NaNoWriMo

November is NaNoWriMo, and today, in a hazy fit of motivation and what I thought might be creativity (but I now recognize as sleepiness), I decided to start! Immediately!

For those of you who aren't my Englishy friends pretentiously posting about NaNoWriMo on your Facebook wall, it's National Novel Writing Month, and you try to write a novel in November (aka, you try to write 50,000 words).

So I sat down at my computer, I opened a Word document (I literally don't think I've opened that program since I converted my masters thesis to a PDF for final submission), and I started writing words.

And I'm not going to lie, as I was typing my first words, it felt crazy easy. 1,600ish words a day? No problem. I figured a wave of inspiration would fall upon me, and I would type furiously through some mess of a story. And within an hour I could get caught up on my writing for the entire first week of November.

I mean, it's just words and stories and typing. And it was probably going to be a masterpiece, and I would get randomly discovered and fulfill my dream of becoming an author that scholarly critics write papers about, and I could scorn them for being critics rather than creators (was I really an English major?).

But by sentence two I was so exhausted. Words? Stories? Typing? So much work. I was able to muster 177 words in 45 minutes. And then gap.com was calling my name. Sorry, brain.

NaNoWriMo, we might just have to chalk this up to an epic fail.

But, at least we now have the below amusing comparison between the start of my NaNoWriMo novel in 2007(!) and my measly opening paragraphs in 2012. (Side note: should I be concerned that the first thing that came to me in 2012 was the image of an old woman sitting in a hoarder's house?)

2007
Kerrie slapped the jam side of the sandwich down and sliced the knife through the center before sealing the halves into a plastic bag. It had come again—the first day of school. Grabbing the rest of her lunch and her backpack, Kerrie rushed out to the bus stop. She always felt silly with her packed lunch; after all, she was in middle school now, but her mom insisted that cafeteria food is the root of all evils in America, and the ritual had become habit. So Kerrie was still eating peanut butter and jelly in the eighth grade. She was known for it, in fact.

2012
The blinds were cracked slightly, letting the cold light glow the specks of dust in the air. The large piles of stuff grew the edges of the room into amorphous shapes, disrupting the smooth symmetry of corners and floors and ceilings. Patches of color revealed distinct objects in the wallpaper of stuff lining the room: yellow spines of National Geographics, blue opaque plastic bins, the stale form of crushed cardboard boxes shoved between an armoir and a rocking chair, a large bolt of brown fabric with tiny polka dots and frayed edging weaving its way between a crushed Monopoly box and a backgammon board with a large crack down the center.

A little lamp with an orange and blue plaid shade propped up on an ironing board glows warmly in the middle of the room, and a small lady sits in the rocking chair, slowly oscillating back and forth as the sides of the rocking chair brush against the cardboard boxes wedged beside. Swish. Swoosh.

This is the night that the world is going to end.

Chicken Coop

I'm not really an animal person. Ok, that's an understatement. What I meant to say is that I hate animals. Not in a heartless, I want to cause animals harm kind of way. Just in a leave-me-alone-and-I'll-try-my-best-not-to-cringe-when-I'm-forced-to-come-in-contact-with-them-and-they-invade-my-bubble kind of way. They're so smelly, and messy, and needy, and expensive and unpredictable. I just don't want anything to do with them. The closest I'll ever come to having a pet is within my brief daydreams/daymares that I'm a 40-year-old woman from the 80s with over-sized glasses, bushy hair, and 15 cats curled up around me as I read a book. Incidentally, I'm always a hoarder in these daymares.

However, tonight I went to an RS activity (shock!) about cooping chickens, and I'm absolutely hooked on the idea of owning chickens (double shock!). First, this would finally satiate my unfulfilled desire to grow up on a farm Little House on the Praire style. Second, I'm a sucker for a good project. Third, the idea of producing my own food is really cool to me. 

Here's some info: it's only about $10/month to keep chickens. They're much lower maintenance than dogs or cats. They lay about 1 egg/day. They're very obedient and stupid. You only have to clean the coop about twice a year if you use a deep layer method where you add layers and layers of straw to the bottom of the coop regularly (when you clean out the coop, this stuff is great for fertilizing your garden). Chickens help reduce weeds. They're not very noisy. They don't smell very much. 

Kind of cool, huh? Unfortunately, it's kind of illogical for me to own chickens because 1. I hate eggs, and 2. I don't have a house/yard.

Every time I dream, all my hopes are crushed. 

Some pics from tonight: 

Back at Home

In attempts to distract my parents (and myself) from the fact that I'm 25 and once again sleeping in my childhood room, I've taken up various projects around the house to appear useful. Projects like yard work, tearing down our old playhouse, painting, scanning woodworking magazines, and organizing the kitchen. I know, riveting. So, the other day I was going through the paint cabinet in the garage, opening old paint cans in order to see what paint had dried out to clear space for new cans. One by one I'm wedging the lids off each can of paint, almost vomiting at molding paint in more than one can (who knew paint could mold?), when I come to the wood sealer. Now at this point I'm about 23 paint cans into the project, so I'm in my efficient mode. I know exactly how many locations I need to wedge the paint can opener in order to loosen the lid just enough to get it off. So, I'm on my second of three wedges, in the zone, when the lid to the wood sealer explodes onto my face. Explodes. I'm talking lid slowly spinning towards my chin before impact as the contents of the can spray all over my clothes and face. Immediately, my ninth-grade science lab training kicks in (thank you Science Officers Kojis and Houck), and I run to the sink to rinse out my eyes. As I'm standing with my head sideways, cold water running through my eyes, I begin to accept my new life as a blind person. I wonder who will remain my friend in my new condition, and I begin to slowly panic when I realize that EVERYTHING involves seeing. Using a computer--all about sight. Driving--all about sight. Texting. Playing boggle. Eating. I humbly accept my fate. And then I turn the water off, and slowly open my eyes. While I am still completely covered in sealer that probably won't come off until I grow a new layer of skin, my vision is fine.

And thank goodness because my mom and I are in the middle of season 7 of Gilmore Girls, and listening to GG is just not the same. BTW--I'd forgotten how fun it is to watch GG with someone who's never seen it before. My mom was SHOCKED when Christopher and Lorelai got married. It's been so long since I've been anything but mildly annoyed by that minor-road-block-in-the-way-of-the-meant-to-be ending.

Goodbye!