Hate It When Stupid Things Keep Me From Doing Stuff I Need To Do.

Muse at the Grammys! Watched them last night... must say, they were amazing. Of course, I've loved them since I first played Knights of Cydonia on Guitar Hero:

Good stuff. I could never play as well as this dude, though. And yes, I'm one of the nerds who would go on youtube to look up videos of people beating really hard songs on expert. But at least I was never looking up Call of Duty cheats like *ahem* my brother...

Anyway, life lately's been kinda weird. My cold's all better but I woke up on Saturday not able turn my head to the right! My neck kinked up and it's still a little spazzy... so we'll see how that goes during swim practice today. I already went to my best friend's birthday party with it and got into a giant cake/tickle fight without too much protest, so it should be fine.

AND I NEED TO GET BACK IN THE WATER, WE'VE GOT A FRAKKIN' MEET IN TWO WEEKS AND OUR POOL'S GETTING DRAINED! *awkward silence*

Please ignore the above spaz attack.

So the books I've been reading! I read Sophomore Switch by Abby McDonald on the way home from Arizona, and it was REALLY funny.

Two girls, one an uptight Oxford student and the other a laid-back UCSB student, participate in a transfer program and end up with each others' lives. Emily, from Oxford, is looking to forget about a bad breakup and try something new to break free from her meticulously-planned success schedule; Natasha, from Santa Barbara, is trying to hide from the press after she unknowingly broke up America's IT couple and turned herself into America's #1 Hated Skank.

The only problem is, classes are harder than Natasha expects and Emily can't help but do the wrong thing. Neither girl can loosen up in her surroundings enough to enjoy the change at first, until they talk to each other and realize how to blend in.

The thing I liked was it was almost like a cultural study as well as a great novel. You see how two VERY different types of people live and how one can go from one extreme to the other.

Plus, you know, you've got all those great plot elements such as adventure and romance making this a pretty good book.

And the book I just finished: Middleworld by J&P Voelkel.
As far as I know, this book had a completely new premise for kids' adventure fiction: a race through Mayan mythology. Rich and spoiled Max is pretty mad when his housekeeper books him a flight to the jungle of San Xavier to join his archaeologist parents on a Mayan hunt and then they don't show up. But he quickly realizes something more serious is going on, and he'll have to team up with a native Mayan, Lola, to not only find his parents but also possibly save the world from an evil spirit.

This book combines lots of Mayan history and lore with the bratty Max and funny Lola to weave a great adventure story. I've heard there are two more books in the series and I WANNA READ EM! Plus, the artwork in this book is pretty awesome too. Definitely made the story more interesting, although it's so fast-paced you feel like you're in the jungle with them.

And so ends my post. Hopefully I'll keep up with my reading this week on top of double practices every day, so I can post again sometime soon. =)

Wow, This Slump Is Worse Than I Thought It Was.

Well, it's not so much a slump as the fact that I've been SO BUSY. I had winter formal to go to, homework to keep up with, swim practice, and now to top everything off I'M SICK.

Actually, having this fever-flu combo thing is what's allowing me to post; I have nothing better to do. I mean, sure, I could get caught up on homework, but who would want to do that? That might make me sicker.

Although it's probably not possible for me to get sicker, since I can barely recognize my voice as it is from my throat being so raw. And I'm half-delirious from fever (I walked into a wall yesterday) so please excuse any typos or random ramblings. Because I'm sure there'll be a few.

So now, onto the books I've been reading!

Starting with: Uncle John's Triumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader by The Bathroom Readers' Institute, apparently. I didn't know they had an institute for that.

This book is FILLED with random knowledge, and it's like the 15th in a series. Thanks to Uncle John, I now know Cockney English, some of the dumbest celebrity quotes ever (yes, one of them was from Britney Spears), the history of bread around the world, and a few words to sound smarter. Now, this may not seem that important, but I assure you some of this knowledge is going to come in handy someday.

Okay, maybe not, but still, it was really interesting. Great book.

Number two (no pun intended): The Night Tourist by Katherine Marsh.

Okay, this isn't the cover on my book, but I couldn't find a picture of that cover anywhere because my copy is an advance proof (doing community service at the public library has its advantages). My cover is all black with just three colored circles right above the title: green, red, yellow. Like a messed up traffic light. I like the simplicity of it.

This book follows Jack, a boy living with his father after his mother's mysterious death. After being almost killed by a car, Jack keeps running into weird strangers who seem to know something about his mother. His father sends him to a doctor in New York, where his mother died, and while at the train station he meets a girl, Euri.

Euri gives him a tour of the New York underground (hence the title) and pretty soon Jack is uncovering secrets about his family he never dreamed could be true.

This book was pretty good, for children fiction; kind of uncomplicated as far as subplots and storylines go, but that was part of the beauty of it. And the end keeps you guessing up until the last pages... it's one of those books where there is a happy ending, even though it's not in the way you might want it to be, at first.

Okay, last one for now: Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland.

I have to say, this book confused me until about 2/3 of the way through, and then suddenly I GOT IT.

The book starts off with this man talking about his colleague, who has shown him this painting that looks very much like an original Vermeer. In fact, his colleague claims it is. But why has he kept it hidden all this time? Apparently, his father stole it from a Jewish family during the Holocaust and he thinks it's too late to return it.

From then on, the book traces the history of this painting, chapter by chapter, showing how it came into all these people's lives since it was painted. The ending's bittersweet, and sort of sad, but all in all it's a good book.

And the language the author uses to describe these families' lives is beautiful in itself; the imagery and the storyline is brilliant, and you'd never guess where the painting's come from, how it's been passed on from person to person. It's almost like Sid Fleischman's Seed Folks except the people never interact with each other. The painting is what ties them all together in history.

Well, enough ranting. I'm going to go lie down with more movies and possibly annotate a little (but probably not) and maybe finish my book later (definitely).

This morning I watched Panic Room, with Jodie Foster and SURPRISE! Kristen Stewart. I remember being like 8 and wanting to see this SO BADLY but knowing it was R and I'd probably never see it. And now I have! Seriously though, look at how young she was:
Crazy! And even at this age, she was still only able to play that one type of character: the aloof victim. Have you ever noticed that? How she's only able to be that person? Like in Speak, or Twilight. I don't remember Zathura being this bad, though.

Whatever. Time to go occupy myself elsewhere.

Return From The Reading Slump

For whoever is reading this: sorry I haven't posted in so long! Allow me to apologize using this hilarious SNL clip:

I don't know what season this was from but it just keeps cracking me up! Vegetarian chili and guacamolito sauce, my god! How do they come up with this stuff?

But yeah, I've been in a sort of reading slump. It's been partly because of school restarting (which means having that homework load) and partly because of swim season starting, yay!!! I now have my daily dose of chlorine perfume and my arms are aching from churning the water ALL READY and it's only been a week. This season is even more special because two of my best friends, Adrie and Thomas, joined too. WE'RE ALL ON JV TOGETHER! Which means we spend that much more time together being reckless teenagers!

And even though I feel so much better seeing my friends daily at the personal hell known as school and I'm SO much happier back in my swimming groove, I just haven't been able to read lately because the book I was reading (and thankfully just finished) was SOOOOOO LOOOOOONG.

Enter Stephen King's Wizard and Glass, the 4th installment in the Dark Tower series out of 7. Isn't that depressing? I'm only halfway done.

Don't get me wrong, I love this series. It's just that this particular book seemed to be really DENSE. It started off well, returning to Roland the gunslinger, his friends Eddie from New York, Susannah, and Jake the kid, plus their talking weasel-dog thing, Oy. They were trapped on a moody monorail that they had to outriddle (I know, how does King come up with these things?).

But then it turns out half the book is a return to Roland's past to detail how he started his quest for the tower from the ashes of his first love, which sounds breathtaking but a lot of it just got to be too much for me to follow. It just got a bit depressing!

Fortunately the book picked up again with a good ending even though it was a bit bland. There are also some tie-ins to The Wizard of Oz which I thought was REALLY cool; I love when authors use allusions as allegories, if that makes sense.

I also just borrowed a book from Adrie since we just had this huge killer sleepover with TONS OF SUGAR! It's called, I Am Neurotic by Lianna Kong.

And boy is it hilarious.

It's a collection of confessions, basically; confessions of random people who have odd idiosyncracies and weird habits that make them neurotic. The funny part is as you're reading this book, you find yourself thinking, HOLY CRAP I DO THAT!!! Like the dude who liked his toilet paper to roll from the top. I SO have that problem, only I don't obsess about it like he does.

Then there are the ones you read and you go, How do they live? There are people who have to have twelve chocolate chips in each cookie, people who punch shower curtains to make sure there's nobody hiding in the shower waiting to get them, even people who can only eat the middle of foods... like sandwiches, for instance.

So this book was entertaining (and a quick read, took me less than an hour) and I recommend buying it... or hiding out in your local bookstore and just reading it there.

Well, time to go get out a new book to celebrate the full recovery from my reader's slump. Maybe I'll read outside... then I must pack my swim bag for a double practice day tomorrow. Yay, right? If this keeps up, I may not be posting as often as I have been for the past month, but I'll try REALLY hard. Promise.

"Today is the first day I am not dead."

To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is ow I would like to live. To feel the joy of life, as Eve felt the joy of life. To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we encounter every day. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to. When I am a person, that is how I will live my life.
~The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

How cool would it be if we all lived this way? Just threw caution to the wind and lived each day as if it was a new gift that could never be taken for granted? I think we'd all be a lot happier. We all know that's not how it goes, but maybe this should be my New Year's Resolution. Or one of them, besides eating less processed foods (failed) and buying no new books (still got that one).

This book is from the point of view of a dog. Just putting that out there. Now normally this can be a little odd because dogs don't think like people do, but this one pretty much does. His name is Enzo, and he understands human life. And whatever he doesn't understand, he explains with the wonder and patience of an outside trying to learn.

Another warning: this book is horribly sad. There are some bad people in this book, and they do bad things, and Enzo the dog is witness to them all. That's what so sad; this innocent dog has to watch his owner go through such turmoil, and by the end of the book even though it's supposed to be happy, you're still crying.

Still, an amazing, amazing book (I can't emphasize that enough) and I thank my friend Sean for making me want to read it.

The DOOM and GLOOM Post

Okay, here comes all the downer stuff to make up for that super-happy gushy post. Let's start with this depressing but amazing book I read.

The Hollow People by Brian Keaney is definitely one I'm loaning to my friends. It starts off in a weird reality: in a world where dreams and free-thinking are all but forbidden, Dante is a kitchen boy at the asylum, the lowest of the low.

He has never known love because he didn't know his parents and nobody cares for him; his mother was a patient at the asylum who killed herself (or so Dante was told). He is given the unwanted jobs such as cleaning up the cells or taking prisoners their food. Life is pretty blah until he meets Bea, a girl dreading her coming-of-age ceremony who also thinks outside the box.

Together with the freaky new prisoner, Ezekiel, they discover and rebel against their oppression. A phenomenally great book.

I can't even say why it's so amazing, it just is. The writing, how it's so realistic even though nothing like this has ever happened... maybe that's another reason I love it so much, the idea is so fresh. It's kind of like The Giver (another of my favorites) only DARKER, if you can imagine that.

Now another video game addiction: BIOSHOCK! This game is gory as heck, really creepy (so don't start off playing at like midnight, like I did), and totally twisted, but I am in love.

This game has an AMAZING setting: the underwater city of Rapture, where everything has gone to the Splicers (zombie-like creatures that would just LOVE a human sandwich). The atmosphere takes your breath away, with creepy corridors and rundown buildings, with little tidbits from the sixties, since that's the time period.

I want to post a better screenshot on here, but unfortunately it's all too violent. So if you want to see more, go look it up or buy it yourself, at your own risk. Because as much as I highly recommend this game, it's not for the intestinally weak. This is the same reason I couldn't post the video promo. =)

This is also my first shooter game, meaning it's first person. It's a little hard to get used to, but I don't mind it as much as I thought I would... just the screen is really dark on some parts so you have to adjust the brightness a lot at first until you're used to it, and it's also a little unnerving to not be able to see someone coming up behind you. I got clubbed so many times because of that. Fortunately, I have a wrench and a pistol, and nothing can stop me in this game.