26 July, 2011

ramble ramble happy ramble

Help, help! I'm going to a group interview tomorrow! What the heck is a group interview anyways?  It seems sort of stupid to me. (But please don't tell the prospective employers I said so, because I really do want this job.  I think)  There'll be fifteen of us going round in a circle all saying the same thing.  Dad also says there will be a conversation hog who will look like a fool.  I hope I'm not the hog.  I don't really see how I could be.  Ugh.
Well, life goes on.  I will wear my bright pink jeans and try to be my charming, friendly self.   And if I don't get it I really won't be crushed.

"So," she said, with a cool toss of her well-kept head of silky blonde hair and a casual shrug of her elegant shoulders, "we are moving into the new house in... what is it? Oh, yes, two days.  I'm sure it will be fine."

Yeah.  Back to reality land.

OHMYGOSHOHMYGOSHOHMYGOSH!
I guess I'm getting excited.  You would too if you were moving from very small apartment with a charming prospect across dying grass to three dead, abandoned air conditioning units, glinting in the sunlight, to a comparatively spacious house with bedrooms for all and 150 feet of lake front to call it's own.  Trust me, you would be too.
Do I sound like an insufferable gloater?   Perhaps I am.  But I would like to say that this is beyond anything we ever dreamed we'd get and definitely beyond anything we deserve.  I feel guilty, sometimes, for being so happy when so much bad is happening elsewhere in the world.  But getting depressed and wallowing over things and forgetting the blessings I've got has never helped anyone, I think.  When I'm really honest - tell myself to shut up and stop stubbornly indulging in mopes - I find that every day, every moment can be completely new.  Which sounds like absolute drivel, but is actually true.   I always have a chance to get over myself and get up and do something worthwhile.  Over the past few days, nerd that I am, I've thought several times of that speech Sam gives in the Lord of the Rings movie.  You know, "...the ones that really mattered."  Giving in isn't the answer - where will the people who have suffered have to go when they eventually get out?  Doesn't make much sense, I know, but I'm doing stream of consciousness writing and being very deep and therefore you must take me very seriously.

What a soppy person I am becoming.  But oh well.  I'm happy, happy, happy.  I hope we have one of those always-open houses, with pots of people in and out all the time.  We have a room to put people up in, which is a first for us.  A new frontier, indeed.

22 July, 2011

Okay, I have to shriek for a second.

Why, why, WHY did I never go to Comic-Con when I actually LIVED in San Diego?!  WHY? I lived there for forever!  GAAAAAAAA!

Thanks for listening, blog.

Brett Helquist went to BYU
Apparently, if I want to become a great illustrator or animator, I have to go to BYU.  Because EVERYBODY went to BYU.  About half of the freakishly cool artist blogs I follow belong to people who went to or are going to BYU.  It a shame that going to BYU would be, um, rather awkward for me.   I would like to have such great drawing skills.
OH MY GOSH!  EVEN NAPOLEON CAME FROM BYU! BYU alumni are taking over the world and making it cool! Agh!

I like to say BYU and use exclamation points! I'm going to go read something now! Good night!

11 July, 2011

PROMISES, DECISIONS OR DECLARATIONS I HAVE RECENTLY MADE WHICH, IN HINDSIGHT, WERE PROBABLY NOT WISE

(This is a whine. You have been warned.)

1. Offering to teach British Lit to my poor, trusting little sister.  I've mentioned once or twice before that I am profoundly unqualified for the job.  Now that I've used up almost the entire summer watching Gaudy Night and Lady in the Water*, and am consequently scrambling to put everything together, the realization of how completely inadequate my feeble murmurs about Paradise Lost will actually be when compared to good, sound pieces of scholarship has sort of plopped on me in one large mass of despair, like the blob.   I'm telling myself that if I behave in a very confident, businesslike way, there's a good chance she won't notice that I don't actually know anything.  My college British lit teacher might have been a total moron - but he was so sure of himself, and wore such nice Oxford don hats that I accepted every word as gospel.  

2. Declaring that I will read (or at least finish) a book a day for a year. Only a true fool would do such a thing.

3. Giving up sugar and bread for a week.  I can't.  I'm addicted and I accept it, and now I would just like to get on with life and eat Nutella and toast, thank you.

4. I should never tell people I have nothing to do with myself.  Kelsey, LISTEN. DO NOT do this ever again.  When you do, people send you to ludicrously early doctor appointments and you find yourself taking care of small children.  I really don't understand why people trust me with their children or pets or anything they value.  I wear sweaters backwards on a regular basis.  This afternoon, for instance.

5. Vowing not to buy any more music until I have learned the words to all the songs I've already got - and also get very familiar with the instrumental ones as well.  This is going to be embarrassing, but:

990 - soundtracks
120 - jazz
155 - The Beatles
1,538 - everything else
Grand total: 2,803 songs

I probably know - and I mean really know - somewhere around a third of that amount.  Nobody on earth except maybe Karl Lagerfeld has an excuse not to know the music they own.  And it seems silly for even Lagerfeld to buy so much. 

5. Also vowing that I will not check out any more library books until I've read all the un-read books I own.  Why did I even buy some of this stuff?  It all looks very nice and learned on the shelves, but they must change in transit - because when I've got them off the shelves and open, they've magically become boring. 

There are more, trust me.  But now I'm going to go do something fun.  Take a bath or read Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human.  Woof.  

(*You can probably guess which one I liked more.  I did admire Bryce Dallas Howard's blonde eyelashes, but I think I've watched Gaudy Night at least four times now.  I really am trying to give that M. Night guy a chance, but all the films I've seen have been let-downs.  I'm contemplating giving The Village a view.  The only thing is, I am a huge chicken.  To give you an idea of the level of wimpy-ness I have sunk to - I have to close my eyes when Gollum comes onscreen in Lord of the Rings. So will The Village scare me completely out of my mind? What about Signs or the Haley Joel Osment one, for that matter? It's hard to want to risk it when happier things are out and about.)

09 July, 2011

a volcanic ensemble




Moderate adoration.  Or maybe not moderate.  What can I say, the man oozes personality. 

Everybody is getting married right and left.  A friend and an acquaintance, both twenty years old, got hitched within the past couple of weeks.  (Not to each other.) What's the deal?  I didn't realize I would reach the proverbial age when all my friends would begin trotting down the aisle quite so soon.  Do people usually get married at 20?  Maybe these cider in lieu of champagne marriages are more widespread than I was aware.  21 and unmarried seems to make me practically an old maid.  

I'm trying to write my diary every day, and have also recently decided (like, as in this afternoon) to try to read a book every day, or at least finish one a day.   I think it's doable.  How is that a word?  Doable.  Is my spell check weak or something?

The internet is boring me right now.  I go online, delete emails from Teen Vogue, scan a weary eye over my Facebook page, read blogs - and then just sit there.  I feel like there's this super fun thing to do online that keeps my friends glued to it, but I don't know what it is.  I also feel like there is some secret site where all the cool people in the world go and talk about cool stuff together, and make themselves even cooler.  And it's called 


Could somebody kindly direct me to this site?  I mean, it has to be out there.   Some people I know could not be as cool as they are without some kind of outside help.  It just isn't possible.   Is it like a club?  If you people would let me join I would be very grateful and admiring and stumble over myself to write nice comments.  Or wait! Maybe I won't because that wouldn't be cool.  Aloofness is often deemed cool, from what I've observed.  This learning to be cool, studying for coolness, if you will, is certainly a tricky business. 

This actually used to bother me a lot more than it does now - but lately I've taken to embroidering "As My Whimsey Takes Me" on hankies, and it takes my mind off of it. 


No joke. Getting rather obsessed, what? Almost embarrassin', don't you know!

(Later edit: Ugh.  Is this too weird of me? No weirder than people slobbering over pictures of Johnny Depp on their blogs, right?  I'm just showing my adoration for Dorothy Sayers in a rather peculiar manner, that's all.)

I'm feeling a bit inferior right now.  Everyone is funnier and nicer and better at writing and taking pictures than I am.  But, oddly, I'm not too depressed by it.  It's an okay feeling of inferiority.  Like, I'm busy admiring the awesome people, and not so worried about myself.  I read some F. Scott Fitzgerald the other day, and even though I knew I would never be able to write like that, and the stories themselves were depressing, I didn't get mopey at all.  Felt very good, actually.  Just last year The Bell Jar was making me batty.  It's getting better all the time. I used to get mad at my school (Now I can't complain!) The teachers who taught me weren't cool...
Sorry. Lost control of myself there.  Writing singing down is almost impossible.  It just doesn't work in this (ahem!) medium.

I don't know why I expect greatness from myself.  I've never tried writing, so I don't see why I should get all depressed when I can't conjure up some fabulous poem out of the air with a flick of the wrist.  I'm quite happy being a nice ordinary egg.