It's list time.

1.I'm on the PostSecret chat, and...er, well...I have a sort of strange fascination with the entire addiction and recovery forum. Is it just me, or do all the SI people want to recover, and the ED people are kind of mixed on recovery? Why is that? I would have thought that the ED people would be more pro-recovery than the SI people, because I've heard people other places be all like "SI is just how we deal with things, it's all good." but ED people generally are like "Yeah, it's bad, but...".
2.Drawing. Pukey. It was like...uber bad today. Maybe it's because I was sitting down and drawing on little paper? That's a good excuse, I think.
3.Camp. I'm going to camp next week. I'm going to end up with so many freeking mosquito bites. Right now, my legs are horrible looking, but it's too freeking warm out to wear pants*, so I went with shorts. And...someone asked me if I SI. No, but people used to comment on my legs way more. Maybe the scars are fading?
4.Stagflation. WTF does this mean? We learned about it in APUSH, but it didn't make any sense then either.
5.The concept of getting old and getting a job and getting married and having kids and moving back to this town is making me feel a little pukey right now. More than usual.
6.Earlier, I was all like "Imma draw something from a picture, but Imma make it look all Burtonesque!" and I looked on my computer for pictures and then I was like "Why are there almost as many pictures of Johnny Depp on here as there are of Alan Rickman?" and then the other voice in my head was all like "Why do you have any pictures of them at all?" and then the other voice in my head was likeand then one of the other voices was like "Yeah. Makes perfect sense now. Cheekbones."
And then that little voice that always hangs out in my head was like "Why does Tim Burton hang out with people who have good cheekbones when he, himself has rather unremarkable cheekbones?
7.Sometimes I think my life would be more awesome if I was an animator for Disney.
8.I need to fix my nails. You were curious, I could tell.
9. I think I'm going to go sculpt things. That's what normal people do at 1:40 in the morning, right? After they finish writing their blog posts, that is.
10. Alliterative August. It is so happening, bitches. I'm pumped.
11.Does studying literature make you a better writer? I'm not...that...sure. I mean, reading does, but does it have to be school stuff? I'm still deciding.
12.My bedroom wall is growing. In a good way, I think. I added a weird typographic experiment, another asofterworld comic, and a bunch of advertisments from SCAD.
13.One day I am going to move out of my parent's house and leave this wall behind. And likely several books.
14.I don't even have that many books! I never buy books! Why do they take up so much space?
15.It's because I keep my Euro binder on the shelf so that I can reference it in conversation when nessecary, I know it is.
16.I'm getting heroin-user-under-eye-shadows again. Possibly because I stay up late and blog. It's all for you, readers. It's all for you.
*this is one of the few times when "pants" means, you know, actual pants. Usually it means anything that I put on the lower half of my body that isn't underwear, socks, or shoes.

Just so you know

I just finished Guns, Germs, and Steel. This is an accomplishment, but realize that when I say that I finished it, I mean I got to the epilogue. Harry Potter taught me that nothing good can come from reading past the end of the book. I mean, Hermione/Ron? No. That's just wrong. Nothing good can come from that ship. And who thought that Tom Felton should have a beard in the film version? That was a really bad choice. He's hot. With that beard, he just looks gross. And Harry, give your children better names. The epilogue starts on page 403, but the book ends on page 518, so it's more like I finished the book, sans prologue and epilogue.
You know what this connects to? The other book I recently finished, Empire Falls. It was kind of dumb, mostly because nothing happens in the first 400 pages. If you're going to write that much backstory, call it a prologue so I know to skip over it. And also, a school shooting is taking the easy way out. Really? That was pathetic. It was just like "So, these people live in this small town and everything happens at this diner and they're going to merge with this bar so they can sell alcohol and there's this kid who's kind of messed up and btw, he dumped his grandma's body in garbage and then he shot up his art class (no one ever shoots up their art class. They go to the cafeteria and shoot up the jocks. Really, I learned this shit from wikipedia, where I learn everything else) and then our favourite main characters get the fuck out of Maine."
I can explain the plot of every book I've ever read in long, drawn out sentences.
The Art of Keeping Cool, which I read thrice before I realized that I'd read it before? WWII, kid's dad is in the army, he moves in with his grandparents and spends a lot of time with his cousin, finds out something that's not that exciting of a secret and kinda hates his grandpa for it, and his mom leaves stuff out of his dad's letters when she reads them to him and his sister.
Dude, it's been like four years since I read that book.
Anna Karenina, which is like 800 pages long? I'm Anna Karenina and I'm Russian, I went to hang out with my brother and make sure his wife doesn't leave him and while I was doing so, I met this other guy, Vronsky, who just happens to have the same first name as my husband and then later on, I move in with him and have a kid with him, and then way later, I throw myself in front of a train.
Catcher in the Rye, which every tenth grader in the universe is required to read? I'm Holden and I'm pretty angsty and I just got kicked out of my fancy pants prep school, and I'm going to New York and I'm wearing this red had and asking some questions about ducks because I'm the duck and what happens to me in the winter when the pond freezes over?
You're welcome for that bit of literary education that I just gave you, free of charge. I accept gummy worms as your thanks to me.
Also, if I eat a lot of gummy worms, couldn't it be said that I eat a diet of worms? Get it? Get it? Every time I think of that, I laugh my head off. It's my facebook status right now.
I might be a dork.
In other news, me wanting to go to church alone today turned into a three hour expedition to my grandparent's house. Sometimes, I get angry at my mother. I realize that I should never tell her where I'm going. How long 'till I move out again? Less than a year? Good.

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.