So I'm a little bummed that Spring Break is next week and the only destination I'm setting out to is work (sadly where there will be no gratuitous consumption of alcohol, half naked guys, or consequentially creepers walking around with cameras and promising free t-shirts for a peek at a certain part of my anatomy that guys seem to find very interesting....actually, maybe there might be alcohol...) but I did get a call today that made me hopeful that my summer might just be salvaged. Some friends of mine from elementary/middle school are trying to have a reunion of sorts...in the city of sin!

Because there's nothing quite like seeing the girls you were in scouts with, running around a foam bath...we were taught to leave places cleaner than we found them you know! Next week we'll be buying our plane tickets and sadly we won't be going until August but hopefully it'll be a great way to say sayonara to the US before me and my friend Jen head out for a year of teaching, fun, and culture not of the American sort.

In literary land, I was reading a YA forum and realized that I had never read a Judy Blume book before. So at work the other day I picked up Forever and all I've got to say is hot damn.

I'm beginning edit draft number 1,000 5 of my manuscript for Calling You: Sealed. It's sitting comfortably at a little less than 107,000 words but I'm really happy at where it is. My mom and english prof are editing it again and I'm hoping to start the query process soon, along with the other million or so novelist hopefuls out there.

Le sigh, but it'll happen. Here's draft number 2,000 of my query letter:



Before 17-year-old Samantha Grace met worldly and irresistible Liam Miliankos, her biggest challenge was getting the hell out of her small Oklahoma town, preferably to a place that wasn’t completely obsessed with football. That ambition changes the day Liam reveals that her unusually bright eyes, once the source of town gossip, are a sign that she is an immortal.

She is a Mara, a being descended from a troupe of gypsies who stumbled upon the Fountain of Youth nearly eight hundred years ago and have been living their frivolous lives in secret ever since.

And more than that, the brother she didn’t even know she had is claiming to be the source of the rage inducing virus that’s sweeping the nation. The virus she is the real source of, and now he’s wasting away in a research facility while scientists strive to find a cure.

Guilt ridden but determined, Samantha must find a way to save her brother’s life without screwing up the future she and Liam could have together or being caught by the group of Mara who want her dead for unknowingly endangering their secret. She has one hope, Calling, a rare, dangerous power that one day will allow her to control the other Mara. She just has to put her lifetime of perpetual wallflower-ism aside and gain the confidence to master the power before it masters her and everything she loves.



Still have a few more tweaks I know, until then I shall be Twittering away. US Cellular will be very happy with my phone bill, I'm sure, unlike my father.

Casey

P.S. Anthony Bourdain doesn't know but he's been married to me for a few months now. I can't get enough of No Reservations.

P.P.S. My cat really has a Television problem. She's supposed to be addicted to catnip, not Animal Planet...

Things are getting scary and it's all the economy's fault. Alright so I've never been a fan of economics. I took macro in high school and then again my sophomore year in college and barely scrapped by with a C in both semesters (though in my defense the sophomore year one wasn't really my fault as my professor barely spoke English and now the advisors won't even let Arts and Science majors enroll in her class, which would have, you know, been really good to know two years ago...) but I think all the complaining I did about supply-demand charts and fiscal policy have come back to bite me. As an English major there are pretty much two fields open to me in the future aka, two months from now when I graduate. Anything involving books-since I can obviously read them-and education.

According to a Reuters list I read, these are industries that shouldn't be hurt too badly by the recession but in the past week I've had proof suggesting otherwise. The first came in my small group communications class where I learned that my prof's position will be frozen. Aka, won't be there next semester. Which means that he won't have a job (on the other hand we will have a freakishly green U. What's having teachers and getting an education-you know, that thing we're paying $20,000+ a year for, in comparison to unnaturally green grass?)

The second came yesterday when I got to work and found out that not one but two people from our store had been let go (Borders as a company let go of some 750 employees a few days ago.) This was very saddening and definitely didn't help in store morale because they were both employees that we cared about and were hard workers. Honestly I've never really thought about the recession. It always seemed so far away, trapped in bigger cities and newspaper headlines, but now reality and settling in and I can't help but be worried for my own future.

Things like these doesn't really register until they come close to you and you can see that these are real people who are trying to support their families. Times are hard and I can only send my love, thoughts, and prayers out to everyone who is touched by the recession. We as a nation have a lot of healing and learning to do but I have faith that we can do it. As they say in the Korean dramas I can't seem to get enough of. Aja Aja, fighting!

Alright so for a couple of hours now my computer has been freezing up on one website and one website only: Youtube. Unfortunately, that just so happens to be one of my biggest addictions! How will I live without my extensive favorites list? And my K-pop. Everyone knows my life isn't complete without watching people attempting to do the Wonder Girls 'Tell Me' dance until I'm blue in the face! (And secretly know the dance too!) The knock offs: Hulu, Crunchyroll, Daily Motion etc. aren't doing it for me and I'm starting to have withdrawal symptoms. Seriously! I've totally got the shakes (or maybe that was the shot of espresso I had just before close...)!

So, I've been reduced to watching actual TV and I've got to say it pretty much sucks. Except King of the Hill, of course. As a dweller of the sort of southwestern area I can attest that there are some people like that who live here. I had a prime example of such characters earlier today as I was at the register, checking people out.

At Borders we have to ask every customer if they have a Border's Rewards Card-it's free and there are no forms to fill out so why not, right?-Well I was doing as my job dictated and asked this shining gem of a customer if they would like a Rewards card when they said they didn't have one, and I received this gracious, unbelievably eloquent reply: "No, I ain't got no cable."

I kid you not!

What do CABLE and a REWARDS card have in common? Your guess is as good as mine but this is the type of thing I get on a fairly regular basis. Now, I won't say that ALL okies are like this. I mean, there are some of us out there who consider ourselves reasonably intelligent, and you know, able to recognize the difference between a customer savings card and a bundle of wires wrapped in a plastic protective coating that transmits information, but then occasionally you find the "I ain't got no cable" type too.

Note to self: Get the hell out of here as soon as humanly possible-aka after graduation on May 9th.

Casey


P.S. My independent study prof-the head of the English department here at TU-has deemed my manuscript "readable". This is a good thing right? He's reading the latest edit now. Crossing fingers...now!

Alright, so I've worked at a Borders store here in Tulsa for a little over and year and a half and I'll come right out and say it, the main reason I applied was the discount. I had flitted my life away in a retail job before(I'm a proud survivor of two and a half years at Old Navy thank you very much!) and after my cushy stint as a Resident Advisor at the freshman dorm resident hall at my college (Trust me, after two years of having psycho moms yelling at you for over charging her twenty cents for her baby socks, having a drunk frat bro in training lob a DVD of Jenna Jamison's finest work from the second floor landing during the Beer Olympics is nothing...true story) I wasn't too warm to the idea of trotting back into retail hell.

But it was books so it wasn't like I didn't spend all my time there anyway. Unfortunately I quickly discovered that those same moms who were yelling about their baby socks yelled about the coupon they left at home that you can't let her use anyway because it's against company policy and could get you fired. However, amongst the bowing and scraping, and the spit up on your favorite jeans from the genius mother who let her five year old drink an entire caramel mocha by herself, there come these shining gem moments. Today just so happened to have one of them.

So I was putting away some reshelves and trying not to laugh at the 80+ year old couple who were looking at Karma Sutra books, and you know, worrying that grandma there could break a hip or dislocate something vital if they were seriously thinking of trying page 55 of the Position of the Day book, when I happened to stumble upon Drink, Play, F@#k by Andrew Gottlieb.

Now I'm not going to lie. The title is what did it. As a cronic F-bomb dropper I just knew that this was something I needed to check out. Plus the inner annoyed employee (haha, inner...right...) in me was interested in anything parodying Eat, Love, Pray which we were practically slammed with about a year ago when it was featured on Oprah. And I was not disappointed in the least. I laughed out loud-scaring the guy nosing around the register, waiting for the right childless moment to come up and buy his Playboy. And the smile I gave when he was walking away, waving off my "Have a nice evening, sir!!!" was totally real. I couldn't put it down. So while I'm supposed to be finishing off Grotesque, and you know, studying for my Communications test tomorrow, I'm busy laughing along with Mr. Sullivan in his adventures in Ireland.

Well done, sir and I look forward to reading about Vegas next!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHkWv1vHtHk

Funny video I found online.

I recently decided to grow my hair out naturally because I'm going to Japan where finding African American hair care will be like trying to pull fresh catnip from my cat Stinky's clutches. AKA impossible. Well, in my request for non-chemically processed hair, I did my hair in crazy crimpy waves that got many compliments. However, I'm afraid that said fun hair style may be the reason behind a recent visitor I think we've gotten at casa de la home because I'm pretty sure that my friend Hailey's ghost followed me home from Cosmo's last night. No really! We were sitting there, sipping after work cosmopolitans all sophisticated like and we naturally started talking about ghosts and the fact that one is stalking her. I intelligently remarked that she could keep said ghost to herself.

Well I got home last night and locked the door to the garage but when my mom woke up this morning, she said that not only was it unlocked but wide open. AND that she had heard thumping last night, like metal on metal thumping and one of the things that Hailey said she heard with her ghost was thumping and heavy footsteps on the roof.
I'm hoping that if this is the case and Mr. Ghosty-Mc-Ghostalot is hanging around here that he's a hottie like Hector "Jesse" de Silva a la The Mediator, my favorite of Meg Cabot's series. We can only hope. I'll be wearing a cross when I go to sleep tonight just in case.

You know, because ghosts are like vampires right?
Casey

P.S. Why did it get so cold in here all of a sudden?
P.P.S. I just found this on Meg Cabot's website while thinking about Jesse and decided to post it. It'll make you say aww....And then go buy the series because it's one of my favs!

Haha,
So, I love irony, a lot. It tackles my fancy so I was foaming at the mouth when this happened. I'm not sure if anything other than divine intervention (and a call to a local pimp) could have set this up. As I stated in a previous post, I am currently reading Grotesque by Nastuo Kirino-a mystery novel about a girl whose sister is murdered and perhaps how she tracks down the murderer? (I'm only about 200 pages in so I'm not quite sure on that yet...)But anyways, the sister who was murdered was a prostitute and earlier today I had read this long section of the book about the girl and how beautiful she thought she was (she's not a vain or narcissistic character at all as I'm sure you can tell!) and how being a bigger person you couldn't be a prostitute. Well, I had an experience on my V-tines day that might just prove her wrong.

The day started off sluggish-minus the cool trail-so I wasn't expecting much. Went to a play with my best friend (Ibsen's A Doll's House which I think all women-and especially Rihanna right now-should see because if a mother living in the 19th century can walk out on her manipulative, jerk-off of a husband, there's no reason for you to stick with that abusive, judgmental, WoW playing, mooching lump sitting on the end of your couch, eating all your mac-n-cheese ya know what I mean?) and a quick trip to this trend 50's-ish diner called The Brook in the hipster side of town. When my friends and I decided to take a trip to VI-AKA Village Inn which is kinda like Denny's except for in existence.

Now, we've taken our fair share of late night-til-morning trips to VI. Not a weird, or ironic-thing but this time we were shortly joined by who had to be a prostitute. And let me tell you she was NO Julia Roberts.

At least I never saw Vivian pushing 250 in a skin tight dress with diamonds holes cut out in the stomach and absolutely NO VLP or VBL (yes, the girls were NOT contained, which I felt was illegal enough as it is, no offense to the non-bra wearing people in the world. My older sister is one of you. I just feel that there are some people who can get away with letting the girls go free and some of us who cause traffic accidents when they do...)

And then her pimps showed up in all their Sean Jean, spree wheels, and Jose Quervo glory! My friends and I-ever the sleuth's-watched the deal go down. And there was actual face suckage! It was like the skankiest episode of the Discovery Channel ever!

But alas, the deal transpired and presumably one of the guys went home with a happier ending than finishing his Moon Over My Hammy-you know if it was Denny's, which it wasn't because Denny's isn't in existence anymore, at least not here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But it just made me think of Grotesque. I'm not sure how things are in Japan (In Korea, you look for the prostitutes in the places with the spinning barber poles) but maybe I can let you know in a few years if ladies of the night there don't get any business if they're over weight.

Considering the new law put in place where Japanese employees get fined for having a waist that's more than 35 inches, I suppose that's not surprising. But as with most things, in America we're more forgiving because this lady didn't look like she'd missed any meals from lack of nourishment.

I'm off to buy bedspreads with my mom now! Not to be used in a prostitution ring unless this whole writing thing falls through,
Much love,
Casey

P.S. Maybe I'll looked at silk sheets just in case...