tis the season

oh, thanksgiving. a time when, traditionally, one is supposed to give thanks (or plot future land theft from the indians, whichever works out better). so, in no particular order, here are some of the things i'm thankful for this year: stuffing, my family, music, sweater coats, my annual reread of poisonwood, my friends, cookie and lulu, this picture:

and xabi alonso, disney movies, and the internet:

and now i'm going to sleep. hope you all had great thanksgivings!

said the joker to the thief

today's title comes from all along the watchtower, originally by bob dylan and covered by every decent musician of the last 20 years. if you don't have it already, download it.

i've been a bad, bad blogger. let's just call april the month of bad blogging and leave it at that. and i'd like to think that i'll make it up to you next month but...prom. and AP exams. so my blogging will probably remain sporadic until at least early june.

so, before i talk about anything else, i think i'll update you on my life. yes, i know - you've all been waiting on the edge of your seats for this.

the highs? b day early release turning into the Hijack Empty Classrooms to Watch The Amazing Race on a Promethean Board Club. getting fours and fives on my econ and gov practice exams. new books. new makeup. forgetting lunch at home and having the momster's assistant drop off robeks and chocolate covered strawberries. glee. bones. kings of leon tour dates being announced. having audrey hepburn on a shirt.

the lows: calc. physics. homework. ap exams. realtors and buyers and sellers being in and out of the house at all hours of the day and night shrieking things like "the contract hasn't been ratified yet!" and "what's it's mris number?" and "oh my god will you all shut up?"

...okay, maybe that last one was me. but in all fairness it was extremely annoying having to listen to real estate talk the one time i actually finished my homework and went to bed early.

minor complaints aside, i've been feeling pretty lucky lately. maybe it was the unexpected smoothie windfall today, or the even more unexpected side-trip to tyson's to get this:

and this (in air guitar):

or maybe it's just that i'm glad not to be a rape victim with multiple personalities (see my last post). lately i've been thinking that life? it's been pretty good to most of us so far.

i've kept a list of quotes as long as i can remember. some of the notebooks are so old the pages are actually starting to yellow (don't worry - the glitter gel pen remains as bright as ever) and i actually have to squint to render my oh-so-lovely-hearts-and-stars-over-the-letter-i middle school handwriting legible. i looked through a few of them last night and found it ironic that two of the first things i wrote down could be summed up like this: great art comes from great suffering.

i haven't suffered. not really. if anything, i've been stupidly, ridiculously lucky in life. i might complain about the parents (a lot) or school (even more) but...i got parents who spoiled and loved me. maybe a little too much, actually, since if they'd just had the decency to deprive me a little bit i might be a little more prepared for life in the Real World, but i digress. and school? well, we all complain, but deep down most of us like it. for one thing, none of us would know each other without it. and for another thing, none of us would be reading, writing, or blogging without the wonderful benefits of education - something millions of children in the world still go without.

so maybe i'm not yet capable of creating great art. well, i already knew that - why do you think i'm going to college? and maybe i'm one of those people who you can look at and say, "well, nothing really bad has ever happened to her." i've got thinky thoughts nonetheless.

banana will be blogging about this pretty soon, so i'm not going to delve into this too much (right now) but -

remember when my lit class was reading the poisonwood bible and i dragged out my poor, defeated little copy from freshman year and went back to being in love with it? i don't think i ever blogged this quote, but it's one of the first that i highlighted:

According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame match to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw. At age five I raised my good left hand in Sunday school and used a month's ration of words to point out this problem to Miss Betty Nagy. Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn?

it's a question we all have at one point or another, and i don't think we will ever know answer. god isn't something you can understand; faith isn't a cheat-sheet to all the universe's mysteries, just your place in it.  in other words, there are just some things that we aren't supposed to know because we're human (hopefully). we are supposed to question and argue and grow.

oh, growth. it's a complicated word. for most people, it carries pleasant connotations of preteen growth spurts and too-short pajama bottoms and passing average height. the rest of us mostly hear it and feel bitter. sometimes we even use it to talk about moral growth. sometime like today, i mean.

like it or not, the world has changed a bit since the inklings roamed the streets of oxford smoking pipe tobacco and having Serious Theological Debates. we are, in the words of one lovely new york times article, a generation raised on "pulp and not substance" (if anyone else read that article, mind sending me the link? i never emailed it to myself and i want to reread it). there are people whose only goal in life is to be famous or date someone wealthy, and instead of being the exception, one only has to look at mtv, e!, tlc, or any other television channel besides cnn and fox, to see that they're becoming the rule. these are supposed to be our role models and peers.

basically, we're screwed. see will smith for details:

so what do we do? are we supposed to sit around all day and contemplate life? it's doable, i guess, especially if we add cigarettes and fedoras and french garrets in paris into the mix. we can all swan around looking wan and miserable and contemplating important questions about life, god, death, and the universe. (if you get that song reference, you get a cookie). for true authenticity we should try absinthe and practice sighing asthmatically. oh, and bonus points if you die of consumption.

or, we join the mtv-worshipping, twilight-loving, abercrombie- and hollister-wearing, d-list wannabes that seem to make up half our generation. instructions include buying an edward cullen poster, listening to nothing but top 40 music, and having no original thoughts or ideas.

i don't know about you, but i kind of hate both of those options. i'm not a genius, though - i'm not entirely sure what's behind door number three. i guess that this whole post has actually been one long, rambling, grammatically incorrect way of asking - who am i? what am i? and where do i go from here?

because most of us reading this have the same source material, if you will. we're all lucky. we're all pretty smart or just plain pretty, i love you all for being good-looking, not that i'm shallow or anything. and as soon as we entered this world shrieking with all of our considerable lung power, things started influencing us - family and friends, religion and pop culture. literature. music. the woman you bumped into on the street and the homeless person you pretended not to see. school and work and ideas and plans. that vague picture in the sky that alternately looks like a castle or a prison but is always, always labelled The Future, in capital letters that block out everything else. falling back on someone else's words is easy, so i'll let chuck palahniuk say it better: "nothing of me is original. i am the combined effort of everyone i have ever known."

so i guess that's where i'm going to leave off. mostly because those are the conclusions i managed to reach in my allotted time on the think thought train today. after that i got distracted by the momster's clients offering me cookies and ice cream cake (it was great) and makeup and books and making silly allusions to books everyone has read but which i'll quote anyway. my relationship with life is very, very complicated (take that facebook).

and i can never leave a post without sharing music, so here's lissie's latest:

i will never have children, or: two tales of bad parenting.

it's been a while since i blogged. sorry about that. these past few days have been eventful. s-la, meggo, jenibean, and i went to see alice friday night. it was awesome. johnny depp was predictably unfortunate looking but the CGI and alice's costuming fully made up for that. helena bonham carter kind of stole the show, but that's to be expected. and i just got home from a birthday party/sleepover at jodie's, so that explains last night's missing blog. i'm not going to elaborate on either of those events, so if you really want details you should badger s-la to blog about them.

because you (all eight of you) are such conscientious followers of my blog, i'm sure you're wondering what prevented me from blogging thursday night or saturday afternoon. surely i was spending all my leisure time cackling away about your rachel-blog-deprivation.

well, if you thought that, you'd be wrong. i now present to you two tales of epic mommery. be warned, they aren't for the faint of heart.

let's begin with thursday, shall we?

on thursday i received a text from the momster asking me to go with her to her office and do real estate things for her since her assistant was out. i, being the wonderful person that i am, agreed. however, instead of going directly to her office her client texted and said she wanted to meet us at a bar. okay, we said. so we went to the bar. and then the momster realized she needed to pick up extra pens and things since, you know, they aren't really supplied in bars and restaurants, so she left me to order some snacks and headed to staples - where her client called, changed her mind, remembered that she had to be at some play for her kid in an hour, and asked the momster to meet at the office after all. crunched for time, the momster left staples and went to the office - leaving me, a platter of the best wings i've ever had, and my annotated copy of the poisonwood bible alone in a bar. alone.

it was traumatic. did you know that people hit on you at bars? even when you're munching on wings and reading your book and clearly projecting the 'i'm underage, go away' vibe. some of those people were old! like mid-twenties old. and buying drinks. and not even the happy, fizzy coca cola-type of drinks. it was horrible.

i'm thinking i shouldn't have yelled at the momster about it, though, since now she's on this 'my one and only child is going to college' bonding kick. we spent all of yesterday shopping. my feet and arms felt like they were going to fall off by the end of it. and then we left the mall too late to come home and still make it to jodie's on time, so i had to buy a new toothbrush and set of pajama bottoms and sleeping bag. that sleeping bag is the silliest thing, it's huge. at least it doesn't resemble my old sleeping bag - that one's shaped like a coffin and 'contours to the body' according to the north face sales people.

anyway, the bonding lead to me basically getting an entire spring wardrobe. here, check out the bounty:

in case you couldn't tell, the rainbow bra was my favorite purchase. getting it was awful, though - it involved seeing a librarian in victoria's secret. buying things. i can't bring myself to elaborate any further.  

we ended up getting manicures, too. the woman who did mine was pretty cray cray - all she did was grunt and move my hand and watch the chinese drama on the television behind me. she did an awesome job, though, so now my nails look like this:

i don't have a weird number-shaped birthmark on my hand, either - i wrote someone's locker combination on my hand in fine-tipped sharpie and now it won't wash off. i scrubbed and scrubbed with the little heated towels and in the shower yesterday and it just wouldn't go. i guess i'll just have to wait for it to fade. 

and just to round out this little trio of grainy iphone photos, here's lulu. i think she looks like a squirrel in this picture, what do you think?

i tried to get cookie to pose, since he's the nice dog, but he doesn't like cameras. oh well.

i'm listening to four winds by bright eyes, mostly because s-la said she didn't like it. clearly s-la is a deranged cat-lover with catastrophic brain damage since all sane people like the song.

be like the squirrel, girl

today's title comes from little acorns by the white stripes. i love this song (and am listening to it right now). it's also my haircut theme song. i'd explain why, but you should really just listen to it.

anyway, my day started out pretty badly and has steadily gotten better. expect a giddy post at 11:59 about how i won the lottery or met daniel craig.

to begin with, i had to do all 91 of my government vocabulary words in econ and yearbook because. well, there is no good reason for it, i just forgot the list at school yesterday. oh, and our spreads were due in yearbook. and i had a giant government test.

those were all the bad things. the good? singing telegrams, especially watching teachers get them. finishing my homework and yearbook spread on time. realizing that the government test was insultingly easy and filling my free response answers with snarky comments and stick figure drawings. finishing highlighting quotations for my colonialism thread in the poisonwood bible.

oh, and i got a haircut.

you're totally expecting me to post a picture, i can tell. but i won't. why?

well, it all starts at 2:30 this afternoon. which, in case you were wondering, is when i got the text from the family i babysit for telling me they wouldn't be needing me after all. in other words, i'd cleared my entire evening for nothing. so, i did what any sensible person would - i went out for a haircut and pedicure session with the momster. also added in was eyebrow shaping, which - wow. no wonder hers always look perfect, the woman she uses is an artist. an artiste even, with all the silly french pretension that implies. she made the pain fun. and yes, i am aware of how crazy that sounds.

anyway, i went home with my newly short hair, and did what any sensible person would do after a few hours of self-pampering when faced with an empty house: i turned my music up loud, swiped some pore cleanser across my cheekbones like a linebacker, and held a pants-off dance off across my dining room floor. which eventually descended into a slightly more toned down night of blogging/texting/waiting for the half an hour required for pore cleanser to be on my face to elapse.

and then the doorbell rang.

i, expecting it to be the momster returning with snacks, cluelessly opened the door. only to be faced with Cute Boy. Cute Boy turned out to be the nephew of the people i babysit for, and came bearing an apology cake from his aunt for canceling on me on such short notice (apparently Cute Boy's family dropped in for a surprise visit). my reaction?

this:

like, i'm not even kidding. it was horrible. i hate my life, okay?

luckily things started looking up. mostly because of the bookstore, snacktime, and newly cleansed pores.

ETA: remember how i said i'd be posting around midnight with something awesome? well, i found it. enjoy:

la lala la

did you know that barbara kingsolver researched for twenty years before finishing the poisonwood bible? that's a pretty daunting number. so is 433. as in 4 minutes, 33 seconds of silence. this was a buzzer club question a few weeks ago - none of us knew the answer. it popped up on a blog i follow today and i thought i'd share the link with you.

(heartless (kanye west cover) - the fray)

yesterday was fun. it probably shouldn't have been since now i have a ton of homework to finish before tomorrow, but i don't really regret it. i should probably get over this whole procrastinating thing before college.

speaking of college, what's with all of the tiny schools no one's ever heard of still sending application emails? deadlines have passed and i'm clearly not interested. i still don't know how exactly they all got my email (i never checked that box on the sat that says it's okay for collegeboard to send out your information) but it's really annoying. i hate that i can't check my email without deleting thirty billion college emails first.

(stateline - butch walker)

this poem has been on my mind lately. i've always been a big dylan thomas fan, but i always stayed closer to refusal to mourn the death of a child by fire in london and things of that sort than poems like this. i suppose it's because when i first started reading his poetry i thought this was more literal than the others. and, like all little teenies making their first forays unaccompanied into the wide world of poetry, i was in search of something a little more ephemeral. it's always more gratifying to one's own ego to try and wrestle with the 'big' topics and forget that, to quote l. m. montgomery (again), 'all things great are wound up with all things little'.

(the little things - colbie caillat)

i've managed to work out some this weekend, but i'm thinking the bulk of getting back into shape is going to have to wait until after midterms. sadly, i can only study (or read, for that matter) when i'm munching on something. let's face it - i'm a grazer. and it is horrifyingly easy to go through an entire pint of ice cream while reviewing econ. at least the shape of the output and total revenue curves of a firm in the short-term will always be grouped together with the taste of half-baked ice cream. i just hope my stomach doesn't pull that embarrassing grr-argh-i-am-godzilla-feed-me routine during the exam. those things are long and we can't even eat in that classroom because of some stupid kid with peanut allergies. in other words, i won't even be able to have breakfast/graze during the two hour long economics exam.

if i had a kid who has one of those obnoxious food-in-class-preventing allergies, i'd at least have the decency to home school it so the other kids didn't have to suffer. geez (oh man).

(typical - mutemath)

anyway, here's your poisonwood quote of the day. i've been picking these by random - letting the book fall open and typing whatever i highlighted in round one, which was the fun stuff, not the colonialism or adah-related quotes. today's quote could kind of fall under any of those topics, though, so i guess you lucked out:

s(a)tu(r)d(a)y

so my today was eventful...not. ha, sorry, i was feeling pretty nineties today.

(all the small things - blink-182)

it started with breakfast. breakfast, in this case, took place around noon and involved a quick trip to the drive-thru starbucks in ashburn. in my hot pink, hello kitty pajamas. unfortunately the drive-thru was closed and i had to get out of the car to get my caffeine fix. in my hot pink, hello kitty pajamas.

listen, kids, this is why you should just say no when someone offers you coffee. addiction is not the way, it leads to all sorts of unspeakable horrors and humiliations. also, you spend a lot of time on the treadmill working off those darn empty calories.

(a funny thing - penguin prison)

anyway, after that we went to the post office and sent some stuff off to various relatives with birthdays this month and to the momster's mysterious work-related people. while leaving the parking lot, i had time to realize my dog really is the cutest creature in existence. just look at his little face! and his smooshy little nose!

(come save - sarah reeves)

after that i got down to work. i've made a good dent in my giant AP lit exam review packet and made some calc formula flashcards. luckily we're getting a formula sheet for the physics test, so i don't have to worry about that. i finally printed out the eleventy billion and one pages of review packets my english teacher put online, too, and started reading them over. it was pretty boring, so i was pretty happy when the momster brought down the lovely bowl of chopped cherries and cookie dough ice cream pictured above as a mid-studying snack. clearly that whole 'get fit in the new year' resolution can be deferred to february.

(breakin' - the all-american rejects)

i snacked, then studied a little more, and finally gave up and started rereading the poisonwood bible again. i know, i know. it's probably not necessary. i rationalized it to myself by figuring that i'd be so familiar with this book come exam time that all the essays would be a breeze. i'll just write about nothing but poisonwood, who needs those other three books?

anyway, by now my copy of the book looks like one giant block of highlighting. see, on the first few rereads, i just highlighted the parts that made me laugh or seemed important. since then i've been highlighting the bits that talk about colonialism or adah's character, but it's all been with the same highlighter, so you get pages that look like the one in the picture. one of these days i'll learn to color code.

at least it was fun to go through and see all the things i highlighted on my first reread. here's one of my favorites:

"With all due respect," my father said, "this is not the time or the place for that kind of business. Why don't you sit down now, and announce your plans after I've finished with the sermon? Church is not the place to vote anyone in or out of public office."

"Church is the place for it," said Tata Ndu. "Ici, maintenant, we are making a vote for Jesus Christ in the office of personal God, Kilanga village."

Father did not move for several seconds. 

Tata Ndu looked at him quizzically. "Forgive me, I wonder if I have paralyzed you?"

- Leah Price, The Poisonwood Bible 

picking up where we left off, or a post in three parts

part the first: idol.

(tv family - the rocket summer)

the good: simon and kara and posh.
the bad: recognizing the beegees song which played during the auditions. oh, mother, will you never stop ruining my life?

part the second: they call me ishmael rae rae rachel.
(our life is not a movie or maybe - okkervil river)

"That's a lovely idea, Diana," said Anne enthusiastically. "Living so that you beautify your name, even if it wasn't beautiful to begin with . . . making it stand in people's thoughts for something so lovely and pleasant that they never think of it by itself."

- L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

aren't names strange? think about it - everything we are and were and will be, all summed up in two or three words. in the course of my admittedly short life i've wished to be called violet, cordelia, ray (or rae), princess serena/sailor moon, and, according to the endlessly amusing shameful second grade journal i found a short time ago, lulu. yes, like that lulu. at least the origins or her name aren't so mysterious. i always did wonder how we went from calling her chocolate chip to lulu.

i am feeling distinctly poisonwoody today. and, yes, i am perfectly aware that poisonwoody isn't an adjective. it's a noun, referring to a state of being in which one's mind has been invaded by the spirit of vengeful AP literature teachers who have assigned piles and piles of novel-related homework. to take the positive view of things, at least it's only the homework and not the actual class that's painful. my discussion group is focused on adah, who was my favorite. even though i'm finally learning to appreciate rachel, i don't think i would have been able to cope with discussing her in class - how would i know if someone was talking about me instead of the character? i tell you, sharing a name with a main character in english class is hard work. i think all english classes should only read books about people named karrenhapuch or hermione or aya.

part the third: them furry doggies and other random thoughts.
(passed your place, saw your car, thought of you - butch walker)

in no particular order, these are some of today's most random thoughts, which were considered too off topic to be enshrined in Notey the Second (s-la is a slacker who has yet to mention Notey the First's retirement):

1. do you ever feel like your dogs are the cutest in the whole world? like, you know that you're probably biased, since other people clearly are when they're talking about their dogs being the cutest creatures in existence, but then you look at their fuzzy little faces and think 'but my dog, now - my dog's special'. 
2. i really want to sit all those nerds who dress in too many layers of hot topic and spend all their free time watching anime and playing video games down and impart a Very Important Life Lesson to them: doing those things doesn't make you unique, or witty, or interesting. it makes you just like every other nerd doing those exact same things. quit trying to pretend you're a special little snowflake or you're super misunderstood. 
3. i'm wearing pants and even though there are giant holes in the knees, it's just weird. i'm thinking it'll be tights and a dress or sweats tomorrow. 
4. it's time to repaint my nails. i really want to use one of the colors from that stupid nail polish names blog. too bad i don't know where to find any of them. 

my day without caffeine

this picture is pretty hilarious, but it also sums up my day kind of perfectly. that black sign with the lovely inspirational message (oh, old testament, how you slay me) was my morning. my morning without caffeine. we ran out of soda and i missed coffee since i was in detention/hell. after that (and my nap) things started looking up when the momster picked up more caffeinated everythings at costco today. it was warm and we didn't feel like waiting for takeout to arrive so we stopped by wendy's on the way home. unfortunately wendy's is right next to the drive-thru starbucks in ashburn. which is where the happy, uplifting 'haha all the bad parts of today were just a joke' part came in:

but decisions? however was i going to make them? after all, i'm a libra, i can't be expected to know my own mind. eventually i decided to go with the diet soda and slap The Drink in the freezer so it wouldn't get all melty and disgusting. and then i hopped on the treadmill for an hour and a half to make up for the sudden influx of calories, with the uplifting thought of a Frapp At The End Of The Tunnel/Mile to look forward to. (in other news: 6:58 mile! how? i have no idea. seriously, i never run for speed on a treadmill, but man oh man was it rewarding to see it all lit up. but then i had to slow down and pace myself for the rest of my hour and a half and that was hard, so i think i'll stick to slow and steady from now on).

i'm tucking into my frapp now, and feeling extremely well-rested and healthy and other fit magazine adjectives - for some reason one of those was in the car this morning. neither the momster nor i reads it. we figure the car fairies left it for us as a gentle hint to get our butts in shape.

we got to play/have lunch in alexandria today. i found a likely looking thrift store but didn't go in - the momster does not approve of secondhand clothes and refuses to go in with me. also, i just typed the last two paragraphs without looking at the computer screen and had fewer typos than i normally do, which just goes to prove this theory i have that most of my typos are a result of second guessing myself and going 'no that can't be right' and changing it, only to have the little red line pop up under the word in safari.

oh, and there's this:

plenty of people have already reviewed it (and they're professionals, so their opinions are both more annoying and eloquently phrased) so i won't bother. all i can say is this song makes me feel like summer. don't you just want sunshine and bare feet in the grass and car rides with the top down and your hair flying around your face? because i do. i was kind of bitter at the time, but now i'm glad my poisonwood bible project topic isn't the natural world because i'd probably just end up making a mix or a music video of animal collective songs and failing. somehow i don't think my teacher would be all that pleased with a justification of 'but they make me feel like doing nature dances and becoming a hippie or turning into a sprite or a tree or a wood nymph' in lieu of a real project. darn it.

"please don't say cahoots anymore, it's disturbing."

long time no see, blogger. a long time for us, anyway. homework and inevitable sleep-marathons brought on by chronic insomnia contrived to separate us last night.

we had a two hour delay this morning because of the snow. i was pretty annoyed, actually, since that meant i had to wait til 2:50 to leave. at least we've worked it out in gov so that the next time we have a delay we'll have d lunch and be able to leave at 2:20, which is a little bit better. still - delays. blegh.

i'm rereading poisonwood, this time for references to colonialism. i'm actually pretty excited for my lit project - after all, colonialism. i'm sensing an opportunity to take tons of pretty pictures and maybe even trek to williamsburg and get some re-enactors to post for me. also, on a fourth (fifth? i don't even know any more, but the first time i read it was the summer before sophomore year) reread rachel is somewhat more tolerable. at the very least i can now appreciate the inadvertent hilarity of her perspective. man oh man!

i'm forcing myself to take the writing of Untitled Book slowly. when i binge-write my writing usually takes a hit in quality, so slow. slow and steady wins the race against that darn rabbit. i'm not entirely sure why one would race a rabbit in the first place, but i mean for my book to win the race anyway.

the gilmore girls episode where paris loses her editorship of the yale daily news and rory takes over is on right now. it's on my favorite scene right now. i'd describe it for you, but i think it'd be better for all of us if you just watched it instead:

to all of you who've never seen this show - start watching. aren't you feeling inspired now?

i'm thinking of reorganizing the communist book collective. i really want to read st. augustine's the city of god, but i don't feel like i'll understand it completely unless i have someone to talk it over with and make me read it slowly. anyone in? as communists we are welcoming of all new readers.

oh, and i'm listening to lisztomania by phoenix.

let's just begin this post on a happy note

because you know that a first-monday-back-at-school-in-over-sixteen-days post will not be filled with many happymaking facts.

so, fact #1: i am actually ridiculously, unironically happy about the fact that i managed to discover - and fill my itunes top 25 - with bat for lashes and phoenix and the dirty projectors (although this one's only because of mark hoppus's music blog) long before pretentious indie music blogs started featuring them on their year-end roundups.

fact #2: the new blogger dashboard draft thing? is awesome. if i'd had my way if s-la hadn't made me get one of these things i'd still be on livejournal or tumblr, which are both much easier to use (and have communities for basically everything) so it's nice to see google catching up. you go blogger, coco.

fact #3: i've officially completed my reread of the poisonwood bible, just in time for class tomorrow. that makes the fourth time i've read it. the multiple points of view are still so well done as to make you feel you fail at life and/or writing. rachel is sadly still a moron. i foresee this being a fun unit in lit.

oh, and the best news of all? i've got a full scholarship to my preferred tiny safety school. which is, you know, exciting. at the very least i'm no longer feeling super-stressed, so hopefully i'll actually be able to keep my new year's resolution of zen this year.

and now for the bad news:

this writing-a-story thing is highly complicated. i'm afraid i'm going to have to chop a good chunk of what i wrote during my all-night writing binge. i adore some bits of it but it just isn't doing anything to further the plot and if i keep it the pace will drag. oh well. i'm hoping after about fifteen years and compulsive rewriting this might actually turn out decently. like let-people-read-this decent, even. one can only hope.

i've updated the bloglist, too. it's tiny right now - a few of the most recent adds to the old one and two new songs. well, i'm not sure if they count as two separate songs since kid cudi's the prayer samples the funeral by band of horses. i love the original and the not-quite-a-remix, though, so they both went it. also - and you'll probably be able to tell this by the lyrics - both of those songs have been my theme for what little of The Book With No Name that i've written so far. oh and right now i'm listening to holdin' on together by phoenix.

ugh, i have to go back to my homework now. i'd rant about that, too, but gina and jenibean have both done a better job of that, so just read their posts instead.

here, i'll leave you with something vaguely inspirational. or i assume it's inspirational since when i look at it now i mostly just laugh uncontrollably, since when i was a tiny wee widdle emo rachel and had a myspace and a xanga and still had an aim screenname to post away messages to (oh, the bad old days) this was one of my deep and insightful posts. it's good to know that, no matter how old and grown up you may feel, some things never change: