My Jingle Spells 4 Song: I Wonder As I Wander

“Like all great cities, Amsterdam brims with contradiction. Maps of the Red Light District are dominated by a church, Swans swim up the canal while on the banks of that canal, a woman stands half naked in front of a glass door waiting for customers. Amsterdam is both the city that hid Anne Frank and the city that gave her up. An ancient city perpetually experiencing new construction, A city full of boats that separate you from water and contain water. These same contradictions are in all of us; they’re in me, at least. And so I forgot that I had been awake for 30 hours and kept walking. Grateful to be a little boat, full of water, still floating.” - John Green


I look at the Stats page and see that I've gotten about 70 views today, which is WAY more than normal. By following the links that those viewers followed to me backwards, I discovered that the song I submitted to Jingle Spells 4 is now available for download. Apparently they didn't want me to go by my name after all (they thought it sounded too much like Oliver Wood of the Gryffindor Quidditch team), so I'm the one labeled "Phoenix Song." 
If you can't stand my singing (it's hard for me to tell exactly how bad it is, since I'm more attuned to my own screw-ups than others'), I will be posting a lyric-less version...at some point soon.


So that's exciting. Hello, people from The Leaky Cauldron!


I think it's been awhile since I talked in detail about a book I'm reading. Last night, sometime before midnight but not too far off, I started The Unseen by Alexandra Sokoloff in a vain attempt to get to sleep. Reading never makes me tired. I suppose I was really just bored.
It takes place in North Carolina, which makes it that much more interesting- to read about my area of the state from a perspective designed for outsiders. More specifically, it takes place at Duke, a place to which I've never been.


The main character, Laurel, is a psychology professor who has just moved to NC to escape L.A., where she had a premonition via dream that her fiancee was cheating on her...a premonition that came true, right down to the last detail.
She discovers 700 boxes full of parapsychology (telepathy, ESP, etc.) research in the basement that has just been unsealed for public viewing. She starts looking into it.


That is what I know as of ~p. 40. While my parents are rather skeptical (which is the nice version of "they flat-out deny") anything of the ESP sort, I have no idea what I think on the subject other than that there are lots of lies and wishful thinking within the field. I figure it could definitely be possible-- just difficult to quantify and measure. Since that's what this book is about... you can see why I like it.


All of her books are very dark. The Harrowing (my favorite) is about five teens (college-age?) alone at a boarding school over the holidays with a malevolent Jewish demon. The Price is about a girl dying of cancer and a deal with Satan, and Book of Shadows deals with a murder that may or may not involve witchcraft (which sounds cliche, but it was actually quite good). Knowing those of you who I know as I do, I thought you might like to take a look at them.