IT'S OVER!!! IT'S FINALLY OVER!!! BAH-FREAKING-HUMBUG!!!

Oh rapturous day, caloo, calay, my least favorite time of the year is over and done with for eleven more months. Yes, that's right, I am not a fan of hte Christmas season, mostly because of the fact that i work for the post office and work during december is HORRIBLE!!! You work 90 hours a week, get worked down to the bone, and what do you get for your trouble? A bunch of jerks yelling at you because their package that they ordered on the 23rd at 11:45 PM didn't arrive before christmas.

Therefore, I'd like to take this time, to give you the eleven things I hate most about the Christmas season. Why eleven, you ask? Because that's how I roll.

11.) Decorating. I absolutely despise decorating. I have hated it since I was a child, and was forced to do it anyway until I moved out. Now that I have, I don't even get a christmas tree. Why? Because I don't care. I hate decorating. It's a waste of time, effort and money. There are so many more important things I could be doing with that time, and with the money that the decorations cost. The fact that I do not decorate my home for any holiday, much less Christmas, does not mean that I am an angry, hateful douchebag that has no fun with holidays, but saying that I do because I don't like to decorate does tend to make me angry. Making assumptions like that about people based on something so incredibly ridiculous makes YOU look like a complete ass.

10.) Christmas music. Yes, that's right, I don't like christmas music. Why? because there are, what, 7-8 different songs that are played non-stop for an entire month by 700 different artists? Repetition can ruin every good thing, and it certainly has ruined christmas music. Worse are so-called famous artists who come up with their own, most often horrible, christmas songs, Paul McCartney and the Beach Boys come to mind, or sing existing christmas songs badly, hello Madonna, weren't satified with ruining American Pie, were we?

9.) Traffic. I don't know what it is about December, but all of a sudden there are four times as many cars on the roads, and everyone is driving like a complete retard, or a complete douchebag.

8.) Social Obligations. Now, it would be silly to believe that forgetting to get a gift for someone that gave one to you would cause the ground to crack open beneath you and hell to swallow you up. Quite silly indeed. But try doing it sometime though, the person you snubbed will certainly make you wish that it had. I should not have to spend my hard earned money on gifts for people I don't like, don't know too terribly well, or don't particularly care about, simply because they're an overachiever and got a gift for everyone on earth they've ever met. Yes, I do sound like an grumpy, anti-social douchebag... your point?

7.) Last minute shoppers. Christmas is on the same day every year people. It's not like it's suddenly going to jump out of the bushes and eat your children. You know when it's going to be, and you have an entire freaking year to buy gifts for people. Why, in the name of God, are you leaving it until 4 minutes 'til midnight on the 24th? There is not a word in English for how incredibly, mind-blowingly, completely, freaking dumb you are. Do yourself a favor and Darwinize yourself so that this stupidity is culled from the human race.

6.) Salvation Army bell-ringers. Yes, I realize that there are a lot of people out there that are less fortunate than I am. And I know that they really depend on those guys standing outside of stores, dressed in various states of Santa-ness, and ringing their bells to provide them with warm clothes for the winter, food for a Christmas dinner, and presents to give to their children to make a bleak life a little brighter. But could you maybe choose a slightly less irritating sound to annouce it with? Plus, the way they staaaaaaaare at you as you walk by makes you feel guilty as hell, even when you either have no cash on you, or have none to spare. I make my donations at church, I don't need someone giving me the evil eye for walking past them without donating again.

5.) General disposition of the public. For some reason, despite the fact that every commercial on TV tells you that this is a time of giving, hope, understanding, and joy, everyone on the freaking earth is grinding their teeth, in the worst mood imaginable, and openly hostile toward anyone that gets in their way in December, especially if you go within a mile of any Wal-mart location.

4.) Spoiled Children. The fact that there are children out there that are complete spoiled brats about christmas annoys me. News flash, people, if your child is like that, you have failed at teaching them the point of Christmas. In fact, you've probably missed the entire point of it yourself. There is nothing more annoying than seeing a child throwing a tantrum because he didn't get whatever toy he wanted for christmas. You know what Jesus got for Christmas when he was 2? A funfilled vacation to freaking Egypt because King Herrod tried to murder him by killing every baby boy in the district!!! So shut your annoying faces you spoiled little douchewaffles and be glad that you got anything at all.

3.) Commercialization. The true meaning of Christmas, be you Christian or otherwise, is more about putting others before yourself. However, present day society says that it's all about spending more money than you have, to give away things that people don't really need, or even want. I am a huge hater of comercialized holidays, Valentines Day and Halloween being foremost in my sights, but Christmas is a close third. The way the retail industry just swarms out of the cracks to grab you by the throat and wring your neck until you agree to buy x new gadget for someone just completely misses the point of what the season is all about. The meaning of any holiday is not to spend money on people or else they don't think you love them. If you need a holiday and a pocket full of cash or a credit card for someone to know that you love them you have a serious problem. And if you get angry because someone in your life didn't spend money on you, you've got an even bigger problem.

2.) Family Gatherings. I am not a social person. Surprise, surprise. I also have a VERY huge family, with nearly 100 members within an hour's drive of me. Big get-togethers are loud, crowded, and generally unpleasant for me. I do not like being around a lot of people, especially when there are shrieking children with no supervision whatsoever, and a lot of other noise. I like calm and quiet, and there is no universe in which a Brunson family gathering (my mom's side of the family) could ever be considered either of those. For me, Christmas is a time for quiet reflection, and these gatherings are the complete opposite of that. Plus there's the whole guilt factor if I don't go. "You know your grandparents may not see another Christmas, so you better be there now to share it with them or you'll be sorry you didn't" etc.

1.) Non-christians. Okay, I am very well aware of the fact that the christmas season means different things to different people. Despite it's pagan origins, it is a time to celebrate the savior of humanity for Christians like myself. There are others who celebrate it as a time to spend with their family, to do things for others, to help the less fortunate, and so on. In short, Christmas is a holiday for everyone, not just Christians. That being said, those of you out there that do no subscribe to any Christian beliefs, also need to realize that there are people who do. People for whom the holiday does have that extra little meaning in it. So stop being complete douchebags about it and doing your best to belittle, remove any Christian meaning from, or destroy the beliefs of those who do happen to celebrate the holiday as a religious one. All you're doing is making an ass out of yourself, and completely ruining a time of year that should be filled with joy and caring for someone else. Whatever belief system you choose to put your faith in, if you're celebrating Christmas, doing these things is contrary to what the holiday stands for.

That being said, I hope you all had a very merry christmas.

Book Review: The Shadow Rising

I've posted a review on The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan if you feel the great urge to read it.

Enjoy =)

"They"

/Grammar Nazi On

Because of the political correctness of today's society, people seem to think that it is improper or, in some way, offensive to use the proper gender specific pronoun to refer to people, instead using the gender neutral "they". This is wrong, and it should stop. "They" is a pronoun that refers to more than one noun. If you are talking about a group of people, you call them "they". If you are talking about a single person place or thing, you use "He" "She" or "It". When the gender of a person, place or thing is not known, it is proper English to use the pronoun "he". For example, if you are speaking of the writer of a newspaper artical, and have no idea if the writer is male or female, you do not call the writer "they". You call him "he" whether he is a he or not, until you know for sure one way or another. It is NEVER proper English to use the pronoun "They" when speaking of a single person place or thing. Why would you not call a "woman" she or a man "he"? It's what they are, calling them what they are is not offensive, and if anyone says that it is, he needs to stop being an idiot. That makes no sense. Why would you call him or her "they" instead? That's just stupid and it makes you sound like a retard.

/Grammar Nazi Off

I Am Nobody - Prologue Rewrite

Man, oh man, December suuuuuuucks for my job. I've hardly had any time to sit down and write since Thanksgiving.

Anyway, I keep trying to sit down and write more on I Am Nobody, because it's a story that I'm really starting to like, and I've lately been outlining it a little more heavily, filling in a few blanks I had in the storyline. I keep having some pretty horrible writer's block with it, and have been kind of just puttering around, not really adding much to it. I've come to realize that the reason for this is that I'm just not very good at writing in the first person perspective, in fact, I'd go so far as to say I'm downright awful at it. It's harder for me to do, and that's why I've been so reluctant to sit down and right more. Plus, i was having a hard time trying to work the elements of the story I wanted to tell into the perspective of a single person. As I've said before, I'm not a big fan of the first person perspective because it gives a very narrow view of the world. I also felt that in doing this book in first person I was sort of ripping off Dan Wells, and that is something I really don't want to do, because, really, he can do it much better than I can. Believe me. Read his books. They're GREAT.

Sooo, I've decided to start over with this one, and redo everything in third person, because I'll more easily be able to incorporate all of the elements of the story that I want to, and I'm much better at writing in third person anyway. Luckily I only had 20 pages written so far, so there isn't much to backtrack.

I've finished the new prologue, and it can be found at the bottom of this page. This, in my opinion, is a MUCH better beginning to this book, as it introduces both the protagonist, and the antagonist from the eyes of a third party, and Mia's duties as a Grim Reaper are better laid out up front. I kept the first paragraph of the original prologue as a bit of an epigraph at the beginning of the new one because "They say girls are made of sugar and spice, and everything nice, but not me, I’m made of death and despair and things to beware." is just such a cool first line to a book that I had to find some way to incorporate it. I think I'm going to have an excerpt from Mia's diary at the beginning of every chapter like that.

Enjoy =)

Oh, yeah, I also recieved a digital camcorder as an early christmas gift, so once my job stops being so awful I thought I might start doing video reviews of books rather than written reviews.