012012 -- THE DEATH

I am writing again! Even though I woke up this morning and felt like THE DEATH. (It's a girl thing.)

But I'm now sitting here in my little hidden Starbucks, typing away at my novel. Or, I was. XD Let me tell you about this Starbucks. Finding a place to sit in the city is near impossible. When you go to Barnes and Noble, there will NEVER be any place to sit in there. I can guarantee that. It's like people sit there and just do nothing all day. It's the same thing with the Starbucks down the corner from my house. Never a place to sit. Always room to stand, though.

One day I was in Times Square and I was wanting a frapp, so I put Starbucks into Teebs to see what it would bring up. After I went to Sam Ash, I found the place it was talking about, a small little S-bux between Broadway and Sixth on 45th. It's not widely advertised -- I mean, I'm sure you can see the Starbucks logo, but there are at least three other Starbucks by it.

Every time I go into this Starbucks, I can manage to find a seat. Even if it's just at the bar, but it's still a seat. I can sit, I can relax, even for a minute. It's not Zanesville's Starbucks. But it's pretty darn close. And that's why I like it.

I better keep writing. Does anybody on here want to read part of Cosmic when I'm done with it?

--Emily

012012 -- Book Meme, stolen from Sanyu

Bolded are read, italicized I read some. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either. According to the BBC if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations-Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones- Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madam Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

111407 -- Aqui', va

This was originally posted on Facebook.

We're tired of this. We truly are tired of this. We go through life with high expectations, put on us by the parents and people of the last generation. Do this, do that, they say, and you won't screw up. Fail and you will make your life a miserable hell. And so we follow the rules for a while until it starts to really take a toll. We start wondering, who truly are we? And it's when our personalities start to break away from these rules and limits that we start having problems. We get short fuses and can't stand not having things just handed to us, because we're too damn tired of working for everything. We've tried working and we haven't gotten anything out of it, so we're just going to stop. We care about other things, other more trivial things, things that are just things. You know what I'm talking about; they've been mentioned before by several people. But people mention these things that make life shallow and then all they do is wallow in their pity; they don't do anything about it.

It's time to stop this. The question is, of course, how do we stop such a thing? We feel powerless in our current situation and only continue to change the perception of our reality. It's okay to do bad on tests. We don't have to be better. And we become slaves to these rules and limits instead of the ones that our society creates for us. We have limits imposed on us, then we create our own limits. I'm not sure why. Maybe to make us feel superior, to not have to worry about "doing any better" than we are right now. Maybe because we're used to it, having these limits.

There are those who don't see the limits, which is a majority of the people here. There are those that see and don't do anything about it...that is almost worse than never seeing at all. People don't see that they have these limits. Then there are people who create way too many limits and build a nice fence around themselves (come on, you know who you are). They may have different reasons for doing this, but it all boils down to fear. If I put my fence down, it my limits disappear, I'm afraid I might do something bad. I'm afraid I might be condemned. I'm afraid of the expectations that other people will have of me if I start doing things that I never imagined were possible. I'm afraid of failure.

Well, I got news for you. Bad is rather relative depending on your culture, but you can't know what's good unless you know what bad is. And the best way to experience bad, unfortunately, is to get knee-deep in it. There's no way to avoid it. If you try to be perfect, you're essentially screwing yourself over. If you're afraid of going to Hell, well, I got more important news for you, but that's going to be saved for a later date (unless you wanna hear my testimony right here, right now). Jesus is there for you; okay, done with that. People will always have expectations of you; that's what created the limits in the first place, remember? As long as you forsake the expectations that are placed on yourself, you will want to be able to do more. We do more if we are not required, if people aren't breathing down our necks. And as far as failure goes? Everybody fails once in a while, but it is important to see failure as not a failure but try to find another way of doing something.

Back in the day (yes, THAT back in the day) she used a story against me. Once upon a time, there was a butterfly who was captured in a jar. She flew and flew and flew but could not get out, exhausted, she fell to the bottom of the jar, trapped. The story goes on to say that the butterfly had to find another way out, to see things differently, but to my mind, it was warped that I shouldn't even try. Perhaps we need to stop beating against the lid of the jar, exhausting ourselves with this crazy life, searching for something and something and something and JUST SCREAM FOR SOMEONE, ANYONE, TO UNSCREW THE LID OF THIS JAR!

And then when they do, to never return to the jar...never.

...I don't know where I was going with this...