But I have some majorly exciting news.

It’s called…

ALTOALI.ORG

That’s right. I have a domain! The super marvelous and gracious Emily offered to buy me one and host me so I can embark on the next step of my web-design career. I can’t thank her enough for helping me start setting it up. She’s a real trooper!

With that good news, means this: I’m moving! Everyone, change your links/bookmarks. Altoali.org should be set up in a day or so, whenever it decides to start showing up. I’ll comment/email you to make sure you hear the good news.

So I really needed a new blog. What to blog about, what to blog about…

Last weekend I met my baby cousin, Isabel Grace, for the very first time! She’s very cute. My uncle and his new wife live in the middle of nowhere, out in the country, so it was a long drive out there. It’s kinda cool, being in the country. Very relaxing. I think it’d be cool to live there for a little while. We drove out Saturday morning and got there about midday. We then went to the college town nearby and ate lunch at this really good pizza place, Shakespeare’s Pizza. My dad actually, back in the stone age, worked at one of the very first Shakespeare’s as a pizza maker, so it was probs weird for him to be back there… We then walked around, I tried to take hipster pics, and saw this homeless violinist. I had this overwhelming urge to ask him if I could play his violin, but my common sense got the best of me…I wish I could tell you I showed him up, though! Lol But yeah. We stayed the night, and then went home in the morning, but not after stopping at the Capitol building. It was pretty cool. My dad and I are more of the sightseers, but my sister and mom just really wanted to go home. So they didn’t enjoy it too much!

I’ve also been involved in a local outdoor theatre production of “Cinderella”! I’m not in the cast, but I’m in the pit orchestra. I really, really like it. It’s very laid-back, and the median age is approximately 40. Let’s just say that I’m the only person who not only can’t drive, but hasn’t graduated high school. But I like being the youngest. I get to learn from the older players, and hear about their experiences. It was really weird how I got involved in it. I went to see the same company’s production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” and recognized one of my viola pals, Cody, in the program. I texted him and met up with him and the conductor after the show. The conductor was really, really cool and told me to just show up at Cinderella rehearsal and I’d be in! So I did…and here I am! Gotta love networking

So I changed the layout! The old one was giving me a headache and I wanted something new. Honestly, the old one was really similar to the one before it, except that it was green instead of black. Hope you guys like it! I had a horrible 24-hour css struggle so ENJOY THE CSS. That’s not a suggestion, it’s an order. It was really weird, the content div was directly under the sidebar div, and ugghghhhhgihdhdjk. Not fun. Luckily, 2 html forums, 3 threads, and a talk with my host later, it got solved! Turns out I was just missing a div closing tag…I hate it when the solution is so simple. Actually nevermind I love it. <3 Html forums are my new besties.

Pertaining to the layout and graphic design in general…I feel like I just can’t graphic design at all anymore! Maybe it’s because I don’t have PSP9 anymore and am using a laptop sans mouse, or maybe I’ve really lost it. I dunno. My layouts lately have been very simple. I feel like I’m using “simple” as a disguise for just lack of skill…I really wish I could have a big, impressive, complicated layout, but I just can’t do it. Errgg. I wish I had photoshop. Or a domain. Or both.
Reassure me that my layout doesn’t suck too bad? My sister said it was too plain…tru dat.

Money money money. I have none since I bought gaga tickets! I’m going in August and am super super pumped. I want to get a body suit and bedazzle it. Or something. Something Lady Gaga worthy. I’ll definitely post pictures after the concert.

Oh, and the layout is Kate Nash-inspired. I LOVE LOVE LOVE Kate Nash!! If you haven’t listened to her, I highly reccommend all of her songs. But I’ll tell you my favorites: Mariella, Kiss That Grrl, Skeleton Song, and Do-Wah-Doo. I wish I could link you but stupid FanUpdate doesn’t like links. So it’s whatever. Youtube or illegally download them or buy them. She’s incredible.

First thing’s first, vote for me in Dear Oxygen’s Domain Contest!!! Link in the sidebar. Vote for me!!

Lately I’ve been wrapped up in a little thing called Summer Gym. (Oddly enough, I remember blogging about this exact same thing one year ago…lol life parallels). Summer Gym is a torture device designed for the non-athletic and overscheduled. I happen to be both. Since my state requires one unit of gym (or two semesters), I had to return to this prison for the second year in a row. It’s three weeks, five days a week, 7:00-12:00 IN THE MORNING of constant physical activity. It’s a part of summer school in my district, this year hosted at a ghetto-sketch school that boasts an impressive record of juvenile delinquents and condoms littering the turf field.
It was bad.
However, I survived it with my best friend AJ and made a few new friends along the way. So the social aspect wasn’t too bad. I just learned how awful I was at most every sport. Except soccer and tennis. I like those.
Since it was a part of summer school, we shared the building with the creepy gangtas and thugs who couldn’t pass English or Algebra the first three times and therefore had to come to summer school. We were basically the only ones there by choice.

The other thing that I was doing this week was planning aforementioned best friend’s surprise sweet sixteen! It was very fun and elaborate. I planned it with two other friends. The party was yesterday and we had only started planning saturday. So it was a lot of work squeezed into a short amount of time. We actually had two parties: first, we took him out to lunch, just the four of us, right after summer gym. Polly and Jessy (the other planners) had decorated his car, and so when we got to his house, he was very surprised! We paid for his lunch and then got dropped off at Polly’s. He was very disappointed-like, is that it? We’re not gonna hang out all afternoon? But little did he know…we spent the afternoon picking up his dinosaur cake at Costco, decorating Polly’s backyard, attempting and failing to fix her trampoline net, calling her albino-tool neighbor Henry and amigo to fix it and etc. We even made him a tribute video! Courtesy of me. Needless to say, he was very surprised and very, very happy. He’s a big drama queen and love attention, so the party naturally satisfied that. We had about 20 people over. It was a very fun time!

Have you ever been totally frustrated by how big the world is?
To me, it seems like there’s so much to do, so much that I want to accomplish in my time here, that I’m afraid those dreams may get swallowed in the daily routine.
I mean, haven’t we all heard the story of the grocer who dreamed of being a painter? Or the housewife who wanted to be a senator?

Those may be a little bit extreme. I mean, most of us are just teenagers or young adults, and a lot of time, the pressure is to follow your dream. My parents, as many beefs and issues that I have with them, have always allowed and pushed me to follow my dream, whatever that may be. I don’t even know what my dream is! Maybe I won’t ever know. Maybe no one ever knows what they really want in life. But we all have things we want to finish, what we want to remember, before our time is out.

I challenge you to make a BUCKET LIST. Make a list of EVERYTHING you want to accomplish in your lifetime. Or in the next year. Or during your school years. Or all of the above.
There’s no catch, no requirements. Make it any way you like it: scribbled on a napkin, on a dry-erase board, into an intricate graphic design, whatever! Post a picture of it as a comment. I wanna see what you think!

Challenge COMPLETED! Wanna see my bucket list? Click here!!

What else are friends good for?

Throughout school and life in general, emphasis is put on finding boyfriends and girlfriends, and to a lesser extent, friends. But aren’t friends every bit as important as those other links in your life? They hold the remote to you, thumb hovering over the “build me up” buttons, and even more vitally, the “self-destruct” switch. (sorry about the metaphor) Why would we give someone so much power to make us feel inferior and worthless and simultaneously amazing and popular?

I write this as I’m going through some friend troubles. I have a new friend that is friends with the rest of my friend group. Every time we’re around other people, she’s horribly mean. But in the way that she pulls it off as a joke, so it seems ok. She also steals attention away from the rest of my friends. Basically I feel like crap while everyone else praises her. The only reasons we’re still friends are: A) primarily, she give really, really, REALLY good advice. Like, if I break down, she’s there to build me up. That’s her redeeming trait. B) all of my other friends love her. She probably doesn’t make them feel this way. C) she could destroy me socially. Sounds like “Mean Girls”, huh?
Sorry about the diary entry there, haha,

Just think about this and listen to the song that inspired me: Yes, it’s from the musical “13″

Welcome to AltoAli, version SUMMER!!!

The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the bees are stinging, which means it’s time for AltoAli to return to the face of the web world, freshly emerged from the depths of hiatus.

I plan to blog every day or two, put up much more content much more often, and get some more affiliates and visitors!

Please enjoy the new layout, 4 new brush sets, 19 new scans, stocks page, and 4 new textures!
I also redid a lot of coding and made things look more uniform and polished. Nothing but my best for you all. <3

I have 3 new affilates, Alexx, Aileen, and Aparna who all have extremely fab sites. Shoutout to Aparna, an old affie from forever ago reunited. Go check them out! I cleaned out most of my old affies, because weirdly enough, most have shut down. D: Weeiird.

I also have 2 new advertisees, Snookumz and AGZA which are pretty sweet sites, so check those out too!

If you have any questions at ALL about advertising, affiliation, my site, my content, etc. go ahead and comment or contact me. I’m currently accepting both, so apply for one or both positions!

-Revamp affies, find new affies
-Revamp advertising, find new
-New layout?
-Update about me
-Post blog
-Make new content

I’m going on a hiatus, dunno for how long. But I gotta focus on school, theatre, viola, y’know, life.

Life is going well, but I just don’t really know where this site fits in to everything. I’m gonna try and get back into this later, but right now, I just don’t have the time.

If you want updates on my life (creepy? friendly?) I’ll try and twitter or something. Or you can just email me, because I tend to not respond to comments. Again super sorry bout that.

Affies, you can delete me if you want.

And everyone keep in touch! I do love you all. I’d love to stay in contact.

I hope all of you had a happy Hanukkah, a merry Christmas, or (in advance, right?) a happy Kwanzaa. I hope you got awesome presents, but more importantly, got to appreciate your loved ones.

Updates-wise, I plan to get some scans in, maybe write a few tutorials. I updated my advertise-ees and affiliates, so that’s good.

I have two rather large and awesome things to tell you about, dear readers! They’re big contributors to my lack of updates, haha.

First off, I have been cast the lead in a one-act play at my school!! All the seniors in Advanced Rep have to direct a one-act, so this is one of them. This one’s unique, however, because my director, Hannah, also wrote the script herself! The script is hilarious and brilliant, I love it. It’s about two teenagers, Jeremy and Suzie (that’s me!) who are lonely and looking for love. They are acquaintences in class, but they meet online (unknowingly) on a poetry website, and fall in love. Of course, at the end they find out that their love is actually in their same English class, and a big romantic ending is called for. It’s told as a flashback, the older Jeremy telling some random teenager the story of his junior year in order to get her to appreciate love and poetry at a bus stop. There’s a bunch of jokes, poking fun at the stereotypical teenager things (drinking, horniness, gossiping), but my favorite part is that there is a lot of poetry. The more emotional parts in the show are revealed through poetry, it’s how our characters think and connect. It’s really rather beautiful. I am so ridiculously excited. Fun fact: I get to kiss a senior! Funner fact: Half of the school is coming to witness said kiss! Woohoo! XP
Is it pathetic that I’m obsessed with this play? I read it over and over, lmao. I’m a loser. :B

The second this is a result of my consequential immersion in poetry. Because of the wonderful romantic outlook on poetry in my play, I wanted to see if other people had poetry on their minds, too. And what better way to find out than Mystery Google, right? (If you don’t know how mystery google works, just…google it. Or comment and I’ll explain :P) So I posted this mission hundreds of times: “There’s a poem in your heart. Write it out, and send it to altoali95@gmail.com” I did that ove the course of 4 hours one night, and amassed over 80 poems. So now, my friends, I have a stockpile of raw human emotion, and it’s absolutely beautiful. Some of the authors were great conversationalists, might I add.
Now, I need your help. What on earth should I do with all this poetry? I was thinking of making a project out of it, maybe a website of some sort? I have no clue.

Questions:
1. How was your holiday? Favorite gift?
2. Got any good acting advice/stories?
3. Do you believe in online love?
4. My mystery google project: your opinion?
5. What on earth should I do with all of this poetry??
6. Who else is excited to be on break? Woot, woot!

I think we should outlaw school and homework, because it is occupying far too much of my time.

Oy vey!

Anyhow, I am working on the site, trying to maybe make some content, but mostly re-establish my presence in the online world, cuz it’s crazy what a few months can do to your rep. Haha.

Suggestions on content updates?

PS- Even if I don’t write a blog, I still check in here every day for comments, and I check my email. I’m like a ghost haunting this site.

Anyways, for all of you who remember my old site, this is my new URL! Same content, same webmistress, etc. etc. (same layout for those that remember, too XD)

I’ll have a grand-er opening as soon as I get some time on my hands, I’ve just been ridiculously busy. New layout, additional content…later. I can’t say when but hopefully soon.

So.

Affiliates / Advertisers- I’m alive! Delete me if you must, I’ll reapply later if you would like. I’ll shoot y’all an email right now. And change my link, por favor!