Moving On

And here is where I continue telling you about my life and what has been happening lately in some type of witty but meaningful manner, all of which should lead to some life lesson.  Except that I’m not really the type to have it all mean something except for a rant that could be finished within a single sentence.  Maybe a sentence with semi-colon in the middle, but you get the picture.  But the reason that I’m writing all of this is to say that, for today (and maybe only today), I have the confidence to write as though I do not have an audience.

It’s a tricky thing, writing for an audience.  It’s something that I originally didn’t think that I would encounter since the internet is sometimes a massive wasteland of unread rantings, and yet people did start reading this.  And, somehow, that made my writing become a bit more artificial.  For the first time, I had to start worrying about who would read and what they’d think and whether I would upset them.  And it was important to keep in mind, because I did hurt some people, especially around a year ago.  Anger is a strange motivator that can cause you to have better work-outs or more motivation toward an exam or the ability to change the world you live in, but it’s also a force that can come across in waves.  You may think the first wave is brilliant, but the second comes back with the hurt feelings of others.  And, for that, I am held fully accountable and sorry.

But I do want to be more honest with you, and I do want to be able to tell you how I really think and feel without worrying about condemnation or assault.  While this may never be as fully ‘me’ as, say, my diary, I still want this to be a fully honest public forum that expands from my thoughts.  So I leave you for only this moment.  This tiny little moment.  And I want you to know that I will be back and I will be writing more and it will be of a level of honesty that really hasn’t occurred on here since my blog was first activated (minus the two years that it sat in cyber-space).  I hope that I can speak with all of you on a better level, regardless of what anyone may think.

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Great Expectations

I can sum up this post in one sentence: I like to bitch about facial features of story characters even though I have no facial recognition (whaddup Prosopagnosia?).  Really, don’t bother to read this.  It’s confusing and weird and quirky.  Sure, some good pictures along the way, but really now, let’s not kid ourselves into thinking I’m humorous.

I have this super bad habit of trying to figure out what a character in a story looks like so that I can properly read a book and reinact their movements and gestures in my head.  But I also have a lot of trouble with facial recognition and imaging the right face.  This ends with me reusing the same male characters for just about everything or me scouring Google images in order to find something better.  It’s why you can see me reading A Great and Terrible Beauty but also parading Google in order to find better dress/hair styles for the characters or reading Dan Brown books while searching for the perfect picture of Johnny Depp to be my image of Robert Langdon (which Molly ended up finding for me, which was spectacular).

“Angels and Demons would have been a much better movie, had I starred in it.”

But let me sum up my lack of imagination and help I often need when thinking up how a character will look.  No, let me just explain how I reuse characters.  You know Howard Roark from The Fountainhead?  I put a beard on my image of Edward Cullen for that one (my Edward Cullen looked nothing like Cedric Diggory, by the way).  You know Joe Gargery from Great Expectations?  He happens to look identical to Simon in A Great and Terrible Beauty, but again, I added a beard.  And the protagonists from both Fahrenheit 451 and 1984?  Same exact person.  I’m so freaking lazy.

“Um, hi.  I happen to be Missi’s go-to-guy for every baddass character over the age of forty.”

“Hi.  I have a beard, which allows my character to be used even more times.”

But it’s infuriating for me to not picture someone as the character.  It’s easy for me to picture the women, and I can make it be a variety.  But the men?  I have to have them perfect.  Maybe it’s because I want to fawn over the book character, or maybe it’s because I’m just some type of OCD about the men of the story.  I don’t know, but it bothers me when I can’t come up with something right–especially for the guys my age in books.

So, it’s that kind of dilemma that I have hit while reading Great Expectations.  I’ve been able to come up with what every character looks like just fine–except the main character.  Pip.  Oh Pip.  What the hell do you look like?  I could imagine young Pip just fine.  A kid.  Easy.  But handsome Pip around my age?  Shit.  I haven’t a clue.

I could go the easy route and imagine a young Brad Pitt or Orlando Bloom or what-have-you.  But you know what?  I keep seeing the same thing over and over in my head.  This:

Why Barnes and Noble?  Why?  Why on earth do you ever put what you think a character looks like on my novel?  Why would you not give me the opportunity to try and figure out what Pip looks like?  Why would you ever give me this weird ginger kid to be Pip?!

I know, I’m obsered.  But imagine that you have a character that looks like this in your head:

And every time you open your book, BAM!  This is what you see:

WHY?!

I have enough trouble as it is imagining characters without the book itself trying to put yet another face into my mind!!

So, that is my dilemma that I have been bitching about in my own head.  Sorry you had to bear witness to it.  Sorry also to those who have seen my copy of Great Expectations and wondered what the weird mass was over the picture.  It happens to be a painting I made out of black paint and nail polish so that I wouldn’t have to see that guys ugly speckled mug any more (wait, Ron Weasley from Potter Puppet Pals?  No!  That would have been a great choice; not this rubbish).

So, there you have it.  I have to have the perfect image in my head of a character, but I have trouble when the books tell me what I should imagine.  GRRR!  FEAR ME, BOOK COVERS!

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Water

Hey, Kiddos.  Let’s have a chat about water, shall we?  Half inspired by this month’s National Geographic, half inspired by this morning’s events, I feel it’s about time.

Now, we’ve all hopefully heard the list of simple things we can do to conserve water: take shorter showers, do full loads of laundry, turn off the tap while brushing our teeth, et cetera.  The last one on there always seemed really obvious to me, and I wondered who would actually do that.  Well, this morning, while brushing my teeth in the community bathrooms of my hall, I witnessed the most terrible thing that dashed any hope that I had had for humans getting smarter:

I saw a girl leave the tap running at full for over three minutes while brushing her teeth and brushing her hair.  REALLY?  Are you fucking serious?  If I had known her better, I would have turned it off right then and told her not to leave that on when she didn’t need it.  In fact, I should have asked her to shut it off, regardless of the awkwardness that would have ensued.  And if it was earlier in the school year (you know, with more than nine days left before we all part ways), then I would put up a sign saying to turn off the water while brushing teeth.  But, seriously?  Keeping it on while brushing your hair as well?  How fucking wasteful can you get?  I had to leave to keep myself from blowing up.

I suppose that I’m a little more angsty about water waste at the moment since the current National Geographic is all about water.  There are so many examples of how a third of the world can’t get water and how wasteful people are who do have the water.  So, seeing the tap just running killed me.  That water must be cleaned again, will be lost in leakage (up to ten percent of water is lost in leaks in cities), and will take countless hours of energy to get back to that sink.  AHHH!  It drives me crazy!

So, here is what I want you to do: be smart.  Turn off the tap if you don’t need it.  Don’t use water bottles but refillable mugs/cups (I found out that a girl in my house goes to Walmart monthly to fill an entire cart of just bottled water for her family to drink when they go out.  That’s not cost effective, it’s terribly wasteful, and they don’t even recycle all of the plastic).  Don’t water your garden or wash your car if they don’t need it.

Little things can add up.  You’ll save money, there will be less waste (because, let’s face it, I’m the efficiency queen), and you shouldn’t find your day being any more trouble.

So, please!  Don’t brush your teeth while the water runs!  Or I’ll go completely crazy again and turn into Eco-Bitch!

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300 (AKA: What?)

Rarely do I encounter a film that has me asking “Are you fucking kidding me?” every other scene, but I’ve now found a film that not only asks me that, but constantly.  The thing that distinguishes this film from, oh say, Twilight* or Superbad** or any other movie that has me asking this, was that this film was actually a bit entertaining.

This film is 300.

Now, I’m pretty sure the writers heard about the battle and thought,”Hmm, there were these guys from Sparta who all died fighting the Persians.  How can we use this to make a two hours film of barely dressed men running around killing each other?”  Well, they came up with the script for 300, called it a good thing, and produced it to an adoring audience of college guys who like baddassery and high school girls who want to see abs galore.

I finally watched this film, though, and the thing that caught my attention the most (aside from some very sexy men), was that King Xerxes seemed to not only have a lot of warriors, but a lot of interesting warriors.  I was not aware that the Persian army contained ninjas, trolls, Oliphaunts, giants, Quasimodo, goats that can play musical instruments, snake women, and a very effeminate king.  Yeah, turns out that history forgot about this; who knew?

Really, though?  It was entertaining, but it wasn’t history.  And not every film has to be historically accurate, but I honestly think that film producers could have made a film both historically accurate and entertaining.  It could still be epic, but in more of an interesting way rather than an action kind of way.  After all, diplomacy can be sexy; it’s just finding the right kind of diplomacy to make smart sexy rather than brawn.  But that’s just me.  And as we all know, I’m quite biased.

But I won’t diss too much on 300.  Its what-the-fuckery made it interesting, and it was a good watch on a stressful day.  I just like to complain about how it’s labelled an historic drama when it is an action movie.  Because, when a giant gets stabbed in the eye and rips out the knife to keep fighting, I tend to call bull shit.  But, it had a killer soundtrack, nice effects, and wasn’t half bad for how Hollywood goes.  So, not too bad.

– – –

*For the record, I dislike Twilight; it seems to encourage abusive relationships far too much for my liking.  Plus, I’m more of a Lestat fan than an Edward fan when it comes to vampires.

**I watched Superbad for the first time a few months ago, and I honestly couldn’t even finish it.  I managed to watch it for an hour before completely giving up.  It was crude, not funny, and lacked wit that was needed to balance out the disgusting scenes.  Really, the movie was disgusting; there’s no other way to put it.  Superbad is honestly the only film that I have ever seen that I have hated or completely detested.  It is beyond me why it has such favourable attention from people my age, and even for those who aren’t.  If you like this film, sorry, but I stand by what I say.  I think it’s absolutely horrible.

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I’ve never had to try.

I’m a force to be reckoned with; unfortunately, no force has yet tried to push me over, so my true force has never been seen.

My German class will try, though.  Between memorising these forty sentences for tomorrow’s quiz and trying to understand spoken German, I’m most likely going to die.  On top of that, there’s a hefty dose of physics and maths (which, for the life of me, I don’t remember at all), two chapters to be read for psychology, and a constant stream of spirituality reading and self-reflection.

So, I guess you could say that school has picked back up with full force.  University’s pissed, and it’s showing its teeth.  It wants to make me work, and it wants to push me over into the mud.  I won’t let it.  I’ll be that force that no one has seen.  And I won’t let it completely kick my butt.  After all, I’ve developed the mind set that tells me I must be able to get through this since it will be much worse next year if I’m a student advisor (which I applied for and will hopefully get an interview for).  It’s nerve-racking; I’ll fully admit that in every aspect.  School.  Possibly being an SA.  etc.  It’s all stressful.

Speaking of which, I leave for Mizzou tomorrow afternoon with Noah.  Should be interesting.  My friends haven’t planned out a damned thing for the trip, so I’m finding my planning-ahead personality throwing out red flags every few hours.  It’s tell me, “Missi!  Why aren’t you grabbing hold of the reigns and making them develop plans?  Why aren’t you taking the lead?”

I answer it with grace.  Yes, I am a wonderful leader; I am fully capable of getting people to work together and efficiently.  What I am not is a miracle worker.  Further more, it is not my place.  If they can’t get their shit together, then it’s not my problem.  I’ll just go with the flow once again.

Anyway, time for an end to this rant and back to studying for German.  After all, I refuse to let it push me over.  And seeing how there is a lot of mud in Kirksville, I’m going to be putting up one hell of a fight.

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Catherine and Wendy

Catherine and Wendy are gallivanting around the room, forgetting that Catherine has a room-mate.  They fix each other’s hair, play unpleasant music, and spread the smell of burning chemicals in the room with each passing of the curling iron over oiled locks.  Loraine sits in her bed, high above them, waiting for the time to herself.  But this time will not come for a while, so she drowns out the noise and smell the best she can.  A book lies on her lap along with a list of things to be fixed.  This is where she stays, this is what she does.  In time, she will be given the room in order to sit and think through the things that are bothering her.  In time, she may even get a room to herself for the entire year, with the women of the society pushed to the back of her mind while out of sight.  But these are muses of hers, used to keep her mind off of Catherine and Wendy’s laughing and the smells of burning locks being curled into unnatural ringlets.

Loraine doesn’t know how Mary and Wendy can live together.  They are so different from one another.  But, ironically, Wendy joins Loraine’s room-mate, Catherine, as friends while Loraine and Mary seek each other out.

“How interesting that we should be changing room-mates like this.  Almost like a swap,” Loraine mentions to Mary at breakfast.

“Yes, well,” Mary responds, “Those of similar personalities will often join one another.”

And they continue on, eating their boiled eggs and toast in comfortable silence.

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Blogging, Qat, and Grown Women

Blogging seems to be contagious, as some of my best-friends have recently started their own blogs after my mentioning that I had one.  Granted, half of them were writing before on Facebook or the like, but I still feel slightly accomplished.

Okay, now I just feel self-centred.  Let me reiterate: I feel pretty happy that my friends are now blogging, too.  It gives me yet another source for easy stalking–you know, should Facebook’s stalker-feed ever lose its shine.

Thanksgiving break has been going… okay.  I am by no means getting along with my mum, but that’s to be expected.  Instead, I’ve been running errands with my step-dad and have been shutting myself in my bedroom with Cat.  Cat is my cat.  My mum calls her Sweetie, but I thought that was terribly unoriginal, so I call her Cat.  Yes, I was even less imaginative with naming her, but maybe I’ll spell it as Qat.  Ultimate win.

Right now, there’s homework that I should be doing, though.  Instead, I’m reading the same old Lord of the Rings things, listening to Foo Fighters, and staring out of my open window.  None of which are bad things, it’s just that I have over 100 pages to read for psychology and about an equal length for history.  Somehow, I doubt that I will be able to get everything done that I wanted to over break.  Guess I’ll be working hard when I get back, even though I wanted to be able to read everything now so that I only had to study come December.  Finals will not be fun, and I am most certainly not looking forward to them.  Hell week is not welcome.

At least I’ll be too busy cooking tomorrow to really be able to think about homework.  My tofurkey needs to cook along with my family’s normal turkey, and I’ll also be helping out my grandmother since she is hosting the Thanksgiving party for my extended family.  That will be fun (sarcasm).  Not the helping–I’m looking forward to that.  It’s the extended family.  To say the least, we’ve never really gotten along.  They’ve used me as their punching bag for far too long, and not even in the ways that I can joke off.  I make half of the cousins look like dumb asses, so the parents make themselves feel better about their children by pointing out all of my oddities.

“She sings in choir and plays piano?  How stupid.  Why doesn’t she like video games?”

“Missi’s going to Truman; guess she has no fun.”

“Oh look, I can sing just like Missi.” (Insert off pitch squealing here.)

“You actually get all A’s?  You must be a loser.”

“Lin, your daughter doesn’t drink?  What the hell does she do for fun?”

“Oh, well, J-‘s had a girl-friend for two years now, why isn’t Missi dating anyone?”

Etc.

It’s the type of immature stuff that middle schoolers like to say, except that these are fully grown adults who have nothing better to do than pick on a teenager.  I don’t know about you, but I find it pretty sick when an adult needs to make fun of a kid in order to make themselves feel better.  And as much as I scoff at this immature nagging, it really does bother me.  They’ve made it up in their mind so much that I’m nerdy and not really all that good but all talk that they won’t bother to see what I can do sometimes.  They won’t bother to see my on stage, and they later gossip with each other about how I’m not really that good, but that my mum must just be boosting her own confidence by speaking so highly of me.

Bull shit.

Grown Women, if you can’t find anything better to do with your time than harass a teenager, then you might as well off yourself now.  Because, you may think that it doesn’t matter, but it does when your children learn to do this same thing as you.  And I’d feel pretty bad if my child grew up to be arse to others.  But maybe that’s just me.

Sorry, though.  What a rant.  It’s just something that has been bothering me for, well, years.  Immaturity bothers me.  Remaining ignorant/uneducated purposely bothers me.  Uneducated sounding accents bother me.  Hopefully you can see what I’m getting at here: If you don’t try, I don’t try.  And that’s how it will go.

Hopefully they won’t harass me during Thanksgiving, though.  My success so far will make it difficult for them to resist, but maybe they will have become more mature lately.

Somehow, I doubt it.

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