Since Bold Sophia Has Crossed the Sea

"Fear is a sign of humanity. Only fools are not afraid."

That's a quote from somewhere, and, so atypical of me, obviously, I don't remember where its from. But I thought it was cool.
Heh. It's true too. I mean, what kind of person falls off a cliff by accident? Not the one that's too scared to get within ten feet of the edge. It's the brave fellow who wants to show off how cool and daring he is to his friends or to himself, or maybe he's just foolish. Or she. Not necessarily just guys who are stupid. Well actually... HAHAHAHAHA.. Ignore me. Well. But don't really ignore me. Just ignore anything stupid I say. Pay attention to all my good aspects, of which I have many, like my humbleness.

But yah, maybe fear isn't always such a bad thing. It's always looked on as a negative thing, but even though it's not fun to feel afraid, it sometimes prevents things happening that are worse than that feeling of fear.

Lord Bateman wouldn't have been captured and put in prison and he wouldn't have nearly died if he had some fear and stayed home. But he was brave and went sailing around for the heck of it. If it weren't for a disobedient daughter, he'd have been a goner. What a beautiful rhyme I made this time.

On the flip-side.  Living in fear is a sucky life too. Especially when we've got all those promises from God that He'll take care of us. And besides, what happens to our earthly bodies doesn't matter, we'll be whole in heaven, man can't take away the most important part of us.

OH THE DEEP PHILOSOPHICALNESS. Is that a word? My spellcheck says no, but my spellcheck also says spellcheck isn't a word. Do you deny your own self, spellcheck??!!

Anyways, if Sophia was too afraid, she'd never have crossed the sea and gotten to marry her Lord Bateman, and there wouldn't have been such a pretty song written about them.
Of course, come to think of it, she might have sailed away across the sea because of fear of her father who was probably pretty darn mad at her.
Now, some general updates. I HAVE NEGLECTED YOU, MY DEAR BELOVED PROBABLY NO ONE, BUT HOPEFULLY NOT NO ONE, BUT A WONDERFUL PERSON WHO READS MY BLOG!!!

I use caps lock too much. Actually I just hold down shift and don't literally use caps lock. I believe in complete honestly, if you haven't noticed. But I use capital letters very much, which is ironic because it tics me off when other people use capitol letters too much.

I meant to spell tic that way. Because I like the onomatopoeic word relating to clocks far better than blood-sucking Ixodes scapularis. Random fact, I have a huge fear of ticks. If I think I might have one on my head, I am likely to pull all my hair out and scratch my scalp off. That is really disgusting. MOVING ON.

Okay, I was supposed to be giving you some general updates. Okay. So yes, I haven't posted much lately. I'm prepping for forum show at my school, in which I'll hopefully be performing a song by Dou Wei, called Shangdi Baoyou, or God Bless. I'll put the music video in this post somewhere.

I've also been busy doing stuff with the Red Plague robotics team. Hopefully redesigning their website. I'd link it but it isn't very impressive YET. But it will be. I'm working on it. Kind of. And I've been working on their open house prep and such as well.

I'm taking a photography class right now so I haven't done much of my typical art. But I'm finally learning to use photoshop. Which is good and bad because now I really want it and it's so expensive.

At the library, I've scheduled a craft club day. Made some samples and bought the materials. We're doing this really awesome viking knit jewellery thing with norse rune charms to go with the mythology theme we have right now. I'll get a pic on here... maybe... yes... alrighty. So I think they're cool, and not really bragging about myself here, because viking knit is an ancient technique (check this blog out for some of the history of it) which I never would have thought of myself. It looks pretty high end, but it's easy and cheap to make. Which is ridiculous. And awesome.

So yah. Thinking I might add some extra pages on my blog here to put some photography, maybe a poetry page, might even start posting some of my book I'm writing . . . anyone interested in seeing any of that stuff? Lemme know. If you'd like to have some of YOUR stuff on here... maybe I could do a gallery of stuff by readers.. that might be pretty sweet :) Anyways, just brainstorming right now. 

Thanks for reading, Imma heading to bed. Night!

Happy New Year's Eve's Eve!

      Today is the day before the day before the first day of the next year! Oh my gosh, that's just so incredible.
     Lessee, we have some news . . . Boardwalk Amblers Anonymous now has an official facebook page! Next maybe we'll add a Twitter, a google +, a pinterest, a myspace, a sina weibo, a . . . never mind. Just facebook for now.
    
     I think that's about all I have to say right now. Goodbye! Oh wait, what did you say? Oh? You were wondering how I survived the rest of the end of the world? I guess I did sort of stop explaining it. Where was I? Ah yes, I was buying cheese from the Wisconsin cheese man.
     He was an interesting fellow. A green hoodie with the hood up, big sunglasses with round lenses, and a heavy southern accent (southern as in south of Canada, obviously). He did seem a little shady, but he was actually really friendly and the cheese was good.
     Oh, I was farther than that? So sorry? Was I on the beach? Nope? Ohhhh, the volcano! Sorry, okay, so I was surrounded on all sides and about to be dumped into the lava, when suddenly, it erupted. Which would have been a problem, but I carried an emergency lava proof umbrella  in my pocket, so I just opened it up and everything was fine. Well, not for the punk squid squadron, or the  spat! onomatopoeia society, or the living rocks of personification, just for me and my umbrella.
      When the eruption was over I took out my cell phone and called the angry flying pigs, and they came over with their giant cannons and shot themselves at the volcano until they broke everyone out of the lava, and we took them to the hospital. I hear there were no casualties, except one worm, which was given a very touching funeral. We all wore our best brown clothes for it and wept threw mud around. He would have been proud to see it.
     Finally I got back to ohio, and since it was getting so late I decided to go straight home and meet my mom there. When I got home, our house was in quite a disarray, twenty two and a half hares were having a tea party, or so the flamingotunaman explained when I asked him what was going on.
     "Twenty two and a half hares? Did you kill one?" I began to panic.
     "Of course not, idiotic human, I'm pescetarian, I would never kill a hare! Besides, everyone knows a rabbit is half a hare," he rolled his eyes and glamorously spun around on his heels and took a proffered cup of tea from a crying hare. I looked around and realized all the hares were weeping and everyone was wearing a tuxedo, even flamingotunaman, but he didn't look even a tad upset.
     I went up to the first hare and ask him what was wrong. He just shook his head and sobbed harder. I went to the hare that was lounging sleepily on the couch and crying softer than the rest of them an ask him what the problem was.
     "Mister hare, whatever is the problem?" I asked. He jumped to his feet at the sound of my voice.
     "Well, don't be asking me miss, I'm just crying because they are, I never know what's going on so I just do what they do mostly," he explained then plopped back down on the couch. I found another hare and asked him, hoping the third time would be the charm. It wasn't, it took seven tries, for various reasons, then one pulled himself together and explained.
     "Today's my birthday. So it's not my unbirthday, and we were all born on the same day, so it's nobody's unbirthday, so we can't have an unbirthday celebration! It's the first day in hundreds of days that this has happened, we just don't know what to do!" he sobbed and sobbed.
     "Well, today is my unbirthday," I said and patted him soothingly. He immediately stopped crying and shouted with joy and announced it to all the others. They served me cake, sang the unbirthday song and gave me presents, but then the last one came up to me in the gift presentation line.
     "I don't have any gifts suitable for a girl," he said, "I ran out . . . I'm so very sorry," he began to cry.
     "Oh don't be sorry, it's fine! If you want to give me a marvelous present, you could pick up some of the mess in here, that would be amazing," I said, hoping he could maybe wipe the mud off the floor or something. He brightened up at the suggestion, and cleaned my house totally and completely and repaired everything, then all of a sudden, everybody disappeared. Then my mom came home.
     "How was your day?" she asked me.
     "Interesting," I replied. Nothing else unusual happened that day.

Okey dokes, there you go! Hope you enjoyed reading it, have a happy New Year's Eve tomorrow!

Repentance or Regret?

     I regret not posting in so long, I repent my negligence.

     Those terms, they seem like synonyms at first, but I don't think they are. Hmm. Repentance and regret.
     I saw a movie a week or so ago. There was a man who gambled, and lost, a lot. His wife obviously wasn't happy about it. She was complaining about it to this older wiser man, telling him how awful her husband was for gambling. She expected him to agree and sympathize with her. His reply was a short question.
     "Is it the gambling you mind, or the losing?"
     I thought that was a really cool thought. When we sin, and face the consequences of it, what exactly are we upset about? Are we repenting our sin, wishing we didn't do it because it was wrong, or only regretting it because we had to pay for it?
      Would we regret it if we got away with it scotch-free?
      What does scotch-free mean anyways? Is it a term referring to scotch tape being residue free? Or is it Scott-free? Or did I just make up the term just now? What are the answers to these deep philosophical questions? The answer is . . . 42.
      BAHHHH. How many roads must a man walk down?
     Seven. It must be seven. I like seven. Have I told you that seven is my favorite number? I like it a lot. You know why I like sevens? Because I can cross them like a backwards F! I told a friend that one time, and she wasn't really listening and just knew I was talking about sevens, and she said, "I hate people who cross their sevens." I didn't repeat my reasons for loving seven.
      How in Tobago did I get talking about sevens? Who could that be at this hour?

     Oh, by the way, did you enjoy the end of the world? I've been hearing some incredible tales of triumph from the survivors. Did you survive? If you did, there's this comment box thingy below. Feel free to post your survival story, it will be put in our archives and you will be named in our hallowed list of survivors of the horrific apocalypse.


     My experience was more mild than I anticipated. The day started out with a tuna fish knocking on my door. Apparently he'd read this blog and gathered that I'm vegetarian and came to me for shelter.
      "I'm being chased," he said, "I may bring you grave danger, but if you protect me, and we survive, there will be great rewards for you." I ushered him inside from the rain and took his bowler cap and scarf and purple leather trench coat and hung them up. They were so heavy with water that they tore the coat rack off the wall and hit the ground with a great splat. I shrugged and turned back to him.
     "I'll get you a towel to dry off. I'd let you sit on the coach soaked like that, but my mom would kill us both. Or worse, just kill you and cook you for dinner and make me eat you," I explained. He gasped in horror.
     "No! No! Please no!" He yelled, backing towards the door.
     "Don't worry, dear sir, I will not let her cook you," I insisted, trying to comfort him.
     "Anything but the couch! I'm fearfully afraid of couches!" Tears streamed down his face. There was an awkward pause. Then I thought of the perfect thing to say.
      "Oh." Then another pause and another moment of inspiration and enlightenment. "There's the bathtub.. Or the pond."
    "Ah a pond, perfect! Do you have any salt? I'm dreadfully craving some salt."
      I considered whether allowing him to take salt into the pond would kill the other fish or not. I debated inwardly for an hour with he stood there twiddling his fins. However, five minutes before I reached my decision, a blue bus crashed through our house, it crashed through one wall and out the other without slowing down, while the people aboard screamed,
     "The yellow jackets are coming, the yellow jackets are coming!" Soon after they left, a swarm of flying jackets burst through the hole the bus had made. The jackets' sleeves were tied around curved swords which they flung about with deadly abandon. They each had shining gold buttons and were made out of the finest of the finest green polyester.
     My head itched I scratched it and discovered the itch was caused by a miniature sized live chimpanzee. Thankfully I didn't kill it. I went to the kitchen and peeled a banana and set the chimpanzee next to the banana on the counter. Then I made a list of what I needed, packed the knives and packed the bread and prayed for holy things. I was careful what I wished for, and I was sure to crawl through the open door.
     I didn't crawl because I was too tall for the opening, absolutely not. The bus expanded the door to record heights. No, I thought it would sound more epic to tell people that I crawled out of the rubble of my home. Then I started walking.
      I made it half way down our half mile long driveway, when I half remembered I had needed to do something. But since I only half remembered, I half mindedly continued walking, though now at only half speed. I made it half way down the second half of our half mile drive ways, when I remembered the second half of how to remembered what I'd needed to do.
     "The fish!" I exclaimed. I ran back to the house and looked for the fish. I saw some squishy goop under the door that was smacked down on our floor by the bus.
     "Oh Mr. Fish! I'm so sorry," tears streamed down my face. "I promise, I cry because you died, not because I won't get my reward now. I wouldn't have accepted the reward anyways, I would have gotten my reward in heaven for my good deeds. But now you're gone!" I sobbed.
     "Oh good," I heard a voice say. I looked up. There was Mr. Fish, slurping salt up a straw and looking increasingly like a flamingo, "I was lying about the reward and such anyways." He crossed his legs and leaned on the balcony railing. I could tell he thought this position made him look cute. It made me want to throw a pineapple at his feathery scaly flamingotunaman face. "Oh, I accidentally dropped this weird iridescent triangle collection and some eggs and red paint. I mopped it all under the door. I don't think your parents will notice it now."
     "Gahhhhhh youuuuu!!" I raged and bounded up the stairs to attack him when I heard the far off tune of an ice cream truck approaching. I made a run for it, to the ice cream, not the tuna fish.
     Unfortunately the ice cream truck did not surface from its underground path to sell ice cream at our house. But since I was already at the end of the driveway, I decided to walk to my mothers workplace and ask her for the number to call the insurance company to have them come inspect the damage done to our floors from the stupid flamingotunaman's mess. Idiotic fish. If anything could make me want to eat fish, it was him. I was seriously considering stopping by McDonalds to get a fish fillet just to spite him, but decided it was unfair to eat a fish for the sins of the flamingotunaman. So I kept walking.
     Unfortunately I lost track of time and walked too far and ended up in Wisconsin instead and had to back track, which was annoying but I stopped and bought some cheese so it was alright. The journey back was a bit harder because all bodies of water simultaneously turned into volcanos. (Millions of fish died, proving the theory of evolution wrong as they failed to adapt enough to survive in lava instead of water)
     And just as I reached the peak of the tallest volcano and was walking precariously around the edge of the hike that cascaded down into a lava pit, the punk squid squadron of inconveniently inconsistently emphatically employed alliteration burst down from the sky and pointed their noodle guns at me.
      "This is the tuned tuna we are looking for!" They exclaimed exponentially in unison.
Then the spat! onomatopoeia society boomed through the surface of the lava and with a click, each member shot their grappling hooks with clanged against the rock and with grunts and groans, they climbed towards me with hungry growls coming from their stomachs.
     Then the living rocks of personification grew legs and the stones knew it was their time. They took sips of their brave water and clambered towards the volcano where they must go into the angry lava and melt with their happy ancestors. The crowds of living rocks threatened to push me off the sad edge into the furious lava myself.

This is getting long and it's rather late so I'll tell you more about it later. Vale!

Books Are Dusty and Muddy Things

To put it nicely.

See, as you may know, I work at the local library here as an assistant to the teen librarian. Today I was working on picking out books for next month's book display. I'm doing books with red and/or green covers to kind of go with the Christmas season coming up. It seemed like it'd be super easy. I could just pick out a few books from the teen section that sounded interesting and had covers with red or green on them.
Well it wasn't that simple. I'd grab a book that looked interesting and look up some reviews on it, only to discover it was full of rather disgusting content. Since that wasn't going so well, I compiled a list of all the books in the teen section with red or green covers (that took a while, there were many more than I'd expected) then proceeded to go down the list looking up reviews. Book after book I discovered to have horrible content. This was the TEEN section. My younger brother is supposed to be old enough for this stuff, and I, four years older than him, was horrified just reading reviews of these books.
Look, this blog is directed mainly at 15-18 year olds, though I try to keep it rated PG for any younger friends or siblings of friends or just plain any younger kids who read some of it. I don't even feel I could uphold my obligation to appropriateness for my audience if I even alluded to what these books graphically describe. Wow. And guess what, only a year or so ago, the library didn't allow anyone under 18 to check out any movies that weren't rated G, seventeen year-olds couldn't get Tangled, but 12 year old kid could check out a book that makes me want to throw up just reading reviews of on the Common Sense Media site. Why is it that books are so different?
I think parents often think that if a kid is reading a book, any book, its a good thing. Because it's educational and all that. It isn't so quick and easy to read a book first before giving it to their kids, so they don't. Sure, they could search through reviews, but it's a lot easier to pre-watch a movie. So they don't check as much as they should. And maybe it doesn't occur to them. Books don't come with ratings like movies and video games do. I think they probably should. That would hurt the YA book industry though.
See, that kind of trashy book sells, doesn't it? Sad to say, but it does. And the YA book industry knows that. It's not some crazy accident that there's all these horrible things in books written for teens. It's not even a decision that the author made by themselves. Books go through agents, then are read and marked up all over by and editor. Then the author gets it back and makes changes. Then the editor reads through again and makes some more suggestions, then the author, then the editor, then the author... It might even be a number of different editors. They know this is going to be marketed to teens, and I bet they know it's wrong too.
Sure, make the excuses. They're just writing realistically. They're writing what the world is really like and what teens really do today. WELL GUESS WHAT GUYS??!! Where do these teens get their ideas to do these things? From your flippin dirty novels!
And that stuff is totally unnecessary. Unless you're writing a historical fiction novel about the holocaust. And even then you don't have to swim in the details. And if you're going to do that, you have every right to, but market it to adults, please.
You can write a romance novel without getting super physical, and you can write a great adventure without dumping blood and gore on us. Tanith Lee for example. She's a adult horror novelist. And that's fine. But when she wrote the Claidi Journals for young adults (one of my favorite series ever, I might add, I can't get over how amazing the books are), there was no extreme violence, the worst language was a few occurances of D*** and the physical romance reached its height at.. like five extremely brief kisses over four books.  Let me repeat that. She's a adult horror novelist.
Write horrible graphic stuff to your heart's content if you want but please, market it to adults!
 I hate how I can't just pick whatever sounds interesting from teen sections in libraries and book stores. I hate being afraid to read because of unnecessary bad content in books. I love reading, but I read a lot less because of that.
I think I'll be praying for the YA book publishing industry. Join me?

It's not Thnot

     Thnot: something kind of like a squid disco ball, but . . . not.

     That had nothing to do with anything. But, you'll remember, yesterday, I said that China would crash, Turkey would fall, and Greece would be overthrown. Oh, and America would be attacked. Well, something unprecedentedly preposterous has happened. I have, not only prevented any huge disasters of that sort from happening, but my predictions have also come true!
     You see, even though I myself am a vegetarian, my family is not, so my dad made a turkey. He dropped a wing when it came out of the over, so you see Turkey fell, in the process he also threw grease all over the kitchen, Grease was over-thrown. I would say that a teacup, or piece of "China" crashed, while it probably did somewhere today, I didn't wish to kill any cups for the sake of my prediction, so I just tossed one onto my bed where it "crashed" but was unharmed. So China crashed. I didn't have to do anything to America myself, for America was attacked with a huge number of belly aches from eating too much.
     If the difference in spelling of "Greece" verses "Grease" bothers you, and you think it doesn't qualify to prove my predictions true, I can throw a map of Greece over my laptop.

     I hope you're having a great thanksgiving! Remember the pilgrims, they were grim because they had no Thnot!
 Good bye :)

Conspiracy Wednesday

     Thursday: Thanksgiving. Friday: Black Friday. Saturday: Small business Saturday. Monday: Cyber Monday. But what about today, Wednesday? I know you've been wondering. Today in CONSPIRACY WEDNESDAY. MWAH HA HA HA!
     My conspiracy theory is that tomorrow, China will Crash. Turkey will fall. Greece will be overthrown.
     And of course, everybody wants to rule the world. So while America is lying helpless, immobile from their over filled stomachs, we shall be attacked.
     But don't worry, I'm here to protect you and since I know of these impending disasters, I will do my best to stop them. So if my predictions do not come true, know that I succeeded in saving the world. If they do come true, I failed to save you, but at least my predictions would be right.

     That is all. I must go save the world now.

Blablabla

     I like to say that quite a bit, "blablabla," I also write laughter like "bahaha," and write "bleh," as my term of slight disapproval. I guess I have a thing for Bs. Bees are cool too though.
     Anyways. What's happened since my last post? Don't be ridiculous, that was a rhetorical question! Yah, so . . . the very next day I decided to do NaNoWriMo. Even though I skipped the first eight days. Do you know what NaNoWriMo is? Just in case you don't, its national novel writin month, so you write a novel at least 50,000 words long in the month of november. Exciting stuff.
     To finish on time you have to write an average of 1666 words a day, I b'lieve. I started 13,000 ish words behind, but now I've about halved that. Which is cool, but obviously still way behind. It's a lot of fun doing NaNoWriMo, but it's fun too, just like its name, annoying to type because of the capital letters, but sounds pretty sweet to say. Bahaha.
     I started another art project and finished the previous one . . . unless I had already finished it by the last post, don't think I did. I'll post it when it comes out of the display case. The new project is an acrylic painting on canvas. It's supposed to be photo realism, but we have to choose one of four color schemes: complimentary, split complimentary, analogous, or monochromatic. (I won't explain these color schemes here, but if you don't know and want to, this page explains it) None of which will produce extremely realistic results, and the point of photo realism is extreme realism . .  I don't quite get what my art teacher was thinking, but okay.
     I finished my drivers ed classes, they wouldn't let me keep my beautiful doodled-on written-on-in five-languages folder. :( I was going to show you that, but oh well. Now I just have my driving sessions with my instructor still to do.
     Another exciting thing: I got hired by my local library! Which is totally awesome. It happened after a fairly complicated series of events that I won't explain, (bwah ha ha ;P ) but I had my first day of work today. I was only there an hour but I got the grand tour and got introduced to everyone that was there, they all seemed really nice and everything, but I don't know if I'll ever know all their names D: Apparently there are five people working there named Debbie. I'm not sure I even met all of them. So that's a little overwhelming. But I have my own little desk and laptop to use, which is.. pink.. Oh my goodness. Honestly not sure whether I like or dislike the color yet. On the one hand, at least it's not boring, but on the other hand, it looks more girly than I really am. Coincidentally, I do happen to be wearing a pink shirt. Epic fail. Actually, just fail, it's not even epic. What does epic even really mean except when we're talking about Beowulf or the Aeneid? Bother.
     Well hey, that's all I feel like saying today. Thanks for reading! Ali bye bye Alibaba!