No, not National Zucchini Day, and it’s a little late to be celebrating Christmas in July.

It’s WCC’s August Writer’s Workshop, where the objective is to write a blog entry everyday for the month of August. After a seven-month hiatus– and a two-week stint in the middle of Yosemite– this may be one of the more difficult literary journeys I’ve taken. Yes, even more topsy-turvy than the publication snafu surrounding the high school newspaper column piece about people getting it on in the girls’ bathrooms in the E building.  (But it did get published! Thank you Tinker v. Des Moines!)

A friend of mine did NaNoWriMo this past November and completely put me to shame. If she can write an entire novel in one month (brilliant!), then I can surely blog everyday for the better part of four weeks.

I’m trying to decide on how I should get four weeks in of straight blogging. Should I start a little early? Should I attempt to blog via carrier pigeon? Or should I totally cheat and just blog for half a month?

Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Cheating isn’t an option! I’ll blog, I’ll do it! I’ll be the little train that could, or tried, at the very least.

Still, I’d like to think of this weekend of blogging as a pre-workshop interlude. I can completely justify my procrastination: this year, August 31 falls on a Monday. If I don’t jump ship and start swimming for shore until Monday, then everything will fall into place easier so I can…allow more time for drafting and revision, right? Oui? J’ai raison, n’est-ce pas???

I’ve come to a compromise. While I’m (let’s admit it) horrible at keeping time in the blogosphere, I never, ever fail to write (or think about writing! surely that counts–?) in my journal. In planes, trains, automobiles, Girl Scout camps and bathrooms, I’m constantly writing about something. When I’m not near my journal, I feel like I’m a deviled egg without paprika. Sometimes, I wish I could just write down everything and use it for material for the gigantic screenplay I’m writing about, well, life (sans Eddie Murphy and Martin Laurence), or something like it, in which I use an excessive amount of, well, commas, quotation marks, and “sarcasm”.

Okay, that was weak. I’m just warming up, so gimme a break. I’ve only started writing things fit for publication this past semester, and I’m really, really rusty. I’d better get better, quick. I’m planning on contributing to The SeeSaw, Palaver. I’m also helping start up an undergraduate research journal at USC, and I suspect that my excellent friend and I will be responsible for the initial editing, so… I need to quit slacking.

I know what you’re thinking. Dood, it’s still July. Calm. Yourself. Now. But, that’s the thing. I’m a typical American, maybe even an atypical California girl (I can’t surf, I don’t engage in surfer talk, and I don’t live all that close to a beach). Sometimes, I feel like relaxation is a state of mind that I only reach asleep in bed or when I’m dead (d’you you like the rhyme? do you?!?). Of course, this is horrible for my frazzled, frazzled nerves, and, hell, I’m not even twenty yet.

I should end here. The house is starting to warm up. We’re conserving energy by windows on the sides of the house at certain times of the day (passive cooling, anyone?), and it’s working quite well in these 100-degree dog days.

Speaking of ovens that aren’t really ovens, another link for your perusal: Car Cookies.

That’s my exit. Gotta run!

-l.l

For a week or two, I’ve been waiting for the entire bunch of golden, curved fruits to lose their luster and for their skin quickly shrivel and darken to an almost sinister brown-black hue. I hunted for the perfect walnuts to complement their intense, buttery flavor (that once hinted of a balmy Ecuadorian day, I’d like to think) and carefully chopped them into perfectly angled slivers. My sugar, butter, eggs, baking powder and soda came together in what was, at first, a recipe that someone somewhere had masterminded at some time, and then was quickly improved upon.

The two bananas became three, the 5 1/2 tablespoons of butter doubled, and cinnamon and honey somehow worked its way into my batter. Crumbly batter the consistency of “brown sugar”? Pah. My batter was a beautiful, daffodil yellow color that reminded me of the sun.

The Joy of Cooking brings joy into my life (me = FOODIE), but the volume didn’t say anything about this lovely smell that is wafting into my bedroom and throughout my apartment and replacing all of my rational thoughts with the singular longing of hunger.

My stomach is singing. . .

I’ll post the recipe after I try some. I need to conduct a, er, quality control check first. It wouldn’t do to distribute a crappy new recipe, right?

[5 minutes later]

I pulled it out of the oven, and I’ve realized that it’s too beautiful to cut. I’ll have to get someone else to dispatch my warm bundle of joy for me because I just can’t bring myself to dissect these beautifully crunchy crags that were once the golden banana batter that I nurtured and churned into something extraordinary.

Success.

I couldn’t resist. I think that the thing deserves to have its picture taken.

Hurray for making breakfast tomorrow! Now, I guess I’ll make dinner?

…frozen burrito time!

I am a night creature, and last night, I spent six hours in Leavey Library studying my butt off. I just…I feel so proud. Usually, I can only concentrate on something for two or three hours, and then I HAVE to go and distract myself to do something else.

But no.

I barricaded myself in a study room, grabbed my enviro book and reader, and burned rubber (eraser). After I was done, the whiteboards were covered in multitudes of beautiful cereulean dry-erase notes on population density, Malthus, and exhausted ecosystems. Dude: I even used calculus to illustrate an idea in my notes. Rate of change, baby, rate-of-change.

It was incredible how it was so quiet. Whenever I’m in the library, I’ve got the bad luck of always being near someone who doesn’t know which floor is the “quiet” floor and which floor is the “if you so much as breathe loudly, I will smite thee” floor. (I’ve had yet to smite anyone, but I came pretty damn close during finals week one semester…)

Silence is so strange, so funny, so futile, so finite here.

I come from a suburban neighborhood that’s so quiet, you can hear someone’s shoes tapping on the sidewalk as the sound echoes off the houses. Whenever I come home and visit my family, I feel lonely and hollow because there’s no one around.

I relish being alone– my idea of paradise would be camping in the wilderness, which I’m looking forward to doing this spring!– but a neighborhood that isn’t bustling with some activity is now an idea that’s completely foreign to me.  The rows and rows of houses on each block of my Suburbia begin to feel like shells of the people that once lived there. Sometimes, I hear children out in the street (mostly the especially mischievious kids next door, who were detonating homemade bottle bombs on the sidewalk when I was at home last) or the hollow calls of the Santa Ana winds… but when I go out for a walk, I am usually slapped with silence.

There’s a different kind of silence in Los Angeles. People walk/run/jog/bike/pogo from place to place while talking/laughing/singing/texting on their Bluetooths (Blueteeth?)/Blackberrys (Blackberries?)/iPhones (Apples?) like it’s nothing. We sing, we play, we curse, we tease, we catcall.

The silence is still there, filling in the cracks of conversations. The little pause between the deeep breath we take before asking someone out for dinner. The brief quarter-rest between the crashes of each wave at Santa Monica. The empty words we say to each other that don’t mean a thing that might as well have been silence because they were too grotesque to be considered noise– heaven forbid, music…

Maybe this is why I’m a night creature: the world drops a a couple of decibels after the sun sets.

It’s a beautiful thing.

So far, I feel optimistic about this semester, which is really saying something considering that I felt hesitant about starting the fall semester this past August– and it ended up being a pretty dismal semester.

Self-actualization? To an extent, although there were quite a few things that happened (including one major one that overshadowed all of the rest) that I couldn’t really control. After awhile, I felt tired and self-defeatist and I was really to give up, drop out, move on, transfer, get OUT of Los Angeles, travel abroad…or at least take a semester off.

But I’m here. And I’m ready to try again.

I didn’t know that *Starbucks* could make you sick. Really? Honestly? How can you mess up a latte that badly?

Errrgh.

And that I’ll be able to have my own room back, if only for a little less than a month.

I will miss my freedom (e.g. the ability to come and go at 5 a.m. in the morning if I good and well please) and my kitchen and my privacy, but it’ll be nice to be back and in the middle of what solitude can be garnered in the midst of the usual insanity that is the holiday season. It’s important to look at the glass half full, right?

In other news:

I have yet to start on my green blog. It’ll probably be a product of WordPress, but that’s probably going to have to wait until the break. However, I am terribly excited! Maybe I will be able to get a certain particularly gifted friend of mine to create a site for me (::nudge nudge::) since I have yet to master the intricate dealings behind website development.

Someday, I will learn CSS/C++/Java? and be a MASTER! Someday.

In the meantime, I study.

Bye bye.

Since I last blogged (excluding the occasional Facebook note), I have gone through so much.

I worked at a camp that summer, and for two and a half months, I chased around girls (it was a Girl Scout camp) who chased me around and called me Blueberry. I rode horses, climbed mountains, slept under the stars and survived an ‘interesting’ (read: insane) camp director– as well as other camp-related drama that I don’t quite feel like elaborating about at the moment. I met young women my age who were just as nutters as I was, and maintained a healthy Trojan-Bruin rivalry the entire time. I ended up doing an eight-clap (*shudder*), but I have since recovered from the shock. I had the time of my life.

My father was diagnosed with cancer, and my family had to learn to deal. School started. I hated my Chem TA, but stupidly stuck with the same section. I felt alone– it felt like everyone in the world was going off in their own direction, and I felt like I was alone. Then, I started to feel like I was being narcissistic for wallowing in my self-pity, and I could slap myself for thinking the thoughts I did during my self-imposed exile from college life as a result. It felt like I missed out on so much while complaining about wanting to transfer. It’s almost funny going through the piles of papers on my desk and counting the unfinished transfer applications, usually covered in frustrated scribbles and dots of ink from dysfunctional blue pens.

I declared a major. I’m environmental studies (with an emphasis in Biology!), and minoring in Peace and Conflict studies, which has to be the most fascinating minor ever. I get to take some awesome electives for both of my concentrations (woot Ecofeminism!), although I’m still tempted to double-major. (This is where the left side of my brain screams, “Tuition!”, and the right side soothingly reasons that I’ll find a scholarship somehow.)

I questioned my sexuality. I could comment on it, but I feel like it’s something that I’ll still be trying to figure out for years to come, so I’ll be like Yahweh and say that I am what I am.

I asked a lawyer from Illinois a question, and he gave me a straight answer. I saw the same man become our next president. At the same time, my heart broke when I saw the same country that had elected this man to be its leader deny so many people an integral, fundamental right that so many had abused and thrown away…

I never did NaNoWriMo, but I have a friend that did (while still being a premed…rock on!), and I am incredibly eager to read her novel.

Speaking of novels (well, short stories), I am finally reading Run by Ann Patchett (go read Bel Canto if you haven’t already!) and rediscovering Roald Dahl. After reading classics like The BFG and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory more times than I can recall, I feel like Dahl’s short stories were written by a completely different person. They’re darkly ironic and funny. In one, titled “An African Story”, an old man tricks a sociopath into being bitten by a lactose-loving black mamba…

I desperately need to catch up on my reading over the break. I’ll have access to a library in my neighborhood over my winter vacation, so it’ll be nice to retreat to the solitude of a book while escaping from the hectic Yuletide craziness that my house usually morphs into at this time of the year.

And so, here I am. Finals have come upon me, I’m trying to find a research project to latch onto next semester (currently interested in conservation biology), and I’m gearing up for Washington for spring break. : )

In the meantime, I’m thinking about starting an environmentally-friendly blog. It feels like there aren’t enough college students at USC that care all that much about the environment, so I’d like to create a blog that links everything together and creates this kind of ‘green news feed’ for LA college students.

I’ve just come up with the idea today, so I’m still working out the kinks. What do you think so far?

I’d still like to keep this blog. It might as well be a private journal, though, because it feels like no one really reads it…

Oh, the joys of anonymity.

Hmm. Since my cousin taught me how to knit over Thanksgiving, I suddenly feel like starting a knitting circle or something. No, I’m not nesting prematurely– it seems like it would be an awesome way to meet people.

Oops– forgot about this assignmnent. Gotta get this thing done tonight!

–l.l

To be honest, I thought that this blog would be finished once I moved to Los Angeles, and I even considered moving this over to WordPress after hearing some advice from a friend. This was back in late November-early December, but my brilliant scheme didn’t get past the “what a wonderful idea!” phase and, well, my schedule got a bit more full.

Let’s see…last blog post since November…what’s gone on since then?

I started school in January, and, so far, it’s been quite wonderful.
I turned eighteen, and I get to vote on Super Tuesday!
I moved out…kind of.
Several of my good friends moved away to go to school.
I’ve logged thousands of hours on Facebook and AIM as a result.
I used video chat for the first time (a monumental event!)
I miss my dog, my baby-boo.
I’m thinking about forgoing journalism.
I packed too much stuff for my dorm room.
I’ve met a lot of interesting people.
One of my professors is a radical feminist. Well, not especially radical, but a feminist. (Hold on to your penises, lads.)
I’m taking French, and it’s freaking awesome.
I live with other people my age, which is pretty awesome.
I miss ‘House’ a lot because I miss ‘House’ a lot.
My procrastination habit is fucking me over.

Like right now.

My problem right now is that I can’t concentrate on this paper because I am hating the prompt…and, for some reason, I can’t seem to organize my ideas. They keep on falling out of my brain like sand in a sieve– I just can’t grasp why.

I don’t know. I don’t need sleep– I slept in this morning until about noon. My sleep debt is paid in advance for the next week, since I did the same on Saturday morning too. Right now, I’d like a nice mug of tea, but I’m afraid it’ll make me doze off a bit. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone home this weekend.

Gross– I think that someone outside just said that they found bugs in their room. If I have to live with roaches in a room that I’m paying insane rent for, I may shank someone, and it won’t be a roach.

There goes that rattling noise again on the fridge. I’d better go.

Au revoir mes amis,

♥ l.l

P.S. GO GIANTS! That was one seriously close game…well done, guys.

Well, I guess it’s back to studying (read: procrastinating) for me. Ugh. I wish I wasn’t here right now, but at home nursing a cup of hot mint tea for my stomach. I think I’ve caught something nasty.

I’m considering switching to WordPress. A friend told me that it was easier to import notes and that the blog format was just… better. Blogger’s alright, but right now, I don’t really have any time to change everything around. It can wait until Thanksgiving, or Christmas, even. However, I do have enough time to write a blog entry. Yes, I’m a hypocrite, and no, don’t sue me, lest I go Typhoid Mary on you and infect you with whatever crappy stomach virus I’ve got that’s making me feel horrible at the moment.

That reminds me of this skit (ergh) that I and a group of my fellow freshmen had to do for a project way back when.

I don’t remember it very well (I think that the memory of the event was so terrible that I voluntarily blocked it out of my memory), but I do recall doing the project on environmental hygiene or something like that, and being forced to play Mary Mallon. (For those of you who don’t know who Mary Mallon is or what typhoid is, click here.)

I do remember that I was supposed to be cooking oversized flapjacks in a little inn in the middle of the woods in a logging camp in the middle of nowhere. All of the loggers were in love with my cooking and wondered where I got the chocolate chips to put in the pancakes. During the entire scene, my hands were under the table, I remember. I pulled my Nutella-covered hands out from under the table, scratched my nose, wiped them on my apron, and asked,

“Eh? What chocolate chips? That sounds delicious!”

Use your imagination…

Oh yes. I played Typhoid Mary, and I played it well. Ugh, the lady in the room behind me is hacking. No wonder why I feel blerrrgh. Time to move to another desk. Well, actually, I have to turn in this computer in a couple of minutes anyway, so I might as well go back to the first floor in a few. Maybe…I can renew it…

Back to work. I can’t afford to miss another day, although I wouldn’t mind not going to class tomorrow.

Oh my GOD! Only a month and a half left…I am soooo terribly excited that it’s terrible and exciting all at the same time. I think my morale just shot up about five happy points. :]

Hm. Maybe I should be a tutor. They seem to be making a killing around here.

(Now, I think I’ll wait and will it to some unsuspecting relative. But, we’ll see.)

Ugh. I just don’t know what it is! It comes and goes. I don’t think it’s the hormones, and I’m not medicated or anything…and I haven’t had a pole rammed through my frontal lobe lately.

Maybe it’s physics? Nah. Not after our professor told us about this. I don’t think I’ll ever look at a shooting star in the same way ever, ever again.

But, wait. Maybe there is an explanation for my melancholy.

Maybe I am mutating into some kind of EMO person?

Well. Me. Emo. Well, now, let’s just see.

I wear black (although, that can’t count too much because it’s fall) a lot, I’m feeling angsty a lot, I think that I attract the emo-tastic members of the opposite sex (at least the ones in the library), I’ve discovered that I like certain aspects of emo music, and…Ron was one of my favorite characters in the Harry Potter.

What…could this POSSIBLY mean!?

I think I’m turning emo-oo-oo, I think I’m turning emo-oo-oo, I really think so.

There is a large spider bite on my forearm. Is it possible that I could be mutating into…Spiderwoman?

I don’t think I’ve ever looked better in Spandex, if I may say so myself.

Oh god. It’s after 1:30 a.m. I’m getting too old for these meaningless (I’ve been staring at my Physics book for the past hour wondering what terrible thing I did in a past life to deserve such karma) all-nighters.

Uhhnnnnh. Time to fall back…more sleep = more happiness?