domestic oceans for jocks

I just saved a recipe of gravy from being total shit, so I'm feeling sort of domestic and Donna Reed-ish right now. On the other hand, I just used the word "shit" (twice now), plus I made said gravy at 1:00 am. My future is safe.

Tomorrow classes start. Classes like The Meditative Poem, which inspired jokes from people who don't know what a meditative poem is about the fictional RIC LA campus where go the California flower children, and Oceanography, also known as "Oceans for Jocks," a joke that came from Geology being known as "rocks for jocks." I'm not interested in either course.

The reason I'm still awake at almost 2 am when I have a 10 o'clock class is that I am making lunch for the week. See, the plan was to get Thai food with Justin tomorrow, and then make lentil loaf for the rest of the week. I e-mailed Justin last night, and even though I suspected he might not get back to me until later because of his job, I got impatient and started on the loaf just in case. That wasn't meant to be a pun or anything, btw. Justin case, just in case. Har har. Soooo, I've been up when I should have been sleeping already (not that I could have gotten to sleep, nocturnal as I am), making lunch that I won't eat FOR MY MAN. Add another point to the domestic column. And how is that looking?

	Domestic	Nondomestic
Saved gravy	1	0
Used "shit"	1	2
Awake at 1:00 am	1	3
Preparing food for man	2	3
Washing dishes instead of leaving them in a heap	3	3
Awake at 2:00 am	3	4

My better side has won tonight. And it always will.

reframe, re-screw over. depression.

Last year I got a magnetic poetry board as a Christmas or birthday gift. I wrote one poem, but nothing else:

The sky is livid with rain
A storm carnival of thrills
Puddle in a summer garden
Galoshes flop though fresh soil

I liked it, even though no one else did. Maybe next time I write a poem, I should switch to the emo type and substitute concrete imagery for generic angst and purposely-vague-but-not-really allusions to cutting.

I'm not in Salem, so now I feel like a liar, since I told so many people for so long that I was leaving. It comes up in conversation, and I really thought I was leaving. The short reason: 42 credits to go at Salem, 17 at RIC. I've feel like I've wasted the past five years of my life here. It's a really, really shitty feeling, knowing those are the best years of my life, and they're not coming back.

And then there are the other issues. The job issue, jealousy issues (over everything, my life sucks right now), the graduation issue. Any school or career move I make after I graduate requires references, letters of recommendation.

Society screws you over if you're the introverted type who keeps to the background and just does their work. Everything goes to the obnoxious extroverted types who are always out there and in peoples' faces. But wait--I'm not supposed to think of them that way! Obnoxious people who can't leave well enough alone have to be reframed as "spontaneous."

National Maple Syrup Day

While it's not likely to inspire a religious frenzy of gift-buying, or even "national" celebration in the true sense of the word, National Maple Syrup Day, celebrated on December 17, is an excuse to pause the other holiday madness, and eat a stack of pancakes. National Maple Syrup day celebrates 100% maple syrup, not maple-flavored syrup, not pancake syrup, and certainly not high fructose corn syrup. It's a day to applaud syrup from trees, shun Aunt Jemima, and spend the extra few dollars to buy pure 100% maple syrup.

December 17 appears to be a random choice for National Maple Syrup Day. Maple producers harvest sugar maple sap in March, which is when the Massachusetts Maple Producers' Association participates in month-long maple festivities. Local farms in other areas of the Northeastern United States and Canada also celebrate in March with syrup-making demonstrations, and of course, plenty of food drenched in syrup. While it seems likely that a syrup producer could have started National Maple Syrup Day, its roots are undocumented, and generally unmentioned. December 17 has no apparent reason for being National Maple Syrup Day, and is only national in the respect that someone, somewhere tacked the word "national" onto an invented holiday to catapult it into the ranks of bizarre holidays such as National Chocolate Covered Anything Day and National Roast Suckling Pig Day, the two special days before and after National Maple Syrup Day.

But the roots don't matter for anyone out to honor their favorite French toast topping. National Maple Syrup Day isn't going to receive a full-on inquisition into its roots as a pagan holiday, or the quaint 19^th century customs that led to our modern celebration of National Maple Syrup Day. Its origins are undocumented, but whoever started it first was clearly someone with a great love of maple syrup. Appreciation of the syrup and complete disregard for calorie counting are the only important traditions of this obscure holiday, which has found a niche on recipe websites internationally. Recipes4us.co.uk recognizes National Maple Syrup Day and dedicates a page to the history of maple syrup and recipes using maple syrup. Mr. Breakfast, of mrbreakfast.com, lists National Maple Syrup Day among the "16 Breakfast Holidays."

Forget the peculiarities of National Maple Syrup Day, forget the madness of the holiday season. This December 17, go to the grocery store and pick up a jug of pure maple syrup with a basket full of syrup-ready foods. Eat pancakes, ice cream, chicken, and salad with maple syrup. Try some new recipes. Remember to replace your tuna sandwich with a tuna-maple sandwich, and your fruitcake with a maple fruitcake.

fake tree

The fake tree is now in the living room, all dolled up with the increasing amount of ornaments we end up with each year. I sort of hijacked the camera while we were decorating, and my candid photography got us a lot of creepy pictures, pictures of people yawning, chewing, and leaning over stuff with butt cracks a-showing. Next week, I think I'll buy a cheap pine tree air freshener and hide it somewhere, like last year. In half an hour, Jeff and I are probably going to watch the old Grinch special, or Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. So far I'm feeling very much in the holiday spirit, but it's still disheartening to not have found a crappy part time job yet. Why is it that none of these places that say they're hiring ever hire me?

I've been working on various web things when I'm supposed to be doing papers--more on that when something exists.

Salem State

Congratulations! You have been admitted to Salem State College as a transfer, resident student for the 2008 Spring semester in the English major. Additional information will be mailed to you.

Because I sent in my application online this time, I was able to check every few days to see if it had been processed. I probably won't receive the letter until next week, but that's still under a month for processing time.

Things are looking up; Saturday I finished writing my 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo, and now I've been re-accepted in Salem. This time, I'm going. Too bad my dad is putting a damper on the whole thing, obsessively asking questions that people ask in the "should I apply" stage of the process, not the "I've been accepted" stage. He also acts like he's trying to free me of some kind of overwhelming naivete that, apparently, I possess. Wow, I didn't know that I'm going to have to pay for college after it's over, thank you ever so freakin' much.

NaNoWriMo

This year I participated in National Novel Writing Month, and tonight I passed the 50,000 word mark, making me a winner.

Take that, Erin! :)

A synopsis of Stars Will Fall Out:
When Jil Doyle skips her homecoming dance, she witnesses a mysterious girl sink into the pond at the park. The next day she finds a strange vial that allows to her travel through the pond and into another world, where she meets Aria, the mysterious girl. Aria has been traveling from her own world to Jil's to go to rock shows and escape her daily life working at a bakery and planning her upcoming wedding. Soon Jil finds herself using the vial to escape like Aria, and both girls are balancing double lives. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Jil and Aria, the creator of the vials has a sinister reason to steal them back, and it might be connected to the stars that have been falling out of the sky. Only Aria's nerdy fiance suspects that her sister Violet might be at the center of it all, but not even he realizes that the innocuous professor of magic might be as well.

Starting off in Week 1, it took some time getting used to writing 1,667 plus words per day. I was still focusing too much on good writing rather than output, but I did make a couple plot/ character connections that established the rest of the story arc. Luckily, I had some scene ideas written down so I didn't have to spend too much time thinking about what to write. During Week 2, I spend three days too depressed to write, and gave up completely. Giving up like that, I felt strangely empty, and I went back to writing just before the start of Week 3, although I was still depressed

Around Thanksgiving, I had a five-day weekend so I wrote 2000-4000 words on each of those days. After the first week, I also went to all the Write-ins at Barnes and Noble in Bellingham, where I managed to type 1000 words or so per hour. About this time, I concentrated on making my friends "effective agents of guilt and terror" as per the instruction in No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty, the founder of NaNo.

Two days ago I managed a 7000 word day, and today I wrote another 4500 for the win. A lot of the writing is crap, but plenty is crap that just needs editing. I still need quite a few more scenes, including a climax that involves a Winnebago and a Ancient Druid Spirit, and possibly a wedding. I'll also need to figure out a lot of details about the fantasy world, which I'm writing in a steampunk style, and then name or rename several characters.

After that, it'll just take about five edits or so.

And, Dan: Thanks for the support, and the sparkly bubbling stuff and chocolate just now.

Here's my Nano Profile, which has statistics, and an excerpt.

Wheeeee! I'm a novelist now. :)
X-posted to My Barely Updated Livejournal

Windows Vista infuriates me.

"From the directors of The 40 Year-Old Virgin... a comedy about the things that happen.... when you least expect it."

Aren't there people who look over banner ads before they're posted on the internet? THEM, not IT. A comedy about the things that happen when you least expect them. Or, a comedy about the thing that happens when you least expect it. Savvy?

Oi.

Trip update coming soon.

literacy is my love affair

To be as vague as possible, I have two enormous worries in tandem, one of which is affecting my ability to deal with the other. One can be fixed with some work, but the other flits about and pecks away my brain function, as well as my ability to think through the first one. Apparently, it is a woodpecker. Dan said he would take it for me, but it is intrinsically mine. Woodpeckers, though, they can be shot with a calm and steady hand. Fear is the mind killer and such.

I have four enormous secrets, one of which is the woodpecker. The others are the ace of hearts, the white rabbit, and the mystery juice.

Pathway to green: kill the woodpecker, solve the tandem worry, follow the rabbit, get a job, and hoard the mystery juice.

Isn't it wonderful to forget that Wilford Brimley is briefly on Seinfeld, and then be absolutely delighted to see that Wilford Brimley is on Seinfeld?

Also, I made good gumbo and I didn't even use a recipe.

if you give a mouse a cookie

Such a relief to finally get a mouse that doesn't cut out every five minutes.
It's like a breath of fresh air, a cool drink drink of water, a new leaf, a clean slate, a long expected party, thank goodness it's Friday, and every other cliche, proverb, or idiom having to do with respite or new beginnings, all rolled into one nice ebony bit of mousely goodness.

Today I blundered my mass media exam, or I misheard when the Very Asian Professor said there was no take-home portion. I finished playing Dreamfall after getting home early, before Jeff even. The game is a disappointment as a game, but a marvel as a story. I'd love to hate it because Ragnar Tournquist obviously sold out in a number ways, but a damn good story earns a load of forgiveness for clumsy Xbox-centric controls, dumbed down gameplay that insults the intelligence of players over ten, and a cliffhanger ending leading up to a sequel which will only be made if Dreamfall sales go high enough. Luckily, the Xbox crowd will buy anything one advertises for them as long as it is purported to have cutting edge graphics. Actually, the graphics for the first game, despite being something like seven years old now, were a lot more accomplished. That is, if one judges graphics on artistic merit and contribution to the story, rather than on how badass a graphics card it takes to run them.

Feanor is dead. He was a beautiful fish, and I miss having him in his tank behind me while I use the computer.

Cannellini parmesan sandwichs are an excellent discovery on my part, I watched The Last Unicorn for the fourth time, and the previous clauses have no relation to each other.

Crossroads again.