So my brother got a job.

It is a pretty sweet job, more so than the abortive national park one and, incidentally, much more relevant to those four and a half years of engineering school I'm told he went through. I’m not entirely sure what it is. I believe he refines lightning, after it is extracted from the lightning mines, and then puts it into large machines, but I could be wrong. I might be confusing this with the magic smoke factories.

Anyway. This is totally awesome, because he no longer has to sit around in the room across from me in the Bat Cave moping, and also it is a bummer, because now I’m the only one in the Bat Cave. It’s hard to yell witty comments about whatever is occupying one’s interests* when there’s nobody in the other room. I may have to remember how to operate one o’ them instant messengers again.

Also it means that while Mom helps my brother drive to California, I get to stay home with Dad, which means alternating between companionable watching of old movies** and reassuring a somewhat nervous Dad that no, that one time he got a call telling him which hospital the Life Flight was dropping his wife and kids off at was probably just a fluke, and that road trips don’t always lend themselves to broken necks and crushed cars. Sometimes we toss in some grocery shopping, although more often the garnish is moping about my brother’s absence.

Oh, and also, we broke the new stove already.

Perhaps you shouldn’t let the two slightly autistic family members alone for a week, is what I’m sayin’.

But I digress! I would now like to take the time to wish the Dude good luck at his new lightning-related job in California. And Dude, I think I speak for all the family when I say: FUCK TUBULAR.

And you know I mean that.


*Such as: “I can’t watch Lord of the Rings anymore! I keep inserting ‘Dammit, Jim’ before every line Éomer utters!”, “Alton Brown has just compelled me to make homemade Pop-Tarts, but it’s 3 in the morning. What do I do?”, “Look! I drew an alien’s respiratory system!” and, of course, “JESUS CHRIST YOU WOULD THINK AFTER 18 YEARS I’D KNOW HOW TO BEAT THIS, BUT FUCK TUBULAR.”

**Although we have agreed: no more Doris Day movies. That shit is bananas.

There is a particular DVD on the kids’ shelf at work that never fails to baffle me:

Baby Einstein’s Baby Neptune: Discovering Water.

I don’t know about you, but I am pretty sure that as a baby and then a small child, I did not discover much about water from a TV screen. Here are just a few of the things I used to discover water:

-the sink
-the bathtub, where you quickly discovered that moving back and forth created El Niño and then your mom would yell at you for making a mess
-the hose*
-sprinklers, which as we all know are where rainbows live
-front yard wading pools
-duck ponds
-puddles
-swimming pools
-creeks and criks
-mountain lakes
-rainstorms
-snowstorms
-icicles

I’m not sure why this DVD, specifically, mystifies me so much. I suppose it would be useful to explain to me, the mountain kid, about oceans, but I have the feeling that if I’d never seen a duck pond on the outside of my TV set I wouldn’t really believe the DVD anyway.

Maybe it’s just my lack of trust in the claims of this DVD. If baby hasn’t been actively discovering water BEFORE this, then I really think there’s no hope for her.


*HOLY SHIT the hose! HOURS of entertainment. You could stick your thumb on it and watch it spray out rainbows, or see what happened if you held it straight up, or put that squirt gun attachment on it and blast your brother, or play London Bridge, or attach it to your slip’n’slide, or drink from it, or use it to fill your sandbox,** or help Mom water the garden …

**Which, given that our backyard is several narrow tiers on the side of a mountain, tended to mean that after a while the sandbox had migrated down a tier and become the sandpile.

COWORKER: (pulling books out of the book drop) Aww! Amelia Bedelia! I loved Amelia Bedelia as a kid!

AMELIA: Really? People liked her? I have always hated her with a fiery passion intense enough to fuse hydrogen atoms into helium.

COWORKER: Aaahowwwwa!* You don’t like her? Why not?

AMELIA: Well, for one thing, we’re talking dumb as a bag of hammers, and I’ve never been patient with the type of idiot who takes language so god damn literally.

COWORKER: I thought she was funny!

AMELIA: Fair enough. But, perhaps more to the point, you probably didn’t have every single grownup who knew your name think it was clever and cute to call you “Amelia Bedelia.”

COWORKER: … I really can’t argue with that.


Ah, the indignities suffered upon small people because grownups thought they were being cute. Good thing I had The Other Amelia with which to distract them. That story was more interesting, anyway.


*I have never been able to correctly render this noise, but you all know it—it’s the sympathetic sad noise a girl makes when you, say, kick a puppy.

Late, but I forgot to post this when it came out.

Made me laugh, though.

'80s babies, unite!

Meanwhile, while I was sick my meme backlog has piled up. I hereby must respond to the memes or my ego will be unsatisfied I will have failed the internet. So let’s see, in order that they were received:

nobleplatypus demands my handwriting answer the following questions:
1. Write your username.
2. Write your 2 favourite bands/groups of the moment.
3. Write something you ♥, AKA lemme see your heart!
4. Write the name of your favourite person of all time.
5. Write the name of your recent favoured person.
6. Tag 6 people to do this meme.

She did not, however, stipulate that I had to answer with the truth.

That’s right, dudes, I have a LISA FRANK notebook. You are jealous.

bottledgoose had this meme:
1. Leave me a comment saying anything random, like your favorite lyric to your current favorite song.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions.

… and asked me these questions:
1) write a letter to me in one of your fun alien scripts!
2) tell me what it means, lol

Okay!


In the Roman alphabet:

Kwiryi Andee
Ka gwŕkarris mezhwubnug ashthekyu,
ishŕl mezhyak midzandghŕa Gherresa.
Lye ka sŕlash rrañif Rroerth tan ethlyi,
dher ki kipal ozkorris olye,
ish juvei esa ghesh frodha sŕyul olye kipal rrañirris ka.
Prat rroareafishŕl jeltsughazho.
Amelia

And it means:

( Hah! Now you HAVE to click! )

… And two seconds after a Fun With Books entry, I find out that Reading Rainbow is going off the air.

I think their philosophy for dumping it in favor of The Mechanics is a fallacy. Reading Rainbow was an excellent counter for Sesame Street—once you learned how to read, it showed you what you could do with it. A lot of kids with basic reading skills don’t really know what to do with the skill.

I wasn’t the kind of kid who needed convincing that reading is awesome, but I still have nothing but good memories about Reading Rainbow. It showed me a lot of interesting topics. I still get hypnotized if I ever catch it on TV.*

Still, 26 years is a good run for a show. Maybe I’ll binge on that next.


*Of course, nowadays it helps that LeVar Burton is ADORABLE.

agenttrojie gave me some more words a couple weeks or so ago. Here they are!

Garnet – I am fond of garnet for many reasons. Yes, I very much like the gem itself—the way it can look so much like a drop of faceted blood or a pomegranate seed* makes me really prefer it even to rubies. But after that, the rest of my reasons are markedly insane. In the miswired synesthetic synapses of my brain, the word “garnet” is the most onomatopoeic one ever seen, heard, felt, tasted, and just experienced. It sounds exactly like the gemstone looks—and more than that, it’s got a musical tone (two, actually), a taste, and a goddamn hand movement to go with it. It has never been topped for pure fused-senses goodness.

Malaria – Did you know that the Super Mario Bros. music can alleviate the symptoms of malaria? I discovered this in my host family’s house in Mombasa, while lying miserably on my mattress being extremely thankful for the quick response of the clinic’s medication and my host mother’s intelligence in dragging me to that clinic. Suddenly the familiar Mario music, the one that I am pretty sure is encoded into my DNA, wafted into my consciousness, and I sprang off the mattress and stomped out to find the kids crowded around their bootleg video game system. “Gimme that,” I said, taking the controller.

“You know Super Mario?” one said, wide-eyed.

“You kidding? This game’s as old as I am!”

And I totally forgot I had malaria for the rest of the evening.

Spore – One of the few PC games I’ve been into—sure, I like the Little Bit Of Everything game itself, but the real appeal is in being able to build the aliens and the buildings and spaceships inside my head. I just wish it wasn’t so cartoony.

Doll – Yeah, I’m the Crazy Doll Person. I could make a lot of in-depth psychological points about why dolls give me insight into myself; I could argue that they are exercises in character development; I could go on and on about my interest in their parallel with authors’ characters and the illusion of independent agency, but the simple truth is that they’re just so damn cute.

They also seem to be a focus for a lot of my craft projects. I'd never have learned to sew if Kuen didn't need clothes.

Space – Space. The Final Frontier. It’s … big, and full of cool, fascinating things, like pulsars and nebulae and swirling galaxies so big we can’t wrap our heads around them—and all of them look really great as desktops. Plus, someday we’re going to bust out into space and absolutely fuck shit up, and we’ll all have a great time, especially when we meet the aliens. I take it for granted that there are aliens somewhere else.

I like to write stories set in space because, while we know some key things about how space works, it’s big enough to accommodate as many fantastic worlds as we can come up with without having them proven wrong anytime soon. It’s a giant sandbox, where you can study real science and speculate with dreams. And, of course, in a very vast sense, it's where we live.


*Which actually gives us the name “garnet.” The more you know!

Had a manic moment today and dragged the trundle frame out from under my bed to vacuum out some of the larger, meaner dustbunnies. I use my trundle frame mostly as a storage space for old writing projects dating back to around 1991, which for those of you keeping score at home would be the kindergarten ones.

This was all part of the plan. Included in that mire of half-finished scenes and sentence fragments is a box of 3¼" floppy discs containing some of my writing from a later period, known as my “Could Spell But Couldn’t Write” period, from when I just staggered into the double-digit age set till about halfway through high school. And also included with this box is my beloved old CD-ROM for Creative Writer 2.

I adore that program. I spent that entire period of writing on Creative Writer and Creative Writer 2.* It had sound effects and background schemes like Deep Space and The Ocean, and you could make words sparkle or do silly sound effects, and you could do drop caps. (I loved drop caps.) And there was some freakish blue bald character who was supposed to manifest the spirit of creativity, and who, in my opinion, is scads better than that accursed paperclip.

The only bug of these programs—and some misguided souls would argue that this is actually a feature—is that they didn’t actually come with the stories prewritten for you. I had to write them myself, and I saved them all and backed them up after a few unfortunate incidents in which they died horrible deaths. And now I have all these stories that need to be re-saved while I still have an old computer that actually uses floppies.

The thing is, some of this stuff is saved only for me and my own nostalgia, because contrary to what my teachers and I myself always insisted, my writing stunk. Oh, it was good for its author’s developmental period at the time, but it was still, quite frankly, practice writing, and kittikattie once voiced the same opinion I have of practice writing and practice crafts: unless you’re looking for pointers or criticism, you do not show it to the world. My practice writing included stories about my dolls, Fantasy Epics, random absurdist mystery stories, veritable stacks of Super Mario and Star Wars fanfiction,** and outright plagiarism. You don't want to see it.

But there were a few gems in there, too, and so if I find a few that I like, I may share them with you. I have promised gondolinchick01 that I will show her the story that won some sort of district award in sixth grade ("Sir Dave and the Dragon"), on condition that she show me the one she wrote that won something or other. And while I suffer no illusions about my free verse poetry, and never have,*** I may inflict some of the more fun poems I came up with on you.

This is what you guys get when I dive under the bed. Pray I don’t go for the closet next.


*The previous period, “Was Just Starting To Form Abstract Conceptualizations,” was done on KidWorks, which had features like an art studio that rivaled Microsoft Paint, little icons that would replace common nouns and verbs, and my favorite feature of all: a voice-aloud option that would read your story to you if you clicked it. I derived hours of entertainment from listening to monotonal recitations of my one-page stories from that guy.

**I think fanfiction, no matter how stupid the fandom, is a very useful device for practice writing, because you can start with an established storyline and characters. It’s like Fisher Price’s My First Story.

***I found a “poetry portfolio” I did as an assignment in 9th grade, and in my self evaluation I stated outright that my free verse poetry sucked, but I enjoyed doing limericks and parodies.

All right, all right! I’ll do the damn meme, Facebook. Yeesh. Pushy bastard.

25 Random Things About Me:

1. For me, some very strange words are intrinsically onomatopoeic—such as garnet, swelter, and bottle. It's an odd extra of the synesthesia, I guess.

2. I chose Kenya for study abroad because I was already studying Swahili. I was already studying Swahili because one day in high school I saw a book in the library that said Teach Yourself Swahili and I figured, why not? Life is just full of these little oddities.

3. I am a first degree black belt in tae kwon do. No, really. No, really.

4. When I was in elementary school I spent every single recess from third through fifth grade meandering around in circles on the school’s crummy little track. I was dreaming up story ideas. I never realized how weird this was. (In sixth grade I discovered that I could do odd jobs in the library at recess.)

5. I started conlanging for real at the age of 12 or 13 when I included a sentence in “Yoshese” in a Super Mario story I was writing. I believe the sentence was “They don’t call him ‘Fireball’ for nothing!”

6. When I was ten, I struck up a long-lasting friendship with a children’s book author because of my name.

7. At one point in my house we had three cats, a budgie, a rabbit, and intermittent frogs and goldfish.

8. According to my mom, I have a defective imaginary audience—that chorus of people we think is watching our every move and judging us. Mine rarely shows up, and when it does it’s after the fact. It makes me immune to self-consciousness most of the time, but it also puts people off.

9. Between the ages of about four and seventeen, I was the Human VCR. I could recite or sing almost everything you told me after hearing it once, and I can still recite everything I learned back then. This includes the entirety of “Yakko’s World,” Rockapella’s “Capital,” and songs I didn’t understand—I learned “Cielito Lindo” from a Speedy Gonzales cartoon, and could sing a song in French. The trick was to memorize the sounds, not the words themselves. Either normal brain development or antidepressants robbed me of the ability.

10. Kermit the Frog was my first crush. (I was four.)

11. I have skinny-dipped at night in a phosphorescent ocean.

12. My hip still sports a big old scar from the great rollover car crash I was in when I was six. I got out of my seatbelt for ten seconds to reach for some markers on our cross-country trip, and of course those ten seconds were the ones we crashed in. I was thrown from the car so violently that I blew the back doors open; I apparently skidded to a halt and shredded my right side. I woke up in a thorn bush and for the next six months was picking thorns and broken glass out of my scalp. But all my abrasions were superficial, and I didn’t even break any bones.

13. I used to play the stand-up bass in orchestra and jazz band in school. That got me involved in all sorts of crazy capers.

14. I am a tea snob and can tell you the correct temperature and brewing time for white, red, green, black, and herbal teas. People laugh at me until they realize that the tea I make tastes a helluva lot better because it’s done right.

15. I once threatened to steal Penn Jillette’s ponytail, until he pointed out there was no way I could reach it with our height discrepancy. I still plan to steal his house someday, though.

16. My birthday is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

17. I’ve had malaria.

18. I have a huge crush on Dr. Henry McCoy from X-Men. My friend drew several comics in which she and I hounded him the way Twilight fans hound Robert Pattinson, although to my knowledge Twifans have not, so far, given the object of their affections a bubblebath in a big washpan in the front yard.

19. For years I had a “Padawan braid” at my left temple while I kept the rest of my hair short. People knew me as “the girl with the braid.”

20. Until I was 19, I had never seen an episode of Star Trek. Then Liz, my best friend in college, introduced me to it. Blame her.

21. Liz and I also started CSI Night our first year in college, which remained a weekly party over the next four years. Sometimes we actually even watched CSI.

22. I collect mermaids.

23. I know how to cast a piece of jewelry using the lost wax process.

24. I have had a theme song since before I was born, courtesy of my mom, who would put headphones on her pregnant stomach while she worked and pump in Annie Lennox’s “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart).” According to her, I could recognize that song long before I noticed any other music.

25. I once got to be in the OR to watch a brain surgery. I was really enjoying it right up until I passed out.


Most of you with Facebook accounts have probably already been tagged 25 times, but if not consider yourself tagged. I like random facts about people!