5, 6, 7: Labels, Drive-ins, Lampposts

I think this is going to be a pattern.
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5:

I have really ridiculous blog labels. I was looking at the "labels" tab on the side of my screen, which shows me all the labels I've used in case I want to label my current blog post with one of those labels, and the first few are

#, $100, $300, %, *poke*, 1,  100, 1000, 11:30, 13, 1st, 2

Then it goes on with a bunch of random numbers till if gets to actual words. Anyway, I don't know why I'd label anything with 11:30 or 100 or 1000, but I know exactly which post the $100 and $300 labels go to. I made a post about getting my tablet a long time ago, and the one I was going to get was $100 while the one I ended up getting was $300. It's kind of weird labeling a post with something like that. I guess I thought, you know, I think maybe one day, I’m going to want to look up my Wacom tablet post, so I’m just going to google “$100” instead of “Wacom tablet. Or maybe I thought I was going to buy a lot of $100 things in the future and blog about them. Lol. It's just weird. I guess I thought labels were like search tags, which they kind of are maybe, but there is an actual search bar that looks up all the words of posts, not just their labels but I was probably thinking I'd label everything a bunch of labels just in case. Yesterday I labeled my post with “3” and “words” but akjehdfd

Today: 758 words
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6:

At drive-ins, every drive-in, every living building at night that chatters busily despite being alone, the warm glow of fumes floats heavily, every huff and puff of yesterday freeing itself into the cool air. The trees feel it first, that dim vibration of everything secret that the world buttons up in its coat pockets, next to the jigsaw puzzles and bricks of mysterious cheese. It hugs every trunk, and seeps into the asphalt, into the dirt, into the shells of the tiny glittering bugs that sleep snug between the roots. And the stars, as small and sad and distant as they are, feel it too, and swing into stuttered motion, clicking their way to the sea, where they drop and fizzle lovely craters in the sand.

- from the writing meeting I went to, to the prompt "summer"

Today: 0 words
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7:

 Allow me to gather my thoughts. This is kind of turning into an every-three-days thing rather than a daily thing. I’m leaving for a week long trip soon! So that week is going to be almost completely sparse of updates. Which is funny, because it means I will have a lot of words to make up, along with the words that I already need to make up! 

I just had some chicken pot pie. It was delicious, as chicken pot pie always is until the need to have chicken pot pie dies out. Let me recall my surroundings. I am in a room, lit by a ceiling fan. Faint desert air blows in through the bejeweled curtains, as I sip from my coconut tea. 

One night, while in the car with a friend, on the way back from a drive-in movie theater, I was watching the tall lampposts(?) outside pass by on the highway, and I was thinking of how the lights from those tall sticks were kind of like stars, except they are held up by poles and follow the highway, so we pass each star really quickly. So wouldn’t it be cool if the lampposts down here were actually the stars of the society in the sky, and their lampposts were the stars in ours? In that case, we’d be living in an inverted world, sort of, and if their lampposts lined their streets, then their streets are really weird and jumbly or scattered. But I guess the stars in their sky are always aligned since their stars are our lampposts and those follow our highways and small roads. Their constellations would be really obvious. Maybe they have a problem where there are so many stars in line with one another that it’s difficult to section them off into constellations. Also, in their world, their sky would be smaller than their ground/land/whatever, which is weird. Maybe they have more underground things than we do as a result, and it would be funny if they kept digging through our sky until finally they popped out through the other side and fell out into someone else’s. 

Today: 626 words

2, 3, 4: AHHHH, :(, Beep

I know I haven't posted for the past 3 days! Ahh! Ok here we go, succession of posts, both short and medium and nonexistent! 
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2: 

Everything burns. I went to the beach with some of my friends. We made a sandcastle with strange jut-outs and a cat head and another head, and tried to boogie board but didn’t really since the waves were somewhat low. 

Clothes: burn 
Fabric: burns 
Shower: burns (apparently there is no cold water in my shower) 
Lotion, 10 seconds later: burns 
Another kind of lotion: burns 
Typing: burns

Just kidding about the last one! But
Sitting with my back touching anything: burns

Today: 153 words
(comment from the future 7/5: what a fun and sad day)
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3:

Today: 0 words
(comment from the future 7/5: .___________.)
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4:

My printer is going kzzk… kzzk… kzzk… kzzk kzzk kzzk kzzkhzkhzkhzkhzkhz 

So I’ve been reading a lot of webcomics lately, and but I only recently noticed all the different sound effects that the artists come up with for things. It’s not just ZAP! or POW! or CREAK.. click beep POOF! slurp, swish, bzzt, slam, whack, kaboom, crash, THWACK, etc. (Actually, it’s funny to note the sound effects that are verbs, like slam, crash, stomp, and slurp. Maybe one day sound effects will evolve into really ridiculous verb sounds, like WALK, drink, CLOSE DOOR!, open, UNPEEL!) Anyway, instead they’re a little more unusual. Like 

Krrrnch - breaking a metal floor 
Zrrrrrt – laser beam through tent 
Woooom - explosion
Shooooop – opening a chest
Crrrr – wagon piece dragging 
Fweeeee – light fleeting away 
Fwshhhhhhh – power zapping out 
Zzzzhooooom – laser beam 
Ffssssss – electricity doing its thing 
Krsh! – power zap, electric 
Shhf –leather boot sliding into saddle, gun into pocket 
Fzz, crik, crak – campfire 

I'll tell you about the webcomics another time. So I was thinking of how you would come up with sound effects for just things you do/things that happen every day. I guess the steps would be something like this: 

1. Listen 
2. Imitate by voice 
3. Try to spell it out 
4. Figure out the pattern (long and extended like shhhhhhhhhhhhhhk, short blips like beep beep beepbeepbeep, dramatic like SLAM!, soft and lowercase, etc.) 
5. Figure out what it looks like (slinky and oozing around in waves, etc.) 

So... I did some stuff and listened to the sounds that happened (appeared, resulted?) and tried to translate them as accurately as possible. Here they are: 

drinking water – glgflkgdlgfglg
fireworks (happy 4th of July, belated!) – poooosh! Buh buh bububububububu crkkk… pook 
flicking light switch up – blun
ceiling fan - whuwuuwWWWwhwhwhwhwhWwwWWWWWWww 
laptop having trouble breathing- vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrn vrrn vrn vrrn vrrrrrrRRRrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRN 
crinkling receipt slowly – blllk mllk blLLK… Kr k MLk blKrr.. 
peeling a post-it - fffzzzzzzzzzzzzzsssssuh 

Wait. Is it peeling or unpeeling? I am peeling an apple. I am unpeeling an apple. Unpeeling a banana. Is there a difference? Ok. Peeling is to remove the skin. So unpeeling would be like putting the skin back on, except it’s not. Also it doesn’t seem to show up in dictionaries as a verb. What a mystery. 

It’s really difficult, when you’re listening to a sound, to figure out whether it is an “n” sound or a “d” sound or something else. I was poking my laptop with my nail just now and couldn’t decide whether it was more like a “d d d d d d d d” or “dn dn dn dn” sound. The only reason the “n” is being tacked on to the “d” is because the tapping sound is slightly muted, probably largely by my finger and then by everything else, so there needs to be something that stops the d sound from being too duh duh duh when you read it. 

Anyway that was fun. You should try it. It was surprisingly difficult. I guess there’s a difference between the sound effects used in comics and how you would actually spell out a sound effect if you wanted it to be as accurate as possible. I’m pretty sure if someone drew a character scrunching up some paper, they wouldn’t write “blllk mllk blLLK” next to it. They’d probably just go with “crinkle crinkle”. 

Aah this is so complicated, typing and continuing the same blog post on different days. Let me tell you how I am organizing my NaNoWriMo writing right now. I’ve got MS Word open, and I just type type for the day. At the end of the day, I write the word count for the day, type a looooooooong line of dashes under that and write the date, in bold, at the end of the dash train. I highlight the dash train a hideous cyan because it’s either that or another terribly blinding color, or yellow, which is boring (only highlighter yellow though. Normal yellow is awesome! And only highlighter yellow on the computer. Real-life highlighter yellow is so practical it’s ok if it’s a bit boring. At least I can see the words underneath). Then I type type for the next day and repeat. 

 Ooh I want to try something. 

“At my end of my day, I write my word count for my day and I type my looooooooong line of dashes and I write my date, in my bold, at my end of my dash train.” 

 I always feel bad about using “I” too much in sentences. Are you ever worried people will try to psychoanalyze you? Anyway, I thought I'd see what it would look like if I replaced all articles with “my”. It’d be funny to have a day where everyone does that when they speak. It might become a habit though. o_o 

So that’s how I’m organizing everything, I can’t keep blog posts in one piece on MS Word. They must be separated by dashes. It’s just weird, especially when I decide, the next day, that I want to type something BEFORE the stuff I typed yesterday for my blog post. Actually, I’m not supposed to really run into this problem since the goal was to post every day, and the assumption was that I would only write blog posts on the day I post them. Gah confusing. Alright see you tomorrow!

Today: 1133 words
(actually I'm kind of warming up to that horrible highlighter cyan. It may look cute here, by the way, but it doesn't so much on MS Word)

1: Camp NaNoWriMo & BrieAd

I’m taking on a challenge this month! Camp NaNoWriMo starts today (I guess it’s yesterday now). If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically National Novel Writing Month but in April and July (usually it’s held in November). The goal is to write 50,000 words by the end of the month, and those words are supposedly part of a novel. Laurapoet is participating in it, and I thought it would be fun to do too! Although I’m just going to ignore the novel part and go for 50,000 words of whatever I feel like writing just to write. I’ll be posting daily (er, almost), so every post will count as part of my 50,000. Split up and rounded up a bunch, that would be about 1700 words a day! Since I won’t really write a 1700 word blog post every day, I’ll just blog and then write whatever else I feel like writing for the rest of my 1700 words. I’ve got a lot of freedom with this, which is awesome! Exciting stuff! Ahh!

Anyway it turns out that I wrote a whole bunch for a blog post but there’s just too much stuff I’d need to collect to finish it today SO I’ll just be scooting that to another post. And tomorrow... there won’t be a post. Which is a terrible way to start this, but I’ll be away from the computer all day! I’ll still be writing with pen and paper so I’ll type that up later when I’m near a computer and count that as part of the word count for that day.

So now that that’s announced and ‘official’ and everything, today I went to one of laurapoet’s writing meetings, where we wrote and talked and ate patriotic brownies! And vanilla ice cream! It was fun! So I think I’ll share what I wrote sometime later. It just feels weird to sandwich it in the middle of a post because then I have to introduce it or something. Boop. This is terrible. I keep introducing things like the-stuff-I-was-GOING-to-post and the-writing-thing-I-did-at-the-writing-meeting-that-I-will-post!-but-later and so all this is really is just an announcement. So I’m just going to find a really interesting link or adorable picture as a brief addition...

I just googled “sad bread” and this one is really cute so here you go

by Jonathan Burrello, click

So now it’s no longer July 1st, but I stopped and got the word count for all I’d written before 12:01am so I’ll just post that number at the end of this post. I’ll be doing that for every post this month, although the word count at the end stands for the number of words written that day, not for that blog post. That’s all!

Also just for personal reference and semi-notice, since I just remembered, I REALLY NEED TO TALK ABOUT WEBCOMICS AND IFICTION AND CERTAIN ANIME AND BOOKS maybe. I’ll ramble about those in some other posts. This IS A TERRIBLE PROCRASTINATING POST I’M SORRY AHH

Tooday(yesterday): 1257 words

Birdy

AHHH OH MY GOD THIS IS SUCH AN AMAZING COVER! Beautiful cover. Seriously. It’s Bon Iver’s Skinny Love, covered by Birdy. Listen to it. Here it is. This isn’t the official music video, but I like this one more.
 

I don't know why it took me so long to realize that I could add embed stuff into posts rather than just using links... For some reason vimeo seems more embed-able than youtube. 

Don’t read what’s below until you listen to it. I don’t want to influence you too much before you listen to the song, even though I was all ecstatic above and have already caused you to have high-ish expectations. It’s kind of like stripped down but blurry. It’s not quite bare because of the glow-echoing sound, so I don’t want to say it’s like that. It’s just simple I guess. At first I thought the close face shot would be awkward, but now I really like it. It just seems honest because it’s continuously trained on her face, so any awkward pauses are recorded, and I bet the singer is slightly uncomfortable (er, I’d be) and it just seems so normal that her eyes would flit off to the sides during pauses. Her voice. Oh my god. Anyway, my favorite parts are 2:39(obviously) and 0:40(whenever her voice does that almost-faltering-sound as it goes up) and the beginning. 

 You should also listen to her cover of The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by The Postal Service. I might as well just emb(ed?) this one too:

Light, Grass, and Oceans

Once again, here I am writing a blog post while I should be working on my college applications. These college apps are really inspiring! Anyway, here are some awesome things I have seen recently:

• While walking to an art museum – saw amazingly long luxurious grass. The most beautiful grass I have ever seen. It grows in tufts and tumbles, thin and green, and immediately reminds you of the ocean, or short wavy hair. It looks like it should be moving but it’s still. I reached down to touch it and it is oddly rubbery. If you have ever reached down to pet grass, well, this would have been kind of disappointing(but it was kind of interesting, how rubbery it was)
• The trees by my house. They sound like the beach. I will explain later sometime.
• The light that escapes the blinds and curtains and hits the edge of the windowsill really sharply at 7am sometimes 
• Driving to school one morning – sun is shining with those streams of light, one hits some parked cars windshield(lots of dried water marks on the glass). Then we drive down more, and pass by a girl who has really long hair and some Pocahontas-like stuff in her hair. She is getting in or out of the car, and her hair swings and the sun passes through it in slow-mo while we drive by. Very cool. 

One day I will be brave enough to open all the blinds of the windows in my room at night. Then I will sleep(early). I expect to wake up to an explosion of light in the morning. You know, for some people, dreams wake them up. But more and more often for me, I wake up and then decide to go back to sleep hoping to continue my dream or have more dreams(even if it’s scary, I am more interested in what will happen next than I am afraid) and then wake up hours later. It used to be sad to wake up so often in the afternoons, and now it isn’t. Hmmm.

Morning Ramble

You know what I would love to do? I would love to finish watching the anime's I never finished watching. I would love to watch Anastasia and Moonrise Kingdom and The Social Network, Ruby Sparks, and Looper. I would love to read a Vonnegut book and Invisible Cities and Einstein's Dreams and the good books that Patty read from the Name That Book list, even if it means we will be a less dynamic Dynamic Duo. I would love to write a memoir to record my memories, and a receipt to record my thoughts. I'd like to write another blog post and take a better senior picture and pick a good quote. I would love to actually do NaNoWriMo since I remembered it was November and that NaNoWriMo happens now, you know, and I can do it since I remembered, but there's no time. There's no time because I have to write my college essays, and writing college essays prompts my mind into thinking of other fun productive things I could do(like writing a memoir). I would also like for my house to have some kind of snack other than chocolate covered peanuts and little crunchy crackers. I would love to spend hours studying for the quizzes and tests coming up in the next few weeks so that I feel like I am adequately prepared every time and that I've done all I could have possibly done for that test(even though I couldn't possibly have. It's impossible. Did you know that impossible itself actually says I'm Possible? This was in a quote by Audrey Hepburn, found while looking for a nice senior quote). I want to finish writing a letter. I want to bake something good. I want to peruse what my ideal afterlife setup would be; what kind of combination of possible afterlife's(there is so much to consider ahh!) would be possible and would make sense(hmm) and would be good for everyone? I want to just sleep and dream and keep dreaming the same dream if I want to. I want to decide, do I want time to stop when I am doing something productive, or when I am doing something unproductive(or maybe I mean fun)? I want to figure out what I want, exactly, when it comes to things that aren't possible. Like, do I want a little space in the sky, a spot on a cloud(the what-I-wish-clouds-felt-like kind), where time freezes and I get to just think and do nothing else, all by myself, or do I want it to be a separate world where other people on their personal clouds can wave to each other and talk as they wonder about things and collect their thoughts? And do I want to have a limited amount of time there every day to make sure I don't neglect normal life or do I want to trust myself to control the time I spend up there? I also want to chat with old friends because I know they are online too and I haven't talked to them in a long time but I know we're both busy. I would like to do stuff I used to like to do all the time, like play MMORPG's and make gifts and watch anime and play tag and upload lots of old photos. I can't remember what else I want now, although there are a lot of things that are wants that are ongoing throughout my life, I think.

That took about thirty minutes, which is fine. Now, back to writing my essay!
(Hey this turned out to be ok for a blog post! I actually got one of those things I wanted to do done! Ha!)

Also I made up a joke! This is a rare thing, but it's good enough to share, although it doesn't start with a question. It doesn't even follow the format of  typical joke, where you say something, the other person says I don't know, you say something, and then the other person says ...ohhh. Anyway here it is, now that I've made such a big deal out of it that it'll be a letdown once you get it:
A glue stick is a pun in itself.

Alright, bye till next time(which will be hopefully but possibly doubtfully soon)!

Eurydice

Today I heard the most beautiful song.

So this evening I went to one of our school plays to see the play, Eurydice. I was super excited because I had wanted to see one of our school plays all year and had never gotten the chance to. Plus, everyone was kind of raving about it(but usually people rave about all of the plays so I couldn't tell if this one was especially good). Anyway, I went to see it, and the play was amazing. The sound effects, the music, the cast, the stage mechanics, the lighting, the timing- everything was so perfect together! There were some really sad moments too..

After the play, I was a little sad because I knew that I would never get to see that play ever again, in those circumstances. That cast is not going to do that play again, and those effects and that stage are not going to be the same in a different Eurydice play. That's the sad thing about plays.. I can't replay them over and over again whenever I want like I can with movies. With movies, almost everything stays the same. But with plays, it just happens like that once. It makes it special and sad(I need more adjectives for this) at the same time. Anyway, in one of the scenes, there was this song that began playing, and it was kind of surprising because I didn't expect them to use songs for some reason. The only lyrics I caught were, "a house built out of stone", so I memorized it and hoped that when I got home, I'd be able to search it up. And I found it! It made me so happy to hear those first two notes because I instantly recognized that that was the song. So luckily I was able to kind of keep at least one part of the play the same. The rest of it is in memory, so that song will be like a memory refresher for what it was like to watch that show today! The artist or band of the song is called The Cinematic Orchestra. Anyway, then I listened to some of the other songs by The Cinematic Orchestra, and some of those are incredibly beautiful too.

Here are the links to my two favorite pieces:

To Build a Home by The Cinematic Orchestra - the one from the play. Ok, so you may not love this song as much as I do since the moment in the play with this song just made me love this song ten times more. It's like when you watch a movie and a certain song comes on and suddenly that combination makes you love both more than you ever could have if you had seen each separately.

Arrival of the Birds by The Cinematic Orchestra - the other one. It is also lovely. I find both of these songs to be really sad in a nice way.

Ok, so these songs remind me of Peter Pan for some reason. I love that movie. I'm talking about the one with real people by the way, not the animated version, as I've never seen that and actually doubt that it can surpass the real-people-in-it movie. I love the soundtrack and the story. Especially the fairy dance song! Anyway, I think the reason these songs remind me of Peter Pan is because the soundtrack of that movie and the music from the play both remind me of adventures! And the sublime! And it's epic and it goes up and down and mellows out and builds up. I think the tune of the songs are what I want my life to be like. That sounds kind of sad.. And I don't actually want my life to be that tumultuous. I think I'd just like to have an adventure with a plotline like the melody of these songs. It just sounds like it'd be so much fun.. I think my aim in life is to not have a boring life! I think that's kind of the aim that everyone has, really though, even if it isn't really specified. So if you were to pick a song to represent kind of your life-plotline or life emotional-plotline or the kind of life-plotline you'd like to experience, what would it be?

Also, the play Eurydice is pronounced like yer-RID-ih-see. I always pronounce things wrong so I thought it was yer-RID-iss or YER-rid-ice, but the correct pronunciation sounds a lot more impressive. :D