Goals

I want to write more. More nonfiction and more fictionfiction. I want to write fiction stories and get my novel on the road, and I want to write articles about things I'm interested in.
I want to exercise more, become fast and strong and undeniably, skinnier. I want to be one of those girls who can walk around in their body without feeling inadequate or bad about themselves, to be able to run without gasping for air. I want to be able to demand my body to do things I never would have done before. I want to be physically strong.
I want to read more, and of alot of different things. Last year was a year of YA fiction, of reading what was in front of me at the library and returning alot of books unread, of keeping up with loved series instead of finding new things to read. This year is going to be different. I'm going to read more non-fiction, but also only reading things I want to read instead of reading things I think I should read. My interests never solely revolved around the books people talked the most about. I should have known better.
I want to know more. About the world and my peers, and how it all works. I want to be able to keep exploring instead of staying in my comfortable little bubble, typing away as I waste my days obsessing over grades and the like.
I want to do more, do more with my friends and make friends. I want to have more of those friendships where you really know someone, where you can trust them with an idea without worrying about tarnishing the image of yourself in their head. I want to practice more, be able to do things more.
I want to BE someone, I want to love and love deeply. I don't want to waste my time and days watching things in order to satisfy that hungry drive in me. I love Tumblr, but it, along with a combination of other factors during sophomore year, really inhibited my talented and ambition. I won't let that happen anymore. Tumblr and Twitter are the places for expression, not placacy. I should have learned that awhile ago, Tumblr is most boring when used that way. I would know.
I want to be myself, without anything stopping me anymore. That's going to be the hardest one. I know that now, as typing those words make me anxious when I can't really envision myself doing that. What will that mean? What kind of person will I seem to be? What really am I? I'm fairly good at disgusing myself, playing roles that aren't really me in public. I wonder what I'll become. What I'll make myself be when I finally stop hiding. I have no idea, but the idea scares the crap out of me, but I suppose that's good. Being scared means you're doing something uncomfortable, and being uncomfortable pushes you in directions you've never been before. Hopefully, I'm in the right direction. I hope my anxiety is wrong.
Sayanora guys.

Rich Kid Books

You know the ones I'm talking about.
Clique. Private. The A-List.
We're all familiar with them, or at least their trope.
A bunch of rich, beautiful people go to an esteemed private school. This private school is esteemed, destined to lead its attendees to the Ivy League and into a glamorous life. The main character is estranged, having arrived at this school out of sheer coincidence or scholarship, and finds herself enchanted and horrified by her peers, particularly THE Group.
There all always variations of this group, but their members always embody these characteristics: Wealthy, gorgeous, ambitious, and smart. The alpha (There is always one) is the epitome of these traits to her peers; to them, she is unstoppable and superior. Nobody can top her. The main character inevitably finds herself wanting to be a part of this group. She wants to prove to them that however badly they might regard or treat her, she is not inferior. Eventually, with persistence and manuevering, they get in, as the plot goes.
I hate these books.
But I still read them.
I have a long history with reading these kinds of books. (The Clique series comes to mind easily) but for a long time, I'd abandoned these almost-political books in high school. That was when I started reading about real people with real lives, and if not, then those about urban fantasies. That changed this year, mostly by accident.
I had owned a copy of The A-List for some time now, but I hadn't actually read it until I was perusing through my bookshelf in winterbreak, bored and wanting something completely new to read. I noticed it, and with a chuckle, I started reading it. I found myself sucked in, not in admiration, but out of sheer disgust at what these people are.
They are wealthy and self-assured in their wealth and beauty through expensive cosmetics and lucky birth. They are arrogant because their wealth and status has assured them that they are important. They are ambitious and ruthless to keep it that way. These people have no qualms about doing whatever it takes to maintain the status quo.
It's easy for people born into these high-society bubbles to forget about the world around them. After all, it's undeniably hard to notice and act on the flaws of a society when its serving you well. At least for these people, the only thing standing in the way of their ambition and desires is their peers, not the faults in their stars. A Roman noble can easily say "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings," because the stars of his birth have not faulted him the way they fault so many others through disease and death and poverty.
There will always be an avid audience for these books because there will always be people who want to be like these people, however wrong and shaded they may be. Or rather, there will always be people who want what these people, despite their many faults, can hold on to.
Pride, and an ability to maintain it.
***This is my shaded way of highly highly recommending The Disreputable History of Frankie-Laudau Bank as a great book to read that intelligently subverts this trope with a highly-intelligent, ambitious girl turned renegade that ends up fighting against these ideals through clever pranks.

Two Quotes

These aren't my favorite quotes, but these are the ones that have stuck with me for a long time. I suggest you look up where they belong. (I claim no copyright to the following quotes, they belong to their respective authors) 

"Listen to me," He said. "Let me tell you the truth about the world to which you so desperately want to return. It is a place of pain and suffering and grief. When you left it, cities were being blasted to pieces from planes flown by men with wives and children of their own. People are being dragged from their house and shot in the street. Your world is tearing itself apart, and the most amusing thing of all is that it was little better before the war started. War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity. There were wars before it, and there will be wars after it, and in between people will still fight one another and hurt one another and maim one another and betray one another, because that is what they have always done.

And even if you do avoid warfare and violent death, little boy, what else do you think life has in store for you? It took your mother from you, drained her of health and beauty, and then cast her aside like the withered, rotten husk of a fruit. It will take others from you too, mark me. Those whom you care about-lovers, children-will fall by the wayside, and your love will not be enough to save them. Your health will fail you. You will become old and sick. Your limbs will ache, your eyesight will fade, and your skin will become lined and aged. There will be pains deep within that no doctor will be able to cure. Diseases will find a warm, moist place inside you and there they will breed, spreading through your system, corrupting it cell by cell until you pray for the doctors to let you die, to put you out of your misery, but they will not. Instead you will linger on, with no one to hold your hand or soothe your brow, as Death ones and beckons you into his darkness. The life you left behind is no life at all. Here , you can be king, and I will allow you to age with dignity and without pain, and when the time comes for you do die, I will send you gently to sleep and you will awake in the paradise of your choosing, for each man dreams his own heaven. All I ask in return is that you name the child in your house to me, that you may have company in this plan. Name him! Name him now before it's too late."

And 

"When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail."

They are from two very different contexts and books, but I thought they paralleled pretty well. 

Writing a novel

Writing a novel is annoyingly hard, not because its hard to write, but its hard to write what you want to write.
Cliche, stupid things bore me. Most first drafts are made up of stupid, cliche things. Therefore, my first draft is filled with cliche, stupid things, and maybe that's why I'm bored with it.
(This is implying that I have a real first draft, that somewhere on my computer there is a 50,000 word sucky narrative. That's not the case. What is the case is that I have 50,000 words of scenes that I wanted to write and did even though in retrospect, they all suck. Plot-wise, 99% of it is useless, and rightly so.)
I still want to write a novel. I still want to write about those characters (albeit the very few) that have survived these tumultuous last few months and are actually complex and interesting. I still have those vivid ideas that pushed me to the keyboard in the first place, the ones brimming with possibility even now.
But I don't have a story. I realize this now as I sit down on Blogger and try to figure it out. Maybe I haven't done enough universe building, and that costs me. I hate outlines, but I suck at coming up with things as I go that are also funny and intelligent. (Another reason I can't do improv) I have to universe-build. I know I'm not going to have time to write in the next year or two though  (and probably weeks as soon as break is over) because of finals and school and ACT and doing-well-enough-to-go-to-a-good-college. I might have a legit excuse not to write fiction if I get in Honors Seminar in Non-Fiction Writing.
But I like fiction. I like making up a world that makes sense to me even in its wrongness and writing about things that are meaningful to me and the reader. I like making up and writing about characters that are complex but cool, crafting something out of the weird mess that is my life. I like making sense of my life through fiction. I'm just very bad at it.