Tomorrow is the Future

The Jetsons, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Star Trek, Big Brother is Watching. The list goes on and on. Books that tried to predict the future before it came around. Some came close. Some… not so much.

But why? What’s up with this fascination we all have with the future? Time Travel is another bogus theory we’ve come up with, but that at least has the driving reason of wanting to fix our mistakes. As for this desire to predict or know the future… I blame that on wanting to not make mistakes. Humans seem to have this big negativity complex. We focus on the negative and the mistakes, not what we do right.

Even I personally have trouble focusing on the positive. It’s a lot easier to name my least favorites than my favorites, and I can never name the best moment in my life… but I think everyone can name their most embarrassing. Mine… not gonna go there. It was… bad. Very, very bad. But it was with good friends, so at least it’s been forgotten. I’d almost forgotten about it myself… don’t you hate it when that happens?

When you’ve almost forgotten something and then it suddenly pops back into your mind… Like how I just lost the game. Gosh, I’ve been doing bad lately.

At least it means we don’t have trouble letting go… I really used to have problems with that. I’m better about it now. I realize I just gotta let it go, smile and accept that I’m wrong. Still working on that, but, again, I’ve gotten better. I feel like I’ve aged a lot in the past couple years. More than I would have thought possible, really. And I’m still learning.

But that’s what life is. As the age old saying that truly needs to be put to rest says, “you learn something new every day.” Really, I don’t agree with it, because I’m sure that I learn something new every couple hours, save the time I’m sleeping. I’m getting rather off topic, though.

My opinion (and I knew it would come to it at some point) is that man can’t predict the future unless God tells it to them. I don’t care what cheap tricks exist. I don’t believe in it. And, even if I’m completely wrong about it, it can’t be a good idea. I mean, we’re supposed to make mistakes. That’s how we learn. See the circle here? Oh, yes. If we don’t make mistakes, we can’t learn from them. And relying on questionable sources like that is never a good idea.

Oh, and in case anyone’s been living under a rock the past twenty years, have you ever noticed that in practically every movie/book/tv show/drama where the protagonist can see the future, it’s always their ability to see the future that gets them into the crazy situations that they see. (e.g. EVERY episode of “That’s So Raven” ever made. Don’t lie. You know what I mean.)

But… we kind of want to get rid of this sense of mystery and this unknownness of the future. That’s why we try to guess. We want to know what’s going to go wrong so we can plan around it. Why? I’ve said it already, humans don’t like to make mistakes. It’s embarrassing, and it doesn’t look good on our record. But another thing is that we don’t like looking ignorant, or being disliked. It doesn’t feel good.

We want to know things. And we don’t like not knowing or being left out. It’s horrible, really. Or at least that’s what we act like. Everything, in the end, is about fickle human nature… you know, I don’t really like that word… and here it is, in demonstration. Accidental, I assure you. But you know… or maybe you don’t. Gah, I’m getting tired of all these sayings.

And it’s really late, and I think it shows where I stopped in the middle of writing the post. So I’m sorry, but I need to wrap this up. I think I made all my points and some extras, so I’ll wrap up here and please enjoy the quote. ^^

“Just remember – when you think all is lost, the future remains.”

~Dr. Robert H. Goddard

If Only Tomorrow were Real

…And that would be a good title for a poem. Or… anything, for that matter.

But yeah. I’m a big procrastinator, for those of you that don’t know me. And something I said once, a couple years ago, was “Tomorrow’s a great day, but tomorrow never comes.” Often, we make the excuse “I’ll do it tomorrow.” But, really, what is tomorrow? Does tomorrow ever come?

When is it ever tomorrow? Really. It’s always right now, which has lead to several dozen different mantras about keeping your head in the now and worrying about the present. Some of which I mentioned yesterday, actually. Something tells me that if I manage to stick to this whole “tomorrow” theme, most of my posts are going to be the same. Or very similar. I have a vague idea for tomorrow, though. And… today is probably going to be short.

But the thing is, that if everybody did all the things they said they’d do “tomorrow,” then tomorrow would be the best day in history… well, maybe not, considering that some people probably don’t have the greatest ambitions, but… you know. Tomorrow doesn’t exist, so stop pretending it does. It’s like shadow, it’s really just, in the end, an illusion created because light exists. Only the light is today.

Of course, this brings on the whole what is time-time is relative-time traveling paradox that I really don’t want to get into but probably will at some point. That’s what happens when you start talking about time every day for a month.

What I want to know is; can I make a whole post about tomorrow without saying the words “today” or “yesterday?” One that’s at least a couple hundred words long. I’m at about three hundred at this point, so that should give you some idea.

So tomorrow…. heh… no pun intended, I’m going to talk about… Oh, come on, I had an idea… Grr… Um… Oh, I think it had something to do with time travel or predicting the future… like people’s fascination with the future. Yeah. And then the day after that, I’ll see how I fare with the little challenge I laid out for myself. We’ll see how long I can go without mentioning “today” or any of it’s synonyms. I’ll enlist a thesaurus to make sure of that.

Yeah… gonna try to plan ahead a bit, so I have something to talk about every day. And then I don’t have to put it off a million billion times and finally scrape something together at five to midnight… like last night. *shudder* that was cutting it close. Remind me never to do that again. But in the meantime… I’ll be seeing how long I can go without a writing dump. Which is inevitably going to happen at some point in August, though it’s impossible to say which (see tomorrow’s entry for more info).

Augh, I’m really loading on the stupid humor, aren’t I? I’d better quit before I humor you all into a coma… Not entirely relevant, but I really like it, and his death anniversarry is tomorrow. So… yeah. Thought it was a bit fitting.

It’s actually a poem, entitled “It Couldn’t Be Done.” Enjoy.

“Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that;
At least no one ever has done it”;
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat,
And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit,
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure;
There are thousands to point out to you, one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start to sing as you tackle the thing
That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.”

~Edgar A. Guest

And Tomorrow will Never Be the Same

I pulled the strings as high as I could overhead, and tried to hold them taught. It would have been a lot easier if my partner and I were both the same strength. But we weren’t. I was a lot stronger, and so I didn’t know just how taught I could try to get them before it would up having detrimental aspects. I asked myself for the millionth time why I’d agreed to be partners with him, and then reminded myself that my normal partner had aged out. So instead I re-focused my attention and pulled my ends of the strings a little closer and farther back. The melon continued to roll down the two ropes, and my partner was managing adequately to balance it.

The point of the game was to roll a melon from one person to the other across two ten-foot-long strings and then back. It was a lot harder than it looked, because the strings were just normal rope. Though they were still called strings, officially, in the game, and thusly unofficially elsewhere.

It was a sort of a tradition that the game be played during any and all festivals. And my normal partner, one of my best and strongest friends named Jordan, had just turned fifteen and thusly aged out of the normal category. So, instead, I was forced to attempt it with my little (and little he was) brother. He wasn’t as bad as I had been imagining, but I could already feel the first place title slipping out of my grasp.

Oh, no wait, that was the string.

I was caught off-guard as the melon suddenly reached it’s first stop and the string started to fray just beside my hand. I tried to grab out and make up for it, but it was no good. The string snapped, and the melon fell with it. It didn’t have far to fall, so it didn’t splat and crack open in the usual spectacular show of doom, just bounced a little and then rolled over.

And that was it. Jordan would never let me live this down. Even before I’d become friends with him after my first festival in the normal age class (8-14; which holds the majority of competitors and competitive fun, and is the biggest deal, though there is a younger and an older competition), I’d always been the best. And now, in a rather depressingly unimpressive twist of fate, all that was gone.

I felt like slamming the other rope to the ground, but I just let it go. I wasn’t angry enough. The melon splat was what made you want to take your anger out, because it made you feel almost good in a way. It got you started. But ours hadn’t. And I didn’t feel like I had the energy to bother throwing a tantrum.

I just walked over to sit in front of the crowd of watchers and let my gaze wander over all the other tantrum-throwing losers. It made me feel good to know that defeat came more gracefully for me. They looked like idiots… they always had, and they still did. They still do, to this day. I didn’t belong with them. I wasn’t like that.

I sighed and leaned back on my hands. I stared at the sky, watching the clouds pass. To this day, I swear that one of them looked exactly like two kids in the middle of balancing a melon, but it might just have been me being caught up in the competition, as usual. It was strange. I had been dreading the day that anything like this would happen since I won my very first competition, but it wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. It wouldn’t ever be the same, I knew that. I wouldn’t be the undefeated champion anymore, the one to always finish the quickest and without a single drop. But, now that it was unlikely I would ever do it with Jordan again, it didn’t matter so much.

I’d known it’d have to come some day. I’d hoped it would’ve been with Jordan, so we could’ve suffered together, but… sometimes, we can’t pretend like everything’s the same. Sometimes it really does change, and sometimes we just have to accept that.

———-

So… This came from a creative prompt list I found. Most of them are really bad, and I’m not going to bother telling you guys where it is. But some of them are half-decent, and I thought this one was interesting.

“Start freewriting with the help of this image: ‘a melon strolling on two tendrils’ (A line in Sylvia Plath’s poem, Metaphors.)”

Um… yeah, I got this funny image in my head, and I had to write something about it. So I decided to tie it into today’s topic. I may continue onto it, and if I do it’ll be edited to death in the meantime.

But back onto more important and relevant things. Today’s title came from a phrase which I’ve heard many versions of: “Yesterday is gone, and tomorrow will never be the same. So today’s all you got.” Or, the version made famous by Kung-fu Panda (re-watched it yesterday), “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is history. But today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.” …I hope I got that right. XD Sorry dead turtle dude.

But anyways, as I said last post (I think…), there’s been a lot of stuff going on in my life lately, and I’m not sure if I’m ready for all the changes coming up. Sometimes I feel like today’s wasting away. And it only gets worse during the summer. With the lack of structure and everything, it’s easy to get lost and just start floating. Summer never seems to be a good time for me religiously, either. I hope to tighten back up by the time school rolls around, so I’m ready and all.

But yeah… I’m kind of at that place in-between “I don’t want summer to end” and “I just want school to start.”

…I’m sure nobody else has ever been there, though. This is going to be a big year for me, transitionally, and I’m sure God’s going to work everything out, but… I’m kind of afraid of tomorrow at this point. Those of you that pray, pray for Leah. Please. My friends, I’m sure you can think of a million and two things to pray about me for, and everyone else, you can be vague. It’s okay, because God knows. And he’ll know who you’re talking about.

Sorry to go off on a religious rant, but… I don’t know. I’m hoping that the changes coming up will be quick and painless, but I’ve gone through enough years to know better than that.

Anyways, thanks for listening to my rantings for today. And sorry it’s so late… I almost forgot, and only the third day! DANG! *sigh* Sorry. Here’s the quote…

“Never think someone will be there forever… forever is a long time and time has a way of changing things.”

~Unknown

Maybe Tomorrow…

Well, welcome to my second NaBloPoMo post… I’m really getting tired of saying that, actually. I know I said it was growing on me, but… that changed. Anyways, until I think of something better to call it (one of the many things I’m half-promising for some tomorrow in August), here I am with a fairly short nonsense post.

Well, I’ve caught up to the last chapter in the fanfic I’ve been addicted to, and now I kinda want to write one of my own, just to have something to work on and junk… Well, today was kind of busy, but y’know. Most days aren’t, and I’m running out of stuff to write about, and now I’m out of stuff to read about, too. I’m also getting seriously bored with Narnia in comparison to the awesome fic. It just seems like such a… fairy tale to me, and such a long one at that. I keep assuring myself they’ll get better, but I have no way of being sure… and in the meantime, they’re just holding up my reading list, and I’m starting to feel marginally guilty about having them out of the church library for so long.

Anyways, a lot of upcoming changes on the horizon for my church, including the leaving of our youth pastor and his kids, leaving us back in the same small youth-group hole we’ve just been starting to crawl out of. I’m sure God will work it out, but I just can’t help but worry in the meantime.

I know I’m jumping around a lot, and I’m sorry, but it’s been a long day. I spent most of it, like usual, at my friend Matt’s house after church. Which doesn’t leave much time for posting. Sorry.

Now… I just kind of want to write something long and epic, partly to give me something to do, and partly to try out a new planning system that I’ve seen another writer use. I really like the room it leaves for change and development, but I’ve never done to well with planning. I think I’m going to do it a bit more loosely structured than reccomended, but I’m going to try. Now… I don’t know whether to do a fanfiction or something original. I kind of want to do a fanfic, just to do it.

Anyways, I’ll try to have at least the planning started by sometime tomorrow, so I can do… something. I don’t know. Today was kind of supposed to be about how I’d do something decent tomorrow because I’m too tired right now and too pressed for time, but I kind of got off track. So… I guess I apologize, and again, I’ll do better tomorrow, promise.

In the meantime… I don’t feel like typing up my scribble today, so I think I’ll wait ’til later for the writing dump, but in the meantime, I’ll give you a quote and stop babbling. Mmmkay? Mmmkay.

“Consistency is the quality of a stagnant mind.”

~John Sloan

NaBloPoMo BEGINS!

Um… yes, today begins August, and I am an idiot. I thought I still had a couple more days to go, so please excuse the stupidity of the “If it’s not in August” remark last post. That’s what you get for not checking off your callender on time. But don’t worry. I’ll fit a writing dump in somewhere.

Anyways, today begins the journey. And, apparently, the August theme is “Tomorrow.” Kind of ironic, in a way, because you have to post today, not tomorrow, if you actually want to get the whole thing done. XD Well, I’ll try to slip tomorrow into the title every day, unless I have something to talk about.

This post is mostly going to be talking about yesterday’s tomorrow, and the yesterday to yesterday’s tomorrow. (For those who don’t speak Leanese, that’s today and yesterday.)

Yesterday I stepped on a cockroach… actually, it kinda looked like half a cockroach… but I shouldn’t be talking about that, since I’m already feeling a bit sick. Note to self: never go to an hour-long work out class on only a couple mini-powdered donuts… and let’s make that a note to the rest of y’all, while I’m at it.

Now, since I have nothing in particular to talk about, and I think I’ve said too much already to make this a story-dump, you are all going to have the treat of reading a little rant I wrote down last night. It’s intended as a joke, inspired by some of the crazy comments on deviantart of a stamp that said “Nobody likes a writer” and had some stick figures standing around one that was on the ground with his leg twisted backwards. One of the standing figures had a club.

Of course, this stamp was just a joke, made by a writer. And, at the time, the writing community was small and they all laughed at the joke because they knew the truth of it. DA Made it extremely hard for writers at the beginning of the 21st century. I wasn’t a member back then, but I joined when it was in the middle of transition, so I know. However, DA is now overflowing with writers, many of them of questionable quality and… *shudder* sensitivity. So, lately, the stamp has been re-discovered and caused a small riot.

This is loosely based off of the sarcastic comment I made on it, kind of telling the sensitive writers to bug off. Two of them were in a long argument about which one was a bigger ignoramus or something like that (only I can assure you it was merely feining literacy), and I was temped to cut in and say “Arguing over the internet… tisk, tisk, no wonder we have a bad reputation.” But, from the childish argument, I realized that my words would hit a sensitive spot and I didn’t want to put myself in such a position.

People are such idiots. *sigh* But, moving on. Don’t keep your head in the past and whatnot. Anyways, rant begins… now.

———-

In all of time, there have been few more vile and wretched creatures than the hated writer. Hunted and over-worked to what should be near-extinction, the reace has somehow managed to flourish.

They haunt the night by the light of computer, silently killing off your favorite characters and bashing your dreams of happy endings into what should also be near extinction.

And then, of course, they invented the horrid sequil! They turn you beloved books into more, seeminglyu through magic, and make your “to read” list pile up into infinity, only so you can discover that the once-happy ending you admired is no longer.

In fact, I can think of only one creature more wretched, more vile, and more slimy and disgusting than the dreaded writer. The reader.

They invent their own story-lines and past and future, they mess up your pairings and throw the perfect harmony of your Heptology into chaos and throw off your perfect plan with the ever-annoying “fanon.”

They pair up your characters however they please, and they whine when you kill anyone off. They demand all that they want and not a single bit less, even though they can’t agree on what that is, nor are any of their ideas very good. The wretched things expect you to write just for them, like a word-robot or a writing slave.

But give one what they want and the rest will protest. There’s a reason they’re readers and not writers, and that’s because their minds don’t know how to make anything anyone else wants to read.

And yet, like yin and yeang, neither is anything without the other. In this world, only a select few can claim to be neither.

And then there’s my kind. The bodies that house both of these ever-warring wretches.

How we all manage not to kill ourselves, I don’t know, but there really seems to be a lot of us.

———-

Okay. Yeah, it’s random, I know. But it’s all I’ve got. That and some work on starting a world for a venting-type anything-goes epic fantasy story of doom… But that’s only like, two or three paragraphs on paper. Which means, if I type it up, it won’t be very long. Yet. I’m still working on it. But you’ll see it eventually, since where else do I have to post it?

Okay, since the theme is “Tomorrow”… Quote of the day! Which, this month, actually will be daily… wow. Anyways…

BTW- A lot of close contenders today. If you want to see the rest… http://thinkexist.com/search/searchQuotation.asp?search=tomorrow

“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.”

~John Wayne

August is Coming

Her finger traced letters into the still water, but they stayed behind like sand.

And, above it and around it, the word undo was traced a million times over and over in the water. They were of different sizes and neatnesses, but all traced by the same hand. The same left index finger.

The girl stood on the water, as she always has, and wondered what force made the water stay. Sure, she could make it stay any other day, and she could move it back into place, but, no matter what she did to it, it stayed. Every time she made the water push against her foot, she had to move it back. Gravity didn’t claim it as normal. And yet, as she had found out on accident, she could fall in, and the formation left behind still stood, a few miles off to one direction. She had thought it too much of a beauty, like a photograph.

And the water inside herself was still functioning properly.

It wasn’t until, after counting the thousandth “undo,” that she turned around and realized that something was really wrong. A small clump of fresh red fall leaves hung in midair in various stages of complicated twirls, caught on some no-longer-existant wind, and she realized what she should have hours ago, when she first set out on the lake.

It was deathly still, and there was no wind.

She plucked a leaf out of the air, and found no resistance as she pulled it towards her and then let go. It continued to hang there. She grabbed it, crumpled it to bits and blew on it, and they scattered as far as her breath would throw them normally, and then they hung there.

She nudged one, and it moved, then hung where it was pushed. And, through the whole thing, they weren’t falling an inch.

Finally, she looked up above her. The sun still hung low, barely risen and leading the way to her house., and the clouds remained the same as when she’d woken up.

Surely she’d been out for hours, hadn’t she? But no, there was the bunny-shaped cloud she’d noticed as she set out, still just to the right of the sun. The only difference was the perspective changing from her walking over and out a couple dozen miles.

What in the world was going on?

———-

Mmmkay. So, this is the random start of a story idea. If you’re one of my friends who wants to be surprised for when I write more later, or if you just like being surprised when/if I ever post more, then you can skip this next paragraph. It’s just kind of me rambling anyways.

But yeah, this is about a girl who can control water, and has even learned to be able to walk on it, and she doesn’t know that there are others like her out there. But time has been stopped by one of them, and… something about the people who can do weird stuff that have yet to be named… yeah, gotta work on that, but this was a midnight idea. So y’know. But something about them makes them… immune to eachother’s powers? Like I said, details need to be worked. But, um… for some reason, whatever stopped the rest of the world in this one moment in time doesn’t stop them or their systems. I… am working on the scientific details of how this works, because force and momentum and crap all involve speed, which involves time, and the only time running is the internal clocks of the whatever-they-ares. So… complicated, but it’s pretty much stuck that way for the whole book. Or something… but bla bla bla. Trying to make this quick.  But the point is, I kinda wish I could be stuck in time… so I could do more stuff. This also raises the question of computers and technology and crap, but… to control time, how awesome would that be? I just… as I’m sure I’ve said before, I’m a firm believer in the idea that days should be thirty hours long. Time… the rise and fall of all the great and weak.

And, speaking of which, August is coming. As the title says. Which means that I am going to be attempting NaBloPoMo. (See my first couple entries for details).

I’ve noticed that my posts are getting shorter and less frequent, and that’s just because I don’t know what to say. The next post, if it comes before August, is probably going to be a writing dump. I have about fifty million pages I’ve written as various story starters with no real purpose lately (and some work on already-started stories) that I’ve done lately from some sudden bursts of inspiration (good to know I still have them, because I was starting to think I’d lost all my knack for a while… biggest fright of my life, I have to say), and I don’t know if I’m ever going to do anything more with them.

But I’ve been doing a lot of work on The 13, mainly the ending. I was originally going to re-write the whole thing, but most of the last seven chapters were salvagable without a complete overhaul. And so I may actually get started on the re-write sometime soon, while I’m into it.

After I finish the fanfiction I’m reading. It’s seriously addicting. The weirdest thing is that it’s a Naruto fanfiction, and I haven’t watched that for at least a year or two now, and even then it was the “meh, this is okay” kinda thing just watching it on Cartoon Network because my brother’d developed a fascination with it. But… I mean, it’s just… awesome. I can’t even explain it. It’s just really well-written, and I know enough to follow it.

But yes… it’s amazingly inspiring, and it kinda makes me want to write fight scenes, even though I’m not very good at them. My sleeping schedule has been really off lately (though, according to my doctor, completely natural for a teenager because of our internal clocks and the way we’re set up), and y’know.

Yes, August brings NaBloPoMo, which should also bring with me something to post about. Sadly, however, it also brings with is school, near the end. *sigh* It steals time away and it annoys me, but it brings with it funny stories, friends new and old, and, with any luck, something to write about. So… No promises, but I’ll try to post at least something every day in August. But we’ll see about the quality… XD Anyways, now I need to find a quote to end this hodgepodge of randomness and the kitchen sink… and through my very strange thought process, that sentence makes me hungry. But that’s beside the point. Now, to wrap this up…

Double quotes today because I found some good ones… or is it that I found a lack of good ones? I don’t know, but they’re both extrememly similar, so whatever.

“Technique is what you fall back on when you run out of inspiration.”

~Rudolf Nureyev

“Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.”

~Brendan Francis

Your Whole Life in a Box

A black-and-white sketch inspired by a comment made at Church.

No, this isn’t about hobos. This is about moving. You see, we had a woman who was a friend of our pastor’s come to talk to us. They both served in Russia at the same time in a lot of the same ministries. So they’re old friends. And they both served in Russia for a long time. The woman still is, though she’s on leave for the summer. Being a teacher principal lady, she can do that.

So she said she had to move around a lot because of people leaving and coming back and stuff because of Visa and financial problems. The Russian government makes it hard, but God makes it work. So anyways, at the end question-y time thing, I asked what the most amount of times she’s had to move in a year has been. I know I butchered the grammer on that, but she got it and I hope you guys do. She said three, and I said “Wow, that’s a lot of packing.”

And then she led off into a mini-rant/explanation of how strange it was to have to pack and unpack so often. I think the words she used were… “Yeah, it’s pretty strange to have to pack your whole life in a box.” And then there was some more, but that was the part that caught my attention… and made me want to draw this. It’s the major parts of my life, with the mandatory stuffed animal thrown in for fun. I kind of rushed it, but I’m happy with how it came out in the end. There are a lot of things that might not make sense to most people, but you know. Whoever knows what I’m holding (at the bottom of the picture) gets a muffie!

But… yeah. It was really strange to imagine, considering I’ve never moved once in my life… And soon you might get a character who’s moving. I don’t know, I figure I should play around with it. I know you’re supposed to write what you know, but every character is individual, and I can always make it up as I go along. Plus, that’s what I have friends for.

So… yeah, I’ve been wanting to post this for a while, but I just finished the sketch last night, and I didn’t have time to post. I finished the Marilyn Monroe picture I was talking about, and my next picture for a speedpaint, when I get around to it, is this one. Like it says on the side-bar, I still have a bit of an X-men thing. I want to read the comic books, but I don’t know where I can get them… anybody know a place where I can rent them? Running on broke… Heh heh. And… I still gotta color that sketch I did a week ago.

Yeah, I’ve been in an art mood lately… and I got an idea for a story two nights ago and a poem this past one. So inspiration is back! Take that, writer’s block! …Now I just have to write. *sigh* There’s always something.

And now… THE QUOTE OF THE DAY! There weren’t many that had anything to do with today’s theme, so… here’s what I found. And if it’s true, there may be hope for my moving story after all… or perhaps there’s something deeper in it… it leads to a lot of thought. Now, without further ado…

“We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.”

~Eric Hoffer

A Plethora of Menageries

…Which pretty much just means a whole lot of random crap. I don’t really know what to do for a header, considering I’m already over my head in art projects and haven’t been able to write anything good lately (I think because I’ve been trying to force myself to write the wrong stuff… which I’ll get working on fixing sometime soon), and instead, I shall shamelessly plug My Deviantart! Yay! *poke poke* You know you want to. And I added some new scraps today, but that’s about it until I finish what I’m working on. Namely, a colored version of the sketch I put in and, if everything works out, my very first Speedpaint!

What is a speedpaint? Well, it’s where you make a picture on the computer, normally in one sitting, in a very short amount of time. Oh, and no lines. Mostly used for concept art, practice, and/or drawing super-awesome reference pics. The one I have found that I intend to practice with is one of Marilyn Monroe. I know, weird, but that’s okay. I’m just like that.

Also, oddly enough, in the process of finding the picture, I also found a very strange website called listal. It confused me, so I wanted to check it out. After some basic poking around, I found a very strange list of quotes. Some of them I’ve seen before, some I haven’t, and about half of them are in portuguese. If you, like I, are crazy and would like to read the ones in portuguese, Google translate should do most of them up quite nicely for you, though some are completely unrecognizable. Most, however, will be understandable, if a bit oddly worded. And, of course, there are some words that are apparently complete misspelled gibberish because Google Translate has no idea what they say.

Now, I would like to tell you about why I’m suddenly interested in speedpainting. Well… actually, I don’t really know, but here’s what I re-discovered when searching for a tutorial. An amazing Deviant who is the most incredible speedpainter in the world. He has such an eye for detail it amazes me. And he has step-by-step breakdowns of his various speedpaints, tutorials of all shapes and sizes, and videos showing entire speedpaints from start to finish. Not only are they educational, but they’re fun to watch!

http://bikerscout.deviantart.com/

He also has some cool graphite stuff I haven’t had much time to look through. But nonetheless, He’s a super-amazing artist. Check him out.

In other news, despite the fact that I have already given you a whole page of quotes, there will still be a quote of the day. And perhaps and update later with a quip of a story, since I figure I need a balanced creative diet. And… well, there’s some other stuff I could talk about but don’t feel like, so expect pictures next time I post and, before the quote of the day, a bout of profoundness that came about from my riffling through the writing section at Barnes & Noble trying to find a good birthday present for my friend. One that has been housed in my signiture on the roleplaying site:

No matter how many writers you ask and how many writing help books you read, no one will ever agree on the best way to write. As well they shouldn’t. It doesn’t hurt to listen, but if you want to write, just write. And do it your way.

“If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.”

~Edward Hopper

Just Reflecting…

Y’know, I went back and looked, and I was originally gonna name the blog Painted Stone Soup. I still really like it, but I’m not sure which I like more. Y’know?

It was gonna be a bit of a parody on the old story hot stone soup. I  don’t remember exactly where I heard it, but it was about this guy who started a soup… somewhere where people didn’t have much to eat. And all he put in it was water and a rock he stuck in the fire for a while. Hot Stone soup. And, as people came along, they would add whatever they had to it. It was pretty much a big pot of whatever you had on you. So not only did this poor guy get food for nothing, but it wound up being better than all of the individual ingredients. Kinda like my blog. A lot of everything, and a lot better than everything on it’s own… or so I would hope. And also a reference, however slight, to my future dreams of working in the food industry.

And, as a bit of my own flair, I thought that a painted stone would make a much better base than a hot stone. Plus it sounded like something I would do; paint a stone. I’ve pained concrete before, but I can’t say I’ve painted a stone. Still, it does sound like something I would do. This is the girl who wanted to cover a whole wall in “hello my name is” stickers with random crap written all over them. Everything from Leah to Elmo to “no habla ingles.”

Just for kicks. But I thought it sounded appropriate. And now it’s too late. Oh well. Dead with all the rest of the crappy ideas I had originally… but this one wasn’t so crappy, so I thought it deserved at least a mention. As I was thinking in the car-ride on the way home, Memoirs of what could have been. Don’t steal, that may be the title of a book someday. MY book, thank you very much.

I know I haven’t been posting lately. I haven’t had much to post about. But hopefully that will change soon enough, because August is still my planned NaBloPoMo… which is growing on me a little but still isn’t as catchy as NaNoWriMo, which I missed out on this year. I was about two months late in discovering it. :/ Which sucks. But, regardless, I plan to participate in that as well, when the time comes. And probably keep you guys posted over my Blog.

In the mean time, I have an amazing lack of things to talk about, so I will try to be thinking. In the meantime, ideas are appreciated. Hopefully, I’ll soon have various Mermaid-related endeavours to post about. But in the meantime, I’ll be thinking. And hopefully writing. But in the meantime, I have a quote for you. I would like so bad to post two, but I really shouldn’t start this cycle. And, if I can figure it out, this post should also have the first poll so far. Let’s see how it goes.

“If only. Those must be the two saddest words in the world.”

~Mercedes Lackey

Roadway Revalations

A really rough sketch of the trees beside the highway and the sky behind them... from my memory.

Um… Like it says in the caption, a really, REALLY rough sketch I did in Corel Painter… instead of a story. I’ve got some inspiration now that I’m back home, but I couldn’t think of anything to fit with my planned post.

So… yeah, I just had a ten hour drive back from vacation. Not telling you where because then you could figure out a curve of about where I live, the people that matter know, and the rest of you stalkers need to screw off. XD Not really. Unless you ARE a stalker/pedaphile/internet creepo. Then, please do screw off.

But for the rest of you, I was staring at trees for ten hours… minus about the first two or three while I finished Fireproof. (AMAZING book, by the way. Still want to see the movie it was based off of. And now I finally get the salt and pepper thing everyone at church does! Took me long enough.) And maybe an hour in the middle where I fell asleep, then woke up to find it pouring rain.

But, while I was staring at the trees, I realized all over again how gorgeous the little things God made are. And then mom started to say something about how she was glad that there were buildboards punctuating the trees, because it gave her something to look at. But… half the buildboards I saw were for this place called “Risque Cafe” or some crap like that… Black, red, and yellow text. Every one of them, that was it. But I’m okay with that; the giant block-letter “TOPLESS!” on every sign was more than I needed to know to start with.

Needless to say, I would’ve given anything to take Caleb’s baseball bat for a good old-fashioned billboard-whacking… for slightly different reasons than the computer’s death, but nonetheless. (If you don’t get it, read/watch Fireproof.)

Thankfully, there were a couple half-decent billboards. The billboards for this one waffle house that showed up two or three times that said “Jesus is Lord! Closed on Sundays.” Kinda made me smile… I’ll bet they had good waffles, too. And then there are the billboards that are bought by churches and display messages of salvation that work about as much as this one topic on a forum I used to be on… it was like a church-BOT or something that made this long monalogue first post and then just bumped it a billion times through the rest of the replies… some of which were extremely nasty. However, they’re little pearls of encouragement to those of us that already believe… or something like that. And I guess there are those people out there who really don’t understand what it’s all about. It’s hard for me to understand, because of how I was raised (which was an atheist) and how I was introduced to Christ. But some people really don’t get that we can’t just be good to make the bad things disappear. That we could never dream of earning our way to heaven… I still find that amazing. Even raised as an atheist, I still knew all the verses like John 3:16 from preschool… and yet I had no preconcieved notions from any real spiritual friends… at least any that shared it, anyways. Thankfully, I actually found myself wanting to know…

But again, I’m getting off track. Overall, the billboards were very disappointing. I would rather just watch the trees pass by as they brush against the sky. Trees don’t scream at you to visit some freak pleasure cafe. They just sit there, look pretty, and praise God silently because we don’t seem to be too capable of that anymore. As the bible says: “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” Luke 19:40

I know today’s post is a lot more spiritual than the three previous, but that’s because that’s what I did while I was staring at trees. Because, having just finished an amazing Christian book, it’s what I was thinking about. Call me crazy. I hope to tune it down a bit next time, not because I care what anyone thinks about it or scaring anyone off (I have two readers, and they both know me. XD), but because every time I have one of these “Spiritual Revivals” where I go from unconsciously dead to aware yet again, it fades after a week. If that. I’m hoping that I can just find a happy medium, not completely intense (though I have no problem with that) and scaring off people I might actually form a friendship with, but still living like God wants. To use yet another Fireproof analogy, getting the sparks to finally light a flame. Something that will just stay put for once.

But anyways, back to what I was planning on talking about since you people don’t care about that… (yes, I actually have a plan today. *gasp*)

The trees gave a nice thing to watch pass and contemplate the deep meanings of life within about how every one is different and wondering how anyone could ever think anything is the same as anything else (and a moment of sudden horror as we passed a small group of men cutting down a section of the trees), and it was nice to see the little cross hidden in the trees and then the fire hydrant (ironic, isn’t it? In case of forest fire… and Matt’s the only one who will catch either one of those, I’m sure)… but what really got me excited was when we got onto road that I recognized.

I pass it every day on the way to school during the year, and then again on the way back in a different light. But… in the excitement of being back after a week away, it was all different. I found myself poining out every little building and the strange things about our city like the fifth third bank. Even though my dad’s lived there since he was a kid and my brother knows the city as well as I do, I still pointed it all out. Just to show that I knew where I was and I was for the first time in a week, and that we were almost home to normally chlorinated water and our own beds. Where we were staying, we were near a lot of water parks and probably running off the same water they were, so the water had so much chlorine in it I could hardly see the first time I went swimming like I do around here… underwater, with my eyes open. A lot. And no goggles. OUCH.

Sure, I’m gonna miss my cousins and my aunt and my crazy redneck uncle, and even my Granny who constantly mistakes everyone for their mother and can’t remember anyone’s name. But that’s okay, because after ninety plus years, she deserves a bit of forgetfulness.

Sometimes, no matter how great it is to get away, no matter how many amusement parks are in your hotel’s backyard, it’s just good to be home. Where you can plop down in your own bed and take everything out of the fridge and maybe get yelled at but just feel perfectly comfortable. Lately, I have come to believe that home is anywhere where you can just open up the fridge without being asked and feel completely normal. That said, as an aspiring chef, I feel at home pretty much anywhere with a refridgerator. XD

But, as I was pointing out the buildings I knew, even though we’d only been gone for a week, my dad and I both had a bit of a moment like the post before last. A Ciella moment, if you will. Everybody and his brother’s building an apartment complex, and… either they’d gotten a lot farther or I’d forgotten how far along they were. And the old daycare that they tore down forever ago… the bank on the lot’s completely done now. I don’t know; it’s just different. And my dad was thinking back to his childhood. He’s a bit of a local kid.

It was kinda odd… I’ve been noticing a lot of irony since Matt and I started talking about what it really was… I guess just opening up my curiosity and awareness. But… it in itself is kind of ironic. Which is only even more ironic.

But I’ve made my points and now I’m getting on a whole new one and I’m thinking it’s time to find a quote and wrap up.

Oh, but first one last apology; sorry the picture’s not amazing. It was quick and I’m still trying to find my own way to draw trees. Though this is better than most that I do, though. Which should tell you something. Oh, and the trees in the foreground are just barren skeletons, since I couldn’t get them to work out right how I wanted to. Instead, the green foilage is behind them.

Now, for the quote; there were so many that were the expected stuff; so sickeningly similar to the eternally vague “Home is where the Heart is.” I hope I chose one that more accurately describes what home is without being corny or overused or anything, and still not being my own view that I’ve already expressed.

Thank you for being patient with my constantly-changing midnight mood, and the fact that I lied and chose two quotes of the day. Gracias.

“Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.”

~John Ed Pearce

“There’s nothing half so pleasant as coming home again.”

~Margaret Elizabeth Sangster