I wish I was boning vampires.

I'm watching the "Wizard of Oz" when it occurred to me:

Glinda is a troll. She makes this "little girl" go on a journey to see the Wizard-- a journey where she was almost killed multiple times and which leads her to committing involuntary witch-slaughter. Then she laughs when she makes the big reveal after Dorothy has gone through all this shit and the Wizard takes off in the balloon without her that she "could have gone back to Kansas all along." What a total bitch.

I like her in the book better since Dorothy only meets her in the second half. The book is also the reason why I own a pair of silver flats which are kid's Hannah Montana shoes but they were $3.50 so who cares!

I also want to make a Tin Woman costume, but I have other projects planned already.

ETA: Having a one-person movie-viewing after party by listening to the "WICKED" musical soundtrack.

It is National Book Week. Grab the closest book to you. Turn to page 56. Copy the 5th sentence as your status. Don't mention the book. (Post these rules as well.)

"Have you seen them, magician? They are wild and sea-white, like me."

I'm reading "Reasoning with Vampires" and trying to work my way through the archive out of sheer determination because reading the blog along with "Mark Reads Twilight" is sort of like reading Twilight, but not so painful. As I've stated before, I tried reading the first book and got to baseball then decided that was enough. This is one of my least favorite line in Twilight because I am a petty, petty thing:

I kept my eyes down on the reading list the teacher had given me. It was fairly basic: Brontë, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Faulkner. I already read everything.

My beloved Brontë sisters are dragged into this mess for the first time. In later books, Meyer does quote Wuthering Heights (does Bella indicate it is a quote or is it cited in footnotes?), so I guess it's poor Emily, but she doesn't say which sister is on the reading list. I doubt it's Anne. Everyone forgets Anne. Why couldn't Meyer just make Jane Austen roll in her grave some more like everyone else? (Sorry, Jane.)

Are we supposed to take at face value that Bella reads for enjoyment or did she already read this for school? I don't like the latter implication since it implies that kids ~*in the big city*~ are ahead in school as compared to ~*small town folk*~. This is also reflected in the scene in the biology room where Edward and Bella have already done the experiment before. In the very least, it's another example of Bella being self-absorbed and it's easy to get the impression that she feels superior to others in multiple ways, including because she comes from *Pheonix, AZ* and Forks bores her. I take this as she read it for school because Bella is never shown reading anything aside from vampire research *on the internet* and working on an essay for school (on whether or not Shakespeare exhibits sexism in "Romeo and Juliet" or something like that). Those are the only things that I know of. If she is shown reading anything in later books, let me know.

GRRRRRRRRRRRR

I had an especially bad day yesterday. We went to a live tree farm to choose our Holiday tree for this year. My dad was in a VERY bad mood because we went going late and rushed choosing it. He was snappy when I asked how much he wanted the tree to cost because he thought I was acting like a car salesman. I was annoyed by this so I wandered off and they chose the tree without letting me look at it. This was supposed to be a family activity and I was the one looking most forward to it.

On the flip-side, I discovered Metalocalypse and I love it. Toki is seriously me in man form. I have a fuzzy exterior and rage like you wouldn't believe when crossed or triggered. Most people don't see this side.

I'm reading Jane Eyre again. I love Jane. She is such a bad ass and I wish that one day I can be like her. I discovered this book during a period when I had just started therapy and had a lot of problems with social anxiety. I discovered I was bipolar. I also was then a budding feminist and feeling a bit alienated over the fact that I hadn't read many women authors or artists as I had never been introduced to them during my schooling before college.

"Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags"
- Charlotte Brontë,Jane Eyre, Chapter 12

This passage means a lot to me and I tear up when I read it and other parts of the book still. It's one of the reasons I refer to this book as my "Band Aid book." How fucking awesome is this character. There's another film adaptation coming out in February. I'm a little anxious over that, but I hope its good.

I needed a break from reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for the second time, so I started reading The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle today. I never imagined that it would be so lyrical, but I met Mr. Beagle in person at Comic-Con and he is very much as precise in his speech as he is in writing. We had a lengthy conversation on the Red Bull which is my favorite character from the movie and he told me that it was inspired by a painting by a friend which led to The Last Unicorn. His father was a painter and he was surrounded by artists during his childhood, but his talent lay in writing. He's a sweet man and a great storyteller. If you have the chance to meet him, you should.

His descriptions are unorthodox which really help you see the characters and the action; in example, "For an instant the icy wings hung silent in the air, like clouds, and the harpy’s old yellow eyes sank into the unicorn’s heart and drew her close[...]And out of the wreckage the harpy bloomed, terrible and free, screaming, her hair swinging like a sword. The moon withered and fled."

I love the threats that characters throw at each other while fighting like this:

"Barbed wire," he [Schmendrick] gasped. "You pile of stones, you waste, you desolation, I’ll stuff you with misery till it comes out of your eyes. I’ll change your heart into green grass, and all you love into a sheep. I’ll turn you into a bad poet with dreams. I’ll set your toenails growing inward. You mess with me."

I really don’t find anything conventional so far in his writing style. It really is a stand out work of fantasy fiction, still holding its own after forty years, and needs far more attention than it gets these days.

My friend is taking a game character design course where she is doing a series on The Last Unicorn, reinterpreted and inspired by traditional Japanese art and folklore. Worth checking out.