Once of the first things my freshman English professor taught me was that if you don’t know what to write, just sit down, start typing (or literally put the pen to paper and start writing) and let your words flow. Eventually an idea will come to you.

I knew that I wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo this year, but I didn’t think I would have the time, let alone enough to say for 50,000 words. I had a general plot, as in I had an opening paragraph, but that was it. No real idea of where I wanted to go with my novel. Then I found myself signed up on the website (be my buddy here) and suddenly BAM! I was doing NaNoWriMo. So I sat down and typed my awesome opening paragraph. Then I followed my dear, sweet professor’s advice and just continued writing. I had no idea what the plot was going to be. Suddenly I’m 1,496 words into it and I type one sentence, one measly little random sentence and I have my plot. Well, when I say plot I mean general direction of where I want the story to go. I have the ending clear in my mind. I can see the finish line. I just have about 48,000 more words to get there.

I don’t think I’m ready to share the plot of the novel with you just yet, as I myself am still trying to figure it all out. But I will share with you a little excerpt of what I’ve written, and maybe it will catch your interest? Don’t worry, this is NOT the opening paragraphs. This is about 2,000 words into the novel. Speaking of, is it weird that I’m 2,000 words into the novel and haven’t even revealed my main characters first name? Don’t worry, it’s coming within the next paragraph. Not that I’ll be posting that here. More of a mental note. Right. Moving along… the excerpt.

At first glance this morning I not only saw no presence of my mother, but no presence of her wedding dress. Having a minor freak out I rushed into the closet, pushing clothes out of the way, consequences be damned, until I found it. As I walked out of the closet I couldn’t help but wonder why she had taken the time to hide it. Was she hiding it from me? Or like so many other things in this house, was she hiding so she didn’t have to remember the life she once had?

I did a quick check in the rest of the rooms in the house; no sign of my mother. Though I hate to say it, I checked for running cars shut it the windowless garage, my mother’s limp body dangling over the drivers seat; a suicide note, containing all the words she wanted to say but simply couldn’t, clinging romantically to the windshield wiper. Alas, all I found was an empty garage in need of a serious cleaning session. I decided to make myself some lunch and wait for her to come back. Let’s be honest, this isn’t the first time she has come home during the middle of the day.

What do you think? Is it attention grabbing? Feel free to leave you opinions in the comments! I’m off to dreamland.

No, I didn’t dress up for Halloween. I did, however, pass out candy to the most ADORABLE and FRIGHTENING kids. What an experience I tell you. But enough about that. The real reason for this post.

I got back to the dorm around 11:30 and on my desk was this piece of paper labeled COMMUNITY AGREEMENT. I am assuming this is from my RA (whom I’ve only ever seen three times this semester) and what we are supposed to do is give a suggestion about how we can improve the floor community. Since each member of the room is asked to suggest something, my rommate took the more serious route (speaking for both of us) while I spoke from the heart. This is my suggestion:

Teach the boys on our hall various insults so they don’t have to continually call each other “vagina.”

Yes, I really did put that. Yes, I really am serious.

Thank you and goodnight.

Would you like to know what silly nonesense we are working on in my grammar class? Yes?! Okay, I’ll share. We are currently finding simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences. In case you have no idea what these types of sentences are, I shall now enlighten you.

Simple: Your basic subject-verb sentence. Has one independent clause and no dependent clauses.

Compound: Two or more independent clauses, no dependent clauses.

Complex: One independent clause, one or more dependent clauses.

Compound-Complex: Two or more independent clauses, one or more dependent clauses.

Clause: A phrase with a subject and verb

Independent clause: A complete clause (can stand alone).

Dependent clause: An incomplete clause (relies on the rest of the sentence).

———————

Sounds like FUN right?! So my professor gives us a list of sentences and we are to figure out to which category they belong. Let’s take the sentence:

The team captain jumped for joy, and the fans cheered because we won the state championship.

Step one: Get rid of prep phrases (this is necessary because your subject will never be in a prep phrase, and those little devils can be tricky.)

The team captain jumped for joy, and the fans cheered because we won the state championship.

Step two: Find any and all independent clauses.

The team captain jumped for joy, and the fans cheered because we won the state championship.

Step three: Find any and all dependent clauses.

The team captain jumped for joy, and the fans cheered because we won the state championship.

Step four: Review your sentence and see which category it belongs to.

# of Independent clauses: 2

# of Dependent clauses: 1

Category: COMPOUND-COMPLEX!

Wasn’t that just so much fun! Now YOU TOO can figure out what types of sentences you are speaking and writing, any time of the day, any day of the year!

You’re welcome.

So often on this blog I talk about me. ‘Tis only natural, I suppose, but how are *YOU* Internet? Are you doing okay? We are getting really close to this day known as Halloween… what are you dressing up as? I honestly have not a single party to go to, so I am not dressing up. I think I may go to my parents house, watch a movie, and pass out candy to the little trick-or-treaters. Does any one you know actually trick? I would think that so many kids just want free candy they don’t have time to plan out elaborate tricks. Is this true? Am I so far removed from societal practices with this holiday that I am seriously missing out on some awesome tricks?

I’m quite ready for Thanksgiving. I adore Thanksgiving. I can’t wait to tell you guys what I am thankful for, because that is a very long list. I also can’t wait until Thanksgiving, because as soon as I am in the car on the way to North Carolina I will have completed my French presentation on Chamonix, as well as my oral exam. Last semester we did them the week before the final, this semester they are the Monday before Thanksgiving. I think after those two events it will be smooth sailing, that is, until the exam. Yikes! I don’t even want to think about that. I’m telling you what Internet, I am seriously going to go insane by the end of this semester. I thought LAST semester was bad; handing in a typed paper every single Monday was NOTHING compared to what I’ve had to do. And I’ve only been in these stupid classes for two months! Let me see, already I’ve had three presentations with two coming up next week, and before you go “oh presentations-NBD” I should point out that these are for EDUCATION classes, ergo they are no simple presentations. Oh no. I have to make a lesson plan and teach the class an assigned topic. Have you ever tried to teach a room full of 18-22 year olds subject-verb agreement?

I didn’t think so. I’ve had to teach about subject-verb agreement, gifted and talented students, learning disabilities, Asperger’s Syndrome, and next week I have to teach these people how to revise papers. And then, of course, I have to practically memorize my French presentation and I’m already dealing with the fact that my professor doesn’t like me very much. My mother calls it “a conflict of personalities” which is totally true, but the thing is I HAVEN’T DONE ANYTHING CONFLICTING. I’ve been in class all but one day (and we can miss up to four!), I’ve paid attention in class, I’ve volunteered to answer plenty of questions… I just suck at French! I think he thinks that if he treats me a certain way my grade won’t reflect badly on him, just me. And I’ve asked him questions after class and get a reply that is about three seconds of explanation, like he doesn’t need to be wasting his time answering my questions. But I shall not let it get me down, Internet!

I’ve also been crazy busy with papers. And I’m not talking about measly one page papers or book reflections. I’m talking about four hours of research for a psychology paper on bullying, a three hour research paper on the origin and history of the word “KIND” and its uses in middle English, a three hour research paper on teaching a gifted student, and various other hours and hours of research required type papers. On top of all that, I’ve had meetings and tests to study for and I somehow have to find time to sleep and function. Oh and watch CSI:Miami.

Is anyone else as obsessed with that show as me? I know for certain my sister is NOT. Anyone who hates Horatio as much as she does is no sister or friend of mind. You guys, that show just… is amazing. I don’t know. Call me a dork or nerd or freak; I just love it so much more than a person should. I had to stop watching because of school and now that I have NETFLIX I’ve decided to pick up where I left off. And boy have things gotten intense! Intense, but awesome. And I should stop here because you are probably already laughing at me. And speaking of laughing at me, for my (educational) psychology class we were assigned into groups that we would be working with throughout the semester, and at the end of the semester our groups will teach a 40 minute lesson to the class. So we were talking and we came to the conclusion that EVERYONE in our group LOVES Harry Potter! Can you even believe that? And when I say love, I mean we all have posters on our walls and underline our books and highlight and are just general Potter nerds. The most interesting is this group is made of four girls (including myself) and one very athletic boy, on the hockey team. And he loves Harry Potter. They all love Harry Potter as much as I do.

So as horrible and annoying and terrible as school is, and believe me- it is, I will always look back at our Harry Potter discussions and smile because I’m not alone in my nerdiness. AND IT’S WONDERFUL.

I am very tired and have to get up at the crack of dawn (7:40) so I can’t be bothered to give a long, witty description of who the Vlogbrothers are, and why they are so amazing. (Though I have mentioned them before here and here.)Perhaps I will tomorrow. For now, I leave you with one of their best videos to date. DFTBA.

For my British Lit class we have this thing called a “creative project” which is designed to torture us to get us to fully understand how Chaucer and various other authors wrote such great works like The Canterbury Tales, or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. My professor gave us four options, and I had no idea what to do for any except number three. So number three it was.

As Chaucer is known for taking previous stories and telling them himself, with a moral attached (basically the ENTIRE Canterbury Tales) I had to take a pre-existing story and put it into metered lines. I also needed a rhyme scheme. The pre-existing story I chose was the excerpt from The Odyssey in which Odysseus must pass the Singing Sirens. The “moral” of my story would be that it isn’t a good idea for anyone to tempt fate as Odysseus does. I would appriciate all comments letting me know what you think; I’m still a little unsure of it.

—————-

And now it is time to tell the tale

Of a single man and his fight so great,

Our hero Odysseus without fail

Struggled and tried, we find, to tempt fate.

By way of the open sea, traveling home

There was the island of Aiaia just offshore,

Odysseus spotted a land shaped dome

Where he must bring the body of Elpenor.

So soon Circê learned of his arrival

That she met Odysseus at her door,

And told him of the many things fatal

That his future journey had in store.

She spoke at length of beautiful girls

Detailing the charm in their haunting cries,

She told his men the power they unfurl

And to plug their ears with wax, looking to

the skies.

If Odysseus must look upon their face

He will surely be bewitched, and so to

A mast on the ship must he be put in place

And bound where he cannot break through.

Odysseus and his men they listened

And began on their long journey back,

When they came upon the Sirens’ island

The men quickly came under attack.

Calm took over as the water became still

The wind suddenly became obsolete,

As Circê’s prophecy began to fulfill

The crew found paddling away no easy feat.

The men tied their leader to the ship’s mast

Plugging the wax in their ears so bravely,

When Odysseus cried to be set free fast

His crew tied him tighter for his own safety.

The beautiful women opened their mouths

Their haunting song ringing loud and clear,

The crew paddled faster towards the South

Careful not to let her words reach their ears.

The women taunted and beckoned and called

Odysseus wanted nothing more than to stay,

The crew tightened their grip and were appalled

Reminding him of family not so far away.

Odysseus screamed and yelled and pleaded

But his crew simply would not oblige,

He roared until he thought himself defeated

He could see the resistance in their eyes.

Finally the Sirens’ island they passed

Odysseus happily headed home,

The crew was sorry they ever trespassed

But glad they did not do so alone.

And so, you see, Odysseus did try

To tempt fate by hearing the Sirens’ song,

But at the end of the tale fortune is sly

For fate was in control all along.

Soooo my roommate was a very bad Jew and hung Christmas lights with me. Now, if you are the type of person my sister is, you may say that hanging Christmas lights this early is sacrilege. However, I am here to tell you that 1) we hung them this early because they are so pretty! and 2) we want to keep them up for the rest of the year, which goes way past Christmas. So technically, they are aren’t Christmas lights. Even more technically, they are. But let’s not get into the fine print.

Anyway, I was in a photography mood tonight, so I snapped a few pics. Here they are! Enjoy.

For the past couple of days there have been a lot of things going on in my life that 1)you probably wouldn’t care about and 2)I don’t feel like retelling, but let us just say that I, Lauren, for what is probably the first time in my life, hate school. Once you pick your jaws up off the floor, we can continue.

Now, if that last part didn’t make sense I should state that I love school. I have always loved school, ever since I was little. I may have hated the people *in* my school, but I still loved school. Yes, yes it can be annoying at times and no I didn’t want to wake up so early every day, but overall, in general if you will, I love school. I love it so much I am going to be in school for the rest of my life. Granted, I will be the one with the answers (in like, a year! wow!) but I will always have a summer and thanksgiving and spring break until I retire. And I am okay with that, obviously, since I chose that as my career.

But over the past two days things have happened that have made me, at least temporarily, hate school. And I will share one of these things with you because you just won’t even believe it. Okay, you might, but it is insane. So my university uses this online system called Sakai, which is your basic blackboard or whatever the equivalent to that is at your school. For those of you who don’t know what Sakai or blackboard is, basically it is this online thing, through the university, that lists your classes, and your grades and professors can post announcements, etc. Well a lot of my professors have us submit our papers and such on Sakai because our university is paperless this semester. (Which is nice I suppose, yay going green! Except that it is a bother sometimes.) Anyway, my psychology of education and adolescent development class took a vote, and we had our midterm online. Now I like this, don’t get me wrong, because we were able to use our notes which proved very helpful in getting me a good grade. But here is the thing.

Okay. My midterm for that class is made of two parts. Part one- 11 multiple choice questions and one short essay worth 9 points. Part two- a very long paper. Both of these parts were due on MONDAY at 11:55pm. So I do the questions and the short essay and submit it on SUNDAY at 11:30am. Okay, everyone with me? Everyone see that I submitted it super early? Okay. When I went to submit part one the page refreshed, all on its own. So I went back to the test and quizzes section, saw that it had not submitted, went back to it, and redid all my answers and copy/pasted my essay. Then I clicked submit and got the confirmation email.

When you submit a multiple choice test, the computer automatically grades it. HOWEVER, I figured that she (that is, my professor) would have to grade it herself because of the essay. So naturally I didn’t panic when I saw my grade was 0/20. I did my thing, spent four and a half hours on the freaking paper (insanity) and submitted that on time. No problem, no worries.

Except I went back to check my grade because some of the other people in my class had gotten their grades, so I was curious. I saw that my exam was available for me to look at. (It only becomes available with the corrected answers when your professor is done grading it, which meant she graded my essay.)

It was still 0/20. “That is odd.” I thought to myself. So I clicked on my exam.

BLANK.

“What the [explicative]?”

STILL BLANK.

So I emailed my professor asking if she received my exam blank, or if Sakai was screwing with me (though I didn’t use those *exact* words). She said she received it blank. Now, here is my thought. You are a professor. You have set your due date for MONDAY at 11:55 PM. You have a student submit his/her exam on SUNDAY at 11:30 AM, way, way, way before the due date. And it is blank. Does that not raise any flags? I mean, if I wasn’t going to put time and effort into the exam, or do it at all, I wouldn’t have taken the time to submit a blank exam.

Well, I was FREAKING OUT. I mean this midterm was like… 15% of my grade? Something like that, so I called and made an appointment with her for the following morning. She emailed me and said we would talk about it in the meeting and I should be prepared to take a re-test IF NECESSARY. As in, I don’t know if I quite believe you.

PANIC.

So I get to her office and she is all “how are you Lauren?” and I am all, “Oh I’ve been better!” And then apparently my situation got her thinking because this happened to three other students.

RELIEF.

So she let me retake the SAME! exam and since I was smart and brought a printed copy of my essay, I didn’t have to rewrite it. Yay!

And that, my dear readers, is just a tiny slice of why I haven’t been blogging lately. I miss you Internet, and I will return full force very soon.

Sonnet 1

Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands,
which hold my life in their dead doing might
shall handle you and hold in loves soft bands,
lyke captives trembling at the victors sight.
And happy lines, on which with starry light,
those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look
and reade the sorrowes of my dying spright,
written with teares in harts close bleeding book.
And happy rymes bath’d in the sacred brooke,
of Helicon whence she derived is,
when ye behold that Angels blessed looke,
my soules long lacked foode, my heavens blis.
Leaues, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please alone,
whom if ye please, I care for other none.

This is an email I received today from my British Lit professor JAMES DEAN. Now, he may be a terrible grader, and unclear on his assignments, but this email shows the very reason I love this man. The way he phrases things makes class time, and life in general, so very interesting. (All bold has been added by me for extra emphasis.)

Dear Brit Lit I class,

It has come to my attention that some of you were sold the
wrong book for the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries.  
The error occurred at Lieberman's book store.  The book is
labeled for 205 classes, but it is a text for the 206 class!  
It contains Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, for example.

If you were victimized in this way, please proceed back to
Lieberman's at your earliest convenience, explain the situation,
and demand that they get you the correct text right away.  The
correct text is THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE,
Vol. B, 8th ed.: The Sixteenth Century and the Early Seventeenth
Century.  

Let me know of any other or further difficulties.

Yours,

Jim Dean