Okay, my parents told me I had to celebrate, so I’m over at Brendan’s havin some fun.
Last night, Brendan discovered his calling as a hair stylist. I was his first victim. He could be a good one, it’s just that, well, he’s a couple of decades too late.
The real question is….where is David Clark? And where are his cartoons?
I’m always very careful about the chicken counting. Whenever I get excited about some new, shiny, potential egg, I always rein myself back with “NO COUNTING CHICKENS YET!” or the like. I am very careful.
However, now my chickens have hatched. All of them, right there in a row. And I just sort of stare at them with a muted, melancholy sort of gaze, perhaps mumbling, “wha?”
Meanwhile, the chickens are standing there, crossing their stubby just-hatched wings, and tapping their little chicken toes, and saying, “um, HELLO?? You can count us now! Any freakin DAY NOW!!”
So, here they are, one, two, three…
I officially have a job. A real job. A grown-up job. Starts middle of June.
I officially have an apartment. A nice apartment. Move in middle of June.
My Japan trip is totally planned. I have tickets to Chicago and then out to Japan, a hotel to stay in in Chicago, and enough money to do more than merely survive over there.
……
I should be having Dance Party 2005 right now. I have no right to be sad about ANYTHING.
……
erf..
I have always been quite a packrat. At fairly regular intervals throughout my life, I’ve tossed all my excessive belongings into a box, shoved it away in the attic or basement somewhere. There, the contents of the box goes through a slow chemical change. When I drag out the box years later, I am no longer so attached to much of the contents, and can toss out a good amount of excess junk. What is leftover is obviously precious enough that I should hang onto it, though sometimes the same stuff gets put back in a box and shoved away to go through the lengthy refinement process once more.
To get to the point, I dragged a box out of the attic today, all giggly and a-squee, and opened it to delicately pluck out the treasures from the junk. I still have a rather packrat-ish method of rooting out the keepers.
Birthday cards from the second grade on up– toss!
Card bearing an image of a winter-phase longtail weasel containing the cryptic message, “Lisa, now you don’t have to take anything hostage anymore. Too bad I’m not your dead relative. Oh well, close enough. Peace on Earth. Jessie”–that’s a keeper
Crinkled, wallet-sized school photos of people I barely remember from the 3rd grade–toss!
Photo of my mostly-male 4th grade class dressed in drag, dancing with plastic skeletons and tossing pies during our self-written Teacher Parody play–I’ll hang onto that.
I also discovered mysterious gems, such as a form-generated postcard sent to me from Hulk Hogan saying such things as “I will strive to be worthy of your support.”
I also dug out a mysterious contraption that I don’t ever remember existing, called “The Etch A Sketch Animator.” It appears to be an electronic etch-a-sketch, with little buttons that say things like “animate”, “next”, and “recall.” Its biggest limitation seems to be the fact that it is still, fundamentally, an etch-a-sketch, and thus one of the most frustrating and difficult drawing devices of all time. I don’t know how you are expected to animate with it. Once I nab some AA batteries, I’ll find out. Muahaha!
Doing this makes me all excited to go pulling out more boxes. My plan to clean my room has failed; it will only get messier.
More Opencanvas fun with Marji
I drew and Marji colored…
Marji drew and I colored
Fun times were had by all
There was this one summer when I was growing up, possibly the summer before 5th or 6th grade. My brother was obsessed with The Hunt for Red October for some reason. Every day he watched it. Every. Day. I would always wake up and groggily wander downstairs, and he’d be watching it first thing in the morning. So, since I suffer from the common little-sister syndrome of “Everything my brother thinks is cool is most definitely cool,” I would usually sit and watch with him.
He had the whole movie memorized, even the Russian parts, and I was about to get to that point, too. But you know, looking back on it, I’m pretty sure I had absolutely NO idea what was going on in that movie, at all.
It’s kind of like this terrible, wonderful compare-contrast paper I had to write for some English class, either high school or 8th grade, i can’t remember. It was one of those deals where you had to read so many novels over the schoolyear on your own, and then they made you write papers on them to make sure you’d really been reading them. I somehow managed to write a compare-contrast paper on Red Storm Rising and one of the Dragonlance novels, somehow convincing the world that one of the Red Storm characters (I forget which) and Tasslehoff Burfoot were more alike than they had any right to be. It was terribly forced and I was snickering the whole time I was writing it, but the teacher was enchanted and gave me an A (she’d probably never read either). I’m pretty sure that, even though I’d read it thoroughly, I had no idea what was going on in that book.
And now, as I take a break from playing Ghost Recon because it stresses me out too much because I can’t play one squad without worrying about the other and fearing that the computer is too stupid to handle them and is going to get them all killed and switch back and forth and back and forth and OH MY GOD A TANK…
…I wonder…WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH ME, TOM CLANCY???
So I got my yearbook from Centre yesterday. Holy crap, what a pile of total, utter, crap. I’m thinking about sending it back. Seriously, I would have much rather just never received a yearbook than to have that show up in my mailbox.
Now, this isn’t anything mean towards the people who worked on yearbook (well, perhaps one mean thing for whoever put a picture of a doorframe instead of the photo I submitted, what the hell??), because I know how much work is involved from when my brother and sister-in-law worked on it. It’s just that Centre won’t get their ass in gear and make it a for-real thing, and instead they leave it up to flailing students who die under the amount of stress it produces.
My brother has been begging me to write a nasty alumnus letter about the craptacular state of yearbookness from the moment I graduated. Maybe I’ll get around to that.
Marji and I were talking tonight about close friends who vanish off the face of the earth. So I thought I’d give a shout as loud as I can into the void of the internet.
Keary Bailey, where aaaaaaare you?
Before vanishing mysteriously off to China, Keary entrusted me with his special engraved zippo, which I have no idea how to convey the significance of through words, so just trust me in that it was a big deal. His parting words were that either a) he’s be back for the lighter, or b) if “something happened”, his soul would be magically transported back to the lighter, and I was to be its safekeeper. Sure thing, I keep the lighter in a safe place, I get one email from Keary in China, then nothing. That was several years ago.
When I started going through rough times, I started carrying the lighter around with me, flipping open and closing its lid, at times clutching it in my fist almost constantly. On one of the mysterious tear-filled nights, Brendan pointed it out to me, that I carried the thing around like a talisman. It was unfair to impart Guardian Angel status onto someone like that, a normal human, or someone’s phantom that was still a part of my life. I put people up on pedestals; that is bad. Back to the safe place the lighter went.
But still, since then, it has secretly come out of the safe place. In particularly rough moments, I have found the thing somehow ends up back in my hand, clicking open and closing again. I dunno, maybe it is purely the compulsive act of doing that which comforts me. It does make a rather gratifying “click-clonk” sound.
I’ve heard around that he’s been back in the states. Perhaps the revelations he experienced from his adventuring pushed out any memory of silly attachment to an object, or a person. I don’t mind so much, I change just as often over time as the next person, I can relate. Still, I’ve gotten back into the old talisman habit. Is it still unfair, what I’m doing?
Keary, you were a good friend to me in that growing-up time I was going through. I hope you are happy and doing well, and I’ll continue to keep your lighter safe, even if you’ve forgotten.
Part Two:
Wertle crawls back out of the same green pipe and skips over to the riverside. She waves down Siddhartha with her claw.
“Look, look, I made it a bit further, didn’t I? I remembered an important thing!”
Siddhartha smiles, “Yes you did, but you used the whistle again, didn’t you?”
Wertle tries to hide the device behind her back, a little embarrassed, “So…it’s not my turn to be the ferryman, is it?”
Siddhartha shakes his head, “You haven’t lost everything yet.”
“Yes…I know.”
“I know you know.”
Wertle climbs back into the pipe and disappears a third time.
Referring to this entry, here’s round 2.
D Flo causes infectious laughter. I remember when I was up north, everyone in the house always knew when I was on the phone with D Flo, because it wasn’t long after “hello” that we’d both be bellowing out laughs about some ridiculous thing or another. I remember D Flo was one of my favorite people to show comics to. I’d finish a Halo comic, run up and give it to him, and fidget there, watching his eyes, waiting for him to reach the punchline, and be rewarded by one of my favorite laughs. Spending time with D Flo feels natural, as if he’s always been there. The Blue Bike Gang, Walmart runs, or even just sitting and watching him play Age of Mythology over his shoulder, keeping an extra eye on the invasive red dots on the radar. D Flo is one of those rare people that I share a brainwave frequency with. It makes playing co-op games so natural: Halo, Ghost Recon, Desert Conflict (ah, Kuwait never had to worry with us around!), and of course, Taboo (“Mogwai! Mogwai!”). D Flo is my partner in crime, stage management or otherwise, and whenever I am with him, I feel light and playful and full of energy, as if joining forces to save the world is no hard feat.
In other news, Ken and I had OpenCanvas fun this afternoon.
Skater?
Scott Fargus of Dragons
I have no idea
Tonight, Will, Marji and I discovered the joy that is OpenCanvas…
