Best songs of 2008

This year I have to say was a pretty respectable year for music. We were, temporaily, exonerated from the craptastic songs of the past and were enlighten with a much softer, and lets be honest, better styles of music. Here are my top picks for the year 2008.

Top 10:
10.Rehab-Rihanna feat. Justin Timberlake. I have to say when I first saw this on MTV I instantly loved it. It tells the story of how a love can be like a deadly drug that sucks and takes everything from you and you have to get help for it. Hence Rehab.

9.Gives You Hell-All American Rejects. Hello ulitimate fuck you song! I love this video which showcases two feuding neighbors, (the lead singer in dual roles) and the ways the get on each others nerves that results in the exchanging of girlfriends and ending of thier feud..maybe.

~I would like to take a digression and dedicate the song above to three people. My two ex-best friends (without respect) Monika and Rima Patel and my ex-boyfriend Paul Smith. Hey! I hope my face gives you hell and when you walk my way I hope it gives you hell! Bitches!~

Well, now that thats off my size B chest, let us continue shall we?

8.Let it Rock- Kevin Rudolf feat. Lil Wayne. I don't generally like songs by Lil Wayne, but this one I could not stop watching on YouTube. Seriously, from the minute I saw it I had to watch it over and over. It does go against my stand on crappy music..example: anything by Lil'Wayne, but I do find it catchy and definitely a great dance tune. I love it! Let it Rock!!

7.Disturbia-Rihanna. O.K. I'll be honest I hated this when I first saw it on VH1. First off, it reminds me of NIN's-Closer and being loyal to this lovely band I was put off by the simularities of the two videos. But after seeing it being constantly rotated on the music channels I swallowed my pride and began to take a liking to the song. Anything disturbing catches my attention. Hello Marilyn Manson!

6.Don't Trust Me-3OH!3. I love this song! It is so hilarious and again from the minute I saw it I had to see it again and again! It tells the story of the last two male models who have to survive being latterly said the last on Earth. And oh the fun that ensues!

5.Fall For You-Secondhand Serenade. I love this ballad of falling in love. It is so good I actually had tears in my eyes it was so beautiful. Call me a sucker, but I love this song.

4.Womanizer-Britney Spears. The best comeback of 2008 has to be Miss Britney! She has had a rough past two years thanks to all the marriage and baby drama the tabloids love to shove down our throats in different magazines and so-called "newsshows" I.E. The E! Channel's Daily 10. But all drama aside, this video is so risque and pushing the envelope I actually blushed when I first saw it. Hey who am I kidding? There is no "over the limit" any more. But I digress. However revealing this video may be she still shines and I love her and wish her the best!

3.Bleeding Love-Leona Lewis. I adore this woman and her dynomite voice! Chosen as VH1's own number one for the year, I place it at number 3. Why? You'll know my pick for the top in just a bit, but I do have to say my crush for this woman propells my love of this song, which is so beautiful in its simplicity and you can't help but love it. I know I do.

2.I Don't Care-Fall Out Boy. With so many surprising "reveals" I cannot help but love this video and song. Mixing the crazy antics of the band and the song it self just ballons a paramour for this pick. Enjoy the video below!


And My number one BEST SONG OF 2008 IS:

*DRUM ROLLS*


1. Shattered-OAR. In 2008 I had many problems with my personal and mental health, almost having passed out while shopping on Black Friday and having a major panic attack to boot. I found in this song a way to express my feelings without harming myself. I love how simple the message is and how it just speaks to my soul and teaches me that others feel what I do and they get by. I love this song, but not to be redundent, I simply found my one song to help me through just about anything and that is why this song is my number one for the year.


Peace and Love!!

Happy Holidays!!

:)

Stone Heart

Attack so swift.
an angel of light
prematurally taken away
the force to which beats
through an animated corpse.
Prick of sharpness
breathing growing rapid
pulse dying
Dripping down is
blood on a
dried up
old side walk.
heartbeats thundering
through the sleeping street.
passion surging through
the predator
as he drinks from his
hapless prey.
death knocking at
life's door.
a stray tear falling
down the cheek of the deceased.
Here is made another
heart of stone.

Angel of Death

If I be an angel
then paint me
with black wings.
carve from me
a heart of stone.
take the blood
I foolishly possess.
ravage me with evil.
strangle me with passion.
bite my dying flesh
make me an angel
of death.

‘Twilight’ Sucks… And Not In A Good Way"

By Kellen Rice
Written by Phoenix native Stephenie Meyer, the popularity of the young-adult series comprised of Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and the newly-released Breaking Dawn has reached critical mass. With a Twilight film adaptation coming to theaters this winter and an opening day's sales of 1.3 million books for her latest installment, Meyer can be left with no doubt of her success. From a first-time novelist to a mainstay on the best sellers list, she has risen through the ranks like a veritable juggernaut.

But why? To figure out why the books were inspiring legions of fans and a dozen fan-sites (including the recently hacked Twilight Lexicon), I read the books myself to see what's what.

To put it simply, dear reader, I was horrified. Not just by the sickeningly purple prose or the lack of general writing quality, but the books themselves are insulting on every level-as a woman, as a teenager, as a literature student, and as a graduate of the Harry Potter craze. What's worse is that so few seem to realize it.


Twilight is the story of the so-called "average" new girl Bella Swan (Ha, ha, get it? Beautiful Swan?), who finds herself as the object of not one, not two, but a total of five boys' romantic designs (because she's so "plain", see?). The most important of these is the mysterious, hilariously-Byronic Edward Cullen. Bella plays the pitiful damsel in distress a few times and after 200 pages of thinly written suspense, we learn that Edward is in fact a vampire. Never fear, though, because Bella's "Adonis-like" admirer is no Nosferatu. Instead, he and his vampire family are so-called "vegetarian" vampires, feeding off of animals instead of humans and inexplicably attending high school (during lunch periods they buy trays of food and stare at each other so that Bella can conveniently get a glimpse of Edward from across the cafeteria). The first novel deals with Bella and Edward's romance and is capped off by a hastily tacked-on plot designed to shove Bella into the damsel in distress role yet again so that her vampire lover can save her.

Okay, you're saying. It's a little cheesy. But why is that so bad?

First and foremost, the books present a female heroine who can hardly take a step without needing some boy to rescue her. In fact, the books represent sexist views in almost every way-from the fact that Bella gives up her ambitions and plans for college to get married to Edward, the fact that she is portrayed as a modern Eve, begging the noble, moral gentleman for sex while he desires to preserve their virtue, the fact that their relationship is dangerously unhealthy, and finally to the fact that nearly every single female character in the book is a hopelessly negative caricature.

The series does not improve with subsequent books, either. In New Moon, Bella enters a self-described "zombie" state when Edward leaves her. In fact, the author oh-so-cleverly inserts blank pages with the months' names as a poorly conceived plot device for showing the depths of her heroine's pain and also to avoid having to write the "hard stuff." Bella turns near-suicidal; she purposely puts herself in harm's way-going so far as to jump off a cliff-to hear her lover's imagined voice in her head.

What does this say to readers, bearing in mind that the target audience is the tragically impressionable 12-17 year old girls? That they should fall apart at the seams for months if their boyfriend leaves them? That reckless self-endangerment is okay, so long as it's to be close to your lover? What a lovely message to send to young women.

The sole bright spot of New Moon is the lovable Jacob Black, a member of the nearby La Push reservation and newly-turned werewolf. It is in Bella's scenes with Jacob that readers see a glimpse of actual personality, and the burgeoning romance is certainly much more true to real-life teen romances than the lofty ideals of the star cross'd lovers Edward and Bella. But add another half-forgotten plot into the mix and Edward and Bella are reunited, with Jacob left by the wayside like a kicked puppy. Pun intended.

Eclipse. It is in this tome that Edward and Bella's relationship takes a decidedly worse turn. Edward goes so far as to remove Bella's engine from her car to prevent her from seeing her friend, Jacob, and even has his vampire 'sister' kidnap her from a weekend. Bella is a little peeved at this, sure, but she writes off Edward's atrocious behavior with the terrifying "he's just a little overprotective" and "he does it because he loves me". Reader, I actually felt a little sick while reading this, despite these so-called good intentions (they're always leading to hell, remember). Not only does Meyer give her two characters an obviously unhealthy-even abusive-relationship, but she romanticizes and idealizes it, and not only with Bella and Edward, but with Bella and Jacob as well.

Jacob, in fact, gets a bizarre personality transplant (lycanthropic dissociative identity disorder, maybe?) and turns into a real asshole in this book. He actually forcibly kisses Bella-twice-while ignoring her protests and actually threatens suicide should Bella refuse him. But not once does the thought of abuse, sexism, or inequality even occur to her main character! In fact, halfway through Jacob's forced kiss (sexual assault, mind you) Bella actually decides that she's in love with him. What is this??

I threw down my copy of Eclipse in disgust and I was ready to forget that the books existed until the Twilight-mania began anew in the lead-up to August 2nd's release of Breaking Dawn. I can write this article just having read the first three, I told myself. In the end, though, partly due to morbid curiosity and partly a result of wildly irrational hope that somehow Meyer would redeem herself, I gave in.

I was wrong. In Breaking Dawn, Meyer gives us an honestly bewildering and at times horrifying close to the series. The several hundred pages are filled with sickly-sweet self-indulgence and a blatant dismissal of continuity and realism. In brief, Bella and Edward get horizontal at long last (but only after they're married, of course-we can't have the naughty temptress taking away Edward's 107 year-old virginity) and Bella somehow gets pregnant. Please, Meyer says, never mind the fact that all the vampires' body fluids are replaced with their 'venom' or that sperm dies after three days, much less a century. Even more fantastically, the vampire/human spawn grows at an alarming rate, so fast in fact that Bella feels it "nudging" her at approximately two weeks of gestation. Now, I've never been pregnant but I did take health class back in high school and I'm pretty sure that there's something wrong with that picture.

I'll spare you the details of the rest of this horror show. Trust me, the birthing scene is something I desperately wish I could un-see (after the loosely-called 'baby' breaks Bella's pelvis, spine, and ribs from the inside, Edward ends up clawing his way to a surely-unsanitary vampire version of a Caesarian section using his teeth). I'm sorry. I had to share my pain. Bella becomes a super-special vampire with super-special powers and she wins the not-conflict of the not-climax. And don't forget her nifty ability to go hunting in a forest in a cocktail dress and heels.

Thankfully, the 'Twilight' series is over. Not as great is the fact that millions of girls are reading this sexist tripe without a care in the world, obsessing over the "perfect" Edward Cullen and the "hot" Jacob Black, pretending to be Bella Swan and ignoring the unhealthiness of the relationship just as successfully as the character does. What happened that two hundred years after feminist hero Elizabeth Bennet is put down on the page, we get one of the most awful excuses for a female literary hero that I've ever seen?

So frankly, excuse me if I bow out of the Twilight mania. I'm going to go sink my teeth into Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and pretend that Stephenie Meyer's terrible series did not set gender equality back two hundred years in the minds of millions.

I'm a nineteen year-old female literature student trying to understand the world one book, song, and idea at a time.

I hate to have to agree......BUT I DO. [; ~M.j.W~

The real meaning for the pentacle

I discovered the secret to the pentacle or pentagram. Its early use was to symbolize the Greek godess Venus. It is a sign of the believed energy between men and women, yin and yang. The sign in particular represents female energy.

Religious symbolism:


Christianity
The pentagram is used as a Christian symbol for the five senses and if the letters S, A, L, V, and S are inscribed in the points, it can be taken as a symbol of health
Medieval Christians believed it to symbolise the five wounds of Christ. The pentagram was believed to protect against witches and demons.

The pentagram figured in a heavily symbolic Arthurian romance: it appears on the shield of Sir Gawain in the 14th century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. As the poet explains, the five points of the star each have five meanings: they represent the five senses, the five fingers, the five wounds of Christ, the five joys that Mary had of Jesus (the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Assumption), and the five virtues of knighthood which Gawain hopes to embody: noble generosity, fellowship, purity, courtesy, and compassion.

Probably due to misinterpretation of symbols used by ceremonial magicians, it later became associated with Satanism and subsequently rejected by most of Christianity sometime in the twentieth century.


Mormonism
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has traditionally used pentagrams and five-pointed stars in Temple architecture, particularly the Nauvoo Illinois Temple, and the Salt Lake Temple. These symbols derived from traditional morning star pentagrams that are no longer commonly used in mainstream Christianity.


Judaism
The pentagram was the official seal of the city of Jerusalem for a time. Due to the similarity of the star shapes, it is occasionally confused with the Star of David by those unfamiliar with the symbols.


Satanism
Satanists use a pentagram with two points up, often inscribed in a double circle, with the head of a goat inside the pentagram. This is referred to as the Sigil of Baphomet. They use it much the same way as the Pythagoreans, as Tartaros literally translates from Greek as a "Pit" or "Void" in Christian terminology (the word is used as such in the Bible, referring to the place where the fallen angels are fettered). The Pythagorean Greek letters are most often replaced by the Hebrew letters לויתן forming the name Leviathan. Less esoteric LaVeyan Satanists use it as a sign of rebellion or religious identification, the three downward points symbolising rejection of the holy Trinity.

Neopaganism
Many Neopagans, especially Wiccans, use the pentagram as a symbol of faith similar to the Christian cross or the Jewish Star of David. It is not, however, a universal symbol for Neopaganism, and is rarely used by Reconstructionists. Its religious symbolism is commonly explained by reference to the neo-Pythagorean understanding that the five vertices of the pentagram represent the four elements with the addition of Spirit as the uppermost point. As a representation of the elements, the pentagram is involved in the Wiccan practice of summoning the elemental spirits of the four directions at the beginning of a ritual.
The outer circle of the circumscribed pentagram is sometimes interpreted as binding the elements together or bringing them into harmony with each other. The Neopagan pentagram is generally displayed with one point up, partly because of the "inverted" goat's head pentagram's association with Satanism; however, within traditional forms of Wicca a pentagram with two points up is associated with the Second Degree Initiation and in this context has no relation to Satanism.

Because of a perceived association with Satanism and also because of negative societal attitudes towards Neopagan religions and the "occult", many United States schools have sought to prevent students from displaying the pentagram on clothing or jewelry.In public schools, such actions by administrators have been determined to be in violation of students' First Amendment right to free exercise of religion.

Coming Out: Being Bisexual in a Small Town

BY: MISS MEGZ


I AM BISEXUAL.
That is what I told my best friend of nine years during a tornado drill while sitting in the hallway of our crowded, igneous school. It came up casually when we were naming celebs we were infatuated with. I asked her if she thought any female celebs were attractive, she blushed and named a few. That's when I made my confession, "Well," I said, feeling my heart beating in my throat, "I'm bisexual." I looked at her waiting for an 'ewe', but she just smiled and said, "Really?" I knew then that coming out wouldn't be that hard, but I was wrong. I never thought what others at my school, who are definitely intolerant to any "gay activity", would think of me. A fear manifests when I catch myself checking out other girls, including my extremely attractive Home Economics teacher.

Finding any comfort in much desired information in my library is scarcely in number. In fact,a law passed in Alabama in which any books depicting gay or lesbian subject matter would be immediately pulled from all school or public libraries. I was shocked and angry. Thus furthering my fear of being my true self, a sixteen year old bisexual young woman. I am virgin, but I am worried what gender will be "my first". A boy or the forbidden, same sex? What should it matter, right? If I love the person it should not matter what gender, religon, race or preference. However at the same time, how can I be proud of who I am when I have not one book nor confidant in my town to confide in?

Being bisexual is a challenge, as one can imagine, especially when my parents are old generationalists. Coming out to my dad was easy, but my mom, who wants me to have children, is against lesbianism, whether she is willing to admit it or not. However, my dad is against gay marriage, which I strongly advocate. He believes the ultra-conservative close-minded mantra of: Marriage should be strictly between a man and a woman. Which has to be the most degrading statement if I ever heard one.

It is a shame, I can let complete strangers on My Yearbook and Face book know my orientation, but I can not on My Space because than my secret will be all over school. Everyone in my tiny learning establishment has an account on My Space, therefore anything personal written in a blog...or bulletin can be the next days gossip thread. I guess that's what being in a small town will do. ]-:

So here is my official proclamation...Take it or leave it:

I AM A PROUD BISEXUAL WHO LOVES BOYS AND GIRLS. LOVE OR HATE IT.

THIS IS WHO I AM!

I Wish You Were Mine.

I wish you were mine
to hold.
Love with
smoldering lust so
profound
the sun may explode
at such freightning intensity.
I wish you were mine
to kiss.
Your delicate lips
touching mine.
How I need your love.
Passionately aching for
attention is
this needy heart of mine.
Secret admiration
plaguing my every thought.
Emotions are filling
spilling over.
Yet
No one must know
How I wish upon many a star
To have you.
Oh!
I wish you were mine
dear love.
Alas!
You remain unattainable.
Admiring you from afar
I must.
Wishing for chances
To prolaim
My love
I wish you were mine!

Lovely Dreams

Heart dead.

soul in hand.

drowning in

a bloody ocean.

pain swimmng in

an endless flow.

rust stained razor

dropping to a stone bottom.

water rains down.

life dripping away.

an undying abyss.

screeching white light.

soundless black darkness.

death

has

arrived.

coming to take

what soul belongs to him

mine.

so pale.

no life blooming.

lifeless in illuminating

mistakes.

death never tasted so

tempting.

sudden cold feels the room.

his breath

wispy as the air

surrounding us.

he speaks

but is not heard.

horrible screehing.

menacing darkness.

was this manifestation

of death

a reality?

could this have

been death wanting

to be a salvation

from a seering infestation

of daily pain?

it seems this

may have just been

one of my many

Lovely Dreams.

Scariest Movies top 25

Top 25:

25. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [original]

24. Jeeper's Creepers pt. 1

23. Psycho [original]

22. Dawn of the Dead [new]

21. Day of the Dead

20. Evil Dead

19. Resident Evil

18. Cabin Fever

17. Silent Hill

16. Children of the Corn

15. Saw

14. The Ring

13. The People Under the Stairs

12. Insanitarium

11. Vacancy



Top 10: My top personal scary movies.


10. The Exorcist [1971]

9. The Omen [original]

8. Carrie [original]

7. Pet Semetary

6. Halloween [original]

5. Silence of the Lambs

4. Friday The 13th

3.House of 1,000 Corpses

2. Hostel pt.2

AND MY NUMBER 1:


1. Hostel pt.1

Bye my lovies!

peace and love!

Happy October!

Angel with the Scabbed Wings

Perfection in life.
Not plausible.
Not this lifetime.
Poor Anna Angel.

She soared above.
Crashed to the ground.
Can she love that
Which destroyed her?

Friends lied.
Though the need was there.
Still scarred Anna.
Will it never
End?

She was loved.
Shunned.
Her trust slaughtered.
Anna is beyond
Repair.

Life was kinder.
Harshier.
She was mutilated.
Comforted.
She will never know
Love.

In the end
We knew Anna
Would be crowned
An angel.

Though her deceased soul
Still haunts those
Who wronged her in
Life.
Poor Anna.
Dead in such a horrible
Way.

None remember.
None even care.
She truly did become
What we knew she was
All along

An Angel with Scabbed Wings.

Rock-n-Roll Baby

Angry voices
hashing unitelligible lyrics
captivate.
Satanic guitar riffs
make virgin blood
burn white hot.
Can any earthly being
capture
such an awing
heaven?
Of course not.
angels with
scabbed wings
are never
to be obtained.
so if
smoldering
enticement
takes over
a bleeding heart
always remember this
no one
can
ever be
these glorious rogues
only true
Rock-n-Roll Baby.