And one night, HE COMES. The most horrible man in the world...Santa Claus.

My Christmas break was short and sweet. It sort of saddens me that I was only home for four days for Christmas, but I need the money. I also left on a happy note, not my usual "Okay, I'm ready to get as far away from these people as I reasonably can." I love my family, and they love me; but too much time together and there will be an explosion of emotion.


My only problem with not being home for very long was my lack of time with my friends. I miss them, and I realized that now whenever we see each other it's always to catch-up never to really spend time together. Somehow to me, those two things are different. And I miss just spending time with my friends.

The best part of my Christmas vacation was having Adam come home with me. I've never had a boyfriend spend Christmas morning with me, let alone not be afraid of me and my family after having to listen to arguments over cookies and gluten-free ham. We saw Adam's family on Christmas Day too, on my way back to school for work. Even if his mother hates me (like I suspect) his family was still nice to be with, and his little brother likes me and liked my Christmas present to him.

Overall, I loved Christmas this year. It came and went too quick, but I have a feeling that just means I'm actually an adult now. On to 2012!

Music Appreciation Post- The National

I would just like to take a moment to talk about the genius that is the band, The National.
Their music is beautiful, lyrics poetic, and Matt Berninger's vocals are full of passion and honesty. His voice, their lyrics, and the music are honest in that they bear all emotion upfront but not with fanfare, completely simple.
Most of the time, all my "sad day" music (as I like to call it) goes out the window when I'm in a relationship, but despite my happiness their music still calls to me. I can't turn it off, and I can't help but play it.



"You know you have a permanent piece, of my medium-sized American heart."

Certainly, uncertain.

A lot of people I know who are Creative Writing Majors, including my TA's, and professors always talk about how much they write. They wrote this the other night, and that this morning. Hearing them talk about how often they work always worries me as a writer. It worries me because I don't work like that. I don't just write all the time. I'm not working on anything really. Maybe my stories for class, and sometimes I journal (and I try to write in this blog). But I don't sit around just writing.

I wish I did because hearing them talk about it and realizing I don't do what they do makes me feel like maybe I'm not meant to be a writer. I always sort of knew that, even in declaring my major. I don't expect to behind a laptop in a coffee shop all day long making money. I still don't know what I'm going to do when I graduate. I want to be around literature, and around writers. I know that much.

Sometimes, I say that I have to wait for "inspiration" in order to start working on something. I guess that is true in some ways. Once I got inspiration for a short story in my fiction workshop this past quarter, and I think that story is the best thing I've written to date. I want that to happen again, and I also want to continue editing that story. But am I editing that story? No. I'm watching television, and organizing my apartment. Does that make me a writer? Probably not.

It's too late to change my major, and I don't want to. Maybe I'm not meant to be a writer. Maybe I'm just different than the other writers I know. Maybe watching television, organizing my closet, and scrolling through tumblr is my way of writing. Maybe, I still really don't know.

The Adventures of Huck Finn

As you read and learn you begin to make connections with everyday life and the stories that you take in. Even in lectures and class, making connections with lessons with daily activities is bound to happen. But maybe, in creative writing classes this happens more.

Today, in my survey course on fiction writing my professor went on a rant about how high school English classes over analyze stories for symbols. He claimed that no writer he knows sets out to write a symbol into their novel, and that as a writer this is something we should never do. His rant sent me back to a high school, and a story that my friend told me about her English teacher.

While reading The Adventures of Huck Finn, her teacher said, "They were on a wooden raft. You know what else is made of wood?" After no response, he said, "The cross!" It took everything in my friend not to reply, "The raft was made of wood because rafts are made of wood, not because of Jesus."

Ignoring the religious aspects of this argument, you can see my professor's claim on symbolism coming into light. This rant was something tangible and attainable to me because I experienced this exact over analyzing in my own high school. This memory only seemed more relevant to me when later in the class my professor began to explain how in structuring a novel or short story there can be a disconnect of what the main character knows, versus what the reader knows and he used Huck Finn as his example.