Dear You:

I know why I'm living in the past. I'm going to become someone who feels worthy of being with you again. I'm going to need lots of help, since my self-motivation ability isn't as strong as it should be, but together, we can do anything, remember?

I miss you, but I'm going to fix it. You and me and God, we can make it better.

Love, Me
 

After observing my penchant for reading, my boss has lent me his copy of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. I'm about a third of the way through; the plot is enjoyable, but my goodness, Langdon is the Sue-iest Sue that ever did Sue. >_> And I thought I had a high Sue tolerance level. Langdon needs to take all of his super special awesome sekrit knowledge and walk off a cliff and let the story continue to be interesting.

Hmm. I am currently at 2628 words. I'm supposed to be at 4000 by the end of the night. ...I feel burdened to confess that before this November started, I decided to lower my word count goal to 30,000, because free time is not as abundant a resource as it was back in college, and I'd rather reach a lowered goal than not reach a goal at all. Plus, I'm going to be out of town for a weekend, and I really don't want to scramble to catch back up when I return. Maybe in the next year or two I'll work back up to doing a full NaNoWriMo; it'd be nice to do again when I find where all my motivation ran off to post-graduation.

I've been pretty conflicted about this lowered goal thing. On the one hand, it feels a lot like giving in; on the other hand, it's giving me more freedom to actually make my writing good (despite the NaNoWriMo mantra, I've never bought in to any form of "quantity over quality"; if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well) and I'm not giving myself more stress than I'm currently equipped to handle. On the other other hand, I wonder if this is nothing more than a fear of failure taking over. Easier to lower a goal than to acknowledge that missing a goal is okay. So am I not giving it my best try (bad thing), or am I merely being realistic and accepting my own present limitations and allowing myself to work within them (good thing)?

Alright, it's past midnight, and I'm sitting at 3043. Good enough, considering that I worked through that one tough part and came up with a plan for at least my next few day's worth. Also considering that I'm about to fall asleep where I lie.

~DigiFaith
 

Damn. I have belatedly realized that I don't actually care about any of my characters. This throws a rather large wrench in the whole process. NaNoWriMo, with the Wrench, in the Ball Room. Luckily it's not too late to switch back to my epically ongoing story with the characters who I actually do care about.

How am I ever going to start writing my own stuff if characters have to be well-defined before I can start caring about them? As it is, I'm limited to either using other people's characters or just inserting myself or someone I know.

I guess I still want to work on the other story, too. Maybe I can care about the characters as I write them more. I'll ride on the momentum of my ongoing story, and I'll devote the last few hundred words of each day to the new novel. That's probably breaking a rule, but rules are much less important than novels.

~DF
 

I think I like taking pictures more than I like actually doing anything with the pictures I've taken. o_o

If you ever get a chance to visit Mackinac (pronounced mack-ih-naw) Island in Michigan, make sure you take it; it's a beautiful place, especially in August when we were there.

( Sixty-three large images; about 8MB total. )

My eye has been weird lately, so I went to the doctor today, and apparently I must have scratched it at some point, and it has become infected. I have eye drops, but I can't wear my contact for a while, so I'm wearing just one contact now. Hopefully in a few days it will stop burning and I can stop blinding it with this bandana when it starts to get hard to read. :(

NaNo is go. I have 508 words. This is going to be interesting.

Do you enjoy finding new, creative, and potentially self-harming ways to beat the system?

~DigiFaith

* When we were little, my family vacationed on Hilton Head Island every summer, which is a good twelve hours by car from Cincinnati. Me and Brian and Kevin would always pack bags of things, usually books and drawing supplies and car games, to amuse ourselves in the car. Ben, who was about five or six on our last few trips, always packed a bag full of large dinosaur action figures, something that's rather cumbersome to play with in the backseat of a car. He would proceed to get bored in about fifteen minutes and ask to color in someone else's coloring book. I was at Wal-mart getting supplies for this trip, and I found a $1 plastic dinosaur and bought it, and presented it to him when I got in the car with the admonition to keep himself amused. He did so.
 

I have 9 words. 8|
 

Today was an adventure! First, I was wandering around the intarweb and I ran across Cooking for Engineers, a site for those who view cooking as more of a science than an art (and whose creator "regrets that the name can be misread (when in a rush) to be 'Cooking Foreigners,'" according to the About page). After some poking, I found a recipe for a very tasty-looking baked cinnamon apple. I like apples, and I like cinnamon, and I like baking, so this seemed a rather suitable activity. I then observed that it was a perfect temperature to eat a warm baked apple outside, so I finished my dinner and wrapped my apple in foil and a protective towel and went to the park by my house. ...Apartment. My apartment. >_>

The place was deserted, because of the weather and Halloween, I guess, so I walked around and sat by the lake and decided that if my apple tasted half as good as it smelled, it would be a success. It was a success, and the sun was just setting so I climbed up the very unnatural large hill (whose purpose I have yet to ascertain) in the middle of the park and watched it for quite a long time. It was pretty, and I had a clear view of the horizon, and there were some clouds and a cloud ridge over my head and I could see flashing lights of radio towers in the distance* and light streaming down through the clouds somewhere off in the distance where the sun hadn't set yet.

And then I went to the Greene, because it was pretty dark and you need light to write. I hung out for a while and did more planning, and I was looking out the window when all of a sudden I saw a familiar figure reflected in the glass. I turned around and saw Darth Vader coming up the stairs, followed closely by Han. Vader had his lightsaber and proceeded to wield it against a stack of poor defenseless R2s and then moved on to browse the cooking section.

Then I happened to see the first Yuugiou R manga! I forgot all about that mini-series! I never read the fan translations, but I got the book anyway; hope it's good. And the guy at the checkout saw my NaNo shirt and said he's doing it too, for the first year. Good luck, Books & Co. checkout guy. \o/

In the meantime, here is one more of the (admittedly few) good potential uses for Twitter.

Hmm. Bedtime.

~DigiFaith

* Gramma told me a story about when she and Grampa were dating (I think), and they were out for a walk one evening, and they saw a radio tower with a blinking light at the top. Gramma asked Grampa what the light was for, and he said, "To make sure that planes see the tower and don't hit it." Then she asked what the tower was for, and he said, "To hold up the light!"
 

I woke up this morning and opened the blinds and there was a flock of geese resting mid-migration on the lake; then I did a double-take and realized that there was one white goose swimming around in the middle of all the gray-and-black Canada geese. He had an orange bill and black on the tip of his tail. I wondered what he was, then promptly forgot about him, until I saw the same flock on a nearby lake on the way home from work, with the same white goose looking like a cotton ball right in the middle of all the darker colors.

Some skillful Googling revealed that he is a snow goose, which don't live around here but migrate through from Canada. I'm somewhat amused as I wonder how he came to hook up with a flock of Canada geese, and whether he ever looks around and realizes how much he sticks out.

~DF
 

Stand
Rascal Flatts

You feel like a candle in a hurricane
Just like a picture with a broken frame
Alone and helpless, like you've lost your fight
But you'll be alright
You'll be alright

'Cause when push comes to shove
You taste what you're made of
You might bend till you break
'Cause it's all you can take

On your knees, you look up
Decide you've had enough
You get mad, you get strong
Wipe your hands, shake it off
Then you stand

Life's like a novel
With the end ripped out
The edge of a canyon
With only one way down
Take what you're given before it's gone
Start holding on, keep holding on

Everytime you get up
And get back in the race
One more small piece of you
Starts to fall into place
 

This is hilarious and cannot possibly be unintentional.

Question for pondering: Do people gain worth for what they do, or for what they are? Can we gain or lose worth through our acts?

My uncle is currently in Shanghai on business. An excerpt from one of his emails: "I'm not sure why or how, but I've not died in a traffic accident yet. If I live through this, upon my return I will campaign to abolish all traffic laws because apparently they are unnecessary. They can be replaced by frequent use of horns and more aggressive use of the accelerator and brakes."

I need to go to the bookstore and devise an outline.

ETA: I return. Progress was made. Not much progress, but better than nothing. I need to work on plot, rather than characters and backstory.
 

So I got in the car to go to work this morning, and one of my favorite radio stations was playing Christmas music. I was like "D: What." I love Christmas, but I hate it when various people try to start it early; when the timing isn't right, it's just irritating, and then by the time the real season gets here you're already tired of it. There is a time for everything, and Halloween =/= Christmas.

My workplace is getting new heating this week. Apparently our old boiler has only one setting, "full blast," and up until now we've been running the air conditioning along with the heat to regulate the temperature. Yes, we are the very model of modern efficiency.

I have not the writing mojo tonight. And my main characters still need names.

~DF
 

I just won a game of One Must Fall with my eyes closed. 8|
 

I has a Yuusei on my desktop. <3

I also has Halloween decorations. A bit late, but at least they're up. I must procure a pumpkin.

Stupid MapleStory, release your vice grip on my time. >_> LightShizuku is now a level 30 Wind Archer, and let me say, Wind Archers are a million times better than normal archers. o_o My first archer was a wimp; it's no wonder that's the least popular class. My Cleric is still the best, though. Can solo almost anywhere and almost never uses potions. Also, Storm is still awesome, and Storm Break will be awesome once I level it up a little higher and it gets decent accuracy.

I reread The Giver yesterday and today. That's one of those books that you read in gradeschool and then it gets better as you get older. The ending, though, is still maddeningly ambiguous, so I petitioned the almightly Google to see if anyone else out there has made better sense of it than I have. The explanation that I ran across, though, was one that I had never considered (spoilers, I guess): apparently there are some people who hold that Jonas and Gabe died of exposure and that the Christmas village they saw was nothing more than a hypothermia-induced hallucination.

Where do people come up with this stuff? Do they sit around actively trying to make things depressing? It's one thing if a character's death holds meaning and plays an active part in the plot, like Obi-wan letting Vader skewer him and then turning into a blue ghost for good. But killing your characters at the end of the book just to drive home your message? What in the world was the useful purpose of killing half the cast at the very tail end of the Harry Potter series, or Tamora Pierce's Lioness quartet? Whenever an author does that, I can't help but think that it's nothing more than a ploy to show the readers how "hardcore" they are; it seems that the "life sucks" message is in vogue.

Luckily, we have a nice bit of Word of God from Lowry stating that Jonas and Gabe do, in fact, reach the very real village and live happily ever after (or alternately happily and unhappily, since that's kind of the point of the story). Word of God is nice to have on your side in things like this. (Just as long as it doesn't turn into a Flip Flop of God.)

Even if it weren't for the Word of God, though, I think in my mind, Jonas and Gabe would still have made it to the village, and found a real family, and lived on to experience colors and music and all sorts of non-Sameness. ...I could write more on this, but I need to sleep.

Gah. Not enough time left to plan for NaNoWriMo.

~DF
 

Happiness is having someone be impressed with your work.
 

I used to love going outside at night, even though it drove my parents crazy (my mom made me carry a whistle around with me). It was so calm and quiet and peaceful, and I never had to worry about other people being around. Not that I don't like having other people around, but I'm always aware of them at least on some level. I can't ignore people; I'm always paying at least some attention to what they're doing and wondering at least a little bit about how they are perceiving me and how I ought to be relating to them. So it's really nice when I get to switch off the social centers for a while (read: what it means to be an introvert).

But over the last two years or so, I've become a sunlight lover. I get moody when the days start to get short, like now, and every cloudy day is my own personal raincloud over my head. Sunlight is amazing; it makes everything look different, it warms you up, and it's like a direct route in to the contentment centers of my brain.

I think today I reclaimed a bit of the nighttime part of myself. I was hanging out at Cox Arboretum, taking advantage of what may well be the last semi-warm day of the year, and it was cloudy. At first I was disappointed because I wanted to take more pictures, and pictures are better with sunlight, or so I thought. But then it got dark and I didn't leave, and it got darker and I didn't leave, and pretty soon I was the only one left (except for those nice people who must have wondered what I was doing, sitting on the rock bridge leaning on my hands and staring at the dark sky [see, I'm doing it again]).

And I was walking across a clearing ringed by trees that were pretty much just silhouettes by that time, and I felt something pricking at my memory, and I realized that it looked just like I always imagined the Shadow Field in those old castle-things that Artemis used to make. And I remembered a little bit of what it was like to walk around the circle after the sun had gone down, and then come back to my house and lay under that one tree and pretend that it was the Shadow Field, and how I would focus on each of my five senses in turn and try to create the illusion as vividly as I could (sight: dark shapes of the swaying trees, stars overhead, wispy clouds, bits of color in the starlight; sound: rising and falling wind in the leaves, crickets in harmony, swishing of the grass around my feet; smell: scent of new spring life carried on the wind; touch: soft earth, swirling winds, just enough of a chill to wake your senses; taste: crispness of the air).

Then I realized that if I rested my camera on the railing, I could hold it still enough that I could use the longer nighttime exposure without the picture turning out blurry. I wonder how those turned out. I'll get them off my camera tomorrow.

~DF
 

Or is it the beginning?

( Fall has... fallen. o_O )

I went to do my laundry today, and there was a sign on the door that said that the laundry room was closed for maintenance. I was indignant. Not that I expect to have laundry facilities always available, but a note would have been nice, right? They just delivered a note to us a few days ago with energy-saving tips; it wouldn't have been hard to let us know laundry was out. Because then I could have dropped it off at the coin laundry down by the Krogers while I was doing my grocery shopping yesterday and thus saved some time. I don't deal well with having my plans messed with, and I was not planning on going to the laundromat today. On the upside, the washers there were clean, and the dryers were enormous. I could have climbed in one of those.

Also on the upside, I realized that my favorite park with the duck pond was only a short drive away, so I visited the ducks and several squirrels while the dryer was applying my six quarters' worth of minutes. Also discovered that the hood of a hoodie can double as a scarf when manipulated just right, when the wearer has a sore throat and has forgotten her scarf.

I beat Emperor Palpatine. Was somewhat disturbed by the fact that in order to beat him, I had to make one character purposely get zapped by his lightning, then use the other character to apply lightsaber to the emperor's head. Kind of masochistic, really. But aww, Luke and Darth. <3

Animorphs is a strange series. I don't remember having any ideological problems with it when I was younger, but now I'm not so sure I agree with everything it seems to be setting forth.

~DigiFaith
 

The RPM Ultrazord makes me proud to be a Power Rangers fan. Or something. It's just so... I cannot locate the right words. o_o It's the culmination of everything. The ultimate.

Haaah. Ziggy, you are wonderful. And Fresno Bob is amusing. And this season is really big on the pairings, isn't it? o_O

I have progressed to the Lego Star Wars level where you get to play as Luke and Darth. Little Lego Darth is so cute, it's incongruous.

Geez, where did the day go? I was cleaning, and then I sat down in this chair to reorder some checks and look up the payoff amount for my student loan, and then I made some dinner and now it's eleven o'clock. I really know how to while away the hours. Don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Getting sick again. wtf, immune system.

...When I was little, I made morphers out of cardboard, and we played with them in the backyard. I saved every piece of cardboard I came across; I could make anything out of cardboard.

There has not been enough music in this day. I need to fix that.

~DF
 

I has a Cygnus Knight, and her name is Shikuzu, and she is a Wind Archer, and she is awesome, and she has a guardian spirit, and his name is Storm, and he kicks butt. :3

So I finally cleared out enough hard drive space to get MapleStory installed again, and they've added a whole new type of character! Five classes of Cygnus Knights, and each with an element! I had a tough time deciding between a Wind Archer and a Dawn Warrior, but Shikuzu is coming along nicely so far (level 17, and I just created her a few hours ago :3 ), and the guardian spirits are awesome. An archer with mob control, w00t.

My resistance to dropping money into this game is fading. >_> I wish they'd give you a few more character customization choices that didn't cost money, but I guess the servers have to keep running somehow. I wonder how much they take in on those Cash Shop items.

Moral of the story: Do not download MapleStory. It is too addictive and you will play it instead of planning for NaNoWriMo.

~DigiFaith
 

Hmm. I wrote this entry a while ago and then promptly forgot about it.

--

9/4/09, 6:58pm.

"Answer the big question of eternity, and the little questions of life fall into perspective."
~ Max Lucado, Let the Journey Begin

This is one of those new ideas that's grabbed my attention and won't let go. I will exist forever. That's a great deal of time, considering that twenty-four years has already felt like a pretty long time to me. One pebble didn't seem like much when viewed against the long shore of Lake Huron on Mackinac Island, and one lifespan doesn't seem like much in light of forever. It won't be long now before the only thing that will matter will be the person that I've become. As Max Lucado points out, there's a reason why we're called human "beings" rather than human "doings."

This is slightly related, but here's a list of things I like about Star Wars (well, the original trilogy, anyway):

• Good is good and evil is evil.
  
• Religion surpasses technology.
  
• There is no such thing as neutral. Luke never concedes that it's acceptable for Han to look out for his own selfish interests; if you do nothing, you're still making a choice.
  
• Obedience, as Luke renders to his aunt and uncle, is a virtue, even when you think it's unfair. I think our culture has trouble with this one.
  
• Trusting those wiser than yourself is also a virtue, even when you think you know better.
  
• A plan doesn't have to be perfect in order to work. Determination, quick thinking, and faith can fill in the gaps.
  
• Courage in the face of not only fear but doubt is perhaps the most important virtue there is.

There's been some interesting new research by a psychology professor named Jonathan Haidt about a concept that he calls "dark morality" (not "dark" as in "evil," but in the same manner as dark matter and dark energy). He categorizes morality into five broad divisions: compassion for others, fairness and justice, respect for authority, group loyalty, and purity or sanctity. The first two, compassion and fairness, are what most people think of when they talk about morality, while the last three remain largely unacknowledged but still play some part in most people's moral decision-making.

Now here's where it gets interesting: Haidt did a survey asking people to rank these five areas according to importance. Compassion consistently came in at the top, but beyond that, people who identified as liberal were more likely to rank fairness just below compassion, but they assign much less importance to the three dark morals. Conservatives, on the other hand, give all five of the areas a relatively equal importance, with compassion at the top and fairness at the bottom.

What strikes me is how much sense it makes. Don’t liberal policies seem to place a high value on fairness and equality, while conservatives value things like sanctity and patriotism and individual providence over government-provided welfare? Could this be why we find it so difficult to agree -- because we really do have different ideas of what is important?

As far as the morality scale goes, I found that I'm a pretty true conservative. The dark morals are important to me inasmuch as they reflect character while the visible morals center on actions. Society seems to say, be whatever type of person you want to be, as long as your actions are acceptable, but this seems to have inherent problems, at least as a moral guideline.

As unintuitive as it may be, I think there's an argument for assigning a diminished importance to fairness as well. The world is unfair; it does not work according to a system of what we deserve, and neither does God. In a moral society, demanding your own fair share would not be necessary; each person would be willing to sacrifice for another, and thus all needs would be met. If we focused on this rather than on statistics and quotas, I think we'd see a positive difference.

I'm beginning to notice that I have a deep-seated love for stories that exhibit the dark morals. Power Rangers RPM is doing a good job of it so far; The Chronicles of Narnia is a wonderful example; John Peel's Diadem series is a strong case; and I'm beginning to see shades of it in Star Wars as well.

--

Back to action.

Oh, that's right, Jonathan Haidt has a TED talk. +10.

I apologize to those people I've been neglecting on AIM. I have been feeling very unsociable of late. I'm not really sure where this is leading, but something's gotta change soon.

~DigiFaith

I--I think I have a crush on Jon Stewart. ._.
 

So the whole Dillon-and-his-seemingly-evil-sister plot may have been done before, but perhaps that's why RPM feels so much like home. ( Episode 25 spoilers. )

Except that Dillon is obviously a "lone wolf" type, while Andros is obviously an "aloof but natural born leader" type. Couldn't be more different, except that they're both awesome. 8|

Gah. I've been sick. Again. >_> I thought I filled my illness quota for the year already. How can I be getting sick more now than when I was in school? I thought schools and campuses were supposed to be germ breeding grounds.

Time to go play Pokemon Platinum and fall asleep.

~DF
 

So my local ABC station fails at life and has been wasting their airtime with football games lately rather than showing RPM, so I'm a bit behind on the episodes, but is it just me, or is "Ancient History" a pretty kickass episode? Dr. K holograms? Mason Effin' Truman? Scott being awesome? Dillon being protective of Ziggy? Yes plz.

( RPM episode 24 spoilers. )

Hmm, I've been away for a while. Life has been busier than I like.

...I think I need to go to bed early tonight. I keep meaning to catch up on sleep, but somehow something shiny always manages to catch my attention right around ten-thirty or eleven that keeps me up for another hour. >_>'

Also, Animal Crossing is merciless if you leave it alone for a few months. My entire town was one enormous weed. <_<'

~DigiFaith