PotentialPoltergeist on Xanga

K.'s Cogitations

Saturday, 05 January 2008

Currently Listening
Lyrical Sympathy
The Red Carpet Day
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Sleep is Wonderful...

..and I really need to go get some sleep right now; yesterday was jam-packed with excitement. Or at least what I would consider exciting: a lecture by Dr. Brier,yes, the Dr. Brier! To say that it was pretty cool to get to see his film about mummies and then hear his account of the modern mummification process firsthand right after that would be a grave understatement. Our motley crew's DDR session afterwards wasn't bad, either (although my dancing certainly was). And to top that off, I spent the rest of the night with my best Fisherville friends, whom I don't see nearly enough of these days. I walked in a bite war, which set the tone for the following hours of pure lunacy. We tried to watch Rent, but wound up sprawled around in helpless fits of hysterical laughter after a brutal Twister match instead.

My only nagging concern is this: what do you do when a seance goes wrong? The question was posed to me and for all my interest in the paranormal, I'm really not sure.

Tuesday, 01 January 2008

Currently Reading
Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books
By Francesca Lia Block
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My Year(s) in Quotes

This is a collection meant more for archiving purposes than anything, but feel free to peruse these odd snippers of my life thus far.

Your mother wears caligae!
~Marcus

G-e-ORGI-a
ORGI is our middle name
Go Georgia! Go Georgia!
~Georgia JCL

Speaker: Knock, knock.
Crowd: Who's there?
Speaker: Ara Pacis.
Crowd: Ara Pacis who?
Speaker: Ara Pacis cigarettes cheap here?
Crowd: [silence]
Speaker: [waiting for laughter]
Crowd: ...boooo.

So there's this movie called "Walk the Line", have you seen it? I think it's about Usher.
~girl at NJCL convention

Hannah Sybil [playing telephone at girls' retreat]: Frogs in apostrophe bubbles.
Me: Frogs are nursing Michael's toes?!?! What?!?!?

There's one thing about my opinions...they're always right.
~Mr. Cothran

I'm sorry, it's language enforcement Wednesday.
~Mr. Cothran

Wildchildlaetes: The IM gods do not like us today!
Odd Afterthought: We must appease them.
Wildchildlaetes: I
Wildchildlaetes: am offering them libations as we speak.
Wildchildlaetes: Oh, great gods, we give you milk and hoeny and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note.

She's slower than molasses in January!
~Susan

It is to be hoped that I shall be able to do something with the inside of my head, for I shall certainly never do anything by the help of the outside.
~character in H. Rider Haggard's "She"

I'm raping virgin snow! I'm raping virgin snow!
~Hannah Z.

MOOOOOOSE!!!
~Hannah M.

Emo? Like the red, fuzzy "tickle me" thing?
~Mr. Moore

If you're buying meat at Kroger, you're not loving your neighbor as yourself!
~Mr. Moody

You pepper sprayed yourself AGAIN?
~Lady on a cell phone at Qdoba

Heather: I'm falling asleep in this movie again!
Becca: Maybe the first Saw is just boring?
Me: The second Saw has more stuff than stuff and...yeah.
Becca: Oh, that's helpful.
Currently Listening
ABBA: Number Ones
Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)
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W00t, 2008.

So here it is, 2008 already. Where did all the time go? Well, here's what I did with it, anyway.

*Went to cookie exchange. Definitely did more eating than exchanging.

*Managed to get along with all of my relatives. It's a Christmas miracle!

*Maybe committed a felony? I'm sure it's legal for a group of friends simply to drive around taking pictures of strangers' Christmas decorations by night. But when that involves dragging out a spotlight, cranking up the Riders in the Sky Christmas music (we refused to carol ourselves), and traipsing about yards quite uninvited, even mistletoe and cookies in the mailbox won't stop some people from calling block watch. Most people either didn't come out or just agreed and gaped out their windows at us, but one family actually turned on the lights, pulled up the shades, pressed their faces to the window, and started to call the cops on us. Geesh! I'm just glad I won't have to put "arrested for spreading Christmas spirit" on my college applications. But on the bright side, we made history; I'm sure those disgruntled people will be telling this story of weirdos in the night for many Christmases to come. And hey, I'm always up for adding a little absurdity to random strangers' lives.

*Saw National Treasure; learned that burritos as big as your head will make you sick.

In summary, not much of interest went on over my winter break except for the whole "Uh, Merry Christmas...RUN, KIDS, RUN!" fiasco with the Scrooges of Cherokee Park. Fortunately, Block Watch has yet to come after me.

So here I am...New Year's Eve. I resolved to go to Iceland, and that's about it. Everyone else went to sleep a long time ago, even the dogs. As for me, for lack of New Year's nightlife, I'm going to curl up with some deliciously unhealthy chocolate-covered popcorn (the person who invented that stuff was a genius; it satisfies salty, crunchy, and chocolatey snack cravings all at once! and I know it's horrid for you, but what the heck, it's a holiday) and ring in the New Year with a good J-horror film and some Sandman reading later on.

Happy 2008, everybody!

Saturday, 24 November 2007

Currently Listening
Saw
Hello Zepp
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Personal Novel Writing Mayhem

I should be adding onto my novel right now, but I also should catch up on my sleep, scrounge around for some dinner, finish my study guide for Language Arts, and STUDY FOR CHEMISTRY. Or I could procrastinate and write in my Xanga about all of those other things I should be doing instead of going and doing them. Yes, I think I'll do that instead.

My word count stands at 26,353 as of today. According to the No Plot No Problem book, I should be over 40,000 by now. Chronic insomnia and carpal tunnel, here I come! I'm worried that my novel is becoming too personal and bitter, considering that I'm keeping a list of people who must never, ever read it if I want to avoid a lynching. It's not that I don't love those people (well, except for a certain headmistress, She Who Shall Not Be Named But Is Very Wicked Indeed), it's just that they're so quirky and fascinating that I can't help but write about them. I suspect that I ought to worry more about my warped mind than my characters' real world counterparts, however; so far the scenes I've had the most fun writing have been Llewellyn's visions of Hell, Llewellyn's death by fall and hair straightener, and that one scene where the satellite radio DJs meet their untimely demise in the form of a fungus zombie. I honestly do not know where that last scene came from; I could swear it wrote itself. Next year I am absolutely going to write a horror novel. That's what this one started out as, but now it's leaning towards satire/stream of consciousness/thing that makes you go hmmm (or, more likely, WTF?!?). I don't know what to call it anymore, actually, but that's the joy of it!

Perhaps that aforementioned fungicide -- wait, is it fungicide when the fungus thing does the killing? no, I don't think so, but let's just leave it at that -- was a product of my first drug-induced high. I look like a major drug addict now with this obvious yellow-blue bruise and needle wound right in my armpit, but I needed the morphine when I got my wisdom teeth taken out. I was terrified, but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as I expected it to be. The only frightening part was when I first went in and the nursing duo strapped my arms and legs to the chair, put some plastic thing in my mouth to hold it open, and put the laughing gas mask over my nose. And that bit was only unnerving because I was thinking of this one horror movie -- I want to say Room 6, but I'm not sure of that -- where someone gets strapped down for surgery, indicates that the drugs didn't kick in, and then the nurses say they know it didn't and operate anyway. Ouch! Anyway, after all that they put a tightening band around my left arm, presumably to check my pulse since the band loosened up after awhile, and by the time the doctor/surgeon came in the laughing gas had kicked in. I only felt a tiny, faraway prick when he put the IV into my arm and that's the last of my clear memories of the day. I do recall that when I came to, I was sore and swollen in the gums and cheeks and very much ready to collapse into bed when I got home, but beyond that everything is hazy. The laughing gas and morphine made me feel the same as I do whenever I get little to no sleep and not enough to eat and drink for several successive days: both especially bound by gravity and floaty out-of-body all at once. It's a sensation most peculiar.

I don't understand how people get addicted to pain pills. I really don't. I like my mind to be free at all times, and pain pills make it too heavy for me to do anything. Gah.

I may have lost some teeth, but I gained some wisdom, or at least insight, in the process. When you've been living on pudding and apple sauce for about a week, no matter how delicious the tapioca, chocolate, and rice flavors were at first, you're more grateful than ever before when they snip your stitches and you're finally able to eat a real Thanksgiving dinner's worth of solid food. I'd never tasted such sumptuous sweet potatoes, tasty turkey, or beautiful broccoli. Not to mention the macaroni, meatballs, chocolate chip cookies, crackers, and cheese that came later! And pie. Oh, yes, the pies. Pumpkin and apple cinnamon (oozing frosted cranberries and icing, mmm) and oreo cookie chocolate and lemon cream and Boston cream and chocolate cream, oh my! It wouldn't be a family gathering without all that sugar. I don't know why they even asked us to bring the vegetables and dip; on my dad's side of the family, it's all about the sweets. And, ironically, the traditional Thanksgiving Day *coughcough* family gripe fest. Conversation abounds about everything from taxes to travel to work to insurance to personal ailments to, inevitably, the whole country going to hell. It's always interesting to listen to my dad and my uncle talk, considering that the one hates Indians because they steal his jobs and that the other's job is to train those Indians to steal the jobs. I think the nicest part of the day for me was the morning, when we visited my sister and ate her homemade apple pie and pumpkin bread while my nephew got all excited about the parade. At the end of the day, I felt exceedingly grateful for everything. I have no real reason at all to complain about anything, you know.

To top off this sequence of madcap events, I've just returned from an amazing overnight Sawathon with some crazy-fun old friends that I don't get to see much now that I'm out of Fisherville. I was expecting generic torture porn, but as it turns out, Saw has a plot! And a good plot at that, albeit one that is uabashedly sadistic towards the majority of its characters. If you can get past the inevitable bloody death scenes, it is, quite contrary to my expectations, a movie that will make you think. It most certainly isn't a movie that I openly recommend, however; I suspect that my enjoyment of it was likely a result of Tobin Bell's being my current favorite actor. After watching Saw II, we looked at each other and went, let's go enjoy life more! So, we went walking and skipping up and down the road in the middle of the night in the full moonlight that made everything look silvery, snowy, and spooky. It was freezing out, but that just made it more wonderful.

But now I desperately need a nap. And some lotion for my hands before they crack like crocodile skin from cold air and frenetic typing. Ergo, good night, mes amies!

Wednesday, 14 November 2007

Currently Listening
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
By The Beatles
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!
see related
Potential Poltergeist, Definite Procrastinator

So...about me. Not that you wanted to know or anything. I'm going to keep writing, and you can stop reading whenever you choose. I did some blogging like this on Myspace for awhile, but it got old. Myspace, I mean. Facebook is infinitely better. I decided this once and for all after listening to a crossdressing Michael Jackson lookalike in a coffee shop chat with his friend via cell phone about tracking down people on Myspace. I'm fine with crossdressing Michael Jackson lookalikes at a distance, but I'd rather not acquire such internet stalkers. Facebook is better, yes, but it is also extremely addictive. And as if I weren't wasting enough time there already, my friends suggested this, and here I am not doing my homework.

I am an arms dealer, fitting you with weapons in the form of words...okay, not really, just felt like throwing that in. Or maybe I am? I am a Dreamer, a writer, a fan of all kinds of horror, an adventurer, an introvert, and an eccentric afterthought, among other things. I might even be a hobbit, considering my overall build, but especially my hands, which are small, but frustratingly awkward and eczematic rather than graceful. I've only ever met one person with fingers shorter than mine, and hers were little more than stubs! One thing I'm not is graceful, coordinated, or atheletic in any way. It's not that I'm clumsy so much as that I'm always in a dreamy, sleep-deprived fog, so preoccupied with my musings that I fail to note things right in front of me. Consequently, I trip over my own feet and fall up the stairs embarrassingly often. It's a small price to pay for the pursuit of whimsy, of which I never tire. Normality is not something I ever wish to be a part of. And that was flawed grammar, I know. Deal with it.

Why a potential poltergeist? I read of a theory which suggested that poltergeists are not rowdy spirits. According to this theory, they are in fact teenagers under so much stress that they cannot hold it inside themselves. The intensty of these teens' troubles emanates from them as a physical force, which creates a corporeal extension of the turmoil within via flying objects and the like. And while I am not one of these poltergeists now, I certainly live with a heck of a lot of chaos, so I thought the name would be appropriate. Don't get me wrong, though; I love the chaos. Wouldn't want it any other way. I also love all things odd and morbid. I spend my spare time researching vampires, werewolves, and many other things that go bump in the night. This Xanga will reflect my warped and morbid mind, functioning in a stream-of-consciousness style. Rants, raves, Philippics, randomosity, it'll all be here. Except for the butterflies, rainbows, and happy happy ponies. If you're looking for that peace-and-love sort of thing, you really should stop reading now.