I have something for you.

A song!!!

I basically feel like this right now for reasons that I will eventually discuss when I actually feel like typing.

Mr. Incredible - Sick of Sarah

Yep. That pretty much sums it up.

Yay.

Yo- So, School starts in a week. And this is what I've been doing this week to prepare.....

I'm pretty sure I haven't even purchased a book bag yet.

.....I am soooo not ready.

Do it Again. - The Chemical Brothers

Please do note that I named this post after the Chemical Brothers song because that is the song I was listening to when I started the post. There is no other reason. Lol.

Soooo, Yesterday was a real close friend of mine's 21st birthday. We celebrated prebirth date - Friday, and on-birth date - Saturday. On Friday, we decided to go out to eat at the casino and then try on the gambling experience.

You know how when you were little your parents would go out with their friends to the casino and get all dressed up? Well, even if yours didn't, mine did, and they made a pretty huge deal out of it too. They always went with a lot of people and wore lots of unnecessary perfume and cologne, and my mom did her hair, and my dad trimmed his shadow....

Well, apparently the casino IS and IS NOT that fancy.

I mean, when we finally got in (which is cool because I got in and I'm not even 21 for another 3 weeks = SKILLS baby, guys like girls with SKILLS), it wasn't as awesome as I thought it would be. Like, there were your dressed up people, of all age groups crowded around the card tables and bars. They were yelling, and laughing, and drinking, while playing blackjack, and roulette, and (some other card game name insert here). We're going to call them, the Happy People. There were big screens playing music videos and a girl's silhouette dancing to the song by the Happy People. The Awe factor hovered around the Happy People.

Then there were the Happy Hour People. Those people were spread out and about, hording various card tables with corporate business suit-and tie attire. They were on there iphones, blackberries, palm pries, and other various PDAs talking, texting, googling, and mapquesting, while simultaneously participating at their table.

Then, there were the Poker People. They were all in a glass room sweating and looking intense while being massaged and playing poker. They came in all shapes and sizes, but were predominantly men. A few had on sunglasses or hoodies, or both, I guess to disguise themselves. (Those few were slightly creepy.) There were a few really geeky looking people who seemed to have high stacks of chips, and a few a few of the Happy People and Happy Hour People with PDAs had wondered in there and they'd rolled up their sleeves as if to get down to business.

I felt as if the most dangerous fights could've started in that room.

And then finally... there were The Gamblers. Even though there were a lot of card table games and bars, the slot machines still outnumbered the rest of the casino about 10 to 1. Each slot machine of course has only one seat, directly in front of it. Apparently, other requirements of a complete slot machine experience include the machines being from 1981 (they looked old and boring). Apparently the criteria for being a Gambler is being 60 or above/and or alone, wearing clothes that you would mow your lawn in (as to not get your regular clothes dirty), and having a strong right arm. It was sad really.

Really it was.
:/

We circled around that place at least five times, while the SAME people pulled the lever towards emptying their pockets.

I can't see myself ever being interested in the slot machines enough to lose over one dollar. (Just to say that I did it.) Maybe if there was a Wii game or something with betting, I would actually consider playing, but I think by the time they upgrade in the casino to that, we'll have the new hologram system in homes across America. Plus, it's probably ruled as unethical by the government. Gambling would be an epidemic; people actually like Wii.

Interest-minded.

Ok, so now that I'm on the road to cease and desist working, I am re-dabbling into the world of my interests. I even practiced my guitar a few days ago!!!

I know, forgot I owned one of those for a minute there.

Well, anyway, I am getting back into poetry, by slowing writing (inspiration is slim these days), and by "keeping an ear to the street." Its easy to say you're a poet, its humble to know that you're not a great one, and you're working on it.


How might one work on poetry?, one may ask....Well, by paying attention to those around you in the same field. So, here's a little video for you that I loved that I came across floating in the land of Myspace.

2-inch sky...
___________________________________

Also, because I am not only an English major, but a Film major as well, I need to re-vamp the projects I've only begun at the beginning of the summer. Let us remind ourselves of the quirky intuitive-ness of independent film-makers with a funny clip that bit at me on facebook.


Credit for ALL of these clips are due to an independent filmmaker named Ashley who can be found here (Myspace), here at Throw'd TV (Facebook), and on her website: BlameItOnAshley.com

And I've also decided against such a small font, it makes my eyes hurt.
Happy watching. :)

Oh yeah.

Welcome to August.

I've finally gathered the nerve to quit my job, and even now, I don't think I used much nerve considering the way it was executed. First off, I waited until my store manager finished transferring to her new location so I wouldn't feel bad, and then I told the stand-in manager. So, because I have no obligation to this stand -in manager Ann person, I didn't need much nerve to tell her that I quit, while giving her a month's notice. YEP, A MONTH'S NOTICE: which is pretty ridiculous-ly long, but as I am a shift manager, they may need to train someone, that was as considerate as I could've been. (All pics in this post are from Gwyn's, my old manager's, going away party...)



So that whole plan to read books all summer didn't necessarily get thrown out of the window, but it did dangle out of it while I took two summer classes to finish my associate's degree, worked, and volunteered as a committee planning member for a regional leadership conference for the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE).

So, I will have no job come the second week of September, and I'm pretty much ecstatic about it. Yep, like actually overjoyed. I've been working 40 hour weeks since I TURNED 16, literally, and I'm going to love to having less things to focus on while in school.

Also, here is a book list I copied from a friend's facebook note:
BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (only the first one...)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x+
6 The Bible (started...)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (started...)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwel (A book before its time)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (Edmond Dantes is the man)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce 76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (started...)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en francais...)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I plan to read all of these. Some I already have (marked in red). I also realize that I've read a lot of books not listed, written by the author's that appear on the list. Like, for example, Alice Sebold's Almost Gone.

September will be a beautiful month.