If you could stop your body from aging at any point in your life, what age would you want to stay at and why?

I’m probably alone in this wish but I would have chosen pre-puberty. My body rebelled when I hit puberty. Massive, crippling cramps. Hips and boobs that none of the other girls had. No thank you! I was happier with my body because I was just like all the other prepubescent girls as well as the boys. I’ve never actually embraced my curves. Not when I was ‘thin’ and not while overweight. Since puberty, I’ve never actually been thin. Why? Because of my curves!

Even at my most fit, I was 5’1″-5’2″ (height varies depending on the day… seriously!) and weighed 110 pounds. That was with a great deal of work and a daily workout regiment in high school. But I was still curvy and boobalicious. My shoulders were still wide. I had a perfect, hourglass figure. Clothes STILL didn’t fit right! Clothes have never fit right.

But if I still had the body of a 12 year old boy, I wouldn’t be having issues!

It’s silly. I know.

Oh look. It’s a brand-name product! This is a favorite that I really should be doing without but it seems to be an addiction that I can’t kick completely.

I like Pepsi.

Just Pepsi. Not diet, not zero, not any other type of ___-Pepsi. Just regular old Pepsi. Out of a can, out of a glass, with ice or without, it is my cola of choice. Now, I am not an elitist and I do not mind drinking Coke when it is all that is available.

Of all the things to have an addiction for, I really don’t need the calories and the sugar that these cans have to offer me. And yet it’s about the only way that I can get my caffeine fix up just high enough to where I’m not 1. suffering from a lack-of-caffeine headache and 2. wanting to rip someone’s face off because I’m still half asleep. It offers ‘just enough’ of a kick to my system.

Now, let’s talk about that lovely little headache that I get for a moment. I am prone to migraines and for many years I depended on the likes of Excedrin and other full-of-caffeine products to keep the edge off. Maybe it’s an addiction to caffeine itself now. But I’m a bit more of a realist here: I fear the 20-hour mark in a day between caffeine intakes because that headache sets in and goes straight to the red-zone, pending migraine quickly on its way. It’s not even a withdrawal headache at that point.

Regardless of all that, Pepsi is still my product of choice. I’m still not a fan of the logo re-design but I did applaud the change from the white/silver background of the cans/labels to the pretty blue color. Then again, my car is almost the same shade of blue. Mine is darker.

So my NaNo project has pretty much failed. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, either. Not really. I just had a really difficult time getting into any of my character’s heads to properly write. The muse was not with me this time around.

I shall endeavor to try at another time and do my own NoWriMo (see what I did there?).

Meanwhile, I have been working and already disliking my job. It is painfully simple and offers zero challenge to me. And yet I see my co-workers constantly struggling, both the ones that were trained in the same week as me as well as others. Today, for example, we were in our chat and the assigned Chat Coach left at the end of her shift. Usually we see someone else come in just before or just after. An hour later, there was still no chat coach. Me, the newbie, was half running the chat along with a veteran and we were doing fine. Then things started getting stupid and I ran off to IM my team lead to let her know. She moved us all to another chat instead.

In my spare time, very recently, I took up reading comics again. I was introduced to a little boy named Alexander Aaron, also known as Phobos. Or is it Phobos-also-known-as-Alexander-Aaron? I’m not really sure. Either way, the 12 year old boy is quite entertaining. He shakes down Norman Osborn and kicks Nick Fury. You just don’t do that. True, it was to get the old man’s ass across a ravine to safety so Phobos could take on the big-baddie on his own and be all kick-ass but still. Damn. Okay, okay. God of Fear and all but damn. Too amusing. I may have just added a new favorite character to my Marvel roster. Deadpool still tops this, naturally.

My dear friend Robin happened to point me in the direction of a PanFandom RPG and Phobos demanded to be played. So, for the past few days, I have been working on his profile and making sure he was safely secure in my head. He has made himself at home and is currently snuggled down, in chibi form, wearing feetie-pajamas.

I love it.

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Nevermind that some of these shouldn’t have been listed since they fall under other numbers…

Personally, I think this list is not only biased but it is hardly a list of ‘great literary work’ – I refuse to read some of these books simple because I do not want to read the author’s work.

Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis (this is part of the Chronicles of Narnia #33)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaed Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (also in the complete works #14)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

For a grand total of:
Read = 27
Started = 11

Glee. One word, one syllable, and one thing that makes me absolutely geek-out over every week. True, there have been a couple missteps and there have been entire episodes where I didn’t like a single song that was either played or covered. But overall, I have loved and adored this show since Fox decided to air the pilot months in advance of the first season truly starting. I couldn’t get enough of it. I was addicted. I needed more. More! What did they mean I had to wait until the Fall??

I even managed to get Rick hooked on it. This was an impressive feat, considering how much he despises covers of any kind.

I went to one of the live concerts. In NYC.

I have the red foam finger from the SDCC 2010 panel.

And I have almost every song from the show downloaded in one way or another, all organized by commercially released album AND by specific episode. That’s right. By episode. Season number. Episode number. Episode title. And then in each folder are the songs from that episode.

Perhaps I am more of a geek over the music than the actual show itself but s2e6 gave me an honest-to-goddess jaw dropping moment. I don’t have many of those. I can usually see plot coming from a mile away and while I may have suspected certain things, that had not been an outcome in my mind. Campy? Absolutely. Wonderful music? Completely.

I still have the Glee cover of Teenage Dream sitting on my desktop for quick play, set to repeat. I was not a fan of the original or any of the remixes but suddenly it’s covered by Glee and I can’t get enough of it. Then again, I am a total sucker for good male voices–which is why I also have a thing for Mark Salling. No big surprise there.

Where was I? Sorry. Got distracted. Enjoy!

Today marks the first of two days called “Nesting” where the new agents are slowly eased in to the actual production part of our job. Baby birds preparing to leave the nest.

So, yes. I am now employed. What an interesting journey so far with this company. First, I am not even told that I was hired. I was just given the things necessary and then finally sent an e-mail that contained the virtual meeting place information so that I could attend the class. I work from home. Allow me to crush the initial thought that many people have with this: I work from home but not on my own time. I have a set schedule. If I am not logged in and on my phone during my scheduled hours, to the dot, I risk having issues with schedule adherence which can lead to termination. So while I am able to work in the most comfortable clothes I own and no one will ever know–aside from Angel–that I am not wearing a bra, I do not set my own hours and work ‘whenever I want to’.

Unfortunately, the job is only part-time and it is seasonal with the possibility of becoming permanent depending on both staffing needs and my performance. The job is going to absolutely suck. I really try to be optimistic about things but I can’t even manage to get my hopes up about this one. I just have to suck it up, recognize that it is a source of income, and be thankful for the fact that I do not have to drive my car anywhere.

In the meantime, I have been putting out more applications in various places. Fingers crossed.

From November 22nd through December 5th, I will be working 6 days a week. On December 6th my schedule shifts and I move to 5 days. Sure, it’s only two weeks of the six-days but I am most certainly not looking to only a single day off. I feel burnt out just thinking about it.

I’m so bad. I haven’t written a post in a week. To be fair, it’s been a long week for me.

Anyway! The Dark-Hunter series, by Sherrilyn Kenyon, has quickly become a favorite series for me. I never, ever thought I would get into reading romance novels. Apparently I like them if they are paranormal-romance. The characters are fun, some more than others, and I love her writing style. Acheron, Vane, and The Simi are my favorites, followed up by a couple of other characters which isn’t entirely surprising given the popularity of Ash and Simi. But gimme some Vane and mmm!

It’s no real secret that I adore Greek mythology. I’m very knowledgeable when it comes to the myths and the entities. At first I was a little leery about the Gods making appearances–especially Artemis’ role–but after awhile it becomes so commonplace that I easily accepted the author’s version and the world she has created. None of the books in the series, and there are many, have been boring to me. They have all held my attention easily and I have been able to devour a book in a single day. Sure, things become a little… overplayed… but when you look at the whole picture of the world itself? So interesting! I am currently reading the long-awaited book Acheron and am only just shy of 60 pages in. I am transfixed by what little I have read so far and have had to force myself to put the book down on several occasions before I became too engrossed. If I do not force myself to slow down, I will lose all track of time and wind up not sleeping. Again.

Give the books a chance, if you’re looking for something new. It starts off timeline-wise with Fantasy Lover and it is difficult to pin down the correct reading order. But the author herself even states that the books can be read out of order without confusing the reader too much.

Now excuse me while I go off to read a couple more chapters…

Whoever didn’t see this one coming doesn’t know me very well. But it would have been way too much of an expectation for me to start off my Favorites with this wonderful, sexy man.

Jensen Ackles. I was smitten from the moment he arrived on screen as Ben in Dark Angel. Lo and behold, he returned to play Ben’s twin… Alec. Hilarity ensued and I mourned the loss of more Jensen when Dark Angel was suddenly canceled. Sadness! And then came the arrival of Supernatural. Ah, Dean Winchester. The writers for this show are fantastic and the characters are a crack up quite often. But what gets me every time are Jensen’s eyes and his voice. I am a very auditory person but the low tones of his voice are just… yum. Shivers.

I had the pleasure of sitting in on the Supernatural panel at San Diego Comic Con 2010 and had a moment of OMG I’m in the same room as him! which amused me to no end. Then he spoke. I squee’d in fangirlish joy, to which my friend Mark laughed, and got goosebumps. It sounds so pathetic to be such a fan but, like I said, I am an auditory person. It is why I have a thing for accents. I also have a thing for eyes. Jensen? Both of those boxes got a checkmark of approval from me.

And he just seems fun. Watching outtakes, seeing random bits and pieces of him on the internet… he comes off as being a great guy to be around. I may have the hots for him, and he may be a married man now, but I would settled immediately for ‘friend’ status if given the chance. I get the feeling that he would be an amazing friend and incredibly fun to just chill with. And there you have it, my fangirl moment of the week. To be quite honest, Jensen Ackles has been the only actor I have ever swooned over. I’m not the type of girl to do that over just anyone. That should say a lot about just how much I adore this man.