In Exciting Exitementses

(Fast-talking-author's-note: For this post and this post only, you will refer to me as Gollum.)

Is anyone elses excites for the Hobbitses movie?  Come December, you'll find Gollum in a theater against Gollum's will.  Yesssss, Gollum is excites, but the Lord of the Ringses series averaged three and half hourses each.  None can go that long without a bathroom break.  Not only does Gollum hates public restroomses, Gollumses developed a fondness for Gollumses precious pause button.

Anywayses, the writer decide to pay tribute to the Lord of the Ringses movies by writing entire post in Gollum's accent.

Yessss, the upcoming Hobbitses movie has caused some role reversalses in the writerses household.  Normally, writer is the one who drags family to theaterses, but now writerses brother has taken over.  Not only that, writer is now blogging as a creepies, emaciated hobbitses.  And Gollum is youngers now.

(Another fast-talking-author's-note: I cannot go further in that voice.  It strains the brainses)

On another matter, does anyone feel a little deja vu in this matter?  The same thing happened with Star Wars: they made a prologue after making the original trilogy, which now causes a lot of tension among fans.  Which ones are technically "the first"?  Please tell me we aren't going to undergo the same happenings with the Hobbit!  Granted, this time each movie will either have Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit at the front of the title, but it's not much consolation.

And that's all I have to say on the matter.

Just kidding, one more thing: when typing, it's really hard to write like Gollum without Jar-Jar Binks getting in the way.

"Yesss, meesa thinks the Hobbitses movie will be very entertaining!"

The Blogging Process

For those of you who care, care to know, or think knowing will help you care, this is a post about my personal process for blogging and what an average post goes through before arriving online Monday morning.  This will be a detailed step-by-step process, so get your pencils and/or pens out and prepare to do some serious note taking.

STEP ONE: FORMULATE ROUGH IDEA
This generally happens via embarrassing occurrence to/about my person and/or other person who I may/may not know.

STEP TWO: PONDER EMBARRASSING OCCURRENCE
To know it, you must go back and replay it over and over in your head, no matter the personal humiliation it makes you feel.

STEP THREE: LOG ON TO BLOGGER
Easy enough.

STEP FOUR: HIT THE 'NEW POST' BUTTON
If you start feeling a burn in your hand, push on through.

STEP FIVE: TYPE MADLY
Hit keys.

STEP SIX: VIEW COMPLETED FIRST DRAFT
Some straining of the eyes may occur.

STEP SEVEN: DEVELOP WORK ETHIC FOR BACKSPACE BUTTON
It'll thank you later.

STEP EIGHT: HATE STUPID SECOND DRAFT
Second drafts are always the worst: not bad enough to be an obvious work-in-progress, but too awful to read over without initiating a gag reflex.

STEP NINE: KILL IT
I generally use a blowtorch and the red X in the top right corner.  That's left, for you Mac people.

STEP TEN: RESURRECT IT
Preferably with thunder and lightning for special effect.

STEP ELEVEN: MARRY IT
Optional.

STEP TWELVE: BURN IT WITH FIRE
Blogs are known to cause violent mood swings and often influence hardcore love-hate relationships in their owners.

STEP THIRTEEN: SCATTER ASHES IN THE WIND
Maniacal laughter optional.

STEP FOURTEEN: LIVE IN A CARDBOARD BOX FOR THREE DAYS
You'll spend your time not showering and fretting about how close Monday is.

STEP FIFTEEN: RUN BACK WITH A BROOM AND A LOT OF GLUE
If you scattered correctly, unnecessary parts of the dreaded second draft should have gone to the Alps, leaving you with a presentable third draft.

STEP SIXTEEN: REPEAT NEXT WEEK

***

And that's the basic process of how I meet my mandatory deadline. 

In All Honesty

You know those people who are always saying things like "Well, if everyone were honest, life would be better and we'd all be happier"?

Well, I can honestly say that would only lead to chaos and an unnatural amount of exercise for the unfriend button on Facebook.

After all, if we were perfectly honest, social functions would die with a loud hiss.  Just think of the name tags:

HELLO, MY NAME IS
Tyler, and I'd rather watch teen angst movies than be here

HELLO, MY NAME IS
Ian, and I'm a double-dipper so you might want to steer clear of the salsa

HELLO, MY NAME IS
Lana, and I just got out of prison

HELLO, MY NAME IS
Brigit, and I spent the day wiping toxic waste off a laboratory floor

There are some things we just don't want to know and are better left unsaid.  Besides, if we were honest about what the bean dip really tastes like, we wouldn't get invited back.  And if we're not invited back, then we lose our social lives.  And if we lose our social lives, we become pale hermits who spend their time collecting bendy straws or the like.

I'd rather keep my opinions to myself, thank you.

But everyday parties aside, what about the Super Bowl?  Not that people wear name tags to watch the game, but what about when the room splits in two because people are truly honest about which team they are rooting for?  It turns into a food fight with crushed tortilla chips and double-dipped salsa everywhere.

So if you want to live in a world where no one has any friends and name tags take ten minutes to write, start being truly and undoubtedly honest.  I sort of like things how they are, though.

Besides, eventually, we'd get some stupid "Abe Lincoln" award or something for the most honest celebrity.  No, Britney Spears, I don't want to know the details of your nose job, but thanks anyway.

Ear Buds and their many Technical Difficulties

You know those Apple ear buds?  They're okay.  Mine are too big and people can hear what I'm listening to from five feet away. 

Recently, the grey rubber around the speaker of each bud started to peel off (that's how old they are).  After a while, I got sick of it and removed it because I don't want little rubber pieces floating through my ear canals and into my brain.  Not only would that damage my hearing, this blog would inexplicably become dedicated to the scent of rubber.

So the other day, my family and I headed up into the mountains to canoe.  I took my iPod and started fiddling with it at the gas station.  Since the protective rubber, which holds the speakers to the neck, is no longer in place, I can remove the speakers and pull them away from the neck.  This drags the cord through said neck in the process.  I did so out of sheer boredom.

I can honestly tell you the rubber is there for a reason, and a good one at that.  It holds the ear buds together, and keeps all sorts of assorted garbage away from the wires and such contained within the bud.  Garbage like link, dirt, and earwax. 

Needless to say, ear buds go in ears, where earwax is.  I cleaned the inner rim off with a tissue and restored the yellow color to factory-condition Macbook white. 

After fitting the speakers to the necks again, they promptly fell apart in my hands.

A word of wisdom: if you don't have grey rubber to protect your ear buds from imminent decay, earwax does the job just as well.

The Problem with iTunes

After using iTunes for about three or four years, I've decided why it's unappealing to me.  For one thing, when it's just playing in the background, weird songs come up that I would never listen to under normal circumstances.  They're mostly odd instrumentals, Christian pop, and kiddie songs which have been purchased over the last few years.  Most were bought by my brother, but I'll admit I played a part in it, too. 

Another thing I don't like is that it's hard to expand one's library.  I rarely use the iTunes store because I automatically feel stressed when I step inside.  I'm not sure why.  Therefore, I resort to grabbing mp3 tracks off YouTube and importing them to the iTunes library.  That's a long process, though; one must find the song they want, convert it to mp3 format, and then import it to iTunes.  Plus, a lot of videos have copyrights on them which block the converter. 

So, it's a very long process to get an mp3 track into iTunes.

I think I'll stick with Pandora.  That's not to say Pandora is much better, though.  Users only get a limited amount of skips per hour, and every time you skip a song/change station, you must watch an annoying advertisement (Their current fad: dolphins talking about planes).  And, you have no control over what you listen to next, so you can sit there for hours and not hear that one song you want to.

That leaves me with YouTube.  While it's possible to build a playlist of videos that will play automatically, the creation of that playlist is time-consuming and it's hard to find high-quality videos. 

Of course, there's also Playlist, but I'm not going to touch that.  Talk about your user-hating sites.

To sum it up, I don't use iTunes because I wear out the right key on the keyboard skipping bad music, Pandora is annoying, YouTube is time-consuming, and Playlist is garbage.

I have no idea what I was trying to convey with this post, either.

Drunk Driving and Duck Heads

Hello and happy Monday, my followers! 

Despite the late hour, I am determined to keep my Monday schedule at the cost of anything--not that you can fine me if I'm late. For once, I have a good excuse--I was learning to drive.  In fact, I'm fairly completely almost perhaps sure that drinking and driving is illegal.  Driving and drinking, however, will most certainly put one in jail. 

We made posters in class.  My team's was really crappy.  It did what it was supposed to do, though: covered a blank spot on the wall.  Unfortunately, I have to look at that thing the other two days I go in for class.  At least it's not a photo-poster.  That would be painfully ironic.

Moving on to other matters.

The other day, I found some felt in a drawer.  There were two white pieces, each cut into the same circular shape.  I found two pink pieces as well, which were a little smaller but still circular. 

Long story short, I sewed a duck head.  It was originally going to be a neat little doll, but once I sewed on the eyes, I realized it looked nothing like a doll. 

The thing is, I have no more felt to make a body.  So, I think I'll get more and make it a platypus head instead.  I don't want to make wings.  I really don't like wings.  I can't sew them, draw them, or fly with them.  That's disappointing.

So there's a platypus head in my drawer right now.  It's kind of neat, but I bet it's the last thing people expect to find when they open a drawer.  I certainly don't expect to find any kind of head in a drawer. 

I also learned I hate sewing machines.  With a vengeance.

Seven

This is my seventh blog post.  That's pretty good.  Seven is a nice number.  When I logged on to Blogger today, I was my seventh page view.

A few days ago, it occurred to me that I have a pretty spoiled brain.  Not only does it get to do what it loves (mostly writing) for a good chunk of the day, it has its own blog.  Most of the time, blogs belong to people.  This one, however, belongs to a brain.  Mine.

I wonder what it would be like if someone else had my brain for a short period of time.  I don't think they could handle it.  Even I can't handle it.  For one thing, this poor brain-babysitter would have to put up with constant streams of creativeness, most of which manifest themselves in ideas that, if made into movies, would be really horrible movies.  You might make three cents off the movies in my brain.  Maybe less.  Perhaps you'd simply lose money.

These streams of creativity would be interrupted occasionally by dumb quotes, pictures of cows, and the rare "oh my gosh what day is it I've got to update that blog I have on Mondays because that's the deadline I set for myself and I'm not going to change it because I need to keep it because it is a deadline nonetheless and what am I going to blog about this time nothing is happening in my life that's worth blogging about and if I just typed about my stream of consciousness that would be really boring and people would stop reading my blog and that's not good at all and plus my stream of consciousness is probably very long and winding and  bumps into a lot of walls and who would be reading it and why am I still thinking about this I'll just do it Monday" panic attack.

Anyway, so far my brain is welcoming (post 1), enjoys current pop music (post 2), listens to said music on the radio (post 3), likes to draw parallels (post 4), hates posters (post 5), ponders utensils (post 6), and enjoys pointless summaries (post 7; you are here).

You might say I have a reader-welcoming, music-listening, radio-addicted, parallel-drawing, poster-hating, fork-pondering, post-summarizing brain.  Say that ten times fast without taking a breath.

But again, this is my seventh post.  That's an accomplishment.

Were my blog a calendar, it would be a week long.

Forks

The other day, my father and I got into a very odd conversation.  It was late, so of course our minds were somewhat scrambled and incoherent; I was talking about Google Street View and how neat it was, but then we found ourselves on the topic of forks.

"Of course, it makes you wonder," I said, "about four-pronged forks.  I mean, clearly, they are forks.  We might as well call them fourks."

Dad looks at me, clearly waiting for the point to be made.  (He cannot see the spelling of my voice, so the "fourk" thing didn't come across well)

And I say: "A three-pronged fork is no longer a fourk; it's a threek."

He's chuckling by that point.

"In fact, to quote a certain man who knew what he was talking about, 'Three tines is not a fork.  Three tines is a trident.  Forks are for eating, tridents are for ruling the Seven Seas.'"  (A tine is a prong on a fourk or threek)

He's chuckling very much then.

"Of course, it makes you wonder," I say again, "about sporks.  Most of them have four prongs, but what about the ones with three?  Are three-pronged sporks actually throrks?"

Okay, he's in stitches by this point.  (Even as I write this, I'm not sure of the existence of three-pronged sporks.)

There's another long pause in conversation, which is filled with laughing from him and a bit of deep thinking on my part.  Then, another enlightened message of utensildom:

"Or are they tridorks?"

I don't know about you, but I think a tridork is a nerd in elementary school with three heads.  Not a three-pronged spork.  Perhaps it's one of those words that has two meanings--like biweekly.  Is it twice a week or every other week?  I mean, who would come up with this jargon?

Apparenly, I do, because I just coined the doubly-meaningful term "tridork."  Good for me.

Posters

I really hate posters.

You might remark, "Why do you say such a thing?  You have a poster in your room!"

My answer is: "It's not a photo."

I mean, how awkward is it when one is trying to read, but peers over the top of the book to find Justin Bieber or One Direction staring them down?  I mean, who wants to see that?  It's extremely stalker-ish and, by all definitions of the word, uncomfortable.

Returning to my poster--it's not problematic for me because it isn't an actual photograph.  The colors have been changed, making it lose its reality factor.  Therefore, I don't mind it.  I don't feel self-conscious around it because my brain does not interpret it as an actual person.

But really, why would anyone truly want a real-looking person like Nikki Minaj, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, BarlowGirl, Gavin DeGraw, Leonardo DeCaprio, or Robert Downy Jr. on their wall?  Staring at them.

Like creepers.

Tim Tebow in the bathroom--watching you--is a strange experience.

I've got a friend who has two full-body, floor-to-ceiling posters of Edward Cullen on her bedroom wall.  Those things are terrifying.  Like, scarier than Signs.  Or Children of the Corn.  Or Simon Cowell (who, I might add, is on posters as well).  Or my dog when you wake him before 8:00.

... I don't go in her room.

Parallels

Apparently, the My Mandatory Brain Thought Blog got over three views last week.  Wheeeeeeee ...

Anyway, someone asked me yesterday what my blog is about (for the sake of stopping identity theft in its tracks, their name shall not be mentioned).

That got me thinking.  So far, I have three posts--four if you count this one--two of which are music-related.  The first is a standard introductory post, meant to be skimmed and/or primarily ignored (how many of you are going to scroll down and read it now?).

Therefore, I decided to draw some parallels.

For you movie watchers, this blog is Temple of Doom--an installment of a series you feel obligated to watch (if only to see what plays out), yet you are unsure if the cruddy sequel is worth it.  You could be spending your time reading other blogs, after all.  It could get gruesome, and sometimes updating when I have nothing to say makes me want to rip my heart out and set it on fire.  (Okay, maybe not ...)

To those of you who read, this blog is a vampire romance novel.  It may have wordy phrases and sparkle occasionally, but ultimately lacks character (duh, it's a blog for crying out loud) and the plot is nonexistent.

And, to the music lovers, said blog is that feeling you get when you're in your car, listening to your favorite song on the radio.  Then, it gets fuzzed over with static.  That happens to me a lot.

There was really no person who asked me about this.  I just wanted to draw parallels.  And it was time to update.

...

... eeeeeeeeeeee ...