well, a bit to say, but not too much
I went driving today in the parking lot across the street. I did well, which I'm glad to say. I practiced driving on the brake, making turns and righting myself, and I wasn't scared at all and got used to it pretty quickly. I'm also happy to note that the Jeep isn't nearly as touchy as the Saab was so I didn't brake in a jerky or abrupt manner. I got accustomed to the wheel and even parked, sort of. Mom was scared I was going to hit the fence so she yelled at me before I stopped, but I told her what I'd intended to do and she calmed. We were only out there for probably less than 10 mins, but it was time well spent and I felt like I did something very useful with my day.
We went to Tata's house afterward and got the remainder of our stuff, save the beds and possibly my TV if Mom and Curtis are going to go back over there anytime soon to get the grill. Brandon and I ate bacalao, which was much appreciated seeing as I didn't want to eat anything at home. We quickly shuffled out of there and spent the rest of day doing pretty much nothing. Curtis got sick today and dropped over here, and course Mom says she's not "made of stone" and can't just say "fuck you no you can't come here", though she should. Sigh. I'm not gonna get into it. I'm trying hard not to care. As long as he's not living here, what can I really do?
In other news, I'm making headway with this SH2 one-shot called Push, after the Matchbox Twenty song. The fic is about how James reacts to Laura running away (kind of like the Flagstaff incident from Supernatural when Sam ran away). It's coming along smoothly, but I'm pantsing it so I don't know where I'm going with it or how it's going to end exactly. I know he's going to find her, but how he's going to find her and what's gonna happen after he does is all up in the air. Oh well. Joy of discovery, as they say.
Oh, and I should probably mention before I go that All the King's Men is one of the most pretentious books I've ever read. It's got glimmers of language pleasing to the ear, but in the vast scheme of things Warren's making a metaphysical and transcendental trip out of the most trivial scenes. He's trying so hard to make Willie Stark, the subdued and proper mystery man with political leanings, so damn interesting and mysterious that it's utterly failing. The dialogue is overdone and mostly unbelievable and the interactions of the characters a tedious bore. They're just mingling uselessly at bars, restaurants, or driving around in a car and the narrator is chopping it up to be so damn important. Maybe it's the historic overtone he's going for, similar to Nick Carraway's narrative of the events in Gatsby, but it's just not working when he utterly fails to build the sense of wariness and foreboding in the opening passages like Nick Carraway did. You knew something was going to happen to Gatsby, you knew the story wasn't going to end well, but you just didn't know how. I don't get the point of anything that's happening in All the King's Men so far and I'm 30 pages in. I'm bored, almost completely un-intrigued and missing better books.
Maybe by the time I get to the middle or even the end I'll realize Robert Warren Penn for the supposed genius of prose he's upheld as, but I certainly don't see it now. I don't see how anyone could. Aside from the absence of plot in the first 30 pages, the writing is just riddled with so many "ands" and "did not's" (JUST WRITE "DIDN'T" FOR THE LOVE OF TITS) and the sentences so overly long I can't pick up a rhythm for long. But what bothers me the most is the man's propensity to overemphasize the aura of Willie Stark, like everything he does is shrouded in godlike mysticism and he's just got such an inner beauty unknown to greater mankind, and his stark refusal to use contractions and employ more concise language! This was published in 1947, but STILL. Catcher in the Rye was published just five years later by a dirty beatnik and it reads ten times more worthy of the toilet paper it was written on than this crap.
Oh, sorry, my bad. That was Jack Kerouac.
Maybe I should have just gone with my first comparison and stuck with The Great Gatsby, which was published in 1925. I think Fitzgerald actually uses contractions in that one.
Ugh. Just take my word for it - this isn't a book I'm gonna be picking up again after it's finished. In fact, after I'm done, I think I'll throw it out - the book's apparently an ancient edition from 1963 and both the front and back cover cracked off like glass. That's how stiff the paper was. As I've said before, I'm 30 pages in and the spine looks like it's on its last leg as well. Sigh.
Woe.
We went to Tata's house afterward and got the remainder of our stuff, save the beds and possibly my TV if Mom and Curtis are going to go back over there anytime soon to get the grill. Brandon and I ate bacalao, which was much appreciated seeing as I didn't want to eat anything at home. We quickly shuffled out of there and spent the rest of day doing pretty much nothing. Curtis got sick today and dropped over here, and course Mom says she's not "made of stone" and can't just say "fuck you no you can't come here", though she should. Sigh. I'm not gonna get into it. I'm trying hard not to care. As long as he's not living here, what can I really do?
In other news, I'm making headway with this SH2 one-shot called Push, after the Matchbox Twenty song. The fic is about how James reacts to Laura running away (kind of like the Flagstaff incident from Supernatural when Sam ran away). It's coming along smoothly, but I'm pantsing it so I don't know where I'm going with it or how it's going to end exactly. I know he's going to find her, but how he's going to find her and what's gonna happen after he does is all up in the air. Oh well. Joy of discovery, as they say.
Oh, and I should probably mention before I go that All the King's Men is one of the most pretentious books I've ever read. It's got glimmers of language pleasing to the ear, but in the vast scheme of things Warren's making a metaphysical and transcendental trip out of the most trivial scenes. He's trying so hard to make Willie Stark, the subdued and proper mystery man with political leanings, so damn interesting and mysterious that it's utterly failing. The dialogue is overdone and mostly unbelievable and the interactions of the characters a tedious bore. They're just mingling uselessly at bars, restaurants, or driving around in a car and the narrator is chopping it up to be so damn important. Maybe it's the historic overtone he's going for, similar to Nick Carraway's narrative of the events in Gatsby, but it's just not working when he utterly fails to build the sense of wariness and foreboding in the opening passages like Nick Carraway did. You knew something was going to happen to Gatsby, you knew the story wasn't going to end well, but you just didn't know how. I don't get the point of anything that's happening in All the King's Men so far and I'm 30 pages in. I'm bored, almost completely un-intrigued and missing better books.
Maybe by the time I get to the middle or even the end I'll realize Robert Warren Penn for the supposed genius of prose he's upheld as, but I certainly don't see it now. I don't see how anyone could. Aside from the absence of plot in the first 30 pages, the writing is just riddled with so many "ands" and "did not's" (JUST WRITE "DIDN'T" FOR THE LOVE OF TITS) and the sentences so overly long I can't pick up a rhythm for long. But what bothers me the most is the man's propensity to overemphasize the aura of Willie Stark, like everything he does is shrouded in godlike mysticism and he's just got such an inner beauty unknown to greater mankind, and his stark refusal to use contractions and employ more concise language! This was published in 1947, but STILL. Catcher in the Rye was published just five years later by a dirty beatnik and it reads ten times more worthy of the toilet paper it was written on than this crap.
Oh, sorry, my bad. That was Jack Kerouac.
Maybe I should have just gone with my first comparison and stuck with The Great Gatsby, which was published in 1925. I think Fitzgerald actually uses contractions in that one.
Ugh. Just take my word for it - this isn't a book I'm gonna be picking up again after it's finished. In fact, after I'm done, I think I'll throw it out - the book's apparently an ancient edition from 1963 and both the front and back cover cracked off like glass. That's how stiff the paper was. As I've said before, I'm 30 pages in and the spine looks like it's on its last leg as well. Sigh.
Woe.