On the Hobbit, and my emotions transcending the intra-Kiersten age gap

*Be forewarned, this is a long and maybe slightly ramble-esque post.*

So, I see all these things on the Internet about Harry Potter and how emotional fans got over the last book and last movie coming out, and how people cried when the Sorcerer’s Stone theme capped the epilogue scene of the last film, et cetera.  The thing is, even though I love Harry Potter I don’t have all this nostalgia attached to it because I didn’t read the books until I was sixteen (or see the movies until after the sixth one came out).  Most of the time I’m okay with this, but sometimes I really am sad that it wasn’t part of my childhood.  I feel like I missed out on this grand adventure that millions of people all had together.

Hearing the newly released Hobbit suite today, it struck me that Tolkien is a little bit like my equivalent of Harry Potter.  I read The Hobbit for the first time when I was seven, and The Lord of the Rings when I was eleven, and The Silmarillion when I was fourteen.  I’ve grown up loving them so much.  They made movie of LotR and I adore them, and I’ve been listening to the soundtrack for the film trilogy for eight years, and the Hobbit soundtrack has a lot of the same elements but combined with new ones.  I thrill at the new bits, and the familiar bits mixed in are wringing my heartstrings like crazy.  (I started crying when the Shire theme came in.)

They’re really doing it—making a movie of this book I still remember reading on a long car trip and being confused by because the seven-year-old introvert in me didn’t understand why there was any reason anyone would willingly cram fourteen noisy people into one hobbit-hole.  It’s the first book I remember reading with a dragon it it (although I’m sure it wasn’t actually the first).  It’s the first book I remember reading with trolls that turned to stone in sunlight.  I remember making up my own melodies to go with all the poetry; I remember wishing I had a map with moon runes and wondering why the elves got to invent the pinnacle of invisible ink.

I didn’t get back then why Bilbo was so keen on staying home and having a warm bed and robust food and tea, but now as a college student there’s definitely a part of me that empathizes with that, while at the same time thrilling to the adventure as always.  There’s a part of me now that understand Thorin’s crazy this-is-what-I’m-entitled-to-and-I’d-better-get-it spree.  There’s so much that I appreciate more after having read and reread so many of Tolkien’s other works.

I love The Hobbit.  I adore Tolkien.  I am so grateful that the rights for the films went to an amazing crew of people who are dedicated to carrying on the spirit of his works, and making a movie of the best quality they are able.  There is no way to convey how excited I am that The Hobbit is coming out this year and the next.  I feel like I’m at a perfect time in my life to really be excited for it and appreciate it, and it’s good timing for the casting and all.  This is like my childhood coming to life in a new way.

Literally, I had essentially all these thoughts—condensed of course into one big weepy explosion of emotion—when I heard the music.  It’s beautiful.  It;s going to be a fantastic film.  I can’t wait.  But at the same time, I have so much nostalgia that I could wait a long time, just staying in thoughts of happiness and appreciation like this one, and that’s how it’s been six months since the trailer and it’s still six months until the first film and I haven’t died yet.

MY SEMESTER IS NOW OFFICIALLY OVER

And I mean "over" in the sense that it has now come to its natural conclusion, not that something so dramatically awful has happened that there's no point in continuing with it.)

NOW I CAN HAVE MY FIRST COMPLETE SUMMER BREAK EVER.

(And work on getting a job.  And a driver's license.  And a car.  And applying for things like scholarships and other schools.  But, you know.)

I AM HAPPY.  Even the fact that I had to walk a mile in the rain doesn't matter.  I had great conversations with my professor and the wonderful coffee hut lady and some dude on the bus who's a total European history buff.

[ Also, I have a brand-new tumblr and it's a lot of fun.  

I also have fantastic books out from the library that I'm rereading (because now I have TIME and spare brainpower!) and THEY ARE SO GOOD.   (The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner.)  Go.  Read.  (Seriously, you should read them.  They're some of my favorite books of all time.  The Thief is the first one.  Do not be put off by the slow pace at the beginning.) 

Hopefully, I didn't fail my math final.  Keeping my 4.0 GPA would be a really nice cake topper right now.  (Unfortunately, KVCC is going to make me wait THREE WEEKS before they post final grades.  Yrrrgh.)

Darn it, I just love my friends so much, and [*insert effusive, rambling emotional post about how amazing and smart and goofy and unique and nerdy and beautiful they are and how amazing they've been in my life and how grateful I am for them and how I don't know what I'd do without them*] I am way too happy to go to sleep right now, even though it is four minutes to one o'clock in the morning.

Not to be presumptuous…

…but I am gollydarned proud of myself right about now.

50,041 words on a single piece of fiction in 30 days.
I honestly didn't think this was going to happen.
Now I just need to do some brutal editing on the 4,598 words of something akin to total rubbish that I churned out in the last two hours to make it happen.  And some less murderous editing on the rest of it, which isn't nearly as bad but still very rambling and untenable to an unbiased reader's judgment, I'm sure.
…Also, I need to finish it.
There's probably another 10,000 words in this thing, and somebody shoot me if I am not going to finish this creature I spent a month pouring a good deal of my lifeblood into.  (Ignore the preposition on the end of that sentence, please, except insofar as you need to cognitively process it for semantic intelligibility.)
(Ignore anything else I write that doesn't make sense.  I am so jacked up on words and long sentences right now that could probably invent a subspecies of incoherent English on the spot [because, you know, we don't have enough of it already].  If I lived in Britain, I could probably also give Donna Noble a run for her money for the notable position of the fastest-typing temp in Chiswick.  At least until the caffeine from my tea wears off, at which point I would just go to bed.)

I also cannot believe that was a whole month.  November has been insanity.  Really compressed insanity.  I think there are whole days that time-traveled out of themselves and passed me by without so much as a wave of greeting.  Actually, I'm rather surprised it didn't turn out like more of a train wreck in the end.

Also, speaking of writing, I have two math papers due tomorrow that I lovingly put off writing especially for this.  So I go, back to the keyboard.  (On another bright note, only three weeks left of school!  The end is in sight!  Tally-ho! [Maybe too in sight for comfort, actually…].)
But I am happy right now.  And not as sleepy as I likely ought to be.

Finally getting around to that one particular bit in Acts 2:38…

Yes,

I'M GETTING BAPTIZED TOMORROW

and I'm

ÜBER–EXCEEDINGLY–TREMENDOUSLY–FANTASTICALLY EXCITED ABOUT IT.

It has taken me way too long to get here.

The Holy Spirit is pretty much the best thing that's ever happened to me.  And it's just going to get better from here.

I'd like to teach the world to smell like strawberries…

the one on the far left makes me think a bit of marshmallows,
which are another yummy, albeit human, invention.

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, "strawberry" is derived (through Old English) from "straw" and "berry".  (So profound, I know.)  The problem with this is as follows:  if you look up any of the eight definitions in the same dictionary for "straw",  they all have to do with something being dry or pale or worthless.  Unless the pre-1150 A.D. Anglo-Saxons only ate underripe berries, that frankly does not describe well the amazing fantabulosity that is a strawberry.  Strawberries are bliss.  (If I were thirteen, I would write a perfectly rhyming ode to the strawberry. But I'm not, and no  longer brave enough to try.)


And—mon mot—have you sniffed one recently?  or even better, a full punnet?  I am convinced that one of God's most wonderlous gifts to humanity is the smell of ripe strawberries.  (Their genus name in Latin, on the authority of Wikipedia, is Fragraia.)  I wish I could get this into a Google picture, but I doubt it would produce quite the desired effect. And they're quite sweetly aesthetic, too.  I think I'd like to grow strawberries someday (you can grow them as potted plants, and not just beds).

Oy, I haven't had strawberries in a couple of months, and a craving is coming on right about now…

Also, this is one of the best things I have ever seen:

The American Dream…version Two-Point-Kiersten.

Something to add to the Ultimate Accomplishments of Awesome Life Bucket List:

I am going to build a tower.  And it's going to be freaking amazing.

Dad and I schemed it all out.  Obsidian, with some metalwork on the outside and a fiberglass core (which Dad says will be on the cheaper side, and more stable & versatile than plain stone) with a dungeon, roof access, a spiral staircase, a dumbwaiter (in case I can't find the heart to put in an elevator, hahaha), an entire floor devoted to a library (complete with one of those sliding ladder-thingies), and a chandelier which runs continuously through every floor.  And a wrought-iron fence in some really sweet design, and a great scenic view.  And maybe a couple of spires.

WOULD THIS NOT BE AMONG THE MOST  ÜBER FANTASTIC THINGS EVER? (In every sense of the word?)

So now—to add to one of the items on my 2011 Accomplishments of Awesome list—I have to learn to draw well so I can design all of this for a good architect someday.
And finish at least one novel (referred, item #1 on the 2011 UAoAL), and maybe live off ramen for a while (this is not on the UAoAL) once I get an $80,000-salaried editing job after college, so I can make enough money to do this.  (Imagine what kind of mortgage I'd have to take out if I actually wanted to furnish the place, too. *sarcasm*)
And marry somebody whose American dream is not a white picket fence (e.g., nerdfighter).

(Note & explanation of title:  in my honors humanities class today, we discussed the American dream, and when I was telling him about it on the way home tonight, Dad posed the question of "What if…" to me—what would my "American dream" be?  And this is what came out.  Apparently we're both a tad bit on the eccentric side?)

It's a moment of time, both hurtling and frozen.

It's a moment to live.

Do you ever have that moment when you feel like the world is yours?  Maybe it's just a moment when you feel utterly yourself.  You're in your own skin and you know beyond all feasible doubt that your skin is something worth being in, whether anyone else is there to see it or not.  I'm sort of having one of those moments, for no apparent reason.  It's one of those times when I wish it was a gorgeous day, autumn and just a bit windy, in the late afternoon when there's sienna sunlight tumbling over the treetops and sporadically pooling on the ground below, so you can just hear the faint riffling of a piano in the breeze, and I'd go outside in a skirt and bare feet and stretch myself out to the sky and just breathe.  Because I am someone.  I am a living poem, and the world is a poem, and God did a *insert a profoundly but not vulgarly emphatic adverb here* good job inventing poetry.

I apologize in advance for the inarticulate tweenyness of my fangirlness in this post.

So, I just watched the most miserably, helplessly tragically sad, infuriatingly vague and mysterious Doctor Who episode ever.  I teared up and was just about crying through the whole last half.  And even though IT WAS THE ONE SINGLE EPISODE WHERE NODOBY DIED—even the imaginary people who never existed—it was definitely the saddest episode out of the forty-five or so I have seen to date.  And now I feel all wound up and pensive and am not going to bed.
I FREAKING LOVE THIS TV SHOW.

Because, today, it made me cry.  Any fictional creation that makes me cry when it's not three in the morning has done a good job.  (Geez, David Tennant almost cried; that might have almost done me in even if it hadn't been a really sad episode.)

And, I figured out something before the Doctor did.  He was trying to figure out this bit of alien logic like always, and I was like "Oh, oh, oh, it's_____!!" and then four seconds later he did that thing where his eyes get really big an he says in that quiet 'lightbulb" voice, "It's the_____..." and then freaks out.  And I was like "OHMYGOSH I WAS RIGHT I feel so TimeLordgenius right now!" (I actually said this out loud and my mother laughed at me.) That kind of totally made my entire night. 
(Well, it made it until the episode got really sad and maddeningly mysterious...but also mysterious in a potentially-conceivably-nice way.  I love having all the answers and backstories and obscure details {probably the source of my Tolkienmania}, but just this once, I know enough to let it go.  After all, I've got my own imagination, right?)

(Though, referring back to the second paragraph, the episode prior to this one involved a giant wasp who murdered people with a lead pipe.  That was decidedly lacking in awesomeness.  That was just absurd.  And really gross.  So...most of the time I love this TV show.)

I cannot sleep.  
This is the insomnia that bleeds through the whole universe, that makes my mind run at such a speed I can almost hear the little organic gears whirring and clicking—that makes me ache to live.  That creates characters made of personhood and not my own perceived need for circumstantially-bred catharsis.  That makes my quill shriveled up by three months of writer's block shiver in the zest of fresh ink.  That invents poetry at meteoric rates too quicksilver for my fingertips that run like clunky mouse feet over my keyboard.  That makes eyes glow in the darkness, makes color become texture; that makes the whole of the universe prowl around my infinitesimal compass of existence, sunrise and sunset in one, teeming with possibility.  That gives me an hour where I can take a knot of befuddled emotion and bind it with logic and rationale and observance and senses, and take logic and wrap it in emotion and moodiness and the tumbling swiftness of a hundred burning poems, and call them sentience.  I can create people made of people, even without a universe in which to put them.  I can create dragons made only of emotion; and breathe the magic made of the unfathomable, ever-roving tides of unplumbed knowledge.  
I cannot sleep, but for threescore minutes more, might I dream and live in one seamless conflagration of existence?

*cue choir* the moment of unparalleled epiphany. . .

...when you've been stuck on the same paper for FOUR HOURS
and then
you "get" it
and you draft your final three pages in twenty minutes
and instead of being too torpid to concentrate
you're too hyperadrenalized to sleep
even though
it's midnight
and now
there's no longer any homework rearing balefully in the gap
between you
and rapturous slumbery bliss.
but you're too high on the geekiness
of your beautiful introspectively researched eureka
to even think about
devoting more time
to something
so stunningly mundane.


...I just had that moment.


...thank you Jesus.