How to get an Affectionate Kitty

This is for all you people asking.

Haha just kidding, no one's been asking. But I do have a super-affectionate kitty, and I know people whose cats aren't so affectionate. I've always wondered why this is, so I got to thinking about it, and now I've made a set of super easy-to-follow instructions on how to get a kitty just as affectionate as mine!

Things you'll need:

• A kitty (male or female)
• Cat food and a place for the cat to do their business
• An animal shelter or friends willing to take on unwanted kittens
• Older siblings (3+, 4 recommended, males also recommended)
• 10+ years

URL Change

I warned about this on Tumblr but I forgot to mention it here.

My previous URL was Disociative.Blogspot.com - and while I kinda liked it, no one had any idea what it was supposed to mean. Because I'm interactive with people on Tumblr now (which, being linked to this blog, I figured should always share the URL), I wanted to change my URL to make it easier to read and understand.

The new URL is PagesOfKenna.Blogspot.com. I decided to add my name in, since it's always a bit awkward trying to remember the names of Tumblr users, when their URL is all you generally see. It's pretty simple and self-explanatory now, so there's no need to try to explain what the name means.

I don't think this change will cause too much conflict, since everyone following me is probably doing so through Google's Blogger account system or from my constant updates on my unlinked Facebook account - hopefully this will actually make things better, since the name is easier to remember.

New Classes (again)

Spring semester has finally started up again here in the desert, so here comes my obligatory 'new semester' overview. We've had quite a long break between Fall and Spring semesters (in the past I believe there was a short Winter quarter in there, but with budget cuts that's now gone), and I know I'm not the only one who's pretty relieved classes are up again. Break is nice, but when I'm not looking for work I'm sitting around the house with nothing to do.

My schedule this semester is pretty full; I'm trying to make up for having a pretty meager selection last Spring. Not only am I at the college for a longer period of time this semester, but I'm also having to familiarize myself with parts of the campus I've never been around before.

A Desire to Make Things Better

Early last week a girl I happened to be following on Tumblr posted a query to her followers asking if anyone would be willing to edit an essay she had written. I, as you might know, have quite a bit of experience with writing and editing (or at least more than the average internet user), and I instantly thought that I could do so easily. Instead of informing her, however, I kept quiet; she seemed to be a relatively popular user, and of her many followers I was a random nobody.

She reblogged the query again an hour later, at which point I realized that, despite my expectations, nobody had responded. Since I really wasn't doing anything that afternoon, I nervously sent her a message, which she responded to a few minutes later, and before long I had her essay in my email box ready to be looked over.

Thoughts on Love and Selfishness

This isn't at all what I meant to talk about today, but I read something recently that got me to thinking, and it would be sacrilege not to publish my every thought (that was sarcasm, btw). This is going to be short, and probably a bit aesthetically unappealing as I'm not going to bother finding a bunch of random, semi-related images to sprinkle around.

I just got finished reading a romance novel, and at one point the male romantic lead mentioned to the female romantic lead that, for at least one second, he thought he would be willing to let her die in order to spare her the pain of seeing him die. When MRL (I'm initializing) said this, my respect for him grew enormously.

I'm mostly talking about the Great Romantic Love today, the heroic love from romances and not real life. There seems to be a thought going around that this kind of love is completely selfless, where both romantic leads are willing to do anything in order to make their significant other happy, even risking their lives so that the other might survive. I gave it some thought a long time ago (and by 'a long time' I mean I think I was in Middle School), and I decided that I largely disagreed with this thought.

This came up again in High School, when we read Ayn Rand's Anthem for IB English in our Sophomore year. Ayn Rand, in case you don't know, created the philosophy of Objectivism, which essentially states that man's highest goal in life should be to obtain his own happiness. This idea, of course, chaffed with a lot of the students, though I found myself agreeing with it in at least some respects. Anthem itself was a sort of allegory used to explain Rand's philosophy.

A major part of the story is the fact that Equality, the name given to the main character by society, falls in love with a girl named Liberty, who he's not supposed to even know. A few students brought this up, wondering how he could be falling in love with someone if he's supposed to be thinking only about his own happiness, and our teacher tried to explain that the act of loving is mostly selfish, saying something to the effect of "he loves her because making her happy is something that makes him happy."

I completely understood that; when thinking about love and selfishness, my mind is almost always drawn to think about the obligatory 'dying in order to save your lover's life' scene in most heroic romances. The hero of the scene, helplessly in love with the main love interest of the fiction, would rather die than be forced to live in a world without him/her.

Which is nice until you consider that, by dying, the hero is forcing their significant other to do the very thing they (the hero) could not possibly stand to do. That's OK if the significant other didn't feel exactly the same way about our hero, but that's rarely the case in Great Heroic Romances. So, what; you can't bare to live with the misery of your significant other's death, but you don't mind is s/he had to live with that misery?

Sure, it sounds a bit narcissistic to assume your lover will be as broken up about your death as you would be about theirs, but essentially you're coming off as selfish either way.

This is something I've been thinking about; I just finished re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo earlier this week, which has a somewhat similar Great Romance subplot, and the life-for-a-life thing isn't rare in heroic fiction with romantic subplots. That's why, reading this other book, I really grew to respect the MRL, not just for all the awesome things he did in the story, but for being, at that moment, extremely selfless, wishing to spare the FRL more suffering (which kind of ended up being a major theme within the story).

Phil the Flying Shark

I'm not a huge bragger; I don't find joy in bragging about things that I have or so on. In fact, despite being a generally happy person, I feel a bit awkward whenever I talk about things that make me happy.

I'm going to break that habit for a moment, however, to explain how incredibly stoked I am about my new pet flying shark.

Sorry for the low quality - cell phone cameras, y'know.

New Year's Traditions

I may be a week late, but Happy New Year everyone! 2012 is a year that I know many people have been looking forward to.

Personally, I'm not very big on New Year's Resolutions; everybody jokes about how we all forget them within a couple of weeks, and it's true. I agree that goal-setting is a worthy activity, but waiting until that specific day to start them seems a bit arbitrary.

As a family, we've also never been pretty big on the whole 'New Year's Eve' thing either. I hardly ever remember staying up to cheer on the New Year, or watching the ball drop in New York. A friend introduced me to the idea of eating black-eyed peas for good luck, but I don't think my family has ever done anything of significance for luck in the new year. Generally, I'd stay up late (as a normal teenager on break) and listen to our neighbors making noise before finally nodding off an hour later.

December Update

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, I should be back to regular updates this week! I already missed Monday, however, so we'll see how far that goes.

Regarding NaNoWriMo - I won! Again. This was my fourth year in a row winning, and my final word-count was somewhere around 100,211. In case you're wondering, that's about 139 single-spaced pages on my word processor, which might translate to about 350-400 pages in a paperback. It's very, very rough, with copious misspellings, grammatical errors, and plot points that I only remembered to add in halfway through, and are thus out of context.

I sort of feel like this has been my hardest NaNoWriMo yet, though I'm sure I've felt that every year. Still jobless, I doubled my word goal from 50k to 100k, and managed to work away at it pretty easily for the first week or so. During the second and third weeks, I remembered that a particular video game that I had been waiting for would be coming out before the end of the month, and in order to give me some days off to play it, I averaged about a thousand words extra every day.

NaNoWriMo Music

One thing I like to do while I write is listen to good mood-setting music. This means something different depending on what I'm writing, but it helps me get into the feel of what I'm writing, and if others are home at the time, it helps block out whatever noise they're making.

My first year of NaNoWriMo, I listened almost exclusively to a Japanese band called Plastic Tree. Listening to English lyrics, I'd found, really distracted me (if I knew the song, I wanted to sing along, and if I didn't, I wanted to find out what the song was about, and either way lyrics always ended up in my writing), and since I was really into Japanese modern culture at the time, I found the Plastic Tree songs very helpful.

My novel in '08 was a period piece called Princess Kate about a king's daughter who was slowly discovering that she had a multiple personality disorder (the actual name for the condition is Dissociative Identity Disorder - DID - and that's where I got the URL for my blogs). Plastic Tree's music matched the tone of my novel because most of their recent stuff was softer, with a melancholic sound with some occasional heavier rock influences.

NaNoWriMo '11

Happy Halloween, dear readers! I hope everyone's having a great time dressing up, trick-or-treating, going to parties, or whatever it is you do to celebrate!

Halloween marks the last day of October, as you well know, and the last day before the writing craze NaNoWriMo begins. I don't mean to detract from Halloween here, but NaNoWriMo is a bit higher up on my list of priorities - and by 'a bit' I mean that I've been planning my novel for months, while I don't even have a Halloween costume this year (in case I need to go out, however, I can just grab my Hufflepuff scarf and say I'm studying charms and herbology).

HUFFLEPUFF.

Shadow of the Colossus

If you've been paying attention to anything I've been writing, then you may remember that I like stories. All kinds of stories - deep and meaningful, or light and fun; fantasy, sci-fi, or realistic; stories from books, graphic novels, TV shows, movies, and yes, even video games.

Because sometimes, in my opinion, video games can have the best stories. Sure, there are your silly arcade games and pointless shooters or beat 'em ups, but for every handful of those, there's at least one game with a truly captivating story. One of the greatest gems of literary fiction that I've ever seen happens to be the video game Shadow of the Colossus.

Trip to Oregon: Part III

There was no blog post on Monday, because I spent the morning coming home from a week-long stay in Portland, Oregon. We flew up there last Thursday to attend the Saturday wedding of one of my older brothers, and, as you might image, it was wonderful and fun and amazing!

Adventures in Cat-Training

We recently bought my cat a scratching post. She's been getting older, and goes outside less often, so she had taken to scratching at our furniture. Our old couch was fraying at all the corners where she'd attack it, so when we got this new one a few months back, we used a special kind of double-sided tape to keep her away; the fabric on my piano bench was also coming apart, though now it's been reupholstered.

I've also noticed my cat's claws getting caught in things. Cats, unlike dogs, can retract their claws (well, except for cheetahs), but when my cat stretches out in front of the doormat, she flexes her claws into the fabric to hold herself steady, and finds herself pulling the carpet up with her as she tries to move. Something had to be done.

Intense

Of course, you understand, I keep hearing 'In Tents'.

I know it's a stupid joke, but I'm not exaggerating; every time someone uses the word 'intense', I think of tents (such as 'that movie was in tents!' or 'this book is in tents!' or 'that was an in tents car ride'). When I'm in mixed company, I refrain from actually saying anything, but I always think it in my head.

I was hanging out with friends today, which is why today's post is short and late. My friends are leaving for far off colleges in a week or so, so we're trying to fit in as much "chillax" time as possibly before we can't anymore. How did people handle this before in internet? Well, I guess they wrote letters, right?

Computer Troubles

I like to write blogs reviewing things I've seen and talking about stuff going on in the world that I think you guys would be interested in, but every so often I have to talk about things going on with myself, so you'll understand where I'm coming from (actually, I've been doing this a lot recently). Today I wanted to take some time out from your regularly schedule broadcast and talk about my computer troubles.

Lately, computers and I have been having a strained relationship.

Wisdom Teeth Extraction

I got my wisdom teeth removed today. They're gone. I'm not 100% sure what they were doing there in the first place, since it seems like everyone just wants to get them out eventually. I'm sure a five minute Google search would lend me an answer, but I find I don't actually care enough to go look it up. Ah, 21st century.

I got to the dental surgery place a bit early, after driving myself and my dad there in his truck - which is a stick-shift, by the way. Remember how I said I never wanted to have to drive manual transmissions? It's because I hate them, and I think I'm going to either die or kill someone else when I'm in them. A few minutes ago, I looked up "pros and cons of learning to drive stick-shift," and you want to know what the best 'pro' reason was? "A lot more fun to drive."

It's totally not.

Wake Up Juice

Getting ready for the school year to start became official last Sunday, when I turned on my phone's morning alarm tone. The particular tone I use has gone through some changes in the past year, and since I'm doing my 'back to school' special, I wanted to highlight a few of them.

When I started school last year, I didn't have a phone, so I woke up using my favorite little Bob alarm clock. I got it years ago from Brookstone, after seeing a friend use it at summer camp, and I always thought it was super cute. Unfortunately, it emits a sharp, repetitious beep in its attempt to wake me up, and listening to that day after day, year after year, was grating my nerves.

First Day

About a year ago, I came onto my local community college campus to start my first day of classes. It was a truly terrifying experience.

For starters, I had to take the bus to campus. The college campus is a 20-30 minute drive from my house, and since I didn't have my license at the time, one of my parents would have to drop me off on their way to work (which, by the way, is in the opposite direction). Instead of taking me all the way out to campus an hour early just to get to work on time, they dropped me off at a local bus stop. My first experience riding a bus was that first day of school, and I had no idea what to do. I managed to deposit the money and find a seat without too much hassle, though I ended up sitting in the same spot for almost the entire semester.

Vacation Time: Results Show

Monday, August the first, my parents and I set out for our official summer-vacation-get-away thing. The goal, I believe, was to visit my brother in Utah, see a few people in Idaho, and get to know said-brother's future in-laws in Oregon while we scouted out places to eat in Portland for the upcoming wedding. My own personal goals, meanwhile, were to work through some of my 'to-read' backlog, figure out our new car radio, and drive at least one leg of the trip without mom yelling at me (she's a very nervous passenger).

The drive to Utah took about ten hours, and I drove the first three. The road goes straight through the Mojave Desert, which is relatively pleasant to look at but pretty boring to drive through. Add that to the fact that I didn't know where I was going, and I was kinda stressed (I'm not used to using the overdrive button, so there were a few people riding my tail, and mom was finicky throughout), and by the end of my shift my back was sore and I was ready to stop.

Like this, but with no clouds. Ever.

Monday the Fourth

I don't have a main topic for today's blog, so even though there are several things I'm going to go over, it'll be relatively quick.

About a week ago, I preformed a system restore on my dad's old laptop (which I've informally adopted) to clean it of any malware. For some reason, after the software reset, the 'Control' key fell off of the keyboard (In case there are any computer illiterates following along: there's no reason that something in the software would effect the keyboard hardware). I was unable to click it back into place, so instead of wasting the opportunity, I decided to sew the 'ctrl' key onto a bracelet that I could wear around, because the symbolism was too good to pass up. I don't know if I'll ever actually wear it, but it's pretty cool looking.

In other news, this past week has been pretty interesting. I managed to make all three of my blog appointments last week, so I'm really not doing too bad, but last Monday was a pretty late update (surprisingly, according to my stats, my post on the 27th got an unexpected amount of hits. Who knew people were so interested in hats?) I blame Monday's tardiness on my mom's compulsive desire to catch up to me on Psych.