Only 800 words??

So I put the first two parts of my story (which I wrote in one sitting -- it took me about 1.5 to 2 hours) into Word and ran a word count, and it all only amounted to a little over 800.  D:  NaNoWriMo requires almost 2000 words each sitting (1667 words, if we're being exact), and I felt like those 800 words were already so much!  Maybe I'll get better, faster... stronger?  You get restless, though, sitting and just typing for so long.

A quick word about this "story" that I'm writing:  The first part was based on something that I did some time during the first couple weeks after getting to college.  There was a poster sale, and, as at any good poster sale, there were several Beatles posters.  I mostly just wanted to write about that, because I think this endlessly-hesitating-over-and-then-finally-buying-Beatles-merchandise thing that I do is kind of fun, at least for me, because I usually end up with Beatles stuff afterward.

I didn't have any idea where the story was going after the first part.  But I found myself wanting to write about what happens to the poster afterward, and then half-way through the second part, I was like, "Oh yeah, I need characters, plot, and conflict."  So I figured out some semblance of a conflict, and, well, anyone who has read the second part probably knows where this is all going...  Even though this story is taking place in college, I really only know how to write about high-school-type stuff!  I apologize.  Though, if you think about it, even as college freshmen, we're not really that far out of high school -- I don't think we're as grown-up as we think we are, even if we technically are adults.  (And by "we," I guess I mostly mean me.)  Maybe as I get older and wiser, that will change, and I'll be able to write about grown-up things, like life and stuff.  But for now, probably not.

As-yet-untitled story thing, part 2

I slept on the bottom bunk, and Julia slept on the top.  We had wanted to save space in our tiny two-person dorm room, so we bunked our beds together.  It worked out pretty well, actually:  I had been worried that I'd wake up one morning, forget that I was not sleeping on the ground, and promptly break my neck.  Luckily, Julia said that she had always wanted to sleep on the top bunk of a bunk bed.  Being taller than I was, though, she nearly hit her head on the ceiling once or twice after waking up, but so far, no broken necks, and that was always a good sign.

We had been college freshmen for about three weeks, so we were at that point when we were still getting used to the freedom and mystique of college life, but we knew at least where to find our classes and where to go so that we wouldn't starve.

We got back to our room, and I unrolled my newly purchased poster onto my bed, staring at it, smiling and admiring my good taste.

"Aw, just kiss, already."  I looked over to see Julia smiling at me.

"Ha, ha."  I grabbed a roll of tape from my desk and began the always-amusing task of putting up a new poster.  Right above my desk, where I would see them every day.  "Does this look straight to you?" I finally asked, stepping away to admire my handiwork.

"Mhm..."  Julia obviously did not notice the curl on the lower-left corner of the poster.  I proceeded to correct this, then looked over at my roommate.  She was looking out of our room's one large window.

"Yo, what's up?" I said, joining her at the window.  I had been so focused on hanging up my poster just right that it wasn't until then that I noticed music coming from the half-open window.  "Is that...  Oh my gosh, it is!  That's 'Yesterday'!"

"Shh."  Julia put her finger to her lips, but continued to stare out the window.

Looking out the window, I finally understood what was up.  A boy.  Dark brown hair, medium length -- not exactly a Beatle cut, but it definitely suited him.  Well-proportioned, plaid button-up shirt, jeans.  I was a sucker for plaid.  He was sitting on a bench outside of our dorm, guitar on his knee, playing and humming softly. And he was left-handed.

By now, I was staring right along with Julia.  If he had seen us at all, he didn't show it; he just kept right on playing and looking damn attractive.  He had changed songs and was now playing "Here Comes the Sun," with that glorious intro that I love so much.

Julia turned to me and sighed.  "What a cutie."

"Yeah," I said.  "He's just like Paul McCartney."

"Oh," Julia groaned.  "Again with these old men of yours."


[Part 3 coming soon!]
[Read from the beginning]

If you’re of voting age and are opposed to SOPA/PIPA, stop whining and do something about it.

I don't want to sound like a jerk, but here's what's up:

As many people as there are on The Internet, the fact of the matter is that we don't have the money or the lobbyists that the people who support SOPA and PIPA have.  A couple of Hollywood execs have already withdrawn support for President Obama for opposing the bills.  Unless someone can get together a Save Facebook Fund within the next three days, we could never hope to compete with the financial power that Hollywood has.


But here's what we can do:

There are millions of users on the Internet.  If you're at least 18 years old, you automatically have a certain bit of leverage over your state's representatives.  (And even if you're still too young to vote, you'll be ready to vote in two, four, or even six years, right?)

Many Internet users who oppose SOPA and PIPA are us young people, but let's face it:  political campaigns are just generally not directed at us.  (The voter turnout for ages 18-25 is the lowest of all age groups, and politicians know it.)  So let's target them where it will matter:  the re-election campaign.

Please let your senators and representatives know that you will be going to the polls this November, and that you will be paying attention to what vote they cast on January 24th.


TL;DR:  Before January 24th, click [here] to send a stock, pre-written letter to your senators, or click [here] to find out how you can access your representatives' Twitters, contact pages, phone numbers, etc.

A letter to my senators

I never realized how much I use Wikipeda until I came across this terrible image earlier today:

Today,  January 18, Wikipedia blacked out their entire site -- except for the pages on SOPA and PIPA -- in protest of the two bills.  

And then not too long after, I came across it again.  And again.  (Don't judge!  I need Wikipedia to look up Beatles facts.)

I think anyone who has been on the Internet lately has heard of SOPA and PIPA.  If you're not sure what these two acronyms mean, Gizmodo posted a pretty complete explanation [here].  SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA stands for PROTECT IP Act.  (And if you just can't get enough of those clever acronyms, PROTECT IP stands for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property.)  [Source: Wikipedia :)]

From what I understand, these bills in the House of Reps and the Senate that are supposed to stop Internet piracy, but they will probably not do that and instead cause a bunch of problems that everyone will hate.  ...Well, okay, not EVERYone.

So as Wikipedia suggested, I contacted my local representatives.  Unfortunately, after I copied the email I wrote into my clipboard, I forgot to paste it and promptly copied something over it.  :(  So you won't get to read it.  But I basically just mentioned that voters would not be happy if SOPA and PIPA passed, and repeated some of the arguments that Google posted.  If I get a response from either senator, I'll be sure to post it.  Voting on the bills is supposed to take place on January 24th, so before then, make sure to sign the petition against SOPA/PIPA!

As-yet-untitled story thing, part 1

"I don't know!  Should I get it?"

I stared longingly at the poster in the rack.  There they were, in all their black-and-white glory:  John, Paul, Ringo, and George, walking down the street -- not Abbey Road, this picture had been taken many years before then, when the four of them were still close, still friends, when the tensions and stress of fame hadn't yet threatened to break them apart.  They were so young, so fresh-looking, clean-shaven, with those haircuts that they were so famous for.  They were beautiful.

For some reason, I was never sure where exactly the picture on the poster was taken, but I always just assumed that it was in front of the BBC studio -- I figured it was because of this other pictures of The Beatles dancing around in front of another building labeled "BBC," and this other building looked suspiciously like the one in this poster.

"Alice," my roommate, Julia, woke me from my daydreaming.  "You've been standing here looking at that poster for a good ten minutes, now!  Are you going to get it?"

"I don't know...  Ten dollars seems like an awful lot to pay for a giant piece of paper.  A very handsome piece of paper, but still."

Julia laughed and said, "I still cannot understand what you see in these sixty-year-old men."

"Woah! woah! woah!"  I said, half-jokingly, but with the other half genuinely offended.  "First off, they're seventy-year-old men," I said proudly.  "And second, The Beatles are amazingly talented and handsome, revolutionary, charming, and gauh I can barely even explain how awesome they are!"  I was getting pretty worked up about all this, as I usually do whenever The Beatles comes up in conversation.

"Okay, okay," Julia said, her hand motions saying, Down girl, it's okay.  "So...  You gonna get this poster, or what?"

I pulled the poster from its place on the poster rack.  "Yeah," I said.  "I'm getting it."


[Part 2]

Don't forget those resolutions!

I was looking over my blog, and I was looking over the resolutions that I wrote for this year.  I made a couple -- not totally impossible to keep, but I had forgotten a couple of them.  I think it's a pretty good idea for me to do that every once in a while, just to remind myself of the things that I want to accomplish or change about myself this year.  I might even add a sidebar, just so that I'll be able to see them every time I come on my blog.

I got a Hanklerfish!

I am a Nerdfighter.  I'm so happy to be part of a community that appreciates us awkward yet smart and passionate people.

So I feel really lucky that after a couple months of not paying much attention to Nerdfighteria, I suddenly got back into watching YouTube videos and discovered that John Green was coming out with a new book!  The book is called The Fault in Our Stars, and it came out yesterday, January 10th.  Everybody who pre-ordered the book got a copy signed by John Green himself.  He signed 150,000 of those things.

On top of that, his brother Hank Green, the other half of vlogbrothers, drew Hanklerfish on 7,400 of the 150,000, meaning there was a 5% chance of getting a Hanklerfish.  AND I GOT ONE!!  I was so excited when I opened my copy of the book that I had to literally run around the room to dissipate all of the energy that I had.

Anyway, I'm about one-third of the way through the book, and I'm so excited to finish it!

Getting prepped for NaNoWriMo... ten months early

Something that I like to do these days, now that I've got loads and loads of time on my hands, is watch people play video games while they make fun comments about the game.  So I was watching John Green play FIFA 11 on YouTube, and in one episode, he talked about NaNoWriMo.  NaNoWriMo is basically this event where a bunch of people from all over the world try to write a 50,000-word novel within the month of November.

I remembered that this was something that I wanted to do some time last summer (when I had time and actually believed that I'd be able to pull something like that off), so just now, I went to the NaNoWriMo website and was reading it, and -- I dunno, I want to see if I can do it.  I've had this idea for a novel since the end of my senior year...  The novel would have been about a Chinese girl who's, like, trying to figure out who she is.  Like, I dunno, for me, being Chinese-American, I always felt not totally American, but obviously not Chinese either.  I'm not sure how this conflict / quest would have been resolved, since it's based on stuff that I'm experiencing -- even now, and I still don't really know the answer.  Maybe I thought the answer would come to me while I was writing.  Haha!  I don't know.

Another idea I had was to write a mystery, because my favorite author of all time is The Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie.  I also admire Isaac Asimov, not only for his robot stories (which are amazing!), but also for the fact that he was able to combine science fiction with mystery, something that editors and publishers believed was near-impossible at the time.  Mysteries are freaking hard to write, though; ugh, all those plot twists and red herrings and everything.

Anyway, since I've never actually written any real fiction, I figured I should practice before the event.  So to prep myself for NaNoWriMo, or even Camp NaNoWriMo (which is basically NaNoWriMo that takes place during not-November), I was thinking that I'd try writing something short once a week, at least.  I've got a couple ideas; not sure if they're any good, but maybe I'll get better as November approaches!

The Bet

Before we left home for college, one of my best friends and I got into an argument over who was flirtier.  Totally dumb, I know.  But we decided to play a game (that was as dumb as the argument) that our guy friends play sometimes when they go on school trips:  Who can get the most numbers?


The rules were simple:

1)  We both had until a week after our orientation to get as many guys' numbers as we could.
2)  We would report our results to a third friend, to ensure that there would be no cheating.
3)  Numbers from MIT and Harvard dudes counted as two points.  (My friend goes to a college in Boston.)

I'm not sure how the challenge affected my friend, but for me at least, being a relatively timid person when it comes to meeting new people, the game forced me to actually talk to people in my dorm and in orientation groups.  In fact, I met my best friends at college because of the game:  if I weren't expressly trying to get guys' numbers to beat my friend, I might not have even given those dudes a second thought.

In case you were wondering, I won.  Did I have a distinct advantage being a girl in an engineering school?  You betcha.  (Though, in my defense, I didn't have classes the first couple days after orientation, so it wasn't as big of an advantage as you'd expect.)  For the record, though, I'm mighty surprised at how close my friend's score was to mine.

Anyway, I just wanted to share one of the silly things that I did with my friends.  Who knows?  If you're having trouble meeting new people, it might help to make a competition out of it.

How to combat homesickness

When I was younger, I always imagined that I would be the kind of person who would go to college close to home, cry when I got dropped off, and visit my parents often.  This all sort of changed some time last year.

I'm not sure why, but when I got accepted to my state's university (in the Midwest) and a university on the East Coast, I just really wanted to get away from all of the people and places that I knew here and go on an adventure.  You know, meet new people, discover new places...  I don't know what came over me, but I knew that if I stayed in-state, I would fall back and rely on my friends from high school; I wouldn't meet anyone new.

So in addition the school's reputation and its beautiful campus, this longing for somewhere new played a big part in my decision to enroll at the East Coast school.  What does this all have to do with homesickness, you ask?  I think that this adventure-seeking side of me is what kept me from getting homesick.  Or it might have been that the adventures that I sought left me no time to feel homesick.  Either way, here are some things that I did the first couple weeks of school that I think definitely helped me adjust to my new home.


1.  Make new friends -- go on adventures together!

New friends can help distract you enough so that you don't have time to feel homesick.  It's cool if these people don't become your best friends, or even if you never talk to them again after orientation week.  Meet some new people, talk to them, and have lunch with them or something.  The adventures that you have with them don't have to be anything big:  movie marathons, exploring the campus -- heck, one of my friends even called our first Target run an "adventure."  Just make sure you're doing something that doesn't involve sitting in your dorm room thinking about how much you miss home.


2.  Keep in touch with friends from back home.

I think a big part of homesickness is not so much missing the house where you used to live, but rather missing the people who were around you.  While it's important to meet new people in new places like college, talking to old friends helps a lot, and Skype and Facebook make this so easy.  Talking to old friends reminds you that someone misses you, too, and you'll be able to talk about things that you wouldn't be able to talk about with your new friends (such as, your new friends).


3.  Talk to your parents.

Because let's face it:  if you're close to your parents at all, talking and complaining to them makes any depressing situation better.  However, while it's not up to me to tell you how often to call your parents, I recommend not calling them every day.  Even if you miss them a bunch and you know they miss you, both you and they are going to have to get used to the fact that you're basically a grown-up now, and you can't rely on your parents for everything.  Besides, you should be too busy adventuring.

New Year: in with new resolutions, out with old baggage

When I think about it, 2011 was a pretty big year for me.  I'm not one for those year-in-review things, so I won't do that.  Instead, I'll do what I do best:  talk about myself.

Things that I did in 2011:
- Submitted my college apps
- Got rejected from MIT, my then-dream school
- Drove eight hours to visit my now-dream school (where I go now, teehee)
- Graduated from high school
- Discovered my intense love for The Beatles
- Visited family in China
- Saw Paul McCartney live, in concert
- Went to college (huge transition, when I think about it)
- Got my first boyfriend
- Got dumped by my first boyfriend
- Survived my first ever round of finals

Things that I want to do in 2012:
- Blog more, I guess...
- Love myself and love everyone around me
- Ask out that cute Canadian dude
- Play more Settlers of Catan
- Read more Beatles books
- Sleep earlier on weekdays
- Wear my retainer more often
- Become a better engineer
- Learn to better balance studying and fun

(Interestingly, I think the order that I thought of the resolutions in the previous list says a lot about my priorities...)

Things that I don't want following me into 2012:
- The aftereffects of my breakup
- My poor time-management skills
- Any notion that just because I managed to get good grades last semester, I don't need to study or work hard for this one (I'll definitely need to work even harder!)

I know most people don't come through with their resolutions.  But I mean, it's not like I'm promising anything impossible, like saying I'll exercise every day or read a book a week -- I'm just hoping that this year, I'll be able to become a better student and fix my dysfunctional love life.  ...Maybe that is too much to ask.  We'll see!