Almost a library card.

It's been a busy week of job hunting and interviewing and landing the job, but I am pleased to finally have summer income as a breakfast server where the hills are alive with the sound music. No joke that's exactly where I'll be working, 6am to noon complete with the Austrian girl's costume. My first day of training was today and it is a very basic server job, but very early. I was surprised at how easy it was for me to get up this morning. Of course it helped that I had napped seven hours yesterday and that the sun comes up around 5am, but still for me to be up so early is impressive. I have a few more days of training before I'm officially on the floor making money, but with town as quiet as it is I am making more money training than I would be serving.

This week I also stopped in at the Stowe Free Library and attempted to get a new library card for the summer. Unfortunately I wasn't able to prove my Stowe address just yet and also wasn't willing to pay ten dollars so I ended up checking out the books under my mother's name until my next piece of mail comes when I can get my own card. I've been fiercely reading the Song of Fire and Ice books (Game of Thrones) by George R.R. Martin, but after finishing the third one I am a bit tired out by the series. Instead of checking out the fourth book I picked out a Vonnegut and a Fitzgerald to keep me entertained in my free time until I'm motivated to crack open the fourth Martin book. Unfortunately it means that I will be falling behind in the book challenge that I have going with the Hebrew Friend, but no matter my heart wasn't in it as much as his. 

Today is National Read A Book Day.

September 6th marks National Read a Book Day and I for one am certainly doing so. I fell asleep reading a book last night and somehow the underwear gnomes must have turned my light off for me, thank you gnomes. I am bring a book to work because it can be slow and tonight after my Shakespeare class and some wonderful Yoga X and cleaning my apartment before my parents come I will be back to reading for school and for fun. I love books. Books and reading have done more for me than some people have. It is because of books and reading that I am where I am at right now. So in honor of National Read a Book Day find a book, any book, and take some time to read. It can be anywhere, just let yourself go in the story.

Inhale Upward Dog, exhale Downward Dog.

This morning at yoga class I learned the my palms are very inflexible. I had a hard time being comfortable on my palms, but I learned to do a very successful shoulder stand which I may be doing around my apartment more and more now. It was a good class, but I definitely have a lot of work to do to get in best yoga form. I was next to one woman who was amazing and I could another one of the instructors doing the practice to such an advanced level that it was mind blowing. Of course if I needed to feel better about myself I just looked through my legs at the guy behind me who was struggling with the intense flexibility needed for of the poses. However when it came to head and shoulder stands I was schooled by everyone. The teacher had to come over and work my body into a strong shoulder stand. I felt amazing afterwards and now that my mom has purchased me a pretty blue mat I'm going to go to the hot yoga studio in Bala more frequently. I want a yoga body.

I'm determined to become more obsessive about my weight and exercise. I've been too comfortable about how I look and how I perform and its time for a more drastic focus on what I need to be doing. I need a new focus in my life anyways and I don't want to leave school looking the way I came in. I want to leave looking better and stronger. My mom handed over her P90X to me. She's had moderate success with the program, but she also hasn't been following the program as intensely as she needs to to see any full results. I'm taking the dvds home with me and complete the program before hockey starts. I think with this, running, and a couple of hot yoga sessions I will have something to keep me occupied for a while.

I'm also trying to get back into reading more voraciously than I have been. I've been making too many excuses not to read books and with Netflix hiking up their prices I think that this is my opportunity to cancel my subscription an go back to reading more regularly instead of watching endless SVU episodes after work. It's something to think about especially since I just scored about fifty books for almost nothing at the library book sale. I have read a few of them, but there are still dozens that I haven't so I excited to take my time and work my way through the two boxes of books that I'm bring back to Philadelphia.

The Secret Garden: Literary and Cinematic Gold

I'm not writing. I don't want to write. Writing is stupid. I feel like I'm in eight grade and my mother is standing over my shoulder making sure I'm getting my homework done. I don't like writing. Yet tonight, I write.

I was watching The Secret Garden the other day when I was visiting my aunt's house and I have come to the conclusion that children's stories today are really quite terrible. They have no imagination or creativity and they gloss over the realities of life. The Secret Garden was written in 1909 and dealt with sickness, death, and abandonment great detail. The words chosen for the story are not dumbed down for a slow reader and they story is not fluffed up with silly qualifiers about mediocrity and love or everyone. The Secret Garden was a hauntingly real story that many children could relate to at the time, and while the childhood tragedies on the 19th and 20th have changed and have all but disappeared, many of them are still the same hardships that children face everyday including death, abandonment, and relocation.

The movie done in 1993 was very true to the book, but even the modern film omitted some of the harder to understand aspects of the book. Maybe death by cholera is not as cinematicly appealing as a great earthquake, but it certainly is much harder n a child to understand a deadly sickness in a far away land. I do still think that this movie is well done and I find that I am seeing new things that were not as clear to me when I was five. The scene where Mary's mother abandons her infant daughter in the jungle is much more clear.

The Secret Garden was not the first of it's kind. Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland were also classic children's stories dealing with adult issue and written for what would now be considered an eight grade reading level. Total fail on childhood literacy right there and overprotective parents.

Tonight I also have the hiccoughs.