A wake-up call

Presenting installment número tres, in which I get a wake-up call and realize that I'm up to my old blogging tricks again.

I made this last night, so to update the info: I did get the application mailed, and I did get my shot in the arm. It hurts. Wah-wah. And I slept even later today. Of course, if I want to wake up early in the morning, I probably shouldn't stay up half the night making a silly video blog. Though, I have to say that I am learning so much about revising and editing a "text" through this process. So I'm going to tell myself that this is an exercise in improving my writing. Right.

Possible future topic of discussion: the word adventure. Look out.

Curiosity Killed the Cass, or I'm Nosy

I'm getting excited. Seems everybody's getting that bloggin' feeling again. Now that people are officially being scattered the Four Winds, these crazy things called Blogs almost have a practicality to them. Turns out, we're not all writing about the same experiences anymore. And we have an almost eager -- though meager -- audience of friends. These days, our words might not just be trees falling into an earless forest, to borrow the phrasing of Wallace Stegner.

Here's my humble suggestion: If you're blogging, throw some links up to your friends' blogs so we (me and my 500 cats) can read them, too. If you're not blogging, start so I can see what you're up to. And then I can link your blog so that everyone else can see what you're up to. At the least, check out my "recommended reading" section and stalk my friends for a while. I think they have some pretty interesting things to say. That is, of course, why we're friends.

I know you're on the edge of your seats waiting for the next vlog (sarcasm added), but you might have to wait a day or so.

So do I get a senior citizen discount at Golden Corral?

NOTE TO SELF: Check the middle-of-video screenshot before uploading it to YouTube. You're not flattering yourself at all.

Alright, not to spoil you guys or anything, but I've somehow managed a second...episode? Is that what we'd call it? I don't know.

washed up goes vlogstyle.

I don't know what exactly I was trying to accomplish with this effort. It came off as a sort of pitiful mix between Reading Rainbow and A Current Affair, which sounds nice, but well. If you watch it, you'll see.

I wouldn't mind keeping this up, but it took nearly an hour just to upload the thing to YouTube. So I would have to come up with something worthy of vlogging to justify the time spent -- which was a LOT, despite the quality level -- on making/editing/uploading. And random books from my bookshelf with accompanying unenlightening discussion and my sort of irreverent reaction to Heath Ledger's death isn't good enough for me.

Suggestions?

All pretenses but living itself have long since vanished

I am not sure how a twenty-four year old, single, unemployed person such as myself can accumulate so much stuff. But I did. In three and a half years, I've managed to acquire enough belongings to fill a standard-sized horse trailer -- and then some.

When I lived at Southwood for a month in the summer of 2004, I barely had enough to make a sub-leased room with a borrowed bed feel like home. I was able to carry the entirety of my book collection in one box -- the box my Tiffany lamp, which I bought solely for the sake of that room, came in. This weekend, I found that box -- labeled "BOOKS" -- and filled it with books again. Except, this time, I labeled it something like "Literature A-Cisneros" or "Spanish Language and Culture." See, I'm estimating twenty boxes of books that we packed into the corner of the horse trailer. The books, though, serve only as one fossil of this era.

When I first shifted my little pile of stuff from Southwood to Brentwood, my new apartment was still relatively empty. After hanging a freshly purchased shower curtain and feeling accomplished, I selected an English class literature anthology from my little bookshelf and sat in the floor, in the corner of the living room where the monstrous bookcase eventually stood. I read, from beginning to end, the Lorraine Hansberry play "A Raisin in the Sun" in one anticipatory afternoon.

I can't believe my apartment is almost as empty again as it was that day. It's not nearly as clean, though. I've still got that to do. But once I've collected the last evidences of my residence and once I've exterminated all the dust rodents, I think I'll have a seat in that corner again and read something. Of course, I would punctuate the chapters of my existence with literature.

But what should I read? Too bad all the books have been packed and taken away.