OH-EM-GEE I'M SO YOUNG but already I hate birthdays. I hate 'em, I hate 'em, I hate 'em. Aging, ewww.

My chief complaint is that I'm getting to the age where people will no longer mistake me for a teenager. For a few years now I've been toying with the idea of enrolling in the local high school and attending classes incognito for a month or so, for research purposes. I never went to school, and I worry that if I ever chose to write a modern fantasy, my choices for a (young) protagonist would either have to be a homeschooler, whom a lot of readers might not relate to, or a student whose story simply never involves her school life. I just don't know enough about that life of going to class and taking tests, rules and peer pressure, and all that rubbish.

But I'll never have the time to try it, and since I don't think school administrators would ever allow it anyway, I guess I'll just have to work around it. Getting older still sucks.

Actors Colin Firth and Orlando Bloom are in Durham this week filming for their next movie, and I am just itching to go and check out a couple of the shooting locations. I missed Robin Williams when he was here filming Patch Adams and it's been awhile since I did any shopping on Ninth Street, or saw Duke Gardens in the spring, so I just might go.

Meanwhile I'm still waiting for someone to add a twenty-fifth hour to the day so I have time in which to get some drawing done. Or even - gasp! - some writing!

Quote of the month:
All men and women are born, to live, suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about... We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live. -Joseph Epstein