Happy Thanksgiving!!

I am so thankful for my life! I can't imagine one without my family, friends, and all the fun I have everyday. I hope everyone has a happy and healthy Thanksgiving!

Love,

Beth :-)

The Gone Away World - Update

Thanks to Jeanne at Necromancy Never Pays, I've been reading The Gone Away World by Nick Harkaway. I'm only about a third of the way through at the moment, but the prose is so unique, and the ideas so exciting, that I really wanted to share two of my favorite quotations so far.

I made a failed attempt to twitter these earlier tonight, but when I realized that just one of my favorite sections would take up about 5-6 tweets, I gave up and thought I'd update on the blog! So enjoy, and I'll definitely be posting a review of the novel when I finish.

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"What I am about to tell you...may make me sound like a crazy person. So I need you to remember, to bear in mind very carefully, that I have an IQ of such monstrous proportions that if, for the sake of argument, I were totally insane--if the palace of my intellect were a scary ivy-covered mansion in Louisiana with peeling paint and dead flowers and a garden full of murdered corpses planted by a man named Jerry-Lee Boudain--I am so much more intelligent than anybody else you will ever meet that there would be no way for anyone to tell."

"Modern war is distinguished by the fact that all the participants are ostensibly unwilling. We are swept towards one another like colonies of heavily armed penguins on an ice floor. Every speech on the subject given by any involved party begins by deploring even the idea of war. A war here would not be legal or useful. It is not necessary or appropriate. It must be avoided. Immediately following this proud declamation comes a series of circumlocutions, circumventions and rhetorico-circumambulations which make it clear that we will go to war, but not really, because we don't want to and aren't allowed to, so what we're doing is in fact some kind of hyper-violent peace in which people will die. We are going to un-war."

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So far I am highly enjoying this book, although it did take me awhile to fall into the authors rhythm. Now....back to reading!

Two Stories

Two very interesting things happened to me this weekend..

A Rescue Mission
Saturday was Clayton’s, my brother-in-law, wedding day, so I dropped Daniel off at the church for some picture taking, and I tried to decide where to go to spend the next hour. I started to dial his mom’s number when all of the sudden, I noticed that my car seemed to be acting odd. It also appeared that I wasn’t moving. I looked around and hit the gas, but the car didn’t budge, then I tried reverse and it stayed stuck. So I jumped out only to realize that my car was stuck in a ditch, and the back driver’s side wheel was sticking straight up in the air.

I looked around to see if anyone had seen my predicament, and I immediately saw Daniel, Clayton and the rest of the Wedding Party Groomsmen running towards my car. Together they heroically pushed me out of the ditch and I went on my merry (and embarrassed) way. Needless to say, I was the butt of a few jokes for the rest of the day, but I'd like to call it a wedding day miracle. Also, the moral of the story is: Do not try to dial a cell phone while driving.

The Monster in the Bushes
Every fall I buy Mums to decorate my porch, then I promptly proceed to forget to water them and they die. Well Friday, determined to be a good “mum” to my mums, I grabbed a big pitcher of water only to discover that it had rained the day before, so they were already a bit waterlogged. Unsure of what to do with the unneeded water, I just threw it in a couple of my bushes, and that is when I heard the sound.

“Mew. Mew.” Such a soft noise, but it was very distinct. My mind started racing. Maybe there was a cute cuddly kitten living in one of my bushes. I listened for the sound again, but after a few minutes things were still silent. I looked around the front of the bush to see if I could get a glimpse of the mysterious kitten. By this time, I was getting a little bit wary, but I decided to get on my front porch and see if I could find anything from behind the bush. “Here kitty kitty kitty kitty,” I cooed a few times, each time moving my head closer to the bushes in question. “Here kitty kitty kitty…”

Suddenly the bush started moving and rustling and I dropped my water pitcher, screamed like I was being attacked by zombies, ran in my house and locked the door. After about 10 minutes of heavy breathing and peering through my front window at the bush, I called Daniel who refused to believe me when I told him that there was something living in our bushes, and even had the nerve to tell me that it was ”just the wind and I needed to stop imagining things.” Well I have news for him, “Mr. It’s Just the Wind,” there IS something living in the bushes and it’s probably some sort of zombie mutant cat that will eventually try to eat our brains. And when that happens, he’ll be sorry, and I’ll want to tell him “I told you so," but I won’t because I’ll be far away in my zombie protection shelter. So take that Daniel!

Ummm, but the moral of the story is: Do not water your plants.

It's Coming!!

So October is my favorite month. First of all, there is great weather, (present circumstances aside), beautiful scenery, great food (I loves me some chili), and of course, there is HALLOWEEN!

My all time favorite holiday, I love Halloween more than a pig loves shit. And even though I stole that quote from Julie Powell, it's still true. Although she was talking about her husband, and not Halloween....but this is serious business here.

Top 5 Things I Love About Halloween:

5. Making Spooky Food: I am always so happy when I get to plan out party food, and no party food makes me happier than "spooky" food. Why does taco dip taste better if it looks like a spiderweb? Why do cookies seem a little crunchier when they look like fingers? One of life's great mysteries I guess.

4. Trick or Treaters: So because Daniel and I haven't squeezed out any little ones yet, that means I don't really get a chance to meet the neighborhood kids, or the adult ones either, for that matter. But on Halloween, my haunted graveyard, multiple jack-o-lanterns, and giant pot of candy draw the kids to my house like zombies to a shopping mall. So I get my kid fix in for the year, plus my neighbors are reassured that we aren't some crazy childless weirdos. (Except...we sort of are)

3. Scary Movies: I absolutely adore scary movies, and I'm not talking about some crappy Torture Porn movie like Saw or Hostel. I mean, some really well-made tense/frightening/scary films. Poltergeist is my all time favorite Halloween movie, and we've watched it on Halloween for the past 4 years. For more on this, see my post from last year. Movie Time

2. Costumes! Ever since I dressed up as Igor in the 3rd Grade, I realized that dressing up was awesome. And no crappy box costumes for this lady. The only good costumes are the ones you make by hand. It doesn't have to be perfect, and it could be made of your old clothes, but as long as you "made" it, it will feel so much more special. I was a zombie named Betty last year and it was amazing! She had an entire history, and a very nice (tasting) boyfriend named Steve.

1. My annual Halloween Party! The best part about my Halloween party, other than partying it up with all my friends, is that it encompasses all of the above! Not much in the world better than, being dressed up with my friends, eating spooky food, catching Poltergeist and scaring the trick-or-treaters. Last year's bash was amazing. Check out this post from my friend Nikki's blog. I was too lazy to update last year, but she did a great job!

Anyway, just wanted to display this new banner to remind me and everyone else of what's to come!

The price.

I finished a really good novel last night.

Tana French's "The Likeness" is the sequel to her earlier novel "In the Woods." "The Likeness," deals with a murder and an undercover detective. I won't go too much into the plot so as not to spoil anything, but the general gist of the story involves Cassie, the main character, going undercover into a group of very close friends. These five friends found a very intimate connection, and have moved into together to form a sort of mismatched family. As Cassie learns to integrate herself into this "family," there way of life begin to seem more and more appealing.

The novel really brought some big ideas to my attention. At the end of August, I took a trip to Kirksville and Truman State University to do a 5-year college reunion with my close friends. It was indescribably wonderful. Buildings had changed, businesses had closed and opened, but the overall atmosphere of the city and school were the same. We wandered aimlessly around the campus and the square. We haunted our old haunts, and discovered new ones equally enchanting. Every Kirksville food I touched tasted better than I had remembered, the town seemed more lovely and the campus more beautiful.

Planning the trip, I had completely expected to feel out of place, to enjoy myself and relive some old times, but that was it. I had not imagined I would feel so totally at home. As I looked around, I felt like I had never truly appreciated what had been around me for the four years I lived here. I could hear the excuses in the back of my head. There hadn't been enough time in the day, enough money in the bank, enough good weather. How could I have wasted my time here because of these small inconveniences?

In the novel, the leader of the group of friends, Daniel, talks about this sense of the "real world" encroaching on his lifestyle:

"I'm not by any stretch of the imagination a hero," he said, "and I don't consider myself to be insane. I don't think any of the others are either of those things. And yet I wanted us all to have that chance at freedom..."
"You asked me what I wanted. I spent a lot of time asking myself the same thing. By a year or two ago, I had come to the conclusion that I truly wanted only two things in this world: the company of my friends, and the opportunity for unfettered thought."

After my time at Truman, my mind was equally filled with dreams of what could have been, and returning to the "real world" was a challenge. The normal and sometimes not so happy details of my life seemed trivial in comparison to the dream life in my head. I know that those dreams are not made to last, as much as I may want them to, and Daniel realizes it too:

"It seemed like such a beautiful idea," he said..."The idea was flawed, of course," he said irritably. "Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race's greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature...Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living."

Maybe that's why the world in "The Likeness" seems so inviting, but yet so fragile. Throughout the story, the friends grasp each other tighter to keep their world afloat, but water always seeps in through the cracks. Life cannot remain stagnate, no matter how happy the time may be. "I have always accepted...that there is a price to pay," Daniel says.

The price of a life that stands still, however, is a bit too steep for me.