Quick college update

Well, I heard from UNC today.

...

I didn't get in.

The letter they sent was very kind. I didn't expect to get in anyway, and I'm not crushed with disappointment. This does mean, however, that I have one option left before I'm stuck here all next semester, taking classes at GTCC, which I really don't want to do. Really, really, really don't want to do. College life at home, with all the drama in my house, would be...well, it would be really bad. Nightmarish.

On a lighter note, I think I'm getting sick. But I really hope it's just allergies. On a still lighter note, my brain hurts. I hate trig!

Let me just reiterate something I said in a previous post...anyone who reads this who isn't in college yet, don't do what I did. Don't do anything I did; do not follow in my footsteps. It's a very bad idea.

Great. My dad's home; he'll find out about UNC any minute. I'm really not up to that conversation.

The Small Things

Wow. It's been almost two months...and I said I wasn't going to neglect this blog...famous last words, as my grandmother says on all occasions.

Speaking of grandmothers, I had a funny adventure with mine at the end of last month (this being the grandma on my mom's side of the family). She lives about two hours away from us, so usually when we go to visit, we stay at her house for a day and a night. Well, she also has lots of land around her, and a few old abandoned houses across the road. My cousin and brothers and sister wanted to go exploring over there, and she said they could but warned them not to go inside because the houses are in bad shape and there had been rumors of someone staying over there. They went. Those of us still at the house went about our business. The kids didn't come back. Grandma started to freak out. Eventually the worry was too much for her, and she practically made me go with her in her rickety old golf cart to see if we could find them. She drove that darned thing way out into the sticks and shouted and called, and still they didn't come, and I was sure if there were any sinister people in the area they would find us, alone and defenseless in the woods, with a golf cart that would stop groaning along at any second...I began hearing things, imagining the mystery of our missing bodies... No sooner had we gone back to the house, she more worried than ever and I completely freaked out by this time, than the kids came trotting up the path, blissfully oblivious. I ran at them and pretended I was going to bash them with my cane for putting us through all that. Later that day, my aunt saw a man emerge from one of the houses and go walking across the fields. How creepy is that?

I am now president of the Greensboro Career Club for the Visually Impaired. Wow. Actually, I have been since its conception in December, but we didn't have our first meeting until this past Saturday. We had a smaller group than expected, and it could have been a tad more organized, but the meeting itself actually went off without a hitch. I'm very excited...and vastly relieved to be past all the nervousness and shock at finding myself president of anything at all. :) That aside, we have wonderful officers and wonderful members. More updates on that when we actually start doing stuff...I'm going to try not to think too hard about the fact that I've never in my wildest imaginings done anything like this before, and just go with it and put all my resources to the best use I can. Praying for help, knowledge, and quick wits and high spirits.

I still haven't heard anything from UNCG. Oh! My! Gosh! I don't know what I'm going to do if I don't get in there or Chapel Hill...I'll have to take classes at GTCC, and I do not want to be at home another year. I've already determined that I'm oing to start saving for a house or something ASAP, so that maybe after six years of school, I'll have enough for something cheap and small, just some place of my own. I actually don't want to live alone, but if I haven't found my prince charming in all the time I'm at college, I'm not hanging around in the nest waiting for him to find me. Major pro and major con of homeschooling. Pro: if you use the right resources, the academics outstrip any crap you'll get in public school. Tried that for two years and just about perished of boredom. I wonder more people who actually care to use the brain between their ears aren't totally smothered by the beurocracy. Con: lack of emotional breathing space. I've concluded that during adolescence, drama is capable of following one wherever one goes, and if it's not silly girls wailing over their pathetic and premature love lives, it's going to be family stuff, or other stuff capable of creeping through cracks in doors. Hmm, that's a slightly sinister image. That might become a poem.

Writing is going slower than I'd like, but still going well. I finally have a title: The Shining One. I'm just about to a huge turning point, which is exciting and slightly nerve-racking as well. I've found, though, that I'm not turning my back on writing what I know after all. Yes, this is quite different from my usual work, but rather than defying that age-old piece of advice, I've found new meaning in it. For instance, Renee is perhaps the first of my characters to ever have a realistic family life. Now that I'm over the initial shock of that, I like it, because I can identify with her more, and I think anyone else who reads this will be able to as well. I hope I'm not going overboard with Eric, the romantic interest. My two friends that are reading it both love him, but I'll have to get a guy friend to take a look - if any are that brave - when I'm done. :)

School has begun to slither along at a snail's pace, yet I feel that time is going by incredibly fast. It will be the end of the year before I know it...I hope I'll be ready.

This post is long and rambling, made up of lots of small things. But the small things in life are what keep us from being bored to tears with our lot on this earth...they're what make us human.

Fun Stuff

I really should be posting my review of Eclipse, since I just finished it today, but book reviews are challenging and I'm warming up to work on my story some more, so I'm going to be relaxed and write a fun post for once. Everything has to have a non-serious side, right? Even a serious blog? ;)

I took a friendship quiz on www.blogthings.com, and here are my results:

You Are A Good Friend You're always willing to listen to your friends.And you're the first to lend a shoulder to cry on.You're there through thick and thin. You won't stop being friends with someone when times are tough.In fact, you're such a good friend that many people consider you their "best friend"!

Aww! And yet, it is an internet quiz...hmm. Well, I was going to give the link, but the window very mysteriously went away...:( Guess I should be more careful.

I have officially played the dorkiest, most amusing game ever. It's a version of "blind date" made by the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind). I wasted a lot of time that could have been used more productively playing with it, but it really was highly amusing! I got to date an Elvis impersonater who really needs to work on his acting skills, how lucky am I? LOL Oh yeah, and a geek who sounded like he was reading his lines right off a paper. Probably was. *sighs* Alas for my luck. LOL
I have found a new favorite singer: Brandon Heath. I've had one of his albums on my computer for a while now, and I always liked it, but the other night, when I was listening to it after a really miserable day, it took on new meaning, and I realized that he really has an uncommonly fine tenor voice. Not many Christian artists can pull off what he does: good music *and* meaningful lyrics *and* a really lovely voice. If this catches anyone's interests, check out "Beauty Divine," "The Light," "Love Never Fails," "Sunrise," "Red Sky," "I Will Lay You Down," "Steady Now," "You Decide," "Let's Make It Last," and "I'm Not Who I was." Yes, I have a lot of favorites. :)

I was playing the piano after supper tonight, going over the three versions of the lullaby that Edward composes for Bella in Twilight, unable to decide which one is really going to be it. I like the music from the movie, but it's just not a lullaby. The last one (of mine) is too dark, but still would make a cool vampire theme or something. The first one is almost too light. I think the second one is going to be it. My nine-year-old brother was listening to me play it and first asked right away if it was a lullaby, and second said immediately after that it made him feel sad in a way, and that it "has a lot of emotion." My brother constantly surprises me. But I did realize why I've been having difficulty - because I've been trying to compose from the perspective of someone who would be almost a hundred years old, though he never physically aged past seventeen. Kind of interesting to really contemplate that. Still, I think I've settled on the right one. I really wish there was a way to put it up on this blog after I get it recorded...if I ever get it recorded. It's incredibly hard to play. And while I'm talking about that, here is another fan's rendition, with lyrics, posted on YouTube. It is so amazing. It makes me cry and gives me goose bumps every time I hear it. I don't even know what it is that strikes the cord, but something definitely does.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpjqj7tktUU

Okay, well, now that I'm all teary-eyed, that's all for now.

Book Review: New Moon

This is the second book in the Twilight Saga. The first time I read it (I think I'm on the fifth now), it was the hardest book of the four, but this time I was actually anxious to get to it.

I read once in an article about what editors and agents hate that one should never open a book with a dream, but Stephenie does it here with great effect, showing us right away that Bella dreads aging because Edward never will. But soon that becomes the least of her worries. When an accident gets out of hand at Bella's eighteenth birthday party, Edward realizes anew how much his and his family's presence in her life endangers her...and a few days later, they are gone, as if they'd never been - except, of course, for the ripping agony of grief in which Bella drowns for the next months. When she finally begins to resurface, she renews her acquaintance with Jacob Black, and with him, werewolves come onto the scene. But just as things are starting to settle down again, Edward's psychicly gifted sister Alice shows up, having seen Bella jump from a cliff and interpreted it as attempted suicide when it was, in reality, a nearly fatal attempt at cliff diving. She finds Bella alive, but before she can tell the rest of her family, Edward's other sister Rosalie, who has never liked Bella, informs him of Alice's vision. Following up on his earlier declaration that he cannot live in a world where Bella does not exist, Alice sees him making his way to Italy to ask for death at the hands of the Volturi (a kind of vampire royal family, the ones who enforce the rule of secrecy and anything related to it). Alice and Bella go after him, but if they don't make it in time, they will likely die, too.

Things I Love
1. The characterization of Bella that gets accomplished while Edward is mostly out of the picture. She's not orbiting around him anymore, so we see more of what she's like.
2. Again, the atmosphere, though it's slightly different from that of the first book. In New Moon, the focus isn't on the world that still lives on in modern Forks but the town itself and the area around it, saturated with quiet magic that no one feels except those who are a part of it.
3. Charlie. He was in the background during Twilight, but now he becomes a more fleshed out and developed character. He's an ordinary guy, never guessing that his daughter is dealing with some very extraordinary things, just loving her and trying to protect her. There's something about his and Bella's relationship that is really poignant.
4. The werewolves. Again, a departure from the norm, but I can't say much on that lest I give too much away.
5. Alice, when she enters. I just love Alice; I always have.

Things That Could Have Been Better
Again, only one: the portrayal of Bella's grief. I've never loved and lost, and it occurred to me this last read-through that maybe the difference, the physical sense of pain, is partly because she loved a vampire - no normal teenage relationship, to say the least. The description of a hole in the chest works a few times, but after a while it loses its effectiveness. Still...

Five stars!

Book Review: Twilight

I'm sure everyone knows what Twilight is by this time, but for those that don't, or to clear up misconceptions that some might have, I'll introduce it anyway.

This was the very talented Stephenie Meyer's first novel - a colorful and unique burst onto the literary scene. Seventeen-year-old Bella Swan feels that she is holding her newly remarried mother back from much happiness with her new husband, so in an act of supreme self-sacrifice, she leaves her beloved, sunny home in Phoenix, Arazona and goes to live with her father in Forks, Washington, the rainiest, dreariest place she can imagine. On her first day at her new high school, her attention is caught by a boy named Edward Cullen. He is gorgious - too gorgious...and he seems to hate her, though they've never exchanged so much as a hello. The mystery deepens when he saves her from being crushed between her truck and a speeding van one morning before school, leaping in its path and lifting the car out of the way all in a flash, with inhuman strength and speed. This is her first clue that whatever he is, he is not your average guy, and already she feels a strange attraction to him. When it comes to Bella's attention that Edward and his family are not allowed on the local Indian reservation, she asks one of the residents, Jacob Black, about it, and he tells her old legends of werewolves and vampires that are more meaningful to her than he ever guesses. Slowly the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, but it's too late to be scared: Bella is hopelessly in love with a vampire.

I feel obligated to say here that when I first heard this from a friend, I thought it would be the last thing I would ever read. I mean, a girl falls in love with a vampire? How corny can you possibly get?

I'm so glad I was wrong.

Things I Love
1. Bella. Compared to many other YA novel heroines, she is fantastic. She's not ridiculously good or disgustingly bad; she's just your average girl. A little shy, perhaps, and she does have a higher vocabulary than the majority of teenagers today (huge plus for me, because that's just another one of the little things I feel I share with her), different enough to be special, but not so different that she stands out more than she should.
2. Edward. How can I not love Edward? He's everything any girl could want. Well, okay, I'm not really eager to be faced with the dilemma of whether or not I want to be changed into a vampire to be with the love of my life forever, but otherwise, he's amazing.
3. The way Stephenie has made her vampires in general. They are anything but typical. I can't stand the vampire stereotype that was started centuries ago - garlic, stakes through the heart, death by sunlight, fangs...Stephenie makes this look incredably uncreative with her beautiful, perfect predators. Everything about them is designed to attract, from their flawless appearance to the sweet scent that hangs about them. They're also amazingly tough, strong, and fast, and not precisely dead. Some are even gifted. I won't spoil any more of those little surprises, but the creativity put into the vampires alone is worth reading the book.
5. The atmosphere. I don't even know how to describe it. Reading the book, I find myself smiling and laughing a lot, but the humor is very subtle. The sweetness and intensity are there, all painted across a mysterious background. With each vampire comes a taste of an older world, a former time, and it's really felt, though it isn't stated very often.
6. The spiritual/moral aspect of the story. A lot of Christians hear about these books and go, "Nooo! Vampire romance!" This is just a repeat of the Harry Potter series, which was a deplorable lack of open-mindedness and a great deal of quick, uninformed judgment. Twilight is indeed a love story about human and vampire, but the underlying focus is far deeper than that and goes deeper as the saga progresses. This first book is about temptation and overcoming it. The quote from Genesis in the front truly fits well. No blood has ever smelled so appealing to Edward as that in Bella's veins, but to yield to its lure would mean the loss of everything for him - his and his family's situation in life, his home, and ultimately his happiness...and that's a big deal when you know you're going to live forever. I'm doing a poor job describing this aspect of the story. This particular theme is never stated in so many words, but it's there, the heartbeat of the book, as it were.
Things That Could Have Been Better
Hmm, I'm coming up empty. I suppose Edward is rather too perfect to be real, but he's supposed to be, and he's still amazing in this book. I'm going to have to change my review format to accomodate the rest of these, I think.

Five stars!

Miscellaneous and Random Things

Okay, I realized just now that I might have introduced this blog, but in a shallow way; I didn't actually say what the real purpose in even having one is for me. Maybe I didn't truly know it myself until I noticed that after only two posts, one of which hardly counts, I'm already creating another pile of worthless scribblings. To publish essays, articles, book reviews - that's all very well; but the blog will have no heart in it if that's all it contains. Particularly if the essays are horrible academic ones. I've read some blogs over the last couple of years that have touched me deeply and even changed my life, though perhaps not in drastic, perceptible ways. Most of them detail the daily lives of people that matter, people who have something really meaningful to say, people with incredible odds against them but who still take great joy in life. I don't believe I have incredible odds stacked against me or any really amazing stories to share with the world, but I have passion, and hopes, and fears, and perhaps a teaspoon of knowledge and experience, and a keen desire to make a difference in this world before I leave it, even if it's only to a few people. This blog is merely a medium, a means to many possible ends, and that is its whole purpose.
And now, with that in mind...

First some advice for future college students: ***DO NOT WAIT UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE TO SUBMIT YOUR APS.*** I have done so...they still aren't all in...and I have learned the hard way that the longer you wait, the better your chances of being absolutely, gloriously screwed. There's still hope for me - a fair amount, actually - but honestly, my dear brothers and sisters in pre-college insanity...it is not worth the stress. If only I had really listened to the many friends who tried to tell me so. UNCG is my first choice of school. I've gotten a letter of acknowledgement and a little ID card from them, which I'm assuming is a good sign. Then today at church, I spoke with a friend who is quite a successful student there, and she told me that she submitted her ap about the same time I did a couple of years ago, and she still made it in, even with complications. I'm praying. Hard.

Okay, moving on...

I am very happy, because this past Saturday, I got more writing done in a few hours than I have in the last month. All things are possible when one rises from bed at a seasonable hour, a wise woman once said...that wise woman being not-so-wise me. *grins* Seriously, though, I am being showered with blessings I can't believe. First the great idea for this story seems to fall out of the sky and into my brain, and then I find myself invigorated with new passion for my calling. For months before this story, my writing was insipid at best, and at worst, downright awful. I don't know what went wrong or when, but I just tried to do what the professionals say: keep writing even if you don't feel like it. Well, that can only be done for so long before one gets really discouraged. Feeling slightly worthless, I beguiled much time with computer games (one in particular which is very good and will get some stage room here at some point in the future), but my mood continued to spiral steadily downward because of the lack of motivation to write productively. Then something wonderful happened. I found myself participating in a collaborative story. At first my goal was to help one of my very best friends deal with some stuff in her own life, and writing this story seemed to be cathardic. But gradually I was reawakened. I realized just how much when she found out my reasons and threatened to kill the story on the spot...and I reacted with horror and a stab of grief and even a little fear. The collaboration is still going on and is tremendous fun, but lately I've been hungering to work on this wonderful gift - this idea that has such great potential that it must surely be a godsend. It couldn't possibly have come from me, after all; I'm not that good. *grin* I tried, but I was in the midst of a fairly creepy part and would end up having to stop, incapacitated by shivers of horror, after only a few minutes of writing. By Saturday I had finally gotten past all that, and now...I can't remember the last time I felt this free! It's amazing! I will be facing a lot of challenges in this story, doing things I've never done before, turning my back on the convention of "writing what I know," and exploring unknown territories (literally and figuratively), but my excitement is definitely outweighing my lack of surety.

Coming hopefully soon: an article on writing what you don't know.

Essay Thursday

For the English and literature class I'm taking this semester, one of the exercises we do every Wednesday is to write an essay in response to an SAT prompt in twenty-five minutes. We did our first one yesterday. I'm generally not good at such writing, but at least when I'm under pressure I *have* to do it, no ifs, ands, or buts. So since these essays are not turned in or graded, I'll post them here as I do them, for anyone who might be interested. Yesterday's question was, "Can success be disastrous?"

*******
In today’s culture, we are all about feeling good about ourselves and being successful. As soon as we reach one goal, we are pushed on, either by our own dissatisfaction or by some outside force which plays upon it, to something else, because it is never an option to say, “Enough.” We are playing a dangerous avoidance game with ourselves, constantly dodging the emptiness of independent human existence. The easiest way to solve this problem seems to set a goal that we can pour our whole lives into, one that we cannot be certain of reaching. We think that if only we can reach it, we will be happy; but in reality, we will simply find ourselves once more at the bottom of the mountain, all the worse for having fallen. Success is perhaps the most desired achievement with the highest potential for disaster known to mankind.
My grandfather once knew a man who constantly strove after money; his business was his entire life. Eventually he became very rich; he was successful by modern, worldly standards, and retired to enjoy himself. But it seemed that he did not know what to do with his success or his wealth and simply put it away as if it had never been, hoarding it, not even using enough of it to provide himself with adequate food and living conditions. My grandfather told me that in this man’s latter days of great wealth, he was always unkempt; his house was unheated and without air conditioning; his property was overtaken by weeds and wildlife and fell into disrepair. At last he died of malnourishment and other attendant health problems, literally killed by his so-called success.
But the dangers of success do not all lie in money. In fact, they have little to do with money at all, but rather with the mindset of the one who strives to be successful. In Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter, Roger Chillingworth pours all his energy and every waking moment of his life into discovering his wife’s adulterer, and even when he learns that it is the Reverend Dimmesdale, the most revered man in the city, it is not enough; he seeks to torment him into confession or madness. At last Dimmesdale dies after one brave stand, though hovering on the gray border of insanity, and Chillingworth’s ultimate purpose is achieved. But by this time, his life’s work has ceased to be that of a physician and has become a long, sadistic revel in the torment and pain of this one frail man. After Dimmesdale’s death, Chillingworth becomes ill himself and dies a withered man, a mere shadow of his former self, because he has nothing else to live for, and it is too late now for him to return to the wife he once adored. He succeeded, but the price was his mind, his soul, and ultimately his life.
Success can be a wonderful thing, bringing fame and fortune, security, or simply personal pleasure. It is something to strive for, something that no one should leave life without tasting, because it is a God-given blessing when it comes. But it is not the be all and end all of this life and should not be elevated too high. It is a dangerous game to play, with too high a potential for disaster to become the core of one’s existence. There must be something more to life to rejoice in once success has been reached, or it may consume the one who strives for it.
*******

Yeah, it's sort of...crap. But I'm out of practice at this sort of thing, and it was done in twenty-five minutes, anyway.