May 10, 2012
Book: The Marriage Plot
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Description: It’s the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.
Over the next year, as the members of a triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.
Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce?
My Opinion: Not a huge fan. The book was engaging enough and I did sympathize with the characters, but the ending didn’t distract me from the fact that a good chunk of the book was pretty boring. Aka the ending was merely acceptable. I can see why it won a Pulitzer, though, seeing as Eugenides is a wonderful writer.
May 10, 2012
She asked him why the clouds looked like anteaters, and he said, “They don’t. They look like cotton candy.” Cotton candy, she thought. Cotton candy, like cotton, like cottonballs that Mother uses for nails, like white, fluffy balls that are miniature clouds held in the palm of your hand. No, she decided. The clouds were anteaters grazing on blue sky with their long noses that breathed wind through her imagination. A rose isn’t always a rose.
April 15, 2012
realisticallyoptimistic asked: TAG YOU'RE IT! Here are the guidelines: 1) Each tagged person must post ten things about themselves. 2) You have to choose and tag ten people, as well. 3) Go to their blogs and tell them you tagged them. 4) Sadly enough, there is no tagging back~
1. I used to be addicted to Diet Coke. I literally drank 7 to 10 cans a day. Then the aspartame gave me headaches and now I am a recovering Diet Coke Addict.
2. I never paint my fingernails or toenails.
3. I need chocolate once a week. Same with peanut butter. Preferably together :)
4. The right side of my body is stronger than my left side.
5. I’d love to be a kickass guitar player but I don’t have the patience to become one. I’ll probably be strumming the same old fifteen or so chords for the rest of my life.
6. I went to an all-girls high school.
7. I absolutely love acting and miss being in plays/musicals.
8. Almost every time I cried in grade school was because a teacher told me I was wrong. Ridiculous.
9. My birthday is in 10 days.
10. I have never trick-or-treated on Halloween. But I have partied, of course :)
April 15, 2012
Book: Cutting for Stone
Author: Abraham Verghese
Description: Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.
Opinion: A truly wonderful novel. I feel like I have a better grasp of what doctors go through in both first-world and third-world environments, and I also have a special place carved in my heart for each of these characters. I also saw this author speak, and he was one of the most amazing men I have ever had the chance to see in person.
April 15, 2012
Blank pages have meant numbness to me in days past, when my feet looked for leaves to crunch and rain to soak in. Today, a blank page is peace.
April 3, 2012
"No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should have been paying attention. Well get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel like someday."
— Chuck Palahniuk (via pavorst)
March 30, 2012
Does anyone have any suggestions for a one-person drinking game? You know, like if one person was drinking alone and needed motivation to drink the beer because her parents got the shitty kind?
In other news, Jeff, Who Lives at Home is a really great movie. Check it out.
March 28, 2012
Frustration lies right under the surface of my alcohol-red tinged cheeks. Drinking alone is a sign of alcoholism, they all say, but it’s really just a sign of complete loneliness. I have indie music blasting from the radio, hopes of a free indie concert on Friday, and no one to share my indie joy with. Can joy exist on its own, or does it need to be shared to be fully enjoyed? I’m convinced the happiness floating in the foam of beer in my stomach is only a toe in the sand. I want to dig a hole and bury myself in it, grains of sand stuck in the crevices of my skin for days afterward.
March 28, 2012
Book: Looking for Alaska
Author: John Green
Description: Miles “Pudge” Halter is abandoning his safe-okay, boring-life. Fascinated by the last words of famous people, Pudge leaves for boarding school to seek what a dying Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps.” Pudge becomes encircled by friends whose lives are everything but safe and boring. Their nucleus is razor-sharp, sexy, and self-destructive Alaska, who has perfected the arts of pranking and evading school rules. Pudge falls impossibly in love. When tragedy strikes the close-knit group, it is only in coming face-to-face with death that Pudge discovers the value of living and loving unconditionally. (Amazon)
Opinion: I didn’t see the second part coming. I should have, but I didn’t. Needless to say, many tears dripped down my face while reading this. John Green has revived my craving for young adult literature. Anyways, I’m pretty sure anyone who has read this book will agree that every other teenager on the planet should read it too. Or people in their twenties, too, since that’s what I am X)
March 28, 2012
I find it amusing when I don’t write or post anything for a bit and lose exactly one follower per day. Never fails X)
Anyways, I will write tonight! Pinky promise. (You can’t see it, but I’m linking my pinkies together right now in a promise to myself).
March 26, 2012
"Logical validity is not a guarantee of truth."
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (via honeyforthehomeless)
March 25, 2012
Anonymous asked: ANONYMOUS LOVE REVOLUTION! Takes a minute to send this to the ones you think are worth it, also show to those who use it for hate that the anonymously button should be to show love instead. Because it doesn't matter who I am, I just love you and that's what really matters.
Half of me thinks this is spam, and the other half of me is pretending it’s not so I can feel good about myself.
Anyways, first anon message ^ :)
March 24, 2012
Tripping over giggles and freshly painted toes, we crept through the grass that night and considered ourselves brave for agreeing to a game of Capture the Flag. He’s standing in front of us, half-cloaked in a black hoodie and dark jeans, but the shadows are not quite convincing and we pounce. Friend or foe? Friend or foe? we demand in high-pitched voices. Friend! We think, blink, and then reach for his arm. Foe! we squeal and then he’s slipping away into deeper shadows and we’re following, bravery blazing through our joined footsteps.
He’s losing the race, although maybe intentionally, because his grin startles us as we tackle him to the ground and repeat Foe Foe Foe. Preteen hormones are slipping through our veins but our shared glee over a conquest distracts us away from the overwhelming urge to kiss him and besides, which one of us would be the lucky girl?
These are the summer days when innocent games and firefly-dotted atmospheres are infinitely more important that sticky love. These are the days I sometimes wish I could steal from my younger self, but my older cynical self would only mar the memory.
March 23, 2012
Hunger Games Movie > Hunger Games Book
March 21, 2012
Above my childhood pillow there is a phrase written in cursive: Be good. Laying my head on the pillow and gazing at the ceiling, my eyes rove over: Mark O’Malley. Princesses. Cotton candy fields. Creeping round the closet door, a squinting eye perceives Scorpions and Clowns gouged into the wall behind my clothes. On my dollhouse story upon story is scratched into the wallpaper, affairs and deaths and scandals and children being punished. My dolls’ arms are weathered with written school lessons. The desk is sagging under loads of character developments and arithmetic problems.
Words follow me and decorate my past in visions of black and white. If you peeled away the skin covering my sternum, I’m positive you could read Childhood engraved on the bone closest to my heart, for nostalgia may be stored in the brain but it is remembered in gentle heartbeats.
