Tripping through the wire forests...

This morning I woke up dreaming about my car. Same car, but it had slightly customized controls. Instead of a steering wheel I had a reverse yoke. The gear shift was a flat red button-lever on the right bottom leg of said yoke. Worked pretty well actually. Had to explain it to everyone who got in the car, but that was a small price to pay.
Did you have a good Christmas? I had a good Christmas. Not a bit of snow here, just rain. Gorgeous out last night though. Clear skies, chill air. Been bonding with the dog. Also watching a lot of Animal Planet and Science Channel. Did you know that dragonflies have four wings which they manipulate separately? That's what lets them fly in basically any direction, and pull off the impressive aeronautics that they do.
Have a great New Year everybody!

~ Look, this may seem simple and juvenile, but it's really quite complicated. Now could you hand me that red crayon?" ~
~ Ben
From the mind of Renee.

I'm very understanding...

Some of you may have been wondering what's been going on with the SoF lately. Oh yeah? Well I'm going to talk about it anyway.

First off, we were delighted to bring in fresh talent earlier this semester. Here's a belated welcome to Steven "Angel Hair" and Brant "Rubble". As always you can see their true-to-life profiles on the SoF website, or on the SoF wiki.

We've had a good number of shows this semester and the club has been moved to take part in several charitable works. We're all so very proud.

In other news, we've already begun booking next semester with tentatively firm dates set for our third annual SoF/AOO show (March 1st) and for a return trip to the Towle Theatre in Hammond, IN (February 2nd). That is something that I personally am extremely excited for. Former Fool and current ISU grad student, Alex, will be rejoining us that evening on stage if all goes as planned.

In another area of my life, I am just under my goal of 26,000 words of my novel completed by the end of this year, and hopefully I can finish that up over break. Right now I am going to set the goal of having 39K done by the end of next semester. I am pleased with what I have so far. As I stated before it has been kind of slow lately, but I rather expected that. Apparently most authors hit the doldrums somewhere near the middle of a book and just have to fight through it until another fresh breeze hits the sails.

I've been publishing my ongoing story Knowing Andrew online for 2 months now, and I like it. Though it does take time away from Aiden, I think that any writing practice is good writing practice.

Speaking of writing practice, I am enrolled in a creative writing class (ENGL 205) for next semester. Hopefully that will be fun. I'm also in Abnormal Psych (PSY 350), Motivation (PSY 333), Spanish (SPAN 102), Gender Across Cultures (ANTH 303), and Philosophy of Religion (PHIL 330). A very Liberal Arts heavy schedule indeed. We'll see how that goes for me.

Finals are over for this semester and I think that I did alright. I intend to continue studying Spanish through the break to get the stuff that I failed to memorize during the term down pat, and also to hopefully spend a good bit of time writing.

~ "I'm not tense! I'm just terribly, terribly alert." ~

~ Some character in Touch of Pink

The unnecessary...

So how do you feel about New Year's resolutions? I personally find them inefficient. If I want to resolve to do/not do something I can do it at any point in the year. I suppose that the idea is that you are starting a whole new, heretofore unadulterated, year and thus can leave the past behind you and strike out on a new path, new leaf close to hand. In my personal experience the past is never left behind you.
That sounds rather negative, and perhaps even a tad creepy ("Just what don't you understand about 'Leave me alone!', Past? Don't call me again!"), but I don't mean it that way. To the contrary, without our pasts we would be lost. Not just the good things, but the bad things as well, shape us into who we are. Bad things don't have to be a complete loss. As hard or unpleasant as it may be to face them, they shouldn't necessarily be buried or hidden. Pain can heal, and hurt can teach.
This year, sure I'll make a couple of resolutions, at the least for traditions sake. I will write them down in my journal and a year from now I'll look back and see how I did. If you ever see them you'll find that they tend to be rather vague, and quite often abstract. Hopefully, they'll never, ever take the form of wishing to change the past.

~ "Let no one delay the study of philosophy while young nor weary of it when old." ~
~ Epicurus - Letter to Menoeceus (Diogenes Laertius) 10.112

Contemplation...

I absolutely love this song by one Robbie Williams. He's got the great combination of strong and smooth in his voice which is so wonderful for the classic jazz pieces (I recommend It's Delovely, Ain't Love a Kick in the Head, My Way, and One For My Baby to name a few), but also the versatility to do the more poppy rock songs (I like Something Beautiful). I think you can see both in Angels. It's also great when he sings it in Spanish! I'll tell you one thing; the man has better range than I do.

So, for your viewing pleasure, Robbie Williams' Angels:



In Spanish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnggOwh3RWI

Listen up, we don't have much time...

Let's talk about my literary exploits.
The book is coming along. Slowly. My gosh, slowly. Seems that for the past month or so I've been in a dry spell. And when I say "dry spell" I mean "arid wasteland". But! Last night I pulled it together and wrote another chapter for it. That makes me happy. That also gives me approximately 21K words. If I write another 5K before Christmas I will have met my goal for this year.
In other literary news, I've written 12 chapters of my ongoing story Knowing Andrew (That's http://knowingandrew.blogspot.com kids!) and that's pretty exciting to me. I have my doubts as to how long I can make this particular story line last, but so far I think it's going pretty strong. I like the fact that often it comes down to the day that I'm supposed to post and I have no idea what's going to happen, so I just start writing and the story manifests itself.
I wouldn't call it my best writing by any stretch, but there are parts that I really do like, and it is breaking into a genre/format that I haven't worked much with, so that's exciting.

~ "President Jischke does not touch doorknobs!" ~
~ Preston