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

Today is the first day of Spring. I came home from work today to find that one of my seed trays, which I had placed under the light on top of our washing machine, fell, killing half of my seedlings. They were going to be delphiniums and forget-me-nots.

The low tonight is 34 degrees Fahrenheit.

Happy Spring everybody.


Quote of the month:

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating. -Pearl S. Buck

I wasted time today. Not all of it, but most of it, certainly. I spent about half an hour trying to think like an eternally youthful polymath and later about two hours reading.

I should feel worse about wasting a day off, all that time to work, but now with the day drawing to a close I only feel moderately guilty.

It's hard to feel bad about something I so deeply enjoyed. I spent a good twenty minutes simply lying in the grass, watching the way the higher clouds flew across the sky at a much slower rate than the lower clouds. The higher-up clouds had a much more wind-blown appearance and I wondered if they weren't moving faster than my eyes were telling me. The wind came from the west - a zephyr.

At twilight the most amazing thing. Alone in purple dusk and encircled by the swaying pines so familiar to me, I watched as nearly twenty hawks rode the currents together, for no apparent reason that I could tell, other than for the sheer pleasure of it. And why not, I say, but why together? Do hawks have social dances just as people do?

Sometimes I worry that I'm the only person I'll ever know who finds so much to think about in so little subject matter - water vapor, wind and wild birds.

Quote of the month:

A moment's thinking is an hour in words. -Thomas Hood

Quote of the month:
Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ew ew ew ew ew ew BLEGH!

Did anyone believe for a second that Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson (bless their hearts) loved each other at all or that their relationship developed naturally? Where was the camaraderie, the sarcasm, the emotional tension? Where was the chemistry?

And for goodness' sake, don't try to make up for the lack of emotion by permeating the senses with that constant flow of sickly-sweet, nauseating music. Empty melodrama like this is exactly why I should never see a movie based on a book that I love.

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Quote of the month: There is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it. - Terry Pratchett