The Ramifications of Chick Lit

Okay, so I'm currently ~15 pages from finishing one of the two chick lit books I checked out when I went to the library again today (but forgot to bring one of the books back that I'd checked out before - oops!), and even though I was going to go to bed before midnight in an effort to shift myself back to a normal sleep schedule...I got sucked in and I couldn't stop reading! I have to finish it tonight.

So why am I writing this?

It's because I'm reading The Cinderella Pact by Sarah Strohmeyer, which is partly about three woman vowing to lose weight and keep it off (therefore becoming sexier and happier and healthier and yadda yadda) in six months. And it's got me all enthusiastic to try the same thing, even though I'm not obese.

Or, like, I'm not obese but sometimes I FEEL obese. And not just the "ohmigod I just looked in the mirror and I'm SO UGLY why would anybody associate with me" kind of "I feel obese" because I'm pretty sure everybody feels like that. Or, at least, everybody who is female. You know. Mirror phobia and all that. (Or camera phobia for those of us who aren't ridiculously photogenic without trying...or at all...)

It's more like...I just feel heavy. And flabby. Like it's restricting my movement, weighing me down, giving me an unflattering figure, and making me breath harder just to do something normal. It's not like I don't work out - I started going to the gym again, so hopefully that'll help - but it's like...I dunno. I don't like it, though, cuz I don't FEEL good. Screw looks - this is something else.

So I'll cut to the chase: I have a "curvy tummy" as they say in Seventeen magazine, and it's getting in my way. I don't want this tummy! I want - er, well, I would LIKE abs of steel, but I don't think "abs of steel" and "Anne Ciccarelli" will ever go together - but I want something that doesn't feel like its weighing me down and splashing out everywhere. Especially now with all the fashions - they're so flowy around the middle and cinched at the waist. A curvy tummy does not work with these! So it's like I can never go to a store and buy something. I'm a bad shopper, but like, I got a gift card for Anthropologie and I really wanted to get something...

But nothing looked good! And while it wasn't ALL because of my curvy tummy - some of them just didn't work with my wide shoulders or were just kind of weirdly shaped to begin with - it doesn't help!

Then I went to Gap and saw a dress I LOVED. It's like my number one sin - dress lust. Seriously. I LOVE LOVE LOVE dresses, but I can never wear them without feeling like everyone's judging me or that they only show off the worst parts of me.

BUT I LOVED THIS DRESS. They had it in two colors, and I think I liked the two-tone brown one better, but the navy-and-black one was cute, too. I mean, if I could just find some cute brown flats, I could totally wear that brown dress! (Or I could just use black flats I own from band and wear the blue-black one...)

Except it was the absolute WORST kind of dress for my curvy tummy. I couldn't even try the stupid thing ON, even in the seclusion of the dressing room. I could just stare at it and luuuuuuust. It's like prom season all over again. I stare at dresses, but I never get to wear them. The last time I bought a dress that I actually WORE was for homecoming in FRIGGIN NINTH GRADE.

So I've decided!

Enough of not wearing dresses! Or, at least, not having a good tummy for dresses!

I want that brown dress! (Or the blue-black one, since I already have shoes for it.)

So...I don't know how...but I'm going to kill the curvy tummy. Or at least get it under control. I'm going to start each day by doing crunches until it kills me (er...maybe I'll just start off with 20 and work my way up...) And I'll do push-ups, too, although that won't help the tummy. But it can't hurt, right? And I'll keep going to the gym. Maybe I'll run in the morning OUTSIDE (I've never had enough confidence to do this since I can't run for more than fifteen minutes on a treadmill).

I dunno.

But I want that dress. Even if it has a 99.9999% of being horribly out-of-fashion in like, two weeks...I don't care. I at least want to be able to walk into freaking GAP and try on a dress I think looks cute.

Because I want to be able to wear a dress. :) Screw prom and Cinderella fantasies, a casual one will work just fine.

(Okay, now I'm going to go finish that book and GO TO SLEEP because it is waaaay past my bedtime. And crap, I should have written this in my journal...I wonder how long it'll be before I cave and just print out blogs and things? Haha. I'm just a fast typer! Can't deny that. :) Anyway...even though nobody reads this but me...bye bye! Sleep tight. I'll dream of myself in a beautiful dress I'll never wear tonight.)

About that novel...

So I decided to be more nostalgic this summer and write an "juvenile" story. Two of them, actually. ;) Of course I won't be posting about them, because they're embarrassing that way. Even though I'm an adult, I guess it's just hard to shake off the kinds of stories I liked to write as a child. After this, I promise I'll write more mature things.

But for now, I'm just gonna have fun and pretend I'm still a kid. I mean, hey, a novel's a novel, bottom line.

It'll be our little secret. ;)

Insomnia and Summer Novels

Alright, so I still can't fall asleep, so I worked on my novel for this summer...goal number 1. :)

And guess what? It's CHICK LIT! :D Best type of book everrr, even though romance hasn't really started blooming yet. (That's because...I dunno...I don't want to give it away? Actually, it's because I had trouble wrapping up Chapter 3. That's why.)

Yeah, so I'm taking a break from The Eleventh (even though I need to finish the second book) because The Eleventh got so wrapped up in my senior year...I need a break from it, too. I'll finish the draft of the second by the end of the year, and maybe get started on the third if I can (NaNo '09?)...but for now...noooooo. I'm writing harmless chick lit. :P I'm almost 10,000 words in, and although I don't have any outline written (which has me kind of freaking out) I have a good idea of where it's gonna go.

With the exception, of course, of the next few scenes. I think it's going to end up being kind of like Highness in the sense that the first draft is gonna SUCK due to its flailing-about nature, but hopefully it'll be salvageable. Maybe even enjoyable? I'm trying to get a spunky-type female narrator-thing going, since that's what contemporary chick lit is all about. Hopefully I'm succeeding.

Oh, and it's based off of my own experiences (haha, no). It's about a girl named Wendy Phillips who has an overactive imagination that ends up sucking her into movie plots as she watches them, in particular one movie: an action-adventure fantasy type called Glass Flower that stars her best friend's celeb crush. But the guy Wendy ends up falling for isn't the actor her friend adores, but the character himself - the standard charming action hero with the weird name, Cain Leafheart. But Wendy ends up learning that falling in love with someone who's just in her head has more problems than solutions, especially when she begins to lose the overactive imagination that gave her Prince Charming in the first place.

I either want to call it "Overactive Imagination" or "In Your Head"...or something else. I'm having trouble coming up with a title I like. :/ Oh well. I'll call it Overactive Imagination for tagging purposes...even though it's currently In Your Head in the document version. Heheh...working title, much?

But yeah...maybe I'll post the Prologue through Chapter Three here! :) Just for fun. Like a preview! Haha, yeah, I'll do that. (But I'm going to be lazy and not transfer over the italics...because I'm lazy. Hehe, sorry.) Here is the unedited first draft prologue...:

Prologue

I have always had an overactive imagination. It was just something that was a part of me - I personally always blamed it on being an only child with two parents working full-time. Plus, there being three of us, I was sometimes the odd one out. (Yeah, three-way conversations? They don't work.)

So, when my parents were out and I was stuck at home with a babysitter or at that after school program they signed me up for every year, I usually just had to dream up my own adventures to have. It wasn't to say that I didn't have friends, because I totally did. I was actually a really social kid, not "Miss Popular", but high enough up the social ladder to never be in a situation without someone I could be friendly with.

It was just that a lot of times, I was stuck in a situation where either I was by myself, or everyone else around me wasn't being as friendly as they could have been. (This happened a lot if my parents had to drag me to a company dinner or a dinner party with their friends, and I was surrounded by boring adults who would ask me my name, age, and what I wanted to be when I grew up before ignoring me completely.) So I had to make do with what I had, and what I had was my imagination.

It started out innocently enough. First, I had basic imaginary friends. I never had a consistent imaginary friend, I just used whatever was around me. Sometimes it was a stuffed animal, sometimes it was an action figure, and sometimes it was a cloud up in the sky. Then, once I got older and could imagine things in my head, I would think up vague shapes of people to talk to. Eventually, they became clearer and ended up developing personalities, and I sifted through my very large collection until I found a few characters that seemed interesting enough to keep imagining up everyday.

Then I started getting into reading books, seeing movies, and every now and then playing a video game. That, as it turned out, was a mistake just waiting to happen.

As it turned out, my imagination on its own was completely harmless. No matter how real anything was when I imagined it up, it wasn't...you know. Real. It was just a tiny little figment of my imagination that I could throw away at a moment's notice.

But, apparently, my imagination worked synergistically with other people's imaginations. If a book was imaginative enough, suddenly I found myself staring at a vague shape that resembled the main character or villain, and they would only go away once I closed the book. It was the same with games - characters would begin to interact with me outside the screen, only leaving me alone if I turned the console off.

Movies were the worst - as soon as I started watching a movie, it was like I was in the movie. Sometimes my interpretation of the movie plot would end up drastically different than whoever I watched it with because I ended up basically seeing a different movie. (Apparently, adding just one character - namely me - could potentially change a movie from a sad ending to a happy one, as demonstrated when I single-handedly saved both Romeo and Juliet when I saw the 1968 film.) Heck, sometimes I ended up seeing a different movie if I watched the movie a second time.

But it only happened to me, and nothing that happened in the movie was permanent. I think I got killed once when I watched the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and I was fine when the movie ended. That was always what happened - the movie would end, I would wake up from my movie trance, and everything would be normal again. It just made it unbelievably awkward to watch movies with people, since if they turned to talk to me during the movie, I wouldn't respond. In fact, I'd usually just stare up at the screen, my mouth open a little bit, looking a bit like I was about to have a seizure (that was how one of my friends, Nellie, described it).

I mean, it wasn't really much of a problem. I just avoided watching movies, if I could. In class, if we were going to watch a movie, I'd usually find some way to convince my teachers I had to go to the bathroom, health office, library, computer lab, lockers, or, once, across the street for coffee. And some movies weren't even worth trying to get out of, so I'd just watch them anyway. (If it got bad, sometimes I could close my eyes and avoid getting sucked into it.) I also learned that if I avoided big screens and dark viewing rooms, I could "snap out of it" much easier - so movie theaters became off-limits to me. I didn't care, though, since I had enough luck to land a group of friends that put shopping and trips to the beach before movies.

Really, though, it wasn't anything I ever had to tell anyone. It was just an overactive imagination that didn't go away when I hit puberty, like all my friends. So I kept it all through high school, and as I entered my senior year, I had just sort of gotten used to it.

Unfortunately, that was the year my overactive imagination got the better of me.

Which really sucked, because I had to focus on college apps and not failing my calculus class.

But whatever - it was nothing I, Wendy Yui Nakamura-Phillips, couldn't handle.

(Except the calculus thing. Oh my god, derivatives. HOW DO YOU DO THEM?)

The nice guy...

Okay, so you know how in romance novels/movies, there is usually a love triangle? And in this triangle, there is the "safe guy" and the "dangerous guy"? And how a lot of times, the dangerous one wins because the heroine just doesn't feel excited enough when she's with the safe one EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE PERFECT FOR EACH OTHER?

Like...Twilight. Now, I'm going purely off the first book/movie (since that's the only one I've seen/read), but Edward is definitely Mr. Dangerous and Jacob is Mr. Safe. GUESS WHO WINS? GUESS WHO IS PERFECT FOR BELLA BUT LOSES ANYWAY?

(I think I am one of those people referred to as "Team Jacob"...but seriously! Who wouldn't want to hang out with a bunch of werewolves? Werewolves are super cool! Especially when the other choice is a family of dead people who watch you sleep.)

So...I finished one of the books I checked out of the library (part of the eleven chick lit books I am reading for my summer goals), and guess what? Mr. Safe won! I was so worried Lindsey would end up ditching Michael for Dustin, but SHE DIDN'T! That made me so happy in only a way that chick lit can. Aaaaaah...this is why I love summer.

(What was the point of this blog post again?)

(Also: why am I tagging this as a rant? This is a pathetic excuse for a rant. But whatever, it's my blog, I can do what I want. I feel like I've said this already...)

Summer goals?

So before, when I made my summer goals, I said that I was going to read more chick lit. Yesterday I went to the library to check out some chick lit, and ended up getting four books ("the Asian one", "the Southern cooking one", "the amnesia one", and "the one written by one of the cowriters of the movie Legally Blonde"). I'm now about 2/3 of the way done with one of them ("the Asian one"), so hopefully that one will go up on the master list of chick lit I've read soon. (Hopefully then followed by the other three in a timely manner, since I have to turn all of them back in on July 15).

I think that was the first time I'd used my library card in at least a year - maybe more...I was sort of afraid it wasn't going to work (the library card, I mean). I'm so bad, I never go to the library.

Actually, that's not true. I went to the library a bunch of times over the past year, but that was as a meeting place to work on projects with people. I don't think I ever checked out any books. I want to say the last time I checked out books was sometime during junior year when I was working on that project about Robert Fulton and Eli Whitney with Melanie. (I think that was when I had to replace my library card so I could check out those books and do research at home.)

Luckily, the card worked, and I was able to use those self-checkout things so I didn't have to interact with anyone. Plus, those machines are kind of fun. :P Yup...

I really should use the library more often...hahaha. Libraries are cool. You don't have to pay money but you get to read all the books you want. And those books don't end up cluttering up your room and taking up space. (In case you couldn't tell, I'm trying to go through my stuff in my room and get rid of a lot of it before I go off to college.)

So yeah...what was the point of this blog post again?

Summer 2009: Chick Lit

So I said I would read at least 11 chick lit books this summer. Here is a list of the 11 books I have read so far, and the day I finished them (roughly...some of them are guesswork):

1. Airhead by Meg Cabot - 6/13

2. Being Nikki by Meg Cabot - 6/14

3. Buddha Baby by Kim Wong Keltner - 6/19

4. Deep Dish by Mary Kay Andrews - (estimated) 6/23

5. The Bachelorette Party by Karen McCullah Lutz - 7/5

6. Remember Me? by Sophie Kinsella - 7/6

7. The Cinderella Pact by Sarah Strohmeyer - 7/9

Still need to read: 4

In lieu of BFS...

Here are 11 personal goals for this summer. Because you know how I feel about the number 11. ;)

(These goals, except for #3 and #4, are made up on the spot, by the way.)

1. Write a novel - because hey, why not?
2. Go to the city on the train with my friends - because I still haven't done this.
3. Get my driver's license - because I need to.
4. Watch a sunrise - because I still want to...
5. Take a picture under Hoover Tower - because I forgot to.
6. Read at least 11 brainless chick lit books - because that was how many books/plays I read in entirety in AP English this year, and, of course, it is conveniently my new favorite number.
7. See Janice - because I do it every summer, and I know it's a goal I'll make.
8. Clean my room - because I told my mother I would...
9. Practice flute at least sometimes - because I won't be quitting in college, apparently...
10. Make sure to coordinate me-Cally-Brandy-Anna stuff so it actually HAPPENS - because I don't want to not see them all at once this summer.
11. To get some sort of thing made to represent/remember "home" with - because I'll be leaving it.

Yep...