Leaving Home

This past summer I realized that I really loved the Twin Cities, which was rather inconvenient as I was preparing to go to school in London for a year, and then New York for the next three. I was of course excited for this, but not as much as it seemed I should be, and there was so much cool stuff at home. Maybe I would have been fine going to the University of Minnesota, maybe I made all the wrong choices. Was I just spending a ridiculous amount of money to go off on some adventure that I couldn't seem to be able to really get excited for? I wanted to go to London, I've wanted to travel for ages, a few months before I had been seriously considering applying to some universities in Edinburgh because all the smallest bits of British life captivated me. (I was one of those teenage American girls) Or something. But now that it was really happening, I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know how to move away to college, much less to an entirely foreign city. Everything would change, and it seemed like nothing really registered with me. I just kept on explaining to people how I was going to NYU -in London- for my freshman year, the whole year, just the year, yes, freshman year, it's an option they had with the program I'm in, it seemed like it'd be cool, I was very excited and everyone was just SO excited for me. That was probably the biggest thing that convinced me I was doing the right thing. Everyone, especially adults, seemed to be unable to stop telling me how excited they were for me, what a great time I was going to have. "To be 18 in London" is an approximation of the words my math teacher used. How wonderfully fantastic. This was it. This was my chance to travel, to adventure. What better time? These four years are my chance to do stuff like this. Where better than London and New York for the bases of my adventures? Minneapolis is a great city, one where I could see myself living after I finish college. I could live in the Twin Cities for the rest of my life. And I'm not going to throw around words like "once in a lifetime" or "never again" because I don't have any idea what the future will be. But as far as opportunities come, this one is pretty spectacular.

Everyone Should Have a Blog

So, I was working at the Fitzgerald the other night and I think it's fair to say that a lot, if not a majority of the people who usher, especially the volunteers, are old ladies. Such was the case on Saturday.  There were two old ladies standing with me for house hold and I listened to them talk about their lives and they gave me what might be the best advice anyone has ever received: Save money and don't gain weight. 

When the house opened, me and one of the women, I think her name was Alfreda, went up to the first balcony. We didn't have much to do, it was general admission and we didn't get programs until part way through, and it hadn't sold very well so hardly anyone was on the first balcony. So we mostly talked. We talked a bit about the Oscars that were happening the next day, and a bit about the Wisconsin fiasco and somehow, she ended up telling me some things about her life, or rather just in general what life was like when she was younger. She said that she remembered the first time that there was the issue of whether teachers had the right to strike. She told me that she had been a sixth grade teacher and the material was harder than when she was in sixth grade and is much harder now, and something about how there weren't many teachers because people were working in wartime industries. She talked about how it used to be that a man needed to be present for a woman to buy a car. 

Which is why I think that everyone should have a blog. Everyone's life is a story, and then people could learn the stories of other people. It would sure make things like the mystery of Gussie Manlove simpler.

But then I think about how nothing on this blog would really interest someone in the future. It doesn't really give a picture of my life, it's mostly a bunch of ramblings and whining. I don't have enough perspective to really talk about my life, whatever that is. But maybe someday.

Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone's life has something special and unique, and if you pieced all those stories together, you could really get a picture of the world. This is why I love the internet. The internet is completely changing the world. But that is for another day.

Merry Almost Christmas

So, I'm sitting here in my basement. In about 40 minutes, it will be Christmas and I will be 17 years old. Every year, what a strange feeling. The feeling that I should feel different, but I really don't. Like, I'm thoughtful about it, and I'm aware of it, but I'm just sitting here in my basement, like any other night, listening to my brand new Arcade Fire CD, and if I just didn't think about it, nothing would be different. I've felt 17 for a few weeks. That's really how it always is, especially because 17 isn't any big landmark. I can go to R rated movies by myself. Yippee! Christmas was much more exciting when I was little, and it was all about the presents, and that was okay, because I was little. Now I am older, so I am not allowed to be as focused on presents, which is fine, because the presents aren't as exciting now that I am older and also now that my grandparents aren't able to do as much shopping. Present wise, nothing will ever top the year when my grandparents stood in line to get my brother and me a Wii, and we both got DSs and that might have also been the year I got a digital camera for my birthday... Or was that the portable DVD player with the awful battery life? But this Christmas has been really great. I don't know. I'm still too young to only be about family and stuff. In 35 minutes it will be Christmas and my birthday. I will wake up, it will be exciting, and before I know it, it will be over. That's the way it always is. No, that's depressing. What am I even trying to say here? I like Christmas. I like the feeling driving home from my grandparent's house, listening to the Current play the biggest variety of Christmas music I've ever heard, looking at lights. I don't know...

I'm sitting here in my basement.  Soon it will be Christmas, and soon it will be my birthday, and that is exactly how I feel. 

Christmas Eve always makes me think of the song from A Year with Frog and Toad: "Merry Almost Christmas, Happy Almost New Year" There are a lot of other really nice lyrics too, but that pretty much sums it up.   

Here I am. 11:30 on Christmas Eve.  I should go to bed before too long, or else Santa won't come, and I won't want to wake up in the morning. (yeah... right...) But not before midnight. I'll sit here, staring at this screen, and ponder. But probably not. I'll probably just listen to more Arcade Fire, maybe watch some youtube videos, but mostly just wait. I don't know. When I started typing this I expected it to be shorter and less rambly... How silly of me. 

Well, here I am. Now what?

I am confused. also fangirly.

What's this?! Another blog post? Unheard of!

So, it has come to my attention, (due to my new found frequent use and refreshing of my gmail) that I have 6 subscribers on youtube. Only 2 of them are people I know. I don't understand.

But the main purpose if this post is for me to puzzle out my feelings about becoming a fan of things. (Not just the obsolete facebook version, but like real life interests.) When I become fans of things I usually start after the thing has started. Like for a TV Show, I'll start watching from the beginning when it's a few seasons in. Or like I started watching a lot of youtubers a few months ago, and they had all had communities around them for years. And that makes me feel like if I consier myself a fan of the thing, I'm in some weird way cheating the people who have been fans from the beginning. Especially because if I like something, I am HARDCORE about it. I can make references out of nowhere, and I'm currently doing quite well on my quest to watch all vlogbrothers videos. I can comb the internet for info and interviews and articles on things. When I got caught up on Doctor Who I was excited that I could now freely browse the internet searching for DW things. 

I'm trying to determine why I feel this way. Most times my interests are such that previous fans of the show are completely unaware of my existence just as they were before. And when I start something that a friend had been interested in previously, they usually seem fine with it, sometimes happy to have someone to talk to about it and make references. I know I like having to talk to people about things, and I sure like to make references. When I discovered that Elizabeth (hi) watched White Collar, I didn't think that she was infringing on my fan-ness, I was excited to have someone to talk to about it. I tried to get someone to watch Burn Notice so I could talk to them about it. 

However, there are times when I feel like I will feel like someone is infringing on my fan-ness, or stealing my "thing" although thinking about it, it is generally limited to one person and I think I might have some idea why, but I'm not going to talk about it here on the off chance that she reads this. I made this post to talk about it and try to figure it out, but then I got here and realized that there's really nothing stopping the person from reading this one day, so I guess I'll just leave it as it is. Sorry. I think I was able to still say some things in the top part. If you have any kind of burning curiosity just talk to me and I can tell you about it.

Song of the Moment: Exploding People, by Cloud Cult

Quote of the moment: "You can't feel alone if it's all you've ever known."

-Hank Green, A Song about Anglerfish.

Not Whining: Cloud Cult and HP7

So, I haven't written a blog in a while, because I haven't really had anything to say, and I'm sure Elizabeth is the only one who reads these (Hi), and if there was something I wanted to talk about it I figured I should save it for a vlog. But I don't feel like doing that tonight, and I was looking over all my old posts and for the msot part they are all very whiny, so I wanted to have some sort of update on my life that wasn't whiny and annoying. So I'm going to talk about my amazing night last night when I went to a Cloud Cult concert and then the midnight showing of Harry Potter 7. 

The Cloud Cult concert was AMAZING. I had forgotten how much I liked them, and they have an awesome, spectacular live show. Not only was the music amazing, they had people on stage painting on these big spinning canvases during the show and the music was amazing. I bought two of their albums, because they were a decent deal, and I would have bought at least one anyway and now I don't have to pay shipping. I had one of their albums already, but I stole it from my brother, and I think it was one of their older ones, because when they played songs from it I got really excited but not as many people seemed to know them. But it was great.

Harry Potter 7 was also great. It wasn't amazingly perfect, but as the movies go, it was good. For the most part it was quite true to the book. It moved fast, but there is an outrageous amount of stuff that happens in that book, it was kind of neccesary. I can't imagine what it would have been like in a single movie. I also noticed many parts where they didn't really explain things, or they just briefly mentioned them. It seemed much more dependent on people having read the books than the previous movies. (I look forward to seeing it again with my brother, who never made it past book 4) I also kept pointing out little inconsistencies in my head. (Technically, she modifies her parent's memories, she doesn't erase them. Actually, they apparate back to Grimmauld Place. etc...) But I also got nice little moments like haha, Scrimgeour, you're about to get dead. But along with that I knew exactly what was going to happen to Hedwig and Dobby. :'( The other really annoying thing is that they didn't really have full consistency between night and day. Like, there's the whole Silver Doe scene, at night, Ron returns, they destroy the Horcrux, but then when they get back to the tent to meet Hermione, it's daytime. um.... Yeah. So I wished they could have spent more time on pretty much everything, although I realize that not everyone would sit with me through a 5 hour movie. A lot of people would, but not everyone. However, I probably would have fallen asleep, seeing as came a little close as it was during a few parts. But as a whole, it was good and true to the books, assuming you've read them, and are still fairly familiar with the plot. And one other little thing that bothered me is the great line Kingsley's patronus says (at least they had something) in the book it is: THE MINISTRY HAS FALLEN. SCRIMGEOUR IS DEAD. THEY ARE COMING. in the movie they say THE MINISTER OF MAGIC IS DEAD. or it might have just been "the minister". either way it doesn't sound as good. I realize that not everyone knows who Scrimgeour is, but still. this is really long and I'm sure I could say more, but I am going to summarize and be done: It was a good movie, faithful to the books and it probably would have been even more amazing to someone who is a little more casual of a HP fan than me. But not too casual, because then they wouldn't follow what's going on.

Rambles about Music

So, it seems like everyone has at least one thing that's like their interest. And for a while I was hardcore into film and TV, and I'm still kind of, but less so. And I've realized that I'm really into music. I love to listen to music and to play music and to sing. I love the way music can make you feel, happy, sad, excited. I love music in cinematic settings and just as music. It can set the mood for anything. There are so many times when my life story can be told through song lyrics. 

The only problem is, I don't know how to be into music. I like to listen to it, and a lot of times I will characterize it by what it would look like in a cinematic setting, like what kind of scene this song would be in if it were in a movie. (I sometimes do this with places, too. Does everything lead back to film? maybe I should have joined yfp...) I've been compiling a mental list of albums that I want to buy and there are so many great bands in the world. (Why does pop music suck so much?) But what else does a person do? As much as I love music, and as much as I would love to be good at it, I am TERRIBLE at performing. I can't sing, I'm bad at guitar and piano and drums and all the other instruments. As much as I'd love to, I really can't see myself as a performer. Well, that's a lie. I can see myself, but I don't know how realistic it is. Sometimes I can sing average, sometimes it's terrible. I wonder, if I keep doing the youtube thing, if I would ever have the courage to upload a song. I wish Central had more periods in a day and I could take choir, just to see what happened, even though women's choir already has SO many people in it. I wish there was someone who I trusted enough to the point where, if I wrote a song or wanted to sing a song or something, I could do it for them and know that they would be completely honest and tell me if I was terrible (which I think would be the most likely outcome) or if I tried to write a song, they could help me figure out any music I stole from somewhere, because it seems almost guaranteed that if I (or most people for that matter) tried to write a song, some of it would be ripped off from somewhere because so much music is loaded into our subconscious. 

I'm basically a musician without the talent. Music inspires me and I'd really love to write songs and play music. I've already got a tentative title for my debut album, The Other Side of Town, and now Elizabeth and I have our band name, Reckless Abandon. :) I like it. 

This has been another really long post, but I think this time it was a little more cohesive and I feel like I might have actually got some coherent thoughts across. 

Bye

Songs of the Moment:

"Creep" and "Believe in Yourself" as performed by Sons of Admirals

"Don't Look Back" and "I Hate Mario Kart Wii" by Alex Day

like I said, I like music.

Quote of the Moment:

The entire lyrics of all 4 songs of the moment.

*cough* http://www.youtube.com/user/aburger9009 *cough*

The epic adventure of how I hopped a barbed wire fence while being chased by a mountain lion

So, today I'm going to take a break from all that teenage angst crap and tell you a story. But first, a teensy bit of background: I noticed the other day that the scar on my hand was almost completely faded. This made me sad, because I like my scars. When I was younger I always wished I had some scars and I was happy when I finally got a couple, even though the process of getting them was very unpleasant. But those aren't the scars I'm going to talk about today, and that's not even really the reason I'm a bit sad about the fading of this one. It's because the scar is a reminder of how I got the scar, and that is a story. It's not a particularly special or exciting story, but it's still a story. When I noticed I could barely see the scar, it occurred to me that the story could soon be forgotten. How horrible, I thought, I should write it down. -And then do what with it. -*gasp* I should blog about it. And that brings me to where we are now. This looks like it might get to be another really long post, sorry. Maybe I'll make the font smaller. So here is my story:

I went to a family camp in the black hills last summer called Outlaw Ranch. One of the things my age group did one morning was hike to Outlaw Mountain. Not everyone in my group went, but most or all of the guys did. and I did. I was the only girl from the age group, but this doesn't seem to be overly unusual in my life. I wanted to hike up a mountain. And it was a tough hike, it was really steep and pretty long and there were tree branches literally everywhere. EVERYWHERE all over the ground. My legs got all scratched up. Sometime on the way to the top, I noticed that there was a nice red scratch on my hand. It didn't really hurt and it wasn't really bleeding, so I didn't realize until I glanced down at my hand. I figured I had scratched it on a tree branch, but later, I decided that I had probably scratched myself hopping over the short little barbed wire fence on the way. 

We were a little late coming back for lunch, so we decided to make up a story about how we got attacked by a mountain lion, and it scratched me, but then this kid in my group named Jay knocked it out with his water bottle and we ran off before it woke up. That was the story that I was going to tell people if they asked about the scar, until I realized that hopping a barbed wire fence sounded almost as badass as fighting off a mountain lion, and it was more realistic, because it actually happened. Then I decided I should say I hopped a barbed wire fence while being chased by a mountain lion. 

That's really all I have to say. It was pretty long. sorry.

Quote of the moment: "Are you a battlement?" -some really dumb chick on amazing race

"Hi, I'm Tom from Australia" -Tom from Australia aka frezned