Les Miserables

I got it for Christmas from my favorite sister-in-law, Sarah. I started it in July. It's 1,462 pages long.

Today, I finished it.

It's worth every single minute--even the minutes involving 19 pages of the history of Paris' sewers (I'm a firm believer that you need to go into a book assuming every single word is there for a reason). I feel accomplished and completely satisfied. Dear reader, you must know this book. It is, in a word, vast--every single aspect of the book, from the characters to the setting, is complete in every detail, no matter how briefly it appears. It's staggering. I can't believe it only took him 17 years to write it. I'm at a loss for words to fully capture how awesome this book is (as evidenced by my disconnected and understated sentences).

If you read no other books in your life other than the Bible and Les Miserables, I think you'll be okay.

"If we want to be happy, monsieur, we must never understand duty; for, as soon as we understand it, it is implacable. It is as though it punishes you for understanding it; but no, it rewards you for it; for it puts you in a hell where you feel God at your side. Your heart is not quickly lacerated when you are at peace with yourself."

All My Thoughts Today Center Around One Thing...

In the case of strawberry banana flavored yogurt, banana always comes out the lesser party. This blatant bigotry is outrageous, as everyone knows banana is by far the more popular fruit anyway.

Last night I ate the most wonderful thing the world has ever seen, but it was in one of my dreams. I dreamed I was in a place reminiscent of the Reading Terminal Market, and at an ice cream stand was favored with culinary perfection: a banana, on a stick, dipped in marshmallow and rolled in coconut and chocolate chips, and finally smothered with peanut butter and chocolate drizzle. I am now alight with the fire to obtain this Dream Banana in waking life.

Midnight pizza does wonders for my subconscious cerebral awareness.

Have you ever played with those foam packing peanuts, enjoyed the airy squish of it beneath your fingers, and said to yourself they would be really fun to chew on if only they didn't taste like hand lotion and tree sap? I have. Imagine my delight, then, when I realized today that dried apples are of that precise texture.

How does SoBe make their lifewater so delicious without a single gram of sugar? I suspect witchcraft is involved.

The most disheartening bit of trivia I've learned this month is that Sun Chips are actually fattier than potato chips. What in the world are they good for?

"Fruit punch" is probably the most suspicious sounding name for a drink I know of. It's as bad as "brown sauce" and "food store." Exactly what fruit is in that stuff, Hi-C, that you aren't willing to specify, hm? Not even "orange drink" is as evasive.

You know what's the most unkind name for a movie genre ever? Spaghetti Western. It calls to mind all manner of fantastical visions regarding what such a name could mean, like a Western that comes with a complimentary plate of spaghetti, or wherein the characters fight using spaghetti instead of guns (as illustrated above, please click to zoom), or all the cast are noodles. Reality, however, is nothing so awe-inspiring--a Spaghetti Western is merely a Western made by Italian people. Which doesn't make any sense, because Italians never had a Wild Western era.

How To Clean Your Room Like Meagan

Step One: Decide to clean your room. This decision must only be made after the piles of clothes (vaguely organized into "clean" and "unclean"), random envelopes that probably contain important financial aid information that you've forgotten, your unmade bed(s) and unchanged sheets, and other random knick-a-brick such as empty shoe boxes, toenail clippers, ripped Target bags, unmatched socks, and mostly-unpacked luggage have all been staring at you resentfully for several weeks, and are now so sick of being in the same place that they attempt to murder you in various ways--mostly involving tripping and/or smothering. Usually said conflict comes to a head--leading to the decision to suck it up and pick up your crap--after you have pulled a muscle in your thigh or lower shoulder whilst flailing to keep your balance.

Step Two: Pick a free day where "Clean My Room" is the only thing on your Inner-Brain Calendar (this entire process is made null and void if you use an actual calendar, such as an e-calendar or planner--THAT IS NOT HOW TO DO LIKE MEAGAN DOES). Set your alarm the night before for a reasonable 8:45 am to give yourself a fresh, healthy start on the day. When the morning of Cleaning Day dawns, and reasonable alarm wakes you with an appropriately obnoxious and peppy ringtone (ideally with a Latino-inspired beat), remind yourself that you have nothing else to do that day and therefor if you sleep in another half-an-hour you'll still have plenty of time to get cleaning done. Sleep until 11:30.

Step Three: Meander downstairs in you pajamas, because breakfast is the most important part of the day. After scouring the cabinets, decide that there's nothing good for breakfast and you weren't hungry anyway. Use your set-aside "breakfast time" to check email and Facebook. (Do not eat breakfast--THAT IS NOT HOW TO DO LIKE MEAGAN DOES)

Step Four: Get bored of both Facebook and waiting for the five-year-old kitchen computer to load pages, and make your way back upstairs to your room. Start Cleaning Day in the official way by choosing to view all clothes as "unclean" (because they've been lying on the floor long enough that if they were clean they're probably contaminated by dust and feet and the unclean clothes by now anyway) and tossing it all into your hamper. Allow for about fifteen minutes of gathering all clothing whilst in your pajamas before you come to the conclusion that though you had originally planned to wear pj's all day, you're starting to feel gross and kinda fat; spend twenty minutes picking out an outfit combining comfortability, cleanness, and not-feeling-fat-no-moreness in equal parts (this process may and probably will be lengthened by the fact that you've just thrown all your clean clothes into your hamper, and so need to dig them out). Brush your hair and teeth so you don't feel half-ready for the day anymore. Go back to cleaning.

Step Five: Organize everything in your room into an obscure filing system of piles that only you can decipher. Do as much as you possibly can to put things away sitting down--i.e., work on the trash pile and pairing socks first. Soon your small trashcan will be full and you'll realize the necessity of procuring a bag to empty it into. Haul yourself to your feet, and trundle downstairs to get one (trundle, as opposed to frolic or stroll: THAT IS NOT HOW TO DO LIKE MEAGAN DOES). Notice while you're downstairs that it's about lunchtime and you're hungry because you didn't get any breakfast. Make lunch [an hour long process altogether, which perhaps someday I will explain in another blog post].

Step Six: Go back upstairs. Remember that you forgot the trash bag. Go back downstairs and get it. After arriving back in your room and emptying the trashcan, gaze about yourself and realize that you have no idea how you organized each of the various-sized piles surrounding you. Spend approximately an hour feverishly pinballing between piles to pick up random objects and put them in their proper place (if at any point you think to yourself that the whole reason you made piles of like objects in the first place was to avoid this exact pinballing, shame on you: THAT IS NOT HOW TO DO LIKE MEAGAN DOES)--all the while accumulating a new pile simply brain-labeled "Where to?" This is where the really gritty, sweaty, pant-inducing bending and reaching happens. If this is your first time Cleaning Like Meagan, you may want to stretch before Step Six.

Step Seven: When you have arrived at the point where most of the work is done, and you have nothing but the "Where to?" pile and making your bed left--about a half hour's worth of work, at most--decide you need a break. Compose a blog post about an inane subject no one was wondering about. Double-check that you have no new emails, and that no one interesting is on chat at the moment.

Step Eight: Spend another frenzied fifteen-to-twenty minutes finding random homes for the "Where to?" accouterments and making your bed. At this point you have conquered Cleaning Day. Get a bottle of water for you parched throat, flop onto your bed, and sip it whilst panting and sweating and moving on to the most important:

Step Nine: Congratulate yourself that while it did take you from 12 noon until around 4 in the afternoon to clean your room, that's still significantly less time than it took your sister too when she lived in the room (THAT IS HOW TO DO LIKE MEAGAN DOES).

Jooj

For those of you who remain ignorant to the glorious bit of news--which probably means that you're not remotely my friend because I've been texting/facebooking/g-mail-statusing it all the time--I am officially a first time aunt. Julia Mae Smith was born July 14th, and she's most definitely the best niece ever. She's all pink and squishy and she located her fingers within ten hours of out-of-the-womb life and apparently thinks them delectable. Alas, I have only been able to visit her once--and alas thricefold, I have yet to hold her since I have a cold--but what a visit it was.

The absolute highlight was watching my little brother Dan hold her. My dear readers who are unfamiliar with Dan should know that he's usually extremely reserved when it comes to people and situations he's not completely familiar with, so we weren't sure exactly how he was going to react to this sort of red, squishy, drooly thing his family was making him hold (considering a new baby is both persons and situations unfamiliar to him). Dan sat in hospital chair that completely dwarfed him, and Dad arranged JuJu carefully in his skinny arms, and Dan sat for about fifteen minutes with a huge grin on his face just giggling.

New favorite memory? I think so. I've taken to just reflecting on it in my spare time to make me smile.

Julia is three days old, and these are the things I know about her so far:

• I want my particular special nickname for her to be Jooj.
• At this point she seems to take after both her parents equally--she's pretty fat (nine pounds! that would be Michael, he was a fat baby), and also tall (21 inches, if I remember correctly, which is all Sarah because Smiths are short). As of yet her face is still working on being unsquishy, so it's hard to tell whether she looks more like a Smith or a Sharp.
• As I have mentioned, she thinks her fingers are delicious.
• She's a genius, as evidenced by the fact that she pooped on Uncle Sean.
• According to the pictures taken of her, she sleeps all the time (as evidenced below--picture courtesy of my sister-in-law's facebook). Clearly Mike's daughter.
• She, who was once the single most anticipated baby on the planet, will now be the single most loved baby on the planet (at least until Michelle and Alex get down to business; then it will probably start being a tie).

I love my little niece so much. I can't wait to visit her again. I also can't wait til I don't have a cold, so I can get started on those extra holding rights.

Nondescript Monosyllables

You may have noticed that I haven't blogged anything interesting recently, or blogged anything at all, nor have I started my sparkley super amazing pixie blog for writing. Aren't you clever.

Unfortunately, Constantine--the Laptop, for all you n00bs (aka, non-family members) out there--suffered a bit of an accident. Actually it was more like a direct attempt on his life, executed by an old Nintendo DS. Clearly embittered by its looming obsolescence, the chunky console got the drop on Con while was chilling out on my carpet--the jealous blighter. Constantine is still technically functional, but his screen is a bit shattered, in an LCD way.

I've been free-loading off of my mother's and sister Shannon's laptops for necessities--like e-mailing, Facebook, and watching Doctor Who on Netflix Insta-Play--but for something that requires extensive, intense, personal time such as writing, obviously other persons' laptops aren't going to be available and/or useful. Shannon uses her's a lot, and mother's is super tiny. Very, very small. Trying to type on it for more than about an hour or two every week is like begging for carpel tunnel syndrome and chronic claw-hands. And I won't get into details because this is a G-rated blog and I intend to keep it that way, but the house computer is my arch-nemesis and therefor not an option either.

What this means for you, dear reader, is that the whole writing blog thing will be a bit of time. I need to figure out how/where to get my screen replaced, and to do that I'm going to have to find someone to discuss my problem with who's more interested in telling me how much that will cost, not trying to sell me on the latest super special awesome deal on Dell laptops including their two year, $150 service plan complete with a new cord every year. Yeah, Staples guy; I wasn't even there and I saw right through you, so don't think you sold my mother on the idea either.

So I thought I'd let you know. In case you were wondering. I can hear my one fan weeping in the distance--it's gratifying.

If anyone knows how to replace a laptop screen, or knows about anything related to that, like where to get one cheap, you'll probably be my new favorite person. I'll find a cute/funny picture on the internet and post it on this blog for you.

Who can resist such incentive?

My Heart is a Bird that was Just Approached by Another Bird that Didn't Know Her but Still was Super Nice and Said "Hey, Nice Shirt!"

In other words, my heart is super duper gratified. Gratified seems inadequate, but I can't think of a better word. I'm super duper excited right now, because I just got my first:

STRANGER COMMENT

Huzzah! Ashley Cail gave me a lovely comment on my last post with lots of good ideas on how to brainstorm writing ideas. Honestly, I'd probably still be really thrilled if she had left a comment to the effect of "You smell. Stop contaminating the Internet with your gross boring posts, you Smelly McSmellpants", but I digress. My heart is full of fuzzies for her right now. Ashley, you officially beat out Jeremy Wade as my favorite person that I don't know right now. Admittedly, that list is usually totally dependent upon what I happen to be reading or watching on television. But you could be on top for at least...three days! I wish I had something nice to give you...Do you like ladybugs? Do you like dinosaurs? This picture moderately relates to those questions:

See, it's a patchwork dinosaur trying to eat the ladybug...he's probably just curious and will spit it out right away when he realizes it tastes yucky, and then the ladybug will fly away (it won't even have to wait for its wings to dry, because see the dinosaur is just full of cotton and the love of children, so it doesn't have spit). How's that?

Anywhoosie, I'm pretty positive that I'll be starting that writing blog. Thanks to you all who commented with advice/encouragement--I'm so grateful I have friends like you. Now, the remaining two questions in my mind are: should I make it private or no? And how am I going to make it pretty?

Pretty blogs are very important to me. I really like pretty blogs. I'd like my writing blog to be pretty; this way, when I write a really crappy post, I can dazzle people's attention with the snazzy design of my blog and then they won't notice that the post they're reading is made of ugliness. "What pizazz! I'm bookmarking this blog, definitely."

Oh, one more question: judging from your comments, most of you seem to be under the impression that one dimension of this writing blog is to put myself out there, so to speak. That isn't my intention--I'm really only interested in the exercise--but I'm wondering if you really think that's what will happen?

Since I Never Claimed to be a Nonconformist....

So, I've been thinking.I've been a very bad writer for the past yea months, in that I've hardly written anything at all. The problem is, I haven't really written consistently for about a year now, maybe more. Which means I'm rusty, which means everything I write is so inadequate and dull even I notice. Which means that I stop writing whenever I start (who doesn't know the frustration of trying to continue with something you're doing horribly at?). Which means I get more unpracticed. Which means I get more dreadful, which means I get more frustrated, which means I get more unpracticed, and so on.

Well, it's summer (for me, anyhow) now, so I want to break free from this rut. And I know how to do it--I have to knuckle down and start writing crap and just keep at it until it looks less ugly--but it's the actual carrying out of the solution that always stops me. Therefor, I'm toying with the idea of committing to write something--a sentence, a paragraph, a scene--just something creative every day (as much as is possible, because there's always vacations and Youthcamp and days where I'm just weak). Following that vein of thought, I'm toying with the idea of following in the footsteps of basically every creative friend I have and starting a writing blog.If I did start one, I'd be open--nay, rabid--for suggestions and prompts on what to write on, because I really can't just pull ideas out of my couch cushions. I'm also thinking I'd at least loosely use that "100 Themes" list that seems to be so super popular around the cybersphere these days as a potential framework for the project.

The process of thinking through this idea is extremely back-and-forth in my mind.On the one hand, having a blog that other people (potentially) would read might keep me more accountable than I would by my onesy; on the other hand, it may just mean that I have more people to throw pitchforks and full wine bottles at me during those long gaps of weakness and lack-of-posting than just my own brain. On the one hand, it would help me if I had people reading and critiquing my work as I went along so I could continue to improve; on the other hand, my creative psyche quails at the thought of subjecting you poor readers to some of the melodramatic, inane space-waste I have been known to and most likely will produce. On the one hand, the vain side of me has grand dreams of complete strangers reading my blog and thinking I'm the next...Marcus Zusak, and lavishing me with praise and book deals; on the other hand, the more practical side of me knows that will never happen and it's more likely that if it's read by strangers at all they'll glance over it, never read it again, and forget they ever heard of me; and then there's also my paranoid side that wants to make it sacrosanct so no one evil will steal my brilliant ideas; so the vain side and the paranoid side are at war and neither of them are speaking to the practical side because she's against both of them and is just mean to suggest that someone would think my literary prowess is less than the level of a god-Shakespeare.

You may be telling yourself I'm over-thinking this. If you are, are you surprised? You shouldn't be.

Thoughts? And I mean complete, helpful thoughts on the whole subject entirely, not just "Gawsh I love reading your stuff!" Don't just tell me to do it because you want me to write more (Ben). This isn't exclusively about me writing more.

[You'll notice I've broke the lovely repetitive format of my post titles. It's my blog, I can do whatever I want.]