Fighting the Current

"hardcover, paperback, juvenile, teen..."

"...read and read 'till your face turns green"

Maybe that should be a jump-rope rhyme. I won't suggest it though. It might actually entice kids to read... Or not. I don't really know how that would affect a kid's mind... I don't think I want to know either.

Wow, two hits. Makes me feel popular. ::rolls eyes::

At least it's better than none.

The letters are rubbing off the keys of my keyboard. The bottom of S is pretty pale. A, H, L, E, D, C, and R are not far behind. Just noticed that.

I had this really good line for a poem in my head earlier and I can't remember the entire thing. I didn't have any paper or else I would have written it down. AH!! Okay, I just remembered the missing word. Now I've gotta write the rest. Or later. Just have to remember the line. "A chorus of unenthusiastic voices..."

I don't know if I mentioned this before, but "Speak" by Laurie Halse Anderson is one of the best books I've ever read. I usually stay away from teen fiction because they are typically romance, but the summary and sample in the front cover were really interesting and I loved the cover (so what about the old saying...). This was not romance, in case you can't tell. Romance inside of another plot or plots adds another dimension to a story (most of the time at least), but by itself... I know that adult romance follows a certain pattern. I can't remember it exactly though.

I usually read sf (note: "sf" is pronounced "sci fi" and refers to science fiction literature; where as "sci fi" refers to movies/tv. Or so someone told me...); or news magazines (US News, Time, etc.); or non-fiction (usually Holocaust, Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures [Maya, Aztec, etc.], or pro- and/or anti-paranormal). Ocassionally I'll traverse beyond those genres and read fantasy, tabloids (Weekly World News is the best. I don't mean to offend anyone, but I think a lot of things in that are utterly hilarious), suspense (not horror though), collections of poetry or short stories, or whatever looks interesting.

I've got this song in my head. It's off one of those CD's you see on those big racks in stores where they have this center panel of 20 or so squares of small pictures CD covers and you can press a button and it plays a CD. Well that's a run-on sentence. Do you know what I'm talking about as far as the CD rack goes? Anyway, the song's got these flutes native to South America I guess. I play the flute. Can't tell you what kind, just your usual flute that's played in a school band/orchestra. I know there's another name for it though. I've been playing for about six years but had a crappy teacher for four years of that. And so I ended up not really learning much after the first year (from him at least, I got books of songs I wanted to play and taught myself the notes I didn't know) and losing some of what I had actually learned, and have had to re-learn (or just dig up in my mind) tonguing (mind out of the gutter, it's a woodwind instrument term meaning you stop the air flow after a note with your tongue), counting certain types of notes, what the bottom half of the time signature means, and certain other things over the past 2 years. My teacher this past year told me that the only thing that I really need to work on is keeping time.

I took up piano about 3 months ago. I needed a challenge. My teacher for that seemed to be very excited to have a first-time student who could read music. She has me playing a simplified version of Beethoven's Fur Elise and the first page of... someone's Sonatina I. Let's just say that they don't sound that great.

Hmm... I can't think of anything else to write right now. I have to get to my writing notebooks and write down that poem...

~a_g_