Because self-centeredness is sooooooooo much fun! Lol!

 I've got a few things to whine about and then we can talk about happy things, okay blog?  Just so you know, this post will be one of unabashed narcissism.

1. I can't make this silly blog look nice and I am tired of fiddling.  Blah.

2. On the topic of blog design, I don't like the new template designer thingy.  It gives error messages all the time and is inconvenient. And I fear change.

3. I can't seem to get to bed before three these days.  What's the deal?

4.  I realized this afternoon that I don't like some of my facebook friends.  Which is terribly mean of me to say, but there it is.  And anyways I just made a rule that says I can be as mean as I want to on this blog.  So there.

Okay, that's all.  Here are some happy things.

1. Amelie.  I saw it for the first time the other day and then watched it again the next day.  And again the next day.  My gosh.

2.  Netflix.  What a terribly nice thing.  Last night, dad and I watched an episode from a lovely space documentary (How We Left Earth or something like that) on instant watch.  Rear Window came today.  On The Town (which was mildly awful but had Gene Kelly) and To Kill a Mockingbird and The Italian Job (also not the best movie ever, but certainly enjoyable.  I like heist movies.) recently went back to Netflix.  I imagine the housing place as a giant vault with bookshelves stacked with mix-matched shoe boxes of DVDs.   And guys in glasses who look like Mac from the Apple commercials bustling around chatting about the movies with one another as they send DVDs off to people. (I know it is killing traditional rental stores, but I don't feel particularly sorry for rental shops when they make me pay six bucks a movie.)

3.  Reading in the bathtub for hours and hours.  One of the many delights of summer vacation.

4.  Music.  Pomplamoose's Tribute to Famous People. Vampire Weekend.  The Beatles.  French singers in general. the soundtrack from An Education.  Sinatra and Bobby Darin and Michael whatever his name is.  Gosh, music is a wonderful thing.

5.  Sad, scary poetry.

6.  Reading books by people much, much smarter than me and then adopting their superior literary loneliness, even though I don't have the brains to be crushed by, like, Dostoevsky the way the writers are.  I can barely spell Dostoevsky.  But I enjoy walking around Super Walmart in a kind of huddled despair and wondering if I'm the only person with a soul. I bet I enjoy abandoning myself to the sorrows of these writers more than they did themselves when they actually had them.

7.  I've also enjoyed wondering if this move will become the Personal Tragedy That Fuels My Art. (Yes, in caps.) You know what I mean?  A good number of really great actors and painters and writers were either wacko or had parents who gave them drugs or something.  My theory has always been that if you want to be really great at something you either have to have talent or a personal tragedy.  You just can't make it if you're mediocre and like your parents.  I've always been sorry knowing I could never do anything great - my home life is ridiculously happy and I have no talent of any sort. (Scratch that.  I have one talent.  I can sing one or two lines from different Beatles songs one after another without pausing - like switching radio stations - for approximately nine minutes.  Although, some people I know do not call that a talent.)
 But, what have we here?  A recent and possibly scarring out-of-state move! If I play my cards right and cry a lot, this could be my tragedy.  How awesome is that?  Who cares if moving is actually not that bad - in interviews I could talk about the angst of it all and look troubled!  I've got a golden ticket, baby!

Mere Christianity

Hard to choose a quote from a book so infinitely quotable.

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."


C.S. Lewis is the probably the best writer (particularly theological or philosophical) I have ever read.  I don't like when writers feel they have to dumb-down ideas when they try to explain them, and I dislike even more when they show off their superior intellect by needlessly complicating things with weird sentence structure or words that sound learned.  C.S. Lewis gives the full picture in stunningly simple terms (he makes writing clearly seem so effortless!), and yet you feel the full force of his intelligence behind it. Even in the Narnia books, it never feels like he's trying too hard.  
Now that I think about it, seeming effortlessness is my favorite literary style.  Bill Bryson writes "choke-on-your-coffee funny" books, but it never seems like he's trying too hard.  And then when I try to write something in the same style I realize how ridiculously difficult it actually is.  And then I say what the heck, toss down my pencil, pick up I'm a Stranger Here Myself and vow to leave writing to people who can actually do it.

And on we march through the reading list.  Finished The Hobbit today. I wish it had taken longer.

As all things come to an end, even this story, a day came at last when they were in sight of the country where Bilbo had been born and bred, where the shapes of the land and of the trees were as well known to him as his hands and toes. Coming to a rise he could see his own Hill in the distance, and he stopped suddenly and said:

Roads go ever ever on,

Over rock and under tree,

By caves where never sun has shone,

By streams that never find the sea;

Over snow by winter sown,

And through the merry flowers of June,

Over grass and over stone,

And under mountains in the moon.

Roads go ever ever on

Under cloud and under star,

Yet feet that wandering have gone

Turn at last to home afar.

Eyes that fire and sword have seen

And horror in the halls of stone

Look at last on meadows green

And trees and hills they long have known. 

Gandalf looked at him. 'My dear Bilbo!' he said, 'Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you were.

It's late, I'm sleep-deprived and I'm so nervous I'm loopy. Isn't life grand?

GAAAAAAA! As Dilbert would say.
Okay, I'm sort of freaking out at the moment.
Here's the story, blog.  Or, at least, as much of the story as I'm willing to tell.
There's a certain book I adore.  I never thought I could ever, ever pin down a favorite book, but this book is it.  I love it.  It's the only book that makes me cry every time I read it - and I never cry in books.
I found out recently that this book is being made into a movie.

Now, for your consideration, a run-down of the feelings this discovery created:

Panic/despair:
"NOOOOO! I was going to make it!  ME ME ME!  POOR POOR ME!"
Bitter curiosity:
"Well who the heck are these people anyways?  Why do they get to do it?"
Grudging respect:
"Well, I guess they have money.  It might actually be made someday. And the screenwriter made disparaging remarks about Thomas Kinkade on her blog, so I guess she's okay."
Sudden panic:
"AH AH AH! I MIGHT GET LEFT OUT! I MUST HELP THEM! OH NO!"
Fearful victory when I found the screenwriter's email address:
"YES! Now I can send a begging email!  Er... oh dear. Now I have to send a begging email or I'll regret it forever."
"kill me."

So, basically, I'm terrified.  I've written two drafts of my begging letter, neither of them very good, and after showing it to my mum tomorrow - I'm going to send it.
Oh help.
Probably nothing will come of it, blog.  Don't get your hopes up, blog.  Be proud of me for sending the darn thing at all, because such an act of boldness is entirely out of character for me, blog.

So, that's all I have to say at the moment.
If, you (imaginary reader/dear void/blog) are the praying sort, I wouldn't mind a little "and help Kelsey to find the Chill Pills so her heart doesn't explode before she's twenty-one" prayer, if you'd be kind enough to pray it.

I wish I had someone to send a bouquet of sharpened pencils to, even though it would be out of season. But I need the someone before I can send them, and fall is just around the corner.  Goodbye, blog.  I'm off to find someone.  I've gone round the bend!  Hooray! I'd know him anywhere!



28 June:
Okay, it's been days since I said I was going to email the lady, but two minutes ago I officially did it.
I can't believe it.  I'm very proud of myself.  Usually, I'm an absolute chicken about... well, everything.  I hesitate to comment on people's blogs - think how much will it took for me to do this, blog.  Absurdly shy people of the world unite!

Okay, is it slightly strange that I actually address my thoughts to my blog?  I guess no weirder than saying "dear diary".

Okay, slightly embarrassing...

Once upon a time, during a sleepover with a friend - gosh, ages ago now - we were chatting about crushes.  Well, actually, her crushes.  I said I didn't have any, which I realize now was entirely untrue.  I was too narrow, I thought having a "crush" meant actually liking a real person.  My dear friend, I deceived you.  I've had a crush on at least one person per year since the age of ten.  And, as penance, I will list them now.

10: Robin Hood

Why: Good tempered, funny, amazing archery skills, cool hat, and he's Robin Hood. 

11: Donald O'Conner (in Singin' In the Rain)

Why: The man is hilarious.  And he can run up a wall and do a backflip.  And can he dance.

12: Gene Kelly (also in Singin' in the Rain)

Why: He can dance (which feels like the understatement of the century, and probably is) and sing.

13: Prince Philip

Why: There are so many reasons. He dances, he sings, he rides an awesome horse, he has a sense of humor and the best hat ever, he actually does something scary and difficult to save dumb Beauty (he fights a dragon, for heaven's sake!) and he lives in a world where the bushes are squared.  I love him the best of all. 

14: Cary Elwes (In The Princess Bride)

Why: Because he's funny, can sword fight, has a mustache and puts up with stupid buttercup so nicely.

15: Mr. Darcy - Matthew Mcfadyen (in Pride and Prejudice) like every other teenage girl on earth

Why: He has an incredible speaking voice.  Like, amazing.  Plus, he looked decidedly tall in that movie. (Who knows how tall he is in real life.  Thankfully, I seldom deal with real life.)  And around that time I'd suddenly grown about six inches, so it was convenient.

16: Morhange (Les Choristes)

Why: Can the kid sing. Plus he's French, which is cool.  And still living, which is a bonus. A little troubled, which worried me, but at the time  I didn't care.  I'm sorry to say this attachment was somewhat short-lived.  Because:

17: Gregory Peck (In Roman Holiday) came along.

Why:  Just because.  He really needs no explanation.  Probably learning that he pretended to have his hand chopped off during the mouth of truth scene to spook Audrey Hepburn started it.  Any guy who would do that is cool. 

18: Peter O'Toole (in How to Steal a Million and real life)

 Why: He's unny, funny, funny. Gorgeous, smart in real life, won't mind if you accidentally shoot him, will help you burglarize museums. 

19: Cary Grant (in everything)

Why: sense of humor, for a short period of life worked as an acrobat in the circus, accent, general wonderfulness.

And who knows what my twenties will bring.

So there you are, friend of long ago.  The truth at last.

(P.S.  I do have crushes on regular people who are alive.  I just don't advertise them.  And I always know in my heart that Philip is ten million times better than any of them, so I never like them that much anyways. No point getting silly about people when I know I'm not ready to be silly forever, is there? And besides that, they're all shorter than me.  Which is a no-no.)

23 June:
Okay, I officially figured out who the crush of my twentieth year of life will be:

Jimmy Stewart.  Yep.
That's all I have to say.

From Atonement, by Ian McEwan. Some freakishly good writing, in my opinion.

"Was everyone else really as alive as she was?  For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was valuable to herself the way Briony was?  Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony?  Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it... Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman?  If the answer was yes, then the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone else's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.  One could drown in irrelevance.  But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had.  This was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely.  For, though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts like hers.  She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn't really feel it."

From "Nine Notes on Book Covers" by Orhan Pamuk

I'm reading Other Colors at the moment, and it's definitely one of the best books I've ever encountered.  It just sucks you in.  But, anyways, here are some truths I enjoyed this morning:

• If a novelist can finish a book without dreaming of its cover, he is wise, well-rounded, and a fully formed adult, but he's also lost the innocence that made him a novelist in the first place

• Detailed depictions of heroes on book covers insult not just the author's imagination but also his readers'. 

•  When designers decide that The Red and the Black deserves a red and black jacket, or when they decorate books entitled Blue House or Chateaux with illustrations of blue houses or chateaux, they do not leave us thinking they've been faithful to the text but wondering if they've even read it.

•  If, years after reading a book, we catch a glimpse of its cover, we are returned at once to that long-ago day when we curled up in a corner with that book to enter the world hidden inside.