dimension 29

it's my blogiversary...

2006-04-18T00:10:00.000-04:00

A year ago today I wrote my first blog post.

Since then I've kind of flailed around with this blog, experimented with the content, the template, etc. etc. etc. I've seen my average number of comments per post rise and fall and rise and fall.

Here's what I'm doing: I'm moving to a new site. Maybe it's silly of me but it seems like this has sort of been a practice blog and now that I have a better handle on what I'm doing I should make a fresh start. So from now on, you can find me at http://laughtrack29.blogspot.com. Update your links and all that if you will. I'll leave this site up at least for the time being but there will be no further posts.

A big thanks to all of my blog-friends (well, to my approximately three blog-friends) and I hope you'll follow me to my new address!

100 things about me

2006-04-14T20:21:00.000-04:00

I have no idea what to put as the number one thing about me. I mean, that's pretty defining, isn't it? Incidentally the items that follow are in no particular order.
I do not handle stress at all well.
I prefer dark chocolate.
I was in love once.
I am neurotic about organizing the files on my computer; for example, papers for school are arranged into folders by class, and further by semester, with the file names matching their titles, etc. etc. etc.
I rarely ever drank coffee before I started college. Now I'm an addict.
I can say "bless you" (like what you say when someone sneezed) in Arabic.
When I'm nervous, I have a variety of odd ticks like pushing my glasses up my nose and constantly adjusting my watch.
I play the trombone. Quite well, actually, if I say so myself.
I am aware that hardly anyone reads this blog and yet I keep it up anyway.
My two favorite-ever novels are The Beekeeper's Apprentice and Life of Pi, both of which are sitting on my desk next to me as I write this.
My favorite play is Inherit the Wind, and one of the people who co-wrote it graduated from my school.
I am a Trekkie.
I never used to get fangirlish about movie stars, but I'm in loooooooove with Ewan McGregor.
I have a half-sister and a half-brother who are much older than me (sixteen and eighteen years older, respectively, as I recall).
I was one of those girls who made friendship bracelets out of embroidery floss, but I eventually moved on from that to making actually jewelry with beads and beading wire and clasps and whatnot, and now I'm glad I did because I have the ability to repair my own jewelry when clasps and stuff break.
I was also one of those girls who drew pictures of horses in elementary school.
And I used to be really into different alphabets and stuff -- Egyptian hieroglyphics, Elvish runes, Shavian, I tried my hand at all of them at some point or another.
The most times I've ever gone to a single movie when it was in theaters is three. It was Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
I was in second grade when I decided I wanted to be a writer. I'd written a mystery that year about a family of rabbits whose carrots were stolen by a fox, and it made it into the school district's literary journal.
I have an extremely eclectic music collection. Classical, jazz, oldies, pop, movie soundtracks, Harry Potter fan music (a.k.a. "wizard rock")... yeah.
My fingers are double-jointed; I can bend them back about ninety degrees.
I am utterly incapable of touching my tongue to my nose. I have a really short tongue, I guess.
I don't like tomatoes.
I hate spending money. I got this from my parents, who are very cheap.
I don't wear make-up. Hardly ever. The last time I wore make-up was for my senior prom.
My favorite colors are blue and purple.
I'm more of a cat person than a dog person.
I used to speak German pretty fluently, but since I stopped actually taking German classes I've gotten extremely rusty.
I went to see John Kerry during the 2004 presidential election.
I have never owned a cell phone.
I have four pairs of earrings and two pairs of socks with frogs on them.
I got red highlights in my hair a couple times in high school, but for the most part I pretty much leave my hair alone. Wash it, dry it, put it up if it looks crappy down, and get it trimmed whenever it starts getting ratty.
I don't really like to swim.
I know the constellations (you know, the stars, in the sky) pretty well, but not as well as I used to.
I'm not religious.
I am very well traveled, especially for someone my age.
When people give me backrubs it tickles. I squirm around and giggle.
My high school graduating class voted me "Most Likely to Become a Politician."
My first car was a silver Ford Taurus. I think the year was... '94? I have no head for such things. It used to be my dad's.
I used to think it was immoral to burn CDs because it's, you know, illegal. I'm not that naive anymore. I burn CDs all the time.
I don't think drinking is immoral, either; I don't even think underage drinking is necessarily immoral. But I'm not a drinker myself.
I love ice cream. And cheesecake, though I didn't use to. And chocolate cake.
I like coconut, and mushrooms, two thing that many people don't like.
I've eaten sushi, but (as of this writing) only the sushi they have here on campus, and I have no idea how authentic it is.
I was definitely a PBS kid. I watched all those PBS kids shows. (Though there were some different ones then than now. What happened to Kratt's Kreatures? I can seriously trace my interest in zoology right back to watching that show when I was six or so.)
I have trouble working in a group if I'm not in charge. Usually. If I'm intimidated by other people in the group, then it just freaks me out, like when I had to lead a trombone sectional and my section included several music majors.
If I were to ever get a flat tire while driving by myself, I would really be screwed. I couldn't change a tire to save my life.
I can be very insecure about my friends. I always hate it when my friends do anything fun without me. I feel like I'm being left out of the loop or something.
For an English project in my senior year of high school, we had to pick the four adjectives we felt best described ourselves. Mine were intelligent, creative, contemplative, and I forget what else. Out of curiosity I asked my best friend what adjective she would use to describe me, and all she could come up with was "musical," which I found rather irritating.
People confided secrets in me surprisingly often in high school, and I didn't handle it well. Probably a good thing that no one at college has shown this tendency.
I had braces, but only on the bottom.
My only piercings are a single hole in each ear.
I secretly think it would be cool to get my nose pierced. But I'm too chicken.
I like reading the ends of books before I actually get to the end. I get more out of reading a novel if I know where the plot is heading. (For the same reason I like reading really good novels for the second time even more than the first.) My best friend thinks this is heresy.
I cried when Dumbledore died in the sixth Harry Potter book, but not when my grandmother died.
I can't decide whether or not I like the fact that I grew up in a small town in Ohio. It was cool to grow up somewhere where everyone knew everyone else, but on the other hand it was a pretty narrow-minded little place.
I consider myself a feminist.
I spent three and a half weeks in Germany without my parents when I was sixteen and I didn't try beer once.
I think Katharine Hepburn is the greatest actress ever.
I keep a paper-and-ink journal in addition to my blog, but I don't write in it nearly as much as I should.
I finally made the switch from old-school pencils to mechanical pencils when I started college.
My favorite word is "defenestration."
My favorite city I have been to is San Francisco, probably closely followed by Berlin and Munich.
I love Walt Whitman's poetry.
The only computer game I own is The Sims 2.
I've never taken piano lessons, but I borrowed a friend's piano books and taught myself the basics.
I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with 100 things about myself.
When I was little I thought Karl Marx was one of the Marx brothers.
I'm a browncoat.
I never spend change. I save it up in a jar, and when I have enough I put it in rolls and deposit it in the bank.
I have never once in my life plucked or waxed or otherwise manipulated my eyebrows. It's just not a skill I've ever acquired. Maybe I should ask M to teach me.
I've grown to like doing laundry, but I've never ironed anything by myself.
I can bake some things, but not actually cook.
I've been to all three American coasts (East, West, and Gulf).
The first time I rode in a plane was at Kitty Hawk.
I played with Barbies when I was little, but now I think they are evil and if I ever have a daughter she will NOT be allowed to have Barbies. Barbie clearly suffers from anorexia.
I like dangly earrings, but not really heavy ones, because I'm afraid of getting my lobes all stretched out.
I can tell a red-bellied woodpecker apart from a pileated woodpecker by sound alone. (That one's for Jen...)
I know two people who got perfect 1600s on the SAT test (before they changed the scoring and made it out of 2400).
One of them is the person I was in love with the single aforementioned time that I have ever been in love.
I myself only got a 1450. Stupid math score brought me down.
M got me hooked on Friends, but I can't pick a single favorite character: it's a toss-up between Joey, Chandler, and Phoebe.
I learn the words to songs really quickly. My albums that I own and listen to regularly, I know all the lyrics to all the songs, and I do tend to sing along with them out loud when I play them. My roommates are amused by this. (All my lovin... I will send to you-oo-oooo... All my lovin... darlin i'll be truuuuuue...)
I can also memorize things on the trombone pretty easily. I can still play all of the solo I did last year from memory, and most of the one from the year before that.
My best friend and I have known each other since first grade. Now we're going to college together, which is pretty cool.
My parents don't know I have a blog. Well, actually, my mom might suspect but she's discrete about such things, thankfully.
I live in an all women's dorm.
The quotes on my Facebook profile consist mostly of things I myself have said, because strange things come out of my mouth sometimes, such as "So if God didn't want us to make obscene gestures we wouldn't have been born with middle fingers?" and "I need to marry a former Pakistani cricket star so I can divorce him and date Hugh Grant."
I have scoliosis - not bad enough to have ever needed a brace, but I do have it. (It means my spine is kind of curvy. You can't really tell unless you run your hand across my back, though.)
When I was in sixth grade I had pneumonia and missed two weeks of school.
Never once, all through middle school and high school, was I ever marked tardy for a single class.
My very first "real" job was at a McDonald's; before that I'd gotten paid for giving trombone lessons and for playing trombone at a church, though.
I sometimes filch things like staplers and paper from my roommates.
I generally get along with people very well. There are a few people who extremely get on my nerves, but they tend to get on everyone else's nerves, too.
I took a yoga class a couple years ago and loved it, and I wish I had time to take yoga now.
I used to be afraid of thunderstorms, but now I think they're really cool.
The movie Shawshank Redemption was filmed in the area around my hometown, as were a few scenes from Air Force One.
I'm trying to think of something really definitive for number 100.
Um... I hate sauerkraut. (Wow, Rebecca, really definitive.)

Now that I've finally finished this extremely narcissistic list, I'm off to do some reading.

harry potter internet finds

2006-04-14T09:45:00.000-04:00

Five things Harry Potter fans might be amused by when they're bored and surfing the Internet...

accioBRAIN! A website featuring fan art by someone who styles herself Makani. Some of her stuff is really cute, so you should definitely go browse through the pictures. I had the one of Dumbledore and Fawkes as my computer wallpaper for a while.
Harry and the Potters. Taking filk (fan music) to a whole new level, these guys have helped create a whole sub-genre of indie music called "wizard rock" - that is, rock music (or something like it) based on the Harry Potter books. A friend of mine introduced me to their awesomeness and burned me copies of their albums. How can you beat lyrics like "A three-headed dog! A three-headed dog! Oh my God, a three-headed dog!"
Wizard People, Dear Reader. Intended as narration to be played with the movie version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, these recordings are also pretty entertaining just to listen to as an audio book. It's like a weird R-rated parody, and it's actually pretty clever at some points.
The Harry Potter Lexicon. There are a number of well-known fansites out there, such as Mugglenet and the Leaky Cauldron, that include news, discussion forums, and whatnot, but the Lexicon is unique in that it's essentially an encyclopedia of the entire Potterverse. What are the ingredients in a boil-curing potion? What was Sirius Black's paternal grandfather's name? This is the place to find out.
J.K. Rowling's Official Site. Finally, this is one is not run by fans, but by J.K. Rowling herself. A beautifully designed site with lots of trivia and Easter eggs that, if you're so inclined, will keep you occupied for hours.

Now that I have proved my eternal geekiness by giving you this peek into my list of Internet bookmarks, I'm off to class. If anyone actually takes a peek at these links then let me know what you think.

could this be the world's greatest party, or what?

2006-04-12T14:45:00.000-04:00

My parents are going to be in Arizona this weekend, so I can't go home for Easter (well, I could, but it would be pointless because my family wouldn't be there). I explained this to my roommate M when she asked me what I was doing this weekend, and we ended up plotting to do something fun ourselves to celebrate.

My roommate is Buddhist, not Christian, but apparently the Sri Lankan new year is Friday. Since our other good friend, S, is Muslim, I wondered out loud if there were an Muslim holidays coming up... and it turns out that yesterday was the prophet Mohammed's birthday. Now, picture a little lightbulb blinking on over my head! Yes, I said! That's it! We'll have an Easter/Sri Lankan New Year/Happy Birthday Mohammed party!

At first M looked at me like I was crazy, but then she started warming up to the idea. However, when I mentioned it to S this morning, she seemed perplexed.

S: I don't know if it's right to have a party for Mohammed's birthday, because actually he died on the same day.
Me: Oh. Crap. Well, could we make it a "We're Sorry That Mohammed's Dead" party?
S: ...
Me: Okay, maybe not then.

She wasn't really offended, just a little freaked out. Anyway, we probably won't do anything to celebrate except what we always do - sit around our dorm room, doing homework and watching old Friends episodes and eating junk food. But ya gotta admit. That would have been one cool party.

bookshelves

2006-04-09T11:45:00.000-04:00

You can learn a lot about someone from their books. For example, scattered around my room you will find textbooks on calculus, zoology, and music history, and the Charles Dickens novels that are required for my English class this semester, but there's also a smattering of personal books I don't have just because I need them for classes - a total of three bird books including Peterson's Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America; two of my all-time favorite novels, The Beekeeper's Apprentice and Life of Pi; Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, which I just finished reading; and Eats, Shoots and Leaves, an enormously entertaining book about punctuation - yes, punctuation.

Yesterday I went to my advisor/zoology professor's house for the third time, to do bird banding for our tutorial, and I was fascinated by his bookshelves. A biography of Charles Darwin, The Ring of the Nibelungs, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends shared a single shelf. In another room one can find the complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy mixed in with books about techniques for censusing bird populations. If I didn't already know Dr. Burtt, a glimpse at his books would have been enough to make me want to meet him.

This could be extended to music collections and all sorts of things... but my roommate M is calling me to come watch Friends with her, so I'll stop now.

muggle studies

2006-04-07T20:59:00.000-04:00

A lot of potential topics for a post have been chasing around in my head lately; here's what I've finally decided to ramble about.

I've mentioned before that my roommate is from Sri Lanka and another of my good friends here is from Pakistan. (I'll call them M and S, respectively, just to be on the safe side.) They're literally from about as far away from Ohio as it's possible to be without leaving the planet, so obviously there's a pretty wide cultural divide and I'd be lying if I said there were never any awkward moments between us. Still, we get along fabulously most of the time, and you know what our biggest common ground is?

Harry Potter.

Yep, M and S are both big Harry Potter fans, and it's interesting because British culture seems to lie midway in between South Asian culture and American culture. They both went to British-style schools, and whenever they talk about prefects and head girls and houses I crack up because it sounds just like Harry Potter and they think I'm weird because it's just normal to them. On the other hand, the first time we had a big snowstorm they both were excited because it was "just like the snow in the Harry Potter movie." S and I are plotting to do our summer research at the same time so we can both be here when the seventh book comes out. Funness.

S's parents are both dentists. And she's very studious. Guess who I tease her about being just like? She's a Muslim, and she was thinking about taking a class on Islam here because she needed another humanities class and "it would be interesting to study it from the Western point of view..." I just couldn't resist pointing out that she sounded exactly like Hermione taking Muggle Studies. Hee hee hee.

Anyway, it's Friday night and I'm a college student so off to party. Okay, actually I'm going to read Bleak House and watch TV. See ya later.

writing

2006-04-03T18:33:00.000-04:00

After I'd gotten my last couple rejection letters, which seemed partially to have been caused by the fact that my writing simply wasn't suited to the journals I was sending it to (an inexcusable lapse on my part), I got kind of down on my writing for a while. At least, I got down on submitting. I was thinking that maybe I needed to stop submitting my writing for publication for a while, take a break, focus on improving my writing before I send it off to others.

Today the school's new literary magazine, Confiscated, came out. (See the link in the sidebar.) I have both a poem and a short story in it. And... it was pretty cool to see my name in print.

And I sent in another new submission today.

I think what I need to do is be more careful about my submissions - not stop submitting entirely, but focusing on making each piece of writing as good as it can be and then finding just the right market for it. Maybe, eventually, I'll start having some more success.

Wish me luck!

...

Tags: writing submissions

the lazy birder

2006-03-29T09:36:00.000-05:00

Lazy, lazy, lazy.

I've written before about the research project I'm working on this semester, studying the preening behavior of wild house sparrows. Well, I have a confession to make. I'M LAZY.

The other girl working on the project (who, incidentally, I can't stand, but that's another story) goes out to watch the darn sparrows about every day. Me? I'm doing well if I make it out into the field once a week. Part of this is because I'm involved in band and other such time-consuming things that the other girl is not, but still. Bad Rebecca. Bad.

I'm afraid this is all finally going to come to the professor's attention at the end of the semester and he will be most disappointed with me. Crap. I fail at life.

...

Tags: laziness

geek test

2006-03-28T10:37:00.000-05:00

I love to go birdwatching, the only thing I like about Las Vegas is the Star Trek Experience at the Hilton, I own a T-shirt with a picture of Shakespeare on it, and I still only score 36.88363% on the Geek Test? There's something wrong with the world.

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Tags: geekiness

my superpower

2006-03-23T22:21:00.000-05:00

Ellen's post about superpowers got me thinking. I finally figured out what my superhero identity is: I'm Supertypist!

My roommate is applying for a summer job and the application wanted to know her typing speed, so I timed her while she typed for a minute, and she got about fifty words. This made me curious, and since I was bored I had her time me.

Ninety-one words in a minute! Typed flawlessly! Typed without even looking at the keyboard! Woo!

Isn't it funny, the little things that can, at least temporarily, make up feel good about ourselves? The fact that I am a ridiculously fast typist is never really going to matter in my life. I'm not going to be a secretary or anything. And yet, right now I feel like it's cool. Haha! I can type at warp speed!

I feel the same way about my ability to bend my fingers back at a ninety-degree angle (my fingers are double-jointed, apparently). It's these ridiculous, useless little talents that make us unique.

Just call me Fast and Freaky Fingers.

...

Tags: typing speed

imitating jen

2006-03-21T18:51:00.000-05:00

There's a link to this blog on my Facebook profile, and so I never can be sure exactly who might read it.

So I'm taking a page from Jen's book (or blog?) and saying that if you want to read the full contents of what I would like to post here but am not due to its potentially sensitive nature, leave a comment and I may email you.

This non-posted post is entirely happy, I promise.

second-guessing myself, again

2006-03-20T21:18:00.000-05:00

I didn't get into the summer program in Kansas. (Not surprising, since apparently they had 120 applications for 8 positions.) So now I'm applying to summer jobs. I have two possibilities: my first choice would be to work as a teller at the local blank, and my backup is to load boxes onto trucks at this local school supplies distribution place.

I turned in the application to the bank over break. It was pretty lengthy, with sections on my education, employment history, the usual. Now, though, I'm wondering if maybe I should have turned in some sort of resume with it as well? I mean, everything that would be on a resume was already covered by the application forms, and it didn't say anything about including a resume as well, but...? I don't have any experience applying for "real" jobs.

Now I'm working on the application for the other place, which is online. They have a blank to upload a resume if you so desire (which is what got me thinking about resumes in the first place), so I made myself a basic one using a template on my computer, but now I can't seem to get it to upload to the application. So do I just submit the application without it? Or would that be frowned upon -- would it seem like I wasn't really putting any effort into applying?

GAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH.

I have further musings on the publication quest to post at a later date, but this is enough for now.

...

Tags: job applications

back

2006-03-20T09:09:00.000-05:00

Too busy to write a proper post; suffice it to say I'm back and more or less caught up with the various blogs I read. Hello, all.

spring break, here i come!

2006-03-10T09:10:00.000-05:00

I'm leaving with the school band for our spring break tour to Virginia Beach tonight, and I'll be gone with them until Wednesday, and then I get to spend my last four days of break at home (yay!). So probably no posts for this coming week. See you when I get back to school.

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Tags: spring break

dear world...

2006-03-08T22:32:00.000-05:00

Dear world,

I hate you.

Yours,
Rebecca

Wow, that felt good. This is the Gigantic Week of Stress. English project and avian microbiology project and waiting to hear whether or not I got into the summer program in Kansas and packing for band tour. Way too much stress. Gah.

Anyway, I'm working on an interesting piece of required reading for my tutorial on the microbiology of birds: a novel called Cantor's Dilemma. It's a novel written by a scientist, about science research. It reads like a textbook interspersed with wooden dialogue and bits of porn. I present the following excerpt for your consideration:

"Where were you last night, Jerry?" she asked as they were showering together. [...] "I waited up until almost one and then I couldn't stay awake any more."
"I didn't get home until after three. I was in the lab."
"At 3 A.M.? Doing what, for God's sake? Fucking somebody in the stockroom?"
"Don't be crude, Celly. I'm so bushed these days, I'm not up to it."
"You're telling me." She soaped his flaccid penis. "What's really going on with you?"

She soaped his flaccid penis? I HAVE TO READ THIS FOR A RESEARCH TUTORIAL IN ZOOLOGY??? Scientists should NOT attempt to write fiction.

...says the zoology major waiting to hear back on three different fiction submissions. My God, what I am I saying? Please excuse me while I go throw this book at the wall repeatedly.

...

Tags: bad fiction, scientific research, stress

oscars

2006-03-05T23:48:00.000-05:00

Okay, this is going to be a quickie post. Tonight for the first time ever I actually stayed up and watched the Oscars all the way through, on a big movie screen, no less, because the local theater was showing the ceremony for free. It was funny. I enjoyed it, even though the only big Oscar movie I'd actually seen was Brokeback Mountain.

But... maybe I'm an old fuddy-duddy, but I was HORRIFIED that a song entitled "It's Hard Out Here Fo' a Pimp" could win an Oscar. Ick. Ick. Ick.

EDIT: Okay, some people have told me that the song was much better in the context of the movie than it was on stage last night. But still...

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Tags: Oscars, It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp

the nicest rejection letter i've ever received

2006-03-02T20:54:00.000-05:00

And there have been some nice ones. Here it is. (Yes, it's for another story about birds.)

Rebecca,

Thank you again for submitting to VerbSap.

"The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker" is a closely-observed and richly-detailed work. I particularly like the final line "her dreams were filled with birds." However, I did find the sedate pace, which I suspect intentionally mirrors the quiet of the woman's days, a bit of a hindrance to being drawn into the story. As well, the language is quite dense--almost old fashioned, again like the central character--whereas VerbSap focuses on lean, minimalist prose.

While I'm passing on this piece, I'm more than happy to read more of your writing in the future. If you weren't aware, we also run nonfiction. It might be interesting to read a first-person account of your fieldwork.

Best,
Laurie Seidler
Editor, VerbSap.com

...

Tags: rejection letters

victory!

2006-02-28T09:30:00.000-05:00

After Yahoo email butchered a second submission for me, I finally dove into the options and figured out how to switch it over to plain text. Pity I only discovered this was possible after screwing up two submissions of my short stories.

Now back to my daily routine of class, homework, coffee, trombone, field work, coffee, homework, sleep, class, trombone...

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Tags: email formatting

so my iguana jumped in the toilet while i was studying for exams...

2006-02-23T23:25:00.000-05:00

"Think of a time when you were really stressed out, and you felt like you didn't have time to do anything. It doesn't have to be something that really happened, you can make it up, it doesn't matter. Is that enough for everyone to write about? And you should include an iguana. Or if you don't like iguanas you can write about a plunger. Or both. Really you don't have to include either of those, you can write about anything you want, okay? Three minutes. Go."

That is the prompt for the writing exercise we did at our Writers Club meeting tonight, as told to us by the club president. If you're feeling ambitious I encourage you to set a timer for three minutes and write about being stressed out, and an iguana, or a plunger, or whatever. Post the results in a comment. I could use the entertainment.

I should be going to bed, since I have an eight AM class tomorrow, but instead I think I'll work on adding to the couple of paragraphs I wrote in response to that and turning it into a short story. We'll see how it turns out.

...

Tags: writing prompts

oops

2006-02-20T14:47:00.000-05:00

I submitted a short story to Strange Horizons today, and spent quite a while fitting my submission to their detailed formatting guidelines. Unfortunately Yahoo email was being anal and I wasn't sure if the line breaks between the paragraphs were going to show up or not. Finally I just had to send it and cross my fingers.

So I checked the email in the "Sent" folder. Sure enough, the spaces between paragraphs were gone, gone, gone.

Ah crap. I worked on this story for quite a while making it as good as I could, and I would love nothing more than to get published in SH, but now they're going to think I'm a pathetic amateur who couldn't be bothered with following the guidelines. I did include a note in my cover letter saying I wasn't sure if it would show up correctly... I hope the editors are forgiving.

(goes away to bang head against wall, feeling like a stupid child)

...

Tags: email formatting, fiction submissions

a late night adventure

2006-02-18T19:11:00.000-05:00

It's not uncommon for our fire alarm to go off in the wee hours of the morning; every college has its drunken idiots who pull these stunts, I suppose. What made last night different was the fact that this time, when I was jerked out of sleep, grabbed a sweatshirt, and stumbled to the door of my room, there was actually smoke in the hallway.

My roommate, my one other suitemate who was there (I live in a quad), and the three friends of the suitemate who'd been hanging in her room all stood there in shock for a moment. There was nothing to do but head for the stairs leading to the nearest exit, though my roommate was so freaked out she didn't move until I started shoving her along the hall before me. When we opened the door to the stairwell we found it was so thick with smoke we could hardly see, but we had to get out of there. We held our breath and plunged down the stairs and out the door, where we stood gasping in the cold air, coughing and blinking.

As our thoughts became somewhat rational again, though, we realized that the smoke hadn't smelled terribly smoky. More like chemicals. We were all hopelessly confused.

After about ten minutes of standing around in the cold with some of the other girls from our floor, our RA showed up and told us it was safe to go back in. Still, that chemical smell lingered in the air, and the stairs were now covered with fine white powder that was settling out of the air. Unwilling to sleep in that, Sara and I grabbed pillows and headed to the room of Sara's friends, who lived in another dorm, while Madhu sought out one of her own friends. I ended up spending the night in the room of these girls who were pretty much total strangers to me. It was bizarre.

All we can figure is some idiot set off some sort of chemical smokebomb thing in the stairwell. Anyway, it was weird.

(P.S. I modified my template! Isn't it pretty?)

...

Tags: fire drills

birds of a feather

2006-02-17T14:33:00.000-05:00

I got a rejection letter from the Kenyon Review today. Rebecca, rejected by some of the finest literary journals in the country.

Anyway, in addition to my latest beginnings of a novel (which I hope, after many fits and starts, I might eventually finish), I've started a shitty first draft of a short story. The funny thing about the story, which is a fantasy, is that my interest in ornithology is spilling over into my writing. The story is about a sparrow that gets turned into a girl and a woman who gets turned into a lovebird (literally, not in the figurative sense of one half of a mushy couple). The sparrow-girl popped into my head a couple days ago and I've been playing with the idea to the point that I finally have a bit of a plot.

I'm not the first person like this, you know. Today I went to a lecture about the life of Alexander Wilson, a great poet-cum-ornithologist who was a contemporary of Jefferson and Lewis and Clark. According to Dr. Burtt, who was giving the lecture, the guy even wrote his scientific descriptions of birds in the form of poetry sometimes. That's me, the latest in a long line of poet-ornithologists.

...

Tags: ornithology, Alexander Wilson, poetry, writing, rejection letters

it's valentine's day and i'm single, single, single

2006-02-14T23:25:00.000-05:00

...as always. A friend of mine, also single, renamed today "Singles Awareness Day." I celebrated by dressing all in black. Dr. Griffin (my trombone prof) laughed and told me I'll change my tune as soon as I meet "Mr. Special." Yes, he actually said "Mr. Special."

Then my friends and I watched a romantic comedy, which kind of ruined our whole anti-Valentine's Day thing.

Hey, it was either spend the day mopey or have a little fun with it. I chose the latter. What can I say?

...

Tags: Valentine's Day, singles

sunday night stream-of-consciousness

2006-02-12T21:01:00.000-05:00

I think I'm the only person in the world who still listens to Train. You remember "Meet Virginia" and "Drops of Jupiter," that got played on the radio over and over years ago? Yeah, that's them. I just got their newest album and I don't like it. At all. Right now I'm listening to their original, self-titled album, from back when they were still a real band, before they became Pat Monahan Singing Songs With Really Bland Lyrics, Accompanied by a Random Assortment of People.

A partial species list from today's trip to Killdeer Plains: bald eagles, a ring-necked pheasant, a red-headed woodpecker, many many kinds of ducks, two kinds of mergansers, trumpeter swans, flickers, harriers, long- and short-eared owls... and I'll stop there, since no one except possibly Jen finds that interesting.

Now, off to work on my latest pathetic attempt at writing a novel. Wish me luck.

intimidation tactics?

2006-02-11T20:56:00.000-05:00

"When we notify you about our decision on your submission, we provide feedback from our reviewers (comments from 2-6 editors) about work considered so that writers will know why we've accepted or rejected a particular piece. These are not in-depth critiques, but subjective comments from our editors and may not be positive in nature. The comments returned from our editors are unvarnished and have offended some who receive them."

That's from the submission guidelines of the online magazine flashquake. My goodness, how ominous. What will I get if I submit something to them? "You suck"? But they specifically publish flash memoirs (that is, under 1000 words), and I happen to have written just such a thing. I'm going to submit as soon as their next reading period starts March 1... but I'm going to do so with a certain amount of butterflies in my stomach.

In fact, the stupid butterflies won't leave me alone lately, because I submitted my application to a summer program on Tuesday: "Ecology & Evolutionary Biology of a Temperate Grassland," ten weeks at a field station in Kansas doing research. As a freshman my chances of getting accepted are nil. I applied anyway.

Off to another birdwatching adventure tomorrow morning. For now, I'm awfully sleepy. I bid you good night.

photos

2006-02-07T21:28:00.000-05:00

At last, the promised photos of my bird-banding escapade. The first one is the only picture I'm actually in, and it's a horrible picture of me. I'm the person in the center. The other one is to prove that there were actually birds involved.

the most wonderful time of the year

2006-02-06T09:07:00.000-05:00

Ahh, February in Ohio. One day it's so warm and spring-like you go to dinner without putting on so much as a sweatshirt, and the next morning you find yourself creeping to class over an inch of snow and ice while your face freezes off. Woo-hoo.

A friend of mine from Pakistan recently taught me the Arabic equivalent of "bless you"--you know, what to say when someone sneezes. (They speak Urdu in Pakistan, not Arabic, but apparently this is one Arabic phrase they use.) Obviously in Arabic it would be written in their squiggly letters, and I don't know if it as a proper Anglicized spelling, but it's pronounced "al-HAHM-dur-lilla."

For some reason this got me to thinking about sneezing. Why is it every language seems to have a proper response for when someone sneezes, but necessarily, for example, when someone coughs or hiccups? We say "bless you," the Germans say "Gesundheit" (well, actually I'm rather partial to "Gesundheit" myself), the Arabs and the Pakistanis say "alHAHMdurlilla," and I seem to recall French and Spanish having similar phrases, though I don't remember what they are.

What's so significant about sneezing that every culture has an expression like this? I know "bless you" comes from the fact that sneezes were once thought to be demons leaving the body, or something like that, but I don't know about any other languages. If I were a sociologist or a cultural anthropologist or whatever, I would study the cultural significance of sneezing.

Just my random thought of the week.

(On a side note: I promise I'm not quite so heartless as I sounded in my last post. I agree, it was a sad story. The headline just made me do a double take.)

this headline amuses me

2006-02-02T20:01:00.000-05:00

"Heroin hidden in puppies"

Heh heh.

EDIT: After the comments I've gotten I feel like I should add yes, I realize it's a horribly sad story, lest everyone think I am an insensitive jerk. But the headline just struck me as ridiculous. Sometimes you just have to laugh at stuff like this, even when it's terrible, to avoid losing your marbles.

another meme

2006-01-31T09:07:00.000-05:00

Just because I don't feel like writing a post of any actual significance.

Who would play you in the movie of your life? Kate Winslet.

Who would play your parents? Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Except wait, they're dead, and my parents aren't near as cool as them anyway... Okay, my mom would be Sally Field and my dad would be Dustin Hoffman. That's the best I can come up with right now.

Who would play the love interest? What love interest? I guess the closest I've come is Dustin (that was a one-way love interest, anyway), so he could be played by David Krumholtz. David Krumholtz doesn't look much like Dustin, but he's quirky enough to be Dustin, and anyway he's adorable. If you don't know who David Krumholtz is, your loss.

Who would play the best friend? Scarlett would be played by Vivian Leigh, of course! Okay, okay, bad joke. Hmmm. Jennifer Aniston might do, if her hair were more frazzly.

Who else do you want to do this meme? Patrice and Jen, of course. And Katy, if she's so inclined. And, hm, Ellen, if she would accept a meme from a lowly member of her court.

Anyway, here's what's new in my life. It's raining and I have to go to a funeral tomorrow. Other than that, I'm pretty good. No fascinating and blog-worthy new adventures, though.

rebecca the weirdo

2006-01-26T22:13:00.000-05:00

So, I've been tagged by Jen to list five weird things about myself. Here goes. I'm having trouble thinking of anything, actually. I know I'm weird, but specific examples...

I am extremely phone phobic. Whenever my friends and I order pizza or Chinese food or whatever, I always make someone else call. If I have to call someone I don't know it takes me forever to work up the nerve to do it. If the phone rings and it's for me, I'm fine, but I am absolutely terrified of calling anyone myself. It doesn't help that the dorm phone system is, by my standards at least, hopelessly complicated. I still don't know how to check my voicemail. I make one of my roommates do it for me.
When I went to Las Vegas last spring break, by far my favorite thing was the Star Trek Experience at the Hilton. (Squeeeee! I got my picture taken with a Klingon!) Actually, it was the only thing I liked about Las Vegas. So I'm pretty much a hopeless Trekkie.
I have a secret and deeply embarrassing love of Harry Potter fan fiction. Particularly the angsty stuff about Remus Lupin. Horrible, I know. I wonder if there's any sort of Fan Fiction Anonymous organization? Most of the stuff is utter drivel and yet I'm addicted.
If I have to be at a specific place at a specific time and I'm not sure where it is-- for example, starting classes this semester in buildings I'd never been in before-- I have to get there early. REALLY early. I always feel stupid when I end up sitting around the classroom for twenty minutes before class starts but I would get unbearably agitated if I didn't get there really, really early.
I have recently become a mad organizational fiend. All my class notebooks have Post-It tabs dividing them into sections, with all handouts carefully punched with a three whole punch and inserted into the proper sections along with my notes. I make a list each week of all my assignments that week and keep it on my desk so I can check them off. My music collection (50-odd CDs) is on a shelf above my desk, sorted by genre and artist. My files on my computer for school are organized into folders by class and semester. I'm insane. This madness does not, unfortunately for my roommate, extend to my wardrobe; my shoes are scattered all over our floor.

Anyway, not much going on with me. I'm home for the weekend. I'll catch up with everyone's blogs tomorrow night or Monday.

robins!

2006-01-25T14:15:00.000-05:00

I just got back from class (Music Appreciation-- the most aggravating class in the world-- been playing the trombone for nine years, and now I'm stuck in a class where we learn stuff like what a time signature is), and as I was walking back to my dorm I suddenly noticed the gigantic flock of robins all over the lawn and in the trees! There must have been two hundred of them. I know that a fair number of robins does overwinter around here, but I never see them in the winter, so to me they're still a sign that spring is coming. Robins!

a rather unusual class

2006-01-21T20:34:00.000-05:00

This morning I had to get up at 6:30 to meet my ride out to the house of Dr. Burtt (better known as Jed), my Avian Microbiology professor.

Here was the agenda for the day:

breakfast. Jed provided two kinds of coffee cake, orange slices, and our choice of orange juice, coffee, tea, or hot mulled cider to drink.
take microbe samples from bird plumage. The proper way to hold a bird is to squash its neck before your first two fingers. This prevents it from flying away, but if constantly feels like you're about to strangle it. To weigh the bird, you stuff it into a tube. Anyway, house sparrow claws kind of hurt when they dig into your palm, but I'm told that house sparrows are on the tame end of the spectrum. Heaven knows what will happen when someone hands me a cardinal. Every so often someone in the banding room would lose track of their bird and it would fly around frantically and we'd have to catch it quickly before it ran into a window and hurt itself. Fun times.
lunch. Jed provided two kinds of tortillas, turkey, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, and three kinds of mustard with which to make wraps, various cut-up veggies with dip, more orange chunks, more yummy cider, and spice cake for dessert.
back to school. Put the microbe samples in the incubator, and we were done for the day.

It was FUN. I'll probably post pictures later.

back to school

2006-01-15T15:54:00.000-05:00

It's rather strange, but coming back to my dorm room after three weeks of break felt like coming home. Three weeks was enough, and I'm definitely ready to start classes again.

You know how last Friday was Friday the 13th? I'm not normally superstitious, but Friday was almost enough to make me wonder. I was over at my best friend's house (we were having a Chinese evening-- Chinese takeout and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Her cat has hated me ever since it first laid eyes on me five years ago, and hisses and spits and growls if I get within four feet or so of it. Well, I had gone to the kitchen to get another crab rangoon and was walking back to the TV when I heard a sudden hissing noise to my left. Being terrified of her cat, I jumped a foot and collided with the coffee table.

The next thing I knew I was rolling around on the floor, clutching my knee, while my friend exclaimed that I'd moved the whole coffee table. Today I have a bruise about the size of an egg, colored in three lovely shades of purple. That evil cat was sitting on one of the chairs tucked under the kitchen table. I swear it was hiding and waiting for me to walk by.

And this in and off itself wouldn't be enough to make me wonder about superstition... except for the fact that the cat is black.

Har har har.

a new year and a new look

2006-01-12T17:25:00.000-05:00

Even though my last post was actually the first one of the new year, not this one, I skipped over the obligatory "hey-it's-a-new-year" stuff in that one. So hey! It's a new year! I went through some really tough times in 2005, but there was a lot of great stuff, too (can you say STARTING COLLEGE???). Here's hoping 2006 is my best year yet.

Partially in honor of the new year and partially in hopes of getting my blog to look less wonky on Internet Explorer, I've switched templates. The old one was getting boring anyway. I keep telling myself one of these days I'll take the time to make my own, but it hasn't happened yet.

I go back to school on Sunday. This semester I'm taking Reading Charles Dickens, Appreciation of Music Literature, General Chemistry II, and Avian Microbiology. Should be lots of work but fun.

i'm still alive!

2006-01-08T19:11:00.000-05:00

I'm just on Christmas break, and therefore have been lazy about everything lately, including blogging. In addition to not writing in my own blog, I haven't even been keeping up with other people's (shame, shame). But a random person has tagged me for a meme, so here it is.

Four jobs you've had:

McDonald's drone
musician for the occasional church service
giver of trombone lessons
calculus tutor (beginning next week)

Four movies you could watch over and over:

When Harry Met Sally
Philadelphia Story
Inherit the Wind
Star Trek: First Contact

Four places you've lived:

a small town in Ohio
another small town in Ohio
a dorm at Ohio Wesleyan
Erlangen, Germany (for a month, once, a couple years ago)

Four websites you visit daily:

Four TV shows you love to watch:

NUMB3RS
M*A*S*H
Star Trek (preferably TOS or TNG)
As Time Goes By (an obscure British sitcom that comes on PBS late at night)

Four of your favorite foods:

Thin Mint ice cream
chicken salad sandwiches
hash browns
my mom's spaghetti

Four albums you can't live without (at least for the moment):

A Magical Christmas of Magic, by Harry and the Potters (don't ask)
On Your Shore, by Charlotte Martin
My Private Nation, by Train
Sounds of Silence, by Simon and Garfunkel

Four places you'd rather be:

the Galapagos Islands
San Francisco
Yellowstone National Park
London

Four people who are now obligated to do this on their blog:

Patrice
Jen
Julie
hm... Katy

Not that anyone should feel at all obligated, considering what a neglectful blogger I've been lately. Anyway, I promise things will get back to normal once I'm back at school next week and once more looking for ways to procrastinate on doing any homework.

rebecca's incredible adventures in...

2005-12-18T20:17:00.000-05:00

...birdwatching?

Yeah, this one's for Jen.

This morning I got up at six AM. On a SUNDAY, when I didn't have to for class, and I am a college student, so this is a big deal. Also, exams are also this week, so I should have spent the day studying. But what did I do? Got up at six AM to spend the day walking around outside in the cold and the eight inches of snow looking for birds. Yup, this was my first year participating in the madness known as the Christmas Bird Count.

And it was SO MUCH FUN.

I was in a group with two professors. All day it was just the three of us driving around in Dr. Burtt's car and occasionally getting out and tramping around in the snow at various promising-looking places. Most of the day I just nodded and smiled while they identified various small brown birds as being this or that kind of sparrow, but I did spot our only Cooper's Hawk of the day. (Okay, they're the ones who identified it specifically as a Cooper's Hawk, but I was the one who called out "Hey! Wait! Go back! There was a hawk in those trees!") And I learned how to tell a Hairy Woodpecker apart from a Downy Woodpecker apart from a Red-bellied Woodpecker. And I started learning some birdcalls I didn't know before. All in all a very successful outing.

I'm getting involved in some more of this fun ornithology craziness next semester, and I'm looking forward to it immensely. Woo! What a geek I am!

...

P.S. I sent in a new poetry submission yesterday, and instead of describing myself as previously unpublished I got to say I have work forthcoming in blahdy-blah-blah magazine. Boy, did that feel good.

what counts as "real" writing?

2005-12-14T13:27:00.000-05:00

I need to leave for class soon, but I've been thinking about some things related to my writing lately.

Several years ago I wrote down this goal in my journal: "I will have two short stories published by the time I graduate from college." (I've since mentally amended it to short stories or poems or whatever.) The question is... what really "counts" as getting published? There's a new literary magazine starting up here on campus that I think I might submit something to, and I suppose it's very likely that I'd get published, since this is, after all, a brand-new publication that hasn't generated much publicity yet (and therefore probably hasn't received many submissions). But if I am published in it... does that count? Can I say, I'm a published author? Or is getting published in some measly campus journal more of a practice run for the real world? Hmmm.

Another topic of interest: fan fiction. Ready for a deep, dark confession? I read Harry Potter fanfiction on occasion. Ready for another even deeper, darker one? I've written some. It was quite a while ago, and it's my guilty secret. People make fun of Harry Potter fanfiction, and with good reason, because a lot of it is hideous, but it has a strange fascination for me. Somehow this came up in conversation the other day and I was forced to admit out loud to my authorship of HP fanfic. My best friend blinked and said "Really? I don't remember that." Well... that's because I never told her about it. It was embarrassing.

How does an enjoyment of a pathetic imitation of literature like fanfiction fit in with my goals as a "real" writer? I can produce some decent poetry and prose on occasion... but I can also write fanfic mush. And sometimes, writing mush is fun.

Oh well. I'm eighteen. I don't have to have everything figured out yet.

it's official...

2005-12-11T22:49:00.000-05:00

...I'm royalty! Ellen has declared me a member of her court and drawn a cute little caricature of me. Check it out!

shake that thang

2005-12-11T22:37:00.000-05:00

I was just browsing through the names of some of the files on my computer that I wrote for my zoology class... "Effects of Temperature on the Behavior of Sciurus carolinensis." "The Kleiber Relationship Between Weight and Metabolic Rate." Wow, don't I make myself sound smart?

But that isn't what I sat down to write about. I wanted to write about the dance show I ushered for yesterday. My friend Scarlett has been trying to get involved with the theater department in every way possible, and she convinced me to come be an usher with her. We got big yellow badges that said USHER and handed out programs and got to see the show for free. Fun.

This was my second experience with watching dances be performed on stage. The first was in Berlin, during my study trip to Germany about two years ago (wow, has it been that long?). That one involved naked people smashing plates and saying the f-word over and over again... Very modern, I suppose, but also very shocking to a sheltered sixteen-year-old from Bible Belt Ohio. Of the group of American students I saw it with, I was the only one who didn't profess to like it. Really, I think it scarred me for life.

Needless to say, the show here on campus was much tamer. The most shocking it got was one number choreographed to the theme music of Kill Bill, which was really cool, actually.

I may have lost some of my naivete since I was in Berlin. But call me a prude though you may, I still don't see how plate-smashing and profanity could be considered art...

so what caused YOUR heterosexuality?

2005-12-07T21:31:00.000-05:00

I've been racking my brains, racking racking racking, for something interesting to post about instead of the rather incoherent emotional spewing of the past couple days. Then it occurred to me that my project for my final in Women's and Gender Studies is kind of interesting. So I thought I'd write about that.

A while ago for class we had to read "The Heterosexual Questionnaire," by M. Rochlin. It's a list of questions like "What do you think has caused you to be heterosexual?" and "When and how did you first decide you were a heterosexual?" The point is that they're the sort of questions that might often be posed to gays, only in reverse, to highlight just how ridiculous they are. SO for my final project, I gave this questionnaire to some of my friends to fill out, and I'm writing an essay analyzing their reactions to it.

My friend Natalie blinked at the first question (the one about cause), and then burst out, "What?! That's a dumb question! That's absurd!" But by the time she'd finished the questionnaire and figured out the gimmick she was so taken with it that she was going around asking people "So what caused YOUR heterosexuality?" It was pretty cool.

"This biting of their toenails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into the cause of goodness, so why of the other shop?" wondered Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Not to equate homosexuality with badness. It's just that we get so used to think of one thing as "normal" that a whole new world is opened up when your idea of normal is challenged. I guess the point is, I'm about the least heterosexist person you'll ever meet, but even I was questioning some of my assumptions about sexual identity after reading this questionnaire. That's what I love about college: IT MAKES ME THINK.

a question for all of you

2005-12-06T13:16:00.000-05:00

When you're in a funk or feeling sorry for yourself or stressed out or whatever, what helps? What do you do to make yourself feel better? Any secrets to kicking the mean reds? (Did I just quote Breakfast at Tiffany's? I believe I did. How odd. I guess I'm in a Truman Capote sort of mood.)

Because lately I just feel extremely
BLEEEAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGHHHHHH.

Things that haven't worked so far: sitting in my room by myself, having Diet Coke for lunch instead of food, procrastinating on my homework, listening to Charlotte Martin

okay, so maybe i don't hate the world

2005-12-04T01:01:00.000-05:00

Reasons not to hate the world:

pomegranate juice
Star Trek movies
my hilarious zoology professor
being mostly caught up on schoolwork
Christmas lights strung up in my dorm room
getting paid a hundred bucks to play trombone at an advent service
getting my Christmas shopping done
the fact that according to my calculations, I only have to get a 63 on my calc final to pull off an A for the class
Scarlett and Natalie, the two most amazing best friends a girl could ask for
and oh, did I mention I found out I might get to meet Wynton Marsalis this spring? WYNTON FREAKING MARSALIS.

blehhhhh. i hate the world.

2005-12-01T22:10:00.000-05:00

Ellen and the other Rebecca have both been blogging about funks lately. Well, lemme tell ya, I've been in one too. Ugh.

I hadn't mentioned before, I quit NaNoWriMo about halfway through the month, stopping just shy of 20,000 words. The fun went out of it when I had a fight with my only friend who was also participating in the madness. Without the motiviation of us competing and egging each other on, I just gave up. (Again. Second year in a row. Not the fighting with friend part, but the giving up.)

Also, my grades have been slipping a little lately... well, okay, for me "slipping" is getting a B+ on my calculus exam instead of an A, but still, I don't like the feeling. I'm weird about grades.

I am soooo ready for this semester to be over. Tomorrow, and then next week, and then a four day week, and then finals. Whoo boy.

Here is a random fact about my college (Ohio Wesleyan University): one of the authors of Inherit the Wind graduated from here. This is the best play ever. You should go read it, or else watch the excellent movie adaptation starring Spencer Tracy and Gene Kelly. It's based on the Scopes Monkey Trial.

mr. anonymous

2005-11-28T23:35:00.000-05:00

Anonymous said...

"Instead, she chose to have her baby and now she's paying for that decision."
Exactly.
The policy is equally enforced on all how get caught, and I have no doubt they have caught male teachers, too. Knowing the rules she chose to act against them.
And there's nothing inherently sexist about it. She is not being punished because she is a woman, she is being punished because she broke the rules. If she was only caught because as a woman she could be it is still not sexist, as the policy is still applied across the board.

...Hooray for people who leave comments full of absolutist statements and then betray their lack of confidence in their own position by remaining anonymous, making it impossible for anyone to continue the argument.

Not that I'm looking to get into an argument. What I'm looking for is the middle ground...

paralysis

2005-11-27T14:41:00.000-05:00

There's an old Calvin and Hobbes comic strip in which Calvin staggers around a Picasso-esque version of his house, complaining about the sudden shifts in perspective and finally explaining that he was arguing with his dad about something when suddenly he saw his dad's point and was "paralyzed by being able to see all sides of the issue at once," or something like that. (I wish I could find it to post it here.) Finally he manages to eliminate all points of view but one and marches back to his father to announce, "You're still wrong, Dad."

Well, this news story reminded me of that comic strip: I'm sure you've heard of it already, the woman fired from her teaching job at a Catholic school because she got pregnant without being married. My dad used to teach at a Catholic school, and his immediate response was of course they had every right to fire her, private schools operate under different rules than public schools and can fire people any time they want, and anyway, they were probably right to do so, because after all she was violating traditional Catholic morals.

I can see his point. Probably a prime reason for parents to send their kids to Catholic schools is that they think kids will be in a more "moral" atmosphere there (whatever that means).

But when I heard the teacher's lawyer on TV explaining the situation... well, I could see her point, too. How, she asked, do they go about enforcing the sexual morals of male teachers? Obviously, they really can't, and that makes their action against this female teacher inherently sexist. What's more, she could certainly have gotten an abortion (a big no-no for Catholics) and hidden it from the school and never suffered any consequences. Instead, she chose to have her baby and now she's paying for that decision. Echoes here of numerous lectures in my women's studies class.

So, basically, I don't have the answer. I'm like Calvin. I can see both sides of the issue, and it's screwing up my sense of perspective.

Just so long as I don't start looking like a Picasso painting.

thanksgiving

2005-11-23T20:29:00.000-05:00

We had snow today, the first real, grass-covering snow of the season.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in blog land: Patrice, Jen, Julie, Helena (well, I guess Helena's the name of a fictional character, but Helena's author), Srini, the other Rebecca (though she's dropped off the face of the blogosphere lately), and anyone else who might be reading this. Even Ray Ray. If you read this anymore. Wherever you are. You all make it onto my list of things to thankful for (well, maybe not Ray Ray).

If you read this and I left you out of that paragraph, post a comment and let me know.

Tomorrow, off to Grandma's house. There will be twenty-two people there, spanning four generations. My family really knows how to do Thanksgiving right.

and another thing....

2005-11-18T03:57:00.000-05:00

Rita Skeeter hitting on Harry. That was just wrong.

blogging at 3:30 in the AM...

2005-11-18T03:26:00.000-05:00

I just got back from a midnight showing of the new Harry Potter movie. (Yes, I went to a midnight showing of the new Harry Potter movie. Yes, I went with tape around the bridge of my glasses and a lightning bolt drawn on my forehead with my roommate's eyeliner pencil. Yes, I am eighteen, not eight. Yes, I am a geek.) First things first, let me get my complaints out of the way:

What was with the romantic tension between Harry and Hermione? Huh? Where the heck did that come from?
They left out Rita Skeeter's true identity. And Percy, Percy never appeared. And Ludo Bagman was left out entirely. And Dobby. And I could go on, but you get the idea. On the other hand, I know they had to leave out a lot to prevent the movie from being three days long.
When Voldemort finally comes back full-strength at the end... frankly, I thought he was a little disappointing. But then, when you have this image of evil personified built up in your head, there's no way a character on a screen can live up to that.

Now that that's out of the way... WOW. Best one yet. Wow. Wow. Visually stunning, and just... amazing. I was this close to crying, and I'm not a big movie cryer.

Book IV is the big turning point in the series, and they did it justice. I'm happy. There are some really emotional scenes in this, and they were handled well. I think it was harder to watch knowing what was coming. They get to the end of the maze, and touch the trophy/portkey, and you're just thinking "Oh, this is where Cedric dies," and... yeah. It's awful, in a wonderful sort of way. (And I suppose that was a spoiler, but COME ON, PEOPLE, everyone who cares already knows the plot.)

If this is incoherent, my apologies. I'll find out when I reread this in the morning.

It is, after all, 3:30 AM. Maybe I just won't bother going to bed tonight...

down with narcissism

2005-11-15T10:36:00.000-05:00

I read an article recently about blogs and how narcissistic they are, which suggested trying to write a post without using the word "I" to make it seem a little less-self centered. Here goes. (Of course, I've already broken that rule once. Oops. Make that twice.)

Um... wow, this is really hard.

The stereotype about college is that it's a time to experiment and figure out who you are, to maybe go a little wild, maybe a lot. Maybe just to get stone drunk every weekend. Experimentation can take many forms, though: taking a class in a subject you know nothing about, watching a movie you never thought you'd like, letting a friend chop all your long hair off with a pair of paper scissors and dyeing what's left purple.

The most amazing thing about college is the people. You wouldn't believe how diverse and fascinating a campus with only about 2000 students can be, especially to someone coming from white Protestant middle-class Farmtown, U.S.A. According to some statistical something, this college is one of the most international of its size in the country. A German R.A. looks after students from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, China, Japan, Jamaica, the Ukraine... and Illinois. And unlike a lot of the people in good ol' Farmtown, U.S.A., most people here are open-minded, inclusive, friendly. Frat boys and football players are friends with science geeks and theater nerds. Social categories are loosely defined at most.

If there's a downside, it's lack of real free time, between classes and band practice and homework and club meetings and everything. A whole week off for Thanksgiving is going to feel REALLY nice. But overall, it's wonderful.

Breaking the rule again: I had a really bad day yesterday. (Jules, actually, I alluded to this in the comment I left on your blog yesterday... really not a fun day.) But I'm having the time of my life, and I am *determined* not to let anything keep me down for long. Determined and ambitious are the words my friends use to describe me, and I intend to live up to them.

excerpt

2005-11-10T21:32:00.000-05:00

[A/N: I wiffled and waffled for a while about doing this; posting an excerpt of something you're writing for all to see invites second-guessing and self criticism, the antithesis of everything NaNoWriMo stands for. But here it is anyway. Nothing much happens in this scene, and there are one or two references that won't make sense out of context, but I rather like the writing, if I do say so myself.]

Miranda sat in a study cubby on the third floor of the library, pretending to work on her astronomy homework, but really just sitting quietly and enjoying the feeling of being sealed into her own private universe. If she leaned forward, the partitions on either side of the cubby cut off her peripheral vision of the room around her and she could pretend she was the only living creature in existence. The other students working around her disappeared, and she could pretend she couldn't hear the sound of their breathing and the rustling of papers. The world shrunk to a space of about four cubic feet, small, safe, controllable, and she was alone.

"Hi," said a voice in her left ear, exploding the pleasant delusions she'd been working on. Her head snapped back and she nearly lost her balance and toppled her chair before grabbing the edge of the desk with both hands to steady herself. Then she turned to see who had interrupted her so rudely.

It was the pug-faced girl she'd seen lose at the chess club meeting. The one who was in her English class. Miranda couldn't remember her name. "What do you want?" Miranda demanded, her manners momentarily startled out of her head.

"Sorry I startled you. I was just wondering if you had the notes from Japanese on Wednesday? I missed class." So it was Japanese, not English, that they had together. Miranda had chosen to take Japanese on a whim to fulfill the school's language requirement.

"Oh. Yeah, they're not with me, they're in my dorm room."

"All right. Sorry I bothered you then." The girl turned and started to walk away as Miranda's manners crept back to their accustomed place and gave her a confused urge to make up for her rudeness of a moment before.

"Hey-hey, wait. Um, I'm not getting anything done here anyway. I was about to head back to my room. You can come with me if you want and, and get them."

"Okay."

Together they walked down the stairs to the exit. It was evening, and the air was crisp under a sky still green with the afterglow of sunset. The wind picked up and made a low susurrus in the leaves of the trees. In contrast with the color and sound above them, the campus itself seemed dark and deserted. Miranda shivered, finding herself irrationally glad not be walking back to her dormitory alone. Thankfully this other girl didn't seem to feel any more need to talk then she did, and they walked across campus together in silence, listening to the sound of the wind punctuated by the percussive noises of a squirrel somewhere gnawing on a nut.

"What dorm are you in?" the girl finally asked as they crossed the street that separated the academic side of campus from the residential side.

"Webb. The all-women's dorm. You?"

"Same. I'm on the second floor."

"Oh. I'm on first. Surprised I haven't seen you around."

"Yeah."

Miranda swiped her ID card in the slot to open the front door of the building (CLIFFORD is coming, announced the fliers on the door) and they went in, Miranda leading the way to her room. The door was open, one of her roommates sitting at her computer and talking on her cellphone to someone. Ordinarily eavesdropping on her roommates' cell phone conversations was one of Miranda's favorite pasttimes-listening to the dip and flow of half a conversation, following its meandering course through blow jobs and volleyball games and the names of two dozen people Miranda would never meet, all living in a world where Miranda didn't exist-but now she had something more important to do. She retrieved her Japanese notebook from the stack balanced next to her computer and handed it to the girl. "Here."

"Thank you." The girl turned to go.

"Wait-I'm sorry, I feel terrible for it, but I don't remember your name?"

"Jill. And yours is Miranda."

"Yes. Good night, then, Jill."

"Good night."

a schizophrenic lifestyle

2005-11-04T17:48:00.000-05:00

I realize my posts have been sporadic and rather uninteresting lately, but college is certainly keeping me busy...

In the mornings, I'm a scientist. I have calculus and zoology. Or, if it's a Thursday, I have my zoology lab instead of regular class, and if I'm really lucky, maybe it will be a field lab--going out and wading around in an icy stream catching crayfish or equally fun. I hang around after class to talk to my awesome zoology professor and ask her if the species of vulture with yellow heads she mentioned is an example of sexual selection. I write papers on niche partitioning in orb-weaving spiders. I search the internet for summer research programs to apply to (no more McDonald's job for me!). Life is good.

In the afternoons, I'm a musician. I walk from the science center to the music building, on the opposite end of campus, and I practice the trombone for an hour. I go to music theory class and learn about chord progressions and intervals. I have jazz band or concert band, depending on what day of the week it is. I hang out with the music majors, amused at the fact that most of the boys have turned out to be fraternity brothers-- I have friends in Chi Phi! And I try to turn joy and sadness into sound.

In the evenings, I'm a writer. I go to meetings of Writer's Club, or the group trying to get a new literary journal started on campus. I write essays for classes. I write emails and IM's, blog entries and journal entries. Occasionally (though not as often as I'd like, lately) I'll produce a poem or a short story... and this month, I'm attempting to write a 50,000 word novel. So far I have 7,279 words of mostly incoherent bits of narrative about squirrels, philosophy, flying saucers, and espresso shots. I'm determined to see where it leads, even if it costs me my sanity.

So yeah, I'm still here, crazy busy from time to time, but still here.

five things

2005-10-26T00:06:00.000-04:00

Ten years ago: I was eight years old (ha ha, don't I make you feel old?) and in the third grade, if I'm counting right. My batty teacher was teaching me Pig Latin. I was friends with my current best friend, Scarlett, who now lives in a dorm room one floor down from me. The funny thing is that after that year we had nothing to do with each other until middle school.

Five years ago: I was thirteen and in eighth grade, and Scarlett had recently become my best friend. I was in my first year of German class, my second year of trombone lessons. Scarlett and I were writing a hideous fantasy novel together.

One year ago: I was worrying endlessly about whether or not I would get into Ohio Wesleyan. We all know how that turned out! :-D

Five snacks: ice cream, frozen grapes, tortilla chips, ice cream, and ice cream

Five songs I know all the words to: "Drive My Car" by the Beatles, the theme song from Firefly, "Drops of Jupiter" by Train, "Your Armor" by Charlotte Martin, "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" by the Beatles

Five things I would do with $100 million: buy a trombone with an open wrap, pay for all my college stuff myself so my parents wouldn't have to, um... wow. Is it weird that I can't think of anything? I would just save most of it, I guess, or donate it to the Audobon Society or something.

Five things I would never wear: short shorts, tube tops, thongs (God, I make myself sound like a prude), um... contacts (I tried them once, they were terrible), excessive make-up

Five favorite TV shows: Firefly, Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, M*A*S*H, Blind Justice (cancelled, sadly)

Five biggest joys: good food, good friends, wearing hats in the rain, looking at the sky, playing the trombone

Five favorite toys: laptop, metronome, dissecting kit, CD player, graphing calculator

Five people to pass this on to: is there anyone who reads my blog who hasn't already been tagged by someone else? I'm not sure.

where is everyone?

2005-10-24T23:17:00.000-04:00

Maybe I should post more often. No one reads my poor little blog anymore. But oh well, speaking of blogs no one reads, I added another link to my list at the left: Cinema Princess, the blog of my dear friend Alyssa, who knows more about movies than anyone I know. This is her first foray into the blogosphere so send a little support her way.

What's new with me... howzabout a random list of happenings since my last post:

I was a smash success at my trombone recital.
I got another rejection letter.
I had to break up with a guy I wasn't actually dating. Long story.
I became a browncoat.
I ate Rocky Road ice cream.
I learned that there are crabs four meters across in the ocean near Japan.
I bought a pair of fairy wings at a Renaissance Festival.
I watched The Producers. (The original version with Gene Wilder.)
I skipped dinner twice.

and...

10. I got an email from a friend I hadn't heard from in three years. (Which I haven't actually anwered yet. Bad Rebecca. Bad.)

Edit~~ I didn't mean the beginning of this post to sound quite as whiny and feeling-sorry-for-myself as it came across. I've said it before, I really hate the Internet sometimes, because it's impossible to tell when someone's joking!

someday

2005-10-17T11:06:00.000-04:00

I'd heard that it's depressing to see your old friends for the first time after going away to college and realize that they're getting along just fine without you. It's quite true. I'm home for the weekend (it's our mid-semester break, so I have Monday off too), and yesterday at the mall I ran into a friend of mine who's a senior in high school, hanging out with his girlfriend. This guy was essentially my sidekick in band for the past three years. He was in every ensemble I was in, and we were quite the trombone duo. This year, since I'm gone, he's lead in all the ensembles, and the trombones at my old high school are getting along fine under his leadership. It was strange.

I got a rejection letter from Strange Horizons today, and I was pleased, because the editor took the time to explain why the story was being rejected and suggest some things to work on improving. It was very nice, really. Someday, I'll get a letter from an editor saying my writing is wonderful and they want to publish it. Someday.

four semi-serious goals and one frivolous one

2005-10-11T09:33:00.000-04:00

It's been a week, so I figure it's time for an update. What to write about...? There have been some potentially interesting developments in my personal life lately, but I don't feel like splashing them across the Internet just yet.

The weather here has finally turned chilly-- it feels like we went from August to November with nothing in between, actually. But I like it. I'm looking forward to showing my friends from Sri Lanka and Pakistan how to build a snowman the first opportunity we get. (My friend from Pakistan has never seen snow. This amazes me.)

I've been thinking lately about the kinds of things on my list of goals, my "what I want to do before I die" list. I think there was something like this as part of those lists of seven things that were going around out blogs a while ago, but I'm going to post about it again... because the truly wonderful thing is how likely most of these are to come true within the next couple years.

Get published. Hey, if I keep at the submissions game long enough, I'm bound to succeed eventually.
Write a novel. With any luck I can check this one off after next month.
Find love. Or at least a boyfriend. Yeah, I'd settle for a boyfriend.
Watch every movie Ewan McGregor has been in. This might take a while, but I will have SO much fun in the process. Ewan McGregor is the only movie actor who can reduce me to the status of slavering fangirl.
Visit the Galapagos. Yup, this one's actually going to happen too, thanks to the wonderful biology program at this college. Yay Island Biology!

...Other than the obvious ones like getting my college degree, that's all that comes to mind now. It seems like within a year and a half or so I might have to begin thinking up more, because most of these might have been done by then!

I will leave you all with a picture that makes me happy...

"tuesday afternoon is never-ending..."

2005-10-04T18:57:00.000-04:00

NANOWRIMO!!!

The servers finally seem to have gotten over their hiccups, and I can log in and spend time perusing the forums when I should be studying.

I've blogged about this before, but really, it deserves to be said again and again: National Novel Writing Month is the coolest concept ever. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Good or crappy, all that matters is that the words get written. If you've ever toyed with the idea of doing some creative writing, now is the time. Get your butt over to the website and look around! (This means you!)

My premise for this year is kind of vague--purposely so, because I want to have the fun of making it up as I go along. It concerns three people whose lives intersect one autumn in a small Ohio college town suspiciously similar to the one in which I currently reside: a former priest working in a pet store while he tries to figure out what he wants to do with his life, an idealistic English professor, and an eccentric student whose convinced the campus squirrels are plotting with aliens to take over the world. The first sentence? "He would never forget his first encounter with Miranda: he caught her trying to shoplift a chinchilla." It's random and unlike anything I've written before, and I'm looking forward to it immensely.

The insanity begins November 1!

from my inbox

2005-09-30T17:23:00.000-04:00

Dear Rebecca,

Thank you for submitting "The Girl Who Looked at the Sky" to The
Cafe Irreal.  The story, however, doesn't suit the needs of our
publication.  We wish you good luck in finding a place for your
work elsewhere.  Thank you for thinking of The Cafe Irreal.

Sincerely,

G.S. Evans
Coeditor
The Cafe Irreal

Well, I did read the stuff on their site before submitting and I thought my piece was a pretty good match for their style, but pfft. Whatever. At least I finally got a rejection letter that was grammatically correct.

My readership lately seems to have dwindled down to... patrice. Oh well, I'd keep writing on here even if no one were reading it, because I enjoy it. So there.

mmm, calamari

2005-09-29T21:15:00.000-04:00

Check out this first-ever photograph of a live, adult Architeuthis (giant squid). Twenty-five feet long, with an extra eighteen feet or so of tentacles. IT'S SO COOL!!!!!!

a trip into the past

2005-09-25T14:38:00.000-04:00

"'It's not revenge, Danica, but that's just the kind of thing you'd think. I'm not chasing after him. No, I just really like Jake. That's all. You're the one who's jealous. You have your magic sword, and now you want my new crush too! You're so selfish! Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go feed my cat!' Vivian shrieked, trying to regain her composure. She tossed her hair as best she could and walked of haughtily."

I think it's a law that all girls who have any creative aspirations, and a lot of the boys too, are required to write a hideously awful fantasy story sometime between the ages of ten and fifteen. You know the plot--the girl (or boy) who's family doesn't appreciate her is whisked away to a magical world, discovers she has special powers, finds true love, and saves the day. Unicorns and fairies generally enter into it somewhere as well.

My best friend and I wrote ours together when we were in eighth grade, and yeah, it's definitely hideously awful. We spent last night re-reading parts of it, as well as reading parts of the hideously awful middle school fantasy written by her roommate, yet another aspiring writer. (Despite the carniverous three-legged frogs and talking raccoons, hers had essentially the same plot.) It's funny, the things you notice with a couple extra years' worth of perspective. For example, take the following ruminations of Leonidas (an evil minion, who happens to be an albino-- weren't we creative?) as he looks at the chief villain, Terberus:

"He was sitting on the ground, back against a tree, his fancy helmet beside him. A slight breeze made his cloak flutter. Hand on chin, sleeves rolled up past his elbow, and brow furrowed in concentration, Terberus was handsome in a very dark way."

So the chief villain has a cape and a fancy helmet, and his minion thinks he's handsome in a very dark way. And at other points in the story, Leonidas is continually tossing his long, white hair, and Terberus addresses him as "my white lion."

Our bad guys were definitely gay. We had a gay albino minion. Yeah.

me and chuck d

2005-09-17T00:12:00.000-04:00

I love college.

I am definitely what might be called a zoology geek. Life of Pi is one of my favorite books. I use the words "dispersal mechanism" in casual conversation. As a resident of Ohio, I have been to the Columbuz Zoo numerous times, but never once to the world-famous amusement park Cedar Point.

And, one of my most treasured posessions is a T-shirt proudly displaying the emblem shown above. When I wore this shirt around in high school, I got dirty looks, tirades along the lines of "Why are you wearing that shirt? Do you believe in evolution? Don't you know that evolution goes against the Bible? Don't you believe in the Bible?", and of course the occasional puzzled person wondering who Darwin was.

I wore this shirt today--it seemed appropriate, since were discussing natural selection in my zoology class. And not one, but two total strangers stopped me to say "That's an awesome shirt, where did you get it?" The lack of hostile people astounded me. In a good way. Considering the college I attend is at least nominally Christian (Methodist), I was impressed.

...

A side note: I know, I'm a strange animal: I'm interested in everything. I am passionate about writing, about music, about science, and probably about numerous other things that I haven't happened to mention on my blog. But, my actual major is zoology.

...

Another side note: I was going to apologize in case I offended anyone with this but decided not to. I don't apologize for my views on religion. However, I don't judge individuals based on their religious or political positions (or at least I try not to) and I expect others to extend me the same courtesy.

yours truly

2005-09-15T22:02:00.000-04:00

Because a picture's worth a thousand words.

shoe horned

2005-09-11T19:40:00.000-04:00

First, just let me say I'm not a sports person. I enjoy watching an occasional football or baseball game, but I don't make an effort to follow any teams or anything. My half-brother, on the other hand, is obsessed with sports. He and my sister-in-law flew in from Texas this weekend to watch the big UT-OSU game last night.

Apparently this game was a big deal? I really don't get it. But since we my parents and I were spending this afternoon with my brother and sister-in-law before their flight home--we went to the zoo--I figured I should at least check cnn.com to see who won. The headline? "Shoe Horned." It made me laugh.

(For the uninitiated, the OSU stadium is shaped like a horseshoe and is called the Horseshoe, and the UT team is called the Longhorns. So, since UT won... Shoe Horned. Ha, ha, ha.)

So after the game, we went to the airport to see big brother off. AND THE ENTIRE COLUMBUS INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT WAS FILLED WITH TEXANS RETURNING HOME. It was creepy. Every other person was wearing an orange hat or shirt or carrying an orange bag ("burnt orange" being the UT color). And I figure that for every two or three people actually wearing UT paraphernelia there was at least one Texan who wasn't. We'd been invaded. Seriously. Wow.

Tonight, calculus. I must figure out how to calculate K, or I am doomed...

the mysterious trombone plague...

2005-09-07T18:45:00.000-04:00

It all started over the summer, when Male Trombone Player #1 caught mono. Apparently he was miserable for quite a while. BUT, by the time school started, he was supposedly not contagious anymore.

This is what everyone thought until his roommate, Male Trombone Player #2, caught it.

And since Male Trombone Player #1 had already innocently borrowed a mouthpiece belonging to Female Trombone Player #1, we are all anxiously awaiting to see whether or not she gets sick.

Today, Female Trombone Player #2 said she was getting tested for mono, because she thought Male Trombone Player #2 had given it to her. From this, I am guessing they are dating, of which I was not aware.

This means that in wind ensemble, only two of the six trombone players, myself and one other girl, do not have mono and have not been exposed to it. As I do not share a room, a mouthpiece, or my lips with any of these people, I probably don't have anything to worry about. Still, it is eerie, how it seems to be spreading through my section...

...

I wrote a short story about a cookie. Right now I'm writing a short story about a woman who sells her smile to make a little extra cash. So, yes, I have started writing again.

...

EDIT: I was talking to a trombone-playing friend of mine currently in college in Alabama, who reports that a trombone player at his school has mono, and he is beginning to feel sick as well. Eerie is definitely the word.

hallucinations

2005-09-03T19:13:00.000-04:00

I added a blog to my list at the left: Mildly Melancholy. Check it out. I also considered adding ray ray's blog, but decided against it. Nothing personal, man, just that you freak me out a little.

So, I'm at home at the moment, on my first visit home from college. When I'm here, it's hard to believe that college really exists, and when I'm there, it's hard to believe that home really exists. Sitting here, I find myself wondering, did I really eat sushi for lunch one day last week? Did I really make friends with a girl from Pakistan? Did I really look at a sea cucumber under a dissecting scope? Could it possibly have been some sort of weird hallucination? Hmm. There's a sense of unreality about it. Gas costs three dollars a gallon, New Orleans is under water, and I'm losing my sense of reality.

I submitted another piece of writing for publication last night, nothing new, just something I wrote several months ago and hadn't gotten around to sending in yet. Also, the fall issue of Outsider Ink is up today. Loyal readers (do I have such a thing? something to ponder) may recall that my very first rejection letter came from this publication-- I had submitted a piece for the Spotlight section of the fall issue. The relevant post from June can be found here, and if you're interested you can read the work that got published instead of mine here. I'm being objective about it. In a lot of ways, particularly having become familiar with the style of things published on this site, I can see why this piece was chosen over mine. I think as a poem it lacks a little polish but it has strong images as well.

...

One of the few things I dislike about Blogger is the fact that if you put two spaces between your sentences, it automatically takes one out when you publish your post. I'm sorry, I learned to put two spaces between sentences when I was in elementary school, and I don't appreciate Blogger taking it upon itself to change this.

motivation 101

2005-08-30T23:14:00.000-04:00

Hey, I'm sorry for the total lack of posting lately-- I'm still settling into college. I started classes yesterday. At the moment I'm all caught up on homework, which is a good feeling. We'll see if it lasts. Oh, and I'm playing lead trombone (first part, the leader of the section) in jazz ensemble. This freaks me out a little. I'm a freshman. I'm not a music major. And I'm playing lead? It makes me wonder about my director's sanity, though he is an awesome guy.

...

I originally started this blog in relation to my writing. I discovered blogging by reading the blogs of authors I like, and thought "hey, I want to do that." Well, since arriving on campus last Wednesday, I have done... zero writing. I forced myself to finish the (crappy) rough draft of the short story I'd been working on, which amounted to a couple paragraphs, and that's all. And I don't like this. I didn't expect this. I thought I'd do MORE writing when I started college.

It's not that I don't have time-- I don't have a LOT of time, but if it were important to me I could be writing. I don't know. Maybe it's silly to worry about this when I've been on campus for less than a week, but my routines are already becoming set. I need to start writing again. Now.

Since I seem to study best in locations other than my dorm room, I think I need to take the same approach to writing. The computers in the library say "Academic Use Only," but if I were pounding away on the word processor, who would know the difference?

I guess what I really need is for it to be November. November=instant writing motivation. If you don't know what I'm talking about (and you probably don't), click here. I attempted National Novel Writing Month last year and failed, but I have high hopes for this year. (And if you've ever toyed with the idea of writing a novel, at all, this is your chance-- the great thing is that it doesn't matter if you write crap, as long as you write. Check it out. I mean YOU.)

And now, off to bed with me.

seven times seven

2005-08-28T09:51:00.000-04:00

The other Rebecca tagged me, so here it is.

7 things I plan to do before I die:

get published.
earn a college degree.
find love.
see London and Paris.
master trilling on the trombone.
own a home.

7 things I can do:

bend my fingers backwards at a ninety-degree angle.
recite "Jabberwocky" from memory.
figure out which end of a garbage bag is the end that opens (and open it!).
double-tongue. (it's a musical term, you sicko.)
identify almost any episode of Star Trek after watching the first five minutes.
find my way around campus without getting lost.
use an ATM machine.

7 things I cannot do:

cook.
drive myself to an unfamiliar destination without freaking out a little.
resist free cookies.
speak Spanish.
touch my toes.
do a push-up.
remember names the first time I'm told.

7 things that attract me to the opposite sex:

sense of humor.
eyes.
eyelashes (I know, this is kind of weird).
body type (fit with out being ueber-muscular, if you know what I mean).
hair (a little shaggy, preferably).
intelligence.
smile.

7 things I say most often:

"like."
"you know."
"oh dear."
"I dunno, what do you want do do?"
"friggin'."
"lol." (when talking online.)
"hey!"

7 celebrity crushes:

Johnny Depp.
Ewan McGregor.
Viggo Mortensen.
Orlando Bloom.
Cary Grant, if he were still alive.
Harrison Ford, if he were still a young guy.
Brad Pitt, I guess.

And the seventh category is supposed to be seven people I want to do this, but since I think everyone who reads my blog has already been tagged by someone else, I'll skip it.

adventures in wonderland, part ii

2005-08-22T11:20:00.000-04:00

Morning in Yellowstone. After a night without heat, my parents and I woke up as ice cubes. We'd been eating granola bars in our room for breakfast since we'd been staying in hotels that didn't provide breakfast for free, but this morning we decided, for obvious reasons, to treat ourselves to a hot breakfast. We ate at the little coffee shop in Canyon Village, where I was revived somewhat by a cinnamon-flavored cappuccino. Then we went to the front desk to complain about our non-functional heater.

"Did you try the little lever at the bottom of the thermostat?" asked the woman at the front desk.

"Um. What little lever?"

Yeah... the heater worked the whole time... we just hadn't been working it right. Needless to say, we were pretty embarrassed.

adventures in wonderland

2005-08-20T14:54:00.000-04:00

If you've never been to Yellowstone National Park, go. Seriously. It's amazing. In addition to the close encounters with elk and bison pictured here, we saw moose (my dad, drat him, accidentally deleted all the moose photos), pronghorn, coyotes, ospreys (fish hawks), you name it. We even saw grizzlies and wolves! Okay, I admit it, the grizzlies and wolves were at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center in the town of West Yellowstone, but we did see them. To someone who is seriously considering working for the park service as a ranger or naturalist as a career, this was a very exciting trip.

The animals were amazing. Some of the accommodations, however, left something to be desired-- especially the hotel from hell at Canyon Village. All right, all right, it was a cabin, not a hotel, but then it wouldn't have been alliterative, and as a writer I'm not about to pass up a chance to alliterate. Anyway. Beds shabbily made, mine with several inches of bare mattress at the head. Dirt and gravel and dead insects on the carpet. Iffy hot water. Paper-thin walls, so we could hear everything that was said in the next unit. And the worst part? No heat.

When I told my best friend this, she asked what we needed heat for in August. Obviously she's never been at 8000 ft in August. It was cold enough at night to put frost on the windshield of our car. And we couldn't figure out how to use the thermostat. It appeared to be set to 65 degrees, with a plastic seal on the front to prevent us from changing the setting. But the real problem was that as the room got colder and colder, it didn't kick on. We fiddled with it and fiddled with it, trying unsuccessfully to pry off the cover. My parents have four graduate degrees between them, and I'm no slouch in the I.Q. department myself, but we couldn't figure out how to work the darn thing. Finally we decided it must be broken. However, complaining to the front desk required walking or driving about a mile, and it was getting late. We piled on the blankets and prepared to face the cold.

What did we find the next morning?

Tune in tomorrow to find out.

~~~

Incidentally, I must apologize for the odd formatting of this post; I've never done photos before.

coming home

2005-08-18T20:39:00.000-04:00

I had two interesting emails when I got home. The first was on my school email, a notification of when cheerleading tryouts are being held, which made me snort with laughter. (I am NOT a cheerleader, needless to say.) The second was this:

17 August 2005

Dear Ms Deatsman

Thank you for letting us see your poem and for your interest in Strange Horizons. We are afraid we are saying no on this submission. We wish you the best of luck in your writing and hope you will continue to consider SH. Enjoy the rest of your Summer.

Best wishes,

Roger Dutcher
Co-Editor, Poetry
Strange Horizons

So... yeah. I'm a little disappointed, but not too. My second rejection letter.

Longer posts (with photos!) concerning the awesomeness that is Yellowstone National Park will follow in the next couple days, but this is all I have the energy or time for right now.

kitner's quest

2005-08-06T21:02:00.000-04:00

Updike added: "John Kitner's quest is a part of a larger one: how to write a character who is different from yourself. If he can find the magic key to this age-old puzzle, he will usher in a renaissance in human literature. For the first time, crime novelists will be able to write convincingly about murderers, even if they are not murderers themselves. Non-spies will be able to write about spies. In this new type of literature, there will actually be characters who are something other than novelists. Imagine the possibilities."

I don't read The Onion every week, but occasionally it proves entertaining--as it did this week, with an article about (gasp!) writing. It's intended as parody but what makes it so funny is how close to the truth it hits. The article is about a (male) aspiring writer trying to write a novel with a female main character, who constantly bugs his wife with questions about how a woman would act in a given situation.

"Write what you know" is something beginning writers hear a lot, but the truth is, if you want to grow as a writer I think you have to break that rule. I'm currently working on a short story about a Catholic girl in the 1950's. I'm not Catholic, nor did I grow up in the 1950's--nor, for that matter, do I have two older brothers like my main character does--but that's not stopping me. Maybe it won't be the most authentic-ever story about the Cold War, but I'm having fun writing it.

The truth is that it's entirely possible to write about what you don't know, and in fact, it's necessary. That's what the article in The Onion is getting at, I think. The one thing that remains constant, whether you're writing a historical romance or a modern thriller or a sci-fi novel or whatever, is people. To be an author, you just have to be able to get inside people's heads. Once you're there you see that everyone, man, woman, space alien, whatever, is pretty much the same.

Now if only I could really get the hang of it. When it happens, it's marvelous. But for me, it's not a skill I can always count on. Yet. I have yet to tackle writing a story with a male narrator, myself.

---

In other news: I'll be in Wyoming next week, so there may or may not be a post. Probably not. But it will give me something to write about when I get back.

so close, and yet so far away

2005-07-30T17:00:00.000-04:00

These are the college courses I'm going to be taking this fall:

ZOOL 115: Animals and Their Environment
MATH 111: Calculus II (my AP scores get me out of Calculus I)
WGS 210: Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies
MUS 110: Fundamentals of Music Theory

Plus trombone lessons and whatever ensembles I end up in. I haven't written a lot here about starting college, which is odd, because preparing for it has been the main focus of my summer.

Don't get me wrong: I loved high school. I'm going to miss my friends and teachers and activities so much, especially the jazz band and the Academic Challenge team. But for so many years, college was the Future. It was the Great Unknown. It was what we daydreamed about and longed for. We would be Adults, we would be Free, we would NO LONGER BE LIVING WITH OUR PARENTS. (Goodness, I seem to be using a lot of capital letters all the sudden.) Suddenly it's actually here, almost, and it's both wonderful and terrifying. I've already been in touch with my roommates. One of them is from Sri Lanka, so every time I start to worry about homesickness and being on my own I remind myself that I won't have it nearly as bad as her. Anyway, move-in day is August 24th, and the closer it gets the more excited I'm getting. Less than a month left! Yeah OWU! Go Battling Bishops!!!

In other news: HAPPY DANCE! Today was my last shift at McDonald's until Thanksgiving break! No more morons coming up the counter and saying "Ummm, do you have anything kinda like a double cheeseburger here?"

attack of the motorcyclists

2005-07-24T17:01:00.000-04:00

The small town (population circa 4000) where I live has one claim to fame: the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. If you're a fan of auto or motorcycle racing, you just might have heard of it. When I'm more than a few counties away from home and someone asks me where I'm from, my usual response is "Lexington-which-you-probably-haven't-heard-of-but-it's-near-Mansfield-about-halfway-between-Columbus-and-Cleveland..." but every once in a while I'm interrupted with the words "Oh yeah, Lexington, where Mid-Ohio is."

So, a few times a year, when an important race is being held here, things get a little interesting. The distant whine of the race cars can be heard all over town, restaurants sprout signs saying "racing fans welcome!", traffic jams grow out of nowhere (here, a traffic jam is more than five cars lined up at a stop sign), and occasionally groups of people in logo-emblazoned Spandex shirts speaking in funny accents will pop into the McDonald's where I work, and I can only assume they're race car crews. Generally, the local population increases by quite a bit, and the police actually have something to do for a change (directing traffic-- those traffic jams are a real mess!). The only road leading into the development where my best friend lives leads off of the route to Mid-Ohio, and when a race has just let out it's almost impossible to get to her house.

This is motorcycle weekend, which is particularly interesting because the town is suddenly crawling with people riding motorcycles. McDonald's was insanely busy today. Darn race fans.

In other news: Scarlett, I'm not sure if you actually read this regularly, but if so-- HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

grief

2005-07-17T18:30:00.000-04:00

(Okay, SPOILER ALERT. I'm sorry, Patrice, don't kill me!)

No one close to me has ever died, not since I was too little to feel it fully, anyway. So oddly enough, the profoundest grief I've felt in my life has been for fictional characters.

Star Trek: Nemesis was a stupid movie, one of the worst of the Star Trek movies if not the worst. But it made me cry, and it's rare for me to cry at movies. Why? My favorite Star Trek character (favorite from The Next Generation, anyway), Data, died at the end. Of course, since I haven't watched the movie again since it first came out two or three years ago but watch ST:TNG reruns with Data regularly, it's not that big a deal anymore.

That was nothing compared to this.

I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince about half an hour ago.

I sat on my bed and cried for quite a while.

Oh, my God. AHHHHHHHHHHH. Is it silly to mourn someone who's not even real?

the internet is a straaaange place

2005-07-12T10:05:00.000-04:00

This is my post for the week, since Saturday's was rather scattered.

Yesterday I was online for quite a while talking to a friend of mine. We were talking about tacos. And fedora hats. The strange thing? I'VE NEVER MET HIM-- in person, anyway.

He found my screenname on a forum for trombone players. We're the same age and share a hobby, but he lives in another state. I don't even know what he looks like. Yet we spent half an hour last night talking about fedora hats.

I suppose my generation will be the last to remember the world before the Internet, when if you wanted to communicate with someone, you either had to see them face-to-face, call them on the phone, or (gasp!) write a snail-mail letter. Now I can talk to my roommate in Sri Lanka as easily as if she were in the next room-- without having to pay for an international phone call. The Internet is wonderful. It is also very strange.

For me, and I suspect for a lot people, sometimes it's even easier to talk about important stuff online instead of in person. You're removed from the person's reaction, can't see their face or hear their voice, and suddenly it's easy to pour out your secrets and feelings. I have a good friend who I rarely talk about anything serious with in person, just joke around a lot, but online this year I've confided in him endlessly (I had a major thing for one of his best friends, and the feeling wasn't mutual, and he kept me from going insane a lot of the time). It's just... STRANGE.

Sometimes I think I'd be a healthier, happier person if I didn't have Internet access... nah.

(insert witty title here)

2005-07-09T16:05:00.000-04:00

I have started writing a post twice now and given up on it when I decided it wasn't very interesting or even coherent. Maybe it has something to do with having just come home from an eight-hour shift at McDonald's, which is like running a marathon, only without the endorphins. (No, I've never run a marathon, but this is what is called poetic license.)

This week I got new glasses, went shopping for stuff for my dorm room and for a computer, sent in my registration form for my college classes, submitted four poems to Plum Ruby Review, and played in two concerts with the local musicians' union's summer concert band. Woo-hoo. (Hmm. The apostrophes in "musicians' union's band" gave me pause for a moment, but I believe they're correct, just funny-looking.)

Watch this space for further developments. Or not.

the angle of repose

2005-07-02T16:47:00.000-04:00

A few months ago I read a book by Wallace Stegner entitled Angle of Repose. The strange-sounding title has a double meaning: it's a mining term (one of the main characters is a mining engineer), but in the book it also refers to where you are in life when you finally stop moving, when you get where you're going, whether it's where you thought you were going or not. And it made me think.

My father (like every other little boy growing up in the 1950's) once wanted to be an astronaut. His plan was to major in engineering while doing Air Force ROTC, then become a fighter pilot, then become an astronaut. Well, he changed his major to math when he got a bad professor for his first engineering course, and he couldn't be a fighter pilot because he'd had an ulcer--just as well, or he would have been sent to Vietnam. He got married, had two kids, and got a job as a computer programmer in Arizona... then got his PhD and moved to North Dakota to become a college professor... and eventually got divorced, remarried, had another kid (me), and ended up teaching high school in Ohio. He's reached his angle of repose, I think, and it sure isn't where he thought it would be.

He had a plan once and just ended up not following it. On the other hand, I don't have a plan for my life yet. I sound like I do when I tell people that in college I want to double major in biology and environmental studies and minor in music, but I don't really. I might get my PhD. Or just my Master's. Or maybe not. I might work for the EPA or a national park or be a college professor, or who knows, I might end up making it as a writer and become a bestselling novelist, or I might do none of those things. I might get married, I might even have kids, or maybe not. I don't know, and it's a little scary. My best friend claims to have a calling to be a teacher and a mother, but I have no such thing. I wonder where on earth I'll be when I reach the angle of repose?

rejection, yum!

2005-06-25T21:28:00.000-04:00

I got my first-ever rejection letter today.

Rebecca,

Thank you for your submission of "One Night on the Subway in Berlin" to Outsider Ink. The German's have a point, American's really don't care beyond their own noses, unless they've got a personal interest in it. Although it is not quite what I am looking for, I did appreciate the chance to read your work.

Thank you for sharing your story,

Sean Meriwether, Editor,
Outsider Ink

Did you catch that?

The German's have a point, American's really don't care beyond their own noses.

That sentence contains both misplaced apostrophes (what Lynne Truss describes in Eats, Shoots & Leaves as "the greengrocer's apostrophe") AND a comma splice. Frankly, I don't want my work to appear in a publication if its editor can't even use apostrophes correctly. For crying out loud.

let the nail-biting begin

2005-05-22T18:56:00.000-04:00

I came home from a brutal eight-hour shift at McDonald's, got on the computer, and emailed the short story I wrote recently to the online literary magazine I semi-intended it for. I did it. Wow. The website said it can take up to three months to get a response, so now I wait.

The magazine is Outsider Ink, and I submitted my piece for the Author Spotlight in the fall issue. (If you happen to read the guidelines on the site you'll see that the fall issue is a "special issue" with a political slant. I make no apologies for my political opinions, but I try not to take people's politics personally, so I hope anyone reading this will extend me the same courtesy if yours happen to disagree with mine. Okay. Climbing off my soapbox now.) The truth is, I won't be crushed if I get a rejection letter (well, e-mail). I know the piece I submitted isn't going to win a Pulitzer Prize or anything, but I think it's decent, anyway. Even if it doesn't get published, I still feel like I've accomplished something just by submitting a piece of my writing for publication in the first place. This is something I've been dreaming about since I was in second grade. Now I've finally done it, and it seems surreal.

And of course, if it gets rejected, I shall try, try again.

most likely to be...

2005-05-19T15:57:00.000-04:00

My class has voted me most likely to become a politician. I have to laugh, because I'd be a lousy politician. I'm just not enough of a people person.

It's really more about how others perceive you than how you really are; for example, the girl voted "most musical" isn't any better at her respective instrument than I am at mine, she just makes a bigger deal of it. (Rather irked to discover that my best friend voted for her as most musical over me. Ah well.) But everyone tells me they nominated me for this because... I argue a lot. So... I'm seen as the most argumentative girl in my class? Not sure how to take that.

We were supposed to dress up and be photographed for the yearbook. I dressed nice and made a sign that says "Rebecca for President," and the guy most likely to be a politician, a friend of mine, wore a pin-striped suit and a top hat and had a little American flag. We had fun with it. But it's always kind of strange to get a glimpse of how others see you, and discover it doesn't mesh with your conception of yourself at all.

does this happen to anyone else?

2005-05-15T17:20:00.000-04:00

Today I was flipping through a book my mom brought home. It was a novel told through emails and whatnot, interesting really, and near the end was one character's mP3 playlist, including a lot of songs by someone named Dar Williams. I'd never heard of him before.

Then I got on here and was randomly clicking through blogs. I found one where someone was talking about their favorite musician... Dar Williams.

These strange coincidences happen to me so much. I'll read something about a book, or an author, or a musician, what have you, that I've never heard of before, and then suddenly I see it everywhere. Like Temple Grandin. She's this autistic lady who does stuff with cows. Long story. I read an article about her in a magazine, and then suddently one of my favorite authors was talking about her on her blog. How do these things happen?

...

In other news: any Smothers Brothers fans out there? Last night I was standing close enough to Tom Smothers to smell his tobacco fumes. They were performing with our local symphony orchestra, and some youth orchestra people, myself included, were also playing on one song. Somehow we all ended up backstage at the same time. Anyway, the Smothers Brothers are really funny. If you haven't heard of them, you should check them out. "Remember the story about George Washington and the cherry tree? George Washington said, I cannot tell a lie. Richard Nixon said, I cannot tell the truth. Clinton said, I cannot tell the difference. And George W. Bush, well, Bush got lost looking for the cherry tree."

why i love my trombone

2005-05-12T18:31:00.000-04:00

Next Tuesday, our symphonic band has its spring concert, at which I will be performing "The Blue Bells of Scotland"-- one of the awesomest solos ever written for trombone. Earlier this year I played it for a solo contest and recieved the highest possible rating, which was pretty darn cool. When I was preparing for that contest I was practicing about forty minutes a day, and even practiced EVERY DAY of Christmas break, including Christmas, in order to get down the very difficult finale. (Double tonguing, if anyone knows what that is. A long passage of double tonguing.)

Since then, though, my motivation has been lagging in the practicing department. Call it senioritis or burn-out or whatever. But my birthday is coming up, and in looking for things I'd like to ask for, I came across a couple CDs on Amazon. One of Carl Fontana, one of J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding (and I'm perfectly aware that non-trombone geeks won't know who they are, and I'm sorry about that, but they're great jazz trombonists). Browsing through them and listening to clips of music--including a solo that I did with our school jazz band at a concert last week--had the effect of getting me fired up again. It just reminded me of why I love music, and this instrument in particular, so much. Music is the most important part of who I am.

So, off to practice, and I wish equal joy to anyone else who's been in need of motivation lately.

making every word count

2005-05-09T15:07:00.000-04:00

In English today we read a short story by Joseph Conrad, "Lagoon." It's the only thing I've ever read by him, and I was surprised to learn that English was his third language, after Polish and Russian. Third. I can barely imagine writing a short story in my second language, German, much less learning and writing in yet another language, much less writing as well as Conrad.

I found it interesting. Reading it with no background info wouldn't cause you to think "Aha, this was written by someone not native to English," but knowing that, I did notice a certain... deliberateness in his writing. The words he chooses, the construction of his sentences, all have an almost mathematical precision. He does what every good writer is supposed to: makes every word count. I think that writing in a foreign language might be a good exercise to force one to think about one's words more. Pity I'm so out of practice with the German.

Okay, I was going somewhere with this but now I'm not sure where... have a nice day, everyone.

catch-all

2005-05-01T17:35:00.000-04:00

Seen on the bottom of a restaurant receipt: "Whole Half Rotisserie Chickens Available For Carry-Out!" Quite apart from the fact that capitalizing every word gives me a headache, I can't work out just what a whole half chicken is.

Flipping through blogs with the "Next Blog" button can be entertaining. I found one about sunglasses, and another one about fibromyalgia.

I am also entertained by the fact that the Blogger spell-check doesn't know the word "blog."

Finally, I should add that I am at long last starting work tomorrow. I am also taking three AP tests this week... my brain hurts just thinking about it.

to recap...

2005-04-28T17:57:00.000-04:00

1) After turning in my application to McDonald's, I let a decent amount of time pass and then called to check on its status. After making three phone calls to various locations and wrestling with an automated voicemail system, I was told that my application had been lost-- which it hadn't been, as I discovered when the manager called and had me come in for an interview.

2) After I was hired, I had to get a work permit. The first time I took it in to the restaurant to get the employer's part filled out, the woman left one of the mandatory fields blank, so I had to go back a second time.

3) When I finally got my work permit done and went in to do paperwork, the manager told me orientation would be an hour and a half long. It was actually supposed to be two hours long. It took two hours and ten minutes. My parents started getting worried when I didn't get home when I said I would.

4) Having been oriented, I'm currently on my third over-the-phone attempt to actually get put on the schedule. "Oh, we're really busy right now... let me take your phone number and call you right back," said the manager... two and a half hours ago.

Applying to college wasn't this hard. All my parents have to say on the subject is "get used to it, this is what the real world is like," which isn't helpful.

AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGHH.

i'm lovin' it

2005-04-24T11:45:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow I go to orientation for my first-ever job: I'll be joining the one in eight Americans who have slaved away beneath those famous golden arches, asking crabby customers if they want fries with that. Yay.

My friends keep asking why I'm not going to work at a bookstore or something else slightly more cerebral, but hey, one has to begin at the bottom. Besides, Mickey D's has flexible hours, which is a big plus.

The funny thing is, I don't even know what my salary is going to be. I never thought to ask. Money will be very nice, but for me this isn't about the money so much as the experience. I didn't want to go off to college as the pampered little rich girl who never had to get a job because her parents gave her all the spending money she needed. I wanted a taste of the real world.

The real world turns out to make very little sense. It took three phone calls back and forth to various locations trying to figure out whether they'd lost my application, two trips into the restaurant trying to find a manager competent to fill out the employer's portion of the work permit, much other grappling with bureaucratic nightmares, and a partridge in a pear tree, but I am finally about to start work.

Wish me luck...

if a blog falls in a wood...

2005-04-19T16:49:00.000-04:00

It occurs to me that posting to a blog no one reads is rather like the message to aliens they sent on that one space probe. Voyager, I believe it was? With the record of "hello" in a zillion languages and the maps to Earth? Sent in the faint hope that something intelligent might come across it someday? I'm sending my musings out into the far reaches of the Internet, armed with little satellite dishes and what have you. Maybe someone will read this eventually. Maybe not.

Or maybe aliens will come try to destroy my weird little planet, a lá Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Who knows?

So! Benedict XVI! I was pulling for an Urban, myself.

mmm... blogging

2005-04-18T18:48:00.000-04:00

Today is the aniversary of the opening of the first laundromat in America. It is also Clarence Darrow's birthday. Most importantly, it is the date of the founding of... my blog. Scary. I intend to fiddle with the formatting eventually, but this will do for now.

I intend to post here about once a week. Topics will include whatever the heck is in my head, which is often related to music or writing. Or random things like Laundromat Day. I suppose it's likely that no one will actually read this, but hey, I think I'm a good writer. I think I'm entertaining. Maybe there's someone out there who will agree with me. ::crawls away to massage ego::