The other day I finished reading Paper Towns. Great book! As I posted on Twitter & Plurk, it was funny, sad, and deep, sometimes all at once.
I liked all the characters, which may or may not have been John Green’s purpose. The morale of the story is that people are people. We have a habit of seeing people as almost godlike or as animals, forgetting that everyone has good and bad traits. In the video that I recorded of him in Orlando, he quoted Walk Whitman “I contain multitudes” and he went on saying that he is both ugly and hot, smart and stupid.
One cool thing that John did in the book was quote from a few past sources, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (a good amount of Song of Myself from “the Whitman” ), Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and T.S Elliot. A bit of Greek mythology.
Although it’s written for the young adult audience, I really liked it. It’s written in first person, about a group of teens, Quentin (written from his point of view), his best friend Ben, Radar, Lacey, and Margo Roth Spiegelman. Most of the story is about Quentin finding Margo after she goes missing. As he’s finding clues and figuring out where she is, he also finds out who she really is.
And I was able to successfully fight the temptation of jumping to the end to find out if Margo is alive. It was tough.
Does he find her? Alive? Ahhh… to find that out, I recommend reading the book 😉
I also will be letting Kristi read the book as well when she is old enough. As John told me, “not for a few more years”. Nothing really dirty, just a few teen related things that a 9 year old is not ready for yet.
Ye need some teachin on how ta talk like a pirate? Pay attention ye of little attention span….
Ye better be hearin’ Dutch priest Father Roderick from SQPN talk of th’ treasures of speakin’ pirate in th’ followin’ podcast or ye be sleepin’ in Davey Jones locker:
John, who did the Charlie Chaplin montage to the tune of a Moby song that I posted earlier, posted in the Buster Keaton forum about another montage of Buster Keaton. Brilliantly done!
This time he used the same montage to two different songs. The first is done to the Pixies “Here Comes Your Man”
Or if you are more of a folk music fan, here’s the same montage with the Soggy Bottom Boys’ (from the movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”) “Man Of Constant Sorrow”
That’s what I would eventually like to be. And I’m not deterred by the fact that I’m 35 either.
To some, you should have you’re life figured out by then. You’re almost middle aged!
But Life has a way of working in a different way than what you expected. But the dream lives on through marriage, kids, and divorce.
Mark (ex-husband) poo-pooed the idea of me being a writer. Sometimes he was supportive but with everything else that was going on, I was majorly discouraged from writing. I have managed to keep some of my notes and short stories that I have written, and still add onto that.
So what makes me think I could be a writer? Well, throughout my schooling years I was told by all my english teachers plus other teachers that I would have to write essays for, would tell me I had a real good talent for writing. And as the years went by, the teachers never seemed like they were trying to say something nice, but they were consistent. Of course, my papers were not lacking in corrections, but the teachers would make compliments on my style. And all teachers encouraged me to do something with it.
So what kind of writing do I want to get into? Mainly historical fiction. And a bit of sci-fi because I love the idea of time travel. Right now I am working on a story that will mostly take place in Acient Rome. I have not decided whether it will take place before Caesar, after Jesus, or what. Maybe jump around to different eras. Acient Rome lasted a looong time, over 1000 years. The empire was just part of it.
Kristi is also interested in it, which is also part of the reason why I choose a Roman story. She loves (or I should say “loved”. I lost the discs when we moved :() playing Casear IV on the computer, and I would explain the different buildings, classes of people. She loved building her own Roman Empire :). And she watched a documentary that came with it, and looked at My Roman books, and checked out a couple more from the library.
When I told her my idea of writing a story, she loved it. And she wanted to read what I had written which wasn’t much at the time.
And while I was writing the Roman story, which starts of in present day in Somewhere, Some state, USA. I started writing another story changing from a different POV that takes place in the 1950s and I just kept writing. I have not decided whether to combine those.
I have decided to write it the younger set but still enjoyable for “old people” like me. Something like J K Rowling did with her…oh what was that series… She sold one or two copies. OH YEAH! That Harry Potter kid.
And yes, I’m kidding :).
Rowling is an inspiration for me with her writing the first Potter book while being a mom and divorced. That gives me some hope there!
And time for me to go back and deal with being a mom…
There’s an essay contest going on at TheCelebrityCafe.com and the prize is volume 3 of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour tv show from the 1960s. (If you don’t know who they are, check out their website).
I wrote a short essay on one of my favorite routines they did on the show called “Lessons and Morons”:
So for those of you who have never been here before, Hello there!
I have added some of the other sites that I run on the left hand side.
The About Me page is still being written. So yes, I know that I did not finish the last sentence 🙂
By the way, if you want to see the old version of the site, click here. That is pretty much like an “About me” type of page anyway. I still have my Twitter updates there. Eventually I will add a Twitter widget here along with a plugin to post my tweets for the day. Maybe it will be a Plurk widget instead…have to see about that. I use Ping.fm to post to both so there’s no need to have both since they will both will have the same short messages.
After thinking about it, I thought I might as well make the blog my main site and just have what was on the previous site move to my About Me page… when I make one that is :).
The version I’m using at this moment of writing is WordPress 2.6. There are some nice upgrades, such as autosaving my writing, similar to Gmail. That is *very* handy. Especially now that is stormy here in Florida and the power goes out without notice.
I’m also looking for a new theme, and looking around for some. Particularity ones with blue and round corners. I have looked through ThemeViewer and have found some nice ones that I will try out later on.
Things here at home have remained constant. I’m still living with my parents since my new job started and the girls are still with me. The divorce was finalized May 15.