Friday Five - the My-Brain-Is-Sadly-Fried Edition

Hello, my dears!

I am still recovering from a Week of Doom and Stress and Deadlines and Weddings and then Dancing - both in chair and on dance floor (more information below). As a result, my brain is operating only at half capacity.

So, instead of writing a long post full of wisdom and structure, I'm going to cheat and do a Friday Five. I'm 95% sure that I can make a Friday Five make sense. :-P

But noting that 5% that says brain mush will win out - read at your own risk...

1. The Scariness (not related to Halloween):

You know what I don't recommend? Telling your agent that you'll get a new manuscript to her THE SAME WEEKEND you're going to be a bridesmaid in an out-of-town wedding.

I'm not sure what I was thinking. It's clear that these are both BIG, time-consuming activities. Sleep was sacrificed to the powers of Productivity. Since I came down with a sinus infection that same week, and one of my meds kept me up till the wee hours of the morn, I ended up sending Jo an incomplete manuscript at 4AM (ie. 13 hours before the wedding). From the floor of the hotel room closet, because I was concerned that my frantic, last-minute typing skills were bothering the other bridesmaid I was bunking with.

This has lead to Serious Thought on such topics as: Boundaries, the Value of Time, and Work-Life Balance.

Seriously Fuzzy-Brained Thought at the moment, however. Hence, this post is a Friday five rather than a discussion of those topics.

2. Happy Ending #1:

The Burton-Kasprak wedding was beautiful. The bride (now Mrs. Kasprak) is a dear friend I've known and loved since age 13 - the one childhood buddy who loves books as insanely as I do. She was gorgeous and poised and funny (during toast, not ceremony). I didn't embarrass her by tripping during the ceremony, or getting lipstick on my teeth, or fouling up the reading she asked me to do (Shakespeare's "Let me not to the marriage of true minds" sonnet, a.k.a. the poem Kate Winslet recites in Sense & Sensibility).

Poem starts at 0:29, in case you're curious.

But I might have embarrassed her on the dance floor. The reception afterwards was awesome. Especially after I changed out of my heels into another pair of flats. :-P

3. Happy Ending #2:

The ms I sent Jo on Friday night was missing the final chapter. That one, I finished on Sunday night, partially in the airport, partially on the plane, and partially at my dining room table. Yes, my Powers of Extreme Concentration - honed during years of doing my homework on the schoolbus - have not deserted me.

Y'all, it's DONE. It's 150,000 words long, ie. 500 pages, ie. WAY too long, but still DONE. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I have enough clay now to mold it into something BOOK-shaped.

This is a VERY good thing.

4. New Deadline:

The manuscript is back with me. I have until Thanksgiving to make it pretty and book-shaped.

I have cuts and themes and rewrites in mind.

It will be EPIC. It may even be FUN.

5. Florence + the Machine:

Um, is anyone else SOOOOOO spectacularly EXCITED for their new album? (I LOVE Florence Welch. We share a birthday, you know. Month, date, AND year. This totally makes us besties by default, even if she has no idea I exist. We were born on the same day - OF COURSE, we're connected.)

November 1 can't come soon enough for me. I've already downloaded their new song and added it to EVERY SINGLE PLAYLIST I've listed to this week.

Yes, this includes my EA'S writing music. :-P

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Okay, peeps - please excuse all typos and lack of picturedom. I'm currently blogging by phone, and I'll fix after I get back to my laptop....

ETA: Videos! Better than pictures! (Perhaps they'll distract from the typos I didn't look for...)

5 Fantastic Things About Going to DC

5. Not missing my flight home. I almost did. I didn't read the itinerary closely enough, and I thought my plane took off an hour and a half later than it actually did (ie. the time it arrived at its destination). I checked in less than thirty minutes before its departure time, realized my mistake, and ran. I only tripped once, but I slid across the floor, very surprised at the lack of friction. And I made my flight - JetBlue has forever won loyalty points from me. :-)

4. A trip to Georgetown Cupcake, where I split a couple cupcakes - one red velvet and one pumpkin - with my dear friend and ex-roommate, Angela. We were lucky enough to walk by early on a rainy Friday afternoon, so the wait was just over 10 minutes.

3. A trip to the National Zoo with my other dear friend Ems and her boyfriend Nick. I haven't been to a real zoo since I was eleven. This was an incredibly exciting venture for me. I took well over a hundred pictures. I won't force them all on you now. Just the ones of the baby gorilla climbing on her mom's head. :-)

Other highlights include:

• watching one of the pandas eat a ridiculous amount of bamboo
  
• staring at the prehistoric, epic-sized fish
• seeing a convergence of elephants (we believe they were going to move to another pen for an early dinner)
• visiting the small monkey house, and
  
• catching a prairie dog with his head in a pumpkin.

2. Where the Wild Things Are. The cinema was perfect for a rainy Sunday. I can say with assurance now that it's a quality movie.



That said, I'm not sure how I feel about it. I agree with the filmmakers, who call it "a movie about childhood" rather than a kids' movie. It brought a lot of childhood memories back - and not necessarily good ones either. But I am glad that I saw it. (I even bought the soundtrack, because I kept humming the score by Karen O and the Kids.) It helps you remember how much of you was already there when you were nine, and how much you've forgotten.

1. Old, old friends. There's something fantastic about old friends. Angela, Ems, and I have known each other for ten years. Considering that we're all in our early 20's, that's a significant chunk of time. There's no posturing, and there's definitely no BSing. It's not possible. We've known each other too long. We already know all our fault, and we guess at each other's reactions even before they happen. We understand the history behind a comment without having to be told.

There is much, much love.