitedness is done. Thanksgiving is done. Joey and I are done. Even the stupid charcoal chess drawing is done. Class is going to be done on Wednesday.
I need to get on a schedule or something. This is worrying. I have too much free time, and the vast majority of it is being spent...well...watching youtube and singing songs from musicals and Disney movies. Not to say that's a waste of time...but...I should be doing other stuff.
Like cultivating my awesomance. It's like romance, but totally platonic and involving so much more shipping...and giggling like a fourteen year-old girl.
I sometimes think that I was frozen as a fourteen year-old girl. I haven't changed that much, I really haven't. That's a little worrying.

*Reading fanfiction for TV shows is way way way different from reading book fanfiction. Like, things happen faster. There aren't any novel-length Glee fanfics. And there isn't the question of style - a big thing in my mind concerning Harry Potter fanfiction is that it sounds enough like Jo, which isn't an issue with TV.
**I like Madame Bovary a lot. It's like...pretty language without being like "Where is mah symbolizmz?" or "Don't u see teh hidden MEANINGZZZZ?" which a lot of books are screaming at me. With excessive Zs.

There's a novel? Forrealz?

It occours to me that I have a novel ("Because I have a voice!" from The King's Speech trailer, which I have not seen the movie for because it is only showing in New York, Toronto, and L.A.) and since I have said novel, I can give you quotations. Yay quotations.

“Well, it's sort of like an apology. In fact, I think you deserve a formal apology. So here it is; I'm sorry. I'm really sorry that I thought and talked like I knew everything about your life, because I totally didn't. I'm sorry.” I looked into her eyes, which were pointedly looking away from me “Will you accept my apology?”
“I would.” My hopes flew, until I realized quite what that could mean. “Except for one thing.”
“And what is that one thing?”
“The fact that you said it in the first place. The fact that you said it in the first place tells me one thing, and that is that you think you really do understand me. You don't. I need to talk to someone, and you're here, and I'm going to talk. I hope you're okay with that. I hope you don't read more into it than it's meant as, because all I need is a friend. You're that friend.”
I nodded. “Okay then. I'm here to listen.”
“Just listening.”
“Yeah...yeah, just listening.”
“And not judging.”
“No judging will be happening.”
“And all psychoanalysis will occur solely inside your own head.”
“But it's helpful, it really is. I'm just trying to help.”
She glared at me.
“Okay then, I get it. No psychoanalysis. Got it. That's fine.” She could be a little scary sometimes.
“Here it goes.” She nodded, closed her eyes, and started talking.