Random Pop Thought of the Day

Does the Katy Perry machine purposely piss different cultures off in order to get media attention for her songs? You'd think after all the commotion about her geisha act for "Unconditionally" (a song I really can't stand, by the way), she'd lay low on the culturally-influenced themes for a while and stick to fluffy candy and sugar themes. I just read an article on the BBC about the Allah pendant in the "Dark Horse" video was edited out in a new version on Youtube. I'm guessing nobody in her entourage thought that having a suitor wearing the Allah pendant disintegrate to sand at Katy Perry's touch would maybe offend Muslims? Or maybe they did and thought it'd be good publicity? idk. I read in some TIME article that the Egyptian stuff is supposedly accurate, but since I don't really have any desire to watch the video and I'm not an expert in Egypt, I wouldn't know.

I didn't have any negative feelings about Katy Perry back in her Teenage Dream era. I actually thought some of the songs were pretty catchy. I hated "California Gurls" because I am the farthest thing from "daisy dukes, bikinis on top" as you can get, but everything else I could listen to without immediately changing the radio station. But Prism and all the other drama following Katy Perry this era has pretty much made her the pop star I absolutely can't stand. I was very blah about "Roar" and very ughhhhh about "Unconditionally," but chalk it up to personal taste---I had nothing against her. Then the geisha thing happened, and while I wasn't terribly outraged (more like an internal groan), then she had her GQ interview. All I'm gonna post is this excerpt, because it speaks for itself:

"I was thinking about unconditional love, and I was thinking: Geishas are basically, like, the masters of loving unconditionally." She’s so earnest, I don’t have the heart to point out that in the gamut of human interactions, the courtesan-patron relationship is, um, maybe the most conditional relationship there is?

And with all the other things she's said about John Mayer and feminism and whatnot, I feel like the more I know about her outside of music, the more I start to dislike the Katy Perry public persona. (Gotta make the distinction that I don't know her as a person--only as a public brand.) And all the people who come to her defense with arguments like, "Lighten up! Why do you people always find something to be offended about?" are even worse. They make my blood boil than anything Katy Perry says or does out of ignorance.

Thoughts on Internet Oversharing and Flaming

This has been a topic I've discussed at length with YY recently, and I thought I'd get my thoughts down about it now. Chances are, my opinions might seem outdated as we become more and more reliant on Internet presence and technology, but we'll see.

This blog has always been a paradoxical mixture of the public and private. There's no denying that it's public. Anyone with the URL can access this blog and read all of my published posts. People who don't know me in person can read everything accounted from my sophomore year of high school up until now. On the other hand, there's a reason why I've usually referred to this as my "private" blog. I never use my real, legal name. I never refer to people by their actual names unless I'm writing about a public figure or celebrity. I've only loosely alluded to my hometown in California.Thinking back, there was no concrete reason why I decided to go by Sophelia online. It was a spontaneous decision.

In hindsight, it was an intuitively smart decision to adopt a pseudonym. Prospective employers and Internet stalkers cannot Google my real name and connect me to this blog. But mainly, it meant that from the genesis of this blog, I'd already made a clear distinction to myself that my Internet persona was separate from my real-life persona. I know many people for whom this distinction is very blurry. They could be online celebrities with thousands of followers on Tumblr and pour their hearts out about their lives. In reality, they could be completely lonely. They grow more and more attached to the virtual world and neglect the real world. Is this bad? Today, most of us would say yes. But I think the lines are blurring socially, and one day the real world persona may hardly matter.

Thanks to social media, I've noticed a certain type of character in my network. These are the people who blast out constant status updates and tweets, who post regular photos on Instagram and Facebook detailing their daily lives, who tag themselves at every location they ever go to. Up to a certain point, you can tell who has become so needy and dependent on social media for positive reassurance of self-worth that it has morphed into something like an addiction. When I voluntarily deactivated my Facebook last October, I discovered that despite the lingering withdrawal effects in the first week, it was refreshing to realize that I didn't know what was going on with my 800+ Facebook friends and that I was feeling happier as a result. If there was someone I actually cared about or if someone noticed my disappearance, we would contact each other via text or e-mail and have an actual conversation about our lives, as opposed to passively reading about it on a newsfeed.

Hence, I've probably made my stance clear at this point. This might make me an old fogey in this day and age, but I am not fond of the immediacy and overloading of personal information in online social interactions. I refuse to ever get a Twitter account--what meaningful thing could I possibly need to say in 140 characters? The only reason I returned to Facebook was that it has become my only means of communication with certain people in an age when you tell people "add me on Facebook" instead of asking for their e-mail or phone number.

Back to blogging. I was reading an article that was linked on the BBC called "How Much My Novel Cost Me--Debt Ridden." After reading it, I believe the title is a misnomer. The debt came not from writing a novel. It came from a series of bad financial decisions made after the author received a six-figure advance for an unfinished memoir and only supplemented the money with a part-time as a yoga instructor. Many of these decisions drove me bonkers. She acknowledged that buying bottled water and cappuccinos every day was a habit she should have kicked earlier (invest in a Brita filter and a Camelbak?) and yet writes in present-day: "In retrospect it seems clear that I should never have bought health insurance." Considering how absurdly expensive American health care is, you're better of paying 400 dollars a month than risking the off-chance you develop major health problems and wind up with a debt spiked up thousands of dollars.

Moreover, it was clear in the article that the author wallowed in unproductivity by spending an exorbitant amount of time on Tumblr and Twitter. To give a context of where I'm coming from, two days ago I received a package in the mail from my mother. In it was the book she had written and illustrated, published this past December. From the moment my brother submitted his last college application, my mother jumped on that empty-nest syndrome like a famished beast and, in December 2013, published a book in which she had painstakingly painted, researched, and written about a Confucian temple in her hometown in Tainan. She did this all in two years. Considering how slow my progress with EP has been, I am only in even more awe at my mother's will power. The creative process is not easy. It's a test of endurance. Self-doubt, writer's block, lack of inspiration--these can all be debilitating to the point that people procrastinate, throw their hands up, and quit. The author eventually has the epiphany that I myself had just a few months ago. Social media is a distracting waste of brain energy that could be channeled towards creative pursuits! It took me a few months of trial and error before I learned to install Leechblock and prohibit my laptop access to Facebook from 8pm-12 am on weekdays and 9am-5pm on weekends. I dunno about the timeframe of the author, but at least I wasn't waist-deep in debt before I got my shit together.

I did catch myself thinking, why am I being so hard on someone who's clearly reflecting back on a miserable naive moment of her life? Maybe because the bottom of the page was a very obvious marketing blurb for her new novel. Maybe because I couldn't imagine what I was supposed to take away from this story, except that I really can't handle people's incompetence. Her writing wasn't bad--in fact, it was well-written and engaging--but ohhh did this author and her story irritate the heck out of me. Maybe because her dreams of fame and success were embarrassingly relatable, but likely because there was an inherent thread of self-importance in the article that I could not reconcile with at all.

I decided to Google the author for kicks, and I was surprised to find that not only does she have her own Wikipedia page, but that there have been a whole slew of articles written about her. I guess I was under the impression that the author was a relative unknown and aspiring writer. No, it turns out she was previously a writer for Gawker and was known for some confessional (read: oversharing) styled articles on other platforms. I found this article, "You've Got (Hate) Mail," which recounts a sympathetic portrait of the Internet hate that the author and her boyfriend received. Going back to my whole gripe with Internet personae, I get really angry when I see people leaving all sorts of poisonous comments no one would ever say to a person's face. If I hadn't read the first article, I probably would have been very sympathetic towards the author, because some of those quote comments were atrocious. However... considering how much I disliked the first article when I read it, I had to acknowledge that I could understand where the negative feelings were coming from. As someone was quote saying in the second article:

"Her whole trick was the idea that the whole world revolved around her, and she was not a particularly clever writer, not a particularly clever thinker. So I, rather unfortunately, got caught up in that eddy. I'm not interested in kneecapping her career, but there's a certain amount of bullshit you want to call a person on, and she happens to manufacture quite a bit of it."

There's another interesting bit at the bottom of the article that really caught me. In the 1990s, the writers of the New York scene hailed not from the blogs but from Op-Ed columns in the Wall Street Journal. In one instance, they went after a government official in a series of editorials, who later killed himself and left a note in his briefcase: "WSJ editors lie without consequence." The writer of this article quotes a former lawyer: " There's something called the 'eggshell skull' doctrine. If you bop me lightly on the head and my skull falls apart, well, you didn't know that would happen. But the rule is, when you're dealing with human beings, you take the victim as he comes."

Personally, I think this quote needs to be engraved on every computer in this world. Sure, you're entitled to your opinions. I didn't like that first article about novel debt. Does that mean I need to trash-talk the author in the comments? Can I talk critically about why I didn't like it, instead of telling her to do everyone a favor and get hit by a truck? I'm at the cusp of the Internet age, in that I can still vaguely recall a time in elementary school when I couldn't use the Internet for research projects and had to reserve books from a public library. The Internet has been a nasty place for as long as I can remember, and I wonder if it's actually impossible for us to ever adopt a certain Internet etiquette that would make this online rudeness obsolete rather than the norm.

Dear CS,

You might not remember who I am. In fact, I hardly remember you. I know you played JV on our high school tennis team, but I can't remember if you were two or three years younger than me or whether you added me on Facebook first. What I do know is that your posts show up on my newsfeed fairly regularly, and for the most part I do enjoy clicking on the links you post, including the British Actors Reading Prose and Poetry playlist from last week (Richard Armitage!).

However, your recent posts relating to your new blog about a crazy roommate have made me very tempted to write you a private message about why your blog disturbs me. But considering how unfamiliar we are with each other, I figured I'd rather not provoke you and passively write you a letter on my own blog--one that you'll probably never read.

As of this morning, you've published three posts on this blog about your crazy roommate, CC. All of these posts have been publicly linked on your Facebook, and you commented below one of them that CC has been blocked from viewing any of your posts. My dear, your blog is on a public platform that even I--who could barely remember you--can readily access. One of your hundreds of Facebook friends may easily figure out who CC is referring to and share the link with her. Based on the tone of your posts, I suppose your response to that would be to flip your hair and say, "I don't care! I stand by my words." If you were truly so impervious to how she may think of you, then you would never have bothered to note that you'd blocked her in the first place. But whatever--if you are prepared and willing to face the possibility that she may discover you blog, then that is your prerogative. Instead, I will address why I find the very existence of that blog problematic.

Once upon a time, I was a freshman at Duke. I lived with two other roommates in a room that should have been a double. One was a girl unlike anyone I had ever met. She ran wild during that first semester, bearing a very inflated sense of self that veiled a whole web of insecurities. One day, I wrote a post about her on this very blog sharing how crazy she was. An anonymous commenter wrote to me, saying that instead of talking about her so passive-aggressively on the Internet, I should address my issues with her in person. In a knee-jerk defense, I was livid and lashed out, wondering who knew about the existence of this private blog would write something like that to me. Four years later, I know I would have written the exact same thing to my former self.

Your posts do seem to indicate that you have confronted this girl in person, which is better than what I had done. However, your description of CC's behavior seems to indicate to me that this girl may bear some sort of mental illness. In my four years at Duke, I encountered more friends and acquaintances with mental issues than I'd ever been cognizant of growing up at home. Yes, these friends and acquaintances may be exasperating at times and difficult to live with--I can empathize and sympathize with your situation. But the very nature of you writing this anonymous blog feels as if you are making fun of her behind her back. Yes, it is ridiculous that she retaliates against you and your roommates by letting the shower run for an exorbitant amount of time. (First thought: during this drought crisis in California?? Second thought: That water bill must be egregious.) But to me, your story isn't funny. Instead, I find it incredibly sad. I find it pathetic that CC has been your roommate for three years when it is clear that neither of you like the other. I find it pathetic that you've chosen to vent about your frustrations on such a public blog. You might point at me and pick out all my past posts where I have discussed personal acquaintances--as one might argue that I am doing now. But by merit of you sharing the link on a status update, no less--one thing is clear. You wrote your blog for an audience. You wrote with the intent of having friends and maybe even almost complete strangers like me share your laughter and outrage. There's a maliciousness in this act--akin to pointing and laughing at sideshow "freaks" suffering from physical deformities--that we could all do without.

Best,
Sophelia

Un-thinkable (I'm Ready)

Can't believe I only just discovered this song--and on Songza's "Acoustic Versions of Pop Songs" playlist. (Speaking of Songza, I've converted a bunch of friends into using this website. Their concierge is awesome and they have playlists for anything imaginable--it is awesome.) The music video is quite interesting--though CMM looks kind of sleazy in some of those shots lol. City and Colour's cover definitely holds its own against the original as well.

Makrokosmos - Dream Images

drums clattering in the auditorium
green fuzz on racket strings
droplets of rainbows condensing in hot sunlight
cartoon stickers on a minivan window
etched lines on the arched ridge of two ears
ratty library hardcover copy of Gone With the Wind
a black gate closing between white slats of the blinds

I saw it through the frame and through my face.
Covering my eyes, because we are nothing,
and never quite the same from a black and white summer. 

pantsed

happy monday

 who is bernice you ask

With photographs that showed our rails and razorblades. 

skull and crossbones and safety pins

a wedding ring buried under rotting leaves

white shoes scuffling against red hardcourt

the sound of lapping water

the smell of chlorine

archer archer archer please stfu

sky blue pillow with embroidered pink flowers

the sunken imprint of a body's weight on a vacated sofa 

But through the window you reach for the cold.
But the door is so much closer,
and the sun has sold itself to the land

and all over my skin. 

I don't want to remember anymore.

raucous laughter in the back row of biology

cigarette smoke by the creek
a baritone voice reads modernist poetry aloud---
red wheelbarrows and coffee spoons

whittled waist

skintight jeans

two-faced bitch
stood-you-up-ha-ha-sucker

the slope y = x + deltoids

lavender and vanilla scented questionnaires

enough.

smeared amateurish eyeliner
thin green leaves rustling amidst a clear blue sky

stop it.

red dress

gold earrings

silk lilies

high sandals

artificial river

tasteless food
shadows merge

fingers on the waist
arms around the shoulders
hands wringing around your fucking neck

STOP IT.

 

It was you, bringing your white company.
Oh, bringing the night, so it seemed.
And we will never sleep again.

"On risque de pleurer un peu si l'on s'est laissé apprivoiser."

It's over, we are still nothing.

---------------------

Lyrics from "December" by Lydia

Inspired by George Crumb's Makrokosmos Vol I. No. 11 Dream Images (Love-Death Music) (Gemini) 

Book Report: The Mad Scientist's Daughter

This was another one of those books I found in the Kindle Daily Deals a while back. It had been sitting in my reading queue for a while, but for some reason today I just felt compelled to pick it up. I know I've been "currently reading" Love in the Time of Cholera for ages now, but it's hard to keep plowing through when you're not particularly invested in any of the characters.

I confess that I spoiled the ending of this book for myself before I even read it. I read through a lot of reviews of this book, trying to decide if I wanted to buy it. I knew how the story would end and I was apprehensive about the fact that several reviewers had called the heroine "unlikeable." But in the end, the premise of a futuristic robot love story outweighed the possibility of paying a few dollars for a book I didn't like.

The narration follows the limited third-person perspective of Cat, the titular daughter. The story takes place in the future, after a natural disaster wiped out most of the human population. Robots were then created to help rebuild civilization, at least until the human population was able to bounce back. The book begins when Cat is a little girl and her father brings home a mysterious robot named Finn that is startlingly human-like and one-of-a-kind in the world. Over the course of the novel, Cat grows up into a woman and we see her struggle at different points in her life as she becomes more and more aware of the feelings she has developed for Finn--who, though almost eerily human, is only a robot.

Though this book is categorized as Science Fiction, it's not quite the standard type you see in the genre. I can already think of certain friends of mine who are big SFF buffs, and I know this book won't be for them. In contrast, I don't read much SFF but this book is right up my alley. Yes, it's a love story--but it's also a bildungsroman and a character study of a heroine going through very complicated emotions.

I'll grant what the reviewers were saying about Cat being an unlikeable heroine. She has quite a number of faults. She hurts several people over the course of the story out of selfish reasons. But although there were times when I was dying to jump into the story and shake her shoulders, I liked Cat as a heroine because thanks to how flawed she was, I feel that her character grew and matured noticeably by the end of the book. I cared about her enough that I became very emotionally invested in her story.

Other complaints I heard were that reviewers wished Cassandra Rose Clarke had gone into more depth with the world-building. A part of me does wish there was a more detailed picture of how civilization has changed since the Disasters. I thought it was very interesting that society seemed to have reverted to old-fashioned norms, such as housewives going back into fashion. This actually set up a really interesting dynamic between Cat, who is inclined towards art and other "housewife" pastimes, and her mother who is a scientist in her own right. I felt like Cat's relationship with her mother never had any real chance to grow and be explored, which was a pity.

Now that the minor criticisms are out of the way, here's what I have to say: this book completely drained me. Quite literally, I felt an aching while reading this book. The plot wasn't the most clever thing I've ever read, but Cassandra Rose Clarke's prose was so lush and melancholy. I've never used the highlight function on my Kindle app before today, but while I was reading this book I couldn't stop marking different lines that caught my eye.

Also, Cat and Finn.... sigh. I spoiled the ending for myself, but the very reason I kept reading was because I was rooting for them so bad, I wanted to know how they were going to overcome such a huge obstacle. Y'all have probably figured out that as cynical as I may be, there's a romantic hiding deep inside. But my favorite love stories are the ones where you have no idea how they'll be able to overcome all the barriers in their path. There's a yearning that spans distance and time, kind of like the one that made me love Daughter of Smoke and Bone so much. Again, this book isn't for everyone. But for me, it left a lingering weight in my chest the way one might feel after a long cry.

--------------------
ETA: I just went and looked around Cassandra Rose Clarke's website, and she listed Francesca Lia Block as one of her favorites writers that had a heavy influence on her own writing. Boom. No wonder I liked the prose so much.

G&G

Speaking of being utterly invested in other people's lives...

I was reading some articles about the Olympics and something triggered one of those vague memories in my head. My mother was a huge Michelle Kwan fan, so I remember following Olympic figure skating pretty intensely when I was a young. I even remember buying a book from one of those school booksales about figure skating and I liked looking at the pictures of their costumes and the action shots of their spins and jumps.

Anyways, I was reading those articles and suddenly, I vaguely recalled hearing about a famous Olympic medalist husband-wife skating pair where the husband died while practicing on the ice. I looked it up on Google, and sure enough I brushed up my knowledge on Grinkov and Gordeeva. This article does a pretty thorough job of describing the story behind the pair--how they were reluctantly paired up when she was 10 and he was 14, how they won the Olympics twice together, etc. And damn, kudos to the writer (is it just me, or do people not write like this anymore?), 'cause I started getting all emotionally funny at this one part:

"Just before the performance, Zueva told her, "You should remember that Sergei will help you to skate; try to feel that he is around you."

Indeed, almost as soon as the lights flooded the ice, Gordeeva's fears vanished. "It was like I had double strength," she says. "I didn't even feel that I was skating. My arms were so free." As she glided to center ice, the audience rose and thundered their support. She hesitated, unsure whether she should acknowledge the applause; then, as the melancholy strains of Mahler's Fifth Symphony filled the arena, she began a series of lovingly choreographed gestures—her hand searching for another hand, her body, draped in diaphanous white and gray, arcing to the shape of another invisible body—that suggested she still was one of a pair. The program, choreographed by Zueva, was a wrenching dramatization of Gordeeva's struggle with grief and renewal. At the end she skated with joy, her fingers reaching toward the sky.

The performance brought the tearful audience to its feet again, and Gordeeva herself started to cry. But she took a deep breath and skated to the edge, where she scooped up Daria. The tiny blonde threw her arms around her mother's neck, and gently, very gently, as Gordeeva carried her onto the ice, patted her mother's back."

So OF COURSE I had to look up the video online. The quality was pretty bad so I didn't become super emotional about the dance, but holy moly when I listened to the speech she gave at the end about Sergei and her voice starts cracking and people in the audience start tearing up and GAHHHHHH. I didn't cry because my tear ducts have been surgically removed (I kid), but ughhhhhhhhhh if someone dramatized their story into a novel or a movie I'd be all over that stuff.

On Ships IRL

Sometimes, I've wondered about what will happen if my blog suddenly becomes public knowledge, and all the people I've ever discussed on here over the last seven years will recognize themselves and come after me with pitchforks. But I guess we'll see if that ever happens lol.

It's been snowing majorly in North Carolina these past two days. Actually, this winter has pretty much been ridiculously cold and snowy here. Elsa really 'let it go' this winter, har har har. Lots of snow pictures in my Facebook feed. One of which was this couple I'll just refer to as Battery. (The reasoning behind this name is a dead giveaway to their identities--then again, the story I'm about to divulge will make it way too easy to guess. ANYWAYS.) I'm Facebook friends with both but don't know either of them particularly well. The girl (Plus) is dancer I worked with for the Lunar New Year fashion show a couple years ago, while the guy (Minus) was my neighbor last year. The two are some of the best dancers in this one dance group on campus. Last spring, they started dating and the dance community erupted into a choir of awwwws. Not gonna deny it, it was cute even for an outsider like me. In April, I'd walk around campus and see flyers for their group's dance showcase, and a third of the flyers would have Battery posed in a couple's dance.Which was a little strange for me, because for most of the year I'd been shipping Minus with my friend Cinereus.

This year, my roommate and I had a conversation over dinner one day about the Ron/Hermione bomb that J.K. Rowling dropped, and we started talking about shipping fandoms. I can think of lots of pairings I ship rabidly, fictional (e.g. Anne Shirley/Gilbert Blythe) or otherwise (am I the only one who has some bizarro interest in seeing Drake and Rihanna get back together?). But then we came to the question of whether or not we'd shipped any of our real-life friends or acquaintances. Were there any friends you'd been totally rooting to finally get together, that you'd been keeping up with crazily like a soap opera addict? That's when I remembered Minus and Cinereus, which I'd forgotten I'd dumped far into the back of my brain.

Nothing ever came out of Cinereus and Minus, but I still remember that one glorious moment for this short-lived ship. Cinereus became really sick, so she stayed at home one Saturday while I went out shopping with friends. We were about to eat dinner at a restaurant when we received a text from Cinereus asking us if we could do her a favor and buy Gatorade and some chicken soup from an on-campus eatery. We were at a sit-down restaurant and knew that dinner would take a while, so we hatched a nefarious plan. R called up Minus, who constantly works out at the gym, and explained how Cinereus was sick and asked him to bring back Gatorade for her when he returned to the apartment. Minus agreed and asked what flavor he should bring back. So I texted Cinereus and said we'd be back in a bit and casually asked what flavor she wanted us to buy. Then the rest of us purposely dawdled so we wouldn't be back home before Minus made his appearance.

When we finally made it back, Cinereus made no mention of any appearance by Minus, so I started wondering if we'd majorly screwed up somehow. Finally, I went into the refrigerator and saw two bottles of Powerade. Confronting Cinereus directly about the situation, I asked her if someone had made a "special delivery." This triggered a major response from Cinereus as she began to rant about how could we invite HIM over while she looked like crap. She said she'd been lying feverishly in bed when there was sudden knocking on the door. Thinking I'd forgotten the keys and couldn't get in, she got out of bed and opened the door to find Minus standing at the door. He asked her if she was feeling okay, and then handed her multiple bottles of Powerade and orange juice (which we didn't even ask him to get), telling her, "I didn't know if you liked pulp or no pulp, so I got you both."

GOD. Even as I'm typing that last sentence, I'm still smiling like an idiot at that line.

Of course, that was the pinnacle moment of that little ship. It fell apart pretty quickly afterwards, but there were lots of priceless moments in this tentative pairing in which I greatly enjoyed meddling. Heh heh, yes--I'm that friend. So when Battery happened, I couldn't quite drum up any enthusiasm because damn it, I was still sore about my sunken ship! But today, Plus posted a photo of the two of them with a "snow puppy" they made named Bonaparte. Maybe it's the puppy or the French name, but okayyyyy I finally concede that Battery is kinda adorable.

In other news, OLIVIA just posted that her baby was born today! Atlas Natan Vallis. I am dying of curiosity about Olivia's husband, but I LOVE her baby's name. It totally fits her unique vibe, but not weird enough to be a target of celebrity-baby jokes. Is it weird that I'm oddly happy for someone that I've never met?

Elegie (Fauré)

I know I posted that 2CELLOS performance last time, but I just had to post another video of Luka Sulic (who bears an eerie resemblance to one of my co-workers lol). I don't know why I've never heard of this piece before. It's gut-wrenching gorgeous. I've been going on a classical music binge these days, which may or may not contribute to the fact that I've had one of the most artistically productive weekends in a long while. As in, not only did I churn out a bunch of stuff, but it was stuff that I actually liked. Like when you reread it later and you think to yourself, Wow that's amazing--did I actually write that? Let's hope it lasts.

Bliss

Wrote roughly 2000 words' worth of new material in one afternoon yesterday.

Book Report: Sloppy Firsts

This book was published in 2001. I was in fourth grade, still being a brat to my friends--namely Astrid, who I teased relentlessly over a boy we dubbed Warthog. It boggles my mind that I'm reading this book 13 years after it first came out, and it still feels as fresh as if I were still hunkered down in the trenches of high school.

I'm pretty sure I stumbled across this book in the library at some point during my adolescence, but I snubbed my nose at both the title and the cover art. Even now, I still probably wouldn't be caught in public reading a book with this cover. I distinctly remember seeing this book in Gov. J's house one day (a long long time ago) and thought to myself, Gross. The term "sloppy firsts" conjured all sorts of images of wet slobbering macking that I had zero interest in--which in retrospect was probably a wise decision, because although I read a lot of fiction books from the grown-up section back then, I was completely naive and oblivious about sex and I probably would have been skuzzed out by all the hook-up culture going on in this book. You see, unlike the book's protagonist Jessica Darling who seems to think everyone is boning everybody in high school, I used to think that, other than the blonde cheerleader in my World Cultures class who used to talk about her escapades all the time, people my age just didn't do these things. Cue a rude awakening a few years later.

It's kind of hard to summarize this book and make it sound interesting. It fits right under the slice-of-life category--which means it could have been really boring if executed poorly. Jessica Darling is a straight-A sophomore in a suburban New Jersey high school. She desperately misses her best friend Hope who moved to Nashville, secretly hates her friends whom she's dubbed the "Clueless Crew," has the usual family problems, crushes on a senior athlete whom she's only spoken to once, and has something weird going on with Marcus Flutie, a mysterious loner dude with a dubious reputation that precedes him.

But fortunately, the execution of this book was spot-on. It was so entertaining that I zipped through this in approximately three hours while multi-tasking. Jessica Darling's snarky commentary is a riot, and though she can get quite judgmental at times, to me she's kind of like a modern-day Elizabeth Bennet where those flaws just make her more endearing. If I had been friends with her in high school, we probably would have been smack-talking about annoying people all the time. Though high school hadn't been all fun-and-games for me, I'd say that I generally had a good time. I wasn't a social pariah. I had a solid group of friends that would occasionally talk smack about one another, but reading about Jessica and the Clueless Crew made me just a teensy bit nostalgic for the days when Rogue and I would spend every lunch break swooning over our fictional bad boys, complaining about the lameness of our lives and how we'd both end up at the same nursing home, and discussing the latest brouhaha surrounding the star players of high school drama (always the same dramatic people).

Random tidbit that might be categorized under TMI (you've been forewarned)--whenever Jessica would talk about her problems with amenorrhea (aka her menstrual cycle going on strike due to stress), I would mentally laugh at the irony of me reading this book when last night I woke up at 4 am because my monthly uterine rebellion was giving me such shitty sleep. And apparently I was having half-lucid nightmares about birds exploding into splatters of blood before I finally headed for the bathroom. Don't ask.

Also, no review of this book is complete without mention of Marcus Flutie. I've heard a lot about this boy, especially from FYA which has once dubbed him the "Mr. Darcy of YA." Well, I've only read the first book, so I don't really know if he clinches that title later in the series or what, but he's an intriguing one, I'll give him that. The thing is, Jessica's interactions with him are fairly sparse in this book--so there weren't any major moments that got me all riled up about shipping them. But because he showed up so infrequently, I always immediately perked up whenever he made an appearance--because let's face it, the two of them do have chemistry.

The cliffhanger at the end with Marcus is almost enough to make me scope out for the second book. But I probably won't read it--at least not any time soon. I scoped out some Goodreads reviews, and when I heard that Jessica gets more whiny, more obsessed with sex, and also stubbornly refuses to reconcile with Marcus, I thought---Ughhh. She was already gracefully balancing the fine line between being snarky and complaining about everything, and I'd rather not see that line crossed. Also, FYA favorably compared Jessica Darling to Anne Shirley, which I totally agree with, but if I have to put up with Jessica Darling snubbing Marcus Flutie the way Anne Shirley did to my precious Gilbert Blythe, there will be sad unhealthy days for my blood pressure.

I'd probably reread this book again though, just to savor the hilarious pieces of commentary. Maybe it's better not to tarnish a good memory by reading a less-than-sparkling sequel? We'll see.  

Hurt

Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt" is always going to be one of my favorites, but I really liked this
 one by 2Cellos. The cellos really just sing in this piece, don't they?

Also, huge inspiration boost over the weekend woot.

1004 (Angel)

B.A.P's newest album, First Sensibility, is out. I've talked about my admiration for their leader BYG before, but I should reiterate that the reason this group has still managed to capture my interest--whereas other K-pop groups tend to lose me after one or two trendy songs--is that they're a young group that experiments with a lot of new and different sounds. (Of course, much of this is due to BYG producing their songs, which basically reinforces the fact that I think BYG is awesome, but I digress.)

I don't like the blatant copycat scenes with Youngjae in the mirror maze--way too obviously inspired by Justin Timberlake's "Mirrors," which only just came out this past year. Too soon, man. The rest of the video itself is kinda meh to me as well, though the mirror and gun scene with Himchan at the end is interesting. But I care more about the music, and overall I do like the song, but I have to say that my favorite part is around the 3:20 mark when a very obvious tonal shift occurs as BYG enters with a solo rap. The accompanying guitar riff is very reminiscent of Metallica's "One" in the best way possible. I wouldn't mind listening to a whole song with just BYG rapping to that riff.

Speaking of which, not long ago I found a buttload of his old-school songs from his Jepp Blackman (Soul Connection) and Blackout eras, and I really like his old stuff. If he had more freedom with writing songs, I would probably be gobbling it all up.

ETA: WHAT THE FLIP, THIS IS THEIR FIRST FULL ALBUM? They've produced way more than enough material in the last two years to fill up at least another full album. What is this insane amount of productivity and how do I get it.  -.-