Words Can’t Bring Me Down

I meant to write at least two posts every single week, but the holidays have knocked me back to one. I could blame it all on the work obligations (true) and social whirl (maybe a little less than advertised), but the real culprit is obvious. It’s stupid Words with Friends. I’m not an addict or anything. I don’t play in church or at the dinner table and that only has a medium amount to do with the fact that I can’t ever remember to turn off the popping bubble sound effects and my preacher and/or mother would take away my phone. I do have a lot of games going at once, though. I’m convinced that I’ll learn something new about people by playing them, so I mostly choose opponents I’d like to know better. So far, I’ve only learned who’ll apologize for playing ‘tooters’ and who’ll admit that they have no idea what a word means, but the computer accepted it, so it’s their new favorite ‘q’ word. No one ever trash talks, though, so I either have extra nice friends or we’re secretly Canadian. 

I have been reading, though. I’ve recently finished Entwined, a retelling of The Twelve Dancing Princesses. Apparently. This wasn’t a fairy tale I knew, so I just looked it up and it’s got some parts that link up, certainly. In any case, the 12 princesses are thrown into mourning at the death of their mother and not allowed to dance for one year. They are angry at their father, who is distant in grief, and determined to keep their spirits high during the year of mourning. A secret passage leads to a magic ballroom where the girls can dance all night. A man named “Keeper” controls the ballroom and would like to have the princesses under his control, as well. The parts of the book that aren’t full of fairy-tale darkness and danger are mostly concerned with the girls’ love lives. No one is in love with whom they should be, but all will be well. All will be exceedingly well.

I read The Julian Game, too. The cover with the blue-wigged girl and the freaky gloves. Popular girl uses nerd girl to help punish a hot boy they both like. The hot boy likes the nerd girl for a whole week or two before he goes back to his default boy-tramp mode. Popular girl punishes nerd girl with cyber bullying during her week of bliss. Nerd girl overcomes all with the knowledge that popular girl isn’t really that happy after all. Blurg. I know I shouldn’t be encouraging impressionable young people to take revenge, (It’s only for adults, like Kahlua), but COME ON. Nerd girl has popular girl’s computer password and can smack popular girl into civility, even if she can’t force her to be sorry, but it’s enough to know that popular girl is only mean because she’s unhappy? Like fun it is. Loser.