Dorienne's Log

In the spirit of doing things because “everyone else is doing it,” and since I have been tagged several times with this, I have created one of these lists:

1.) I am a computer nerd. I love everything about programming and teaching myself new things through trial and error just gets me all a-tingle. I also love the idea that making one mistake can cause the remaining code to implode on itself. It takes the love of striving for perfection to a new level.

2.) I am a grammar nerd, too. There is something about the written word that fascinates me to no end. Watching languages evolve (eg: the use of chatspeak, WTF? OMFG! or lolcat phrases, I can haz new wordz nao! in everyday language) through new technology stimulates me and plays very well with the computer nerd that comprises me.

3.) I love musicians. Anyone who can sing or play any instrument captivates me. There is something about music and it’s ability to cross cultures and withstand time that makes me love those who create it. It is almost like a language of its own…a language I can discover more interesting things about on my computer…

4.) I find half the fun of writing stories in doing hours of research into the most minute of details. For example, in my fanfic novel, Flight, I have Olivia playing the cello because I love musicians, however, I don’t play the cello nor have I ever seen one in real life. The DAYS of research I put on my computer into learning minor cellist lingo gave me more joy than actually writing the two sentences that involved the detail.

5.) I flip flop between a desire to have children or not, often. There are days when I pray that someday I will be a godmother and only a godmother, but then I have these moments when I really, REALLY want two boys and a girl. Or just two boys. Or just one boy. Or maybe just one godson…

6.) I am a Christian, but I often feel more comfortable amongst atheists and agnostics. It is almost as if being surrounded by them reaffirms my faith. I wish I could understand the logic behind it.

7.) I detest things I cannot explain or understand. I think that is why being a Christian, ironically, works best for me. Without Christ’s blessings, I would never be able to have the slightest comprehension of death and would fear it right up until my last breath.

8.) I believe organized religion has done more to corrupt Christ’s work and teachings than any unbeliever ever could or would. I am very much a Christian, so I’m not sure if that makes a whole lot of sense, but it is how I view the church on whole.

9.) The imperfection of my human body disgusts me. I don’t mean it in a sense that my weight is not where I want it to be or I lack any control over my hair outside of braids. I mean it just irritates me that this body has to sleep or the mind just begins to deteriorate. The idea that I have to eat or else I get headaches that tell me, “Yo! Time for food!” or that I have to use the bathroom or take shower (gross, I know.) or, again, sleep, when there are so many other things I could be doing during at the same time is just very frustrating.

10.) The shows I “heart” most are the ones I scrutinize hardest. SVU is the only show I watch on television right now. In fact, this past summer, when SVU was on reruns, I only turned on the television once to see what was happening to the weather as a part of Ike hit Ohio. Since I love SVU as much as I do, it literally pains me when I watch an episode that is boring or just doesn’t make sense. It must be perfect. The acting, the writing, the cinematography; everything MUST be on point or else it is total FAIL.

11.) I admire intelligence before appearance. It took me a while to realize this. I found myself having these teen-like crushes on men who were three times my age with no hair and age spots just because I could see glimpses of how brilliant their minds were.

12.) I carry a chapstick on a “chapstick lanyard” on my keys at all times. That way, there is no chance that I will ever be somewhere and chapstick is not available to me. THAT would surely result in psychoses of epic proportion.

13.) I wake up every morning and tell myself the same thing. “You are the most intelligent and most beautiful person in the world. Now, go show everyone else.”

14.) I’m incapable of maintaining long-lasting relationships. If I haven’t called, e-mailed, texted, PM’d or poked or responded to you in a while, it’s not that I don’t care. It’s just not in my nature to carry on “knowing” people once I no longer see them on a day-to-day basis. Sad, I know, but such is Dorienne.

15.) As tech savvy as I am, I own a VCR. WTF, you say? I no longer have cable, so I if need to tape SVU, I’ll need TAPE SVU. Plus, I’ve acquired about 25 8-hour tapes of nothing but the mothership Law & Order and I need to watch them on something.

16.) @15 – I cried when Jerry Orbach passed away. For a very long time.

17.) I have a set of characters in a series that I have been writing since I was ten years old. I have literally grown up writing these characters. Creepy, no?

18.) There are some days when I forgot how young/old I am. I feel much, much older. Like I am actually about 43 years old instead. It gets kind of depressing when I feel like I’ve passed the 40th birthday milestone, but have accomplished so little in my life.

19.) Since I watched The X-Files religiously from age 10 to age 18, I can honestly say that show shaped me into the person I am today. Explains a lot, doesn’t it? 😉

20.) I abhor everything about Micro$oft, which is why I spell it with a dollar sign. They are just crap and, while I use Firefox and had tried using OpenOffice (it just can’t keep up), it still bothers me that I have to use anything made them.

21.) I am currently going through this phase where I am totally “in to” webcomics. Right now I am reading Questionable Content, xkcd, Wasted Talent, Pictures for Sad Children and Jay Naylor’s Better Days. Google them! They are all kinds of awesome.

22.) @17 – I play my sims in The Sims 2 as one large neighborhood that evolves at the same time. I’ve been playing the game for four years and I am still working on the first generation. I’ve “known” some of my sims longer than I’ve known some of my friends.

23.) I don’t like fancy crosses. I have several crosses in my house and I wear one around my neck that I never remove. ALL of them share a common trait in that they are very, very simple. The cross on which Christ died for our sins was rugged, bare and simple in its own right, so crosses that are interlaced with diamonds or are so ornate that they qualify as “bling” just confuse me.

24.) There are currently 487 discs in my Netflix queue. If I have a new disc sent to me every single day for the next year, I will STILL not have watched everything I have queued. It is well worth it, though. Their service is full of win and I like just watching random movies or TV shows on DVD throughout my week.

25.) It took me a week and a half to find 25 random things to say about myself…sigh…

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 guess we got our apartment (woot!) and that’s pretty cool, regardless of the drama that it took to get it. I almost had to go to the rental office with the words “Attorney General” on my mouth, but thankfully everything turned out all right.

I’ve been doing some work on the church website, though my own lack of extreme knowledge about coding makes some things much longer to do. I have so much stuff I want to implement, but it just takes so much time to make it work.

Oh well…time to do work for this class all day and maybe later today I’ll have some time to do some real work on the stuff I want to do.

Also, I’m trying to implement my music just here, so I suppose we’ll see how this goes…

I’m still going strong right now. I’ve got my plans in place and we’ll see how this goes…

I’m still off fast food for the month. I’ve actually gone hungry instead of stopping at a Wendy’s or something, but I know it’s for the best. I caught myself wondering what I would be like at the end of the month. Will I be so accustomed to not eating fast food that I wouldn’t even notice when the end of the month came and perchance I could make it two months without any fast food? Doubtful, but there’s always the hope. I’m pretty sure I’ll be standing at Chipotle’s front door waiting for it to open on August 1st, but there’s still hope.

I’ve been finessing a lot of things lately, especially the code the websites I’m doing. One of the people on Coding Forums, brought up a good point to me as I was attempting to give advice to another. I know CSS and its basics, but I don’t know the theory behind it, so I end up with a lot of redundant information in my code. I get the style, just not the cascading part, but that will soon change.

I’m planning to start another blog, but the new one will be run completely by me since I’ve found the code to make a perfect blog under my own domain. It’ll probably be blog.doriennesmith.com, but I haven’t decided yet. It’ll be a lot on how the website is going and the “hows” behind a lot of my updates.

I’m taking a web class right now, I try as I might, I can’t resist the temptation to show off a bit. Hopefully, my instructor won’t mind that I used XHTML 1.0 instead of the crap code they suggest in the book. I mean I want to scream just looking at the code they are suggesting for their readers; especially since the book is no more than two years old. In fact….okay, the book was published in 2002, which brings up a whole new set of issues. Why on earth are we using a book that’s this old in the first place, especially when the class is on the internet and standards and such change every few years. I mean, honestly: the book is telling people to use uppercase letters and inline presentational code! For a class like this, all the textbooks should be less than a year old. Otherwise, the information is most likely ridiculously out of date by the time class starts. For that matter, I don’t see why a textbook is needed when the W3C is online all the time and holds free information for anyone who wants it; not to mention something simple like w3schools.

Speaking of being annoyed by this web class: we are forced to create our web project. (basically just a simple web page), using Geocities, which both “sucks and blows.” It is so irritating to go through all the work of creating beautiful code that validates using a Strict doctype and have to throw the whole thing in Geocities, which flays my code into some horrifying monster with its stupid and unvalidating side bar. Speaking of validation, I don’t know why I love, or am obsessed over having my code validate. It’s as if seeing the green “Passed Validation” page gives a bit of validation to my life….

Anyway, I always feel bad when I do work on my own website instead of making more progess on my church’s site. I think it’s just that there’s so much more to do for the church site. I mean I’m practically rebuilding the entire site. I’ve got the layouts already sketched out, but it’s matter of going through the daunting task of making my designs come to life in the code. Some things just are feasible from my inexperience, which means loads of time asking questions on Coding Forums and then waiting for answers, not mention all the new things that I need to create my “vision” for the site. (Sigh) There’s just so much to do, but one step at a time I suppose.

Last week looked like the end of my relationship with my mother. Honestly, it looked like we may never be on good terms again. That is, until I got a good look at what other people have to go through with their parents….It was only then that I realized how lucky I was to be in my situation, but have a clear, defined way out of it and with the support needed to keep me from failing. I’m just glad that Jesus helped me stay calm enough from going off the deep end and saying or doing things that could not be taken back later. I was so emotionally I had to revert back to the “Tweety Book,” my old handwritten journal, mostly because my language was getting slightly out of hand and there were things I need to write down that really are not meant for the internet. That’s something I think a lot of people don’t understand about the internet and blogs. EVERYONE can read them, and even if they’re are private, if someone wanted to, they could get to it still. I’ve never put anything on the internet that I didn’t want to be shown to the world. Pictures I would have problems explaining or truly personal moments don’t belong on the internet.

Anyhoo – It’s time to get ready for Sunday School. I haven’t been to Sunday School, literallly since I was seven years old, so this will be a sort of adventure in itself. We’ll see how it goes…

I finished a major part of my website….yay….I also have several finals next week, all of which need severe studying…
I have this feeling every once in while…this feeling of emptiness once I have either finished a project or stopped obsessing over one. I am always left wondering what the next step should be, and, often enough, I pick up something right away, but sometimes this emptiness lasts for days and leads into a depression that takes something really new to get me out of it. More than likely, that will not happen this time around, but I felt it was worth mentioning.

I just cannot figure out the why of it all. Why can I not derive the same energy and willpower that I have for learning Photoshop or perfecting my website into learning all the biochemical reactions I have thus neglected ten weeks into the quarter? Once upon a time, I used to hold an enthusiasm for this, but now….I know that my interests and wants out of life have changed dramatically, but can those truly amount to what I can make myself do? Was the real reason I did so well in high school the fact that I actually gave a damn about everything I was doing?

Hmmph…perhaps….

Well, it took much longer than anticipated, but I completed something; not anything worthwhile, simply my Calvin and Hobbes page. However, what truly amazes me is how even though, the site is complete, and it appeared that I no longer had any excuse to not do what I have to do, I have just now discovered a way to improve it and will take an undefined amount of time to fix. The lesson here, I suppose, is nothing in the realm of procrastination is ever complete nor will it ever be completed. It is simply an ongoing cycle that is destined to doom me for the rest of my being.

My depression over my past interview is beginning to wane and I am, thankfully, feeling more upbeat about my ever depressing future. It is one thing to have a pitiful path lying ahead of me, but it is something entirely different to stroll down that path in low spirits.

Having just “completed” my Calvin and Hobbes site, I feel like any one strip manages to convey whatever message to which I am referring, and so the Calvin moment of the night:

…oh, and looking back through past posts, I’ve realized I missed my deadline for editing my novel…..but I’m warm in my blanket right now….

Today I’ve embarked on a new adventure, of sorts: Xanga! Why? God only knows….something about discovering new endeavors in procrastination and such….oh well.

True, I already have a website (www.doriennesmith.com) over which I have complete power and control, mwuahaha, and am not limited by the nonsensical web designs of Xanga; all this notwithstanding, I am here. I suppose I start a new blog everytime I wish to change something in my life in some significant way….Last time (kaitco.blogspot.com), chronicled (somewhat) the end of my heartbreaking addiction to Pepsi and caffeine. This blog will progress as I embark on a grave new journey; two of them, actually: writing and weight loss.

As an aspiring novelist, I suffer from many things, obsessive compulsive disorder and habitual laziness being the most dominant of the fine plethora of entities that plague my psyche. That being said, I hope to turn the tides in my behavior and I’ve often found the best (and most time consuming) manner of accomplishing such is through the use of “To-do” lists.

Writing — Goal: to finish my second edit of my novel A Ten-Minute Speech by March 4th
Weight Loss — Goal: to lose ten pounds before Spring Break, March 16th
How I plan to accomplish these goals is still quite the mystery to me, but fear not thou who hath not anything better to do, but read thus far into this entry; I SHALL update to my heart’s content, both ill news and good, citing all tales, both harrowing and boring, but nonetheless, awe-inspiring.

It’s 4am and I’m still up! It’s both ridiculous and sad at the same, although they can both often be construed together. I wish it was because of something wonderful like, I don’t know….I’ve been working or I’ve come from my guy’s house or some random BS college story that won’t be funny after age 23. But, alas. I’ve only done work on my primary means of procrastination, my beautiful website. True, I hardly get any hits and though there’s probably another year’s worth of work to complete on it, I trudge forward with it. I get obsessed with getting the code exactly right. There’s something about HTML that just feeds the need obsessive-compulsive need in all the right ways…or wrong ways, I guess. I’ve got exams which are in need of deep studying, but procrastination shall always overrule my life. It’s a fact that I’ve come to live with, oh well. How does the phrase go? Cela guerre? I don’t know…. I should have taken French, but then again, I should have done a lot of things. Like study more often for instance, instead of working on meaningless web design or writing novels that may never be published.
Sigh, sigh, sigh. Cela guerre indeed.