My Diary

There's nothing incredibly distinct about Meg Cabot's writing, aside from the diary-format of her Princess series, which is not even super-particular. Each entry is headed by something along the lines of "English Class" or "Lily's House," or provides a specific date, and sometimes hour. From there, it's Princess Mia's stream of conciousness, as is typical for teenage girl diaries. She'll talk about her family, friends, boyfriend, favorite television shows (particularly Buffy The Vampire Slayer), school and other daily activities, etc. Readers become familiar with all of these as they follow a deeper plotline. Being the diary of a single protagonist, though, the novels take a relatively limited first-person point-of-view, which calls for stronger attempts to understand various characters and situations. Which is annoyingly fun (by which I mean, Among the books I canNOT put down, even at the beach).
But speaking in terms of Meg Cabot's style, her characters are very real, with both positive and negative attributes, with no person or situation absolutely perfect. The stories have a very feminine appeal, focusing on things like pop culture and boys; plus, there's the fact that she's a princess, which is something pretty much every girl has either wanted to be or made fun of other girls for wanting to be.


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Parents' Computer, October 19th, 7:55pm (despite whatever time shows up on this blog)

You know what bugs me? Glee. No, not Glee, I'm kinda in love with it. But all these twisted plotlines in Glee. Like, where it's okay for Finn to kiss Rachel even though he has a pregnant girlfriend. It's not his baby, but he doesn't know that! And regardless, he's committed himself to someone else.
Yet he continues to take interest in Rachel. And somehow, this is okay. Because Quinn, his girlfriend, is beautiful and mean. The latter he doesn't know, either, he just knows Rachel's also cute and interested in him and they sing leads together for their glee club. And we, as an audience, are supposed to accept all this. We're supposed to root for Underdog Rachel to get the guy. Where, if the roles were reversed, if Finn was Rachel's boyfriend and he kissed the cheerleading captain, he'd be a bad guy. But, in essence, he's breaking the same social rules.
Same with main character Will: He's flirty with his co-worker Emma. And we want her to win him over even though he's married. His wife's not being totally honest with him, either (in this case, it's that she's pretending to be pregnant, rather than lying about the father). But he's completely unaware of this, and continues to have this little crush on Emma (who also, in recent episodes, has found a significant other).
I enjoy the fact that there's not absolute protagonist or good guy. But what kinda lessons are we supposed to take from this? That if you're pitiful, it's okay to be The Other Woman? I don't think so. Being loyal to someone you're committed to with is probably the most basic premise of a relationship.
It all reminds me of Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me." Pretty, pretty song (Ismaeel sings it for us all the time on the bus). But, again, it's the sweet, "plain" girl that we sympathize for and want good things for, even if it means bringing down other people (in this case, the cheer caption that wears high heels and short skirts).
(I'd also like to point out that in the music video, it's not until Taylor's all made up at the end that the boy she's singing about leaves his girlfriend. Just something else that bothers me.)
As Rachel (real-Rachel, not Rachel from Glee) likes to say, Speaking of.. actually, nothing that we were just talking about.
Or I guess this relates in that it's something else getting on my nerves lately. But really it's irrelevant. Texting. Like, typically it's totally fine, and a convenient way to communicate with multiple people while doing multiple other things. But when you start to have a heart-to-heart with somebody via text (which, I guess the moral of the story would be to find a more efficient way to communicate, but we don't do that), your words are less or overly effective, people misunderstand one another, and all kinds of new drama can be created.
When I'm upset with someone, I feel awful about not sending smiley faces. It makes what I'm trying to say almost stubborn, which isn't the effect I'm going for. So I'll re-work what I'm saying, and sometime throw in a couple smileys. And then when people don't get that I'm angry with them, it's totally my fault.
Or the opposite happens. I'll send a quick text and forget Haha's and faces and exclamation points, and then worry that people will think I'm angry when I'm totally not.
And the worst is getting people mixed up. Typically for me, it's my mother and boyfriend. I can't tell you how many Can you pick up clear nail polish?'s or We're out of milk.'s or Your genius daughter got an A on the spanish test.'s I have sent to Will since we started dating. Kind of embarrassing, especially the genius daughter ones because, obviously, if I were a true genius I'd be able to recognize the difference between Madre and Will.
But I still text. And watch Glee. And love Taylor Swift. So I'm thinkin' I just need to get over all this. Good to get it out of my system, though.