Always a Kid at Heart

Last night, due to a friend's Halloween costume, I got the urge to watch Hook. I love Netflix because of this. I am able to find most older movies like Hook and watch them on a whim. But I digress. I'm going to be honest, we owned Hook on VHS but I hadn't watched it since the mid-nineties. Since that time I've grown wiser and, against all odds, older.

Being older, I understood a lot of the language, themes, and jokes present in the movie. Never before whilst I watched it did I ever think I would grow up as they harassed Peter for. I just thought that I'd remain much the same as Peter Pan and his Lost Boys and stay young forever.

Boy was I wrong.

I am twenty-seven short days from turning 26. By all accounts I should in turn be much like Peter Banning (Williams's character). I have a job, I pay bills, and although I am single, I expect one day to have a kid(s) of my own that I can attempt to raise to become decent human beings like I am. However much I am forced to adhere the aforementioned adult qualities, I fear that I may never want to quit being akin to a kid.

Some may call it immature or look down on me for wanting to play games or do things that children may enjoy just as much as me, but I don't think that any amount of ridicule will force me to quit enjoying them. In fact, I love moments like tonight when I brought home the Toy Story collection and Cade's eyes lit up. He sat with me through the whole movie and laughed and said "aww" at all the right moments. It was awesome!

I think it is qualities like this that will make me a great parent one day. A parent who is there for his kid(s) and can relate to them. Because as much as the world may drive them to become adults to survive, they will never want to give up the things that shape who they eventually become.

Just a Test

I want to see how photos go to blogger with Posterous.

Ruffio, Ruffio, Ruffio!!!

A Novel Situation

I get asked quite a bit why I never finished my novel. It's a bit of a long story, but the short of it is that it was my attempt to write about a character who experienced things in his life that I had not. I wanted to live the fantasies that I once thought I'd never experience through the adventures of this character.

I know that he would have done things that aren't possible in this world, but the more important things were that he would experience love (for the first time), an eventual family, and an overall sense of being wanted that I hadn't had the chance to encounter in the 19 short years I had lived at the time I began writing it.

Of course I blame it on, frequently, having found--what I thought at the time--was the best thing that could happen to me. Someone who claimed to have loved me as much as I loved them back. The novel fell to the wayside.

Now that I have left that disaster--yet still a learning experience--behind, I find myself traveling back to the world that my mind occupied for two years. I find new characters there, new situations, and a longing, a desire, to return there and finish the story I so long ago started. Perhaps one day I will find that drive to finish what I so long ago started.

Ruination

So this morning I was in a perfectly good mood. I got up didn't feel tired, went to church, and joked around. Supposed to be a good day, no?

My parents celebrated an old Southerner Tradition last night when they invited our duck huntin' cousins over and had a fish fry! Immediately after dinner ended I packed a plate for lunch and left to go play Magic the Gathering at a friend's house. Now to do this I had to bring my cards with me that I normally leave at work.

When I left the house for work today I grabbed my cards to put up at work (for play on later lunches), put my lunch in a plastic bag and mooshed my Harry Potter book between my arm. Getting in the car with hands full was a chore, let alone getting out the same way when I arrived at work.

I looked goofy. If I had seen me I'd've laughed.

Not twelve feet in the door at work, head down trying to adjust the slipping-from-my-grasp objects, a stupid, lazy (let me reiterate LAZY; as almost 99% of shoppers at this retail giant can't do anything for themselves) woman in her mid-life crisis found it absolutely necessary to break my concentration and target me in my blue shirt and ask, "where are the magazines?"

"Well if you'd look you'd find them," was the first thought in my unusually witty mind, but the good christian boy in me was fed up with laziness said something just as bad.

"They're over next to electronics," I instead said in my most non-polite leave-me-the-hell-alone voice. I then sighed very loudly so that she knew she had made me mad, and I walked off shaking my head in disgust.

Why of all of the blue shirts that are in that place did she choose the guy with hands full of stuff that the normal employee would not carry around? In the end it all comes back around to that one word. LAZY! She saw a blue shirt (which I am vehemently opposed to because it takes away the privacy I get between time swipes) and didn't care anything at all about what that person had or might be doing and lazily asked for what helped her out.

I am not opposed to helping people out, but I seriously doubt that my insurance guy would want me to show up and ask him to insure my car at anytime before he begins his shift.

This disregardless woman ruined my good mood and day, and subsequently the day of many who interacted with me thereafter, because she refused to do something for herself.

I hope your Better Homes And Gardens was worth it bitch.

As an afterthought, it is not acceptable to get mad or be pissy with someone who helps you out. It is not my fault that you have to wait five minutes for a fabric lady to cut your fabric because she covers four departments (that's a story for another blog). Disrespecting me will get you the same disrespect in turn.

Of Magic in Shanaan

I just found this in an old blog. I love it. It just may have inspired me to finish this story.


Magic is an all-encompassing entity, a pool of power to be drawn from, given by the gods to the elves as a gift for being the firstborn. Magic can be used for anything. The first elves used it to build great empires and cities, master the elements, heal the sick and wounded, and of course changed their appearances. The only limit to the use of magic is the imagination of the user; a danger in and of itself. For thousands of years the elves, pure of heart, used it for good. With time and practice, the elves became great wizards.
Saergoth was one such great wizard, but his love for the humans led him to betray the secret of magic, and he told the humans and taught them in its uses. Angered, the gods took magic from the elves, granting its use to those who they chose; elves who bore the Mark of the Scion. Anyone who tried to draw on the power of magic was met with disasterous results. Saergoth was seen as a traitor to his own kind and outcast into the wild with nothing. For years he tried endlessly to draw from the once-present pool of magic. He grew insane. It was the only thing he loved more than the humans.
With their help, Saergoth was able to discover a way in which he and the races of men could draw the magic and focus it so that using it would not cause catastrophes. Jewels called firestones--because of the illusion of a fire burning at their core when shaped into a perfect sphere--focused the magic. The only sideefects of its use, if not used sparingly, were headaches and blurred vision because of the strain it placed on the user. Magic became commonplace in everyday society. Saergoth, knowing of its destructive results if not focused, became inspired and sought to replicate its destructive force when focused. The destructive power grew greater. Eventually humans would discover this property as well and as a result a rebellion was led by Alanon Kundark to eliminate firestones from all of human society. After years of human civil war, the firestones were taken and destroied--Saergoth was outcast yet again; this time confined to a fortress-prison for the rest of time--and magic disappeared once again. Secret groups and organizations mined firestones and secretly honed their abilities, something the humans would be happy for after a thousand years of Saergoth's captivity.

TweetDeck for the iPhone

Been a while since I posted and I'm laying here waiting for the iPhone 3.0 update.

My interest today is on TweetDeck for the iPhone. I have used quite a few twitter applications for my phone but none of them have impressed me quite as much as TweetDeck.

The application runs much like the desktop version, allowing multiple column views for tweets. Columns can also be assigned for multiple accounts, allowing a quick view of your accounts.

What really sets this application apart is it's API counter and reset timer. Heavy users of twitter commonly meet the API error that prohibits tweets until the conclusion of the hour. Knowing how much I can tweet is stupendous.

My only complaint so far is that the application oft times assumes that Internet is slow or absent and gives off an error. I am not sure why since an iPhone is always connected to the Internet. This doesn't hasn't happened over wi-fi but could easily be fixed in a future update.

Overall I am rather impressed with the application. So much in fact that I am writing a blog detailing my first impressions of it.

If you haven't already, download TweetDeck for your iPhone and say goodbye to Tweetie for good.

Secret Keys

I used to be a good writer. At least I thought so myself, thank'ee. I was working on a novel almost full time when I had free time between classes. It was mapped out and sequels and their subsequent plotlines were at least floating around in my brain. There were even chapter summaries, 43 in all, which were a paragraph long descriptions of the action, important dialogue, and the twists planned to keep my potential readers turning the pages like so many authors had done to me before.

I wrote the first four chapters in rather short order. I read and re-read them over and over. A friend even offered to proof them as well. In reading them I found that as I mentioned above, I was a good writer. Perhaps I was even the next King or Rowling. But after the first four I became distracted, most likely attributed to being a twenty year old kid who just wanted to hang out with his friends. Having a girlfriend didn't help either. Not that it was a bad thing. It was, still is, a learning experience. You never really know who you are until you have someone who's always there to give feedback and character criticisms, but I digress.

Bored with my progress, I quit writing all together.

A great writer, Robert Jordan (a man who influenced how I wrote at the time), once said during an interview that "ALL writers who are good writers are also good readers. A successful writer like myself becomes so by reading. I'm not talking about a summer book club regimen, but rather thousands. Only then will you become successful." At the time I was discouraged. Here I was trying to find tips and struggling to stay motivated and one of my favorites is saying I can't do it well unless I've read "thousands" of books. I love to read, but "thousands?" Even before I had expressed intrest in writing I read all the time and at best I had only read two hundred.

Discouraged even further, I quit all together. The ideas, as I consider myself a creative genius, continued to build up in my brain. But like Jonesy in "Dreamcatcher" would say, I keep them in a filing cabinet in my brain, locked in a secret room.

Now I am writing a blog and I notice that I do not write quite as good as I used to. I sit in front of my computer and try to regurgitate my ideas, but the story that goes on in my head, vivid as it may be, never comes to fruition when the sysnapses fire and move my fingers along the keys. Hopefully in time it will return. I now realize that like any sport, writing takes practice. A lot of practice. So hopefully, with time, it will come. These ideas are banging to escape. The door to that secret filing room is flexing, but how good of a door can it be if it were to break. It needs a key, a key only I can provide.