We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Internet Perusing To Warn You...

Holiday Awareness Message:

This is not a test!  Repeat, this is not a test.  This Holiday Season, you should be on the lookout for creepy things hidden within innocent-looking Christmas items, which grocery stores stock around this time of year.  Their nefarious scheme is to turn Christmas into Halloween in order to make more money by selling things like this:

But be not afraid!  By instituting the annual Holiday Awareness Message, also known as the "Christmas H.A.M.", we are dedicated to increasing awareness for what to do if you find yourself an unwitting consumer of one of these dangerous items...

So please, be safe this season.  And don't try to be a hero.  These food items are dangerous, and should not be approached without due fierceness and preparation.

Tanks in the House

I would write a real post, but Steve just bought the sixth season of House.  We've watched two episodes already, and they're absolutely mind-blowingly amazing.

So I'll just update you on my parades and be done with it, since we both know that's what you're here for, right?

Because guys, they got tanks.

I don't know how they did it.  They even have little military pickup trucks!

First banners, then instruments, and now this?  They're showing off new skills every day...

The Last Point is the Most Thought Provoking

Metamorphic

My gaze is anchored to my reflection

and I squint oceanic eyes, scrutinizing the parts of me that everyone else can see.

In a sudden, unanticipated movement,

my fingers dart up to brush aside a lock of hair.

A similarly abrupt motion

tugs down the hem of the shirt that I always sleep in.

After several minutes, I stop adjusting everything about myself,

even though I'm still not satisfied.

I stretch out my hand for a tissue and grimace at the familiar pain.

Retrieving my hand, I squeeze the finger with the paper cut that has been

hurting me all day.

Eventually, I stop dwelling on that, too.

I swipe the tissue across my lips,

transforming

my mouth from Hollywood shiny to natural and unadorned.

After sleep takes me, an angry man's face appears in my mind, his mouth wide in fury.

His fist rises above me, poised to fall full force.

I turn my head away from the coming blow and before my eyes is my mother, dying.

She sighs out her last breath and I feel like my heart has crumpled under that delicate expulsion.

My body, aware of my mind's distress, twists and tosses to get away from it.

Is it my mind or the distress that it's trying to escape?

It causes my blankets to wrap around me tightly in a chrysalis that no longer lets me move,

leaving me vulnerable to the torments that plague my mind.

Jeering, hateful words come out of the shadows.

I'm standing under stage lights, with caked make-up covering my face and a huge fancy dress.

All of it is uncomfortable and I want to be rid of it,

despite what my cynical audience thinks.

Dread overcomes me. The overwhelming thought is, suddenly,

What have I done?

Those stage lights fall before me, but they are now a bonfire.

Someone is throwing masks into the fire.

The masks have every expression, every different kind of face, but they're being turned to ash.

They are my masks! Someone has to save them!

I turn around, looking for someone to help me, and there he is.

He is obvious perfection.

Somehow, I know that I love him...

but when I embrace him, his fond and radiant smile becomes fangs, and his face becomes a monster's.

At last, I awake.

In a frenzy, I fight my way out of the blanket that encloses me.

Finally freed,

I stride toward that mirror whose opinion used to mean so much.

My arm muscles tense and my hand lashes out,

paper cut forgotten.

Something tumbles. Something cracks.

Now the glass is broken.

I look up at it to blink

in surprise

and something falls from each of my eyes. In the sink lie two circles of blue.

In fragmented reflections of the mirror, I see

my true green eyes: the color that I'd almost forgotten.

This time, I don't stare for very long.

Instead, I look around for whatever it was that tumbled when my reflection got broken.

There, in the trash can. It's lip gloss that I recognize,

although I feel like it belongs to some other girl.

I won't bother getting it out.

--------------------------------------------------------

Just thought I'd entertain you with something I wrote a while back, since I had ideas for a blog post today, but after a full day of work, I promptly forgot them.

On a different note, I built a parade route for my little people in City of Wonder!

Now they can march without distractions.
More importantly, I can zoom in and do nothing but watch my parades now.

It should also be noted that they have once again switched to fans and banners.  

I am convinced there is a pattern to this that I must decipher.

The Goblin King's Domain and Still Honored

I watched Labyrinth for the first time ever today.  (I blame it on the fact that I was too sheltered growing up.)

Impressions:

1)  If I had seen it earlier, in my childhood, like I bet most people did, I think I would have liked it a lot more.  The old special effects and bratty main character would have seemed more fun and less irritating.

For an ugly worm, he was surprisingly cute.
But not exactly a realistic-looking creature.
Looks kind of plastic-y.
Maybe his mother was a film canister.

2)  I saw more of this David Bowie guy than I wanted to.

There's a certain focal point in this picture,
and it doesn't count as a character...

3)  I liked Sarah's obvious character development from beginning to end.  You don't always see that much in today's movies.

This point, of course, needs a picture to go along with it
in order to make it seem even more interesting.

4)  As Steve and I instantly agreed, the most awesome part of the movie was the stairway room.

As an added bonus, his man-parts aren't featured as prominently here.

5)  The second coolest thing was the helping hands.

The way the thumbs protrude enough to catch the light and make eyes?
Pure genius.

6)  Overall, it was much more goofy and less dark than I expected it to be.

I didn't know ahead of time that the movie even HAD puppets.

Commenter Questions: Did Sara's brattiness drive you crazy when you first saw Labyrinth?  Do David Bowie's prominent man-parts strike you more as sexy or trashy?  What's your favorite part of the movie?


Also, I feel it important to mention that in City of Wonder, my parade has now changed again.

Banners and...sousaphones??

My faithful subjects like giving me variety.


all pictures found using Google Images

To be the Honor of Parades in a City of Wonder

I built a city a couple of days ago.  Today, the economy and population really took off.

City of Wonder is a Facebook application/game, and like all the others, it can be addicting under the right circumstances.  As it turns out, snow+winter break+a laptop+internet are ideal mating grounds.

When I started playing, I had no idea what I was doing.  First, I'm happily buying things that do...things.  Then, suddenly:

Me: What is that?  What is that?  Steve, what's that fog stuff?  What's that on my screen?

Steve: Those are clouds.

Me: Clouds?!

Steve: Yeah, they're just clouds.  See?

Me: What are those doing there?  I didn't buy those!

Steve: Uh, the clouds are free.

I guess I'm a little excitable sometimes.

After a while, I got the hang of it, and now I mostly know what I'm doing.  And I quickly discovered (with Steve's help) that when you do enough of the right things, the little people in your civilization get happy and put on a little parade for you!

They love me...they really love me!

And, even better: after good encounters with other civilizations, their little leaves get upgraded to trumpets. ^_^

Which also, for some reason, made them change direction.

They only have a big square of road to march along, but do you think that stops them?  Their devotion is boundless.  And watching those tiny little people march around and around is so adorable that it makes me smile lovingly at the computer screen just to see them.

I could tell you more about other aspects of the game, but to be honest, I'm more delighted about that little parade than just about anything.  (After all, don't people always say to "write what you're passionate about"?)

You can't really tell how cute it is until you see it animated.

Can I Bring My Cane?

Some people are terrified of the internet.  These people are usually either: 

1) old people

2) the paranoid

or

3) time travelers.

What's so scary about the interwebz?  

Is it the fact that stupidity has become contagious on a global scale now, as can be seen with lolcat language?

Is it due to the free sharing of information, like those sites that tell you how to construct a bomb?

Usually, it's purely due to accessibility.

Take blogs, for instance.  Bloggers are the craziest people out there, because they put PERSONAL stuff on the INTERNET, guys.  Like...their first names.

Plus, I've been told that YouTube is a bad site and that I should never, ever go to it.

Which brings me to the real reason that people are scared half the time: they don't know what they're talking about.  They're so afraid of technology that they refuse to learn to use it, which, of course, contributes to fear of the unknown.   Which leads to circular patterns and their head subsequently exploding, because that's what happens when irony attacks those too old and/or feeble to handle it.

(Late Disclaimer: I can poke fun at old people.  I've had cataracts.  And I've been forced to use a walker after breaking my leg.  I've been there.)

Wow, that makes me sound bitter.  It's not really that I dislike those people; if they don't want the internet, they can do what they want and not have it.  The thing that actually irritates me is closed-mindedness.

Am I right?

all pictures found using Google images 

Mikey the Bridesmaid

I get more done when I procrastinate.  It's just that the stuff I'm supposed to be doing gets finished last.

Speaking of which, tonight I have determined what one of my best friends, Mikey, will wear to my wedding some day.  I asked him whether he preferred a tux or a dress, and his answer led to...interesting conclusions.  Behold what we chose:

with this hair:

this:

with this:

and these:

So, what do you think?  Will he make a lovely bridesmaid?

I told him to think of all the places a dollar bill would fit in that outfit...

He said to stop trying to make money off of his money-makers.
But I think it could offset the cost of materials nicely.


all pictures found using Google images

If You Read This Post Two Days After I Post It, This One's For You

You know what's bad for me?  I mean, it's good, but it's really, really bad.

Other lazy people.

Because when I'm goofing off, not getting things done that I should have started sooner and all that, the other lazy people out there are full of support.

"Yeah, you didn't start your paper until the day of?  My neither!  Ha ha, I know, right?"

"Oh, I'm so behind too!  I'm not really worried about it, though.  I'll probably start on it the hour before it's due."

You know why people have this attitude?  Because it's the only fun thing to do with procrastination.  It makes them feel better about it, because then they fit in with all the other procrastinators, and together, they can laugh at deadlines and all those goody-two-shoes-do-gooders that actually started the project the week before.

And by "they", I mean "we".

You're reading the words of a girl that wrote more than half of her NaNo novel in the last four days of November.  THE LAST FOUR DAYS.

This was my graph:

Yeah, check the "Words Written Today" number.  It was intense.  Like driving on ice.

So when it comes crunch time and I'm avoiding schoolwork as much as possible, I'm blaming it on the other procrastinators of my generation.

Maybe I'll take the blame later, if I feel like it.

Can Tutus Attack People?

Help me.

I'm going girly.

Okay, so maybe I'm overreacting a little.  Combing through the entire beauty section of Wal-Mart isn't so bad if I didn't buy everything I thought about buying, at least.  It's just that...I wasn't emotionally prepared for femininity to smack me in the face.  Where the heck did this sudden interest come from?

I'm pretty sure that most females go through this stage when they're, like, ten.  Since I have approximately a decade on those girls, I guess that officially makes me a late bloomer in the area of beauty products.

Before now, I'd had what I like to call the "man" approach to showering.

But now?  Now, my friends, I have bought things like facial cleanser, conditioner, and, terrifyingly...a "loofah".

I don't know what's happening, but it's trying to make me soft and pretty and moisturized.

The only thing saving me from pink and frilly murdering me in my sleep is that:
I bought this too.

My necessary level of testosterone sanity lives to fight another day.

all photos found using Google Images

You Don't Have To Be Dead To Be Epic

One of the coolest things I learned from NaNoWriMo was how a writer's values make the story something you can analyze, and in doing so, learn about the way the author's mind works.

It's cool, because I'm an English major (meaning: I analyze literature a lot), and I always figured that the authors I was reading and analyzing thought through all the things they wrote painstakingly.  As if they were hunched over their little story with a pen in one hand and a fork in the other, and any time their work didn't have some huge earth-shattering meaning behind it, they stuck the fork in a wall socket to jump-start their brains into thinking epic thoughts.

At some point during this month, I looked at something I'd written and realized that what I think of as the truth just magically shows through in the things I write.

You can actually mistakenly write a piece of literature that someone else can analyze.  In fact, I might venture to say that all literature does this in some way.

I just thought that was really cool.