Well talk about a fail for the month of January. It’s been a good while since I’ve posted anything here. It’s been an awfully busy start to a very busy semester for me. But I’ll jump right in.

Avatar Movie Review

I’m going to say right off I really enjoyed this movie a lot. But I felt that the plot was a direct pull from Disney’s Pocahontas. White man meets native girl, natives teach him their ways, white man and “savage” fall in love and try to bring the fighting between their people to a stop, etc. But I felt that it was a different enough twist with aliens, new planet, outer space, futuristic time period that it was well worth the watch.

I also feel that it had very strong themes on community, nature, and protecting your environment. You get emotionally invested in the storyline and want things to workout. This movie in fact reminds me a lot of the Disney movies I watched growing up as a kid and made me think of the impact those still have on me now. For example, with The Lion King, every little girl (and some boys) between the ages or 4 and 8 became obsessed with lions around the time this movie came out. We all wanted to play with Simba and Nala and Zazu, the nice African animals. We grew a sympathy for lions, and now I think my generation is more conscious and sympathetic towards African wildlife because it subconsciously reminds us of our animal friends from The Lion King, that we watched and played with as kids.

There is similar effect that the Discovery Channel has created with Shark Week on television. People love Shark Week! I hear about it non-stop when it’s airing. People talk about sharks and how awesome they are instead of how many people they bite a year. The few people who do bring up how they bite people, someone pulls out a statistic (learned on Shark Week) about how more people die of bee stings a year than who get bitten by sharks. You have a better chance of dying from a lightning strike than a shark bite.

My point is, that I see this movie getting into people’s subconscious and making them more sympathetic to environmental issues and difference among people. Who cares if you’re tall, blue, and you have a tail; we can still get along! Media effects people, our opinions, what we think, our morals and so on. This movie will impact younger generations most specifically. And from what I see, it will be a good impact. I give Avatar two thumbs up, and I will probably be buying the DVD.

<Dork Alert> P.S. - One other relationship… you know how in Pocahontas when she’s singing “Colors of the Wind” and she touches the tree and the rock right before you see the bears and the ground glowed… I wonder if Avatar took that from Pocahontas? Hehe. I always wanted to be able to do that… </dork>

“National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.” ~What Is NaNoWriMo?

So, I love NaNoWriMo. This is my 5th year participating in the madness. I began my sophomore year of high school when a friend told me about it over the summer. I idly blew it off. But then when she started getting excited for October to start when the NaNo forums open, I decided to check it out and I was hooked. I stayed up late that night, refreshing the NaNoWriMo home page on October 1st, 2005, the first available day for new sign-ups to start that year. And every October and November since have been filled with novel writing goodness.

The first two years I completed NaNo with two sci-fi novels in a series. The third year, I tried to continue the series, but I think they ran out of steam, and I was also swamped by my senior year of high school and college applications, etc. Similar story with my freshman year of college. I was simply too busy with the new load of homework and social life I was unused to. But this year I have more free time, a lighter class load, and my own apartment to escape and write in. I’m determined to finish this year with a new slightly sci-fi/adventure novel. Catch my synopsis under Novel Info on my NaNo Profile.

This year I started my free trial of Scrivener for Macs (which is recommended for large research papers and writing projects, even if you’re not doing NaNoWriMo). And there’s a special offer in the forums that gives you 50% off the purchase price if you win and would like to buy it after NaNo! Definitely a great motivator for me this year, because I love this program already and I’ve had it a week. Also, there is an offer from CreateSpace to give you one free printed proof of your book if you reach 50k. That’s right, you can hold a copy of your book, for FREE! I’m definitely doing that as well. (Keep in mind, these offers are only for registered NaNo users who reach 50k and validate it on the website.)

This year I donated $25 to The Office of Letters and Light that runs NaNoWriMo! $5 for every year I have participated. And if you’re a NaNo Participant on Twitter, be sure to add this Twibbon to your avatar! Made by me!!

Forged from a one-sided love affair
created into a double-edged sword
of skepticism and distrust,
I have walked this path,
uninspired for some long time.
Now, on the edge of the cooling pool,
do I dare dive in?
My muse may live there,
as he gently coos me in,
holding out the most delicate of things he owns.
His palms out, I cry as I lift this small, bright energy.
The power I once loved in another
is now my own to control,
and the fear overwhelms me to tears.

Now, my heart, straining against it’s cage
desperately wanting to love you,
needing to love you with all it can.
Taking every grasp of you it can get
through these bars that you are slowly crumbling
with your beauty, wonder, and patience.
I am grateful for each and every shred of moments
we share, my heart fluttering and racing to live it more.
Every word of your tenderness and soothing voice,
better than the most expensive oils on my skin.
And each thought and idea we share,
like flames of our passions,
licking and merging together in my mind,
to form a brighter fire.
When we meet,
a blaze will come that shall never be put out.
What we have now are merely embers,
to what we can hold together.

Inspired by @JavaJunky‘s desire to go sit on some swings, I was reminded of my own love for swings. I recall being quite the swing hog when I was in primary school (K-3). I would run out across the playground in order to get the best swing for me; one where my feet wouldn’t drag in the gravel nor would I have to jump up to reach the seat.

Once I had the perfect swing, I would spend the almost whole grueling 20 minute recess on that one swing. Usually I’d have a friend next to me and we’d race to see who could get the highest the fastest. And whenever two people got stuck swinging together at the same rate we’d shout, “Get out of my bathroom!” and other such childish things.

Other times I would be alone, or just in my own mind and I would just watch the clouds above, aiming my feet at them. Then I’d imagine being able to jump off at the very top of the upswing and fly over the football feild and over the trees on the other side.

This is one of my few childhood memories that let’s me pry into that child’s imagination I had back then. I savor these memories and still enjoy a good session on a swing to really remember them. Now, if you were also a swing hog, then you know the one funny downside to swinging for so long. When you finally jump off at the end of recess when they rung the bell, you land in a spray of dirty gravel and stand up and do that funny waddle back to the classroom because your butt has lost partial felling from the swing seat.

To all fellow swing hogs: go find a swing for me and go swinging again. :)