Alison's Journal

Weirdness abounds. As does car trouble. I wrote a humor essay in...oh, 1992 or so, about our seemingly endless bouts of car trouble, but they amazingly did end. (Psst, want to publish it?? It got honorable mention in a contest, but I've never found a market for it.) So I hope we're not starting another story like that! We're having our car towed today from a store parking lot, for failure of the alternator belt we just got fixed. I assume it wasn't fixed right the first time around, considering that the brand new belt is now ripped, curled, & generally mangled!

I finally had a chance to read Storky last night. Subtitled: How I Lost My Nickname and Won the Girl. At first I was happy with the ending. Then, pathetically, I found myself thinking, "So...why does a 9th grader need to get the girl, anyway?" I was jealous! OK, I got the guy between 9th & 10th grades, but it only lasted a week, and then he stood me up on my birthday. After that...let's just say it was a long time until I got the guy again. You see why I write YA fiction? I guess I haven't quite gotten over my teen years! But I liked them. Meanwhile, this whole grown-up thing is seeming like a raw deal to me. I'm feeling the need to change things. Not to stop writing, but to write more. To live more fully. To take the words I've been quoting to myself for years and make them mean something in my life. Like these words in Tennyson's poem Ulysses: "How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As tho’ to breathe were life." And these: "Come, my friends, ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world." (Easier said than done!)