airport

I think everyone should be required to have a job in customer service at least once in their lives, any customer service. As much as I tend to hate it at times (not too often, but it happens), I really think it has helped me in the long run. I really appreciate helpful people now, more than I did before, because I know it’s not hard to be helpful. It’s not hard to smile while you are helping someone, putting them at ease even if you don’t know what you are talking about. And I know how it feels to actually help make someone’s day better, and it’s a good feeling. Therefore, now, when I encounter unhelpful people or establishments, I cannot understand why they are that way. It makes the customer AND the server’s day better when everyone is just polite and helpful, so why don’t we all try acting like that, all right world?

I’m at the airport right now (surprise surprise) waiting for my flight to Chicago where I will catch a bus to Madison to visit my lovely cousin Mary, and a few days later bum a ride to Milwaukee to see my dear friend Molly. It’s 5:55am. I’m tired. I got up at 3:30am. Thanks Mom and Dad for the ride, and wake up call. And believe it or not, I did not have a bad experience with anyone working here, despite my trouble finding my gate or any information about said gate in general. It did not show up on any of the screens I encountered, neither did any other Southwest flights, which was extremely disconcerting. Unfortunately, at the crack of crack in the morning, the people at the information desks don’t feel the need to be at their information desks, which was not helpful.

However, after lots of wandering around, wondering why I should ever have a problem finding my way in Dulles Airport given the sheer number of times I’ve been here and hoping I did not get the wrong day or something, I finally found a helpful flight attendant (the littlest flight attendant of them all, she was really cute) who pointed me in the right direction. I guess her helpfulness made me think about how much worse being lots in a gigantic airport with no gate number would have been had she been rude or inpatient. I will try to remember this next time I am at work and someone comes in, doesn’t look at the menu at all and asks me for two cheese hot dogs and some BBQ. Now here I am in gate B50, and I have an hour till I’m airborne.

I just saw a women walk by with lights on the wheels of her suitcase. They were inside the wheels and blinked and changed colors when she wheeled it. Honestly, on a coolness scale of one to ten, ten being the highest, that suitcase has to be an eleven. And no mother, that is not a Spinal Tap reference. I need to get me one of those. Or just the wheels anyway, I have sweet luggage.

Ohhhhh nooooo, a mother with four small children, all boys, just sat down in my gate. How much do you want to bet I’m going to be sitting between them somehow, just my luck. If one of them gives me the swine, there will be hell to pay. Mark my words; I will not get the swine, much less from a small, sticky child.

I will not be posting this from the airport, even though they have wireless, because I will not be paying 6 bucks for two hours. Honestly, why isn’t the entire world a free WiFi zone by now?

I’m listening to the soundtrack to Slumdog Millionaire right now, feeling a little badass, because that’s just how that soundtrack makes you feel. Try it, it’s great. All I need are some aviator sunglasses and a backpack I have not had since middle school with my initials on it. Sigh.

All right, I should probably be writing my story instead of a blog and times a wastin’. I hope everyone reading this got to sleep in and has a wonderful day!

~major7th

Ps. I LOVE TRAVELING!

I don’t think the dog likes my music.

I’m at my grandmother and granddaddy’s house again, pet sitting.

See:

That’s me right now. I thought I would do another picture blog since I seem to be on a roll procrastinating the 4000 words I need to write tonight.

Dad got really excited about Knee High Grape today. Not as excited about the BBQ.

Bikes. Looks like a hobbit might jump out of the trees and yell "get off the road!" but with too much pavement.

This is a house I want to live in. Obviously not in it's current state, but, if it were possible to fit it up, I would. I am in love with this house.

My cats are always so cute.

Ok, back to my story. I'm killing off a character tonight that I created just to kill (dad says his name should be Guy, but it's Ben), but I’ve never fictionally killed someone before. However, he must die. I cannot keep his accent up much longer.

"When vacation was over

the word was all over

that I was a crack whore

melissa had told them

and so now were not talking

except we have tickets

to see blur in october

and I think were still going

oh-oh"

~major7th

Are my buns straight?

I’ve done some pretty nerdy things in my time. I’ve gone to a Harry Potter book release and waited 4 hours for the new book, gone on a bunch of Lord of the Rings tours in New Zealand on two separate trips, worn matching, handmade t-shirts to a Police concert, bought Oscar Wilde a rainbow rose and been to Hobbiton, but tonight may have topped them all. Tonight I went to see Star Wars in Concert with my mother, aunt and grandmother a the Scope Arena in Norfolk, VA, and it was fanfreakentastic times infinity.

I dusted off my old Princess Leia costume to wear and mom and I rooted through my costume collection to find all the other Star Wars themed ones. Mom went as Obi-Wan, Auntie Petrina as Queen Amidala and Grandma, the last minute thrown together costume, went as farm boy Luke Skywalker. We were not sure if people really did dress up for this thing or now, we searched the internet for clues, but in the end we decided that we really didn’t care. It’s a Star Wars concert, no one going to that had any room for fun making.

We were a hit the moment we stepped inside the doors. Other people had dressed up, but none as good we us! There were tons of tiny Darth Vaders, Jedi and Stormtroopers running around. I wanted to gather all the Imperial children into a group and take a picture with them all pointing guns at me, but no such luck. One tiny Darth Vader did sort of agree to take his picture with me, so cute.

I have never posed for so many strangers pictures in my whole life. Everywhere we went it was ‘look, its Princess Leia!’ and ‘can I get a picture with you?’ I really felt like a celebrity. Now I know how Nicole felt in NYC last year when the little girl thought she was a real princess. My favorite little girl said “I am always you when we play!” Her brother was not so eloquent. He stuck with, “I’m Boba Fett.” Ya, no kidding kid, you think I’m dressed up as the Princess and don’t know who Boba Fett is? Anyway, we posed with grownups, kids and other costumed people all night long and it was like I had died and gone to a galaxy far far away.

One guy, the exact type of guy that always seem to be drawn to me that I’ve mentioned before, came up to us when we were in the merchandise line. He had on a retro Star Wars shirt, tucked in of course, no hair and a few light sabers. He looked me up and down and said, “oh hello…”

Him- (waves hand in front of my face) You will go out with me…

Me- Sorry, your Jedi mind tricks don’t work on me.

Him- aw, it was worth a try.

Seriously, it was. If it weren’t for the fact that he was in his late thirties, tried to tell me we had a Qui-Gon Lightsaber when clearly it was Luke’s second one, had his t-shirt tucked in and was creepy, I might have been impressed. He found us again later to take our picture, and then we saw him AGAIN when we were leaving, but to his credit, he did not creep on us anymore. Thanks man. May the force be with you.

So, all this happened before we even got to our seats. The concert was really incredible. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra plus a choir plus ANTHONY DANIALS narrating plus laser lights and a huge screen equals the best night of my life. They played highlights from all the movies and full songs from each of the 6 movies, all of which gave me Goosebumps (especially with the choir) and were accompanied by introductions by C3-PO himself.

One thing that made this extra awesome for me were seeing the movie clips on the big screen. Sure, I’ve seen the three new Star Wars a bunch of times each in theaters, no big deal. BUT, the old three, the ORIGINAL three, the best three, I never got to see in theaters because I was either not born yet or not old enough. These movies have been such a huge part of my life, and tonight I actually got to see parts of them on the big screen, the way movies are meant to be seen. That alone made the night unforgettable. When Leia says to a pre-carbon-freeze Han, “I love you” and he responds, “I know,” I totally teared up.

After the concert there was a place set up with all sorts of original Star Wars costumes and props, including THE Han Solo in Carbonate. I almost died. That is as close as I will ever get to Harrison Ford, the first love of my life. Swoon. I posed with more people, got my picture taken with all the costumed actors walking around including Boba Fett, a Stormtrooper who let me hold his gun and an Imperial guard. We stayed until the security guards were literally yelling in our faces to leave (jerks) and I spent the car ride home day dreaming about actually living in the Star Wars galaxy, having a Wookie best friend and flying Xwings like I did when I was a little kid.

Here are the rest of my pictures:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2351756&id=25808219&l=00ab59ce6d

Goodnight and may the force be with you, always.

~major7th

Fruma Sarah Fruma Sarah!

I had the weirdest dream last night, or maybe it was this morning after my alarm went off and I realized I did not have to actually get up. That’s the time when I get the best dreams, I think because I’m so incredibly happy that I don’t have to be awake, or so upset that I do, that it messes with my subconscious and produces short yet vivid dreams.

“All right, this was my dream…in the beginning I dreamt…” That James and I ran away. I don’t know why or how, but we did. And this was not current, tattoo James, it was middle school James. I think I was still 22, but he was defiantly younger. Unimportant. Anyway, we ran away and ended up at Neil Gaiman’s house, in his basement on a couch. This may have come about because I have been feeling bad lately for not reading American Gods like I started to. It is awesome so far, but it’s not November, and thus I have no time for reading, only writing writing writing. So, we slept in the basement, then in the morning I could hear kids upstairs and I woke up by myself, so I guess James went upstairs to talk to everyone (whoever else was up there, Amamda Palmer and his daughter perhaps? I swear I’m not a creepy stalker, I just read his blog). James was being all cool about the situation, talking to everyone while I was too scared to go upstairs and talk to anyone. Eventually Mr. Gaiman came downstairs and talked to me, and I was literally falling over myself because I was so nervous. Whoever said you are braver in your dreams lied.

However, despite my crazy behavior, he was extremely nice. I can’t remember now what we talked about, but it ended weird. He saw how nervous I was, so he took me around the back of his house somehow, although I don’t remember walking or moving in any way, we were just there, and pointed to a bag through a door window. He told me to go inside and get a Xanax to make me feel better. Weird weird weird weird. Not wanting to look lame, although I have never had Xanax before and did not really want to start, I went into the room and started looking for it. I think at this point I realized it was a dream and that it did not matter what I took or did not take. However before I found it he knocked on the door saying something along the lines of ‘put it away my daughter is coming and I don’t want her to see.’ And that’s all I remember.

So those are the types of dreams I get. Not cool ones about space travel or being a Jedi (I did have one of those years ago, it was AWESOME); I get random dreams about famous people I LOVE where I don’t even get dream-confidence when meeting them and just end up looking like an idiot. Lovely. Most of the time I don’t even remember my dreams. I wish I could dream about my NaNoWriMo story so I could get a little inspiration up in here.

Speaking of my story, I’ve had a really poor start to my Nano November. The first day of November I was so excited to start my story. I had spend my entire Halloween morning with my notebook, not quite planning things out, but at least writing notes about important details of my new magical world. On the morning of November 1^st I put on my new Script Frenzy shirt, sweat pants (the proper attire for writing), and my new ‘I believe in fairies’ locket that Nicole got me, for inspiration. She gets credit for the shirt too (thanks Nicole!). Best presents ever.

Anyway, I was really excited to start writing. I hoped in the car and drove to Leesburg because Beans in the Belfry was on a parade route in Brunswick. Distraught, because that’s really where I pictured myself getting stuff done, I instead headed for Greenbriers because I did not feel like parallel parking at Shoes. Coffee shops around here have weird names. SO I was happy, driving, and in a splendid mood.

Then I got in a car wreck.

I am not going into detail about it because all the insurance stuff is still happening. All I will say is that I am determined that I am 100% not at fault, but my lack of witnesses is working against me. The car still works, I can still drive it, but the passenger side door is all banged up and needs to be replaced. MY POOR CAR! Oh, and I’m fine by the way. No injuries on either side. Still, not happy about it all. It really killed my day, got me off writing to a bad start, and now my poor car door whistles when I drive around turns.

I’m sorry to Grandmother, who when she called me the other day and asked ‘so how are things going?’ I replied, ‘oh just great.’ I did not have it in me at the moment to tell her I wrecked the car that used to be hers, that she still stays was her favorite car ever. I’m sorry.

Now it’s the weekend. I finally got to 10k word count last night, I had to write about 4000 words to get there, but I did it. Nicole is still beating me by about 2000 words, jerk, but I will totally catch up somehow. I’m at my grandparent’s house right now, mom’s side, hanging out. The Star Wars concert is tomorrow night. Mom and I listened to all my favorite songs on the Star Wars soundtracks on my ipod on the drive down here to get in the mood. I am so pumped.

Ok, I’m going to go visit.

"You must have heard wrong Grandma
There's no tailor
You mean the butcher Grandma
By the name of Lazer-Wolfe"

~major7th