Dorienne's Log

Now, I’m not one for the l337, but seriously, wtf?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7023245.stm

I mean honestly! These women are not just nuns, but nuns held in the highest regard. Why was this even allowed to happen? I don’t think I’ve disliked anyone enough to start scratching them in the face. These are supposed to be godly women! Married to God, and so on and so forth! It’s just so aggravating! No wonder there are so many atheists and agnostics in the world. If women who are supposed to be devoting their every thought to Jesus break down into Maury Povich-ish “I’m gonna get that bitch”-mode, then what does that say about the rest of us?

My pastor constantly says that not everyone who goes to church is on their way to heaven and this really makes me consider that comment. I mean honestly! These women are supposed to be Godly and they can drop all inhibitions and start duking it out just like hoodrats in the street. This is a dark day for the church, and I’m not even Catholic, but I’m looking to the pope to make some kind of comment about this.

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 have had this Dante’s Inferno test as a bookmark for ages, almost as long as I have had my own computer. Here is the result I got when I took it today:

The Dante’s Inferno Test has sent you to Purgatory!

Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
Level | Score
Purgatory | Very High
Level 1 – Limbo | High
Level 2 | Low
Level 3 | Moderate
Level 4 | Very Low
Level 5 | Very Low
Level 6 – The City of Dis | Very Low
Level 7 | Low
Level 8- the Malebolge | Low
Level 9 – Cocytus | Very Low

Level descriptions: http://www.4degreez.com/misc/dante-inferno-information.html
Take the test: http://www.4degreez.com/misc/dante-inferno-test.mv

The first time I took this test was probably in 2003ish and I remember feeling slightly uneased by the fact that I got Eighth Level of Hell as a result. I laughed off the test (it is something someone came up with on Tickle), but I was still troubled by what I saw. I did not think I was living a “bad” life, but there it was, spelled out for me: The Eighth Level of Hell. I had taken the test several times in these past years, but today was the first time I’d taken it in at least a year and I got purgatory. Even if I lied on the answers in the past, I never got purgatory, yet, out of the blue I was going through the links in my Bookmarks and decided to take the test again.

I am not overly enthused by this new result, but I am somewhat proud of it. I’ve been feeling like a new person in Christ for the past year, and every once in a while, I receive yet another confirmation like this one. I am not the same person I was at 20, and while the fact seems simple and plain, it is a truth of which I’ve grown quite fond of remembering.

I’ve just now finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, almost exactly 48 hours after getting it from the very same Barnes and Noble where I purchased Order of the Phoenix a month and four years ago. I think I should be feeling like something truly significant has happened in my life, having completed the entire series, yet I feel more or less, like I do after reading any other book. It was a good read, though I found some errors: they misspelled Hermione’s middle name and there was a randomly capitalized word somewhere in the later chapters. The ending and epilogue did come across as a bit trite, but I liked it, though I’m not sure if I liked it more because the whole thing was over, than enjoying the writing in general. I think I am just satisfied having the plot revealed to me as I read instead of learning about the ending from television or the internet or from some miscreant shouting out the ending to me.

What got me writing however, was not the subject of Harry, but something fascinating that I realized about myself over these past 48 hours: in just two years, I’ve become an utterly different person. It’s astounding really, that I could still be me, yet so different at the same time. Two years ago, Harry Potter was my world and I spent many hours of my day, devoted to something Potteresque whether I was commenting on Potter forums or simply reading the books. I was always doing something relating to Harry Potter. Book 6 changed this. I was so frustrated by what I read that at one point I actually threw the book across the room. Many, and I do mean many, of those same frustrations came about in Book 7, however, there was no anger, real anger associated with them. I just sort of rolled my eyes and kept on reading. I give all this change to Jesus. As an obsessive-compulsive, I had placed so much “faith” in Ms. Rowling’s abilities that, had I remained so OCD over HP as I was two years ago, at this point, I would be ready to collapse, having nothing to ease me from my compulsions. I would be sitting here like, “well, now what do I do.” God, knows me, and knows when it’s time to move me along from one thing to another. Now, more or less, it’s all on him.

I made a decision today that showed just how much I had changed. Actually, I’ve made several this weekend, but today’s was the most…beneficial, I suppose. There was a four o’clock service today at church and I had a choice: I could either go, the way my heart was telling me I should, or I could just go home and read Book 7 all day. I went back to church and I made the right decision. I’m glad I did too, but I’m still just so amazed by how different I’ve become. The obsession is over and I, for the first time in my life, feel like a young adult instead of an overgrown adolescent.

…she’s forever wrong about Ron and Hermione though…

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.

I was almost completely duped by a phishing e-mail today. It was kind of scary because I clicked on the link and everything and probably would have gone through with the whole thing, if Firefox had not stepped in and saved me from my own stupidity.

I have an Amazon account and I received an e-mail that said Amazon.com and the “From” domain was amazon.com. The e-mail said that “Amazon” noticed that I had been logging in from a different IP address recently, which is what was got me to let my guard down a bit. I had been logging into Amazon from work because it sometimes helps out customers to walk them through things on the site, so when I saw this e-mail, I immediately thought Amazon had the same system set-up as Chase.com, where if you login from a random IP address, the site makes you verify your information first.

Thank God for Firefox, though. It wasn’t until my beloved browser flashed me a note saying that site looked…phishy…that I took better notice of the e-mail. The link provided in the e-mail, asking me to verify my information, actually did not go to site it proclaimed to be and after noting that the e-mail started “Dear Amazon Customer” instead of Dorienne Smith, I realized that the e-mail had been sent to a completely separate address than I use to log into Amazon!

I feel shakened that someone like me, who is normally so careful, could be duped so easily. I thought that I had checked all the safeguards: there was an Amazon.com logo in the e-mail and the “From” address was security @ amazon dot com, so I went for the link, albeit with some suspicions in mind, but I did click the link. I think what through me most was the fact that I had been signing in from different computers recently and I just let down my guard.

Oh well. I suppose that is why there is a need for “Constant Vigilance” when it comes to safeguarding information, but thank goodness Firefox is there to cushion my fall when my own ignorance seems to take hold.

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.”

My YouTube video, Funny Quotes from the SVU hit 10,000 views today…

It’s not all that exciting since there are millions of YouTube videos with millions more views, but when looked at across all other SVU-related videos, mine has one of the highest viewcounts in relation to time spent on the site. There have been 10,000 views in a little more than three months…I’m not sure where, but somewhere in the world that’s got to count for something.

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.