I love writing...

I've missed it so much - writing fiction. Over the last three days I've written sixteen pages, and loved it. It's based on a dream I had (the one with the pepper spray). I started in the middle of the story, so it's not too coherent to anyone but me right now. I don't care. This is writing for pleasure. I'm forcing myself to not edit too much.

I'm a little drowsy now. It doesn't have much to do with tryptophan or turkey (which I think is somewhat of an urban legend). I did un poco Black Friday shopping, just trying to help the economy, and...well...

I got this.

Not my usual purchase. But it's so 'bad a', to quote a friend of mine. I'm not buying anything else for myself (except groceries) until next semester.

Another reason I'm feeling warmly contented: my sister is staying down here at the dorm with me for a couple days. It'll be nice to just chill. We haven't seen each other a lot this fall.

The third reason...shall not be posted on this blog. Just in case. Because, with my luck, the person I'm thinking about would decide to click on the facebook link to the blog.

Yes, I Have Weird Dreams

Oddly enough, I had another interesting dream about this particular classmate. If you haven't heard about the first dream, scroll down a few posts. He was the villain again, which I don't understand, because he's really mostly a nice guy. Mostly. I did leave a little wiggle room there in case he happens to actually be a villain. But I hope not.

He was wearing the same shirt he did to Twilight (yes, he's one of the people I went with/laughed with), and he was so...smug? Cocky? I'm trying to think of the best word. In this particular dream, he looked good (which he does in real life), he knew it (which he probably does in real life), and he was just smug enough to irritate the tar out of me (which at some point in the next three and a half years, he probably will be).

It was a completely different situation this time. No nuclear bombs or anything. What I found interesting, upon reviewing the dream, was that all the bad guys were my age. There were no adults. The hilarious thing was that the antagonists were all Honors College students - actually, all from the Honors College Congress (the brand-new governing body), and the 'leader' is a total dork in real life. He was kind of evil in the dream.

So did I punch anyone? Throw out some choice epithets?

Nah. My dream self has become better-mannered. I was just armed with a couple cans of pepper spray. Told ya it was a weird dream. The only annoying part was that one of my canisters was empty, so when the first one ran out, I caught and didn't escape before the dream ended.

On a totally different note: I might actually write today. Fun, fiction, non-school related writing. I am so excited.

Well.

I woke up at 11:49 this morning. I have never, ever slept in this late. I've also never gotten to bed at 3:30 in the morning. What, you might ask, was I doing?

Well...something I'd have laughed at even a couple weeks ago.

I went to the opening show of Twilight.

Technically, it wasn't the opening show. That one began at 12:01 am. Mine began at 12:05 am. But those are technicalities. Most of you know I share Anilee's opinions on Twilight, so here's why I went. A couple guys and I were talking about the books/movie yesterday, and all came to the conclusion we thought it was...well, we shared Anilee's opinions. Enough said. So I decided to go, first because it was with a group of friends, and second, because I knew all of us would laugh at the wrong parts of the movie. We did, and that was fun.

I won't give any spoilers away, though I'm pretty sure everyone is familiar with the plot. I might share some of my thoughts on it later, but am debating it. Suffice it to say, Robert Pattison looks better in action than in still photography, and the shrieks when he first came on screen were hilarious. The Cullen family also looks better than in still shots. Wow, that is one beautiful family. The scene with the glittering skin was interesting, and to the filmmakers' credit, they made Edward seem like less of a super-controlling jerk.

To be perfectly honest? I think my favorite character, as far as sheer acting and depth of character goes, was James. The actor portraying him did an awesome job of being creepy and evil, but cocky too. He felt the most authentic of all. Not to say the film was horrible or anything. It was okay. But I'm not going to become a Twilight fan any time soon, if ever.

Theo's Views on Today

Theo yawned as she snuggled into her very favorite chair, the green butterfly one tucked into the back corner of the living room. Last night, she planned to stay up until 10 or a bit later to finish off an evil paper/powerpoint duo. Really, were both necessary? Would not the merits of a good paper present her authorial skills better than a speech? But that is digression. She received a text message at 9:30 pm, from her cross-country coach, stating she had practice in the morning.

6:30 in the morning.

Rather furious, Theo stormed to her room, laptop and a stack of books in arm, brushed her teeth, removed her contacts, washed her face, and with a huff, crawled under her bed and tried to sleep. Her simmering anger prevented her from having a marvelous sleep, although she did have an odd dream in which her father (in the dream, this man was her father, at least) was the head of a small-time criminal enterprise, and she secretly informed two policemen of his evil doings. Oddly enough, she met these cops at a donut shop, which was completely unintentional of her, and rather amusing once she woke up. It was rather interesting to be this other girl in the dream; she did not have the same strict moral code as Theo. Although she did not call anyone names as she did in another dream...

The bells of Satan (or her alarm) woke her at 6:10. She stubbornly lay in bed until 6:15, when she convinced herself she should be a dutiful girl and go to practice. Wonderfully enough, she felt fantastic, and not like she had been eating 5000 calories a day and not exercising for the past year. It was wonderful to realize she was in good shape, rather good shape, actually, and the awfulness of the past two weeks was due entirely to chest gunk, sitting too much, a pollen overload, and entirely too much smog. Oh, sweet Houston.

Theo finished proofreading a friend's paper, and, instead of finishing her Powerpoint, decided to dither awhile in the decidedly more alluring pages of the Internet. She made herself a cup of milk tea (a brand she'd not tried before), added a healthy dose of chocolate caramel creamer, and took a sip. Her eyes widened, and she set the mug down in alarm.

It tasted like a glazed donut.

__________

Curiously enough, as I began to type this post, Bach's "Double Allegro" randomly came on iTunes - the same song to which I wrote the first Theo. Odd...

Huh?

I had an interesting morning. Let me explain. My XC team was supposed to have practice at 6:30 this morning. I did not get to bed until 11:30 last night, exceedingly late for me. Alright, rather late. Exceedingly late is past midnight. I mentally slapped myself about eight times when my alarm went off at 6:10. I laid in bed for another minute, debating whether I should say to heck with it and purposefully skip practice for the first time. I decided that, since this was the first official practice since the season ended a couple weeks ago, I should drag myself out of bed.

Berating myself for staying up so late, I crawled out of bed (technically, out from under my bed, but that's another story), and turned my phone on as I slouched into the bathroom. My phone beeped. I checked the text message.

"Practice has been cancelled because of the rain, if you're on campus, you can meet to run at 6:30."

Operative word: can. Not 'will' or 'should' or 'must'. I said a prayer of thanksgiving, shut the lights off, crawled back into bed, drew up the covers, and promptly fell asleep.

And had a rather odd dream.

In this dream, the father (who I've never met) of one of my classmate's had the codes to set off nuclear weapons, and planned to direct them at some other country to start a war between that country and the US. I somehow knew about all this and got scrambled copies of all the control codes. Somehow my grandfather used an old military cipher to find out the code that would disable the bombs.

Now the part that still makes me grit my teeth a little. I thought that this classmate was clueless to his father's evil scheme, and was in some kind of danger. In real life, this person is rather intelligent, and he was in the dream too...perhaps just naive. So I tried protecting him, only to find out later he was freaking working for his dad the whole time. The only reason he was being my friend was to find out if I was the person who intercepted those codes.

So...um, at this point I punched him. Knocked him out, actually. And called him something I've never said in real life. Perhaps it was a bit like this dream, because most times in dreams, something weird always happens, and I can't do what I want to. Nope. I totally knocked this kid's lights out. Eventually I managed to defuse the bombs or something like that, and I woke up, wondering what the heck I just dreamed, and what it meant, if anything.

Because I have to say, if there was any person I might want to punch at some point in the future, it would be him.

I just reviewed the whole post to make sure that if this person decided, after this long, to read my blog, he would not be able to tell to whom I am referring. 'Cause that could just be bad, you know?

My View On Too Much Homework and Living Life

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Theodosia. She found her name absolutely contemptible and very English, like a high lace collar that had been so overstarched it could stand on its own. As the rain fell down gently, she looked from her high window, across the pond to the parking-lot opposite. She saw two or three people huddled beneath their umbrellas, walking quickly to their automobiles and scurrying in. She saw rain dance on the shallow puddles spreading across the cement. She saw a little silver car nip out of the parking lot and a curvy red one glide in, as if they, too, were anxious get get out of the rain. She saw steam rise sullenly from a building far away. She saw a security man in a golf cart buzz through the parking-lot, disappearing between the two apartment buildings. She saw all this happen, while listening to the Allegro Movement from Bach’s Double Concerto.

She wished terribly to be outside, feeling the rain on her face, inhaling the cool breeze that doubtlessly roamed the campus, and wanted nothing more but to press her nose against the window like a small child and continue watching.

But no. She sighed and looked away from the lead sky, rippling with clouds and adventure, and to the book sitting sullenly on her lap. “Lucretius: On The Nature of Things” glowered at her in white and red letters against a black background. How horrible! Would it not be better, she thought, to experience nature and its things, rather than only read about them? Would she not better understand the true sense of rain as she felt wetness trace her face, not by a textbook informing her rain was a three-atom structure, composed of hydrogen and oxygen? Instead of being told the universe was made of the solid and the void, couldn’t she just look at bubble wrap and understand?

Theo huffed, glared at the book, and opened it to chapter four, scanning the overview of the chapter.

Theo blushed a lovely shade of red, much like Heinz 57 or a ripe cherry, coughed twice, and revised her opinion. Perhaps she had been overhasty in her judgment. Some things, it seemed, were better to be read about than to learn about by experience at the current moment in time.

Odds and Ends

A list of assorted randomness:

1. I am still alive, and feeling bad I haven't posted in a week.

2. Allergies are kicking my behind - I think I've gone through two boxes of Kleenex in the past three days. No joke.

3. I got 12 gallons of gas for 23.50 today. Big yay. I don't remember the last time gas was under 2/gallon.

4. Apparently the Goldfish mascot is named Finn. All you Shannon Hale fans: is this not, at the least, disturbing, and at the greatest, heresy?

5. I like dark chocolate. White chocolate is beyond my power to describe. Cuileann did it nicely here. I agree with her whole-heartedly.

6. This is hilarious. I've watched it four times and still crack up.

7. I really want this for Christmas.

I'm back!

The cross-country team went to Orem, Utah (about thirty minutes outside Salt Lake City) for the last meet of the year. And oh, oh, my stars, it was beautiful. I mean, the trees there? Get this - they turn colors in fall. In Houston? The trees do this painful molt of leaves that go straight from green to brown. And when they're piled on the ground, they don't make that beautiful papery whisper when the wind blows or crunch under your feet. No. It's humid here. The soggy leaves cling to the ground. And that's not accounting for the pine trees, which are green year-round.

And the sky...yes, there were mountains, but I could see so much sky. The buildings/trees suppress it here. Clouds rolled across the sky. Cumulus clouds, and then over the mountains, some of those amazing pancake-flat clouds I don't get to see very often. The breeze this morning made me shiver, but what a wonderful shiver!

Enough raving about the beautifulness. (Or beauty, if I must be grammatically correct). The race was 6k (almost four miles), I'm only used to 5Ks (a tad over three miles), Houston is at 279.4 feet altitude (approximation), and Orem is 4500. I'm okay with how I did, but it hurt so badly to finish that race. Enough said. It's over. Next year the conference meet is in New Jersey. Not sure about the elevation there.

So, this is all I have written on Moonlight. Please be satisfied. I haven't had doodly-squat time to write this last week. Maybe tomorrow...

____________________________


I run into the building, the main hall ceiling stretching two stories above me. The hall itself is ominously empty, with muffled sounds seeping through the theatre doors to the left. My backpack jounces my spine as I tug at one of the doors. My watch’s tiny electric soul chose today to depart its metal body. Hence, my nap intended for a half-hour tripled. And now I’m late for convocation, which I must attend for my freshman orientation class.

The door gives, and I slide into a dimly lit passageway that runs along the left side of the theatre. People stand on the stage, dressed in floor-length robes like something out of a Presbyterian choir. One that can’t afford matching robes. Not sure what that’s about. In the back row, a flash of red fabric catches my eye amidst various colors of T-shirt backs. An empty seat. I force a smile and slip into the aisle, murmuring apologies as I try not to break any toes. If you’re short and want to be tall, let me warn you, size ten feet are curses.

I let my backpack hit the floor as I turn and sit. And now I feel paranoid that everyone is looking at me. No one is, actually. At least, not on this level. I’m sure the people in the upper level enjoyed my fumbling. Yawning, I slouch in my seat. Bad habit, but this is a new building, and these are – I snuggle a little deeper – oh yes, nice seats. The only thing keeping me awake is the air conditioning. September in Houston is just an extension of summer, and it is hot outside. The cold air on my face keeps me from nodding off.

A guy starts on the piano, playing some funky piece I’ve never heard before. I nod, eyelids drooping. Not my favorite kind of music, but better than the organ I could hear through the –

A scream blasts through the speakers, and I sit bolt upright. My heart slams against my chest, and it takes me a minute to realize the sound comes from the woman standing center stage. Her periwinkle robe ends a few inches above her ample ankles, and her mouth forms an O. I suck in a breath. Apparently the opera woman of last week has returned. “Oh my God,” I mutter.

Some guy to my right glances my way and whispers. “I don’t think you’re supposed to say that in church.”

The Hispanic voice catches my interest just as much as the comment. I send my gaze his direction. He has a half-smirk, but the rest of his expression says he’s also recovering from the operatic shock. I roll my eyes, and he returns his attention back to his Bible. Oh. My bad. To the
Sports Illustrated in his hands.

I endure the performance by glancing around. Most people look befuddled, as if they aren’t sure whether to be awed or laugh. I’m frankly bewildered as to why anyone thinks opera would interest college students. And the speakers are cranked so high my head is beginning to throb.

As the singer holds onto one last high note, I hear someone cuss further down the row. I tilt my head to the right. The Hispanic guy has one hand on his head, or, rather, the flat-brimmed gangsta hat on his head, and one clutching a tennis ball. “What the hell?” He twists in his seat and glares at the upper seats, searching each row. His eyes narrow on a particular point.

I can’t help it. I lean that way and whisper, “I know you’re not supposed to say that in church.”
By the time he looks my way, I’m focused on the speaker, my eyes wide. I didn’t realize convo could be this entertaining.

When the service ends, I file out and walk diagonally across the parking lot to The Lake House. Don’t get any ideas. This sounds like a high-class blue-blood dorm, or the name of some MTV series that involves a wealthy private school and rich demoralized students. Sorry to get your hopes up, people, but this is a Baptist school. (Or Babtist, as some call it.) My guess is I just haven’t heard about the stuff that goes on past midnight. No one’s gotten busted for having alcohol on campus – yet.

Anyway, The Lake House is the newest dorm. My home now. I walk through two sets of glass doors, which appear to be working today, and to the elevators, both of which also appear to be functioning. A miracle. For a new building, The Lake House has some reoccurring technical issues. They must still be working the kinks out. I join the edge of the little crowd waiting to board the next elevator. The red arrow flashes, something dings, and the doors slide open. I shuffle in, placing myself in the right corner near the control panel. Someone’s already punched six, so I check to see if I know anyone here.

A male voice outside the elevators sounds as the doors slide shut. “Hold it!”

I thrust my hand between the doors, which shudder and reverse course. Through the widening gap, I see dark jeans and a white polo shirt. Ironed, if I’m not mistaken. Some of these guys know how to dress themselves and oh, how I appreciate the effort.

He jerks his head in a nod as he slides in. “Thanks.” He presses two.

I cough as the doors clang shut. “Second floor? I risked amputation so you could go up one lousy floor?” I get a good look at the ungrateful wretch.

Wowza. A hot ungrateful wretch. I know others who would think he just looked pale. But the whole combination of white skin, dark hair, and dark blue eyes I personally find attractive. (You. The ones who got stuck on ‘hot’ and ‘pale skin’. Get your minds out of the best-seller list and quit thinking about the hot vampire. I refuse to mention his name, because every teenage female in the United States knows it. Many of them dream about that name, often attached to their own.)

Now that I look, he totally spent some quality time and gel on that hair. I’m interested. Unfortunately, he looks like an upperclassman. Maybe I look like a sophomore. I could. If I’d bothered to put on a speck of makeup this morning. I curse my broken alarm.

The doors opened on the second floor as he answers, with zero interest in the aforementioned dark blue eyes. “Not when I have shoes.”

I frown and glance at his socked feet. Real black socks, not athletic socks. (Confession: I wear athletic socks with nice shoes when I’m wearing pants and boots. It drives my mother crazy.) “Why don’t you have-”

The doors close before he can answer.

“Shoes,” I say, feeling like I’m delivering the punch line to a lame joke.

The girl on my left catches my eyes and laughs. “Okay, so that wasn’t weird.”

I shake my head. “Who knows?" I would like to find out.