None of this makes sense or has a point. :D

Oh hey, blog. 'Sup? What's new with you? Oh, that's cool. Me? Ah, you know, schoolwork, hangin' out, wrote a book...

Yeah that's right. I WON NANOWRIMO 2010! :D! I finished on Tuesday, the last day, with 50,025 words. YEAAAHHHHHH! ^_^ This is my second time winning, out of four attempts. I'm glad I won this year 'cause 1 out of 4 is a terrible ratio of win. =/ BUT YAY I DID IT. :D I WROTE A BOOK!

Other than that, not a whole lot has been happening. Thanksgiving was good, excited for Christmas now... got like, a week left of school, so yay. :D I'm planning my garden for next year, so that'll be fun to blog about. I AM SURE YOU GUYS CAN'T WAIT.

I have a couple of things I want to make posts about, but if you guys have any suggestions I would be open to them. I feel like this blog is all over the place - personal stuff, political stuff, ridiculous stuff. XD I can't decide what I want to do with it. Ah, well. It's completely random and insane, just like me! :D

One thing that has been on my mind lately - those Facebook things where people post stuff in their statuses or change their profile pictures to "raise awareness" or whatever for different causes? What is up with that? How does putting your bra color in your status, without explaining what it means, do anything to raise awareness of breast cancer? Furthermore, who in this day and age is NOT aware of breast cancer? What does raising awareness DO? I mean, I could understand if it was like, a new thing or something people don't usually think about, or something happening in a different country, maybe... but I still don't see why people think changing their profile picture is going to make a difference.

Currently there's a trend going around where everyone is changing their photo to a picture of their favorite childhood cartoon character. It's supposed to raise awareness of child abuse, somehow. I don't really understand how, exactly. But it's happening. =/ Child abuse is a problem that there really isn't a good solution to. I mean, we as a country or a planet cannot police child abuse because it goes on in the home, and often there's no way of knowing for sure. The only thing we can do is what we have been doing - if you know someone is abusing a child, report it. Then get the child away from that person. And that's really all we can do to fix the problem. But we all know it happens, and it's really sad and everything, but what is Facebook going to do about it? How does this help?

I don't know. I just get kind of annoyed sometimes at the silly things people do. =/ But whatever - if you want to participate, that is fine. Good for you. If you really think it does some good, that's good, too. I hope it does. This is just my cynical grouchy old lady opinion. :D

Also: I really love the character Giles on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but I really hate the actor, Anthony Stewart Head. I think he's gross and dumb and irritating, but Giles is sexy and awesome and adorable. Does anyone else feel this way? O_o

Procrastination Station, indeed.

This is me not working on my NaNo novel! :D YAY.

You guys, I am so far behind, it's not even funny anymore. O_o I don't know if I can make it, but failure is NOT AN OPTION THIS YEAR. I HAVE to do it. I don't even know how I got so far behind!

The first week of November, I had a lot of stuff that I had to do for school. It was pretty hectic. But the very first day, I wrote nearly 2,000 words. I was like "I totally gots this, whatevs" and then I did my schoolwork and didn't touch the document until a week later. =/

That week, I added another 3,000ish words, a few hundred here and there, a thousand that night, and so on. It was progress, slowly and somewhat steadily. But I was still very behind. -_-

And then this past week! Miracles! I finally broke 10,000, even 11,000, and all it took was actually sitting down and writing! Who knew? I hit 11,100 and thought "Well, this was a good night! I'll take a break!" And then I didn't touch it again for four days.

Now I am up to 13,783, when I SHOULD be at 35,000. It is a huge, staggering gap, and I am determined to close it in the next couple of days. I have school tomorrow, but then I have a week off - yes, the holiday and family and working Black Friday, but STILL. SIX WHOLE DAYS in which I can close this gap. AND I SHALL. I am determined.

I can take some solace in knowing a few of my friends have given up, and a few of the people who ALWAYS win are behind, as well. I look to Kristina Horner (of the Parselmouths and ALL CAPS), four time winner, who is currently behind schedule at around 27,000, as my biggest inspiration - she's behind, but she never loses. And there's not so many words between us. I could easily catch up to her in a couple of days. And from there, I could easily catch up to NaNo's suggested word count. And from THERE, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to finishing!

When I look at it like that, it seems easy. But then I think "I'm writing all these words in a blog post when I should be writing my novel!" and I get all discouraged again. XD

Share your NaNo stories! Inspire me! Tell me how awesome I am for trying! Give me comments to read when I should be writing! :D

PS - also, would you guys be interested in a post about my Harry Potter experience? 'Cause I'll probably do it anyway, so just figured I'd ask. XD Do I even still have any readers?

NANOWRIMOOOOO.

So I haven't posted in a bit. =/ Sorry. November is a busy month - midterms and papers and whatnot, plus we are right in the middle of NaNoWriMo, so I'm a bit stressed.

This is the fourth year I've done NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, which is a month-long sprint to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It's pretty awesome. :D I've only won once, but this year I intend to finish, even though right now I'm horribly behind. =/ If you're interested, their website is http://www.nanowrimo.org, and you can follow my progress or friend me at http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/221272.

That's basically all I wanted to say. Life is going pretty well, but I've been busy, so I haven't had a lot of time for things. Hopefully when the semester is over and I've written my novel (IT'S GONNA HAPPEN I SWEAR) I'll be back with some interesting things to talk about. :D And who knows, maybe for Christmas I'll get a camcorder so I can fully pursue my dream of being internet famous! :D HOW EXCITING.

So I'll probably be back in a couple of weeks. :D Be good while I'm gone.

Pointless post is pointless. :D

I think I've decided I'm not going to blog every day in October. I was considering it, but it's very difficult sometimes to come up with stuff to talk about. And I don't want this blog to be just random nonsense, I want to plan out some really cool posts. Also, in November, I'll be doing NaNoWriMo, and I don't think I'll have time to keep up the blogging every day thing. So I'll take a break in October and get a routine going for blogging. :D

I know you guys care so much about that. ^_^

Speaking of NaNoWriMo, I AM EXCITED THIS YEAR. I sucked last year, so I'm really excited to win again. Somehow I can't make myself do it any other month than November. =/ But I've got an idea for a plot already! I'm stoked. :D Are any of you guys doing NaNoWriMo? You should.
http://www.nanowrimo.org

So that's what I've been thinking about today, figuring out a schedule for my life. I need to have time for homework, blogging, writing, and the internet, as well as school, a job, and sleep. Then there's family times, hanging out times, helping around the house, and hobby type stuffs. Lately I'm having a terrible time managing my time, hard as I try, so I really need to just sit down and schedule it out. I like making schedules and stuff. ^_^ So yay.

ANYWAY, that concludes today's episode of Erin Babbles About Nothing In Particular. Whooo! Hopefully I will have something more important to babble about tomorrow. By the way, fall TV premiere week starts tomorrow! I am excited! :D

I'm from the future.

Another suggestion from my blog muse was to write a letter to the Erin of the Future. :D So here's my letter to me in ten years.

Dear 32-year-old Erin,

Hello! It's 22-year-old Erin, remember me? I'm just writing to see how you're doing, how life's going and all. I hope it's going pretty well. For Pete's sake, I hope you're done with college. If you're still in school, punch yourself in the face RIGHT NOW. I'm gonna know if you did it or not. =/

Am I married yet? I guess I hope I am - I mean, it doesn't matter if you're still single, I'm sure life is still awesome. But it'd be nice to be married by now. What's our hypothetical husband like? I hope he's handsome and funny, smart but not too much smarter than me, sweet and caring, with interests similar to mine. I'm not even going to ask if he likes Harry Potter, because if you married him, I'm sure he does. Did we have a Harry Potter themed wedding?! Oh, I hope so. If you didn't have a HP-themed wedding, punch yourself in the face again. SERIOUSLY. That's just messed up. (I'm pretty sure we had a Harry Potter themed wedding, or at LEAST some references here and there. Like the bride and groom figurines were in Gryffindor colors or something. Or maybe we served butterbeer. I'm sure we figured something out.)

Are you a famous author yet? Were you famous before your 10-year high school reunion rolled around? If you weren't, I guess it's okay. I was just looking forward to rubbing it in the faces of everyone who was mean to me. XD But hey, as long as we're a famous best-selling author now, I'm cool. And with pronouns like these, how could we/you/I not be?!

I hope we've had a lot of adventures and fun in our lifetime. When the time comes to write a memoir, I hope future-future-me has a LOT to write about. And I hope our life has been full of joy and happiness, love and friendship. I sincerely hope my parents are still around, and my sisters are close and doing well in their future lives. Let me know how things are going with you, 32-year-old self! I look forward to finding out all about you. :D

Love,
22-year-old Erin

I dream about sharks an awful lot.

I'm wearing fake glasses as I write this. You know, those glasses with clear plastic lenses that they sell in like, Claire's? I totally have a pair, and they have rhinestones on the corners, and they're awesome, and I'm wearing them.

Anyway. My blog muse suggested I write about dreams I've had, which is a terrific topic because I have the MOST CRACKED OUT DREAMS EVER. Seriously. My subconscious is a crazy person.

When I was little, I used to have a lot of recurring dreams. There were three or four dreams I'd have over and over - not for several nights in a row, but for years, with months in between them. It was weird. And they didn't seem to mean anything, either. There was one dream I always had where I was a little fish, just swimming around being a fish, and then suddenly I looked down ('cause fish can do that) and there were like, fifteen sharks in a circle directly beneath me. I'd race for the surface and they'd chase me and just as I was either about to break free or be eaten, I'd wake up. That sounds like it'd mean something, like being trapped in a situation or being afraid of something, I don't know. But I was little, like eight or so. There wasn't much going on in my life.

Another recurring dream from my childhood, which actually became something of an inside joke for me and my sisters: I'm hanging out in my backyard with my little sister, and we're running around playing or whatever. We get to the back corner of our yard, which is fenced in, and we look back towards the house - and somehow, the entire yard is made of ice. Like, not ice over the grass, it's MADE of ice. There's water underneath us, and we're standing on maybe a foot of solid ice. I'm trying to get my sister to go back to the house, when all of a sudden there's a whipcrack in the air and we look to the other side of the yard, which seems to go on and on at this point, and there's a freaking ESKIMO on a DOGSLED rushing towards us. He looks scary, so I start freaking out. Then my sister points out that underneath the ice, in the water, there are sharks. Apparently I was secretly scared of sharks, I don't know. But as soon as we see the sharks, the ice starts to crack. The Eskimo is getting closer, the sharks are right under us, and the ice cracks. Just before we were about to either fall or get caught, I'd wake up.

Pretty sure I had some other recurring nightmares as a child, but I've also had some amazing one-time dreams. XD They're usually funny and weird. This one time I dreamt about pirates, and I was hanging out with this ridiculously gay pirate, just eating mashed potatoes on his pirate ship. It was weird. I don't even like mashed potatoes that much. O_o

I also had a dream about ice skating with Neil Patrick Harris, then stumbling upon a human sacrifice, escaping it, and returning home to find that a bunch of wizard rock people had mailed me cookies and cupcakes.

I've had nightmares about Doctor Who (the Weeping Angels, need I say more?), Harry Potter (literally, one time I had the dream that's just flashes of green light, a woman screaming, and high cold laughter), and Buffy (the Gentlemen freaked me the eff out). I have dreams about famous people and people I know.

My dreams usually happen like movies - they're vivid, there's music and sound effects and crazy visual effects, and there's usually some sort of either completely insane or intensely epic plot. Like traveling from planet to planet via magic doors, being chased by terrifying Police who look like monks and want to kill you. Or delivering some magic musical instrument to someone in a school run by people I know irl, running up and down staircases that only go in one direction, mourning the loss of a girl I dislike in a Spanish class taught by one of my friends, all the while trying to get this made-up musical instrument to the right person so they can save us all.

My dreams are often the inspiration for stories, sometimes poems, and most recently a book. The ones with good plots, at least. Some of them are just insanity. XD So I kind of like having such an intense imagination, because as long as I dream, I'll have plots for books and stories. And being a writer is what I want, so I guess as long as I dream, I have a shot at my dreams?


... No. Let's just pretend I never said that. :D