Below are the 5 most recent journal entries recorded in Carolyn's LiveJournal:

Saturday, July 12th, 2008
1:26 am	All right, time to hook this metaphorical monster up to the machine and zap some life into it. Yes, I haven’t updated in awhile, but it’s not like anybody reads this thing anyway, so I’ve got no one to apologize to.  Among my four posts I’ve generated a whopping two comments, so I’m going to count this post as a new beginning. A clean slate. I first started this blog with the idea of solely writing book reviews. That idea bombed when I realized that that nobody cared about my opinions on whatever published abortion happened to catch my eye. And considering how long my first review took me to write, I don’t care much either. I’d still like to do something like that, but on a wider scale. From now on I’ll be ranting about books, movies, comics, whatever catches my eye. What kinds? Mainly horror, science fiction, and fantasy. That may change in the future if I find a specific thing that works for me, but we’ll see. I’m leaving the door open. For now, I’m going to get to work. Expect a movie review from me sometime soon.  On what? You’ll see. Current Mood: lethargic Current Music: Rule the World - Take That (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
11:22 am	To the cockgobbling thundercunts who wrote my algebra textbook: DIAF k thx. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
2:10 am	So I'm home early for Thanksgiving  Break. But I'm far from happy. My grandpa died this afternoon. I didn't hear about it until this evening. (My phone was off since I basically have classes all day on Tuesdays) I left my late classes, got dinner, went back to my dorm and found my dad waiting for me. He gave me the bad news, and I just collapsed into a chair and started sobbing. I packed in kind of a trance. I remember at one point I physically could not stand up, dropped to the floor and started crying all over again. My dad was in the bathroom, so thankfully he didn't see this. God forbid either of my parents know I still have a soul. I'm home now, and my personality can best be described as shell-shocked. My mom is clearly upset, as he was her father of course. She's going through a bunch of old photos for the funeral that she wants to put on a board there. There's a sense of relief hanging over everyone though. No more 45-minute drives for my mother every weekend to make sure he's okay when her own fucking BROTHER lives five minutes away from him. (It will take every ounce of will I possess to stop myself from decking my selfish bastard of an uncle at the funeral.) No more worrying if it's bad news every time the phone rings. No more suffering for him. No more strokes or heart attacks. No more needles or surgeries. No more pain. My grandmother died seven years ago and he's pined for her ever since. (They were married for over fifty years when she died. Pretty good length of time, but as he described it, it wasn't nearly enough.) The thought of my grandparents finally reunited in whatever afterlife there is is something I take a strange comfort in. Just the knowledge that love like that really exists, love that can last so long, love that can't even be stopped by death makes me deliriously happy and utterly miserable at the same time. I know it's late. I tried to sleep just and I started thinking about a story he used to tell me and my brother. He served in the Coast Guard during World War II, and he'd always talk about when they had to get vaccinated, the toughest, most muscular guy in his group fainted at the sight of the needle. I just kept thinking about how he'd always crack up at the end of that story. He loved telling us stories. That's about the point where I started sobbing hysterically again and decided to go online. (Comment on this)
2:09 am	Writer's Block: Pickup Artist What's the worst pickup line you've ever heard? View 500 Answers The single worst pick up line I've ever heard: "Did you have Lucky Charms for breakfast? 'Cause you're magically delicious!" (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 10th, 2007
7:53 pm	My review of 'The Garden: By Elise Aidinoff' I read this book, and then I immediately regretted it. I've read a lot of tripe that pretends to be deep or revolutionary by playing the 'God is evil and the Fall was a good thing' plot device. But this book should have been crowned the king of such tripe. This book is what tripe aspires to be when it grows up. Yeah, I read this book. I read it a long time ago when it was called 'His Dark Materials'. But unlike the author of this abortion, Philip Pullman actually managed to create a wonderful story that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Aidinoff went wild with shock value, turning God into a hot-tempered bully and the Serpent into a wise and kind teacher. This was the first thing that struck me as being an outrageous ploy to piss off the reader and boost publicity. The Serpent is usually referred to as Satan, and he tempts Eve with the apple of knowledge in an attempt to get back at God. He does NOT give her the apple to free humanity from an oppressive God. He did it for vengeance. I'm not denying it can be considered a good thing that Eve took the apple, but she made the villain into the 'good guy' and completely ignored his established motive for pissing off God. The book is sexist. There's no way to excuse it. Eve is a bright woman, who questions everything she's told, and seems to be flawless in almost every way. Adam was turned into an absolute moron with no free will. Certain points of the story painted him as a mini villain, and I found this to be incredibly stupid. The book seemed to be saying 'Poor men. They're so silly and irrational. Thank goodness they have us women around to keep them under control'. Pure bullshit in other words. And don't even get me started on the bluntness of the theme. 'His Dark Materials' introduced the message of knowledge, love and free will by delicately slipping the message into a carefully planned storyline. The entire message made perfect sense when it was handled in this matter. This garbage, however, beats you over the head with this message until your brain hemorrhages. The Serpent had a tendency to break into long boring rants about wisdom and compassion. Oh thanks a lot Serpent! You really enlightened me! If you hadn't brought it up 90 times in the last paragraph, I never would've known free will was a good thing! What pissed me off the most came at the end of the book. I can handle reading a book this bad. Usually. As long as I can sense the author is definite about what they wrote and won't try to make excuses, then I'll just walk away and try to forget I ever read it. I will rarely go into a rant like this unless the book is truly god-awful. (Anything by Paul Zindel fits into this category.) But at the end of the book, Aidinoff added author's notes. Now I don't know about the rest of you, but I always read author's notes. If I don't, I feel like I haven't read the whole book, and I was determined to finish this book, if only as a form of self-punishment. Aidinoff's notes contained a few quick thank yous to her family and friends, and the people who helped her publish it. So far so good. Then, she made a pathetic attempt to cover her own ass by trying to excuse parts of her book. She claimed this book wasn't a feminist novel, and at the same time she claimed that her version of Eve was probably the version we would've seen if the church wasn't so patriarchal. I find that very hard to believe. The church probably did embellish the story a little, but that's not the issue here. Her book painted men as morons and women as geniuses put down by men. If the church made Eve look stupid, then she did the same thing with Adam. She then went on to say that she didn't want to offend anyone with her book. What was she honestly expecting? She painted God as a villain, of course people are gonna get offended! It would have been all right if she had made him into an overbearing creator who didn't realize he was oppressing his creations. That would've saved the book. I know that Aidinoff's intention wasn't to pass a message that God is evil. But that's what she did. She butchered a classic story, one known by practically everyone else in the world. And you know what the sad thing is? This book would've actually been a half-decent read if Aidenoff had actually told a story instead of relying on shocking the audience and creating some kind of controversy. I rue the day I read this book, and I rue the day Aidenoff wrote it. Even opening the goddamn cover was a waste of time. Thank God I didn't waste good money on it. Final score: 2/10 The writing style was all right, but the content blows. This book goes to prove that you can build an intricate mansion out of shit, but at the end of the day, it's still shit. (Comment on this)