riverstwilight

That's coming along nicely!

Main section, center

ME TOO!!! EEEEEEE!!!!! :woot_jump:

Nope. The tracking system was down the first time I tried to check and it hasn't come back up that I know of. I was going to check tomorrow if my tickets hadn't arrived yet. OMG!!! It's coming up so fast! I've got one more week of antibiotics to take and things seem to finally be clearing up, so I should be right as rain just in time for the show!

There are few mistakes that are so dire that they cannot be learned from. That's the great thing about life. No matter how badly you screw it up, you can pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and take another stab at it. (Have I ever screwed up? In the most epic ways humanly possible.)

That's fab!

Let me know if you figure that out because I still can't figure out why people read what I write

And even if it does freak you out, school is good place to learn if you can overcome that fear in order to do something you really love or to find out that there is something in the same field that you would love even more because it wouldn't freak you out or to find out that there is something else entirely that you love. Your personality isn't set in stone. When you are young, you have plenty of opportunities to explore your boundaries and learn your limits and figure out what is best for you. The worst thing you can do is lock yourself into thinking that you are always going to be the person you are today and that there is only one road for you and you have choose it now and commit to it and never do anything else. Life doesn't work that way. It can if you have a driving passion for something and really want to go for it (but even then, life can throw you curve balls.) If you get overwhelmed by the number of options, just pick one, see where it leads, and if you don't like it, try something else. Learn from your mistakes and move on.

I didn't mean to imply that it was. I was simply suggesting possible carreer options so that she could look into what she might want to work towards, which would include further education for large publications. However, there are several routes to writing. Education greases the wheel, but isn't necessarily essential. Small publications tend to be less picky about education and can be an in road to more significant work later on. I was pointing in a possibly useful direction and leaving it up to her to explore to possibilities and figure out which would work best for her. Education is important and in many cases essential, but it is not the only way to a productive life. Without knowing which resources might be available to a person, I prefer to point out possibilities rather than imply right off the bat that what they want is impossible without specific resources because it isn't impossible. Some roads are just longer than others and some require more creative solutions to problems than others. It's all a matter of how badly you want something, which resources you have, and what you are willing (and not willing) to do to get something. There's also a huge luck factor in there, but there's plenty one can do without the kind of luck that makes people famous. Not that I encourage instilling false hope or discourage going to school. (I strongly encourage further education, but it isn't much good if you don't know where you want to go.) I just think it's better for people to know that there are more possibilities than they might consider at first glance and that it's good to let people know that the right kind of research could lead them in a direction they didn't realize they could because all the information implied that they couldn't go there. Sometimes it's true, but more ofte than not it just means you can't take a certain road to get there. That doesn't mean there aren't other roads that lead there. It's just a matter of figuring out which roads you are able to take. It's better to encourage people to look for roads they weren't expecting to find while they are still young so that they don't grow old thinking that they took the only road they could, only to discover that there were other roads they could have taken when they were younger if only someone had let them know that the roads were there if they looked for them. But that has more to do with the fact that I'm cranky that I'm about to turn 35 and I'm only just now figuring out that certain roads have been open to me for a very long time and I never knew they were there because everybody was too busy pointing out the roads I couldn't take. All I needed to do was look around and find that there are plenty of roads I CAN take. If I'd have known that 10 years ago, my life would be very different.

Mika isn't much of a factor for me. I've wanted to be in England from the first moment of I knew it existed (right around the time I was 6.) That interest was deeply reinforced by having some pen pals in London back in the day when people still wrote letters with paper and pen and spent money to send them through the mail. My interest has grown stronger as more of my friends keep moving there and I keep meeting more people who live there. I think I would like it there. Mika is most certainly ONE factor, but not a primary factor. Something I've learned about life is that even if you commit to one thing, you don't have to give up other things. Different things have different levels of priority at different times in our lives, but we never fully give up our passions. Even if I pursue writing as my primary occupation, there's nothing preventing from seeking vocal work gigs that can range anywhere from singing in a community choir to getting paid to record books on tape. Ideally, I would love to get a book deal and go on tour to promote my book because I LOVE public speaking. One doesn't have to become famous to do that. One just has to earn enough readers to be worth sending on tour. I could always start off with profession and find that my hobby takes over and becomes my profession later in life. The thing I want to do now doesn't have the become the thing I end up doing forever unless I want it to be. Start with one thing. Get your feet under you. Then, branch out.

I do not in any way disagree with that In fact, I've got high hopes for my future education in that regard Journalism might actually be a good avenue for you. It isn't just about reporting the news. Most newspapers have an Arts section devoted to write ups and reviews of what's happening in the local theatres and galleries and what's going on with new music and movies. The only reason I would ever consider going back into journalism would be to review movies/write about the local theatre scene.

Given the way they tend to write, they aren't any more experienced than you are. Not that I am, but I've studied up enough to know when other people are full of it. It's biology and chemistry, not rocket science. Look at writing for travel magazines or for something like National Geographic. There are entire companies devoted to producing travel brochures and they always need people to write copy for their pamphlets. They might be American-based, but they do exist. Have you ever considered journalism? You could be a correspondent that travels around to get the news in other places.

Add me to that list!

Me too! That's why I've just applied to a school with an interdisciplinary program that focuses on the overlaps. My friend graduated from there and has promised me a campus tour when she comes up for a visit in January. I like knowing how things work, especially the relationships between things. I'm a very relational thinker both in the sense that I love relationships and in the sense that most things get connected up in a web in my brain. I have many arguments with my friend, who is a linear thinker (as most people are), because she keeps expecting me to focus on one thread of the thought web right at the point where it's connected with about ten other threads and I keep telling her that it isn't that simple. Well it is, but it isn't. We have a lot of fun trying to agree. That is a vast oversimplification, but certainly a valid perspective within the context of the way we use language these days. I have a ceaseless passion for religion because of what it means to people and how it contributes to culture and how people express a variety of things. Extremism would and does exist without religion. Religion is just the most volatile and common of the topics it's applied to. While religion and faith can be two separate things, neither would exist without the other because at the earliest stage of our developement, there would have been nothing to have faith in without religion and there would be no way for religion to develop if we did not have faith in something ("we" as a species, not "we" as a modern people.) I love my own journey through the topics as well as the communal aspects of journeying through those topics within the context of a social group. If it didn't mean anything, people wouldn't kill each other over it. The stupidity and corruption exists within people, not within the topic, but because it exists within people, it gets projected onto the topic and the topic gets twisted into a social system designed to oppress others "for their own good". But that ties in with social systems in general because of how people oppress each other for a variey of reasons, many of which are so deeply accepted as reality that people don't even do it consciously. It's "just the way the world works, man." Well, it is and it isn't. I love religion for all of the ways that it overlaps with culture, power structures, art, literature, history, etc. It is a vastly rich field of study whether one focuses on one religion in particular or one studies comparative religions. 40? I couldn't learn everything I wanted to know if I lived to be 100 and spent every day of that time in school. I've just had to content myself with learning as much as I can whenever and wherever I get the opportunity to add something new to my thought web, which isn't so much a widely spaced garden web as a tightly woven cobweb....and it's SO TINY compared to all there is to know. Knowledge sponge, indeed.

Yes, I definitely like your brain Topics I can't get enough of: religion philosophy physics quantum physics/mechanics social systems (esp gender issues) entymology (I think that's how it's spelled) semantics grammar To a lesser degree: communication psychology sociology I am especially happy when any combination of those fields overlap. I have been arguing with myself about what I want to major in since I was 13 because I want to study all of those things. Fortunately, most of my friends have turned out to be people with giant brains who happily share their knowledge with me. Thus the highest compliment I know how to give anybody is, "I would like to eat your brain." I think I settled on English as a major so that I could learn to write well about any and all of those subjects. People whose brains I would like to eat: all of my friends any engineer Mika Neil Gaiman Joss Whedon Jonathan Coulton etc.

I like your brain Quantum physics is the good stuff

Drag your mouse over it like you are highlighting text in a document. The selection box will light up and you'll be able to read the text. I had the same problem. It's black text on a black background, so you have to select it to see it. It's like invisible ink

That's more than I make in a month And now you all know how dirt poor I am Still, it IS awfully pretty

ME TOO!