Ahh! Books!

I was looking through the archives today and I realized that it's been almost a year since I posted the list of the books I like. How sad is that?
Last year's picks were Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The View From Saturday, My Sister's Keeper, Anne Frank, and Thirteen Little Blue Envelopes.
Harry Potter, The View From Saturday, and Anne Frank are still on the list. I don't see them ever coming off the list, honestly. I love those books, I can read them again and again and never get bored. New for this year are Paper Towns and Catcher in the Rye.
I read Paper Towns in October and Catcher in August and November. I was just wondering what happened to the first half of the year, reading wise, and then I realized. Jodi Picoult stole it. I really like her books, my current favourite is probably The Pact. It's at least in the top 20, along with Nineteen Minutes. Another good book that I read this year was The Bell Jar. I think it belongs in the top ten. I'm reading Conversations With God and The Secret Life of Octavian Nothing right now. They're interesting. Conversations With God deserves another three posts.
Remember when I wanted to read like, 75 books this year? I don't know if I made it or not. I've totally lost track of the books I've read, and I don't really care. I guess it matters more what books than how many. Is realizing this some sign of personal growth? It better be.
The books that I want to read next year fall into the Deep category. Deep and old.
The books I really should read: The Great Gatsby, Catch-22, Lord of the Flies, The Koran (at least some portion of it), and As You Wish.
Maybe we should call this deepish and oldish. Can the oldness in The Koran compensate for the newness of As You Wish? If you know of any books that I should read, put them in the comments. I just might read them. Wouldn't that make you feel so influential and special and shiny and wonderful? Yes. Yes it should.

I love quotes.

With the kind of obsession usually reserved for Apartment Therapy.
Some of these have been reposted. You are not losing you mind. It is okay. Several of these are last words. I think they're cool, in a die the way you lived sort of way.

To hold a pen is to be at war. -Voltaire

I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment." -Kurt Vonnegut

So it goes. –Kurt Vonnegut

Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one. –Quentin

It's very beautiful over there.-Thomas Edison

Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man. - Che Guevara

You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everyone dances with the Grim Reaper. - Robert Alton Harris

They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong. - Sylvia Plath

We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel —”Yes, that’s the way it is or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought. – John Steinbeck

I don't know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions. - J. D. Salinger

My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness. - Dali Lama

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH- George Orwell

How inconvenient! Always before it had been like snuffing a candle. The police went first and adhesive-taped the victim's mouth and bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars, so when you arrived you found an empty house. You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only things! And since things really couldn't be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don't scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream and cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You were simply cleaning up. Janitorial work, essentially. Everything to its proper place. Quick with the kerosene! Who's got a match! - Ray Bradbury

The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.-Erich Maria Remarque

I'm just scared of ghosts, and home is full of them.-Alaska Young

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.-Kurt Vonnegut

We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. 'Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever.-Philip Pullman

Religion is not "doctrinal knowledge," but wisdom born of personal experience. - Martin Luther

The Tip of the Iceberg

Everyone knows about my Apartment Therapy obsession, right? Here are just a few things that I thought were awesome. More than average awesome. New heights of awesome.I love these stairs. Same black floors look, only so glossy. So, so glossy.Is it weird that the first thing I thought when I saw these stairs was "That's the same wallpaper as in Door Sixteen's bathroom"?I love these stairs. I love these stairs so much.This is sort of the same concept as the stairs above, only more realistic. This is a pretty good floating shelf thing. Me like.Same room, different view.I wish I had that many books. And I lived there.We all know how amazing the Seattle Public Library is, right? That is a library. Love.We're not going to discuss how giddy I was when I saw that faucet. Isn't is so awesome?
And this room. It's calm and empty and blue. I like calm and empty and blue quite a bit.

Telling the truth

I feel like it's time to tell everyone something that I've been thinking about for a while. It has to do with politics, it has to do with morals, it has to do with religion.
I'm pro-life.
Let's think about it. I'm against the war, against capital punnishment, for healthcare for everyone, and vegetarian.
I'm also a Christian.
It seems like there is a certian brand of Christian, a certian brand of pro-life that has decided that they should be the ones representing all of us. They seem to think that Christians should have a certian set of political beliefs, ones that I don't share with them.
Labels sure are fun.
I guess I'm pro-choice too. Pro-choice in the way that I don't think that anyone's beliefs should influence anyone else's actions unless those actions are affecting them.
Basically, do your own thing. My religion shouldn't have anything to do with it.

Memorable

Everyone wants to be remembered. It's the new popular, the new famous. Memoirs are some weird form of that, like we write something that was significant to us because we have some crazy belief that someone else may care what was significant to us. It may get remembered, it may not. The important part is not being remembered, you're dead and you don't care. The important part is feeling like you will. In the end, we're just bugs in amber.
So I'm posting it. I'm posting my memoir that feels to personal to read to the class. This is one of those things that seems like you can do it until you're just about to. That's the point when you say that you can't and you freak out and you run away.
My cousin Steven had downs syndrome. When you know someone with a mental disability like that, it changes the things you value. It’s not a sudden thing, more of a gradual realization that the things you once held at an utmost importance don’t really matter. Steven died when he was three, when I was in fifth grade. I sometimes wonder if he would have affected me differently if I had been older, if he had lived longer. I guess it’s impossible to ever figure out exactly how I would have changed. I know that it made me the person I am today and that’s probably a good thing. Since he died so young, I think it gave me a better appreciation of my own life and a better understanding of the fact that I will die someday, and I’m okay with that. When I think about all of it, his affects on me didn’t have anything to do with him. It had more to do with me and the fact that I had never thought about that kind of thing, dying, before. I didn’t need him to die, I needed anyone to die, just enough to wake me up. It made me the person I am. It made me able to tell people that they’re going to die and not make it feel weird for me. The thing that really makes you grow up is accepting your eventual demise, and it seems like I’ve accepted that earlier in life than some people.
I remember when I heard that Steven had a stroke. It was Monday, and I was staying home sick, standing in the short hallway between my bedroom and the family room when my dad, who was sitting at his computer, working, said that he had a stroke. My mom thought it was Steven, one of my uncle’s brothers, but my dad said it was my cousin. That night was a blur, I don’t think that any of us really remember what we did. The next day I went to school and the school physiologist talked to me. I’m not quite sure why, it didn’t really help me deal with things, but she asked me about my cousins. Over the next few days, we would occasionally hear something about his condition. They were drilling holes in his head, it was the hole in his heart that caused it, they’re taking him off life support. It happened too fast to realize. I didn’t know what to feel when he finally died. It was sad, but it was different from anyone else who had died. I was angry at something, I don’t know what or why. It was weird, then next few days. The funeral was on Good Friday, sort of ironic. I don’t think anyone appreciated the irony. I don’t really remember much about the funeral. I remember playing BS with all my cousins. Looking back, that probably helped more than anything else. It got my mind off of everything, at least.
The thing that was so bad about Steven dying was that he was young. If you can avoid it, never go to a funeral for anyone under the age of sixty. They’re so much worse than old people funerals. Old people are allowed to die, and some of them are freakishly morbid because they and everyone around them has accepted the fact that they will die one day. No one expects kids to die, it’s just not allowed.
The thing that I learned from this, the thing I’ve learned from everything in my live, was that the only experiences that really shape us into who we are now are the really tragic ones. No one learns anything from being happy. You learn things from having bad things happen to you. You learn how to deal with it, you learn how to move on. That’s one of the most important things you can learn, and I’m thankful I learned it when I did.

These are the moments

That just hit you.
I went to the DIA today. Apart from causing me to miss the majority of the school day, this means that I saw a lot of paintings today. I've blogged about my love for the dia before, and this exhibit didn't change anything about that. Part of the reason that art is art is the way that it impacts you and the response it ilicits. I'm not usually a person who feels connected. Connected to paintings and everything else, it just doesn't happen much. There was this painting, Self Portrait with Hat and Coat, that I really liked.
It's not really that exciting, but the combonation of that and Conversations With God, and just the stuff I've been thinking about lately, it sort of made me realize something. I want my writing to feel like that painting. That painting looks like everyone has felt at one point or another. If you peel back the outside, I think more people feel like that than would care to admit. If I can capture that, I'm good.
Also, this is embarassing

Responsibility

Responsibility is one of those things that make me curious. Where do you draw the line between letting people do their own thing and butting in because you feel like you should be responsible. If someone was going to kill themselves, are you supposed to tell someone? Because this sounds like I'm going to do something I shouldn't, I'm going to remind you that this was inspired by a story that we read in English. Johnny Bear, by Steinbeck. What if it doesn't seem like a big deal or anything that would turn into a big deal later? If you see someone shoplift, are you supposed to tell the people who work at the store? How much duty does the government have to protect us before they turn into big brother? Is it ever okay to steal things? What would happen if you never talked to anyone? Would people think you're crazy? Is there anything wrong with being crazy?
These are the exciting things that keep me up at night.

When has it gone too far?

Man killed at Walmart
What's Christmas about? Something like this happens every year, someone gets killed over a TV or a Wii or a DVD player. How many people have to die before we really get it?
Why is it so hard to stop with all the useless foreign made crap? When will we, as humans, realize that experiences always seem to mean more than the crap? It's just ridiculous that, according to the demonstrated morals we see here, getting a good deal is more important than someone's life. How can that be justified? I understand that the people who were in the crowd would be crushed if they tried to stop, because people were pushing from behind them, but still. This isn't the first time someone's died for crap.
An interesting website

Another post about NaNoWriMo

Yet again. I feel like there was just something missing from the OMG I WON post.
NaNoWriMo taught me things that I could've never learned in school. The primary goal of NaNo is just to get words down, no matter how bad they are. There's really now way I would have learned that I should be able to write 2000 words in an hour and a half without NaNo. This will come in very usefull in life at some point. I'm not quite sure when, but I know it will. Write or Die is an invaluable tool when it comes to writing fast.
The biggest thing that I got out of NaNo was a huge sense of accomplishment that I haven't had in a long time. I feel like that novel represents something that I've been wanting for a long time, probably since I was in eighth grade. It means that my dreams, they have a chance. This is, in a way, the beginning of everything I want. It changes your future. Not in the same sense that something huge and crazy does, it's more of a worldview sort of thing.
It's amazing.From Post Secret, clearly.

Fine

I was tagged. 7 random, unknown things.

1.I was getting a B- in Euro (and I was ridiculously excited about that), but the grades were miscalculated.
2.I think I'm more proud of NaNoWriMo than anything I've done in Hi! School so far.
3.I believe that English teachers are the only human beings capable of making a book that I love (The Giver) boring. Particularly my 8th grade English teacher.
4.I don't really hang out with my friends outside of school. Which sucks.
5.I'm a hypocrite.
6.I want to be a minister, but I know I would be a really bad one. If I could afford to go to college for a field I would never work in, I would go to seminary.
7.I have an obsession with furniture design. You already knew that though. Well... let's think. I have a Pandora radio addiction, but you knew that too. Huh. I like cars? That's obvious. I want to move to a big city. That's good. I don't think I've talked about that before on the blog, only that I can't live in this town my whole life. I want to move to the city.

I'm not going to tag anyone. Deal with it.