Have you ever been alone in a crowded room when I'm here with you?

Have you ever been alone in a crowded room; well I'm here with you...

Just finished writing my report cards. You know what they say about girls doing better than boys in school? Yeah, not a myth.

What is going on here? I have the impression that people I've unfriended on facebook are back on my friends list. I have no conclusive proof of this but I've done the unfriending process a few times and I have a hard time believing that certain people made the cut in order to be around today when I went through my friends again.

One of my students used the term "defriended" on an essay regarding face-to-face social interactions. Facebook, what have you done?!

I have made it a personal goal to post on this blog copiously once my summer officially begins. I have had a number of things I've been intending on posting but I haven't had the time/energy. Man, being a grown-up sucks.

Good lord people, stop writing articles about the kissing couple in Vancouver. It's a beautiful shot. That's pretty much it.

I just want to keep track of some of the ideas I may or may not plan on using for writing.

1. The current story, of which I have a first draft. This one's actually been written so yay for that. Primary challenge: polishing, editing, and re-writing.

2. I'm toying with the idea of writing a sequel to the one above, only from another person's point of view. This one would entail a setting shift to residence, or more specifically, the cafeteria. The cafeteria itself, I imagine, will take on a somewhat central role to this story. It would be an interesting experiment in setting, I think. The primary challenge with this story would be finding the correct device to drive the plot, since I imagine that this would be a project that could very easily turn into just a bunch of people sitting around philosophizing (not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but in the interest of plot, I may owe more to the reader).

3. I've sorta started writing something that involves four characters who have semi-related lives that become more intertwined in the latter half of the story. These characters all deal with one of the four primary aspects of existential depression: loneliness, choices, meaninglessness, and death. The primary challenge here is the inter-weaving of four separate, but semi-related plots in a way that is both natural and satisfying to the reader.

4. At some point, I want to try my hand at writing something that involves a much younger cast of characters than I'm accustomed to writing about. Usually, my characters are somewhere between 17-24. This one would entail characters probably in the 12-14 age range. The motivation for this story comes from a conversation I once had with Grant about how things that concerned us when we were younger may seem trivial when we are older, but this should not alter the fact that at the time, we considered them to be almost life and death. The primary challenge behind writing this story would be to somehow convey the significance of the issues that the main characters face, while at the same time subtly hinting to the reader that these are issues that adults, quite reasonably, may not consider important.

5. This may be my crazing ambition talking, but I would really love to write something that you could read backwards and forwards. I got the idea from a video game called Braid and while I'm not sure I am capable of doing this, I can't shake the feeling that to be able to create this kind of narrative would be very satisfying.