Life Post: Vacation in Tennessee

I'm attempting to write this post from Chrome on my phone. We'll see how it goes. I deleted the Blogger app from my phone a long time ago because it didn't work the way it was supposed to, and while this is an improvement over that, typing an entirely blog post on my phone sounds exhausting. I doubt I'll write much.

The reason I'm on my phone in the first place is because I'm in Tennessee on vacation. Technically, our hotel has Internet, but nothing loads once you're connected. It says that there's a limited connection. That means that the 4G on my phone is really the only Internet I've got. For the most part, that hasn't been a problem because we're doing so much, but there are times like now, sitting in the hotel room, where having wifi would be nice.

Yesterday, I got to pet horses, and today, I saw a bear in the national park. Those were probably my favorite parts of the trip. Of course, I've pet horses before, but that was the first time I've seen a bear in the wild where there was nothing between us. It was much less scary than some talk of seeing bears is (although I think grizzly bears are meant to be the mean ones, and we saw a black bear). It was pretty cool.

We go home tomorrow though, and I'm so exhausted now that I'm looking forward to having time to rest once we're home.

A Music Video Just Because

So, here's the thing. I've been in this mood the past week where I don't want to write. And that's to say that I don't want to write anything whether it be this blog or my fanfiction or my novel. I've been pushing myself to work on my novel anyway, but after that, it's even harder to convince myself to blog.

I feel bad about that though. I really want to post something. It's just that, when I do attempt to write a post, I can't bring myself to publish it. I'm not happy with it at all.

That's lead me to today where I'm going to post one of my favorite music videos by Little Mix, i.e. my favorite girl group.

Hopefully, I'll get back to actually writing posts soon.

Life Post: Writing and Teeth Struggles

I've been terrible about writing absolutely anything for the past week or so. That includes blog posts but isn't limited to them. The past week has also included me struggling to work on my novel with varying success every day. I don't think I actually managed all that much. That's just the sort of mood I've been in the past week. Pretty much since the shooting in Orlando.

Hopefully, I'll be past that soon though. I plan on finishing up some edits on a fanfiction I've been working on. My first ever Mortal Instruments fanfiction actually. I've been working on it for months because I completely re-wrote it after not being happy with it. Considering it's only a one-shot of several thousand words, it's ridiculous how long it's taken me. I'm really excited to post the finished product though, so I think going through and doing the final edits will put me in a better mood towards writing. Plus, I'll finally have something I've been working on for ages out of the way.

In my last life post, I mentioned that my tooth was bothering. I've been to the dentist since. There was an explanation as to what was causing the pain, but I know I'll butcher it by trying to recount it. It was something about how my filling was too flat, which caused pain when I bit down. She reshaped the filling in about ten minutes but there wasn't anyway to test if eating would still hurt while I was there. Luckily, it doesn't hurt as badly. There are still times when I'm eating something crunchy or somewhat hard where there will be a bit of pain as soon as a bite down. Maybe I should go back to the dentist, but I honestly don't want to. I already had the filling done twice on top of this latest event. I'd rather just be done with it.

Talking about both troubles writing and my tooth problems led to this post being more negative than I would have liked. Whoops. In happier news, I've been packing for vacation yesterday and today, and I'm excited about that. Unfortunately, that's not exactly a topic that provides me with much to say.

Book Review: Bream Gives Me Hiccups by Jesse Eisenberg

ISBN: 0802124046
Published: September 8th, 2015
Publisher: Grove Press
Received: Christmas present
Read from June 15th to 16th, 2016
Synopsis from Goodreads:

Taking its title from a group of stories that begin the book, Bream Gives Me Hiccups moves from contemporary L.A. to the dormrooms of an American college to ancient Pompeii, throwing the reader into a universe of social misfits, reimagined scenes from history, and ridiculous overreactions. In one piece, a tense email exchange between a young man and his girlfriend is taken over by the man’s sister, who is obsessed with the Bosnian genocide (The situation reminds me of a little historical blip called the Karadordevo agreement); in another, a college freshman forced to live with a roommate is stunned when one of her ramen packets goes missing (she didn’t have “one” of my ramens. She had a chicken ramen); in another piece, Alexander Graham Bell has teething problems with his invention (I’ve been calling Mabel all day, she doesn’t pick up! Yes, of course I dialed the right number – 2!).
United by Eisenberg’s gift for humor and character, and grouped into chapters that each open with an illustration by award-winning cartoonist Jean Jullien, the witty pieces collected in Bream Gives Me Hiccups explore the various insanities of the modern world, and mark the arrival of a fantastically funny, self-ironic, and original voice.

Review:

I am sure there is someone out there who would enjoy this book, but...it's not me. The book gave off the feel of trying to be original but not being enjoyable. Each section (technically, they're each stories, but I'm not sure I'd call them that) is  short, and that may have been the only thing that kept me going with the book. There was nothing long that I had to push myself through.

There were a couple of parts that held my interest slightly, but for the most part, I was bored. It's kind of a strange thing because you can tell that Eisenberg was trying to be creative with the way the stories were presented. I just feel like it missed the mark and failed to be humorous in the way it was intended to be.

The right audience for this book would be a small one I think. It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and I doubt I would recommend it to anyone unless I knew they were a huge fan of Eisenberg himself. That's just about the only group I can imagine recommending the book to.

Book Review: We Are an African People by Russell J. Rickford

ISBN: 0199861471
Published: February 1st, 2016
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Received: Netgalley
Read from June 11th to 13th, 2016
Synopsis from Goodreads:

By 1970, more than 60 "Pan African nationalist" schools, from preschools to post-secondary ventures, had appeared in urban settings across the United States. The small, independent enterprises were often accused of teaching hate and were routinely harassed by authorities. Yet these institutions served as critical mechanisms for transmitting black consciousness. Founded by activist-intellectuals, the schools strove not simply to bolster the academic skills and self-esteem of inner-city African-American youth but also to decolonize minds and embody the principles of self-determination and African identity.
In We Are An African People, historian Russell Rickford traces the brief lives of these autonomous black institutions created to claim some of the self-determination that the integrationist civil rights movement had failed to provide. Influenced by Third World theorists and anticolonial movements, organizers of the schools saw formal education as a means of creating a vanguard of young activists devoted to the struggle for black political sovereignty throughout the world. Most of the schools were short-lived, but their stories have much to tell us about Pan Africanism as a social and intellectual movement and as a key part of an indigenous black nationalism.
A former journalist, Rickford uses a virtually unknown movement to explore black nationhood and a particularly fertile period of political, cultural, and social revitalization that envisioned an alternate society.

Review:

This book is dense. It's offers as much information as you could want, but because it requires that you're thinking and taking in a lot of information, it is not always an easy read. This is a book meant for people who go into it with a high level of interest in its topic. As someone studying to be an educator, I viewed this information as important for me to know and take in.

The one thing I struggled with while reading was keeping track of the dates. The various chapters sometimes jump around in time, and as someone who struggles to remember dates, I did struggle with keeping track of when things were happening, particularly in comparison to each other. However, that was by far my own failing rather than the book's.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning about independent black schools in America over time and who isn't afraid of the time commitment that comes from reading this book. It's a nice resource and full of information.

I received this book through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.