All Blog Posts Tagged 'Book' (68)

Today, a three year old high school philosophy club and several years old book club that I ran last year as a senior, with a couple dozen members total, has lost administration support for content and a faculty sponsor.

Really? Does education really have to go that far? I understand if the teacher sponsor is busy and needs to step out because of a more important reason, but administration not looking for another faculty sponsor and disappointing a diversity of STUDENTS that all love…

Now Over Me.

Written By Ben Paulukiewicz [Jin-Ja]

So I stood there, my ipod in my ears, my feet following the person in front, inside the corridors of the school, like one big game of follow the leader.

At my school, there were no uniforms, so I wore jeans, canvas shoes, a tee shirt and my favourite cotton dark cream jacket.

My friends thought I was Nathan Drake from the Uncharted Series.

I didn’t see it.  The jeans I wore were…

            Oh wait, Colin is a virgin?  I thought, from the way he and K-19 seemed so comfortable removing each other’s clothing and being in Colin’s bed….

            “I AM BREAKING UP WITH YOU.  Gorgeous.  Please tell me that’s TOC under there.  Except this could turn really terrible really quickly.

            Yep, it is TOC.  Wonderful.

            And because Colin likes Lindsey, he’s super upset, like Harry’s inner monster roaring at Dean because…

            “You just need more people who don’t like people.”  That’s not true.  Colin’s totally my type.  “The best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.”  Yep.  There it is, bright as day.  The can’t-find-the-keys-‘til-you-stop-looking phenomenon.  They don’t want clingy.  Was I too clingy?  Did I like him too much?  I know I liked Rudy II too much.  And Aaron II.  And Patrick I.  I liked Justin, but the problem there was that I didn’t let him KNOW I liked him, so…

            Uh ohs.  Just Colin and Lindsey.  This ain’t gonna be pretty.  This ain’t gonna be pretty.

            Ohhh, THAT’S why they say fug.  I kind of assumed it was that JOHN’S publishers didn’t like all the f-bombs.  Huh.  What do you know.  And yes, Colin, good job staying on track with the story.

            What’s the Lass joke?  I guess we’ll find out.  Apparently it isn’t funny.  Stop making fun of your girlfriend, TOC.  Did she fall into a well or something?  No,…

That would be so cool to be able to read four hundred pages a day.  But I don’t think I’d keep much from it.  It’s taken me four days to get 110 pages of this book.  If I’d simply read it, I’d have gotten it finished day 1, and moved on to either the C.S. Lewis book I’ve got or Paper Towns.  But then I’d have missed out on all the thinking I’ve been doing, and that would have been a shame.  Also I need to become a Star Trek fan.  It’s on my bucket list.  Along with Doctor Who.  And a bunch…

WHAT?!?  Everything Nikola Tesla does is absolutely interesting.  Hassan is insane.

And now we can see just how clearly that Colin is a fictional character, because he prefers girls without makeup.  IT’S A LIE.  Believe me, nobody would like my face better without at least foundation and concealer.  NOBODY.

Oh, the matter-of-fact way she talked about how she’s going to “go stare dreamily into the eyes of my boyfriend” is one of the things that reminds me of Lauren.  It couldn’t…

            Ick, we’re really in for some trouble with TOC, aren’t we?  “I don’t think too highly of that boy’s daddy,” says Starnes.  Yessir, Colin Lyford is definitely going to have a significant role in this story.  I’m really worried somebody’s going to die.

            That sounds great, firing only one person per family during the depression.  Of course, that really only works when you’re employing multiple people from each family in the first place, so it’s not like most…

            Hahaha.  “Authors never included the whole story; they just got to the point.”  It’s true.  They have to.  The whole story would take forever to tell, and would be full with pointless information that doesn’t help further the story.  The problem is, you can always tell when a character likes another character, because the author emphasizes certain hints the characters give. In real life it isn’t that simple; everyone gives those “hints” mixed with the exact opposite signals, and…

            I never knew Franz Ferdinand married for love.  Sounds beautiful.  Sounds like life was pretty good for Franz and Sophie.  Sounds like he got what he wanted out of his life.  A hole in your middle is nothing when you’ve got love.  But when the hole in your middle is lack of love, then you’ve got a problem.

            Why does Colin see this so differently compared to how I see it?  Ferdinand has no heavy burden—he was dead before people started dying.  He didn’t know. …

            Why does that always happen, a misplaced item never turning up until you stop looking for it? I’ve experienced that, too.

            I guess it does make sense in relationships, though.  People are generally creeped out by desperate creepers. I should know; I usually am one.  At the end of spring semester, I wanted to avoid new crushes like the plague.  I liked Rudy II and liking Rudy II kind of sucked, to the point that I was actually kind of glad I…

            I always wondered if I should tell my old roommate when she was being tactless.  I didn’t want to just be criticizing her all the time; David did that to me and though I was glad to know what I was doing wrong, it still hurt and tore me down and resulted in tears on multiple occasions.  So usually, with my roommate, I either ignored it or said something like, “Oh.  Okay.”  So yeah.  Sometimes I’d humor her.  Other times I’d ignore her.

            But I look at the…

Yayyyyy chapter fourrrr this is taking foreverrrrrr!

“Not interesting.”  Yes, it is!  It’d totally be Colin’s friend just to learn all the random trivia he knows.  Granted, it’d probably get old after a while.  But still.  Random tangents are fun.  And the best part of random tangents is that you find them by taking the derivative, so if you’re constantly awkward, the constant awkward falls off when you go off on your tangent.  True story.  I’m glad John completes Colin’s statements…

Haha, I missed that, the first time, that Colin brought a whole backpack stuffed with books.  “Oh, of course.  I forgot we’ll be hunting down Voldemort in a mobile library.”

Sanskrit.  I’d be happy just being fluent in Spanish.  Though I’d also love to learn German, Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Greek, Mandarin, Japanese, yeah sure French….I’m pretty sure none but the Spanish will ever happen, and that’s only because I get to go to Spain for a semester in a couple of years.  Total immersion…

            So clearly I’m writing a novel about a novel.  But not really because it’s actually about me, and it’s not like it’s one story so it’s not a novel.

A little melodramatic, there, Hassan.  It’s just puke.

            Rudy II’s was better:  “I want to crawl into a burrito and die.”  Lord, was that boy miserable.  I just wanted to put my arms around him and make him believe that things would be okay.  But his crush on Chelsey livened him right up.  Well, except when she…

Baths.  I feel unclean in baths.  I thought, in this second sentence, that Colin must be rather lazy to share such an opinion with myself and other couch potatoes that things should be done lying down when convenient.  But in reality it looks as if it’s more of an efficiency thing; Colin’s anything but lazy.  Makes sense.

Was it here that I first compared Colin to my friend Kathryn?  The sense of self-worth determined by and only by one’s accomplishments; whether one has made an…

            Okay, so I got about halfway through this book when I finally couldn’t take it anymore and realized I had to start over and write about it, record my thoughts and connections and feelings.  I’m at page 99, when Colin started talking about Lindsey looking prettier without makeup (they say that, but it’s never true) and Lindsey continually reminding me of my friend Lauren.  Seriously, this girl.  But anyway, I want to go back and capture it all, so I’m starting…

In my Nerdfighters Debut, I'm taking a look at Arthur C. Clarke's classic SF novel, Rendezvous With Rama.

Gamers Against Bigotry's IndieGoGo Campaign can be found at http://www.indiegogo.com/GAB648

Their web page is http://gamersagainstbigotry.org/

The campaign ends on…

  Last night, I had a vision. It was inscribed in perfect CopperPlate font onto my frontal lobe across two bus rides and three hours. MY vision was simply this - an illustrated storybook explaining either geek culture generally or at the very least the nerdfighter ethos to the young 'uns. I originally concieved this as a present for young Henry Green, but then I thought there must be quite a few teeny-tiny nerdfighters-in-training out there who could also enjoy such a book.…