When I was in high school, the popular thing to do was grab an energy drink.

That was all I heard: Monster this and Red Bull that and Rockstar is pretty cool and so on and so forth until my head started going in circles just like anybody actually reading this massive run-on sentence is probably suffering just at this moment.

I could never figure out what was so great about energy drinks.  My first boyfriend (sophomore year) had me drink a sip of something labeled “Sobe” and I started shaking all through American Studies.  I tried some Monster when I was out on a (rather disastrous) adventure with my best friend and didn’t like that, either.

After all my little taste-tests, I’d finally settled on drinking nothing but Mountain Dew to get a quick energy fix – much different than my beloved characters in The TECH Project, who can’t drink Mountain Dew at all – fairly early on in high school.  I held steady even throughout my senior year, when stress and tests abounded.

But all that changed when I went to college and started working at the newspaper.

I was talking about my job in the previous post, but only briefly: I work as a copyeditor at our campus paper, which is highly educational.  For example, I think I now know every single way humanly possible in which to prevent H1N1, commonly known as the swine flu.

What I never mentioned, however, is that my job begins at 4 on Sundays and 6 on Wednesdays – and doesn’t end until 1 or 2 in the morning.

Now, the pay isn’t great, but bad pay is better than no pay, and I like it that I’ll have some previous employment in my major when I go to find a job.  But the late hours seriously drag on me, especially on days like today when my extracurricular (and non-paid) activities mean that I’m up at 9:30 in the morning, acting as a runner til 6, then running to work where I’ll be til 1 or 2.  (I was up til 2 last night as well, but that’s another story.)

So I have discovered, in the process of walking to work, that having a nice, cool, refreshing can of Mountain Dew just won’t cut it when the weather outside is 40 degrees and it’s raining.

Therefore, I picked up a brand-new habit that I know my mommy wouldn’t be proud of: drinking coffee.

Coffee is among on of the most addictive substances in the world, just after nicotine and being a rock star.  While I’d much rather be a rock star than a coffee-drinker, I’m just going to have to settle for the closer-to-home of the two.  But the caffeine is seriously pleasing.

However, I do have a few limits on my coffee-drinking indulgence:

1. I will only drink cafe mocha.
2. I will NOT drink Starbucks.
3. I will only drink it when it’s raining, snowing, or exceptionally windy.
4. I only buy Einstein Bros. Regular-sized Cafe Mocha, always hot and always with whipped cream.

Those probably sound pretty picky, but I have some good reasons for that.

First off, Starbucks is disgusting.  Not even joking.  It tastes like someone threw mud in a toaster oven, scraped off what was left behind, and brewed it into coffee.  And that’s AFTER putting whipped cream on it.  Ew.

Second, I only drink it in poor weather conditions because it is nice and warm, like the grown-up version of hot chocolate, which is nice.

Third, the only coffee I actually DO like is Einstein Bros. Regular-sized Cafe Mocha.  I like chocolate, for one, and if I get a large the whipped cream just melts and becomes untasteable.  And no one makes a good cafe mocha like Einstein Bros.

What kind of coffee do you like?  Got any guilty pleasures?

Last night, I was at work – I work at my college campus paper as a copyeditor – and we discovered a Very Bad Article.

Now, we didn’t quite know what to do.  We felt that we couldn’t let this one slide, but we couldn’t really do much with the writer of the article being in the room at the time.  (He’s a nice guy and not a bad writer, jut apparently not cut out to do stage reviews.)  Finally, the copy chief jumped the Arts & Life editor when he stepped outside, and he agreed to have us do a digital copy (which we could rearrange and rewrite at will) rather than a hard copy, which we could only proofread.

My little copyediting escapade of last night brought to mind something that happened to me last year, when I was taking Drawing II.  It was a curious event that happened when we did our first critique.

Now, I like to draw, but I’m nothing spectacular as an artist – I can draw some excellent naked people, but that’s just about it.  My piece for that particular critique was not one that I was proud of: I’d made (in my eyes) mistakes beyond count and measure, the lighting was off, the symbolism was strange, and many other things were just WRONG about it that I couldn’t put my finger on.

Fast-forward to the critique.  I brought my pieces into class, expecting the critique to go similarly to the critiques I’d done in Creative Writing: brutally honest, meant to work like a chipper at a gem to take out all the crap and leave behind something priceless.

But something very odd happened.

I ended up receiving little to no constructive criticism.  Instead, I was told that “the mouse is cute” and “I like the atmosphere.”

I was so frustrated I wanted to pull out some of my own hair.  I like the atmosphere too!  But this composition’s a depressing one with a girl lying in a heap in a dirty alley, and you tell me that the mouse is cute?!  It’s not even a mouse!  IT’S A RAT!

It was then that I discovered the fundamental difference between graphic artists and writers.

Writers, by nature, have to stand up to harsh criticism.  Since our work can be fixed and reworked to no end, we get used to the harsh judgement – even of our writerly peers – and simply go to and fix them.  Artists, on the other hand, are apparently rather sensitive during their formative college years.

Am I right?  I’m pretty sure I  am… but, if I’m not, do correct me.

The final month of my senior year was probably the busiest month of my entire educational career.  Between the National Honor Society induction ceremony, prom, and preparing for graduation, I had little room to sleep – let alone do anything else.  As May draws to a close, though, I find myself wondering what the “big finish” of high school really is.

I have always thought of it as being graduation.  After thirteen hard years of work, why shouldn’t it be?  But after living through my senior year, I’m starting to wonder…

Is the “big finish” of high school actually the prom?

Students – particularly girls – can spend hundreds of dollars on prom.  The clothes, the accessories, the prom bid itself – not to mention the “after-prom” activities and the pre-prom activities, which can range anywhere from a stop at a burger joint to a two-hour dinner at an upscale restaurant.

Do high schools sponsor “after-graduation” activities?  How many people spend upwards of $50 at a pre-graduation dinner?

For me, graduation will always be the big-bang ending, but I’ve never really been a typical student.  What part of high school do you think is the real “big finish”: graduation or prom?

I think this video says it all.

I’ve had my copy of James Patterson’s new novel Max since Saturday.  I still haven’t had the chance to read it.

A review is forthcoming; I promise.

Think of one thing that you absolutely adore.

Got it?  Okay.  Now imagine taking that thing you adore and doing something with it – even if it isn’t your own – and making that a launchboard into your future.

That’s what eighteen-year-old Sam is doing.

Samantha, known as the “Twifamily Interviewer” on MySpace, has been gathering information through surveys for quite a while.  She first started the interview process because she wanted to find out what people really thought about the series, but soon became more enthusiastic about the subject.  The project has gone from a simple survey into a gathering of information that Samantha hopes to send to the company producing the Twilight films and a set of questions that she plans to send to the interviewees’ favorite cast members.

At the time I contacted Samantha, she said that she had interviewed 484 people; the tally on her MySpace page goes up nearly every time I see her status updated.”All in all, everyone seems to love Twilight,” she told me through MySpace message.  “They love Stephenie Meyer as an author and want to read more of her work.” 

Luckily for Twilight and Meyer fans, the Twilight saga contains four novels – Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn – and Meyer has also completed a stand-alone novel called The Host, which incorporates similar themes of romance and perseverance.  Fans can also hope for more upcoming stories from the author.

When I asked her how she had learned about the Twilight books, she told me, “I saw the books online way before I knew they were being made into a movie.  When I heard it was being made into a movie, I went to get the books and could not put them down.”  Some of her interviewees had similar stories, and she says that a lot of them have similar answers to the twenty questions that she uses on her interview form.

What, though, draws this high school senior to Twilight?  She says that she loves the romance between Edward and Bella, but “I personally enjoy the books because of how emotional [they] are.”

Of course, the survey isn’t just a game for a bored teenage girl.  “I’m also hoping that doing this interview will help me get in this line of work some day,” she admitted in private correspondence.  As a writer just a little younger than Samantha, that’s something I can understand perfectly well.

Warning: possibly offensive or inappropriate content may follow.

My only class of the day was cancelled, and after doing all the research I could psychologically handle, I was reduced to this.

On Monday, during my Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature class, my professor was discussing the way that social context is important to understanding the context of a novel, particularly in science fiction and fantasy literature.  In particular, he was discussing the difference between the games in Ender’s Game and the games in the Harry Potter series.

The social context of Ender’s Game is this: the novel was published in 1985, but the original novelette was published in August of 1977, in the publication Analog Science Fiction and Fact. The novelette was published two years after the Fall of Saigon in the Vietnam War.  Both the novel and the novelette, written by Orson Scott Card, were published during the Cold War era.

According to my SFFL professor, the post-Vietnam era was one of great cynicism.  The combination of war protests and the loss of the war itself made the American sentiment generally pessimistic.

Anyone who has read Ender’s Game will notice this cynicism and pessimism in every aspect of the protagonist’s life.  Ender Wiggen starts at the beginning of the novel as a six-year-old supergenius, a Third, who was allowed to be born in order to find the ultimate tactical mind.  He is then brought to Battle School, where his brilliant mind is shaped by his commanding officers to make him the greatest general that Earth has seen.

The novel is full of “games” that Ender must play at Battle School.  The games are war games in which the boys – and the Battle School’s only girl – shoot at one another with lasers that cause their special suits to freeze while bouncing around in a zero-gravity environment.  The games are violent and turn Ender into an outsider when he soon rises in the ranks to become the leader of the top team in the school.

The games in J. K. Rowling’s bestselling Harry Potter series, on the other hand, are much different from those in Ender’s Game.  Quidditch is set on Earth, for one, where gravity has full effect.  Quidditch is also a way for Harry to go from a somewhat ignorant outsider to a full member of the Wizarding world.

Rowling began writing the series, however, during a time when life was prosperous and good in Britain, where Rowling lives.  It was the age of Princess Diana, who brought a lot of hope and optimism to the world with her charm and philanthropy.  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, published in 1997 by Bloomsbury, was published during a time of economic prosperity in both Britain and the United States, where it was published as Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone by Scholastic in 1998.  The United States publication came at the tail end of the Clinton administration, when economic prosperity was at a high.

The games in both Ender’s Game and the Harry Potter series are very similar: tactical, fantastic games.  But their significance in their respective plotlines are highly different, and the novels are visibly affected by the realities in which their authors lived.

Strangely enough, today was my first encounter with the situation known as “Hot Girl Dating Fugly Guy.”

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with this concept, but it occurs when an intensely beautiful or good-looking girl with pleasant facial features and a visually pleasing body shape is dating a guy who is not intensely handsome, good-looking, or possessive of pleasant facial features or a visually pleasing body shape.

My first awareness of this social conundrum was on Lovelyish, where Lovelyish blogger Iris asks why women are expected to be beautiful, but men don’t care if their significant other finds them attractive.

I thought it was just an urban myth. Honestly? In my social environment, it’s usually the other way around: highly attractive males who date girls that are not aesthetically pleasing. (In some cases, the girls don’t even have pleasant personalities, but that’s the topic of another blog post.)

So to actually experience this social myth was astounding!

It was during my Mass Communications class, just before it started. I was working on The Final Experiment, but these two people were distracting me because they were talking. The guy was seriously not attractive. You know the kind of guy who goes to class without shaving or washing his hair? The kind of guy that needs a really great personality just to have friends? That was what this guy reminded me of.

And you know the kind of girl who is totally hot? The kind who spends tons of time showering and getting herself clean and made up, the kind that spends hundreds of dollars on a nice wardrobe? That was his girlfriend.

Guess what? They cut out of class in order to go… ah… have recreational physical activities.

Have you ever seen a very attractive girl with an unattractive guy?

Back again, perhaps.

Yes, I realize that it’s February and I’ve hardly posted recently – and not at all this year – but I hope I’ll be back and posting more often, the way I used to.

But I wanted to talk about the newer release date.  I’m negoatiating with a small press right now, and hopefully The TECH Project will be released in April or May.

Thoughts?  Comments?