Bah Humbug, Guitar!

I want to be able to play the guitar, but I don't know how to learn it. It's obviously one of those things you can't teach yourself.

On a completely unrelated note, whenever I say "envelope" I pronounce it as "onvolope."

I wonder what I sound like to people from Europe or other continents.

I added the kitten for you, Katie. ;0)

Watch as I Babble About Things You Don't Care About

Yeah...so I haven't written here for a while. Might as well post something! So...what's gonna on?

Well, I was recently introduced to the card game Magic: The Gathering, and I have to say, it is so much better than Yu-Gi-Oh (or Duel Monsters, if you prefer to call it that).

I really like it, and I sort of want to teach more people how to play (such as my friends from school), since I have two decks now. Or maybe I'll find other nerds at school who play the game, and I'll have someone to play Magic with other than Heidi.

This is one of the reasons I'm anticipating the return of school. I'll get to see my friends, and I'll have new teachers and a new schedule! Well, maybe not completely new teachers. Some seventh grade teachers might be doubling up for eighth grade too, due to the recent budget cuts.

Ooh, not to mention my golden birthday. Yeah, it's way far away in October, but still. Two things I really want to put on my list: How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster (a clever and very awesome book on literature and symbolism), and the Starship: A Starkid Production DVD, which can only be bought by ordering it off the Starkid website.

Starship is a sci-fi musical comedy by a theater group called Starkid, that started out in Michigan, but later moved to Chicago. The show performed in February, and then it was posted to Youtube in April. Starkid is also the same group of actors who did A Very Potter Musical/Sequel, which I have also taken a great liking to.

Starship is my favorite musical. Ever. The music and talent and musical talent and the creativity is just totally awesome. Basically, it's about a bug named Bug on a far-off planet, and he dreams of being a starship ranger, an elite group of humans that traverses the galaxy in search of strange new worlds.

Anyway, I've been listening to the soundtrack for that a lot. I'm also reading a bunch of books, including Eat Pray Love, which I like very much so far. Italy is just so interesting! My interest to learn Italian has been rekindled, after the last several months of not bothering to pick up Italian: Step-by-Step.

So, anyone reading any good books lately? Learn new games, watch new movies/musicals?

A writing structure I'm sure you're all familiar with: CLIFFHANGERS.

Recently, I finished a book called BoneMan's Daughters. This book was good. I have to say that Ted Dekker gets me everytime, even though sometimes there are lulls in his stories that are quite deadly when it comes to thriller writing. In my favorite thriller books, I find that there are two stories/two things happening at once, and the stories/character perspective switch of every other chapter.

Cliffhangers are awesome. But they can also be annoying, frustrating, nail-biting, suspenseful, or exciting.

This is a clever thing, because once you finish reading a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter, you want to keep on reading to find out whether the other character is going to fall off that cliff or not, but first you have to read about what this other character is doing meanwhile. This technique is both good and bad in different ways. It builds suspense, but it makes a weaker reader set the book down because they don't particularily care about what Jane is doing at the moment. A stronger reader plows through the chapter, and finds out that Jane is dangling off an even higher cliff than John is!

(Oh, and if you haven't caught on yet, this is all hypothetical and John and Jane have nothing to do with BoneMan's Daughters.) So now you're back to John, who you were so worried about a chapter ago, and now you just want to get this chapter over with to see how Jane's doing. This is sometimes the case with a book, but other times it is not, and the whole book is just a whirlwind of events for a reader.

That's the best part- having your emotions flung all over the place, not sure whether you're going to implode any second from all the suspense and excitement the book is causing for you. BoneMan's Daughters was both of these for me - sometimes so exciting I was holding my breath, and sometimes so boring I wanted to fling the book across the room and pick it up again in a few days...maybe. I have been both the strong reader and the weak reader, sometimes setting the book aside and sometimes plowing through the chapters like a steam engine would through a valley of molasses. And with that being said, I need a new book. Any suggestions?

What books have you read that had this type of structure? Was it mindblowingly suspenseful, or so annoying you wanted to fling your book across the room?

Panda?

I want to just scoop this kid up and take him home with me. SO. CUTE.

Buono Giorno, Amici!

I'm bloggity-bloggy-blogging! Do da do...

The post is for you. Yes, you.

How are YOU doing today? I want to know.

I had a good day. At school our first few classes were shortened, so the whole school could participate in a Walkathon. The WHOLE school. The school colors are gold, white, and black, but each grade has a color. 6th graders are gold, 8th graders black, and 7th graders (like me) white. Now with the recently fixed softener, there hasn't been any time to get around to washing white clothes. (I've grown so used to not wearing the any white clothes that I barely notice if they're washed or not.) Of course there were no clean white stuff today, so I just wore a white sweatshirt over an orange shirt. (I don't really have any yellow clothes. That needs to change.) Anyway, the Walkathon was fun, for I got to walk with my friends and say hi to teachers or acquaintances that I don't get to speak to often.

The sun was out more today, but it might have been colder than yesterday. (Look at me, talking about the weather. You don't want to listen to all that.) Autumn is leaving quicker than I thought! And jeez, it's already Halloween next week!

It's awesome how fast I'm writing this post, but I'm not using the "proper" form of typing. ;0)

Oh, hey! November's coming up, and you know what that means! Thanksgiving (nom nom nom potato cheese casserole nom) and...(drum role) HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 1!!!



Don't pretend that you are not utterly ecstatic about it. I know you are. The great part is that since the showing is during the school year and NOT the summer, kids at school get to gossip about it the day of the release, and people will talk about it the next day being like, "AWESOMEST. SEVEN DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS. EVER SPENT!"

As you can see, the title for this post is in Italian. Yes, I have regained my enthusiasm for learning Italian. I don't have Spanish until the end of the school year, so I can enjoy learning Italian for a while longer.

I have such a long mental list of books I want to read and/or need to finish. Some books I've wanted to read for a while, but I never get around to it.

Books I want To Read:

- Running with Scissors
- Eat, Pray, Love
- Halo (a book I got for my birthday)
- Burned? (7th House of Night book)
- Awakened? (8th House of Night book coming soon)

And let's not forget those random books that I pass/look/see at the library and think "hm, that looks interesting..." but I never get it, because I'm already reading some other book.

Note that Burned and Awakened have question marks next to them because I'm not exactly sure if I want to read them, but I probably should because I've already read and own the six other books.

Books that I Started to read/read a good chunk of but Never finished:

- It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences
- Black and Blue Magic
- Star Girl
- Lord of the Flies (the writing is kind of poor)
- Mockingjay (up to chapter 4, but it's kind of boring)

There are no doubt more books, but those were the ones I could think of just now.

Well, buona notte! (At least for me.)

Autumn Wisconsin

I took a walk today this late afternoon, the sun just starting to set. The whole time I listened to the In Between Dreams Jack Johnson CD, and I felt pretty cool. I was really proud of myself of how awesomely awesome the awesome pictures of mine are.
So I walk, and it begins! 8D

I actually like how overgrown our grass looks sometimes. It's cool, and there was a lot of those straw thingies in the yard; like patches of them everywhere.

"I R a hoodlum!"

You know all those red berries on the bushes in our yard? The poisonous ones? Well, all today a bunch of birds have been swooping in and nom nom nomming on the berries! I got really close to a bird. It had already swallowed the berry, but I saw it do so. It was so cool!

This picture above is probably my favorite of all of them.

I looked like a homeless hoodlum, [with my giant swatshirt and baggy sweatpants], looking for trouble. I put my hood down to not scare the neighbors, and I took out my camera to show them I was a harmless citizen, just taking pictures. I probably still looked creepy, though, [looking like I was taking pictures of their homes], so I made sure my camera was always pointed at the sky. Jeez, I can't go walkin' in my own culd du sac without the neighbors eyeballing me.

This is my favorite time of day: Rays of orange light streaking through the trees, slightly chilly, shadows dancing in corners, light hitting leaves and bark jsut right...

This is me, bringing Hartford to you. Have a good upcoming week! :o)

Inception: Review

Inception was a very good movie. No, it was AMAZING - magnificently and deliciously imaginative. I, for one, have never seen a movie about dreams before. Although that doesn't mean that there aren't any out there, I still will go as far as to say that the plot was very original, in the fact that it dealed with the whole basis of original ideas in the first place. I mean, that is exactly what Inception is. Implanting an idea successfully into someone's mind, making the person believe that it was their idea in the first place without any inspiration. The details are still a little fuzzy.

Leonardo DiCaprio, in my opinion, did an excellent job in this movie. If not better, than as good as Shutter Island. He does the whole 'my-wife-is dead- and- I'm-still-grieving' thing very well. I loved this movie not simply just for the creativity, but for the music, plot, characters, and all that jazz. My favorite types of stories is when the main character is keeping a secret from everyone else, and someone is or already has figured it out. The angst - that's just gold.

What made this movie better for me? The surprises of seeing familiar actors. Like Ellen Page, Micheal Cane, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Cillian Murphy. (When those actors are rolled into one, what else to expect but AWESOME?) The fact that I had never seen a trailer for the movie might have helped, as trailers usually give away good parts of a movie and kind of take away the mystery of it all. (This point is true, in the fact that after I saw the movie I looked up some trailers for it, and Danny was right: They're very misleading.) I only knew that the movie involved dreams and it had Leo DiCaprio in it. Plus everyone was saying that it was the best movie ever and my own brother thought it was amazing.

That's another thing - what I heard from other people. So, before seeing the movie yesterday, I lowered my expectations a lot. I told myself that it was going to be really crappy while the trailers were going through, and people were exaggerating to the limit. Low and behold, after watching the movie that was 2 HOURS and 35 minutes, if felt like no time had gone by at all. It felt much shorter. The movie had been excellent, made me think, and it took me the rest of the day to absorb it fully.

Now, I want to see it again. I want to buy a ticket with my own money, and see Inception again by my self. I've never gone to the movie theater by myself before, and it would be an interesting experience. Sit wherever. Never have to turn my head every now and then to see how the other person is reacting. I'll just sit down, move if I want to move, and relax. But I would also not mind to see the movie again with Heidi (she's GREAT to watch movies with) and/or with Danny.

Too bad that I missed the 4:15pm showing of the movie today. That's the only time I can see it - the other times are either too early, or too expensive. I can't see it tomorrow, because Moma, Kelly, Heidi, and I are going to go visit Katie and Amy in Madison for the day tomorrow, after which Heidi has to stay around and see her new dorm. So hopefully I'll be able to go on Friday, but we might have the unfortunate displeasure of Kyle coming over. If not, I'll go on Friday or Saturday.

I would love to see Inception again. I would recommend it to anyone who loves to think during a movie, and enjoys witty and angsty and cool and confusing and downright original. Especially all the people who love the concept of dreams, keep a dream journal, or just have nothing to do this summer or this weekend of right this minute, and want 2 hours and 35 minutes of awesomeness.