The Book

I am published.

This short blog entry today, before the New Year begins, is to let you know that I am officially published. Two of my short stories, of which I am both proud, have been published in a book. The book is a science book, an astronomy book, full of professional papers and recounts done by professional astronomers. Technically, it is mostly the boyfriend's book since he's one of the three editors on the book. Most of the astronomers in the book I've met and adore. They were all very sweet to let me publish two of my short science fiction stories in their astronomy book: "The Demotion of Pluto" and "Titan: Mission Gone BOOM!"

If you're interested in buying a book, go to the  www.CollinsFoundationPress.org and look for the book entitled Small Telescope and Astronomical Research. You can order it straight off the website. Today, it is $19.95. As of the new year, it will be $29.95.

Please let me know if you get it! I would love to hear your thoughts on my stories. So far, I've read them in front of many professional astronomers. I'm curious to know what the public thinks as well.

Goals

My dreams are vivid.

It is frightening to wake up from a dream where everything is exploding around you, where you feel like you're running in slow motion but you know that, in the reality of your dream, you are actually running quite quickly. It is frightening to see your "friends" die in the explosions, give up because they cant run anymore, even though you pull at them to hurry up, and someone ahead eventually pulls on your arm, telling you that there isn't any hope and to leave them be. It's frightening to leave them, as the explosions surround you and your ears are stunned by the sound as you run and run and run... knowing that somehow, someday, you will get to your destination, you will be safe with the few friends who didn't give up, the ones you have left.

It's frightening to wake up and think, "That's a great beginning to a story." And that's what I think whenever I wake up from dreams like that.

A friend of mine recently posted her New Years resolutions and I thought to myself "What are mine?" They certainly have to do with writing, since I feel like I always have a million ideas bouncing around in my head (like the dream, for example). So, I sat down and thought about it and here's what I came up with:

1. I will get straight A's this semester. I feel like I really let myself down this last semester. Even though I moved and was in a new location, a new home, a new situation, a new school, I feel like I should have gotten an A in classes that I got a B. So, I'm determined to bring my GPA back up.

2. I will go to therapy and tell the truth. This one is pretty self-explanatory. I want to get fixed.

3. I will finish the second draft of my novel and edit it, not rewrite it. I'm a freak. Re-writing is in my nature. I keep thinking "what if I did that to my novel?" I need to make a decision and stick with it. So, it needs to be edited, not necessarily re-written. The re-writing can come in bits of the editing.

4. I will not let holidays get me down. Part of the whole depression thing is fighting it. This will be a hard resolution because it starts with New Years Eve, which has a whole lot of a expectation attached to it. Then we move into Valentines Day and so on and so forth. All the expectation makes me want to have the best holiday ever, better than my friends. But even if it's good, I'm still depressed about it. So I'm going to try and not be.

5. I will get published. Technically, with the boyfriend's book out, I am published. However, I want something, on my own, to be published. So I can lift my head up and smile.

Merry Christmas

...

or Happy Holidays. Whatever you prefer.

I know today was AWESOME for me!!! My sister got me the best Christmas gift EVER!

Is Santa a Socialist?

This honestly scares me.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2505663/sarah_palin_santa_claus_or_comrade_pg2.html?cat=60

I checked this out on Snopes.com to see if it was true and couldn't find any info against it. It honestly scares me that A) Sarah Palin would assume that Jewish people don't know the difference between Santa Claus and Jesus and B) that Sarah Palin would say that Santa giving children presents is a bad thing.

Whatever happened to the giving holiday? Whatever happened to the spirit of Christmas? Geez...

Help

I've been keeping most of this inside because I've been a bit embarressed and a little unready to tell everyone my big emotional flaws. But, when I broke down today and told my mom the truth, I decided that I better let the cat out of the bag and break it to the world. Because, really, I shouldn't be ashamed.

I'm getting therapy.

I am one messed up "young adult," if you can't already tell. I'm not quite sure who reads this besides my grandparents and maybe an uncle or aunt, but I really am one messed up person. Because when I was a teen, my dad began his tirade of emotional abuse. Because when I was a teen, I figured out that the only way I could solve things (due to my father) was to get angry. Because when I was a teen, I jumped in the middle of countless arguments, received endless griping about how horrible my mother and sister were, and cried in the corner of my bedroom, hoping that no one would find me there. Because when I was a teen, I discovered that the only way to relieve stress, anger, or any sort of emotion was to cry.

I know this sounds weird and, if you know me in person, you might think I'm a really strong personality and that I have it all together. However, that's my game face. That's what I want to be, what I spend every second trying to be.

The truth is that I am on big ball of salty wet tears. And I can't seem to turn off the hose whatever I do or try. I don't just cry when I'm sad or angry. I cry when I'm scared. I cry when I'm nervous. I cry when there is a situation that I can't control. I cry when I can't figure out my statistics homework the first time. I cry when any sort of emotion beyond happiness gets beyond the level of basic function. And, like I said, I can't turn it off. So imagine being me, going in to my boss' office to ask for a raise, and crying because I'm a little nervous about asking him...

Yea. Pretty pathetic.

But, of course, that's not the reason why I'm going into therapy. The crying is the relief, the break in the dam that helps the pressure to subside. What creates the pressure is the hatred, the pure black blinding hatred for my father and myself that I have built up inside of me that leaks through little cracks, without the crying, effecting my every day life. Making me angry in situations where I shouldn't be angry. Making me depressed when nothing is wrong. The hatred that I have for my father that I can control, which only causes me to hate myself more because I feel like I'm turning into him. The hatred that I have for myself when I look in the mirror and see something different that the person other people tell me that they see.

People tell me not to think badly of myself. They tell me just to take a deep breath and to just calm down. But that's what they don't understand. I don't know how to calm down. And since I don't know how to calm down (except to cry), I can only see myself as this angry, pitiful creature. And it makes me suffer, it makes me depressed. It makes me miserable.

So I'm going to therapy.

A Whole New Ball Game

Christmas break has been going really well so far. I've spent time with my mom's family, I've seen my best friend, I found the skirt for my steampunk costume...

Christmas break has been going really well so far.

Until this evening.

I realize I'm a fairly serious person. In grade school, my friends used to tease me about my lack of sense of humor. I dealt with it, laughing along with their teasing and building up my little brick wall against them. I thought that the older I grew, the more people would understand that I take things seriously because I believe certain things out to be taken seriously. Especially break ups.

Tonight, a friend of mine texted me, letting me know that he and his girlfriend broke up. I freaked out, thinking that he needed me, but he didn't pick up when I called. When he did call me back, he was laughing because it had all been a joke. It had all been a prank.

I don't know about you, but it was no joking matter. Telling a friend that you're moving back to the coast to be closer to the ocean so you can drown yourself because you broke up with your girlfriend is not funny. Frankly, it's concerning. And I was concerned. And hurt. Hurt that a friend had played such a cruel trick.

I'm posting this as just a ramble. I don't know what I'm going to do about it all and I hope everyone who reads this learns from my experience.

What a way to celebrate the week of Christmas.

Twidiots, Part 2

Ok, I just found this article and, if you were interested in my first reporting of poor Military_Mom's story, here's the conclusion to it: http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20091217/BREAKINGNEWS/91217033/1086/rss07

Please read and sympathize for this poor woman.

Twidiots?

I have this kind of love/hate relationship with Twitter.

I've been off and on it for a while. Sure, it's fun to update my status every hour and make my life seem interesting but, honestly, who cares what I’m doing every second of my day? After a while, when you have absolutely nothing to update your account with except for “bored as hell” or “watching the rain,” you realize how dull your life has become.

However, I decided to give it a shot one more time, just to see what the fuss was all about. And, for about two days, I thought Twitter was cool. Then I heard about Military_Mom.

You’ve heard of those people whose life is completely surrounded with Twitter? This is Military_Mom. If you just go and look at her page, almost every minute of every day is taken up by updates and notes to her readers. She was one social mama. So, you can imagine how shocked her readers were when, about an hour after her last Twitter, she mentioned to her readers, “Please pray, my 2-year-old son fell in our pool,” which has since been removed from her page.

It has since become a controversy. Was Military_Mom Twittering when her son fell in her pool? Or was this just an instance where a rambunctious 2-year-old just fell in a pool while his mother had turned his head for a second? Readers have been leaning both ways.

I’m not sure which is it, but the woman made the call to the police about her son falling in her pool around 5:38pm on Monday, according to Florida Today. If you check on Twitter, this was only 15 minutes after her last “tweet.” It completely shakes me up. The facts are unclear but a little brutal.

Military_Mom has responded viciously to four different Tweeters, telling them “you are an ass, I was outside w/him and it took 2 sec for him to slip away, I hope U never feel this pain u ass” and “where us your heart bitch.” However, as someone who wants to agree with Military_Mom, I have to look at the hard facts that this woman has not come back with a reply against the statement that the might have been checking her Twitter or Twittering while her child was wandering around.

Losing someone, especially a child, is hard. I cannot imagine what this woman is going through, whether it is the fault of her Twittering or not. I’m trying to stay on the side of those who are praying for this woman and giving her their condolences. If I were her, I would have deleted my Twitter account by this time instead of taking the controversial Tweets off of her page. My heart goes out to this woman, whatever state she is in. Especially because I believe, unlike others on Twitter, that she would not Tweet her son was at the bottom of the pool while he was there. Maybe she really wanted prayer. I know I would.

Even so, I’m thinking harder about getting off of Twitter. If not just because the readers are so brutal about something they don’t have all the facts for.

Who would want a Web site like this to be the blame for your child’s death? I know I wouldn’t.

References:

Florida Today: http://www.floridatoday.com/comments/article/20091215/BREAKINGNEWS/91215016/Merritt-Island-toddler-drowns-in-swimming-pool

Military_Mom: http://twitter.com/Military_Mom

The undeleted Tweets: http://girlarsonist.blogspot.com/2009/12/mom-tweets-while-son-drowns.html

Conflicted Holiday

Christmas is a conflicted time of year for me.

Now that I live away from home, Christmas is no longer a holiday that I begin and end with my family. It is a holiday that I join in on, a holiday that is left to childhood memories and feelings of the past. I really feel like that, until I am married and have my own family to celebrate the holidays with, Christmas has become simply a time to "remember when" and just spend time with the family I have.

Two memories dominate my mind when December decides to show her chilly face in my life. First, there's the memory that makes me look forward to Christmas. The memory of growing up in Tehachapi. The memory that reminds me of how Christmas feels. This one consists of decorations on the house, the snow covering our 2 1/2 acres of land shimmering in the moonlight, my sister and I pulling our sleds up a hill only to ride back down it again, calling after our dog who had decided to hide in the snow from us, making cat huts (instead of snowmen) out of snow for my cats (who loved them, by the way, and would hide in them as soon as we put an old towel inside that they could lie down on), hot chocolate, a roaring fire, a giant Christmas tree with presents stacked underneath it, listening to the sound of laughter as I watched my family open presents, the smell of the pancakes my mom would make every Christmas morning...

The Christmas of my childhood.

Then, there's that memory that always ruins my Christmas, that memory that makes me despise this time of year more than anything else. You probably guessed it. It's the memory of my father and the legacy that he left behind when he decided to thrash his way out of his family's life. Now, most people might be mad at me for not just saying "screw him!" and throwing this memory out, but, when it's been so deeply ingrained in my mind, it's hard to remember Christmas without remembering him. Without remembering how much he hated the holiday. Without remembering how he moaned and groaned about getting the Christmas tree every year because "it wasn't Christian" and "it's too much trouble" and "that's not what Christmas was all about." Without remembering how, on Christmas day after my sister and I had opened up all of our presents, he would ask us to give him half of the presents that we had recieved to give to the homeless shelter. Without remembering him getting mad at us when we asked him why he didn't just ask us to do that before we opened the presents, before we had seen what they had given us. Without remembering closed blinds and hiding in bedrooms and going out to see a movie with my mom and sister just so we could get the hell away from him sitting at home, being an absolute terror.

I once gave my father a Grinch tie as a Christmas gift and a joke. Now, years later, I wonder if I was predicting the future.

So, as I end finals this week and head from my university to my mom's house for Christmas, I open my book of memories and try to flip backwards through all the bad memories to my childhood in Tehachapi, when all I thought about was stockings and snow and servings of bacon, fresh from the skillet.

What memories do you carry with you at this time of year?

After Birthday Blues

Last night went well. I went out with some friends from the newspaper and the boyfriend for some sushi and sake. We had a wonderful time. After, we were thinking of going to the bars; however, we decided that it was raining much to hard for that and, instead, came home for some eggnog and rum. Yum!

But the birthday is over. And even though it's pouring down rain, and I would love to be working on the end of my novel or doing this:

I, instead, have to do this:

However, I have some exciting/interesting prospects lined up that, if they fall into the right place, I might mention about winter break or even the next semester. We'll see what happens!

Happy Panda

I'm 21 today! Woopee!!

Now... all the major birthdays are over with. It's sort of weird, hoping that this birthday would come and now it's halfway over.

Anyway.

Harry vs. Bella: Why Twilight Fails to Impress a Lover of Lit

If Harry Potter and Bella Swan were to get into a duel, who do you think would win?

If we took into account that the spineless high schooler would inevitably call upon her handsome werewolf or animal-sucking vampire for protection, where-as the Boy-Who-Lived would simply raise his wand to the challenge, I think we would have our answer without discussion.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve been a die-hard fan of both Twilight and Harry Potter. I have read all the books and seen all the movies. I’ve heard all the opinions there really are possibly to be heard. Yet, still, I come back to the same conclusion over and over again — without fail, the Harry Potter series kicks the Twilight series out of literary consideration. After carefully considering all aspects of what makes a book appeal to an audience, and remembering that the next movie in both series comes out November 2010, I have come up with a list of reasons why fans should put down Eclipse and pick up Deathly Hallows.

1. Character development — When we meet Bella and Harry, they are two very under confident teens. Harry’s sort of a trouble-maker. Bella is so depressed after moving away from Arizona that the readers are afraid she might kill herself. As the stories progress, Bella’s attitude develops into “If I don’t have Edward, my life is over,” where-as Harry steps up to the plate, wand in hand, ready to figure his life out. Not convinced yet? By the end of book four, Bella’s selfish idea is that she will protect the vampire baby in her stomach even if it’s going to kill her, where-as Harry unselfishly goes to his inevitable death to protect the world from a very evil being.

2. Climax — Stephanie Meyer murders the idea of climax in her plotlines. At the end of Book 3, there is an epic battle with the werewolves and Cullens on one side and baby vampires on the other side. Does it feel epic? No. Mainly because Bella is too stubborn to stay home and has to be out in a tent, in the middle of the woods, freezing her fanny off with a worried Jacob and Edward, who should be fighting to protect her. On the other side, we see Harry fighting Professor Quirrell in book 1, a massive spider in 2, dementors in 3, Voldemort in 4, Death Eaters in 5, Death Eaters in 6, and a ton of people including Death Eaters and Voldemort in 7. There is always a climax. The audience never yearns for a fight scene, which is what I yearned for at the end of Meyer’s Breaking Dawn, where the Volturi show up, there’s a set up for a massive battle, and then… then… nothing.

3. Sequels — Sure, everyone publishes a book they’re not proud of, but I think I’ll take Harry’s angst, Ron’s struggle with his love for Hermione and a little drama over a finale book that made readers’ eyes widen as they say, “HUH?” Come on, Stephanie Meyer. You tiptoe around every little subject, keep your characters innocent and then your fourth book contains pedophilia, brutal sex, and a C-Section with Edward’s teeth? At least J.K. Rowling is consistent.

4. Morals — This is pretty plain and simple to me. When the Harry Potter series first came out, parents freaked out over their children reading books about witchcraft. However, I could always shut parents up with arguing that the series is an epic about the struggles of good triumphing over evil. It doesn’t tell you how to get the hair of a unicorn and mix it with toads’ eyes to make a love potion. On the other hand, I haven’t heard many complaints from mothers worrying about their children reading Twilight. This bothers me because the book teaches selfishness. She wants Edward. No, she wants Jacob. Now she wants both at once. “I don’t care about my soul as long as I can be with you.” What is this? Shouldn’t mothers be worried about their daughters running off with the first boy they meet because, “Mooooom, we’re in looooove.”

So there you have it. Megan’s perspective on these two infamous book series. Keep in mind that I did read both series, I was a die-hard fan, I saw the movies and I’m taking this all from a literary perspective.

And don’t dis on Harry Potter. That book has come a long way and I feel satisfied when I read it, unlike the disgusted, emo feeling I get from Twilight.

Steampunking It

I almost had a heart attack when I found out Monday night about the Edwardian Ball that's being held in San Francisco in January.

Of course, if you didn't know already, I'm a steampunk fanatic. I really wanted to go to SteamCon in October but getting my costume together that quick is a little much for me. However, this time I'm ready, this time I've got it. I'm going with my sister and a friend first to the Edwardian World's Faire and then to the Edwardian Ball in the most beautiful red dress and (hopefully) a parasol.

The dress looks like this and is from http://www.retroscopefashions.com/images/gallery/gallery130.jpg








Anyway, it's Dead Week in school, the week before finals, and the word "dead" is taking on a new definition for me this week. First, it's definitely much colder here than it was in the bay area, where I used to live, so I actually broke out my heavy black jacket, the one I wore to Chicago for the band trip my junior year of high school and felt warm for the first time here in weeks. On the other hand, even though it's cold, the sky is a crisp blue color that you would otherwise ignore on a hot day, and, though it stings your nose, when you breathe in, you can smell every little icy scent going on around you. In a way, it brings me back to my childhood, living in the mountains of Tehachapi, in my parents' house, sitting in front of a blazing fire that my father had stoked up to be so hot, so intense, that it was impossible to stand in front of it for more than a couple of seconds without feeling overwhelmed. I missed that fireplace...

Google Has Issues

This weekend, the student newspaper worked double time so that we could make up for the fact that this coming week is Dead Week. Maybe it's Dead Week for everyone else, but for me it's "you have a final on monday, your paper is due Tuesday, and you have a lot of statistics homework" week. I guess it is better, though, because I really only have 2 finals that I'm taking during the actual finals week and they're spaced evenly on Tuesday and Thursday.

What I'm really excited about is the fact that I'm turning 21 on Friday. My friends from the newspaper and I have been discussing what to do for my birthday. They, of course, want to go out to the bars, in the town where there are 10 million bars to choose from and is known for its drinking on Friday night. I, on the other hand, voted for sushi and sake, because sushi is my favorite food ever. So that's what we'll be doing on Friday. No bar scene. No getting Megan plastered. Just going out to dinner. Yay!

Anyway, since my brain is still pretty dead from all the double-time copy-editing I had to do yesterday (7 hours worth of copy-editing), I'm going to leave this post with an interesting little tidbit.

Google is weird. If you've ever searched its engines, you know that it has this habit of trying to finish whatever sentence or phrase you want to look up. So, I thought it would be interesting to look up a word and see what phrase pops up with it. The results are... kind of odd.

What
What are these strawberries doing on my nipples, I need them for the fruit salad

Why
Why is my poop green?
Why is there a dead pakistani on my couch

Those
Those who do not learn from history and are doomed to repeat it

I
i like to tape my thumbs to my hands to see what it would be like to be a dinosaur

Who
Who moved my cheese?

Try this on your own. You might spend hours trying to find something fun, like I did!

Bible Thumping Crazy Christians

I am a Christian.

I'm not a flaming Christian. I'm what I would call a "quiet Christian." I share my beliefs with people who would like to listen and share their ideas and opinions back in a calm manner. When my family moved to the coast when I was in high school, I was (what people called) a "pretty crazy Christian." I called people out right on the spot, I didn't explain myself after giving the answer that I believed was right. When someone asked me if they were going to hell and told me they weren't a Christian, I stuck with the "yes, you are going to hell" and was told that I hurt a fair number of people's feelings that way. As time progressed and people stopped talked to me, I turned my tone down from an 8 to a 4, realizing that the way you approach people about Christianity should be gentle, calm, and optimistic. As much as I believe that the Bible is the way, someone else has a right to their opinion as well and it would be just of me to listen to it, even if I'm going to contradict it with another verse from the Bible.

So... when I saw this man on my campus looking exactly the way he does in this picture, claiming to preach a message of love from God... my blood boiled. And every time I look at this picture, my blood boils.

How would you like it, Christian or no, if you came upon someone like this? From this picture, what I gather is that he is pointing his finger, his mouth is open, and his eyes are narrowed. Which means... he's accusing someone of something. And that's just what he is on campus to do. I don't care what he has told everyone. His yelling and screaming and finger pointing presents a message of hate.

I'm come across this guy twice on campus, by myself, and both times I felt compelled to speak to him. The first time, he was standing on top of something, looking over the heads of students, screaming how they were all sodomites and lovers of homosexuals and how God "abhors" them all. I witness a young man from the college standing next to him, holding a sign in cardboard that read "God abhors this guy" and I listened to students laughing at guy screaming. I praised another young man who was telling the crowd that God and Jesus both love everyone and that they want to save everyone, while the preacher tried to scream over him about how they were all sinners and horrible and going to hell. I attempted to say something to him but he didn't listen to me and, I admit, my yelling up at him just blended in with the rest of the chaos.

The second time, Wednesday afternoon, I found that guy out again with an even bigger audience circling him this time, and a buddy who was holding the sign that the guy was holding the first time that I saw him. Off to the side were two young men holding cardboard signs with phrases such as "Jesus loves all!" on them, and I decided to approach them this time. I was grateful to find that they were from a Christian fraternity on campus and were trying to prove to the audience that you can preach a message without screaming, which was true because people continuously approached them, talking to them calmly, and mainly asking if they were with the two men who were yelling at the crowd. After talking to one of the guys for a while, I saw the preacher had stopped yelling so, against the boyfriend's warning earlier that day, I approached him.

I was calm. I asked him if he had a moment. I then proceeded to inquire how he thought all of this yelling was preaching a message of love, when it appeared to everyone that he was preaching hatred. He yelled at me after I had approached him quietly, inches from my face, with his horrid crooked teeth and horrid crooked breath, while I stood there quietly, looking at him quizzically. I felt the full force of his confrontation with his face so close to mine, accusing me of not being a true Christian, of not spreading the message of God. (I wanted to tell him that he reminded me of my father but I was afraid he would actually suggest my father is a good man.) Yet, never once did he open the Bible that he had been slapping around in his hand. He asked me if I had read the Gospels and seemed a little surprised when I confidently replied "yes" and wanted to add "have you?" When he went so far as to say, "What do you think your little ice cream socials and your little Bible studies can do compared to my preaching?" I actually shook my head and walked away. I wanted to slap him. I wanted to punch him in his crooked teeth and get him to stop making Christians look bad, make him stop angering Campus Crusades and the Christian fraternities and sororities. Of course, I didn't, but I wanted to. Perhaps I felt this way because the message he was spreading inspired anger and I wanted to show him anger in the form of my fist.

I later found out from another staff member at the student newspaper that the police have a record on this guy. His group travels around CSU campuses, screaming "the love of God" messages, and getting in people's faces so that someone physically assaults them. Then, they sue that person for a lot of money (claiming that they were in the campus free speech area) and they move to the next CSU. Personally, if I could, I would convict them of a hate crime.

My blood boils when I see that picture. My blood boils when I see that man.

I wonder what the police would say if a girl decked that guy in the face.