Moving!

I'm moving my blog. You can find it now, along with the rest of my new website, here, or at the following URL:

http://spencer.walstr.org/swnw/

Action!

We definitely just shot a movie in my house.

It's definitely amazing, yet terribly cheesy.

I love it so.

Flying

Another free-write. I really like this one. Don't know why.

---

She could hear the crowd, chattering and cheering, through the flapping walls of the striped tent. The elephants trumpeted, parading around the ring. She watched it in her mind's eye, following every step of the routine she knew so well. There; the elephant stood on its hind legs, and the audience clapped. Then; another elephant balanced itself on a ball, and the clamoring crowds applauded appropriately. She recited it in her head the way that some people mentally replay films. The girl had the better experience, however: her mental movies were matched with real sound.

The crowd was good tonight, she noticed. They wanted to have a good time, to laugh, and to be awed. It varied from night to night. Sometimes, the crowds were only looking for enjoyment, and they found it under the big top, more than they could have possibly imagined. Other times, audiences took their seats skeptical, with preconceived notions that muddied their experiences. Some came in angry, unwilling to chuckle or even smile. Others arrived in varying stages of heartbreak and depression. They told themselves they wouldn't find any fun in the circus, predictions that tended to be self-fulfilling. You get what you expect, she told herself, unless you open your mind.

Involuntarily, she sighed. Open minds were growing harder and harder to find, not just inside the tent, but in her entire world. It seemed that everywhere she looked, there were pundits spouting barbed condemnations. People from the Middle East were terrorists. People of faith were opinionated fundamentalists. Homosexuals were bizarre contortions of nature, and if you didn't vote, you were a communist.

It wasn't only adults spewing hatred, either. The children of the closed-minded often grew with visions as narrow as those of their parents. This was obvious in no place more than high school, where bigoted teens were quick to cast their judgments upon classmates that were even the merest bit unusual. A friend of hers had been singled out for tucking his shirt in. Wary of this, she and Nat had tried to keep their love discreet, but the ever-sniffing nose of society found them, and exposed how different they were from the rest.

Though an autumn gust nipping at her bare arms and legs caused the girl to shiver in her costume, the thought of Natalie warmed her insides. Natalie had made her understand the feeling of love, not the petty high school drama of relationships around them. With Nat standing beside her the entire time, she had broken down the walls that had contained her and restrained her for so long. Natalie had helped set her free.

The tent roared with thunderous cheering as the ringmaster narrated the elephants' exit. Poised, the girl stood waiting for her cue. From within, the ringmaster's deep silky voice wove the girl's welcome, and she stepped into the humid tent to the gaze of a spotlight and the gracious applause of two thousand hands clapping.

Adrenaline, the nectar of courage and confidence, flooded her veins once again, and she boldly strode to the ladder.

The ringmaster's booming tone lent to the audience tales of the girl's achievements, grandly exaggerated in the traditional manner of the big top. His resounding bass voice painted pictures of death-defying leaps from canyon walls and mountain faces. The crowd, stupefied, listened with awe. They had no clue that the esteemed girl of these yarns, who was currently scaling the skyscraper of a ladder, had a home in the very city they were in.

Being with Natalie had brought the girl more in touch with herself. Soon, she found within herself talents, passions, and dreams she had never imagined she could have. She began playing the harp, something that she would not have been caught dead with a year ago. The local theatre troupe found itself visited by an eager, talented young woman. It was as if Natalie had unlocked a door the girl had never known existed. The summer of that year, the circus came to town. It set up in an abandoned industrial parking lot by the river, and everyone crossing the bridges saw it. The girl went to watch the first weekend it was performing, and was captivated. She found a magic world beneath the behemoth canvas tent, where gaiety was the norm and the impossible was regularly proved otherwise. After the final show, the girl, thanks to Nat's gentle persuasion, approached the ringmaster and asked if she could audition for a role. He had declined originally, but slowly gave in. The girl auditioned fantastically, and left with the circus for a year.

She reached the platform at the top of the ladder, towering so high above that she could barely discern faces in the audience. Slowly, she reached for and gripped the trapeze, with a silent acknowledgment that this could be the last time she ever did what she was about to do. She stepped to the edge of the platform.

Tomorrow, she would go back to school. Her senior year. She would face the taunting masses, and she would stand tall, proud of who she was and what she had done. The words of the narrow-minded were only that, words, and she was no longer afraid. She was who she was, and no one could take that from her.

She looked down at them. They gazed back up at her, ready to be blown away. All of the women, the men, the children, the elderly; all the blacks, the whites, the Hispanics and the Asians; all the lovers and the fighters; all the believers and the skeptics sat on the edges of their seats, elated, waiting for her to astonish them with the impossible. And there, in a corner, her beautiful face watching the girl's every move, radiating a warmth she could feel at the top of the ladder, was Natalie, waiting softly and patiently.

The girl took a breath, and flew.

The Island

Most certainly influenced by the Decemberists' "The Island". And Lemony Snicket's The End. And my recent surge in fascination with pirates. I blame this on all of them.

---

Somewhere, in the middle of a black ocean under a black sky, an island slept, the sands of its shallow shores gently caressed by the unceasing tides. Above, in shadowy heavens, the stark face of the moon cast a pale luminescence upon the beach. The waves swept the sands with soft hushes. The breath of the light tropical breeze quietly rustled the leaves of the palms. An air of serenity laid over the island, as if it had never known disturbance and never would.

There were no people on the island. There had been before, however; castaways were no strangers to its shores. Some of them had managed to survive, leaving nothing but footprints on the isle. Others left much more, never seeing their families or homes again. Many had gone mad and killed themselves, either by the noose, by diving off the cliff, or, if they had been lucky, with a pistol. In the end, their remembrances quickly vanished, consumed by natural forces– footprints blew away and corpses were claimed by the earth.

The empty island slumbered. The many exotic birds that lived in the jungle dozed on their perches, their heads tucked into their wings. Sleep caught the few mammals that lived on the island, quietly pulling them into its grasp. Another breeze stirred the palm trees, shaded black with night's brush. The waves rolled in, splashing the shore. The waves receded, leaving pinpoints of seawater glistening in the moonlight. The waves rolled in, and placed upon the beach a large wooden chest, along with the unconscious man clinging desperately to it.

Schedule?

1. Honors English 10 - Hammonds
2. Honors Physics - Reynolds
3. Japanese 3-4 - ?
4. Health 2 - Hill
   
5. Chamber Orchestra - Stone
6. Future Focus - Arend
7. Pre-Calculus - Stidham
8. Illustrations - Telesmanich

What's wrong with this picture? Take a look. A good look. Something's missing.

If you picked "Acting", you're absolutely right.

By the by...

If you don't use Firefox, and would not mind doing something a little curious, please drop me a line.

Linguistic Idiocy

Alright, this has gone on long enough now. It's time for me to address something that's bugged me and many others for a long time. There is no excuse for it, and it only continues because people are being apathetic.

The problem is the continual degradation of the English language, and it's a problem indeed.

If you've ever been on the Internet, you know what I'm talking about. You see it everywhere, in e-mails and instant messages, on forums and webpages alike. It's also plenty prevalent in the non-virtual world, where people are perfectly content to flaunt their pathetically childish grammar.

Chances are, you're probably guilty of a couple of these things. Almost everyone does at least one or two.

Stop it.

There is no reason why anyone who's out of elementary school, let alone middle or high school, should not know this, especially in today's day and age of information availability. You are clearly either not thinking or don't care.

You're making yourself look like a fool when you don't bother to use English correctly. Wisen up a little.

And don't get me started with that "grammar Nazi" crap. If your primary language is English, then you are expected to speak and write it properly. Don't ask, "Who cares?" I care. Other people care. You are humiliating yourself and the language, and that's just stupid.

Here are some of the most common mistakes for you:

Your/you're: AAARGH. I hate this one. Look, it's extremely simple. An apostrophe denotes a contraction, a removal of letters. "You're" is short for "you are"-- the apostrophe replaces the A. "Your a grammar nazi" means nothing. "What's you're problem" doesn't either. Don't try to wave it off as being "easier to type", either. Adding the extra apostrophe and the extra E takes fractions of a second. It's easier to type "cow" than it is to type "colloquialism", but the two don't mean the same thing. "You are" and "belonging to you" don't mean the same thing either. Don't mix them up.

Its/It's: This one also kills me. As before, an apostrophe denotes a contraction. Which can be contracted here: "belonging to it", or "it is"? You'd better choose the second, because otherwise, you're wrong. "It's" means "it is", or "it has". "Its" is a modifier. What's wrong with the car? It's got a dent in its fender.

They're/their/there: "They're" means "they are". "Their" is a modifier. "There" refers to a place. It's that simple. They're headed there on their trip (in the car with the dent in its fender).

Who's/whose: Gah, don't you people understand apostrophes? "Whose" is a modifier. "Who's" means "who is" or "who was". "Who's car was that?" is wrong. "I saw a car today. It had a dent in its fender." "Whose car was it?" "Someone who's going to have to pay for some repairs."

Then/than: "Than" compares things. "Then" is an adverb, generally used in relation to time. "We noticed it had a dent in it bigger than a baseball, then left a message on the windshield saying we didn't do it."

Affect/effect: This one is a little different, but that doesn't keep it from being important. You don't effect something. You affect it. And unless you're using some fancy English for "feeling", you don't feel the affects of something affecting you. "Affect" is a verb. "Effect" is a noun. It's really that simple.

Pluralizing apostrophes? NO, NO, NO. You do not have calculator's, or squash's, or green bean's, or shoe's, or book's, or scissor's. Apostrophes do not pluralize. No. The end.

To/too: If you're still making this mistake, go talk to one of your grade school teachers. He or she will quickly lose faith in humanity, and tell you that "too" means "also", or "very much so". "To" doesn't-- it's a preposition.

Quotation marks are not emphasis marks. If you advertise having the "coldest" ice cream in town, I'm not going to be a patron of yours. Why? Because you're saying that your ice cream is the so-called "coldest". Maybe if you advertise the coldest ice cream in town, or perhaps the coldest, I might be inclined to have some. But not if the veracity of your temperature claim is in doubt.

Lose/loose: For Pete's sake. The two don't even sound alike. "Loose" rhymes with "moose" (unless you pronounce "moose" as "mooz"). If something is loose, it is not tight. You cannot loose something, and you're not going to find someone with a screw lose. "Loose" is an adjective. "Lose" is a verb.

Breath/breathe: Take a breath. Breathe in. "Breath" is a noun. "Breathe" is a verb.

Definitely: Look at that. See an A? No. That is how it's spelled.

Of/have: The phrase is not "would of". It's "would have". That's why the contraction is "would've". Think.

Really, folks. It's that simple. Bookmark this blog entry if it'll help you remember these things.

But, seriously, you look like a fool.

And who wants that?