Practicing Dialogue for Japanese Class

Recording: <Stuff that sounds really cool> Please repeat.

Me: *Gargle Gargle Gargle* blah *Gargle Gar-*

Recording: <Moves on to next section before I can finish> Please repeat.

Me: *Gargle Gargle Gar-* Oh, for pity’s sake. I’ve been taking Japanese for an entire quarter. Why haven’t I mastered it by now?

I feel the practice recordings are mocking me. Also, patience is not one of my virtues.

The Great Fanfiction Drought of 2011-2012

That title might make it seem like I haven’t read any fanfiction for the past year, but this actually just started on this most recent Christmas day.

On my desk and on my Kindle, there are twentysome books that I’ve been meaning to read. I’m not lazy - when it comes to reading. It’s not that I’m not interested in these books, I just tend to spend all of my time reading fanfiction. 

My fanfiction addiction, which is a valid addiction (inside joke - long story), began in middle school, when I was obsessed with the musical Rent. I discovered fanfiction.net, and saw that most of what was available was not that good. I read inordinate quantities of it anyway. Over the next several years, I discovered that I had no impulse control. I had a tendency to read fanfiction whether it had any good qualities or not.

Last summer, I started two books, got halfway through each of them and then didn’t read them for months. Yes, I was busy with my first year at college; it is excusable to forsake pleasure reading for the sake of one’s education. However, I was also reading fanfiction. Fanfiction that was causing me to be more sleep deprived than usual. It was kind of becoming a problem. 

So I cut myself off. On Christmas Eve/Day (I always stay up past midnight, so I sometimes have trouble figuring out the date), I decided that I would not read any more fanfiction until after I had finished A Clash of Kings. If you’re a fan ofA Song of Ice and Fire, you know those books run more than 1,000 pages each, and while they can be quick reads, when you are as much of a slacker as I am, it takes a while.

I haven’t read any fanfiction since then. My Kindle says I’m 40% though the book. I usually don’t end up following my New Year’s resolutions, but this has been surprisingly easy.

That being said, I still go on fanfiction sites. I’m making a list of quality-looking fanfics that I shall read as soon as I finish the book.

Fanfiction is far too fun just to give up forever.

Fall Quarter

So under my "To-do lists" tab on OneNote, I have a section for blog ideas. Because I've been busy with school, I haven't been able to update as much as I'd like to, but I've made a list of all the things I've wanted to write about. Here is that list:

Auction

Detergent

Making out until the end of time

That other dream

Finals

That fanfic

In retrospect, I'm not quite sure what I meant by "That other dream" and "That fanfic." I'm sure those entries, were they to ever come to fruition, would have been magical and fascinating. Alas, I cannot write about something  I know nothing about, so those shall be struck from the list. 

Auction

Detergent

Making out until the end of time

That other dream

Finals

That fanfic

Last year, I was awarded an academic scholarship from my local Rotary club. This year, they asked me to speak at their annual auction, as they were collecting donations for the current batch of scholarship winners. I had a good time. The people there were nice, and it was a very classy event (I dusted off one of my nicer dresses, that was nice). I was allowed one guest, so my father accompanied me. We spent most of the evening evaluating the many items up for auction and not bidding on anything. After dining on a complementary meal of what I am fairly sure was prawns, pork and the most delicious potatoes I have ever tasted, we watched the rest of the auction.

They were selling a puppy. It was cute.

Also, the way our table was set up, there was chocolate cake at every other place, and this odd, gelatinous blueberry souffle in the remaining places. At first, I was placed with the souffle, but then somebody showed up and wanted to sit next to one of his associates, so we all had to move down a seat. While it completely destroyed my unstable understanding of silverware placement, it did move me away from the souffle, which I had a small taste of later; it was reminiscent of rubber. 


Score for me; I got the cake.

Auction

Detergent

Making out until the end of time

That other dream

Finals

That fanfic

Several weeks ago, I was visiting my hometown for the weekend. Coincidentally, my aunt was visiting from Oklahoma. While my mom and her sisters were out, and my dad was at work, I had the house to myself. I had promised I would do the laundry while they were gone, so I had just started the washer and dryer. A few minutes later, I heard a loud "thud" from the laundryroompantry. When I went to check what it was, all I saw was a large, solid blue spot on the laundryroompantry floor. I am ashamed to admit that it took me longer than necessary to figure out that the growing puddle of thick blue liquid on the floor was, in fact detergent. 

I'm really glad I wasn't into Portal at the time. I would have expected to fall through the floor and then been really confused.

That is what Portal does to you.

Every single towel, washcloth, dishcloth and the socks I had been wearing later, we had sopped up most of the detergent, but there was still a large quantity of it underneath the washing machine and the dryer. We had to move them so the detergent wouldn't soak through the wood and damn us all to walking around on buckling floors. This task, of course, was delegated to me.

"Now, Katy," my mother said cheerfully. "While you're back there, I also want you to clean the backs of the washer and dryer."

Despite the fact that I do not do well with dust, I did as I was told. Then, after I and my thoroughly dust-covered clothing emerged from the cramped inferno of vents and grime, my mother informed me that I would have to go back to my previous location to connect the flimsy aluminum-looking dryer pipe to the wall. 


I consider myself flexible in mind, but not in body. This new task required me to be flexible in body. After what I consider in my mind to be an impressive show of my gymnastic abilities (i.e. me blundering about and looking decidedly not impressive), I finally returned to stable ground. 


I didn't do that many chores when I was younger. This was an experience for me.

Auction

Detergent

Making out until the end of time

That other dream

Finals

That fanfic

Wow, um...the Making Out Until the End of Time thing is kind of hard to explain. In fact, I don't know why I put it on this list, since it is based entirely on inside jokes. Let's just say it involves characters in my in-progress novel, roundabouts, take-your-father-to-school day and the contemplation of two really bored college students and leave it at that. 

Auction

Detergent

Making out until the end of time

That other dream

Finals

That fanfic


Not much to say about finals either. I got a C on two of them and a B- on another. The Biology final was incomprehensible. Seriously. I expected to get far less credit. Fun fact: finals make your head hurt, but I expect all of you know this by now. Retrospectively, I was probably going to say something more clever here, but if I was, I have forgotten.

Auction

Detergent

Making out until the end of time

That other dream

Finals

That fanfic


Now, I can check off my entire to-do list of blog ideas. That will be nice. In a perfect world, I would be able to provide a greater quantity of shorter updates, but looking at my trend here, you'll probably just get a lengthy information overload two to three months from now.

That Dream I Had a Few Weeks Ago

Maurice Fischer from Inception was my evil grand-uncle who hated Christmas. He didn't just hate Christmas in an "I'm Ebenezer Scrooge and I'm secretly good deep down inside but a sad childhood has made me miserly and bitter, so Bah Humbug" sort of way. He hated Christmas because he was evil, and hated everything that was good.

I don't know why he was my grand-uncle, but because of this, my parents decided that they should take care of him in his old age. Whether my parents were doing this because they wanted him to leave them all of his vast fortune, or because my parents are nice people is never clarified in the dream.

Anyway, Evil Grand Uncle Maurice Fischer from Inception was evil, and for some reason, he hated me, so I had to move out of the house. After this happened, I changed my name and opened a Japanese deli, which oddly enough sold only ice cream and edible cookie dough (which I've tried in reality. It's not actually that edible). I seemed to be doing well in this entrepreneurial venture.

EGUMFfI hated Christmas a lot, so much so that nobody celebrated Christmas any more. However, he still had one group perform a Christmas Pageant for him every year. Apparently, Hillary's mother was part of this group, because she came to my deli one day wearing her biblically-themed pageant costume asking if I could provide her with a fake ID for her friend's daughter. Her friend's daughter wanted to participate in the pageant, but EGUMFfI hated children, and Hillary's mother's friend's daughter was only thirteen years old. She would have volunteered somewhere else, but in the Holiday season, the usual volunteer places are completely packed. She needed volunteer hours for her school project, and the pageant was her only hope.

Then my dream did that thing where it sort of changes the subject but not really. I was trying to get this poor girl her fake ID, but then for some reason I had called April up on the phone. I asked her what she did for Christmas in UaFWTD now that Christmas is gone. She told me that instead of celebrating Christmas, they made giant oil paintings of scenes from Blue Exorcist. To prove her point, she emailed me a scan of her picture of Young Rin and Yukio Okumura playing on a beach (Rin may have been wearing a Santa hat).

Then I woke up. I never found out whether that girl got her fake ID, or whether my parents inherited EGUMFfI's money. 

But I remembered what happened after I woke up, and that it why it was a good dream.

Why I Like the Master

"Shall we decimate them? That sounds good, nice word, decimate. Remove one tenth of the population!" ~The Master - Doctor Who: "The Sound of Drums"

Just to clarify, I like the Master for his correct usage of the word "decimate," not for his desire to kill one tenth of Earth's population.

Also, the guy brought his own soundtrack to the apocalypse, and spread terror by having a publicly broadcasted one-man dance party in his floating space-station headquarters.

He may be a manipulative, domestic abusing, mass-murdering, insane warlord, but he makes for a good respectable villain.

And to go back to my first point: we who know the correct definition of "decimate" have to stick together.

Wait...what? I don't even...

...I've read a lot of fanfiction in my time. I have a problem; I'm not ashamed to admit it. Does that mean I'll stop reading fanfiction? No. Of course not. It's far too entertaining.

Fanfiction is something I turn to after reading a really good book or watching something I really like, mainly so I don't have to let go of the fandom after I've finished going through all of the canonical materials. I read fanfiction when I can't sleep and need something to do, or when I'm really bored but don't want to get off of the Internet.

I know that most fanfiction is...not good. I've read Celebrian (the TVTropes page said that if I could get through that, I could get through anything. I took that as a challenge. I did get through it, but I regret taking that challenge ever so much). I'm well aware that all of fanfiction cannot be that one fabulous X-Men: First Class fanfic that fixed the Beach Divorce in an engaging and realistic way. I'm usually as entertained by the bad ones as I am by the good ones.

But really, I shouldn't pick out fanfiction to read when I'm too tired to think cohesively. Last night, I found one where Erik Lehnsherr's cat was turned into a human. "That sounds kind of odd," one might say. "Why did you read it?" Well, it was really, really weird, and for the first part of it, kind of entertaining. The author may pick really strange stuff to write (most likely) her story about, but she was being very witty and engaging about it. In my tired state, it was making me giggle. Giggling is fun.

To explain my problem, I have to explain the Pros and Cons of the fic:

On the one had, it had Charles Xavier acting like a cat, which is pretty darn funny.

On the other hand, CHARLES XAVIER is a CAT.

If it had just been a regular story about a guy who's cat turns into a person and they fall in love because of compatible personalities, I would be fine with that. Actually, there's a book I loved as a child with that exact plot:

http://www.amazon.com/Cat-Who-Wished-Man-1ST/dp/B0016CF68C/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320779733&sr=1-2

But this was a fanfiction. About Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr. Two characters that I love and respect. It broke my brain.

I'm no stranger to kitten!fics, I am a fan of Fullmetal Alchemist, after all, kitten!fics come with the territory (for some reason); and as a fan of Doctor Who, I can turn a blind eye to the human/cat-person thing. I'll read almost any fanfic, as long as I know what I'm getting into. Which leads me to my main point:

If you're going to include human/cat-person mpreg in your hilarious, well-written fanfic, for the gods sake, please, please, PLEASE put a warning about it at the beginning before I get sucked in to reading the entire thing.

Book Signings

Last night, my parents whisked me out of the county to go to an undisclosed location. They implied to me that we were driving all the way to a town two hours away, but after stopping about 5/8 of the way there in a bookstore for an alleged bathroom break, they revealed to me that we were actually staying there because Stephan Pastis was doing a book signing.

I've been a fan of Pearls Before Swine since childhood, so it was exiting to be able to meet its writer/illustrator. If you're familiar with the comic, you'd know that the author oftentimes features himself in it as a character. Stephan Pastis the character drinks, smokes, has a sloppy appearance and is extremely cynical. The actual Stephan Pastis was much more personable. He had an adorable sense of humor, and was really a really nice guy. 

After getting our stuff signed, we got fried rice and gyoza from the Japanese place inside the bookstore. I had only had a breakfast cookie and a venti White Chocolate Mocha in twelve hours, so it was the most delicious meal of my life. 

All-in-all, I had a really good time. I got to see my parents, I got to meet a public figure from my childhood, and I got to hang out in one of my favorite bookstores. Despite all of my nagging, I'm really glad my parents didn't spoil the surprise.