Dorienne's Log

I always find it fascinating how well I manage to get side-tracked when it comes to my writing. It never feels bad initially, because it is contributing to my knowledge of a subject and thus, making me a better writer, but I am amazed nonetheless.

Take for example my efforts are re-writing/inserting Chapter 31 of Flight, a novel. I decided I needed a scene where two of the principle characters are coming to some kind of reconciliation and then spent an hour trying to figure out how to make it happen.

I said to myself, How should I present this scene? So, I figured a board game between them. At first it was Battleship, since they would be facing one another, but then I was like, “Would people their age even play that? Do they even make that game anymore?” and then went researching to find a decent board game they could play. When I was about to give up and settle for Jenga, I found Othello. It sounded like an interesting game with all its various stratagem, but I did not know how to play and I cannot think of anything more humiliating than to spend hours writing about something about which you know very little, only to realize that you got everything wrong and sound like an idiot, even if the prose is magnificent.

So, to Wikipedia I went and ended up spending the rest of the night playing game over and over and over again. I did not get anymore writing done for the rest of the night, but by the time I had left work (all these revelations came to me at work), I had a rather firm grasp of the game for a beginner.

Another instance of this same issue was when I was working on my Harry Potter fanfiction. I decided it would be best to have an understanding of how streets intersected in the areas I had them going and found myself, hours later, becoming so mesmerized by the River Thames that I just zoomed in on Google Maps and followed the river from its mouth to as far as I could follow during the rest of my shift (again, hard at work).

I mention this as mostly a memoir to myself when I look back and think about my levels of procrastination. I remember a long time ago talking to my roommates in the dorms about how beneficial procrastination always seemed like a good thing, like going for a run or cleaning instead of studying. While it feels like something is being accomplished, the main goal still goes unrealized.

I’ve been in a weird place mentally these past few days. I’ll say mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Most of this I’ll attribute to the fact that the book is done and I’m trying to remember who I was and what I did before delving so wholly into the book. A week later, it is still difficult. I’ve got about nine or ten beta readers and now I’m just playing the waiting game and resisting the urge to PM, IM or e-mail every single one of them everyday just to see how it is going. Perhaps so much of my psyche is being spent trying to keep that OCD down that everything else is coming out that would normally be held in check.

I told one of my students to “shut up” after she said a sardonic comment. It was meant in good fun and she laughed about it, but I’m still shocked that it came out like that. I hadn’t meant to say it, but it just fell out and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Yesterday, I said something else that was pretty mean without even thinking about it. Again, it just fell out before I could stop myself.

Maybe my “body, mind and soul” are all in recovery after the book. I have handwritten two previous to this one, but neither was anywhere near the length of Flight and I completed them over the course of several years. This time around I wrote nearly 400K words in close to eight months. This last month took a lot out of me and I am still stewing in the consequences. It even threw me off cycle, which had been going like clockwork…

Life slowly, but surely falling back into a place, yet every once in a while I find myself asking “Well, now what do I do?” I suppose it will all work out in the end, but I hope that I can get through this lull without anymore not-so-Christian outbursts.

It’s done! It’s done! It’s finally done! It’s a good two weeks after I had intended on having it done and an hour and forty-three minutes outside of the final deadline I had given myself, but…IT’S DONE!

Flight, a novel is finally complete. It’s weird though…I think I was more excited as I wrote the very last section of it, than I was when I wrote “El Fin” and added a timestamp at the bottom of the book. It’s current, unedited state it stands at 371,393 words and 707 pages in M$ Word. It was completed Thursday September 27, 2007 at 1:43AM EST. Looking over it now, I see it’ll be a couple day’s worth of editing before it’s ready to be viewed by the world, but…I’ve done it. I finished a novel. How many people can say they’ve done that?

Edit (9/30/07): I completed my first “edit” of the book and feel that it is finally ready for others to read. The new word count is 372,036, but still 707 pages. 🙂

I will finish Flight this week.

I will finish Flight this week!

I’ve taken off an entire week from work and I am determined to make the best of it. Aside from cleaning the house and reading in general, I am going to finish Flight this week. My goal was initially my birthday, but I can get it done this week. By the time my birthday rolls around, I will be knee deep in school work and before I know it, the day will have come and gone and the book still won’t be done. Then will come the depression that I couldn’t achieve one of my goals and so on and so forth. I will finish Flight this week…

I’ve been writing a lot recently and thinking about other projects as well, specifically Luka. There is a part of me that wants to dive right into him, but I know I shouldn’t until (if) I’m published. I’ve heard it’s kind of taboo for a writer to begin with a series of novels, not knowing if he or she will ever get signed for a second book. Luka will be a monster five-book process and as much as I want to get to it now, I suppose I’ll just have to wait.

Something fun I’ve been doing in Flight, however, is fleshing out my original characters. That is the trouble with fan fiction. Many of your characters are already set, so if I made any real changes to their personalities, I would be betraying the character. With my own people, however, I can shape and contort them any way I see fit. One benefit of fan fiction, though, is that I can see myself reusing some of my original characters in completely original work. I’m sure I’ll use “Maya” in some other capacity and I’ve already found a use for “Deondre Meekham” and his uncle…It’s just fun to watch this little literary world I’ve created evolve almost on its own.

And speaking of evolution…This week’s Sunday School lesson was on Genesis 1:1-25. The first verse is the most profound and the best:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Just wonderful if you really sit down and think about it. God was there before all; before everything that was or ever could be. It’s almost like if you believe in just one verse, you’re halfway “home” already. What interested me most about the lesson this week was the discussion I had with other teachers on the subject of “day” in this first chapter.

I have been raised in a pragmatic world full of scientific thinkers and although I’ll cannot say what I’ll “never” do, I do no think I will ever see “day” in Genesis as a set of 24 hours and here’s why. A day, the way we as humans see the earth, is comprised of the rising and setting of the sun, around which we revolve as our solar system spins around our galaxy in our corner of God’s universe. Simply put, a day to the earth means that the planet has made one full turn on its axis causing the sun to “rise” and “set.” In Genesis 1:3, God says “Let there be light.” and there was, however, God had not yet created the sun and stars and other entities that create light as we think of it today. Light was there, separate from the dark, because God spoke it, without needing anything to produce. Light was because God wanted it to be.

What is of most importance to understand, however, is that God exists outside of time. Thousands of year or one second could pass to God and it can have the same significance. HE is outside of time. So, God called the light “day” and the dark “night” because humans are finite, practical creature that do exist within the bounds of time and so needed something upon which to understand their world. This is where the concept of “day” comes. If “day” in this biblical sense, was created before the entities by which we measure a day, how can we honestly say that the “day” so referred in Genesis 1:5 meant 24 hours?

Unless God comes before me himself to tell me different, this is something I cannot believe. Science tells and shows me that everything that is on the earth was created over the course of millions of years, not 168 hours. What is important and should be remembered about this text however, is that Genesis is not meant to be a scientific doctrine that dictates every single step God took to create the world. Its purpose is to let us know that in the beginning, God was there and he created everything in the universe. We can argue that evolution is the mechanism used by God to get us where we are today, but God is and always will be the driving force behind everything. He is the answer to the “why” when one asks, “Why did said fish mutate in such a way that it could survive outside water?” or “Why said animal laid an egg with a hard shell that could live outside water thus giving us the first land animals?” There is always a why when it comes to evolution and where the atheists answer the question with pure dumb luck and/or fate, I will always answer it with God.

When you think about it logically, it makes a little more sense doesn’t it? Honestly, which would you believe: that everything this is or was in the world came to be because God has created it in his master plan or, that every beautifully complicated organism from the smallest microbe to the largest whales was founded out of some primordial “ooze” and evolved out of chance? When stood next to one another, one of these options holds far more credence than the other.

Phew…I hadn’t meant to carry on like that today, but when the spirit moves you…:)

I was actually in a happy mood until about three minutes ago, during which time I had to go through pages and pages of spam on my blog. What is it with spammers? What is to be gained by spamming people? The comments go unread and nothing is accomplished. At least with viruses there is the satisfaction that you ruined an unsuspecting person’s machine or with phish, where there is some monetary gain to be had. Spam is just mind-boggling for me…anyway.

My English class is going well, eerily well, it feels. I think I had just grown so accustomed to performing poorly in my classes that I don’t know to feel after coming from an exam with a positive feeling. I have found a new love…well, love is a bit much, but oh well…for Shakespeare. Othello has me frightfully intrigued in every way possible. I have not liked a work this much since reading Fried Green Tomatoes at Whistle Stop Cafe for the first time, however, I feel a bit daunted over the aspect of having to go through some of his historical pieces. I see myself being extremely bored throughout, but I will try to approach the plays with an open mind. I mean, if he wrote them, there had to be some significant story to be told, so there is a possibility that I might just love them. Who knows?

There are so many things I want to do with this life and there simply does not seem to be enough time. I want to write, design websites for every show and book I’ve ever loved, play my sims, write and publish sims stories on my sites, learn to play piano, play the piano, plant trees, knit sweaters, play ddr, go running, write in my blog, implement flash on my church website, be at church, know the Bible, learn some aspects about the Torah, organize all my videos, rip all my shows and movies to my computer, make YouTube videos, watch videos, make up with old friends, contact even older ones, make new friends, be an inspiration to someone somewhere at sometime…

Sigh. There’s just so much to do and there’s no time to do it. That’s the depressing part.

Flight is officially a monster of a book. At 337 pages and more than 177K words, I am wondering just how big it will get. This “part” of the book is moving along in weird spurts of inspiration. I’ll be in the moment and write like crazy and then I get to a point where I just want to scrap the whole thing like I did today with a poem I was attempting to write. I was going on and on about being black instead of an African American and I, quite literally, dragged my pen across the paper and groaned about how ignorant I was sounding. I know what I want to say, and there are times when I think I can communicate those words best through, but I just can’t seem to cut it when it comes to poetry. It sometimes seems like the harder I try, the worst it all sounds. I can hear myself struggling as I re-read the crap…but the fanfic is going as well as it can.

Adventures in Vegetarianism #7
Five months into this, I am still going strong. There are days when it seems almost like second nature, as if I’ve always been living this way. Then, there are others, when all I want to do chow down on chili dogs or grinders, but those days are few and far between. The main thing, however, is that being a full-fledged vegetarian is accomplishing the goal I have set out to do. Slowly, but surely, I have managed to shed ten pounds. Not a huge improvement seeing as how I’ve got so far to go, but the fact is, the scale is going down instead of up for the first time since I was fifteen. I plan on taking my measurements again in another week to see if I’ve made any improvements, but I am astounded how I can eat what I want and just exclude meat, and still get the same results I want. Someone once told me that losing the meat caused the pounds to come off, but I did not believe it as they were wearing a PETA shirt at the time, but now, I do wonder.

What I like about being a vegetarian is the change in me. I feel better and people tell me I look better, too. All in all, I feel like a healthier person and my mother has now dropped meat from her diet. At this rate, PETA might stop eating meat altogether, however, nothing will make me give up cheese. I won’t eat the animal, but cheese, all kinds, is a special treat for me and nothing could make me drop. My body withstands it even through violent lactose intolerance, and yet I still keep going. Oh well. I suppose I should not say what I will and will not do because three years ago, I knew I would never be pro-life and I knew I would never understand why people gave ten percent of their livelihood to the church and so on. God only knows what I’ll know tomorrow.

And, speaking of my Almighty, a year after winning from the church, I finally got my piano. I am so excited by it, I could just scream. There are five broken keys, but I don’t play anywhere near well-enough for those to matter for a bit. I am just so excited to have one that’s all mine and I practice upon until the wee hours of the night. I just love the idea of either getting lessons for it or simply teaching myself how to play. I told my mother that this could be my birthday present because it is simply outstanding. I know I will have years of fun and (to be a bit melodramatic) peace with this instrument and it gets me excited again just thinking about the fact that it sits downstairs waiting for me.

Piggy-backing off of my YouTube milestone, I’ve hit a far more important one; two actually. This Tuesday past, I wrote my first 100,000 words in my novel Flight. Always the obsessive-compulsive writer, I actually narrowed down the 100,000th word…it was “felt” :). The second writing milestone was writing 200 pages worth of text. While the page count isn’t all that important because depending on how paragraphs flow and much of one page is simple dialogue, the hundred-thousand words most definitely is. Having no idea how big a book any word count would be, I compare everything to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix as it is the only book that, for some reason, I’ve remembered its word count. OOTP is about 225,000 and the book is about 900 pages in the US, so I figure that I’ve written about nearly 400 pages, if Flight was ever a published novel. The idea of it just makes me laugh because I’m 400 pages into it and I’m only about a third of the way through the book. I know this thing is just going to be a beast.

The length of this book has got me thinking, though. I may end up being one of those Stephen King-ish, long-winded writers since the notes themselves for the novels are getting longer and longer. I guess I just have a lot to say, but I’m excited overall to see what others have to think about this, my first novel. My dream is that years from now, when I look back on my work, I’ll think to myself, “All the Newberrys notwithstanding, Flight was my first novel and therefore, will always be thought of as my greatest work.”

It’s my one-year anniversary of joining my church! I’m so glad I wrote about it here. I don’t think I’ve written it anywhere else, so it’s important to nail down the date because it gives me a point from which I can measure my walk. The exact date is May 14th, but I’m excited about it nonetheless. My mother marveled about it, saying that I had done more in our church during one year than others have done in entire lifetimes, which fascinates me. But, looking back over this past year, I can’t believe how far I’ve come.

Sunday School today was very interesting. It was just me and one student, but we had a very good conversation about the text and about religion altogether. At one point we started talking about gays, and I started to feel the strain of my “old self” and my “new self.” My old self thought of gays and thought, “Okay, to each his own.” however, my new self knows what it says in the Bible and knows what is believed whole-heartedly by all those around me, so the “To each his own” idea just no longer seems appropriate. But still…I’ve learned so much through Sunday School and by teaching and what I’ve learned most more than anything throughout all these texts is that as a Christian, I must love everyone, regardless of their sins because I too am just a big a sinner as the next person.

One of the most poignant things I’ve learned is that sin is sin in God’s eyes. The liar and the murderer have done equal sins; it’s just Man who has made these divisions within sin. Albeit, one could argue that a murder could have a far larger impact on the lives of those around the affected individuals than would a “little white lie,” but the fact remains that sin is sin. I’ve told lies in the past and I’ll undoubtedly tell more before my end. On the subject of gays, I think to myself, “How dare I pass judgment on them, when I’ve sinned too.” and then there’s the idea that even though I may not be able to change how they think, I still don’t have to agree with it. As a Christian, I can be civil with all people, because in God’s eyes, I am no different. My only hope is that with prayer, that they can have salvation and won’t have to suffer the white gates.

I’m not running around with the “I don’t care what you do” mentality any longer, but I’m still nowhere near actually looking down on someone or treating them relatively different because they believe something other than I would believe. As ludicrous as it sounds, I think the Libra in me finds it unfair that I would look down on gays because they don’t follow the Bible, but not look down upon Jews or Hindus or anyone else as well. I’m not willing to take the plunge, so it feels wrong to even take that first step.

Sigh…

On a less melodramatic note, Flight is coming along well. It’s about 80,000 words currently and I’m about in the middle of the first “part,” but I’ve hit a bit of stall. The storyline needs to be changed slightly and I know it will take some time for me to correct what needs to be changed. My hope is that this doesn’t derail me from writing because I’ve been going on at a pretty good clip for a while now, writing at every chance I get.

I’m practically counting down the days before they put up another roadblock for me in regards to writing at work. As long as I have the will, there will always be a way, but it’s that nerve-racking feeling wondering when they’ll pull in the ropes. I won’t be telling anyone, this time, how I’ve been updating my novel, as the last time I spoke up, my primary means of editing was shut down. Hopefully, that will buy me some time. It’s not like I’m doing anything wrong, but I know somehow, someway, it’ll seem “unproductive” or something when someone looks at my, for lack of a better word, talent, and feels somehow undercut.

It doesn’t matter though. If they cut me off electronically, they can’t prevent me from bringing pen and paper to work and writing the old fashion way. I’d to have to resort back to that since I’ve just now gotten over my lack electronic creativity phobia, but I’ll do what I have to do.

Adventures in Vegetarianism #6
On this 13th day of the month of May, I begin my 13th week of vegetarianism and things couldn’t be going better. Today, I went to dinner with my parents and I barely even considered looking at any dishes with meat. I’ve also decided that I’m not going to be eating fast food this month, which makes the veggie thing all the more easy. Not visiting Wendy’s for even french fries, allays the craving that comes after gazing at the #6 option while at the drive-thru. I’m finally looking at this as a normal part of my life, rather than something I’m just doing for the time being. I’ve even lost all cravings for chicken and I can’t even remember what red meat tastes like. It’s a very cool feeling.

Wow! For the first time in quite a while, I feel like I’m in a good place. Despite everything that’s gone on this week, from car breakdowns to spider issues to almost subjugating myself to less than Christian scruples, I feel like everything’s moving in a flow perfectly adjusted for me. I’m losing weight, getting my classwork done and writing more than and still have time to study the Word. Everything actually is fine…for once. I don’t even feel like complaining about all the things that had gone wrong in the past few weeks. I feel perfectly content to be perfectly content. What an odd feeling…

I’m reading 1984 right now, and I must say, it has me intrigued like few books do. There is a part of me that’s screaming, “Get on with the bloody story!” while there’s also another part of me that’s just enjoying every inch of the developing story. What has me most intrigued are all the things that may need to be changed in this upcoming book of mine. While not nearly comparable, Winston and Luka seem to ask the same questions toward the beginning, though Luka will be a good deal younger. The message in the book is completely different than what I’m going for in my own, so I’m also wondering if I can get away with slightly referencing 1984 since the rest of the story is so different. I guess it’ll be necessary to just finish the book first before wondering what I’ll be forced to change in a book I’ve not yet started writing.

Just thinking about writing in general, though, piques my interest further. I love to write. Whether it’s here, through my website or actual stories and poems. I love the written word. Over these past few weeks, I’ve come to love creating my lessons for Sunday School because I have to write out my lesson. I thought at first, I just enjoyed watching characters develop and the way either myself or other authors use dialog to further along a plot, but what I really love are the words themselves. The fact that I can read and comprehend and create with something so simple seems almost baffling when I consider it fully. Twenty-six characters can be shaped and molded into something that can have depth and take on a meaning of it’s own. Now, I’m simply rambling, but I felt it necessary to mention this, because I realized today that get so wrapped in the words that I sometimes forget it is pertinent to yield some attention to actual living people who may one day receive my words. There are many times, I’ve found, that I would much prefer the company of my own characters and inside a world of my own making rather than facing the miscreants that hold dominion over this literal one.

Adventures in Vegetarianism #5
As I approach the end of my seventh week as a vegetarian, I must note that the urges are returning. Some time on Tuesday, I nearly broke down and got a chicken basket at Dairy Queen. It was really close, too. What bothered me was that it seemed so easy to fall back on old habits. It seemed like the most natural thing to do: go to DQ get a Blizzard and a chicken basket and scarf down twice my alloted caloric intake in one sitting. But…I resisted and I feel better for it.

I’ve lost just five pounds in these weeks and I don’t feel any different, but I know there is a positive somewhere in this. The only thing I can really say to myself about this is that I didn’t put on all this weight in six weeks and it won’t come off in six weeks either.

Half of my problem is that I go through periods where I’m OCD over one food and then I tire myself out over it and I start to eat out again. It’s not as bad as my pre-veg days, but it still isn’t good. Pre-veg, if I hadn’t cooked anything for dinner, I would be at Skyline pretending that since I didn’t think of hot dogs as actual meat it was okay. At least now, I stay out of places such as that. I figured that I would have started feeling weak by now, but I still haven’t. I’m not sure why, but I suppose that means I’m getting enough protein elsewhere, I guess…more like suppose…

Today, I had my first Sunday School class. I was so excited and nervous and scared, but mostly excited. Last night, I had this terrible nightmare where everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. I’d forgotten my Bible and all my notes and the pastor didn’t like any of the things I had to say and a whole mess of other crap was going on that just didn’t make sense. But, thankfully, everything went fine. We started out with just two at first and then another two showed. Several others told me they’d be coming around next week. I really hope they do. It’s the Young Adult class and I think it’s completely necessary since there are a lot of us young adults in church and there was always that feeling that there was no place for us since we didn’t want to be with the “old” people in the main adult class, but we were all way too old to be in class with the twelve year olds. I’m so excited to be teaching it and this forces me study the word every week. It also keeps me accountable to my church and not just for me. People will be depending on me.

Adventures in Vegetarianism #3
As I delved into this third week of vegetarianism, I felt this urge and absolute weakness. This craving for meat seemed to overwhelm me and I nearly broke this afternoon. It’s getting close that crimson tide and the Skyline craving was quite strong. I drove past one as I went to my parent’s house and I almost veered off the road just to sink my teeth into a chili dog. Then up the street, there’s the gathering of a Panera, a Chipotle and, of course, a Wendy’s, all on the same block. It was close, very close, but I stood strong.

What I do find interesting is that I do feel a bit weak just like that girl in my class said I would. I’m beginning to feel like my body is missing something important and I’ll be looking into a multivitamin tomorrow. I’m not sure if the reason I ended up sleeping for five hours after church has anything to do with this weakening of my system or if it was just stress from everything. Speaking of stress my cousin slash niece slash second cousin-niece was baptized today and she passed out a bit later. I was very worried and was still worried even after her mother told me she was okay. Children collapsing is so unnerving.

I bought another hundred dollars worth of groceries again and I didn’t even buy anything worthwhile. I’ll cook tomorrow, probably cabbage and some wild rice, something is simple. I am very worried about this weakening of my system, though. It’s not like I’m hungry all the time or anything, but it’s just a bad feeling overall.

Writing
I haven’t made much progress on the SVU fic this week, which is unfortunate because I haven’t done anything else either. I feel like I’m coming to slow point; all the creative juices have stopped flowing. I know it’ll start again, but I can’t help being impatient. I want it all and I want it now.

**Sigh***
Finally! Back where I belong and everything’s falling into place. For the first time in months, my outlook does not look so bleak. I’m doing what I should be doing and at the end of this quarter, I’ll be taking a long-awaited and long-deserved break. Of course, I’ll still be working, but at least I won’t be working and in school at the same time for a week.

I feel like this over-bearing weight is every-so-lightly lifting off my shoulders day by day, and I really do think that everything will be all right. I attribute 90% of this to going to church this week and making it to Sunday School on time. Everyone was so surprised to see me there, not racing in just before consecration. I start teaching on my own this Sunday and I’m really excited about it. I hope it’s not boring for everybody. I suppose if it doesn’t work out, they’ll either move me somewhere else or fire me altogether, but I’m hoping I don’t let anyone down on this. There’s a Wednesday night service tomorrow and I really can’t wait. I’m half mad since I didn’t get to put my tithes in on Sunday because I completely forgot about it. Usually I just have Mother throw it in for me, but she was busy with her own things and wasn’t there. I’ll have to find someone I trust to put it in on days when she can’t be there.

The written word is in the air and it’s loving me! I’ve been writing everyday and I feel like the well of words just keeps flowing. I’ve never been this in tune with a piece before. I feel like since I’ve completely laid out the plot, writing the details is all the more exciting. I love looking back on my old work and see how I’ve progressed as a writer. I wish this book was 100% my original with all my own characters and such, but all I can keep saying to myself is that this is just my way of proving to myself that I can write; that I can create and stay on target. God Lord! The day I actually finish it, I’ll be singing from the rooftops. I sort of want to delve into some of my other works, but I know I mustn’t. I must stick to this and finish it out; must keep the ADHD at bay! It’s what always kills me in the end. I finally have an idea on what must be done with A Ten-Minute Speech and I’m so excited to start, really start, writing the Luka books, I could just burst into flame. It’s all I want to do and all I want to think about. Sometime last week I found myself daydreaming about my own characters. My characters! That never happens and I keep wondering what it really means. With this fanfic novel, I’ve finally conquered my PC-writing demons. For years, I haven’t been able to writing creatively on a computer, forcing me write everything longhand and spend the next year deciphering my longhand as I type the entire thing. It’s a good thing that I’ve learned this now, because I’ve realized I have the tendency to be quite verbose. I’ve only just finished the first chapter of Flight and the book’s 10,928 words and 20 M$ Word pages. I’m wondering just how long it’ll take me to break my goal of 100K. The first chapter’s just on one day and there’s nineteen days in the first part of the book. I doubt every day will be 11K long, but still…my writing just gets flowery and I while I try my hardest not to ramble, I can’t help but delve into the characters a bit more. I don’t want to just write an episode; I want to create something unique that reads like an actual book and could be taken seriously, were it not actually fanfiction.

So, Dreamgirls…Yay! Jennifer Hudson won her Oscar and I feel oddly proud of her. I guess I just love seeing black women win Oscars, but anyway I’m horribly addicted to the Dreamgirls’ soundtrack. Of course, I’m playing One Night Only to death, but honestly, it’s the reason I bought the darn CD and I’m going to play it until my iPod breaks. I’m also slowly beginning to fall for Beyonce’s Listen, which I really don’t think was worthy of the Oscar nod, but whatever. One Night Only (Hudson’s version, of course), was a far better song, but maybe that’s just me. I’m probably not the most objective person to consider the two songs since One Night Only is currently stuck in my head, but so on and so forth…Obsessions: just the writing and One Night Only. SVU’s even starting to subside, but I think it may have more to do with my not wanting to be unduly influenced by the show as I write. I still need like a crackhead, but I missed last week’s new episode and I haven’t had a break down…yet. Thank goodness for USA network. Keeping SVU fanatics in good health, around the globe.

Adventures in Vegetarianism #2
I’ve been a full-fledged vegetarian now for more than a week and the Wendy’s #6 Spicy Chicken cravings have subsided substantially. I spoke with another vegetarian in one of my classes and she told me I’d probably start feeling weak after a bit, but I’ll stick it out a bit longer before taking a multi-vitamin, especially after that nonsense on the BBC news about vitamins actually shaving off the years instead of adding to them. Oh well. I suppose we’ll all go when we do. But, I’m really enjoying this not-eating-meat thing. Tonight, I made a grilled cheese sandwich with olive oil instead of butter. I’m well on my way to becoming a vegan…except for the fact that I love cheese and yogurt and would sooner cut of my own foot and feed it to my enemies than give up cheese and yogurt. But, the point is, I’m not eating any meat. I wish I could say that I give a crap about cows and pigs and such, but I honestly can’t make myself really care about animals. I just don’t want to like the taste of them anymore and I want to just live healthier. I just can’t see any positives to eating meat, especially since I read something about average humans eating something like six times the amount of animal meat we need to survive. That just seems utterly crazy to me.
Anyway, I haven’t lost any weight to this vegetarian diet, but that’s probably due to the fact that I polished off this entire macaroni and cheese dish by myself as I practiced for the pot luck we’re having at work this Friday. It’ll be Dorienne’s time to shine! I also randomly made a bunch of cookies and frosted them myself. I don’t know where the crazy cravings come from, but they are bizarre. But, cheers to me for not even wanting to eat any meat! And a special cheers to me for at least trying to get back on eating like a normal person should…