IN CASE YOU LIVE UNDER AN INTERNET ROCK.


As always, I'm rooting for my girl Hermione. Although I'll be honest in saying that ever since they started throwing Katniss in there I've had conflicting emotions.

Anyone happen to have any interesting resources for making masquerade masks, or decorating them? Or a site/book/something for inspiration on styles? Going to possible be making a great deal of them for a wedding next year. My Google Fu is helping me a lot but I'm wondering if any of you have ever dealt with a similar project.

On another note, did I gush about how much I loved the last episode of The Vampire Diaries? They killed off the character I found most useless and they brought back Queen Katherine! Ah mah gawd, it's like Julie Plec read my demands on Twitter and decided to give in.

I'm about to start reading The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making which I have heard is completely awesome.

I just finished reading Every Day by David Levithan, which was also awesome but also not as fully developed as it should've been. I think he handled the execution of such a crazy premise really well, but in terms of how he handle the progression of his plot he kind of ends up flopping a bit. It was interesting to note that some of the bodies, or the lives A inhabited in the book were a bit uncomfortable for some of my fellow book club members to read. There's a transgendered character, for example, and lots of gays.

And I think Levithan definitely wanted to make people aware of their discomforts if they were put into the shoes of a transgendered person, but I'm not sure some members really got that point beforehand. Others clearly did, which was awesome.

My only issue with the bodies he picked was with the one obese character Levithan chose. I honestly didn't enjoy the way that character was handled, it wasn't really clear the point that the author was trying to make. I think I only came away with the idea that obese people make other people uncomfortable and... that's it. Which is a shame because throughout the book I was like Yay Gay People! Yay Trans People! Yay Minorities! Yay People With Mental Health Problems! And then it all came to a halt with the one obese character. Tsk, tsk tbh.

On another subject: I'm nearly done with Frankenstein, which is not as awesome as I wanted to be but is still pretty good. Lots of wretchedness to be had, although Frankenstein himself is a jackass and I regularly want to reach into the book and smack him upside the head.

Keep in mind that I have a cold and just recovered from a fever when you read this. I can't really defend my writing in this post. Not that my writing is usually something to be praised, trololol.

So I was randomly thinking just now about the reason I tend to hate romantic comedies. I think the reason others tend to hate them is because of the sappy predictability, which turns me off too-- unless it's Love, Actually because that movie is greeeeaaat. But the reason I tend to hate them is because of all this Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus nonsense that romantic comedies throw about. I've grown up all my life having relationships with men and I've hardly ever felt like omg these men-things are so different from us women-things and it annoys me that films, a type of media that people absorb a little too deeply, tend to portray us as polar opposites.

I mean yes, there are differences. I can name a few when talking about brain and behavioral patterns alone. Generally speaking, women are better at multi-tasking but often suck at focusing on one project, and generally speaking men are better at focusing on one project but suck at multi-tasking. Women bond better through conversation, men bond better through activity. Men and women generally tend to specialize in using different lobes of the brain, meaning we can specialize on the different tasks those lobes control-- although that doesn't we're limited to only those tasks.

What was my point? Oh yeah-- romantic comedies take that kind of thing and blow it crazily out of proportion, and then you've got regular people mimicking it all, making things worse than they already are. In my opinion, there aren't enough people pointing out that we're more alike than we are different. Sure, Kevin's not the best conversationalist, whereas I am, but where did I learn my conversational skills from? My dad and my brother.

This actually kind of reminds me of a video I saw a couple of days ago. Actually, a few videos. The first one was Gay Men Will Marry Your Girlfriends, which was hilarious and well done. The second was Straight Men Respond to Gay Men etc. and the third was Straight Women respond to etc. My main issue with the Straight Men one, because it really isn't funny and is more or less made up of jerkass, stereotypical crap that you'd see in a romantic comedy. Also it entirely misses the point of the original video, which was at it's heart about legalizing gay marriage. The second video instead seems to focus on the surface joke about marrying straight men's girlfriends and takes a sort of defensive, whatever-we-don't-care-you'll-hate-it-anyway response. Look at it like this:
Gay guy: If you don't support gay marriage, I'll marry your girlfriend!
Straight guy: Go ahead, marry her, I don't care.
Gay guy: Seriously dude? That's not the point, I want your support for gay marriage. I was just trying to offer it up it a way that was funny.

And the third video, the Straight Women one, borders on going "You men suck!" and bringing it back to "Yay, gay marriage!" And then I think they kind of get their points mixed up at the end. Like, gay men want support for gay marriage and don't actually want women but will threaten to marry them, but straight men don't get that point and just go on the defensive, inviting gay men to marry their women and noting that they'll hate it, a point that then offends straight women who know gay men don't really want them and thus decide to go at it alone as a way to avoid both groups but then offer that going at it alone really means becoming lesbians for the entertainment of men? Something like that.

Anyway, those were my thoughts. I love that first video, hate the second, and am not sure what to think of the third, but I should get back to bed now because I'm feeling dizzy.

I am actually making my way through books now and easily reading/listening to one after another. I just finished Daughter of Smoke and Bone for example, and it was so, so good. I am a sucker for things in which HORRIBLE SAD THINGS HAPPEN and this is one of those books. I would really love it if this actually got turned into a movie, so long as they don't dumb it down. The world-building is complex enough that I could see filmmakers trying to cut a lot of that out.

I'm reading Frankenstein now, and will start the sequel to Daughter of Smoke and Bone after that. I'm going to try to balance my reading out a bit this year, as a sort-of-resolution. I read a lot of YA because it's the genre I'm the most interested in, but I do want to hit up more classics and non-fiction. Cats for Dummies is in my currently-reading pile, for example. (I can hardly ever stick to one book at a time, so yeah, there's a pile.)

I finished Anna Karenina some days ago, it was too long for my liking but I did enjoy it, especially the ending. I couldn't really stand Levin throughout the whole thing, but Anna was never boring for a second. If I could cut out a ton of Levin chapters I would, because I didn't really need to know that much about mowing grass.

Christmas was actually quite nice for our family, we got together and exchanged gifts, with no one being clearly disappointed by anything. I think it's a little more tense lately because the family as a whole still isn't used to my brother's "new" family. Nor is my brother's family used to us. Everyone's had a moment in which they behaved like an ass in the past two years, but this Christmas went very smoothly, I'm glad to say.

My only serious stress right now is really about money. We spent so much on Timon that when Lady (my sister's cat, the Evil Cat) started getting sick shortly after Timon died we started freaking out about the cost of taking her to the vet. I told my sister to make her eat pumpkin puree, and that seems to have settled whatever issues her stomach was having at the time. Now though, something is wrong with Pebbles, her legs keep failing her. I think she's been a bit better this past week, but I doubt it'll go away entirely. I found a treat that has high levels of glucosamine and chondroiton, which is what you need with joint issues, and I think that might be helping a little. Here's to hoping, anyway.

Oh, and I'm not sure I really have any serious resolutions this year. As usual I have my reading goal on GoodReads (80 this year) and I intend to keep a more regular exercise routine (up from last year's resolution to exercise at all). I'm going good so far, I'm nearly done reading Anna Karenina and I've just come back from a jog. I should maybe put more thought into my resolutions, maybe for another post.

In my last post I mentioned that Timon had been seriously ill, and that I was preparing myself for having to put him down because I more or less knew it was coming. Well, it did, on Wednesday, and my family has been pretty gloomy since.

I think it's particularly hard to lose him because-- well, for one thing he was 17, and that's damn old, but especially because he was a very big presence in the house. Now, when I say this cat was vocal, I mean this cat was freaking vocal. Timon knew how to tell you he wanted attention, food, petting, water, etc. He knew how to tell you when he was happy and when he was really grouchy (his grouchy meow was much more common in his old age. Basically, imagine Grandpa Simpson in cat version, "I'm cold! This food is too hard, my teeth hurt! There are too many ugly children in your neighborhood!"). So you can imagine how often we heard from him on a daily basis, and how odd it is now to be at my parents' house and not hear his meows.

He was born at my parents' house when I was a kid, and he was the only one of his mom's litter to survive this long. The others ran away or became ill or were adopted by others, it was actually on he and his mother that stayed with us. His mother died a few years ago, while I was in North Carolina, also from complications that come from old age. She was more like your quintessential cat, inclined to be left to her own devices and such. Barnaby and his sister Marceline sometimes remind me of them now, especially since Barnaby has developed his own formidable vocal skills lately ("Pay attention to meeeee!" "I wanna go outside!" "Feed me, feeeed meeeee!" "Are you awake?"). It's especially comforting to have Barnaby now, because of that.

One of my favorite things about his vocal skills was that he seemed to really enjoy going into the bathroom, the bath tub specifically, in order to just meow. I think he liked the way his meows echoed in there. I suppose it was his version of singing. I especially appreciated his knowledge of this when he used the fact that his meows echoed in there to get my attention early one morning, several years ago. I had been sleeping in my room when I heard his meows in the bathroom, and I remember at first dismissing them because he always did that. He meowed again though, and I realized something was off, his meows just sounded so sad and that immediately alarmed me. When I walked into the bathroom I found him on the floor, completely unable to lift himself up. He was just splayed out on the tile, unable to do anything but meow pitifully. I honestly thought he was about to die on me then and there. We took him to the vet and it turned out he'd caught something and had gotten severely dehydrated. He stayed overnight with an IV hookup and was just about good as new when we picked him up the next day. I had always thought it was amazing he managed that, considering how near dead he was, it left me wondering how he dragged himself to the bathroom in the first place. I mean, it's especially odd since lots of cats will feel the inclination to hide themselves when they feel ill, not to cry in the one place they know they'll be heard by everyone.

He was such a strange cat. He liked ice cubes in his water. He mostly didn't care about the other pets, except for Pebbles, the only other Old Pet. He enjoyed getting his ears licked by her.

None of my family members wanted to face having to put him to sleep, since it was made clear his kidney failure was irreversible. I picked him up from my mom's house early Wednesday morning and took him myself, with Kevin there for support. I made sure to stay with him the whole time, we told them we'd be present while they put him to sleep. When we went into the room, the technician told me they'd have to take him to the back for a second to put in the catheter on his paw. I asked if I could go, they said I couldn't, so I warned them he'd cry. Sure enough, he cried the whole way and only calmed down when they brought him back to me. I made sure I was the only thing he could see-- that I was the last thing he'd see-- so he wouldn't be aware of them injecting him. Watching the life go out of my 17 year-old cat is probably the hardest thing I'd ever done. At least with Buster the choice was taken out of my hands.

I just keep reminding myself that we always did our best to care for him, and that 17 years is a good run. I don't want to be maudlin, it always seems to come off that way when I talk like this about my pets, but it does hurt to think about Timon. I'm just going to do my best to focus on everyone else, especially at this time of year. The whole ordeal has made me a bit tired these days, but what are you gonna do? It's a part of life, unfortunately.

Been trying not to look too closely at any posts on FB or Twitter about the shooting unless it's about factual news, not speculation. There's been too much finger-pointing, and waaaay too much simplifying of the whole tragedy. In my opinion, it is not just the guns, not just mental illness, not just bad parenting, and not just the media. It's all of it and more, and there's no way we'll get anywhere if we assume otherwise.

One of the unfortunate things that happens in this kind of situation is that you get a lot of intelligent people behaving like idiots privately and publicly. It's a little known fact that the more intelligent you are the more biased you are likely to be, and therefore, the more close-minded you become. I believe most people that I know to be intelligent people, and I hope dearly that a tragedy of this degree gives them some sense of humility when they enter into a serious discussion on the topic. My best suggestion before you get to talking about anything is to do your research on the handling or mental health and gun control in this country, because there's a heck of a lot of misinformation being tossed around. It may also enable you to contact any representatives, so that you may express to them what you want to change in your state/country.

In other, still sad, news: I had to take our cat, Timon, to the vet today. He's 17 years old, and his health has been slowly deteriorating the past year. Today I noticed he was dehydrated, and my mom then informed me that he hadn't be eating right. It turns out he's got the first symptoms of kidney failure, and he might be too old to make it at this point. He's staying at the vet overnight, and I'm going to check on him in the morning to see how he's doing. The vet says he's got about a 50/50 chance, which is enough for me because I'd been trying to prepare myself for his death for a while now. Hopefully he'll make it for a little longer, but if not, at least he made it this far. After all, 17 isn't a small number for a cat. So, there's that.

Some spoilerishness ahead, y'all.

I don't know if it helped or made things worse that I spent the last month re-watching the LOTR trilogy over and over again. I really liked The Hobbit but it did not live up to my expectations. Something, and I can't really express what, was off. It was as though the editing lacked finesse, and since I deeply love the first trilogy for its finesse, this was a pretty big deal to me.

For example, there's this scene with Thorin in which he gets up from that tree that's about to tree that's about to fall off that cliff and-- well, I had to try not to laugh. It was trying so hard to be epic that it was funny. And I mean that's weird coming from the makers of LOTR because there's nothing but well done epicness throughout those films. So why'd this scene-- and other scenes-- look so forced?

Aside from that, it was a fun movie and I loved a lot of different bits. I think the one part I loved the most was the part with Gollum in the cave. It was so perfectly done, I wish I could just watch that part over and over again.

I am still very excited for the next one even if watching this one made for some awkwardness throughout.

You know those holiday packages with the sausages and cheeses and crackers and stuff? Kevin got me one of those for my birthday because I LOVE THOSE THINGS. They are SO BAD for you and yet they are SO DELICIOUS. The awesome part though? The set came with a tiny cutting board and a tiny meat cleaver. A TINY MEAT CLEAVER. So cute and so dangerous, I love it!

For my birthday we decided to go to a restaurant and then go mini golfing. I had wanted to go see Anna Karenina but we decided against it for several reasons. One of them being that I haven't finished the book. It just takes forever to get to anything that really matters to the overall plot. I mean I'm enjoying it, but I can really do without an entire chapter (and then some) on mowing grass. Still, I am nearly done so I should be able to watch the movie soon.

Oh, and I've started watching Twilight again, for the second or third time. I can never finish that movie, but this time, in bits and pieces and with alcohol, I'm gonna try.