Winner!

Just verified my 50,000+ words on NaNoWriMo and feeling a sense of accomplishment that should not be this bloated considering that I did not physically win anything. I did, however, get this spiffy image:

Isn’t that spiffy?

Funny thing is, my novel isn’t finished. At most I would say it’s 60% complete. So this accomplishment is even less valuable seeing as how nothing actually got finished except reaching some arbitrary number the rulers at The Office of Letters and Light (yeah, that’s really what it’s called) chose on some cold frosty morning.

And yet I feel just awesome about it. That’s right, awesome. Because ever since I was a kid I wanted to write a novel, and yet I only dabbled in temporary fanfiction and poetry because a novel was just so damn intimidating. Have you seen novels? They have hundreds of pages and thousands upon thousands of words! Who wouldn’t be afraid of trying to start that monster?

NaNoWriMo, with its utter lack of physical prizes, official acknowledgement, or publication, has done more for the writer in me than my numerous years as an amateur writer could ever have. I don’t know what it was that excited me so much. The pep talks? The write-ins (that I never went to)? The chance to meet other writers in the area? No, none of those really held much for me; I never took a liking to pep talks, social gatherings are a pain, and who wants to sit around with a bunch of strangers talking about their own books?`

Somehow, in some strange, magical fashion, the purpose of this month struck a chord in me without any external factors and drove me to furiously hash out word after word, page after page, until I reached that simple number. I look at the over 100 pages of writing I’ve accomplished and now a novel doesn’t feel so daunting. Hell, the first Harry Potter book was only 76,940 words. I am so almost there!

Sure, I have massive editing to do and probably need to cut out a few unnecessary characters and twist the plot around a little… but that’s for later. For now, I gloat in taking down a beast I thought I could never master. Cry uncle, ya blasted demon!

Not to mention I just stumbled upon the application FocusWriter: why fate has so cruelly shown me this wonderful word processor at the *end* of NaNoWriMo baffles me, but at least now I have an awesome application for my future novels. One of which I’ve… already started.. ^^;;

See you at next year’s NaNoWriMo! I will definitely be participating again in order to get my spiffy little winner icon.

 

One liners part 2

To truly appreciate this you must realize that my dad cannot navigate his own computer, and must have all folders separately shortcutted onto his desktop or he will never find it. And don’t even mention keyboard shortcuts. So, when I walk downstairs and find him looking up boxing match highlights on YouTube, all by himself, I immediately think:

Ah, welcome, dear Father, to the modern age; we have cookies.

They grow up so fast. Someone grab me a hanky.

 

Unending holidays

So it’s the weekend of Thanksgiving, we’ve shipped my little brother back to the confines of his dorm, leftover turkey pot pies are baking in the oven, the house is on fire outside with icicle lights, the tree is up and ornament..ed… and Christmas carols are making their way onto my piano. Man, I can play a mean Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy. Ahh, holidays. You smell that in the air?

It’s the scent of panic.

Holidays? Holidays?! You mean it’s time to make vacation time and funds to meet out of state family and buy presents make a gift list for people to potentially buy presents for but probably end up just making a shit ton of cookies for them and plan Christmas events at church alongside finding time (and more money) to go snowboarding and hang out with all the people coming back to the state and grab a boyfriend to kiss on New Year’s?

Okay, you’ve caught me, I’ve never really done the New Year’s kiss thing. Always seemed kinda… odd. What if you messed up your timing and started making out too early and suddenly you have to take a breath right when the clock struck 12? Or maybe you’re in such a rush to get to that fresh New Year kiss that you end up butting heads and one of you gets a bloody nose? Or what if the ball dropping on TV is like two seconds slower than your watch which is three seconds faster than your cellphone; which do you follow? There are far too many factors to take into consideration!! Not to mention, breakup rates are highest the 2 weeks before Christmas, so you probably won’t have a boyfriend by New Year’s anyway. Shucks.

Back on topic: Thanksgiving is officially the kick start of the ridiculously long and over hyped holiday season. You find yourself dozing off in a warm and fuzzy food coma, and the next thing you know you’re trapped in between two middle aged women who are tearing off limbs at the nearest Black Friday sale, stocking up on gifts for people they probably only see annually and spoiled children that haven’t believed in Santa Clause for years and probably borrow money from their parents to buy their parents’ gifts, if at all.

I’m not harping on the holidays; Thanksgiving is nice, Christmas is cheery, and New Years is refreshing, if not the deadline of false hopes and promises. But do they have to be so back to back? Thanksgiving turkey and Christmas ham and New Year’s champagne could probably be taken in a single pill without you noticing the difference. Within the span of a few weeks the home magazines are changing interior decorations from brown and red to red and green to black and gold and then we get pink (Valentine’s) and green (St. Patrick’s) and yellow (Easter) and argh TASTE THE RAINBOW (…Mardi Gras?).

On the flip side, July, August, and September are awesome months, not just because they bring the nostalgic promise of summer vacation, but because there’s just that one holiday (fourth of July) at the beginning, then three months of major holiday free bliss. The only theme in shopping malls is either SUMMER SAVINGS or BACK TO SCHOOL SALE, both of which are not lit up by bright colorful lights across every pole and shelf on the street. Not only that, it’s relaxing.

Here in the dead of winter when the rest of nature is rightfully sleeping away, it’s as if humanity is trying to fight our natural hibernation urges by injecting ourselves with liquid snowflake sugar cookies. Nay, we say, we are not mere beasts of the land that sleep through the coldest part of the year! We are highly evolved. We are humans! Manic, shopping humans! And we spite thee, Old Man Winter, by spending the bulk of our yearly incomes and pouring the vast majority of our energy into this two month frenzy! We are happy! Happy! WATCH AS WE STAB OUR CLINICAL DEPRESSION IN THE BACK WITH SHARPENED CANDY CANES! (New statistics show that suicide rates do actually fall during the holidays… yay?)

And then along comes February with the celebration of our romantic lovers (Remember? The ones who broke up with us right before Christmas) and the dwindling gym passes as we slowly realize that once again our New Year’s resolution has been forgotten under the pile of normal life. Holidays are great for boosting spirits and being all hopeful and such, but there can be too much of a good thing. Ever tried eating only pie for a week straight? The holidays are kinda like that. You have awesome sugary fruity goodness for a few weeks, then life hits back with a solid dose of reality diarrhea.

Which reminds me. My turkey pot pies are burning. That’s what I was smelling…

 

Congratulations to the successful illegal immigrants!

Several hundred years ago the founders of the great nation that is America  sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and brought their civilized and blessed society to the savage natives of this land. Once they stepped upon the hallowed ground of the Western hemisphere they quickly set about to spread their influence like a flood, joyfully thriving and flourishing along the east coast and eventually conquering the lands to the west. Within a few generations the sea sick travelers from the Old World trekked across the country and can now rightfully claim their place on the throne of privilege from sea to shining sea.

Here, we take a moment in our busy lives, giving one day out of the year to celebrate the journey and success of our founders. Here, we applaud the successful subjugation and overthrowing of the Native Americans that wasted their opportunity at subduing the natural resources of this great country. We fixed their silly laws and backwards cultures and honed it to our righteous understanding of justice.

And most importantly, here we congratulate the success of the mass illegal immigration of America! Hoorah to our founders and their border crossing prowess; allow us to hold a toast to the brave men and who women who dared to cross an entire ocean to invade a foreign land. Praise be to those that took the jobs and welfare of the land from the natives! Raise your glass to the grand values of the founders, the true patriots that risked all to bring class to this backwards country! Feast in their honor oh civilians of the new age, stuff your faces until you pass out in awe and admiration of their selfless entrance into the New World!

Oh man I love stuffing. Thanksgiving is awesome.

 

WTF? Korea edition

So as many people have heard, North Korea was at it again, firing artillery shells at the island Yeonpyeong near the invisible border, which North Korea has never fully accepted, of course. Two soldiers are confirmed dead, 16 or more injured, multitudes of buildings were set on fire, and the world is setting its eyes once more on a bat shit crazy dying leader and his pudgy, probably battier son. My Korean senses were tingling all day. Needless to say, it was rather frustrating.

The reasoning behind this latest act of douchebaggery really doesn’t matter to me. In all honesty I think the son is just trying to gain kudos by proving how hardcore he is now that daddy chose him as the successor. Or maybe they’re trying to show their conviction in utilizing their uranium processing plants. Or maybe they just flat out ran out of things to do and they played a really crazy game of truth or dare. I don’t care at this point. People have been expecting war to escalate any time now for years. It’s a shame, it’s frightening, but it’s been hiding in the corner of almost every Korean’s mind, lingering like some tape worm in hibernation. My only reaction after receiving a text about it in the middle of the night was:

WTF? You really want to do this? Big brother China won’t support an unstable country in war, savior of the world US won’t sit back while you rain on their pet Asian country, and South Korea will just lose it. You’re Korean, man, you know how crazy pissed off we can get.

War: sucks. No one wins. People die, economies suffer, lands are ruined and the vibes in the air just shriek anxiety. I don’t even think North Korea wants war. But they do have less to lose, and more to prove, and one day they might just slip up and aim their guns at the wrong people at the wrong time. South Korea can only be “calm and restrained” for so long before they just say:  “fuck it”.

Up yours, brothers.

A lot of people just say “Ahhh whatever, South Korea will win anyway, then they can just take North Korea. Or maybe they’ll just become unified for some miraculous reason and all will be well again.”

Even if victory was so assured (which it never is) remember what happened to Germany when the two sides combined? It sucked. The lagging economy of the East greatly brought down the strength of the West, and they were far stronger and sturdier than the economy of South Korea right now. I’m all up for unification but not like this. A country bonded by memories of pointing guns at each other isn’t such a tempting idea.

There are limits to being bat shit insane. Get your act together Kim Jong Il/Un, this isn’t some board game. People will only tolerate your “nuclear powers” for so long before they show you what real nukes look like. And that’s just another situation no one wants to get into.

 

Songbirds

Looking through my journal I find an entry dated back in  April at 4 in the morning. Apparently I had been procrastinating all night and just recently started working on what was due that day. Behold, a glimpse into the madness that is my mind:

 

One of the most frightening sounds ever carried through the air is the chirp chirp chirping of birds in the morning. That early morning bugle, the war cry of the sky, as menacing fluffs of blue, brown and yellow fill the world with their malicious intent to call upon the morning. The curtains are still drawn and light is still hours away, and yet as if possessed by some unholy demon these colorful minions begin their dawn assault all at once on some psychic cue. Fear shudders through my strained caffeinated heart as I realize that these hell-spawn are drawing out master Helios, bringing my deadline that much closer to fruition. All night, like many nights before, I dawdled through the ticking hours with hardly any notice and skipped along the internet highway, so now like some blaring prison watchtower the birds slam the reality in my face: that I have yet again wasted another potential night of sleep. Cruel, cruel fiends. My task incomplete, my cup empty of tea, and the slow painful truth sinking in with every high pitched tweet. Game well played, my nemeses, game well played.

 

Academic prostitution

The moment our naive little child minds can wrap themselves around the concept of prostitution and sexual “looseness”, a deep sense of shame, loathing, and guilt are ingrained into our consciences by prude, overprotective adults. Have sex, get STD’s, you die. That’s all there is to it. To avoid a painful and humiliating death, all you young girls out there must keep your legs shut, and boys should keep their exploding libido’s in check. Whores = bad. Bad bad bad.

Twelve years later I find myself slowly realizing those same icky feelings of shame, loathing, and guilt are surfacing. Is it because I am wrapping my legs around multiple men? Hell no. I haven’t even kissed a man in God knows how long. So why the dark subconscious cloud?

I’ve realized that we’re all academic whores.

Follow me here. What do whores do?

A whore invests energy and time into satisfying the customer, the customer in return gives them money/other desired goods. There is a pre-contractual period of self-advertisement: through specific clothing and environment choices the whore scopes out potential customers and tries to sells him/herself as being the best at what he/she does, able to satisfy all of the customer’s needs and desires. There are certain niches of whore-dom, specific customer driven demand lines that are fulfilled with specialized production and supply. S&M, role playing, blondes/brunettes/bald, height, weight, you name a desired trait, someone out there will have it.

Now if you replace the word “whore” in the above description with the word “student” and “customer” with “school” and adjust the items, you get this:

A student invests energy and time into satisfying the school, the school in return gives them money/other desired goods. There is a pre-contractual period of self-advertisement: through specific clothing and environment choices the student scopes out potential school and tries to sells him/herself as being the best at what he/she does, able to satisfy all of the school’s needs and desires. There are certain niches of student-dom, specific school driven demand lines that are fulfilled with specialized production and supply. Math, writing, leadership, volunteering, job experience, you name a desired trait, someone out there will have it.

Resumes list off our work experience, laced with our capabilities in the hope that they would be enough to satisfy the employer with a skillful BJ. We whittle away years and years of our lives working on good grades and community service because they are things the schools get hot for. We study for standardized tests like they’re the kama sutra of sex positions. What are personal statements other then the selling of our desirable traits to schools in the hopes of acceptance?  We’re practically strutting around in tube tops and hooker heels hoping to get singled out of a group of thousands by our top choice schools, because we know (hope) they’ll pay out well in the end if we give them a good lay.

Our parents would be so proud.

 

Dexterity of Nature

Blaming humanity for all of Nature’s woes would not be far from the truth. We, after all, have pillaged and raped our environment with such force and speed that Mother Nature didn’t know what was coming. One minute, she’s quietly growing a petri dish of bacteria, in the next she notices that we’ve dammed up her rivers, buried nuclear waste in her confines and burned down entire forests. Not a pretty sight, and the very fact that Nature still lives today despite our best efforts to destroy her is something worth applauding.

Shrink your view down a bit and you have my microcosm analogy; my own little personal shout out to Nature. For the winter I’ve taken it upon myself to grow two little plants of basil in my room in a tiny 2-3 cup pot (I honestly have no idea how you “measure” pot sizes). For being exposed to such a horrendous gardener, my little basil have grown tremendously well and are even budding new leaves. Woohoo!

Quite honestly I was afraid of taking such a task upon myself. If a tiny organism that requires nothing but water ends up dying in my care, it would strike a heavy blow at my value as a competent human being.

The lives of the basil were not my highest priority, though. It was, in fact, little Mr. Earthworm.

You see, I figured that my being such a shoddy gardener and all, I would make it all the more possible for my basil to survive my treatment and ventured out to get them a little worm friend. And by venture out of course I mean sending my little brother out on the errand. After digging around in our backyard he successfully retrieves a healthy looking earthworm. It looks a little shocked, a little cold, but most importantly, alive. With glee I take the little earthworm and place him in my pot, dump a sprinkling of grass cuttings and dry leaves on top and make sure the soil is moist enough.

And then nothing happens. Mr. Earthworm, apparently in shock at having been so rudely evicted from his previous residence, isn’t moving. He lies on the soil, motionless. For hours.

I panic. What have I done? I’ve killed a life in order to raise another.

I imagine my basil will probably wilt in rebellion.

My green thumb is now red with the blood of the innocent.

Feeling a laughable amount of urgency for such a tiny thing I pour more water, thinking that the worm might be suffocating. I put the pot next to my laptop and under a light in order to warm up the soil. (In hindsight, I probably nearly drowned and baked the little guy, but it seemed a good idea at the time.)

Mr. Earthworm proved to be as dexterous  as Mother Nature herself, and eventually crawled around the pot and dug his way to safety. Not only do I feel redeemed as a human being, but I stand in awe at the power of the creatures around us, even something as lowly as an earthworm.

Honestly, if I can’t even kill it, Nature’s got a pretty good chance.

 

One liners

Sometimes during one of the moments in which I’m actually conscious I will think of random one liners; it might be philosophical, it might be relevant, or it might just be a glimmer of my future insanity. Often a one liner will pop up out of the blue with no train of thought leading up to it. It is just as often that no train leads away from it.

Today, we have this:

Monsters wouldn’t exist without morals.

Yeah… What am I talking about?

 

Perfect nails

Ask anyone that knows me and they’ll tell you that I am a tad bit late for the feminine train. Well, maybe a little more than a tad, perhaps an hour. Or a day. Or… I guess I’ll just take a bus.

One of these feminine traits that I seem to have missed in my womanhood training is the elusive fingernail. Painting my nails or growing them out has never been on my to-do list, and if anything is on my try-as-hard-as-you-can-to-avoid-it list. You ever get the feeling after you’ve painted your nails that they’re just dying underneath the gloss and are slowly suffocating a long, painful, oxygen deprived death? Color-me-morbid, but that’s what I feel on the rare occasions I have to paint them. My nails are also tiny, as in the nail beds haven’t grown in size since I was 10. One generous smear from a nail polish brush and they’re pretty much set, often with leftovers for the next guy. I remember one time in high school my mother brought me to her friend’s nail salon to get them done; the woman almost burst at the seams while trying not to laugh at how tiny they were. (They still got painted regardless. It was a frustrating process). My nails also seem exponential smaller because I can’t seem to let myself grow the nails past a millimeter; any longer and I start clipping away at them like a mad woman on meth.

That there is where I make up for nail care: I won’t color them, I won’t grow them, but I will clip and file and straighten them out like my life depends on it. Even back in the day when I used to bite my nails (which only stopped a little over a year ago) I would bite them with style. Meaning that I would take a glance at my nails between chomps to make sure they were being evenly and equally destroyed. I know, it doesn’t make sense, but that’s how I roll. My nails are socialists.

Lo and behold, even when I stopped biting my nails I still obsessed over them. It’s not to the point that I’ll carry around a nail file with me in my pocket, but it’s pretty damn close. If the edges aren’t perfectly smooth or even, I’ll go over them with a fine file and fix the error as soon as I can access one. Seeing as how nails are constantly growing, you can correctly assume this becomes as regular as brushing my teeth. Recall, my nails aren’t even that big, so all this effort I put into making them even is comparable to a bald guy meticulously combing, shampooing, and conditioning his three strands of hair: there’s just no point. You still look idiotic.

Now if I had long nails, this sort of behavior wouldn’t be quite as quirky and you would at least have something to show for all the effort. Like:

Image: Worth the damn effort

But instead you get me, obsessive girl with sad comb over mentality with elementary school girl nails. Not only do I put in borderline OCD (God I hope it’s only borderline) amounts of time and effort, I have absolutely nothing to show for it.

Great.