Welcome, gentle reader, to this modest homepage. My goal is to broaden your mind, my pleasure is to make you laugh, and my skill is to leave you breathless; so it is with the fondest greetings that I invite you to travel into the wildly fantastic haven of my mind.

No, Opheliais not my real name, nor is it even close. Those of you who have read a certain book will immediately recognize it, though. This account is one of several that I possess. I have torn through three fandoms already; falling head-over-heels in love with a certain pairing, devouring fanfics and theories night and day, and writing an entire folder full of random ideas. Then, gradually, I begin to lose interest, and wander on to a new obsession. This is, however, the first TV show I have latched onto, and one of the first TV shows I have viewed as an intelligent, well-thought-out vehicle of entertainment rather than a sanctioned Moron Hour.

Before we start, let’s say this right now: I don’t like to offend people. I like to make them laugh, I like to make them think, but I don’t like to have them mad at me. If anything stated below gets anyone’s hackles up, I most devoutly and regretfully apologize; and I invite you to leave this page, because most of my opinions will not be changed by the flow of general opinion. I don’t necessarily accept flames, but I laugh at them when they do, occasionally, arrive in my mailbox. If you feel you need to flame me, go ahead; but know that I will be sitting in my room laughing at you next time I check my email.

I love to stay up late typing when my light is off, my door is closed, and my parents think I’m asleep. I despise chickens. I love Mary Sue parodies, because I think it’s very healthy to take a step back and have an occasional laugh at ourselves. And we have all written Mary Sues, every single brownie-bingeing cookie-crunching sugar-intoxicated one of us. Show me a fanfic writer who hasn’t had a Mary Sue, and I’ll show you a liar with an unposted story hidden deep within their forgotten computer files. There was a rather embarrassing time in my own career when I wrote a series of humiliating stories about a healer who was followed around by a magic wolf, a dragon who could change into a human whenever it wanted, and a veritable flock of phoenixes and fire-lizards. I destroyed every trace of those stories when I came to my senses a few months later, and I rather wish I had them now, to look back at and laugh. I once had a bizarre dream in which a dragon baked me a batch of brownies with many-colored sprinkles, and I would like to impart to you these immortal words: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!

As far as medical diagnosis goes, I am completely normal, which I resent. Most of the really good writers I know (with a few notable exceptions) have mild dyslexia or attention deficit disorder or something, and I cannot help but feel that the complete conformity of the chemical combinations in my brain will someday lead to my utter downfall.

I believe that the American two-party system should be dissolved, and Presidential candidates should be selected based on merit, not on how many people signed up to be called a Republican or a Democrat. We should have a President who is not affiliated with either party. I also think that donkeys and elephants should be spared the humiliation of being made objects of political satire, and left to live their donkey and elephant lives in peace.

I hate stereotypes. And for those of you who would argue that hating stereotypes is in itself a stereotype, I respond that it is merely disagreement with a concept that had taken leechlike possession of the American way of life and is slowly strangling us to death. I do not believe that all people who use stereotypes are bad – the human mind is so small that we need classifications and categorizations to help us make sense of our world – but stereotypes are a thing to be avoided within oneself, and corrected immediately if discovered. The same goes for prejudice.

Original Quote: Inspiration knocks softly, and at three a.m. I am the one crouching behind the door with a frying pan, waiting to beat it unconscious so that I can get some sleep.

I am viciously territorial when it comes to my laptop and my books. I have many, many books and I love each and every one of them with all of my heart. My personal heaven is a warm bookstore on a day of freezing rain, with a thick shaggy carpet that you can dig your toes into and miles and miles of beautiful volumes. I don’t read my books. I devour them. I submerge myself in them. I throw myself into the words and hope to drown. I drink in every letter, every mark on the page, every dent and tear in the cover and let the book form its own personality inside my mind, so I know every single book on my shelves better than I know myself.

Speaking of myself, I firmly believe that all of life is a journey of discovery, undiscovery and rediscovery that drives us towards a deeper, more complete, and more comfortable understanding of our own selves. I religiously believe in the concept of growing comfortable inside your own skin; I don’t, however, believe that this necessarily entails traveling to some far-off place and leaving everything you know and love behind, as movies and books so romantically portray. Instead I think that the place where out true selves are to be found in the heartbeat of each day, the little moments, our family and friends and that one song on the radio that makes you feel all fuzzy inside. To quote the wonderful Will Smith in his movie Hitch; “Life is not the number of breaths you take, but the moments that take your breath away.”

I adore the crazy and the dark or, as I am so fond of calling it, the wildly fantastic. These are the things that strike you to the bone and resonate with some dark chord in your most twisted fantasies; the suicide poem that portrays pain as pleasure, the angst-ridden story that leaves me cold and sick to my stomach. I am bizarre. I can accept that. And surprisingly, in my dealing with the outside world I am a pretty bubbly and hyper person. Go figure.

Outside of fanfiction, I write mostly poetry, with the occasional short story that I never have the patience to finish. I first got into fanfiction with an all-consuming Harry Potter phase – I was a diehard H/Hr shipper. I also was (and still am) a hopeless closet romantic.

In fact, there is only one person who knows of and shares my love of the first kiss and sugar-sweet ending. Jacquelyn, if you are reading this, congratulations! you’ve found me out at last.

My current obsessions are Phantom of the Opera, Les Mis, and The Fountainhead. My idols, unsurprisingly, are Victor Hugo for his skill with the pen; Ayn Rand for her nonconformism and exceptional mind; and Lorelai Gilmore, for being wittily brilliant in every single episode, and for snaring a man like Luke. ;)

On the other hand, I absolutely loathe Napoleon Dynamite (I don’t need to watch pathetic moron boy running around with his eyes shut for two hours); Fear Factor (and reality television in general); adaptations of Romeo and Juliet (the original is the best by far); Emily (she has her moments, though); and Tristan.

I love run-on sentences, adjectives, alliteration, books and the thought of summer continuing for the rest of my natural life. I crave music with an unceasing addiction; the time before the Ipod was nothing more than a gray expanse of dreary silence. There are days when the broken rhythms of human speech are too discordant for me to handle, and I retreat to my room, curl up under my covers, and blare Les Mis and Fall Out Boy until I can’t hear or care about anything else. The most romantic song in my universe right now is "Reflecting Light", by Sam Phillips.

That’s all I can think of about myself for now. I might add more later; until then, go and read my stories, and take away some new idea to think about or a warm fuzzy feeling inside. I leave you now with the eternal cry of fanfic writers the wide world over; Please, Review!