So, over the course of the summer, I am supposed to post three more times about my Capstone project, and how it’s going along, what I’ve been considering about it, what questions I have, what I have learned about my topic through research, etc. The requirements for these posts are pretty rigid (the impact on your project of your: summer reading, a conversation you have had, other discoveries and experiences). Considering that the only thing I have read on my summer reading/research list is Less Than Zero and its sequel, and I wrote a novel length entry about them already, I will save that post for another time. I also have been a coward and not told my parents yet, so the conversation will also have to wait. Which leaves the “other discoveries and experiences” post. Well, I discovered that I need to actually start writing about my brother, and talking about him in general, in order to prepare for the Capstone, so I threw together a little piece as my first summer entry to help me do just that. I hope this counts as a discovery.
Enjoy!
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All my life, I have been told by my parents and relatives that building a good relationship with your sibling is the most important relationship to build because they are, statistically speaking, going to be in your life the longest. “Blood is thicker than water,” as they would say. My brother and I are exhibit A of all the ways that I don’t follow the rules. To be it simply: I hate my brother. To make it more complex: for the first sixteen and a half years of my life, I idolized everything about him, and fantasized that if I tried hard enough, I could become just like him one day. As you can probably guess, that dream came crashing down in flames all around me, and now I wish that he never had to be a part of my life again. You can’t choose your family, I guess.
To start at the beginning would be to try to start before my memory allows me to remember. So, instead, I’ll start with what I remember from the good ole days, and you can tell me, when I’m finished, how wrong I was. As I go along you can jot down the signs that I have gone back and looked for time and time again. Maybe you can tell me all the things that I did wrong in loving him.
II.
Growing up in St. Albans, Vermont, there wasn’t a lot to do besides torture each other. And torture each other, we did. You see, my brother Doug, is seven years older than I am, and so he should presumably be seven years wiser than I was, or am. But he learned from an early age that if he blamed the baby for everything that went wrong, we were both a lot less likely to get into trouble. So, when Doug and his best friend Brian tied me up and locked me into my grandmother’s bedroom (the locks were on the inside, by the way,) he told my parents that we were playing a game. No one asked me what had really happened.
Then there was the slave game, a popular tale among my friends. The game was simple, really. It involved my brother playing the King, my cousin Meagan as his loyal secretary, and my cousin Matt (only a year older than myself) and I as the slaves. All we had to do was everything that my brother asked us to. This ranged from simple things like getting him a snack or grabbing him another can of Pepsi (always Pepsi) to more time-consuming tasks like doing his laundry or cleaning his room. When we could have been outside playing, we were inside cleaning out the gunk from underneath his bed. And you didn’t challenge his authority because the punishment was that you had to stand beneath the stairs for an hour, and if you tried to move, you were struck with a metal bat by the other slave. If we both rebelled, my brother held the bat, and he took no mercy.
Everyone who’s heard the story always asks me why I didn’t tell my parents on him, but truth be told: the games never really bothered me. I didn’t care that when we played hide-and-go-seek he would trip me down the stairs or bang my head into the wall. I didn’t mind that when he was baby-sitting, he would pretend to call up my grandmother and tell her that I hated her. It wasn’t even that bad when he nearly stabbed me with a butcher knife. I didn’t matter to me because he was paying attention to me; he was treating me like I was one of his friends. He told me secrets. He let me in on his fears. He let me watch him play Resident Evil. He taught me how to achieve a flawless victory on Mortal Kombat. He introduced me to his friends, one of whom I was convinced I was going to marry from the age of four until I was fourteen.
If you don’t have an older sibling, you might not know what I’m talking about here. What I’m saying is that all I ever wanted was for him to think that I was cool, and I would have done anything (and I mean absolutely anything) to make him think that. And, to those of you who are the older one, hang out with your young brother or sister. You’ll make their life.
III.
As I got older, I started to idolize my brother for different reasons. He was a starter on a winning soccer team. At the age of five, I began playing for my own soccer league as the goalie, and my brother was very good at teaching me the rules to the game. I was the only person on that soccer team who knew what “off sides” meant, and I thought that made him king of the world for telling me. He would practice with me after school, and all through grade school and junior high. I would ask him for advice on how to block certain shots (even though he played center field) and he would drag himself outside to take practice kicks at me until it was dark and our mother dragged us in.
My brother was also the person who taught me how to read. Kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and even most of third were marked with my inability to spell my own name. I would write “Pat” on the tops of my assignments in hopes that the teacher wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t spelled out the entire thing. I got away with it for a surprisingly long time until another Pat entered my class and the teacher started to ask us to write our full names on the tops of our papers so she wouldn’t get confused. Suddenly, it was phone calls home to my parents and a special reading class that gave me picture books to read out loud to a mentor who would correct every mispronunciation I made (essentially, every single word except for pat). Soon, I was sent home with a stack of books that I was supposed to read out loud to my parents every night. I would sit on the big couch and stumble over the simplest of words while my parents would look on in their teary-eyed passive way that had disappointment written all over it, and whisper to each other about how it was just their luck to get a stupid child. My brother was the only one who never got mad at me for not being able to read.
The summer before fourth grade, he sat me down on the cement floor of his basement bedroom and asked me what I was interested in. I told him the usual suspects—soccer, unicorns, dragons—and he brought me over to his old bookcase full of hardcover books and handed me a book on Norse mythology. He told me to bring it up to my bedroom and read it under the covers by flashlight after my parents forced me to go to bed, and not to read it out loud. He said it was the only way to read a book. I believed him because, at nine, I believed everything that everyone told me, especially him. That summer I read my first book. Furthermore, I read it multiple times, cover to cover, without stumbling over a single word.
IV.
When he left for college, it was devastating to me. I had lost my other half and I spent a significant amount of sixth grade sulking, even though I got to move into his blood red room in the basement, something which I had fantasized about for years. It felt bittersweet with him gone. On the one hand, I had the whole basement to myself and since my parents never had any excuse to go down there, I had all the privacy any eleven year old could dream of. But on the flip side, I was on my own. For the first time in my life, I had to formulate my own opinions on things. My brother wasn’t around to force feed me his thoughts and convince me that they were also mine. It was scary to have him leave and realize that everything I loved was because he loved it first.
V.
The first time that I thought my brother might have a drug problem, I had just gotten my wisdom teeth pulled, so I couldn’t be sure whether what I was experiencing was real or laughing gas induced. He came in during his lunch break from work at the chocolate factory (packing fudge, which in no way relates to this story, but I still find amusing) on that cold spring break day, and he was looking for something. I was in a stupor on the couch, zoning out to an episode of Hey Arnold, so I didn’t hear him when he asked for the Oxycontin, and I didn’t really see him when he took the whole bottle. I was only able to add up the pieces when, that night, my mother began a desperate search to find them and screamed at me when she could not. I remember thinking that it couldn’t be a good reason that he had taken them, or else he would have asked. He also would probably not have taken the whole bottle of medication that was prescribed to my missing teeth. When I would ask him later about it, he would simply tell me that he needed them more than I did, that he was in pain too.
VI.
After the incident with my wisdom teeth, everything began to spiral out of control in rapid succession. He asked me for $400 to pay for a speeding ticket that he had gotten and then requested that I not mention the transaction to our mother, who works at the bank my account was at; he showed up at my high school in the middle of the day to ask for more money to get out of town for awhile, and would not leave until I gave him my debit card pin number; I came home from soccer practice to a sheet of paper that had my name written in cursive over and over again, more closely resembling my signature as the paper went along, and a missing checkbook; my graduation money went missing from my grandmother’s purse, and he came up with the excuse that his girlfriend had stolen it to get an abortion he knew nothing about; he asked me for more money to take his dog to the vet because of a limp that only he saw; I came home Thanksgiving break my freshman year at Champlain to find all the change jars throughout the house were gone; I woke up almost every single summer morning to screaming and crying as my parents discovered another monetarily valuable thing missing; I came home one weekend during my sophomore year at Champlain to find all my movies and CDs and books had gone missing, probably ran away; and most recently, the call from the funeral home that buried my grandmother two days after my twentieth birthday saying that the check had bounced, and finding out that he had stolen the insurance check from the mail and spent it in increments of one thousand dollars. My parents say that it’s the final straw that broke the camel’s back, but I’ve heard it all before, and it all sounds the same as the lies that he tells.
And the lies have been plentiful. Speeding ticket, abortion, the check didn’t come in, I let a friend borrow your movies, I lost a bet to the fucking Pope, the dog needs to go to the vet, I’ll pay you back tomorrow, this time I swear I’ll pay you back, give me this one last chance to prove myself to you, tomorrow I’m getting paid and then you’ll get your money back. At this point, I don’t think there’s a lie he hasn’t told in order to get money to buy his pills. In fact, just today, he called me up and asked for $100 to pay back this loan shark he borrowed money from who is threatening to kill him if he doesn’t get his money back tonight. Kill him? Over $100? And I’m the most beautiful girl in the world.
VII.
People tell me that I don’t understand, that I can never understand, because I’m not a drug addict. And I tell them that I hate my brother, and not because he’s a drug addict. The addiction I can handle because we’re all addicted to something (for me, it’s falling in love, or lust, or whatever you want to call it). I hate that the person I grew up idolizing is gone, and I don’t know if he’ll ever come back. I hate that he stole our dead grandmother’s funeral money and no one had the balls enough to report it to the police. I hate that he can’t ask for help. I hate that after five and a half years, nothing is different. Mostly, I hate that it still bothers me so much.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
If there's one thing I love, it's a good book
I want this blog to be mine. I want it to be more than a Capstone project, more than an academic endeavor. I want this blog to be a piece of my heart and soul, and showcase my writing capabilities. That being said, I want to start off by sharing something that I love: Bret Easton Ellis. And let me warn you, I am going to get carried away.
He first captured my heart when I stumbled upon The Rules of Attraction (the movie adaptation of one of his books) at the local movie store. Seeing James Van Der Beek of Dawson’s Creek star as such a dark and brooding character captivated me, and I had to read the book that the film was based on. As much as I enjoyed the movie, I enjoyed the book more (as it normally goes). I was mesmerized from the first sentence to the last sentence. His crispness. His simple language. His lack of characterization. His use of dialogue. I had to have more of it.
Using the school’s computer (because my parents didn’t get one until after I had left for college), I researched the author during lunch so as to not get in trouble for using the computer for non-school purposes. I went back and read his first novel, Less Than Zero, which to this day is my favorite of his works. The way that he used pop culture to include the audience in his scenes, and the passive way that his narrator relayed the horrific things he was witnessing was startling and amazing to me. Unfortunately, the movie adaptation of this one didn’t capture the magic.
Then came my encounter with his most famous work, American Psycho, which is a cult classic if I’ve ever heard of one. I have to begin by saying how much it upsets me that 90% of the people I talk to about this novel never even knew it was a novel. All they know about is the movie, which I cannot speak against given my devotion to Christian Bale. That being said, the movie is better. So much better. I read it junior year during English class when we were reading Huckleberry Finn for the thousandth time. I hid it behind the school’s worn copy of the book I was assigned. It both terrified and thrilled me. As much as I wanted to recoil and put it down, never to return to it again, I couldn’t put it down. The star character and narrator, Patrick Bateman, drew me into his world of executions and murders, and I’ve never been the same.
The Informers, a collection of (sort of) inter-connecting stories, held my attention long enough for a first read-through, but never brought me back to it a second time as with the previous novels I had read. Ellis maintained his distant and passive voice, but being told from so many voices made it hard to connect to for me. I’ve never seen the film.
Senior year of high school, for Twenty Century Literature, my final assignment was to choose a twentieth century author and write a paper (and give a presentation on them). I chose Bret Easton Ellis, obviously, and part of the assignment was to read one of their works and include a review of it into our paper. At this time the only novel I hadn’t read of his was Glamorama. It is almost unmentionably bad. The worst character from The Rules of Attraction makes a comeback as the star character and narrator, and it did nothing to captivate me. He was just as unrelatable and annoying in this novel as he had been during his appearance in the previous one.
Soon after that, Lunar Park was released with very mixed reviews. I must say it confused and terrified me. Starring a character named Bret Easton Ellis who had written all the novels with the same titles as the real Ellis, but not being autobiographical in narrator, it was hard to swallow at first, but before long, I found myself engrossed in the story. I read it one night when I was alone in the house, and my parents were on vacation. I loved it, but it gave me nightmares for a week.
This morning I woke up, poured myself a stale, lukewarm cup of coffee, and marched my behind down to Barnes & Noble because Bret Easton Ellis’ latest book, Imperial Bedrooms, was released today. And let me start of my review by saying, he’s still got it.
The book is the sequel to his first novel, Less Than Zero, and tells the story of what became of the novel’s main characters, Clay, Blair, and Julian, twenty year after the original novel’s release. Filled with the same sort of pop cultures that made me fall in love with the first one, it succeeded at making me feel like I have been palling around with the narrator, Clay, all these years.
There were, of course, some surprises (Blair married Trent!), but also the strange familiarity. Clay remained the passive narrator more content to let things happen to him than to take action, and Julian remained the helpless friend, in a way.
Only towards the end did I find fault with the new novel. As the story’s climax grows nearer and nearer and Clay becomes more aggressive, he began to lose some of his Clay-ness and become more… Patrick Bateman, the homicidal narrator of American Psycho. In fact, when the prostitutes enter the picture, I had to flip back to the cover to double check what book I was reading. But I love American Psycho, so I really can’t complain.
All in all, his new book was fantastic and Bret Easton Ellis still holds my heart.
He first captured my heart when I stumbled upon The Rules of Attraction (the movie adaptation of one of his books) at the local movie store. Seeing James Van Der Beek of Dawson’s Creek star as such a dark and brooding character captivated me, and I had to read the book that the film was based on. As much as I enjoyed the movie, I enjoyed the book more (as it normally goes). I was mesmerized from the first sentence to the last sentence. His crispness. His simple language. His lack of characterization. His use of dialogue. I had to have more of it.
Using the school’s computer (because my parents didn’t get one until after I had left for college), I researched the author during lunch so as to not get in trouble for using the computer for non-school purposes. I went back and read his first novel, Less Than Zero, which to this day is my favorite of his works. The way that he used pop culture to include the audience in his scenes, and the passive way that his narrator relayed the horrific things he was witnessing was startling and amazing to me. Unfortunately, the movie adaptation of this one didn’t capture the magic.
Then came my encounter with his most famous work, American Psycho, which is a cult classic if I’ve ever heard of one. I have to begin by saying how much it upsets me that 90% of the people I talk to about this novel never even knew it was a novel. All they know about is the movie, which I cannot speak against given my devotion to Christian Bale. That being said, the movie is better. So much better. I read it junior year during English class when we were reading Huckleberry Finn for the thousandth time. I hid it behind the school’s worn copy of the book I was assigned. It both terrified and thrilled me. As much as I wanted to recoil and put it down, never to return to it again, I couldn’t put it down. The star character and narrator, Patrick Bateman, drew me into his world of executions and murders, and I’ve never been the same.
The Informers, a collection of (sort of) inter-connecting stories, held my attention long enough for a first read-through, but never brought me back to it a second time as with the previous novels I had read. Ellis maintained his distant and passive voice, but being told from so many voices made it hard to connect to for me. I’ve never seen the film.
Senior year of high school, for Twenty Century Literature, my final assignment was to choose a twentieth century author and write a paper (and give a presentation on them). I chose Bret Easton Ellis, obviously, and part of the assignment was to read one of their works and include a review of it into our paper. At this time the only novel I hadn’t read of his was Glamorama. It is almost unmentionably bad. The worst character from The Rules of Attraction makes a comeback as the star character and narrator, and it did nothing to captivate me. He was just as unrelatable and annoying in this novel as he had been during his appearance in the previous one.
Soon after that, Lunar Park was released with very mixed reviews. I must say it confused and terrified me. Starring a character named Bret Easton Ellis who had written all the novels with the same titles as the real Ellis, but not being autobiographical in narrator, it was hard to swallow at first, but before long, I found myself engrossed in the story. I read it one night when I was alone in the house, and my parents were on vacation. I loved it, but it gave me nightmares for a week.
This morning I woke up, poured myself a stale, lukewarm cup of coffee, and marched my behind down to Barnes & Noble because Bret Easton Ellis’ latest book, Imperial Bedrooms, was released today. And let me start of my review by saying, he’s still got it.
The book is the sequel to his first novel, Less Than Zero, and tells the story of what became of the novel’s main characters, Clay, Blair, and Julian, twenty year after the original novel’s release. Filled with the same sort of pop cultures that made me fall in love with the first one, it succeeded at making me feel like I have been palling around with the narrator, Clay, all these years.
There were, of course, some surprises (Blair married Trent!), but also the strange familiarity. Clay remained the passive narrator more content to let things happen to him than to take action, and Julian remained the helpless friend, in a way.
Only towards the end did I find fault with the new novel. As the story’s climax grows nearer and nearer and Clay becomes more aggressive, he began to lose some of his Clay-ness and become more… Patrick Bateman, the homicidal narrator of American Psycho. In fact, when the prostitutes enter the picture, I had to flip back to the cover to double check what book I was reading. But I love American Psycho, so I really can’t complain.
All in all, his new book was fantastic and Bret Easton Ellis still holds my heart.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Capstone: summer plan
I must say that I was not expecting to have to update this blog anymore with Capstone thoughts, but since it seems that the blog, the Capstone, and I are going to be engaged in an academic three-way for a little while longer, I will try to make the best of the situation. That being said, I should give the update about what the hell it is I’m doing (because I have decided at long last).
As I said in my proposal, I have always avoided writing about myself. It makes me very, very vulnerable, which is something that I loathe being. But I made a promise to myself to make my Capstone challenging. To me, the best writing is the stuff that is hard to write. It’s the author’s bare bones on the page (or screen in the case of a blog). It’s standing naked in front of a room full of your closest friends and having them point out your flaws. I realized that the only way for me to become a better writer is to leave my comfort zone and write about things that I thought I never would. That’s why I’ve chosen to write my Capstone about my brother, whose drug addiction tore my whole world apart and destroyed my family.
Where I stand in my thinking about the Capstone is this: I need to start writing. Memories fade with time, and mine are no exception. I’ve kept a diary throughout my life, but I was careful never to mention my brother because I was afraid of my parents finding them and getting angry with me for writing it down. So as it stands right now, the only things I have about my brother’s addiction are the only that are in my head. So I really need to start jotting down notes and making a timeline of events before everything begins to blur together any more than it already has. There is one person, my closet friend, who knows all the tales and all the heartbreak that I have endured because of this, so she is the one to talk to about getting everything straight. That girl has a memory like an elephant, so I know she’ll be able to correct any mistakes that I may make in my timeline.
I also know that I need to talk to my parents about this Capstone before I’ve finished the thing and everyone in my senior Professional Writing program is reading this story, and it’s too late to tell them, or warn them, or whatever. Because if I write the honest truth, no one in my family is coming out clean. We are all guilty, and we will all be villainized in some way. I mentioned to my mother, off-handedly, once that I wanted to write my Capstone about my brother, and she simply said, “Absolutely not.” Case closed. I know I won’t ever get their approval, but I need to at least get them out of denial about me writing it. And I need to accept for myself that they don’t approve and probably won’t ever read it. Like I said before, the hardest things to write are the most worthwhile. (I hope.)
Once I get those two things out of the way, I know that I need to start tackling the list of resources that I made for myself in my proposal. They are mostly movies, which should be easy to watch given that I am dating the biggest movie buff I have ever met, who would be more than willing to sit down and watch a couple movies with me. (He might even (il)legally download for me.) I was asked an interesting question by one of the professors in charge of the Capstone: am I planning to make this story into a script? That is something that I need to consider, I guess. I had planned to write a standard non-fiction piece, but since I am watching so many movies to prepare for writing it, maybe I should write a script.
Basically I have a lot to figure out before I have to start writing this beast. But luckily, I have the entire summer to think about it before any actual work starts. So, I am going to take these next few months and plan out what I want to do. Maybe even make an outline of what it will look like. And I’ll see what happens from there.
Wish me luck. I’m going to need all that I can get.
As I said in my proposal, I have always avoided writing about myself. It makes me very, very vulnerable, which is something that I loathe being. But I made a promise to myself to make my Capstone challenging. To me, the best writing is the stuff that is hard to write. It’s the author’s bare bones on the page (or screen in the case of a blog). It’s standing naked in front of a room full of your closest friends and having them point out your flaws. I realized that the only way for me to become a better writer is to leave my comfort zone and write about things that I thought I never would. That’s why I’ve chosen to write my Capstone about my brother, whose drug addiction tore my whole world apart and destroyed my family.
Where I stand in my thinking about the Capstone is this: I need to start writing. Memories fade with time, and mine are no exception. I’ve kept a diary throughout my life, but I was careful never to mention my brother because I was afraid of my parents finding them and getting angry with me for writing it down. So as it stands right now, the only things I have about my brother’s addiction are the only that are in my head. So I really need to start jotting down notes and making a timeline of events before everything begins to blur together any more than it already has. There is one person, my closet friend, who knows all the tales and all the heartbreak that I have endured because of this, so she is the one to talk to about getting everything straight. That girl has a memory like an elephant, so I know she’ll be able to correct any mistakes that I may make in my timeline.
I also know that I need to talk to my parents about this Capstone before I’ve finished the thing and everyone in my senior Professional Writing program is reading this story, and it’s too late to tell them, or warn them, or whatever. Because if I write the honest truth, no one in my family is coming out clean. We are all guilty, and we will all be villainized in some way. I mentioned to my mother, off-handedly, once that I wanted to write my Capstone about my brother, and she simply said, “Absolutely not.” Case closed. I know I won’t ever get their approval, but I need to at least get them out of denial about me writing it. And I need to accept for myself that they don’t approve and probably won’t ever read it. Like I said before, the hardest things to write are the most worthwhile. (I hope.)
Once I get those two things out of the way, I know that I need to start tackling the list of resources that I made for myself in my proposal. They are mostly movies, which should be easy to watch given that I am dating the biggest movie buff I have ever met, who would be more than willing to sit down and watch a couple movies with me. (He might even (il)legally download for me.) I was asked an interesting question by one of the professors in charge of the Capstone: am I planning to make this story into a script? That is something that I need to consider, I guess. I had planned to write a standard non-fiction piece, but since I am watching so many movies to prepare for writing it, maybe I should write a script.
Basically I have a lot to figure out before I have to start writing this beast. But luckily, I have the entire summer to think about it before any actual work starts. So, I am going to take these next few months and plan out what I want to do. Maybe even make an outline of what it will look like. And I’ll see what happens from there.
Wish me luck. I’m going to need all that I can get.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Hello again, it's been a long time
I just recently moved into my very first apartment. As I was unpacking, I came across all the diaries that I’ve kept during my life. I had no idea where they came from, so like the child that I still am on the inside, I called my mother. The saint that she is had found them when she was packing up underneath my bed for me (I was too busy throwing a temper tantrum to my father, I’m sure), and she thought I might find them amusing. And amusing, they were.
So the day I moved into my apartment, instead of unpacking or doing anything in the realm of productive, I sat down and read through fifteen hardcover notebooks that were preserved with love in an old shoebox, and I reacquainted myself with my former self. It’s amazing the things I had forgotten. Crushes whose names I had long since spoken, people who seemed so important to me at the time, people I thought I couldn’t live without, people who were forgotten over time. I read those diaries and I felt I was meeting a whole new person. So, in honor of that person that I found, I am going to do something that I haven’t done since December 3, 2006: my top five’s.
I am not much for playing the “favorite” game anymore, but apparently I used to be. My favorites were all over the place in those pages. So, for old time’s sake, here I go:
Actors:
Russell Crowe
Vin Diesel
Mark Wahlberg
Christian Bale
Bradley Cooper
Movies:
All Over The Guy
Catch and Release
Heights
Labyrinth
The 24th Day
Books:
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
A Separate Peace – John Knowles
Dear John – Nicholas Sparks
The Neverending Story – Michael Ende
Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
Songs:
Iris – The Goo Goo Dolls
Existentialism on Prom Night – Straylight Run
Undisclosed Desires – Muse
Wait – Something Corporate
Walking By – Something Corporate
TV Shows:
Queer as Folk
Dawson’s Creek
OZ
Heroes
Sex and the City
I just spent the last hour thinking up that list. The consensus I found was that my top three choices were always solid and easy to make, but then I started to get unsure as the list got more towards the bottom. This is why I avoid the “favorites” game—it’s so damn hard to just pick a couple things that I love.
I’m done school for the summer now so I plan to do a lot more writing. If any of you nine followers are still with me reading this thing, I can assure you that there will be less academic posts and more fun ones to come shortly. I, of course, don’t have the Internet at my new apartment, but I am working out a plan to sell my soul to the devil in order to check Facebook so I’ll be around.
<3
So the day I moved into my apartment, instead of unpacking or doing anything in the realm of productive, I sat down and read through fifteen hardcover notebooks that were preserved with love in an old shoebox, and I reacquainted myself with my former self. It’s amazing the things I had forgotten. Crushes whose names I had long since spoken, people who seemed so important to me at the time, people I thought I couldn’t live without, people who were forgotten over time. I read those diaries and I felt I was meeting a whole new person. So, in honor of that person that I found, I am going to do something that I haven’t done since December 3, 2006: my top five’s.
I am not much for playing the “favorite” game anymore, but apparently I used to be. My favorites were all over the place in those pages. So, for old time’s sake, here I go:
Actors:
Russell Crowe
Vin Diesel
Mark Wahlberg
Christian Bale
Bradley Cooper
Movies:
All Over The Guy
Catch and Release
Heights
Labyrinth
The 24th Day
Books:
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
A Separate Peace – John Knowles
Dear John – Nicholas Sparks
The Neverending Story – Michael Ende
Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
Songs:
Iris – The Goo Goo Dolls
Existentialism on Prom Night – Straylight Run
Undisclosed Desires – Muse
Wait – Something Corporate
Walking By – Something Corporate
TV Shows:
Queer as Folk
Dawson’s Creek
OZ
Heroes
Sex and the City
I just spent the last hour thinking up that list. The consensus I found was that my top three choices were always solid and easy to make, but then I started to get unsure as the list got more towards the bottom. This is why I avoid the “favorites” game—it’s so damn hard to just pick a couple things that I love.
I’m done school for the summer now so I plan to do a lot more writing. If any of you nine followers are still with me reading this thing, I can assure you that there will be less academic posts and more fun ones to come shortly. I, of course, don’t have the Internet at my new apartment, but I am working out a plan to sell my soul to the devil in order to check Facebook so I’ll be around.
<3
Thursday, April 1, 2010
My best works
Hi everyone!
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