Please take a look at twloha.com. It is the website of a non-profit group called To Write Love on Her Arms that works to reconcile depression issues and prevent suicide. It is a cause that I hold extremely close to my heart and I’d love if if you could open your hearts to it as well! 
TWLOHA November 19, 2009
The Twilight Saga November 2, 2009
I feel that it is important to finally address the Twilight saga. I resisted reading the books for so long, but caved in last fall and read the first two. I skipped out on going to see the movie. I just finished reading Eclipse in one day and managed to get 250 pages into Breaking Dawn last night before passing out, though I was reluctant to let myself drift into the Land of Nod.
I’m trying to read these novels in three different ways:
1) Just your average reader wanting to be entertained.
2) A hopeless romantic, searching for my own Edward Cullen or Jacob Black
3) As a writer, hoping to glean ways to engage my readers the way Stephenie Meyer has been able to command total attention of her readers, many of whom (myself included) are completely hooked and can’t put the book down after reading just one chapter.
The first two methods of reading this series go hand in hand. Readers cannot help but be enthralled in the developing relationship between Bella and Edward, getting upset with Edward when he leaves and championing Jacob as he steps in the fill the void. It is nothing more than a traditional love triangle, but is it because there is the added element of a vampire being pitted against a werewolf that hooks readers in?
Meyer’s chapters are all similar in length. She balances dialogue with internal thought with actions, creating scenes that span the many pages of her stories. The basic skeleton of plot and her writing style are simple, so what is it that forces us (readers + moi) to stay up until the break of dawn frantically tearing through pages, on the edge of our seats, waiting to see how the drama unfolds?
A Little Inspiration October 28, 2009
Here is a song I came across today that I absolutely love! The entire album is great, but this song was one of my favorites!
It is called “Have you Ever?” by Brandi Carlisle
Weather and Genre October 27, 2009
I started pondering this question after reading in L.J. Seller’s blog, her question about whether people determine what they read based on gender of the author or protagonist. In an effort not to copy her absolutely brilliant question, I’ve developed my own: Does the weather influence the genre you read?
Weather perversely effects mood with gloomier weather usually spurring on lazier indoor activities and bright and mild weather pulls us to be outside absorbing vitamin D. Im my own case, I read all the time. If it’s raining, I stay in bed and read and if it’s sunny, I don my sunglasses and stake out a deck chair someplace and bring my book with me, but does the weather also play a role in determining what I read? I’d say so. In most cases, when the weather is foul, I’m much more likely to pull out the annals of Poe or Dostoyevsky than I am to select one of the 7 volumes of Harry Potter stories. However, there are the days I try to battle meteoric melancholy by skimming the pages of something like Shopaholic Takes Manhattan instead of The Bell Jar. Our summers are full of things that bookshops like to denote as “Beach reads,” which are light, fluffy stories that you can skim, absorb, and feel good about, but what do the stores set aside as winter reads?
What do you think about the weather and the type/genre of the material you peruse?
The “Real” World October 25, 2009
This evening, I’m watching the movie “Accepted” in between working two jobs. The movie is the story of a boy who is not accepted into college and, not wanting to upset his parents, purchases an old building and starts his own school. He does it just to appease his guardians, and has his friends create a website to help make the school look authentic. What he doesn’t plan on happening, is for thousands of students to apply to the school. They are all automatically accepted and show up for class, not knowing that it isn’t a real school. This then leaves him to search out what the “college thing” is all about.
This made me reflect on my college experience. It was a bit atypical. I went to one school for a year, joined a sorority, and realized that I hated where I was. I transfered and ended up moving out of my house and becoming financially emancipated. There were some complications in my transfer, so I ended up taking a semester online. I completed my degree in apparel merchandising, business, English, and French in 3.5 years, including a study abroad program through a Big Ten university. Once I graduated, I moved to Manhattan for 4 months to work in fashion and realized that there was nothing about that field that I liked.
This led me straight back home, where I’ve been searching for a full-time job for the past 4.5 months. I wrote a book and have been working on a couple of picture books. I have more student debt than I’d like to admit to and I’m getting ready to buy my first car. Since I can’t find a job with my current degree, it looks like I need to defer my loans and go back to school.
Is this what the real world is all about? Collecting debt and working jobs that don’t allow for growth into my full potential?
What happened to the days our parents knew? They went to college in the 1970s (ok, jealous already) and took road trips all over the place doing crazy and illegal stuff. They graduated and were, for the most part, able to find jobs or to afford to take time off traveling around doing more illegal stuff. We read books and watch movies about the past and the main characters are all able to do as they please. They run into troubles, but come to good ends at the story’s conclusion. I suppose that’s why movies and books are considered “entertainment.” They allow readers and watchers to escape from their own lives and view the world through others’ lives.
It just makes me wonder what everything is all about, when it comes down to it. Where do we draw the line between living and surviving? We all know how we’d like to live, but most of us can’t survive while living the lives we want. Most of us are sacrificing life just to survive. We trudge through day after day, some of us know what we’d rather be doing, others don’t have the time or desire to think about what the way they want to live.
What do you think?
23 People That Inspire Me October 21, 2009
1) Rosa Parks- for standing up for herself and her beliefs
2) Robert Frost- for stringing words together beautifully
3) Georgaina Cavendish- for her struggles with love and her ability to rise above them.
4) Claes Oldenburg- for being whimsical
5) Walt Whitman- for being political and lovely at the same time
6) Jane Austen- for breaking the mold
7) Marie Antoinette- for being misunderstood
8) Amelia Earhart- for making her dreams take flight
9) Herb Hoover- for making pewter Saltine crackers that make me smile
10) Tim Walker- for amazing photographs that always get my creativity stirring
11) Tim Burton- for his imagination
12) Johnny Depp- (since he goes so well with Tim Burton) for using his talent on screen to delight and entertain and creating a high standard for all other actors to attain
13) Grace Kelly- for being the fairy tale princess on the outside and the complete opposite on the inside.
14) Kate Spade- for her taste and style
15) Imogen Heap- for her lilting voice and soulful music
16) Truman Capote- for being eccentric
17) Sylvia Plath- for teaching me how not to live my life
18) Christophe Irmscher- for inspiring me to leave the world of fashion for the world of books and literature and learning
19) Lone Droscher-Neilson- for helping save the orangutans!
20) Jay Hawes and Grant Wilson (ok, these are clearly two, but I’m counting them as one) for teaching me how to ghost hunt and giving me the tools to stay occupied and do fun things with friends for hours
21) Vincent Van Gogh- for Starry Night. That painting makes me emotional.
22) J.K. Rowling- for taking a low point in her life and turning it around in a big way.
23) Pam Seccombe- for teaching me French, taking me overseas, and for being her own woman. 
Birthdays= Death of the Soul October 20, 2009
It was her Birthday. She wasn’t old enough to be considered old, but she didn’t feel young anymore. She was done with school. She had no prospects for work. She was biding time. Her long-term relationship had ended and she was left in the wake of all that she thought she would be by then: a young professional, recently married, settled, and pondering starting a family with her young husband.
She had none of these. She lived with her mother and worked the same job she’d held in high school.
She was not looking forward to this birthday, but she tried to make it into a positive part of her life; considering all of the things she’d done in the past year and all the things she’d learned about herself and the ways of the world. She’d graduated college and moved from the Midwest to the Big Apple where her best friend usurped the job she thought she’d hold at the end of the internship period.
For her birthday, she planned a variety of quirky activities to engage her townie friends. Her other friends were spread all over the world, engaged in various tasks of study or working in some capacity. Her friends at home always complained of boredom, so she devised an itinerary, spanning a week, of out of the box things to do in celebration of a day she would have rather forgotten.
Her wish, as it turned out (and as her excitement to partake in these celebratory activities mounted) was to be granted. Not a single friend she’d invited was able, after a month of having RSVPed “yes” could celebrate. She canceled celebrations and was then met by a round of agitated friends telling her that she simply HAD to do something, so she devised a less involved itinerary and began to look forward to it.
This schedule, too, was abandoned. She caught up on some much needed sleep and picked up more hours at work, looking forward to a dinner with friends on her actual date of birth. The day started out rough. She had a dream about a boyfriend who had been stalking her. This set the tone for the day. One of the flowers her mother had given her was decapitated by her stepfather and shortly after making this discovery, a rack of frozen ribs descended from the freezer onto her foot. That foot had never healed correctly from being broken at a ska concert years before and a spray of angry popped blood vessels reappeared.
Shortly thereafter, foot recovered and breakfasted, she checked her e-mail and was met with an angry missive from her father, with whom she’d been out of contact for nearly a month. He scrawled out all the reasons for why he hated her mother and included a few paragraphs about how she was turning into a horrible person, with a postscript about having withheld some valuable family information. This piqued her interest, but only until one of her best friends sent her a message saying that the girl he had chosen to be his girlfriend disliked her, though they hadn’t spoken a word to each other in over 15 years, and that they would no longer be able to talk.
Trying not to settle on all the bad things that had happened during the morning, she decided to visit another good friend who was working at a nearby coffeehouse. When she arrived at her destination, she was unable to get in, due to a new sidewalk being poured directly outside of the entrance. ”No matter,” she thought, climbing back into the car and heading to a nearby park to do some reading before heading to her afternoon volunteering program. She sat in the car, enjoying the uncharceristically balmy October day and turning the pages of her novel. ”Nothing like good literature to take one’s mind off of things,” she told herself.
The day was warm, and she quickly grew hot in the car with the sun filtering through the windows. She turned the key in the ignition, wanting to get the car on to roll down the window. The car wouldn’t start. She had 20 minutes to get to her volunteer session. She called everyone who was in town, but no one picked up. Just at her moment of panic, her coffeehouse friend called. He would come and jump start her car.
He arrived in a flurry, five minutes later and hurried to attach the jumper cables to just the right notches on each car’s respective battery. He turned his car on. She turned her car on. Nothing happened. They waited. Tried again. Nothing happened. Ten minutes later, she was already late. She started walking.
She arrived late and had no way to leave once she was finished. ”That’s ok,” she thought, “I’ll call a friend.”
She made the call. ”Umm, about tonight… none of us can go anymore. I’m stuck at work. I can’t help you. Sorry,” she was told by the voice at the other end of the line.
She got a ride home from her stepdad who had miraculously been able to repair the car and went home. She was exhausted. She had a dinner of mac ‘n’ cheese with her mother. She needed comfort food. She took a shower and tried to wash away the bad feelings of the day. She climbed into bed and found out that her friends had gone to dinner without her. She pulled on her favorite pajamas and snuggled down into her flannel cloud sheets with a slice of birthday cake. She got the hiccups and couldn’t eat for a good 20 minutes.
She boxed up the memory of the birthday she had planned on celebrating surrounded by good people and put it on the shelf as the birthday of the cowardly companion, discouraging dad, and fleeting friends and stored it next to the birthday her parents picked up and went on vacation to Paris without her, the birthday her mom got mad and threw a cake at her, the birthday she moved and didn’t know anyone and hardly spoke a word all day, and the birthday she spend comforting her bawling ex boyfriend and nearly got run over by a Range Rover. She jammed the boxes of birthday memories into the highest, most unreachable shelf in the library of her mind.
The buildup to this day had long coming, but the letdown was almost immediate. As she ticked one more year off of her life, she felt a little part of her soul escape. It rolled out in the tears she only allowed herself to cry in the shower, so that they’d mix in with the tap water and disappear down the drain into a sewer of oblivion.
Flying Humans? October 17, 2009
I just came across this video and just wanted to share it with everyone. It blows my mind. Check it out:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5377317n&tag=mg;mostpopvideo
It Feels SO Good to be Back! October 14, 2009
Oh wow! It’s wonderful to be blogging again! I sort of ended up with a bit of a creepy individual who would not leave me alone, so I deleted my last blog, along with my Twitter, but this person has been dealt with and I’m BACK!
I really should be writing a chapter of MIS (the working title for my first novel), but here I am instead, trying to reestablish myself in the world of Internet communication, and let me tell you: it’s lovely!
Ok, this was just a quick buzz to get back into the swing! Time to go prepare a delicious dinner!
