I am Thankful

I thought after months of complaining Thanksgiving is the perfect excuse to examine and give thanks to those things which make me happy and, at times, give me satisfaction. I know I can be a bit of a negative Nancy, but I really have a pretty neat life.

Let's start on the macro level, my time. I happen to live in one the most tolerant and accepting times since the dawning of man (at least as I can tell). Let's focus for a moment on the United States since it's what I have the most familiarity with. Since the Civil Rights movement we've advanced leaps and bounds in the treatment of those who are "different" than our superficial idea of normal. We are far from perfect. Our treatment of the poor and weak regardless of color is shameful, but at least intolerance is no longer politically correct. I'm proud and hopeful to say in my lifetime gay men and women will finally be treated with the respect every human being deserves. Despite backwards thinking bigots, we will keep fighting for equality on every level. I am thankful for our determination to win this war.

I am thankful that I'm a woman in a world where I'm not trod on like a sexual doormat. I grew up knowing I could do anything that a man could do, that gender was not going to be a roadblock. I am thankful for the strong women before me who stood up to oppression and paved the way for me.

Now for the more personal thanks. I have a wonderful boyfriend to spend my time with. He's warm and sweet and smart and handsome. He makes me dinner. He puts up with my abrupt hi's and low's. He's pretty much everything a gal could need or want. I have two magnificent parents who take care of me even though I live hundreds of miles away and don't call nearly as much as I should. I have a cat who is happy to curl up on my chest, full of purrs, and nap. I have a job that I like with health insurance. I have money in savings. I have a roof over my head and food on the table. I have a comfortable bed and a large television.

I'm pretty damn lucky. I tend to forget that and as corny as this post may be, it's nice to remind myself that I am far from lost. I'm in a good place with good people. I am moving forward. I wish everyone could have it this good.

Book

I'm trying to write a book and I've hit the wall at only 34 pages. Everything sounds like a cliche. The story's stupid. I want to take it outside and burn it, only it's in digital form and I don't want to waste the paper to print it out.

Ugh! Frustration! Why can't I just be a writer, poof, with a grand and beautiful way of expressing myself? Why I'm I trapped in my own lethargic mind? Why? Why? Why?

It feels so good to wallow in self pity sometimes. Not right now though. I don't want pity, I want to write. I want to get published. I want a lot of people to read my work and pay me a good deal of money so I can buy that loft I want and spend all day writing on my rooftop deck (in the summer) and all night rehearsing for that next great play I'm in.

Is that too much to ask? This is America! All our wishes and dreams come true here, right? That's what Disney taught me. Don't dream it, be it. Wait, no, that was Rocky Horror. Same sentiment.

I don't know what to do. I just don't know what to do. It's literally the same drivel page after page after page.

Look, I'm not attempting the next Great American Novel here, but if I can't write something at least as good as those stupid, poorly composed, Sookie Stackhouse novels that True Blood is based on, I may actually just keel over and die.

A Little Fun

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

A Late Night/Early Morning

I'm conscious and I'm at work. That's pretty much the limit of cognisant abilities today. As you may be aware, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 came out in cinema's everywhere this past midnight. Being the crazy die hard fan that I am, bucking violently at the idea of growing out of this phase, I was in attendance. And now here I am, at work, trying to maintain some form of awareness on two hours of sleep.

I've never been like some of my comrade's who, in college at least, seemed to live, nay, thrive on minimal sleep. A healthy dose of Z's have always been a priority on my agenda. I never pulled an all-nighter to finish a paper. I can count the number of times on one hand that I stayed out until the sun came up, and they were generally not sanctioned by myself.

More than that, I am strictly diurnal. As much as being a night owl has always appealed to me, what with my penchant for the paranormal and my infatuation with star gazing, I've just never been able to sustain it. My body craves sleep. My body relishes in it.

Getting home at 3:30 and waking up at 5:45 was a feat. I'm proud to have accomplished it. I whipped my blanket off of myself like a champ, bravely facing the icy air and chilly wood floor. I dragged on my jeans (thank god for casual Friday, brushed out my hair, and even managed to make my face look somewhat fresh. I am thoroughly and utterly pooped, but I console myself with the knowledge that in a few short hours I'll be tucked safely in my bed, blankets piled high, my head filled with magical dreams.

For now I'll pat myself on the back for a movie well watched and my brain's willingness not to ignore my alarm. I will smile bravely at the guests who zoom in and out of my office and have no idea of the girl screaming for sleep behind my slightly red eyes.

I will also attempt to stop being so melodramatic and go drink a cup of coffee.

The Other Extreme

I'm finding it hard to write in the absence of politics. I must say, I've had a lot less heart ache and grief since I went on my vacation far from the New York Times and Huffington Post. My worry lines are decreasing, I'm not so utterly depressed when I get off work. It's like I'm a recovering addict.

There's not much to say. I'm in rehearsals Monday through Thursday's after work and it's rather taxing. I'm surprised I haven't caved into the allure of caffeine. Going to the gym is a pipe dream. My point is, my life is far from eventful at the present time. Go to work. Go to rehearsal. Sleep. Repeat five days, sleep for two. Aw the pleasures of the bohemian life. Well not really bohemian with the who full time office job thing, but, you know what I mean.

Do you know what the excitement of my week has been thus far? I get to fly my cat home with me over the Christmas break. That's the highlight. Boom.

It may seem that I am hating on my rehearsal process, which is not the case. I love this show. It's coming together quite nicely. I know some music. I know some lines. It'll be good. I'm simply tired, grumpy and cold. And I'm really struggling to write this today. So it's bad and it's scattered and I just don't care.

An Unfortunate GRE Score

I would like to preface this by saying that not all of my GRE score was unfortunate. I did quite well on the Verbal portion and while my writing section could have been higher, it was nothing to be ashamed of. However, it has taken me a month to get over the embarassment of my quantitative score.

Math, the bane of my existence. Numbers and formulas seem to wash over my brain like so much water. I don't soak them up the way I do words. It would be nice to say I'm handicapped, that something is wrong with my head. Maybe I'm allergic. But I feel like that's the easy way out. It's me making excuses for my own inability to buckly down and actually study.

Most of my life I've drifted through math classes, cramming my brain full enough to pass tests with a reasonable grade, soon letting the equations and time tables flit out when the danger of failing passed. I need to start at the very beginning and train myself, pull myself up from the pool of ignorance I've mired myself in by years of expertly B.S.ing.

Are there classes for adults with a college degree who simply don't grasp math? Maybe I should bite the bullet and pay over $1000 for a GRE class. But what if I take that class and my brain is so thick that I refuse to learn? Why does this one stupid score need to stand in front of me and my Grad school future? Should I not go to grad school? Should I pack up a tiny travel trailer and venture around America with Fay taking pictures and writing stories of the modern American twenty-somthing girl?

Sometimes I forget my age. I forget that I'm 23 and have years upon years ahead of me. But years are getting shorter and I can already feel my life speeding up. Those things I were uncertain of a year ago, I'm still uncertain of. I am bogged down by my generations need to accomplish something significant. I feel as if my life will be a waste if I fail to contribute to humanity in some way, minor or major.

And now I am babbling my insecurities all over the internet in some wave of nervous venting. All I want is to be intelligent and talented enought to leave some tiny scar on the surface of civalization. I guess in the grand sceem of things, that is a lot to ask.

A Political Rest

The elections are over and while things did not turn out in a most ideal fashion, they certainly could have been worse (aka: Christine O'Donnell). It's come to my attention that I have a slightly unhealthy obsession with politics. It's exhausting to constantly scan the New York Times for the latest news. I'm always reading some history book or another, which I love, but I'm usually left with a head ache birthed from frustration. I take politics personally.

As such, I'm going to attempt to pull away from my stream of headlines and history and focus my attention on something utterly unimportant. For instance, today I was reading about Disney World's upcoming expansion of Fantasyland. Later, I may even play a game on my computer. Who knows? It's time to go crazy!

In line with my hiatus, I have an announcement to make. I am now a redhead. I'm not quite used to it yet, and I'm certainly not sure if I like it or not. For some reason, when my hair is crazy (like 3/4 of the time) it makes it look even more insane. I'll learn to love it eventually. If not, I can always make another trip to the salon.

Another exciting (but not too exciting) thing I've been doing today is reading about the Jaws ride at Universal Studios. Jaws, being the classic that it is, is my favorite ride there. Can you imagine my excitement when I discovered pictures of it completely dry?! I never had any idea how shallow the lagoon is. Seeing the sharks just hanging out is pretty awesome. I love knowing how things work, not that I understand most if not any of the mechanisms. I can't wait to ride it again soon!

Please Vote

I'm making one final plea before the election tomorrow: Please vote. Being politically savvy may not be the fad right now. The glory days of 2008 where my generation was filled with over zealous hope are long gone, but hope still exists. Not having our every desire satisfied in two brief years is not reason to turn our back on a presidency that has attained so much for us.

If you are in college on a Pell Grant, thank Obama for expanding both the program and the the amount you receive. If you've graduated and are still on your parents health insurance, thank Obama for the health reform he managed to pass. He has done more for our generation than any president in our history. Many have spoken about making it easier for Americans to go to college, he's the only one to have acted.

I am frustrated too that DADT is still active. I hate that we continue to fight a pointless war that is costing us more than we can afford in American dollars and troops. I'm dissatisfied too! That's why I'm voting. If the GOP take power, do you honestly think we'll be any closer to attaining those goals?

Here is a website with voting guides for individual states. It's a great place to begin sorting through the hodge-podge of untruths that have been told and find the candidates that most align with your beliefs. I hope it's helpful.

Please vote.