Introducing...The Saturday Scoop:

Hey guys! So there is something I'm really excited about that I want to share with you all, and it's called... The Saturday Scoop! 

Introducing... The Saturday Scoop:
It's an idea I've been thinking about for a while now but never put it in action until now. Okay, ok...let me explain. Each Saturday (if life lets me), I'm going to post a Saturday Scoop post and rant about a random topic--any random topic. My first Saturday Scoop topic is going to be fangirling, which I will post today at some point. BUT, I would like to hear your suggestions for Saturday Scoop topics, so   please girls, suggest topics if you leave a comment! I am really excited about this and hope it will work out! I'm looking forward to doing this!

Rules:
If you leave a comment, please give a suggestion. 
No spamming or advertising. You can link back to your own blog, though.
LET ME KNOW what you think! If you loved it, you feel like crying or screaming, if you hated it so much you can't even talk about it? Remember, guys, nothing is offensive to me. 
I'm just a girl who is young and inexperienced with writing so I warn you, this is not professional writing people!
Tell others about my blog and posts! I would love to get some more readers and/or followers. It means so much to me when people leave comments, give advice, or even just read my posts!
I'm a girl who dreams big so please don't be mean when you leave comments. Constructive criticism please!! 

I Love You Followers:
I'll follow anyone who follows me. Just leave me a quick comment to say that you're following and would appreciate a follow back. Followers are my best friends so I love you guys who follow me!

Enjoy! 
Keep calm and read the Saturday Scoop. :)

love, love, love

It's The Little Things In Life That Count

I have recently been thinking about how much people these days think about the big stuff. Like how your life will turn out. What grades you get in school. What kind of person you are.  These things are definitely important but as we're brainwashed by all of these big, important, sometimes frightening things, we tend to overlook the things in life that are little, special, and not meant to be overlooked.

These days you can't go 10 minutes without seeing someone texting on their Smartphone, or typing madly on their computer.  It gets harder every day to find people who smile, who laugh, just for the sake of being happy. Girls at school gossip about who asked who out, who said what, who lied, who's a B-word, and who's not. But have you ever wondered why they do that? It's pleasure, sure, but the only reason it's pleasure is because they're getting the pleasure of indulging in thinking of someone else's pain besides theirs.

I might be over-thinking this, but to me it seems like no one ever enjoys the peace and quiet of a calm day anymore, no one enjoys the LITTLE things in life that count.  Like going out to lunch with their mom, or laughing so much that they cry, or even something as little as the good feeling when you're driving and there's a thunderstorm and when you go under the bridge the rain pauses for those couple of seconds, and it's so surreal if you think about it, but sadly, most people don't.

Ultimately, you're not going to care about some drama you had in 7th grade later in life. You're going to care that you made the right decisions.  You're going to learn that back then, you should have appreciated the small things.  As Taylor Swift said in her 2010 country album Speak Now, there are so many things that you wish you could have said at the time, when you should have said "I Love You" or "Goodbye" or anything else meaningful you should have said at the time.

It's sad, the way that people are slowly being detached from this way of living, being taken over by endless text messaging, Internet addiction, and lots of other sad things.  Even I sometimes catch myself gossiping or obsessing about who asked who out or finding I'm addicted to technology.

But, it's the little things in life that count.  Like eating a perfectly iced cupcake on a Sunday afternoon in the fall, closing your eyes and letting its sweet taste take over your mouth, forgetting about everything else.

love, love, love,




(PS. You might be wondering why I'm writing a post on a Wednesday afternoon when I'm usually at school. :) I actually have a day off today, so that's why...heheh)

2.5 Crazy, Awesome Weeks

Now that it's Saturday I am so excited to be back and posting on my blog! Well I just wanted to say that I have had a totally and completely awesome first couple weeks of school and am so happy and enjoying life right now, :) The weeks are hectic, no doubt, and sometimes stressful, but mostly I'm lovin' it.

The most exciting thing about last week was our first field hockey game of the season.  We won 2-0 and I got to play two different positions-- Right Wing (forward attack) and Left Mid.  It was such a fun experience and our team is really good for having not played together before (I say with a hint of brag in my voice).  Playing field hockey makes me forget how much i LOVE, genuinely enjoy, playing it. It's not like that for a lot of things. I mean, I enjoy ballet, I enjoy tennis, but not in the same way as I adore field hockey.

Besides field hockey, my life is good. I'll be 13 a week from Tuesday, which I'm pretty dang excited about XD. I'm really hoping I'll get a cell phone but that's kind of a long shot, you know? I have a lot of homework every night, but surprisingly I don't really mind, it makes me feel very productive and accomplished.  In English I mostly get A's, in math I mostly get B's and C's, so what? Im enjoying myself so thats just everything that matters. I'm also making a lot of new friends, drifting back and forth between the "popular" group and the "non popular" group (yes, I hate these rankings but sady when you're in 7th grade that is how it is).

The only thing I'm feeling a bit down about is the amount of reading I'm fitting in, which is about...um...a book every two weeks? I feel bad and totally disconnected from the world of books. Sadly, I was very proud of myself when i finished a book during the week this week. Also, my blog. As I've said in my post policy i'll post on weekends but that never seems like enough.  Nonetheless I'm looking for some feedback on my blog:
- Do you think I should post more often? Less often?
- Do you think my posts are too mixed up and scrambed? Should I keep my blog to one subject, not many different ones?
- Do you like the layout of my blog?
- What kind of posts interest you about my blog and why?
- What should I post more about? Less about?
Please please PLEASe give me your opinions, I will definitely not be offended if you hate something about what I wrote, I am just lookin for feedback and what I can do to make my blog better.

Now to my followers! I freaking love you guys. I don't think I wouldve keept up with this blog if it weren't for you. Although I have nearly 50 followers I really want to give a shout-out to 3 of my most common commenters (LOL):

- Grace from The Humble Watermelon (always makes my day with her sweet comments)

- Delaney from Random Ranting (makes me laugh both on and off her blog)
- Erika from Living For The Books (she was my first-ever follower!)

Now I'm not gonna bore all of you with mushy useless "thank you so much" comments, but I do want to say thank you to ALL of you, especially those I listed above. You guys rock!

Liebster Blog Award (Once Again)

I've been nominated again for the Liebster Blog Award by Erika from Living For The Books! She is one of my favorite bloggers if not my favorite so please check out her blog because she is awesome!

Here are the rules:
1) Thank and link back to the giver
2) Answer the award giver's questions
3) Nominate 5 other blogs that have fewer than 200 followers
4) Ask 5 questions for one's nominees to answer!

Here are the questions Erika came up with to give to the people she nominated!

Why did you decide to start a blog?
I was really bored one day this summer and was just scrolling through topics on Goodreads when I decided to look at the Blogs topic.  When I looked at everyone's blogs, I was thinking how cool all of them looked and how cool it would be to have my own.  I had a Wordpress blog before this one that I hadn't posted on in a while and alll of the posts were stupid and repetitive, so I wanted to start fresh and new. I loved all the templates and designs Blogger offered so I chose to use blogger. I'm so glad I decided to start this blog because it has been a completely aweosme experience. 
Do you judge a book by its cover?
Yes *smiles guiltily*. I know that you're not supposed to but when I'm at a bookstore and I can't decide what to read I am more likely to choose a book with a beautiful or pretty cover. And i hardly ever pick up books with bad covers just because of their cover. Its a bad habit of mine that i'm trying to break but still, i think it's kind of reasonable to want to read a book because of its cover art, right? 
If you could write a book what would it be about?
It changes every day. There are so many things i'd like to write about but i can never cram them all into one story. My ideas are very frequent and out of control so i can't remember or keep them all in place. I try to keep a journal of story ideas but i never keep up with it. At the moment i'm really enjoying writing romance, which is completely different from what i would have said just months ago, if not weeks.  Maybe its my age, maybe its cause i'm getting older, but i think i'd like to write a paranormal romance. :D
Have you always been a reader? If not then what book got you into reading?
Well i have always been known for being a voracious reader from  a really young age but in the past couple of years I've gone from being a bookworm to a book ADDICT. I am always reading something and if i'm not I get bored and impatient.  I think in 5th grade I started to get really addicted when I read Wendy Mass's books (like A Mango Shaped Space, Every Soul A Star, 11 Birthdays, etc.). Also there was a fabulous teacher at my old school who would always give me book recommendations so she got me really excited abotu reading. 

Would you rather read one absolutely amazing book your entire life or read books that were only ok or bad for the rest of your life?
Tough one! I honestly dont think I can answer that. i hate the feeling of reading a bad book (almost everyone does, right? well, except I like writing ranting reviews on bad books haha) but I couldn't survive just reading one book! Maybe read books that are ok or bad? I don't know that is such a good question! 

My Questions:
What is your favorite genre to read and why?
Do you like reading books for school, or do you like choosing what you read by yourself?
What is your favorite thing about blogging?
Do you like to read better than you like to write?
and Have you ever read a book that was so bad that you couldn't write a civilized review?

I Nominate:
Little_Miss_Book_Freak
The Humble Watermelon
Random Ranting

I could only find 3! (sorry!)

And finally i'd like to again thank Erika for the nomination! :)

I'm from

the beautiful breeze that migrates in the winter,

the rubber gloves clinging to my mother's polished fingernails,

the gentle voice of my sister,

the velvet silk of a puppy's coat,

the everlasting sound of pens scraping their messages into paper,

the smell of sunscreen mixed with seashells bundled on a shore,

the flutter of rose petals rolling softly in the air,

the sound of beauty as a book page turns,

the shouts of my brothers,

the patience of my father,

and the love of the beautiful whispers that

constantly strengthen

the way I think.

I'm Back!

Hi to all my lovely followers! I haven't posted in 5 days but that is because of my incredibly busy schedule these days *sigh*. I've been feeling kind of depressed that summer is over but I'm enjoying school so far :) I haven't had much time to come online because of school (um, duh), field hockey practice, homework, and just getting settled in to start the school year.  Now its the weekend and I'm finally scraping up some time to write a quick little post on my blog XD

One thing that's making me especially depressed about the summer ending is that I don't have any time to read! Sometimes I have a few extra minutes in study hall to read a page or two, but I've been feeling completely detached from the world of books this week.  I haven't read in a week and if I did read, it was my US History homework, so, I guess that doesn't really count.

As I stated in the Post Policy I posted a couple of weeks ago/a week ago/a few days ago?!, (I honestly can't remember when I posted it; all of the late August days are blending together in my mind and I can't tell one from the other haha) I'm going to try the best I can to post on weekends and occasionally weekdays if my homework situation isn't bad.  I might be able to post on Mondays since I don't have practice on Mondays, but I guess i'll play it by ear. And posting on weekends should be fairly easy since I'll generally finish all my homework Friday nights and I don't have practice or games on weekends (...yet).

So I hope all of you are having a good start to the year and wish me luck in the upcoming months! Bye girls! (and boys!)

Beautiful Blogger Award!

I've been nominated for the Beautiful Blogger Award by the amazing Erika from Living For The Books! Erika's blog is absolutely amazing--I love reading her book reviews, memes, and everything else she does on her blog! She's one of my favorite bloggers so please check her blog out because she  rocks!

The rules of this award are:
1. Write a little something about the Beautiful Blogger who nominated you with the award.  See above. Don't forget to visit her blog!
2. Share 7 things about yourself.

7 things about me:
1. My hair is dark blonde and wavy
2. All my friends call me Annabelle
3. People call me a "string bean" because I'm so skinny (I hate it)
4. I love wearing makeup: especially my glitter eye-shadow and mascara ;)
5. I'd love to be a fashion designer when I'm older
6. I'm borderline obsessive about painting my nails
7. Out of everyone in my family, I'm the closest with my sister.

I'm nominating these blogs:
1. Fashion Coma
2. Little_Miss_Book_Freak
3. The World Revolves Around Books
4. You Only Write So Much

Looking For Alaska

Synopsis:
Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps." Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young. Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy, Alaska will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.

Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another. A stunning debut, it marks John Green's arrival as an important new voice in contemporary fiction.

My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Who Recommended it to Me: a girl who works with my mom
Who I'd Recommend it To: Girls and boys age 13 and up

My review(may contain mild spoilers):
All I could think after I shut this book, letting the crackly library cover sink back into the worn hardcover, was, "Wow." I just sat there for a few moments, and then let everything that John Green had just put in my head sink in.  

This book hit me hard.  Not like 10-pound-rock-thrown-on-your-head hard, but wow-I-have-never-thought-about-the-world-this-way hard.  About halfway through the book I got that feeling.  I'll be completely honest, I think it hit me harder than The Fault in Our Stars did, if that's even possible. My writing teachers in school have always told me, when concluding a piece, "Go out with a bang," or "Give your readers something to think about." Certainly, this was the best ending of a book that I've ever read.  The book was amazing and it got even more amazing towards the end. 

To me, this book had two main themes: that everyone physically sexy or beautiful or attractive is so much more than a pretty face, and that death goes past, well, death.  That even people who are dead are still present in a way that's hard to grasp. When Miles first meets Alaska, the only thing he can think is that she's the prettiest girl he's ever seen.  But then he gets to know her further and realizes that she is more than a pretty face and that her life has been nothing but a startling enigma to her, just a constant mess of emotions that's hard for her to control. 

Alaska is beautiful.  She's a hard-core feminist.  A book lover.  Someone who "smokes [cigarettes] to die". Someone who talks about death casually and half-jokingly, and someone who no one expects to take her own life.  Someone who catches the eyes of all the boys in the school.  Someone who goes through each day thinking she killed her mother. Someone who chose her own name by looking at a globe.  Someone who has more complicated layers to her than it looks at first. 

I'm not sure I can sum up all this book has given me in one review. So I'm going to post the last passage from Looking For Alaska right here so you can read it and analyze it yourself.  

"Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home. But that only led to a lonely life accompanied by only the last words of the already-dead, so I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life. And then I screwed up and he screwed up and we screwed up and she slipped through our fingers. And there’s no sugar-coating it: She deserved better friends.

When she f*cked up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done that, but I saw where it led for her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps, and I can believe in it in spite of having lost her.

Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and him and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person. I know now that she forgives me for being dumb and scared and doing the dumb and scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her. And here’s how I know:

I thought at first that she was dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something’s meal. What was her - green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs - would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke blowing out of some smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe ‘the afterlife’ is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled.

But ultimately I do not believe tat she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take her genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.

Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing I learned from science class is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if she took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself - those are awful things, but she did need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us great than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison’s last words were: “It’s very beautiful over there.” I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful." -John Green, Looking For Alaska

The rest, I'll leave to you. 

Fresh From New York City: A US Open Package

(I'm the one with the ponytail)

 I write this fresh from New York City.  Yesterday I experienced what was probably the most unforgettable day of the entire summer--visiting New York City, which is, conveniently, not a long drive from our middle-of-nowhere residence.     The day started out with an early departure at quarter of seven am.  We were about ten minutes into the drive when my mom asked my dad cautiously, "You DO have the tickets, don't you?" and my dad almost swerved off the road when he had the realization that, no, he had forgotten the tickets.  Typical Dad.  We turned right back around, got the tickets, and were on the road, but then heard from my oldest brother, who was meeting us in New Jersey to spend the day with us, and realized that he was sick with a fever, vomiting, chills, and everything bad you can think of.  So he didn't end up coming.  About an hour later, we pulled into Flushing Meadows Park (that name makes me laugh every time I hear it, for some reason), and walked to the U.S. Open tennis tournament, 2012.

Music swirled around, the crowds' voices turned into a vague murmur, and the scorching August air slowly burned our skin.  If you're a tennis fanatic, like I am, you know that the biggest tennis stadium in the entire world lies in Flushing Meadows Park, New York, with 22,000-some seats.  At first we thought we'd get stuck with the ones way high up where you can barely see the ball, but then my parents' friend showed up with front-row tickets and immediately the day turned from awesome to awesomer, if that was even possible.

Yes--this was literally how close we were to Serena Williams

Yep, I was about ten yards away from Serena Williams (who, if you are clued in to the best sport to watch in the world, is American) in that first match.  And Roger Federer (from Switzerland) in that second match. It was extremely surreal sitting that close up to the play. I still had to process this in my brain and by the time both matches were over, I felt a bit dizzy, as if I'd just woken up from a wonderful dream.   The highlight of the day was when Serena Williams won and as she was getting applauded, she looked straight into my eyes and grinned.  No, I'm not making this up.  No, I didn't imagine this.  Ask my mom.  And the second-best part of the day was when, after winning a long point, Serena turned to her box, made that tigress face, and yelled, "C'mon!" with a fist pump.

Me in front of the court

Of course, those weren't the only two matches we saw.  We started off by heading over to the Grandstand (which is one of my favorite places ever, despite being puny compared to Arthur Ashe) to see Jack Sock, from the USA, and Nicolas Almaro, from Spain.  I must admit I loved this match (yes, partly because, I guiltily admit, I'm a bit head over heels in love with Jack Sock,even though he ended up losing in 4 sets).  After the first set we left to go see the end of Agniezka Radwanska, from Poland's, match, where she beat Jelena Jankovic, of Serbia, in 2 pretty easy sets.  Then we saw Serena and Roger.  Roger Federer seems much taller in person and also much more real.  I don't really think of these people as real since I had never actually seem most of them in person.  But yes, they are living, breathing people. (Of course they are.) Then after their matches, we rushed back over to the Grandstand, where James Blake (USA), and Milos Raonic (Canada) were about to begin.  Okay, one thing.  I was rooting for Blake at first, because after all he is American like me, but then my dad and I were sitting in a crowd of Canadians (and I consider myself to be partly Canadian lol) so I cheered right alongside those Canadians for Milos.  Those were all the matches we watched.

On the way home, I kept replaying each match in my head, from the first match to the last match.  All were amazing and unforgettable.  I'll never forget seeing Serena Williams and Roger Federer that close up, I'll never forget hearing Americans chanting, "USA! USA!" and then all the Canadians yelling back, "Can-A-Da! Can-A-Da!" I'll never forget when Serena looked straight at me, or when I screamed, "I LOVE YOU ROGER!" when he was signing autographs. I'll never forget the Grandstand. I'll also never forget walking around the Open, breathing in the New York City air, and getting lost for 12 hours into the world of tennis.