the real question is, will I ever write a post that is actually about something?

Hello!  It's been a while, hasn't it?

1. Okay, this house is so distracting.  I get almost nothing done.  The apartment was so depressing that you had to get out and do things and go the library all the time for the sake of your sanity.  Now I just sit on the deck and maybe play ukulele and wham-o! All the sudden it's eleven thirty and my teeth aren't even brushed for pete's sake!

2. There are a zillion things I would like to take pictures of in the yard and house and boast about on here, but it's eleven thirty and I'm too tired.

3. Again, this house is distracting.  I don't even want to watch movies anymore.  Or, if I do, I have to wait till it's really dark or the bugs are snacking on me rather too greedily.  I want to be outside all the time.

4. However, Cee and I went and saw Captain America the other day and shrieked for a bit afterwards.  I'm taking dad to see it this weekend, hopefully.  We can't pin down exactly why it was so enjoyable.  I think because the main guy wasn't a jerk.  In a lot of other hero movies the guy has to learn to be good.  You like him in spite of yourself because he's funny, but you know he's a turd.  Captain America was a nice, honorable guy from the get-go.

5.  I don't know why, but when I see actors from, like, a Poirot TV movie or BBC mini-series on the big, big screen, I feel ridiculously proud and happy.  I whacked poor Cee in the arm twice during Captain America for Richard Armitage (the tooth-cruncher) and JJ Feild (the British guy in the bad-guy's-lair-demo-team).  I also sort of whispered in a very shrill voice, "Richard Armitage is going to be Thorin in The Hobbit! Augh! But doesn't he seem way tall?"  I know, I know, they'll make him look shorter.  But I just can't see it right now. He just is tall in my head.  JJ Feild I knew as Simon Doyle in Death on the Nile.   He was  good in that, actually.  Rather the way I always saw the character in my head.

6.  I stayed up till two watching Wives and Daughters the other night.  I am more than ever convinced that all British actors must all know each other.  I mean, just one example:  Keely Hawes (Cynthia Kirkpatrick) is married to Matthew MacFadyen.  They met through MI-5.  He played Mr. Darcy in the new Pride and Prejudice - along with Rosamund Pike and Tom Hollander, who were both in Wives and Daughters as well.  And remember that Poirot I talked about?  Well,  Barbara Flynn (Miss Browning of Wives and Daughters) was also in it with Emily Blunt, who was in The Young Victoria with Rupert Friend who dated Keira Knightley for forever.  And Keira Knightley was in Pride and Prejudice with both Rosamund Pike and Tom Hollander.  I mean!  And I've been talking about fairly obvious examples involving big-name people who do franchises and big-screen stuff.  Don't even get me started on the people who rotate through all the Masterpiece Theatre movies.  If the Masterpiece Theatre people don't exchange Christmas cards and go to each others' kids' birthday parties, I would eat a soft hat if I owned one.

7.  I am, obviously, the logic master of the world.  See #6 for proof, baby.

8. Also, I am great because I took the time to put all the movie titles in italics.

9. I need to go to bed.  Several times today I found myself trying to stuff my purse into the refrigerator.

10. Good night.

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.

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!

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.)

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.  

I'm sure there's some Ben Franklin quote that would just be a killer post title for this.

When I someday make my thunderous slide into financial ruin, I will at least have things to read and listen to on the way down.  And I won't have to blame something vague and confusing like the stock market. (Which hopefully means that I will never have to learn anything about the stock market.  The only reason I would do so is if I wanted to complain to people about how it did me wrong.)  I'll just point a long, bony finger to the bookcase and the ipod and the whole story will be told.  I am the most gluttonous book and music buyer I have ever met.   I never want to find out how much money I have spent on music downloads.  Never, never, never.  Knowing without a shadow of a doubt that I could have had a car instead would make me feel too guilty.  I like my happy ignorance.

I don't know why I feel more guilty about buying music than I do about buying books.  If the books and music I own were sort of graphed together, it would clearly show that the music has got more use.  I guess I feel less guilty because books can theoretically make me smarter.  The music I listen to can only boost my self-esteem a bit, give me tinnitus and make my brain cells burst in tiny, multi-colored explosions.  (According to Bill Bryson, you only get one lump of brain cells - and they don't get re-made or replaced.  So I really don't have any to spare for math.  I need all the cells I can get for other things.  It's vitally important.)

I would like to say that I am making a solemn vow to knot the purse strings and be frugal from now on.   No more five dollar amazon albums for you, Kelsey! Put down that paperback!  But the honest truth is, I don't feel particularly repentant. At all.  

Wait a moment, I thought I felt... No, not a bit. 

Now that I can practically smell my own room approaching (29 days to closing), I have decided to recommend a bit of prudence to myself.  Just suggested it.  You know, avoid buying tatty paperbacks of The Complete Works of Sophocles just because I know I ought to read it, and instead go for things I know I will read for sure.  Right now my bookcase gives off a much stronger aura of well-read girl than I actually deserve - I've bought stacks of learned looking paperbacks en masse at sales and never got around to reading them.  Shameful, but there it is. 

So, when I go to the library sale this weekend, I solemnly swear that I will not to grab every book I see, nor will I purchase any of the dubious "surprise" boxes that I know, deep down, will mostly contain murderously boring old textbooks.  I swear.  Or may I be chopped up and made into soup. 

I must impose some moderation.  Otherwise it's all going to end in some sort of turn on the body in the library theme. 

books about death and crime, mostly

Hey, my dashboard changed! My hands are flapping about in a helpless manner. This feels weird. Unsettled whimperings.

I started reading Rebecca this evening - whoo boy.  Danvers has just taken her on the horrible tour of Rebecca's room.  The atmosphere is incredible.  I'm sure a lot of people probably say they relate to the main character - but I'm going to say so too.  Maybe because she's young and awkward, I just see a great deal of similarity between us.  I feel a bit desperate to please people sometimes, and I bump into things and hide from people.  Schoolgirlish, self-concious. And I'm not good about clothes and hair and things like that.
Maybe I'm in a morbid kind of mood or something, but I'm getting terribly wrapped up in the story.  I need to see the movie after this.  I think Hitchcock is almost the only person who could have got the particular feel of this book right in a film.  It sometimes seems like he's driving off fumes, if you know what I mean.   He can put a fat lot of sinister thoughts into your head with a quite remarkably tiny pinch of scary images.  (Of course, I'm saying only he could have done Rebecca right and I haven't seen it, but I'm basing this bold and completely un-researched assertion on the feel I've gotten from the Hitchcock films I have seen.  And didn't it get an academy award?  The only one he got?  Or am I making this up?)

Okay, I have an awesome life.
Last night I went to a meeting of the Orient Express book club at Barnes and Noble.  Oh yes.  On the way there, I decided that I wanted it to be either:
1. So horrible that it was funny
2. Young-ish people obviously reading scary psycho books, so I would know after getting a peek at them that I shouldn't even sit down
3. Or actually good.  Pleasantly geeky

It was the latter.  They're all at least fifty years old, and have been meeting for twelve years.  They were very friendly.  The leader lady told me that they read for pleasure - don't dissect things (yessss!).  They go to mystery dinner theatre shows.  The leader asked me if I'd read any mystery books lately, and I mentioned Dorothy Sayers.  "Oh, which version of him do you like better?" She asked me.  And - get this - I KNEW WHAT SHE WAS TALKING ABOUT!  I felt like a genius.  (To explain - when Dorothy Sayers wrote Lord Peter Wimsey, she made him a cross between Bertie Wooster and Fred Astaire and intended to do a few books and then marry him off and be done.  But, from what I've read, she got attached to him and, in the later books, made him a more complete character.  Some people like the early, more Bertie Wooster LPW more than the more human later one. I don't know which I like better.  From a pure, shallow enjoyment standpoint, the Bertie Wooster version is more fun.  But I am hugely attached to the more human version too.  So I don't know.  That's what I said to the leader lady.)

I am so going again.  I have to find a mystery book involving some sort of royal personage.  The club reads books by topic, so you don't have to buy anything.  Nice, I think.  It's a sort of title-swop, I suppose.

Also, I am reading A Short History of Nearly Everything.  You already know, dear blog, that I adore - worship - Bill Bryson.  I have dithered about how hilarious and witty he is, and how I feel well-traveled and somewhat brainier when I come away from his books.  Now, I can say (with incredulity) that he is actually capable of making me take an interest in science.  Or at least make me want to keep reading a very long book about it.  Right now I'm reading a bit about how Yellowstone park is basically one enormous volcano. (The sort that look like a champagne glass below the surface, from what I understand.  The name begins with a c and sounds like caldera or something similar.)  From the hints he is giving, I think we will probably all die if it blows.  Oh well.  At least it would be quick and exciting, what?