I Am Completely Serious

thegeekgene: Dad bought a minivan, you know.

Me: What – no, he didn’t.

elongated_tito: He did. It’s red.

Me: Mommmm!

Mom: I know -

Me: Weren’t we, as of, like, less than twenty-four hours ago, buying a used Corolla and renting a minivan for a couple days?!

Mom: I don’t – I don’t want to talk about – I am irrational about this! I don’t want to talk about it!

It has been pointed out that my memory of the time thegeekgene fell down and cracked her head open when she was two (and I was six or seven) is at least half made-up. I have two specific memories of this incident. In the first, she trips in front of the fireplace and bangs her head on it, and there’s red stuff on her and people yelling and the like.

In the second, she is being strapped to a round table, with heavy blue bags over her arms and legs to keep her still. The light in the room is an eerie cool blue, and as I watch the table begins to spin, slowly gathering speed. She opens her mouth to scream – and two heavy blue doors slam closed in front of me, truncating the sound with a sickening clang. The hallway is quiet, and lit a bright, searing white.

Mom says that first part totally didn’t happen. thegeekgene‘s blood is, of course, yellow, and coagulates instantly upon contact with oxygen, ossifying into powder in under one-point-three seconds.

…

Apparently I wasn’t actually at the hospital with them, since obviously they didn’t need any extra screaming children there. When I heard someone saying later that she’d been X-rayed, and they’d had to hold her down with something like sandbags, I must have just constructed the rest in my head. I assume I took the scene from a TV show or something.

But for years, I seriously believed that this had happened. It’s probably lucky I never needed an X-ray myself until I was a teenager.

The noises thegeekgene‘s new puppy makes at night sound like a person talking.

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1) Went to Barenaked Ladies concert with Mom, Dad, and thegeekgene. This is exactly the third concert I’ve been to in my life, if you count Sesame Street on Ice.

I will never again attend a concert without earplugs. I still hear roaring.

Mom says it wasn’t really that loud.

1a) There was a Yelling Shithead (TM) behind us. He was a middle-aged man who was balding and had chosen to grow his hair long to in some way disguise this. He screamed constantly and derided the intelligence of his companions (“‘Mediocre’ – oh, do you know what ‘mediocre’ means?”), whose responses we could not hear. (Or, actually, I’m not totally sure those poor people were actually with him.)

He yelled “Nutshelllll!” at regular intervals throughout the concert. I was pleased that they never played it.

2) Dad owns a t-shirt with the election results printed on it.

3) Okay, I’m going to have to make my family buy a new monitor. This one is going to kill their eyes. I guess it’s been kind of blurry for a while, but it was actually painful for me to read through my friends list just now. Urrrgh.

4) Joseph Beth in Lexington was having a huge manga sale. $2 a volume. I mean, the stuff that this applied to was 90% crap or random high-numbered volumes of series no one wants to buy all of – to give you an idea, I think about a fifth of the selection was comprised of volume 4 of Shaolin Sisters: Reborn and volume 18 of Samurai Deeper Kyo. But I still found eight things I wanted enough to buy, and I didn’t even realize there was a second tableful downstairs until after I’d checked out. ( The haul. )

5) Mom and thegeekgene are watching the Sci-Fi channel.

Mom: “It’s – what are they doing now? Why are they running through a field?”

6) This seriously is hurting my eyes, I’m going go cook something in the properly-equipped kitchen I have access to.

Continue reading “At home.”

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Apparently, Yukito Kishiro is taking some time off the main Last Order plotline to start a series called GUNNM Gaiden/write some side stories? Or something? You’re not helpful today, internet.

I’d actually be kind of okay with that. I feel like Last Order is moving really slow. Over the first seven volumes of the original GUNNM, we had like six plot arcs spanning about fifteen years. That was one of the things I liked so much about it. It was a fighting manga with no filler! No monsters-of-the-day! A new, absurdly melodramatic plotline that completely breaks Alita’s heart almost every volume! This was awesome.

But at seven volumes of Last Order, we’ve only covered a few months of time – the past three volumes have just been a couple of days. And they haven’t really been eventful days, by Kishiro’s usual standards. An eventful day for Alita used to be:

( cut for massive spoilers for first series, minor spoilers for Last Order )

Continue reading “(I am never, ever going to get to sleep.)”

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1) WAHAHAHA election

2) I got nervous the other day (see: election) and spent something like a third of my paycheck on manga. ( It came today. )

3) Sensei’s giving a talk in a couple hours. Apparently he’s talking about Miyazaki somewhat. I hope he doesn’t switch directly from crazy porn to Miyazaki. I hope he doesn’t say something that makes me start giggling and he gets grumpy at me and takes it out on my research draft.

4) ELECTION

I’m feeling kind of weird and hyper and everything’s-awesome. I hope I don’t hit the bad side of it and die this evening, because I really need to get started on my computer science project.

Continue reading “WA”

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I just finished reading RG Veda. Response:

holy crap what was that

…

( spoiler-cut )

Yes.

Continue reading “RG Veda”

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This semester, I’m in two classes in which I’m the only girl. One’s a history class, which has six students, and the other’s a computer science class, which has five. Both have male professors. I’ve had other classes where I was either the only girl or seriously outnumbered, and while that obviously sometimes gets awkward, it’s generally not so ba

( I abandon all disclaimers THE COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT CAN’T DEAL WITH WOMEN. )

Continue reading “HEY HOW IS YOUR COMPUTARRRR”

We’ve got a pile of terriers on the screened-in porch right now. One of thegeekgene‘s friends asked us to come get them out of the road near her house, because we have apparently taken over the local animal shelter. There are three puppies and two adults, apparently a little terrier family.

I have named one of the puppies Emperor Vomitorius, for reasons that are very good. Poor little Emperor Vomitorius got very carsick.

We kept them long enough to dip them for fleas, but they’re going to the shelter tomorrow, so if anyone wants a vomiting terrier who is in charge of Rome, speak up now.

Dad bought a laptop to take lawyering with him today. He took me with him to help, because He Knows Nothing. From what the office’s computer guy was saying when this idea first came up, Dad basically just needed something with a wireless connection, so I pointed Dad to the cheapest thing there. He said okay, and we asked the guy to go get one.

The guy came back and said they were out of stock, at which point I suggested we go to a different store, to find something in the same price range.

Upon being placed in a shopping situation, Dad’s brain begins a countdown. None but Dad knows when the countdown will end, and even he knows not where… but when he reaches zero, an item must be purchased. Dad did not want to take the two-minute trip to the other store. He wanted to buy a laptop now. He wanted the one that said “satellite” on the box.

Loud, Cheerful Upper-Class Businessman (Dad): Oh, I like this one here, honey!

Waspish, Ungrateful Daughter With Nasal Voice (Me): You want – do you like it because it says it’s “satellite?”

Dad: Yeah…

Me: Do you know what it means that it says “satellite” on the box?

Dad: No.

Me: There’s no – I can’t even find the specs for this, there’s no little card -

Dad: Yeah, I’m getting this one here, please. This one here, please!

Grasping, Villainous Best Buy Employee: All right, I’ll get it out for you, if you’ll just sign -

Me: No! Stop signing things – I’m calling Mom! Don’t sign anything! Dad -

At this point, The Plot Thickens, for the computer that Dad had pointed out to the salesman was not in fact, the “satellite” computer. Dad, presented with the information that he had just asked for a completely random computer, said again, “Yeah, this one here’s fine.”

This laptop turned out to be basically the same laptop that I had suggested to him before, but with a slightly beefed-up processor and hard drive, and more RAM – it was about $200 more than the other. The guy asked us whether we wanted a service plan. I’d had to send in my laptop to be worked on twice, and since Dad is not precisely reverent of his electronics, it seemed likely that he was going to need it, too. He said he didn’t want it. While we were going up to pay, Dad muttered darkly that he wasn’t going to pay $250 for a service plan!

I have basically been ranting the whole day.

I decided I’d might as well figure out how YouTube worked. I uploaded this video of Dad’s huge Saint Bernard grooming thegeekgene‘s cat. The dog does this often, and to every amenable cat she encounters, but she and this cat in particular share a special bond; the white cat is the only one I’ve yet seen groom the dog back. Or stand on her back and give her a massage.

You can hear That Show With Undertakers in the background, and the video goes on about twenty seconds after the dog stops grooming, because I’ve tried three video editors and still not convinced any of them to both cut and save the file properly.

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Oh, my god.

I might have driven Shitty Art Teacher away. She’s gone. She was tenured and her picture was on advertisements and she’s gone.

One semester after I sent in my horrible, nasty, mean, signed evaluation. A year after The Voice, who did the same thing, returned to haunt her.

Oh, my god.

The world probably doesn’t revolve around me, or even the anime club, but… seriously. I get the idea that people have only started getting really nasty about her the past couple years, and I know she’s really thin-skinned. Did I help break her?

I was just going, “I HAVE THE POWER” at first, but now I’m trying to figure out if I should feel guilty. I mean… tenure. She didn’t have to quit, she could have just stopped sucking, or something…

…

( And now, the happy post, written pre-the-first-stirrings-of-a-guilty-conscience: )

Edited to put a cut in, ’cause it was long.

Continue reading “Scary Monks = an okay band name”

I finally got volumes six and seven in from ILL yesterday, and I read them last night, and it was almost unbelievably slashy* and I was right about everything it just all came out at the end of volume six, and now I can completely truthfully say that I’m using Pokemon comic as one of the primary sources for my senior research.

I think I’m going to ruin some people on scans_daily‘s day when I’ve got some more free time; I don’t feel up to explaining the awesomeness of this manga right now and without plenty of visual aids scanned in.

* and I looked up the illustrator, MATO, last night, and saw that she does Gundam Wing doujinshi for-Christ’s-sake, so it’s not my imagination

ladyringolane is having a grande mal emo-zure in there. She woke me up a while ago playing something about girlfriends and the color brown, and just now it was “Iris” (which she claims is the world’s emo-est song) and then something really loud with a hoarse guy yelling stuff*.

Yet even over this, I could hear her pounding on her keyboard, having been spurred on to a pivotal emotional point in her latest story about gay cowboys in Nazi Germany who own restaurants in the rain.**

Go, ladyringolane, go! Ganbatte, imouto! Fight! Show the rest of Fanfiction.net who’s boss.

And turn down the volume at some point before I go back to bed, please, I’m still looking over my shoulder thinking a girlfriend is breaking into the house to steal all our brown.

-

* It wasn’t Conor Oberst; unbeknownst to many, Oberst suffered a tragic marching band accident in his youth that permanently shattered his yellin’ bone. With access to today’s cutting-edge technologies, he might have recovered – but physical therapy was not as advanced a discipline in early-80′s Whingeiana as it is today, and the treatment he received basically just consisted of being slapped for forty-five minutes each day. It was later determined that this has no real medical value.

** This sentence may not accurately describe my sister’s oeuvre; it may, rather, stem from a hallucination induced by being woken up all of a sudden.

Me: And there is weather in Ohio and -

Mom: Uh-huh -

ladyringolane, in background: [something irate]

Mom: What, baby? – there’s something *living* in the cat’s vomit.

ladyringolane, in background: YES!

Me: …should I come over and clean up the vomit?

Mom: No, I’ll do that.

elongated_tito is down where Bush is, helping clean up debris and all that. (I’m at the computer. I have a cookie.) Bush has taken over their campsite and it’s all cordoned off so they can’t get lunch. Hahaha. That’s what you *get* for being *socially responsible*.