10 ways to know whether you are a Rabid Dog Owner:

1) You want to raise your leg when you have to urinate.
2) When you see another dog’s poop on the sidewalk,
you want to smell it.
3) You have an urge to be petted behind your ears.
4) Dog food makes you salivate.
5) You want to bark at strangers.
6) You want to stick your head out of the car window
when you are driving.
7) You want to lick yourself when you are wounded.
8) When you’re happy, you want to wag your tail.
9) You want to chase cats.
10) You feel more comfortable on your hands and your
knees.

If you said “Yes” to seven or more of the above-
you are a Rabid Dog Owner-BEWARE!

It is a green valley.

Green grass shines  all the way.

Green leaves  glitter round the bay.

Green hedges have a lovely say.

Green signifies prosperity.

Greens  deliver immunity.

Green indicates get ready.

Green   triggers growth steady.

It is the lush green that brings  cheer.

It s the lively green that drops  dear.

It is the bottle green that attracts all near.

It is the leaf green that  expresses nothing to fear.

So much so green greets  all  .

Green  carries an enthusiastic call.

Green  sets the tune  of a  crawl.

Green gives an impetus  without a brawl..

 .   

Right now I’m supposed to say “I’m heading to bed now. Let’s see what tomorrow will bring!” but I would be lying. Instead I am going to spend way too much time planning out my exercises and read a good amount, heading to bed around 12:30. Tomorrow will be productive, but it will be a late start.
Until then, c’ya!

Disclaimer: I do not own this image!!

I first heard about The American Pavilion Cannes Film Program during my freshman year of college. The program was mentioned by the professor of an “Adaptation” course I was taking (we would read a short story or novel, then watch the movie adaptation of it). Over the years, I’ve thought of applying to the program and this year I finally did.

I really didn’t know my chances of getting into this program. But, as my motto has been for the past year or so, you never know until you apply.

Wednesday (December 19th), I had a phone interview with The American Pavilion. After the phone call, I really wasn’t sure how it went. I just tried my best to answer every question as honestly and enthusiastically as possible. I especially wasn’t sure since my answer for “the most recent film you’ve watched” was the 2009 British dark comedy In The Loop. Furthermore, I was shocked to hear that I would be notified by Friday the same week whether I got in or not!

Well, today is Friday and I received the e-mail… I’ve been accepted into The American Pavilion 2013 Cannes Film Program!!!!!!!!!

The program begins on May 12 and ends of May 27. I have no idea what to expect, but I hope I’m not too star-struck. According to the interviewer, the program is what you make of it, so that means I’m packing all my business cards, postcards, and copies of my screenplays.

After filling out a bunch of forms for The Pavilion, I guess I need to figure out what to pack as well as brush up on some French?

Wish me luck! Or “bonne chance”?

***

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***

Copyright 2012 by G. E. Gallas

      21 suggestions for success

1. Marry the right person. This one decision will determine 90% of your happiness or misery.
2. Work at something you enjoy and that’s worthy of your time and talent.
3. Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.
4. Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know
5. Be forgiving of yourself and others.
6. Be generous.
7. Have a grateful heart.
8. Persistence, persistence, persistence.
9. Discipline yourself to save money on even the most modest salary.
10. Treat everyone you meet like you want to be treated.
11. Commit yourself to constant improvement.
12. Commit yourself to quality.
13. Understand that happiness is not based on possessions, power or prestige, but on relationships with people you love and respect.
14. Be loyal.
15. Be honest.
16. Be a self-starter.
17. Be decisive even if it means you’ll sometimes be wrong.
18. Stop blaming others. Take responsibility for every area of your life.
19. Be bold and courageous. When you look back on your life, you’ll regret the things you didn’t do more than the ones you did.
20. Take good care of those you love
21. Don’t do anything that wouldn’t make your Mom proud.

Thank you, author H. Jackson Brown, Jr.   (*Please note the emphasis above is mine.)

So I came across this list quite by accident it would seem, although I no longer believe in coincidences. Just yesterday, I was sitting my mentor/life coach and we were devising my vision and context for 2013. As part of that, I had declared that I will be the most positive and enthusiastic person I know. I had, in fact, borrowed those words from a person who had described me as the most positive and enthusiastic person he knows. High praise indeed. If you knew me, you would realise just how big those words mean to me.

This has been the best year of my life. The most transformative year of my life. Statements of fact. Attested by me and those closest to me. I’ve finally become me. The real me. Not obstructed by negative thoughts or perceptions created by me or imposed on me by anyone.

And to my surprise and delight, I like the real me. I found the real me is positive and enthusiastic. Friendly. Funny. Silly. No longer has the Sunday back to work blues. Does not dread Mondays. Can find the courage to ask a cute guy out to coffee (and he said yes). Has gained a few pounds and still fits all her clothing. Finally learned to walk in high heels (and is now accumulating an enviable shoe collection). Is absolutely grateful and content with what she has and still wants more out of life.

I hope, as we approach the end of 2012 and the start of 2013, that all of you will have something to be grateful for, that you can look back on the year and see how far you’ve come on some things and for those things that you haven’t made progress, perhaps you should take a tip or two from the 21 listed above.

Have a great festive season. If you want to start something for yourself, do it NOW. January 1 is not a magical date blessed with extra powers to help you accomplish what you wish to do. The power lies with you and within you. Make sure what you wish for is genuinely important and meaningful to you. Sit with it for a few days. Make the promise to yourself. Then go DO IT. Don’t sit there and overthink it. Step outside and go get it.  Make small steps in the right direction. Progress is progress, no matter how small. Record your steps every day so that when you look back, you can see how far you’ve come. That will spur you to continue. Be your own cheerleader. Do it for yourself.

I’m now tired but not tired, I’ve been asleep loads this weekend due to being ill and have pretty much spent the last two days in bed so now that it’s actually time to sleep I don’t think I can. I also haven’t got my boyfriend here which is odd, he is so good at helping me sleep it now eels impossible. My bed also feels huge all of a sudden now he isn’t here and it just makes me feel lonely. Feeling lonely is one of the worst feelings ever, luckily this is just mild loneliness compared to the deep down “in my gut” loneliness I usually feel. I think it’s more in contrast to the weekend as I’ve had someone by me 24/7 for like two days and now I’m cuddled up in bed on my own, it’s not exactly a great feeling. I really shouldn’t moan though, especially after the lovely, minus the illness, weekend I have. Luckily enough I am well enough in time for college tomorrow, please note the sarcasm there. I really can’t be bothered with it! I’m gonna guess I will have a restful night tonight due to my odd sleeping pattern which means I will be shattered tomorrow meaning I will be even less enthusiastic for college. Wish me luck.

Yours Truly
PredictableTeen
xox

“Promise Yourself To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. To talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet. To make all your friends feel that there is something in them To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true. To think only the best, to work only for the best, and to expect only the best. To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own. To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future. To wear a cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a smile. To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others. To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble. To think well of yourself and to proclaim this fact to the world, not in loud words but great deeds. To live in faith that the whole world is on your side so long as you are true to the best that is in you.” ― Christian D. Larson, Your Forces and How to Use Them

This referee gets a little over zealous as Nets forward Kris Humphries attempts a free throw during the Nets/Raptors match-up on 12/12/12

Even holding down the rigours of another job, and even accounting for the phenomenal length of his finished product, the writing of a book is a process that takes a few months for a professional writer (Dame Barbara Cartland once released 25 books in the space of a year, but that’s another story), and perhaps a year or two for an amateur like Tolkein. He started writing the book in December 1937, and it was finally published 18 years later in 1955.

This was partly a reflection of the difficulties Tolkein had in publishing his work (more on that later), but this also reflects the measured, meticulous and very serious approach Tolkein took to his writing. He started his story from scratch, each time going in a completely different direction with an entirely different plot, at least three times. His first effort, for instance, was due to chronicle another adventure of his protagonist Bilbo from The Hobbit, making it a direct sequel in both a literal and spiritual sense. However, he then remembered about the ring Bilbo found beneath the mountains, won (or stolen, depending on your point of view) from the creature Gollum, and the strange power it held; not just invisibility, as was Bilbo’s main use for it, but the hypnotic effect it had on Gollum (he even subsequently rewrote that scene for The Hobbit‘s second edition to emphasise that effect). He decided that the strange power of the ring was a more natural direction to follow, and so he wrote about that instead.

Progress was slow. Tolkein went months at a time without working on the book, making only occasional, sporadic yet highly focused bouts of progress. Huge amounts were cross-referenced or borrowed from his earlier writings concerning the mythology, history & background of Middle Earth, Tolkein constantly trying to make his mythic world feel and, in a sense, be as real as possible, but it was mainly due to the influence of his son Christopher, who Tolkein would send chapters to whilst he was away fighting the Second World War in his father’s native South Africa, that the book ever got finished at all. When it eventually did, Tolkein had been working the story of Bilbo’s son Frodo and his adventure to destroy the Ring of Power for over 12 years. His final work was over 1000 pages long, spread across six ‘books’, as well as being laden with appendices to explain & offer background information, and he called it The Lord of The Rings (in reference to his overarching antagonist, the Dark Lord Sauron).

A similar story had, incidentally, been attempted once before; Der Ring des Nibelungen is an opera (well, four operas) written by German composer Richard Wagner during the 19th century, traditionally performed over the course of four consecutive nights (yeah, you have to be pretty committed to sit through all of that) and also known as ‘The Ring Cycle’- it’s where ‘Ride of The Valkyries’ comes from. The opera follows the story of a ring, made from the traditionally evil Rhinegold (gold panned from the Rhine river), and the trail of death, chaos and destruction it leaves in its wake between its forging & destruction. Many commentators have pointed out the close similarities between the two, and as a keen follower of Germanic mythology Tolkein certainly knew the story, but Tolkein rubbished any suggestion that he had borrowed from it, saying “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases”. You can probably work out my approximate personal opinion from the title of this post, although I wouldn’t read too much into it.

Even once his epic was finished, the problems weren’t over. Once finished, he quarrelled with Allen & Unwin over his desire to release LOTR in one volume, along with his still-incomplete Silmarillion (that he wasn’t allowed to may explain all the appendices). He then turned to Collins, but they claimed his book was in urgent need of an editor and a license to cut (my words, not theirs, I should add). Many other people have voiced this complaint since, but Tolkein refused and ordered Collins to publish by 1952. This they failed to do, so Tolkein wrote back to Allen & Unwin and eventually agreed to publish his book in three parts; The Fellowship of The Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of The King (a title Tolkein, incidentally, detested because it told you how the book ended).

Still, the book was out now, and the critics… weren’t that enthusiastic. Well, some of them were, certainly, but the book has always had its detractors among the world of literature, and that was most certainly the case during its inception. The New York Times criticised Tolkein’s academic approach, saying he had “formulated a high-minded belief in the importance of his mission as a literary preservationist, which turns out to be death to literature itself”, whilst others claimed it, and its characters in particular, lacked depth. Even Hugo Dyson, one of Tolkein’s close friends and a member of his own literary group, spent public readings of the book lying on a sofa shouting complaints along the lines of “Oh God, not another elf!”. Unlike The Hobbit, which had been a light-hearted children’s story in many ways, The Lord of The Rings was darker & more grown up, dealing with themes of death, power and evil and written in a far more adult style; this could be said to have exposed it to more serious critics and a harder gaze than its predecessor, causing some to be put off by it (a problem that wasn’t helped by the sheer size of the thing).

However, I personally am part of the other crowd, those who have voiced their opinions in nearly 500 five-star reviews on Amazon (although one should never read too much into such figures) and who agree with the likes of CS  Lewis, The Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times of the time that “Here is a book that will break your heart”, that it is “among the greatest works of imaginative fiction of the twentieth century” and that “the English-speaking world is divided into those who have read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and those who are going to read them”. These are the people who have shown the truth in the review of the New York Herald Tribune: that Tolkein’s masterpiece was and is “destined to outlast our time”.

But… what exactly is it that makes Tolkein’s epic so special, such a fixture; why, even years after its publication as the first genuinely great work of fantasy, it is still widely regarded as the finest work the genre has ever produced? I could probably write an entire book just to try and answer that question (and several people probably have done), but to me it was because Tolkein understood, absolutely perfectly and fundamentally, exactly what he was trying to write. Many modern fantasy novels try to be uber-fantastical, or try to base themselves around an idea or a concept, in some way trying to find their own level of reality on which their world can exist, and they often find themselves in a sort of awkward middle ground, but Tolkein never suffered that problem because he knew that, quite simply, he was writing a myth, and he knew exactly how that was done. Terry Pratchett may have mastered comedic fantasy, George RR Martin may be the king of political-style fantasy, but only JRR Tolkein has, in recent times, been able to harness the awesome power of the first source of story; the legend, told around the campfire, of the hero and the villain, of the character defined by their virtues over their flaws, of the purest, rawest adventure in the pursuit of saving what is good and true in this world. These are the stories written to outlast the generations, and Tolkein’s mastery of them is, to me, the secret to his masterpiece.