Teenage Notes

I found this note left in a classroom today:

"So I had decided that Ahhh! I love him with a pasion. I just don't know hwo to get him to notice me. Ugh :( It's so frusterating :/ So I really want to look pretty at the dance but it is going to take so much work :) I want so much to be pretty like all of the other girls, but have you seen me it will be impossible I mean
1. Im fat
2. Im not pretty
3. Do I have to list any more?
Well now that you get 'my point' :) AHHHH!!!
All I want is for him to notice me. Please help :("

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I laugh at the love-striking that comes in middle school and that emotocons have officially replaced punctuation. But then I want to cry that so many girls this age see themselves as not pretty and fat and the fact that this is obviously the most important thing in her life right now. I mean, look at all those exclamation makrs!!!

I think the #1 thing I take away from this note on the floor is this:
I love finding notes on the floor.

More posts...And more books

Sometimes I read a whole book in one night. Sometimes I don't. Tonight I did.

I have wanted to read this book since the last day of my Adolescent Literature class when Chris Crowe had all of these young adult books scattered on the carpet. Each person in the class chose one, judging from the back cover, and we played a type of white elephant exchange game. I ended up with some stupid book about wanting to "trade my little sister in!" or something. Someone else ended up with this book with an amazing cover called Peeled. I had no idea what the book was about, but I loved the cover art. Never judge a book by its cover? I think not. I do it all the time.

Every time I go to the library, I check to see if the book is available but it never is. I never thought to request it though....

Luckily for me, I live 5 minutes away from where Scholastic was having a warehouse book sale. I found a couple of books I've been wanting to read and Peeled was one of them. Hooray!

So I read it tonight. It was pretty interesting. It's about high school journalism and it made me suddenly very interested in journalism. It's not something I have really thought about before, but it sounded like so much fun and something with a lot of passion in it. I love books that infuse passion in me. Now, this one was nowhere near as passionate as Matched, but it was good to read a realistic YA novel after all the fantasy ones of late.

p.s. Dana, if you're out there, I picked up Lawn Boy purely on your recommendation ;) wink face.

The Immortal Series

Well, I finished this book:

Pretty much just like the others.

Lots of these lines in it:

"I press my lips together..."

"blah blah blah, But still, blah blah blah"

"I answer too quickly to ever be believed."

I actually just did a Google book search for the phrase "but still" in the her books and it came up with 38 results in Night Star. In Dark Flame, the book just before this one, she uses it apparently 43 times. I think that's too many times...

These books just have that lovely Stephanie Meyer touch to them, where the author just might have had a thesaurus out while writing it, giving her characters things to say that normal 16 year olds would never say.

I don't know how I've read 5 of the 6 books in this series so far. I cringe and make faces while I read them, and yet I keep thinking, well I have to know what happens I guess... so I keep getting them from the library and they keep getting read.

I think I keep convincing myself that since my 8th graders love this series I have to find out what they're reading and keep up with the in crowd. Except when they say, "I love this series! Have you read it?!" and then I don't know how to respond.... "Uh, yeah. I have...they're...great?"

My life

This is my life now. I'm not as awesome as this picture makes me look but I can play my scales and I'm building a repertoire of songs thanks to my husband who rules as a guitar player.

Waiting for books...

Know what's crazy? The way books are reverting back to their old ways, being released in installments; making us wait. Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many other authors during their time had novels released chapter by chapter in installments in newspapers.

It's happening again...Series and trilogies are so big right now; it's officially "the thing" for an author to do. It's interesting to me that you can read a book and instantly go online and find out if there will be a sequel, what it will be called, and when it will be released. I imagine it's like Twain's fans waiting until the next installment in the newspaper to find out what Tom Sawyer was up to! I'm currently anxious to find out what happens to Cassia, the heroine in Ally Condie's Matched.

I took a Print Culture class at BYU as my capstone and I learned some awesmoely interesting things about the history of print and the book industry. I found out that the reason I have to wait until November for Crossed, the sequel to Matched, to come out is because of Harry Potter. Thanks, Potter.

Apparently after Harry Potter got so popular, there were some problems with the British publishing company, Bloomsbury, releasing their copies before Scholastic could. So, of course, the crazed American fans would contact the British company and have them ship out their earlier editions. This did not work for Scholastic, they were losing money!

"Hence, the millennial release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire brought with it major changes in terms of how it and the three remaining installments in the series would be issued in the English language. Bloomsbury, Scholastic, and Raincoast (Potter's Canadian publisher) would guarantee one another's territorial publishing rights by agreeing to what the book industry calls a 'global lay-down date.' Together they would agree on a single day on which they would release their respective editions simultaneously, thereby denying shoppers the opportunity to exploit systemic imbalances in the global market for Potter books...While it's unclear whether Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the first book to be issued this way, it undoubtedly was among the very first to follow what's gone on to become a common industry practice for hotly anticipated titles." (The Late Age of Print, 146)

Thanks a lot, Potter and crazed American fans.

To learn more about crazy Harry Potter fans, might I recommend the documentary We Are Wizards? You can find it on Hulu...

Who wants to go to McDonalds?!

This blog post starts out with a story from my childhood...

Once when I was a young girl (sorry, Dad, for telling this story), Dad was left in charge to feed us kids. I don't remember where Mom was - important meetings? being a nurse?...who knows. So Dad started to cook something he knew - boiled chicken, possibly with rice. He put the pot on the stove, filled with warm water and a giant chicken breast. With dinner started, he went to hang out with the kiddos. Just set it and forget it, right? We were playing Nintendo (probably) and Dad said the 6 most coveted words to kid ears: "Who wants to go to McDonalds?" What kid could refuse that?! We all piled into the van covered in Aquabat stickers and made our way to McDonalds. The most magical place on Earth...

We sat and talked and wolfed down cheeseburgers and when we returned home, we were horrified to find opaque white clouds billowing out our windows and doors. THE CHICKEN! We called the fire department; they found Nacho hiding deep under a bed, scared out of her mind; and they helped us air out the place. Boy was that embarrassing and pot-ruining.

And now this blog post moves quickly a story of tonight...

Tonight, after a hearty meal of rice and beans, Kelly and I are hanging out - he's playing the electric guitar and I'm backing him up with some sweet, sweet bass licks when we hear a knock on our door. Our first thoughts are We made the neighbors mad. What time is it anyway? It's only 8... We open our door to find our upstairs neighbors, the only people we know in our ward.

We looked confused and they looked even more confused, "Are you guys hearing your neighbor's fire alarm?"

Nope. We hadn't heard a thing. We'd been playing our sweet, sweet bass licks too loud.

"It's been going off for a while and no one is home and their car is gone..."

Oh...

So, me being the brave lady that I am, I went right ahead and called 911. I'm not playing around with some "non-emergency police" numbers or "after hours emergency maintenance". I'm going right to the source. I stated the problem and the lady said she'd send the fire department out.

And oh, did they come:

"Get the ladder"

"I definitely smell smoke in there."

"Get in there, don't worry about the screen."

"Or the blinds"

"Need help with that hose?" - Kelly being a firefighter for the day.

Turns out the neighbors had made the age old mistake: leaving something cooking on the stove. I hope they were at McDonalds enjoying their evening. They have yet to come home and find their screen with a fist hole, their house reeking of smoke, and their once potential meal burnt to a crisp.

And that's why you never start to make food and decide to go to McDonalds instead.

8th grade-isms

Conversation with a student in the computer lab:

Student: Why is Facebook blocked?
Me: Probably because it's a waste of time.
Student: Waste of time? No it's not. I have friends in Guatemala!