Holday Cheer

This is just going to be one of those days for me. I'm irritated by everything in general, and have locked myself away in the bedroom to avoid taking it out on Dan at this point. Frankly, the fact that he plays video games 9 or 10 hours a day recently has been driving me into an absolute rage, but when he's not playing them, he's freaking out and crying. I figure maybe he just needs some time for escapism, so I'm letting him do this and keeping my thoughts about it to myself.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of research about real estate here in Knoxville. I'm already kind of sick of this apartment, it's small and there are all kinds of maintenance problems. Plus, we have new neighbours across the street who literally sit for 12 hours a day on their front porch. There are about five of them, and they take turns passing around the acoustic guitar all day and loudly playing their awful songs. None of them can sing and they have the guitar proficiency of a 12 year old. Their music is so loud; it's difficult to believe someone can project like that on an unmamplified acoustic, so they must be absolutely shredding the strings. I've thought about just blasting my music whenever we get in the car. You know, my really loud goth music that nobody likes but me and Dan.

Houses are so cheap here. I keep finding these adorable little bungalows with hardwood floors, central heating and air, fenced yards, etc. for around $100,000, which is not bad at all. In my next post, I'll post some pictures of houses that I'm looking at.

I just think we need a house. Hobo needs a yard, and I'm sick of walking up 3 flights of stairs to a 2-room hole.

Testing, 1,2,3.

I just recently went out of commission as far as life goes. I took the ACT. It wasn't hard, except that I'm really terrible at math, so I spent days and days studying for that one section. When I actually got inside the test center and started the test I did better than I thought. Of course, I aced the English portion without even studying for it, did okay on the Science, and I think I was fine on the math. After all that studying, it was so much easier than I thought it would be. Math usually trips me up so badly.

There was a kid sitting next to me who, during the English portion, shook his head sadly and then filled in "D" for every answer. Now, that's just fucking pathetic.

I was rooting through scholarship offers online the other day and saw an ad for a $5,000 award. It was called the "Writers of the Future" and was for SciFi, Fantasy, Horror, or Speculative Fiction short stories or novellas. Now, none of these fit my writing style, but I figured I could pull something out of my ass and give it a shot for that kind of money. Then I clicked on the website link and found out it was called, more specifically "L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future award" and quickly closed it. I don't care if the money is good, scientologists freak me out and I don't want them knowing who I am and where I live.

I also found another scholarship for some other large sum of money. In it, applicants compose a short piece of fiction or nonfiction involving characters who are vulnerable to AIDS. I figured...well, that's vague. Maybe I can write something fucked up about a bug-chaser and see if they pay me to be morbid.

What say you?

I'll see you on the dark side of the moon...

I'm sitting here eating a microwave-warmed turkey burger from last night's dinner with a granola bar trying to decide how to plot out my weekend.

There's a big tribute band gig tonight at the Marquee. My brother-in-law and friends (a Pink Floyd tribute band called In The Flesh) will all be closing out the show with a special performance of the Dark Side of the Moon concert. I believe I mentioned a rehearsal I visited earlier in the week. That has me a little excited to go. My sister cannot go, however, for lack of a baby sitter. My husband didn't get to see the rehearsal because he wasn't feeling well that night. Tomorrow afternoon will be my youngest nephew's ninth birthday party, who also happens to be my sister's and said brother-in-law's son. I've been wondering if I should offer to babysit the kids and send my husband with my sister to go to the show tonight.

In other news, my second-youngest nephew, Sean, received his orange belt in karate last night.

Website Layouts and Scottsdale Studios

Spent all day working on The AzCasters website. Didn't really accomplish anything but injuring my back.

Will be leaving to meet with the band at Scottsdale Studios in about a half an hour. I'm really just going because I want to see the facility. It looks impressive on its website.

Making headway, Back to the band

I've finally made a little headway for the short story I'm currently working on. It's not going to be anything special or even any good. I'd say that I'm subliminally keeping my expectations low as to not be horribly disappointed when I see the finished product, but since I'm very aware of what I'm doing, it isn't really very subliminal, right? Regardless, I talked about the story with my husband who helped me with a particular plot propulsion device where I was truly stumped. When you read anything about mosquitos, you can have Michael to thank.
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Eric called me yesterday to touch base about his new band, The AzCasters (website coming soon). Some changes involving new band members have climbed aboard. This week, I'll be sitting in on a full band rehearsal at a studio in Scottsdale where I'll get to meet these new people and take new photos since my first batch at their initial studio session just didn't turn out the way I'd hoped.
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I watched most of the bonus material for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Dead Man's Chest today. During that process I've consumed no fewer than 6 cups of tea. There's one steeping now. It's one of those Sundays that doesn't end.

Bookmarks

Today I bought bookmarks with assorted colored bookmarks in bulk. Let me repeat myself.. I. Bought. Bookmarks. In. Bulk.

It is quarter to four in the afternoon. My day so far has consisted of waking up, eating very spicy hot wings before fully waking up, sitting in the living room with excruciating stomach ache, sleeping for a great deal of hours while my husband played video games, woke up and drank tea, went back to sleep, woke up and sifted through one of my husband's large tomes about world mythology (more about that later), considered swimming (but decided against it after Michael announced from our back patio that there was a rather fat woman already in the pool), ate pudding, ordered bookmarks in bulk.

There you go. A day in my exciting life.

Things you find in old disk drives

Anna and Dan came to my wedding last January. This was exceptionally exciting since I had only heard of Dan prior to the wedding. Anna had shown me a few blurry cell-phone photographs a while back when she first met him, but she swore he looked just like me. As it turned out, she was right. We're both Filipino/German half breeds. In some very startling ways, our lives are more parallel than even the most Twilight Zone-esque bonds I've shared with some. True to Anna's guess, Dan and I bonded immediately, and it's a good thing, too. Anna and Dan are scheduled to be married, and I tend to be protective of her, often grilling her about who she's dating in an almost parental fashion. Daniel passes the test.

This photograph was taken in Michael's and my hotel suite after my wedding. Anna, her sister Austin, Dan, Michael, and myself sitting in the room worrying about my drunk Los Angeles friends who were heading out to cruise the Tempe college scene. We took in excess of 50 pictures while Anna and Dan were in Phoenix. Likely, you will be subjected with more later when I run out of things to write about like today.
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My friend Amy G. has graduated from Journalism school in Berkeley! It's fun to think back on the days when she was still considering going, then the process of getting there. We became surprisingly good friends during her first year. In most cases, I tend to be extremely callous to people I don't seem to know very well, but Amy is a very likable and intelligent woman. This is my greeting card to her to say, "Congratulations, you Jewy Journalist! Mazeltov and whatnot!"

She's been working some time on a piece that truly interested me when she first began writing it. Now that it's finished, it will soon be published. Even though there are very few readers to this journal as of late, I intend to link it here because after dissecting Amy's writing for around two years, I already know it'll be a good read*.

*Never mind the time I slammed her about a 9/11 piece she did some time ago. It wasn't meant to be biting. I was just tired of the topic. No, really!
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My husband and I bought some honey meade from an online winery. We just tasted it today. Lesson learned: DO NOT BUY LIQUOR OVER THE INTERNET.

Getting Started - How this works

I've been making myself dizzy with coming up with character compositions. I figure since nobody is reading this, I can just use this for reference at how bothersome this process has been since I started. All the software has been installed and I'm staring at an empty character profile form that houses a blinking cursor in the box labeled, "Name:". At first I typed, "Erica - Demon (Also a fan of heavy metal bands)", which succeeded in making me laugh, but did nothing to further my idea on The Devil & Rock 'n' Roll.

The post that I wrote for MySpace has magically vanished so I realize that Anna doesn't even know that I've begun all of this yet. I plan to e-mail her today and let her know about this. If she sets tight deadlines for me, I can at least write perhaps in parts or "episodes".

Also, I have taken up smoking again. My husband is watching the X-Files and I'm not trying to keep from being distracted as hard as I should.

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How this works:

We write our journal-like things here. Our days, our thoughts, our venting ground, weird dreams, and other such brain droppings. This keeps the Stories journal clear for actual literary writing of sorts and not just editorial bullcrap. All the crap goes here. Got it? Good.

Donut making wives

And old, long misplaced friend of mine and I have written several furtive e-mails over the past two years. She sends a half-sentence here, I send a half sentence there. I last sent her a photograph from my wedding to which she was invited but did not attend. Recently, I was the recipient of a batch e-mail containing her new address which was suspiciously close (being, I mean, the house next door) to the address I lived at over a decade ago. This wasn't a particularly strange matter, but the photograph she sent was clearly an attempt to satisfy me for approval.

It was a photograph of an old, long misplaced celebrity or ours who seems to have grown quite stocky in the past year. I quipped something that was very funny. She replied an even less enthusiastic agreement to my lack of ability to care. Still, I call her a friend because I don't know that I can call her an enemy, even if I should by now.
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I'm in the process of looking for some literary and grammar assisting software since I'm not, in actuality, a very good writer. My ideas are scattered and my mind is quite known for going off into too many tangents for even the most concentration endowed mind.

This is my first post after all. I ought to be publishing stories to the Story Blog, but I'm still a bit apprehensive. I feel that I need to do that after I've found a foolproof program that will keep me from looking like an idiot, if such a thing exists.