So Very Dark

So, after I told Heather that we did not have a fluffy blanket of snow over everything from December through February, and that the snow would often flutter down, stay for a day and then melt….some Arctic storm or something hit PA and we have had a consisitant snow covering for the past week or two, accompanied, of course, by temperatures that were in the teens on a warm day.

Of course, we are at a somewhat higher elevation than the city, and only very recently did downtown get any kind of lingering snow…which it now has in the form of slightly dirty slush pushed to the edge of sidewalks, streets and alleys.  Not quite as picturesque as our middle-of-nowhere, woods and trees and cute little dear walking through pristine wilderness.

Anyway, that may all be at an end.

The current temperature, at around mid-day, is 46 degrees…it feels like summer!  Okay, not quite…it’s rather windy out, so it’s more like an annoyingly blustery spring day…but not the bitter heart of winter.

On the other hand, it’s supposed to drop below 20 and snow tonight.

Yes, I know my weather updates are fascinating (blame Heather).

Hey,  it’s not as though I have a wildly exciting day-to-day existance to report on. You guys should know by now that I don’t do anything…

I started back to school last week…so far, the class I’m most interested in is my first — Graphic Symbolism.  It’s a precursor to Corperate Identity and focuses on logos and symbols, with emphasis off of typography.  I’m really enjoying it so far.

<– (i did not design these)

My Electronic Design class is…well, we had one in-class assignment last week which I finished by the time the class was half over, then continued to hang around because I was sure that there must be more for us to do…but there wasn’t.

My photography class mostly irritates me at this point, because I was specifically told that we didn’t need to use film at all, and for the first few classes, we are expected to use film.  If we don’t have a 35mm camera available to us, we can check one out from AIP (for the durration of the class period only and on threat of great retrebution if anything is lost or damaged in any way) but we are, of course, responsible for purchasing film and getting it developed.  And if we aren’t developing it ourselves, why are they making us use film?!  But I haven’t given up hope.  I am have my fingers crossed for learning something interesting.

As for my art history class…well…it could be interesting…except that my teacher rambles and goes off topic so much that I want to strangle him.  And he says ‘class’ a lot…it’s just weird.  There will be no reason for the interjection, but regardless, he’ll throw it into about every third sentence… ‘Alright, Class…what’s interesting about this is…’  ‘The reason I wanted to show you this, Class, is that…’  Also, he pronounces ‘human’ as ‘yuman’, which is one of my pet peeves.

Sorry you asked, aren’t you?  Could have just skimmed the weather and moved on, but noooo….

Nothing else is exciting.  I promise.  My most recent books (Nightwalker by Jocelynn Drake and Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs) did not thrill me, for different reasons.

Nightwalker is a vampire novel, and the first in a series.  It was badly written…I wanted to leave it in a box with a thesauraus and see if the two bred a better book.  It was obvious that it was inspired by many of the books of the genre, like Laurel K. Hamilton’s and Kelly Armstrong’s…a strong female protagonist who gets pulled into something bigger than her day-to-day life and has to fight off and/or make out with bad-guys and possibly stand up to the ruling party of her vampire society…which I have no problem with on principle.  It’s fun fluff reading.  I like Kelly Armstrong, and I liked Laurel K. Hamilton until her books became pure porn with just enough plot to give her characters excuses to have graphic sex with one another…and I realized that she used the same words and phrases to describe EVERYTHING.

However, Drake just…well…she’s not a good writer.  Not only is her prose lacking in variety and flair (with the exclusion of the regular 4 dollar words she throws in, just to prove she can), but her plot and character development would take turns putting me to sleep and driving me to the cross-roads of frustration and…well, boredom.  Nothing ever really happened, even when stuff happened…or maybe it was the fact that by the time the plot moved forward, the sexy vampire just trying to make it on her own had already told the story of what was happening and how and why it affected her deeply, about five times.  Yes, I get it, you were once tortured by evil elves that want to kill everyone and it was traumatic and you don’t remember anything, except for some stuff that you do.  Not even the random make-outs were interesting…they were so…stiff and contrived.  I suppose I feel that the character was never developed enough beyond a cardboard steriotype for me to care what happed to her.

Oh!  The aspect of this book that almost made me want to hurl it at the wall a few times:  there are (of course) regular references to the protagonist’s vampiric strength and grace…which I have no problem with.  Accepted piece of popular vampire mythology.  HOWEVER…when the same character REGULARLY does things like, oh, trip in a fight and fall on her butt?  If you want to establish that your vampires AREN’T stronger and more graceful than your average teenaged girl, that’s fine.  But if you mention (repetedly) how gosh-darn strong and graceful and awesome vampires are….well, don’t have them trip over random rubble while walking down the street and cry over broken nails and cancelled Vera Bradley patterns!

Moving on…

Running With Scissors — if you aren’t familiar with this book (and/or movie), it is Augusten Burroughs’ autobiography of his super messed-up and crazy childhood and teens.  Possibly both his parents, but his mother for sure, were crazy in a very litteral sense.  From descriptions of his childhood habits, I think he also suffered from a bit of the OC disorder.  In his early adolescence, his mother packs him up and leaves him at the chaotic house of her rather unconventional psychotherapist.  Augusten lives there on and off for the next number of years, and his mother even eventually signs over legal gaurdianship of Augusten to the doctor.  This book is largely the chronical of his experience living in Doctor Finch’s house, where it is considered unhealthy to hold anger in or to make people do things they don’t want to.  Where it wasn’t uncommon to find the bones from the Thanksgiving turkey under the bathroom sink months after the holiday had come and gone.

I didn’t think this was a bad book in any way.  It was well written and fascinating…I just didn’t enjoy it all that much.  I found it depressing.  And someone killed a kitty.  I am sure that many people would enjoy this book a great deal (and have, if it’s best-seller status is anything to go by) but…I found it tragic and bleak.