Butterfly in the sky...

So, I'm back from my vacay. Sad face. The bad news for me is that I have to return to my reality of cold weather and work. The good news for my vast multitude of readers it that I should get back to blogging regularly. Yay for you.

So, since Jumble Mash fulfilled my request to share with her readers what she reads, I thought it would only be fair to do the same myself. I used to read a lot back in elementary school. Mostly Goosebumps and Judy Blume's Fudge books and the like, but then I kinda fell out of reading all though junior high and high school. I picked up a load of extracurriculars and just didn't have time to read. Once I got to college, though, I started reading again. Mostly Christian self-help type books which certainly served their purpose at the time, but aren't really things I'd read again.

Then I discovered C. S. Lewis.

It is safe to say that Lewis is my favorite author. The first work of his I read was The Chronicles of Narnia. They're children's books, but I didn't get around to reading them until I was 21. I still loved them. They're great stories. Kind of like the Harry Potter of the mid-19th century. Yes, they have Christian overtones, but a lot of people would never pick up on that. Simply put, they are great stories. The Horse and His Boy is one of my favorite books of all time. After that, I read some of his other works like Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, and The Screwtape Letters. These three books kind of turned my personal beliefs upside down...in a good way. But The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters are also just great stories. Which brings us to...

Harry Potter. LOVE these books. I avoided reading them for a very long time. They started getting popular when I was a teenager and I was obviously way too cool to be reading children's books then. So I didn't read them until about 4 months before the 7th book came out. I've read all of them 3 times. I don't need to tell you anymore about them. You already know.

I read sparingly for a while after that until I went back to school. I had to read a lot of foreign literature for a couple classes. The only book that stuck out to me as "good" was The Kite Runner. Yep, that's about it.

Then I took a Young Adult Literature class this past quarter. I had always turned my nose at YA Lit. Another case of being too cool for something younger than me. I'm an idiot. We had to read 9 novels for this class, but I'll just share the highlights with you.



John Green

I've now read all three of his novels: Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns. All three are very good books, but An Abundance of Katherines might be the funniest book I've ever read. No joke. They're allegedly turning this into a movie, and I certainly hope that happens because it would be awesome.

The Maze Runner

This one was very popular among the class. I thought it was a decent read, but it just didn't quite live up to the hype. There is one very legitimate reason for this. There was a series of books that I read for the class that most of the others didn't:

The Hunger Games

Go out and get these books RIGHT NOW! Several of the kids in the honors class I observed told me I needed to read these books, so I decided to call them on it. I wasn't disappointed. Hubby read them along with me, and we both had finished all 3 books within a week and a half. It took me 4 days and this was at the end of the quarter with all my final projects and such due. Let's just say I lost a lot of sleep. These books are going to be the next Twilight as far as their popularity, but it's a very different story from Twilight. They're currently casting for the first movie and I can't wait to see it. As long as it's done right, a film of these books could be VERY powerful.

I'm currently reading 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher, but I'll hold off on sharing my opinion until I finish it. So there it is. That's what I read.

In other news, a quick and adorable story. Before Hubby and I left for vacay, it had been in the 60s and 70s around here, so our AC was on. I meant to switch it over to heat before we left. It was in the 70s the whole time we were in South Carolina, but then we get back to Ohio and it's in the 40s. Then we get back into our house and it's 58. I do not deal well with cold weather. I downright hate it. It makes me grouchy. It gives me dry skin. It makes my joints ache. I hate it. Hate it. Hate it. So anyway, I immediately turn the heat back on. Hubby starts a fire in the fireplace because he knows the central air won't warm up fast enough for me. Then an hour or so later I mention that I have had to pee since before we got home but I don't want to sit on an icy toilet seat. A few minutes later he disappears, and then I find him sitting on the toilet still fully clothed trying to warm up the toilet seat for me. That right there, ladies and gentlemen, is true love. He's the kind of husband I always dreamed of having, and there is no sarcasm in that statement whatsoever.

Until next time...

Toodles!

La la. La la la la. La la la la. La la.

NERD!

There are a lot of things that have been rattling around in my head for the last 10 weeks that I wanted to write about, but never did because a) school and b) the wordpress issue. So for a while, you might actually get fairly frequent posts. Maybe.

For now, I think I would explain the name - PirateGeek. Where did it come from? It's quite simple actually - I dig pirates, and I'm a geek. I'm sure I'm not alone with my affection for buckling swashes and things like Smurf hats. In fact, I know I'm not since pirategeek.blogspot.com was taken. Hence the addition of 9 (high school softball number in case you were wondering). I guess that's about the whole of it. To me, it kind of represents not being afraid to be yourself. Ten years ago, I never would have referred to myself as a geek, and I certainly wouldn't have been proud of that. Ten years changes a lot, though. Also, pirates didn't become cool until 2003 with the release of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

I'm actually quite sure that this is one of the many reasons why I want to teach high school: to let kids know that it's cool to be yourself. It makes me quite sad how desperate some teens are to please their peers mostly because pleasing those peers usually involves being stupid. I don't know when stupid became cool, but it certainly happened sometime in the 20th century. I'm not exaggerating about this either. There are kids in the classes I observe that are very intelligent, but they either a) intentionally do bad on assignments, b) don't do the assignments or c) act like idiots in order to hide their intelligence so as not to be labeled as a geek, nerd, dork, brain, whatev.

Who's idea was this? Really. I would love to know what person started the thought process of, "That person's smart. What a loser. I'm going to make fun of them and belittle them to make myself feel better." I guess that's the key isn't it? People make fun of other people usually to make themselves feel better. Lame. I'm not saying I never make fun of other people, but when I do it's usually thrown right back at me and I'm ok with that, and I've certainly never made fun of someone for being smarter than me. That's dumb.

Could you imagine if we were only able to ridicule people using the truth? "OOooooh. You're all smart. You're probably gonna be really successful and make a lot more money than me. I'm probably gonna be flipping your burgers someday." At least it's more creative than yelling "NERD" at someone. Speaking of, quick sidenote, check out www.thenerdmachine.com. Cool stuff for us nerds. Wear it loud. Wear it proud, folks.

Anyway, back to the task at hand, it is my hope that, as a teacher, I might be able to impart at least some wisdom on these youngsters. Maybe I'll actually find a way to show them that being yourself is far cooler than pretending to be something you're not which, incidentally, is exactly what the majority of the "cool" kids do.

As Dr. Seuss says, "Be who you are and say what you feel because those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter." Rock on. If someone has a problem with my Smurf hat and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt, they can go hang out with the other mean, old bitters.