Overall it’s been a miserable week at work, although the first few days were lovely. I even received a pretty vase of flowers from someone awesome, but in general I’ve felt pretty taken for granted at work. Considering a big change, and even starting to look for other opportunities. Somewhere I can be appreciated for the things I can do, to be paid appropriately for such work, and to have a real opportunity to grow.

Well, fuck all of that. I’m going to Dallas in about eight hours to spend the Labor Day weekend with the boyfriend.

Life update:

Work picnic this past weekend. I bring a friend, and we hang around together, join up with a coworker to hike Stone Mountain, eat lunch, then walk around the mini-town at the base of the mountain for a while. Ride the train around the park, see the interactive movie, and then sit atop the mountain again in the late afternoon. By then the sky has cleared and we bask on the open rock as if we are at the beach.

Later that night is salsa dancing, and then in the morning we go lift with Shannon and spend the afternoon at the aquarium, then have the entire evening at the pool. It is a good day.

Yesterday, in general, I sit at home for a few hours feeling tired and worn out from the weekend. I start looking up some salary information which I will use to negotiate a higher pay rate for myself sometime in the next month or so.

But this in general makes me feel a little down, like I’m very behind in life. Couple that with discovering that a friend who is walking a similar path in life seems to be doing very well for herself, and I begin to feel a bit jealous and sour.

It is not her fault, I have to tell myself, that you have not accomplished any of your personal goals so far.

But it’s not even that I haven’t accomplished any personal goals, because I have. I now live in a place on my own (just like I pictured), have begun the process of mastering my debt (just like I pictured), and hold a steady job which I have held for over a year(just like I wanted). And as a bonus, I no longer have to work two jobs to make ends meet.

So in terms of that, my goals have been accomplished little by little. Only now I’m not so sure that I’m completely fulfilled by them.

Mostly I’ve felt the urge to go back to school, especially as I’ve seen most of my peers re-enroll in school or go for the graduate degrees. Yet I am not sure what I want to do or what kind of path would be fulfilling to me. As my interests change, so do the possibilities that a grad degree in writing would be of any use.

So what does that mean? Go back to school and get another bachelor’s degree in whatever? Find a community college that can give me an associate’s or a certificate and then apply to graduate school for something related to that? Do something else completely? What am I supposed to be doing in life right now? Maybe finding another job?

These are all questions that are keeping me up at night. Especially after I’ve spent an entire evening playing Fallout instead of tackling these issues. Hmm.

What to do?

Added another to the list. Hell yes. And I’m about to finish “The Other Queen,” a Philippa Gregory novel.

It’s been a good month for books so far!

Trumbo’s book was another on the Top 10 Most Disturbing list… Number four, to be precise.  But you know what? It didn’t disturb me that much. It was about a soldier during WWI who got his arms and legs blown off, but also had his face destroyed too. He is unable to speak or hear or otherwise communicate and is trapped inside his body.

So… again this didn’t disturb me as much as I thought it would. Am I simply becoming numb?

As a side note, it also reminded me of the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (it might be a book, too?), about a man who suffers a stroke that leaves him unable to move, talk, or make noise.

I don’t think it deserves the number four spot, but once more, I suppose when I get to the end, we’ll see.

It was due to bad planning and unfavorable weather conditions that I ended up back at home, here, on the couch. I suppose worse things could have happened, but even as I drove to the airport with a single bag with me, ready to spend the rest of the weekend in Jackson with the boy for his birthday, I was becoming more and more excited.

I even caught the courtesy shuttle in the economy lot (which I never manage to flag down!), and when I checked in downstairs, I was disappointed to learn that the flight was delayed.

A whole two hours delayed.

The sky had been dark, sure, as I drove in on 85. Menacing, even. I hope the weather doesn’t ground the flights, I remember thinking.

Yet that’s exactly what began to happen. The skies grew darker and darker, and then the rain started. Flights were delayed, then cancelled.  I wandered up and down the C terminal and checked into the book and magazine shops close to the gate and debated with myself if I should purchase anything.

About thirty minutes into my wait, I saw that the flight was cancelled. Shortly after that, we decided I should go home in the rain.

Even though I know this has no bearing on the future, sometimes I secretly wonder if that’s what odd occurrences like this mean.  Don’t say that, the boy said as I made my way back to the parking lot. I told him that I know… it was just bad planning. But saying that ‘it wasn’t meant to be this weekend’ is my way of absolving myself of the guilt of not planning this very well. Had I been on an earlier flight, I might have made it to Jackson and back tomorrow.

Oh well! Such is life.

And yes… eventually I will talk about our week-long trip to DC and back again. And in other news, I have two puffers, but again, that will be in a later post!

For now, Buffy, popcorn, OJ, and a lazy Saturday night.

This is August, so far. Hot damn, I said! It’s been a good month so far, and I even have a few books lined up to finish from the library.

Stephen King’s novel was lengthy… overall  it was all right. Not my favorite. The characters annoyed me more. The plot seemed to stretch on indefinitely, and I was dissatisfied by the resolution. I still like King though.

Alien was the novelization of the movie, so it went just like the film itself does. Considering I haven’t seen that movie in ages, this was something neat. It made me want to re-watch the series. I suppose my interest was piqued because I recently watched Predators and was thinking about the whole franchise.

And The Walking Dead is awesome. Just awesome. I haven’t quite finished yet–I have about fifty pages left. A friend gave me the compilation for my birthday (THANK YOU SO MUCH), and I’m loving every second of it. It does, however, remind me of Lost a little bit… only with zombies.

Well, it should be a good month for books. Boy has left for Dallas, and I have more nights to myself to read. Not that I don’t miss him, of course… but I have to fill all the suddenly empty time with something

500 Days of Summer – Sorry, but this movie still bothers me. JGL aside, I think Summer was an annoying bitch to him.  I thought maybe a second viewing  would change my mind, but it did not.

Restaurants visited:
Carpe Diem for brunch. Tasty, although the service was slow.  Had a bacon omelette, which was egg with bacon, tomato, onions, cheese, and one leaf of basil.  The sides were potatoes and fruit, and with the potatoes some sort of giant, tasty bean. The chai was excellent.

California Pizza Kitchen for my belated birthday dinner with friends. The food was decent as usual. I got the margherita pizza and some water, because I’d had a terrible headache the entire afternoon.

Books Read:

The Pillars of the Earth – Finished this one, finally. What a good book. The style of writing is simple but pulls you along. The characters and plot is engrossing. It reminds me of GRRM (who wrote later, but whom I read first) without the fantasy elements. If you like historical fiction novels, this one is definitely a book to pick up.

Under the Dome – I’m about 350 pages into this one.  It’s okay. The binding is actually falling apart because I took the book out to the pool and it was so hot in the sunlight that the glue started to dissolve… I’m hoping that it won’t be completely dead by the time I return it to the library…

The Walking Dead – Well, the small neighborhood they found was full of zombies. The kid was shot, and now they’re staying at a farm where the farmer has been keeping the dead locked in the barn. What will happen next?

It was a good weekend. Friday night I helped a friend out and wrote a paper for her Shakespeare class. We did this while listening to music and drinking pina coladas. Later we started to watch  Daybreakers and freaked out when a giant insect crawled up the wall, scaring the living shit out of both of us.  It took me ten minutes to get up the courage to go kill that nasty insect and then vacuum up the remains.

Other than that, it was pretty good.

­This month’s reading list is a bit ambitious, especially considering that two of the books (Follet’s and King’s) are over 800 pages a piece.  Realistically, I think I can finish Stephen King’s book if I devote some serious time to it, although I need to return it by the 30^th so that I don’t have it hanging around collecting late fees once it is overdue, which it will be by the time we return from our trip to Maryland.

I, Mona Lisa was rather boring. Nothing spectacular. Forgettable, etc. That and I kept getting the time period mixed up with that of The Pillars of the Earth, for some reason. I suppose reading books concurrently doesn’t always work… Oh well.

The Parable of the Sower was actually listed in the comments below the Top 10 Most Disturbing list.  Others had recommended it on the basis that it was incredibly moving/disturbing, so I decided to get it out of the library when I saw it.

It’s about a girl named Lauren who lives in the time during the decline of the States as a powerful nation; the economy has completely collapsed, and the government has turned a blind eye to everyone’s problems. Food is expensive and water is nearly unobtainable. The country is rife with conflict, cannibals, and gangs of thieves, rapists, and arsonists.  The story itself follows Lauren and her daily life, beginning from when she is fifteen and living in a neighborhood that was thought to be safe, and then continuing to when she is on her own, struggling to survive. It essentially reads as a diary of the apocalypse, divided into entries, and chronicling the growth of her own spirituality, a doctrine she comes to name as Earthseed.

The book contains disturbing elements, of course, but overall, is not one I cringed away from or found hard to read. In fact, sometimes I found it a little difficult to force myself through, as it moved a bit slowly.  I found the spiritual aspects of the book interesting and less intrusive than in other books.

So, my final verdict is that while it’s an okay apocalypse book, it does not warrant a spot on the Top 10 Most Disturbing list.

Oh. Survivor by Palahniuk was weird. He’s such a bizarre, off-kilter writer. I can only take so much of Palahniuk before I have to read slightly more mundane fiction.

Under the Dome seems suspiciously like the Simpsons Movie, where an entire town is kept inside a forcefield/dome. I’ve only read the first 100 (out of like… 800) pages, and so I’m not quite sure what the actual story is.

As much as I like King… I feel like he’s becoming very predictable.  Maybe I’m just outgrowing his style or something though.  This is hard for me to admit because to be honest, King was a lot of the reason why I wanted to attempt writing stories… His early work is incredibly inspiring. But lately… Ugh. Especially after Duma Key, I really just stopped paying him attention. I have yet to read Cell, but then again … maybe I’ll just take it out of the library instead of spending $9 on it.

Finally, A Thousand Splendid Suns was my book club pick, and they picked it. So I get to read it again and revel that I picked possibly the best book since Eat, Pray, Love!

That’s all for now.

It feels sort of odd, being 25 years old. Kind of like I should probably figure out what the hell to do with the last two-thirds (or, optimistically, 3/4) of my life.  I feel old yet still feel young, so really nothing has changed except the knowledge that I am, in  fact, one whole year older.

Let’s see… to celebrate me turning a quarter of a century old, I went to the Sun Dial restaurant at the top of the Westin in downtown Atlanta for lunch, went to the library to take out Stephen King’s newest book, Under the Dome, came home, opened a few presents, and watched the movie Brothers in the evening.  Sunday I saw Inception again and went to my aunt’s house.

It was a quiet, laid-back weekend and I have no real complaints about it.  Some other neat birthday gifts are the compendium of The Walking Dead and some Harry Potter paraphernalia (which is awesome!!), a 1 tb hard drive (to satisfy the inner nerd in me), a pretty dress, and a gift certificate to Barnes & Noble, always appreciated. All of this, and a smattering of checks from the family who cares about me. I also have a few more things coming in the mail from various people, which makes me feel blessed.

But, grievances:

• Last night while running, my headphones broke and then the power went out, so I nearly fell off the treadmill as it abruptly stopped
• Sometime while sleeping I bit my lip open and it keeps scraping against this tooth I have that juts out, so it has been raw for a few days now
• My car is acting retarded… needs two new tires and a balance, oil change, and also has to pass emissions tomorrow so that I can renew my registration

Ugh. This week needs to get better, now.

We saw it last night at Atlantic Station.  My overall impression of it is that it’s got a few script irregularities, but if you’re willing to lose yourself in it, it is a beautiful, rich, imaginative film.

(Spoilers ahead… reader beware):I do have to say that while overall I liked the movie, it did have its issues. I suppose I should tell you all that the theater we were at had a few, um, technical difficulties during the show that extended our stay from about three hours (including wait time) to four and a half.

About an hour into the film there was a pop, and then the picture was upside down and backwards. We sat there for a good five minutes and didn’t say anything because honestly? Up until that point, the movie was weird and choppy enough that it did sort of make sense…

After five minutes though, people began to get up to go complain. More people left, everyone started talking, and then the lights came up. “Sorry, everyone,” a representative of the theater shouted at us, “but the reel is backwards. We’re just going to take 10 minutes and correct it and then resume the film.”

So, we took a break, and then forty-five minutes later the lights dimmed and we resumed the movie from where it had left off.

I’m not sure if my opinion was altered by how the movie was broken up, or if it truly was this way, but to me the first half was hard to follow and the second half was absolutely riveting.

I don’t know. Was it the pacing? Maybe. Sometimes there were points of the plot where you just went…what? What’s that/why did that happen/why are they doing this? A bit of background about why people are hijacking dreams now would have been nice. Other times, things flowed smoothly, while finally, and perhaps on purpose, you just didn’t know if this was reality or a dream.

However, this was also one of the reasons I thought this movie was occasionally brilliant; it tiptoed the line between pissing off the viewers and pulling off something wonderful and toyed with the idea of everything being a dream.  As a fiction writer, one of the big no-nos of storytelling is that you should never make the plot of a book all a dream. Why? Because the reader feels cheated. All of their time spent reading was for nothing, and nothing can be learned from the events that have transpired because it was all just in the person’s head.

There are few movies that pull this off very well at all (A Beautiful Mind does it fairly well). The only one that comes to mind at the moment is Stay, a movie starring (one of my favorites) Ryan Gosling, Ewan McGregor, and Naomi Watts, and that relies on this it’s-all-a-dream plot… and sadly… is not very good. That’s not to say that I didn’t like it. Just overall…eh.  Anyway,  Inception did a great job of handling this, playing with this notion and making us question ourselves just enough. I liked that.

The acting was fine, I think. Leonardo DiCaprio always delivers, although to be honest I feel like his performances are leveling out. To me he seems the same as he did in Blood Diamond, Shutter Island, and now this movie (haven’t yet gotten around to watching the newest one with Kate Winslet).. But he’s solid and dependable as an actor and you can always expect a great performance from him.  I’d really like to see him in another role though, to be honest…

Joseph Gordon-Levitt to me stole the show for a lot of the movie. During the latter half, his character is left on the second level of the dream world to for a while, and these were some of the more fascinating parts of the entire film.  I don’t think I’ve seen JGL in a role like this before (minus G.I. Joe), so this was refreshing.

The rest of the cast, including Michael Caine’s brief appearances, were great as well. Overall, the movie was very well-acted. The CG was fantastic, of course (the zero-gravity fight scenes were the best), and the worlds of the dreams themselves were interesting and incredibly rendered.

I liked it. I liked it a lot. I’m a bit disappointed with Hans Zimmer’s score, though. While it was appropriate, it sort of faded to the background and I didn’t pick up any memorable themes for the movie. What will stick with me is the trailer music, which was more new and fresh than Zimmer’s score.

Or maybe I just didn’t get a chance for a lot of things to hit me. It all went by so fast.

Oh, I’m definitely watching it again. Hopefully in IMAX, when I get some time to myself.  But yes… do yourself a favor and go see this. You won’t regret it.