potentialities

My little brother bought me a Fullmetal Alchemist t-shirt!

Then he made fun of me for watching the Cinepuri making-of special and kicked me off his computer so he could go to sleep! But still!

I designed nifty invitations for his graduation open house. ( Here it is, with certain minor alterations. )

Also, my dad took me to see X3 this afternoon and we didn't even get the Snakes on a Plane trailer. It was highly disappointing. On the plus side, the movie was totally worth what I paid for my ticket ($0) and I was not assaulted by projectile confectionary. I feel that on the whole, I cannot complain.

Oh my God, people!

You know those American Girls books, and they were cute and stuff and so you read them when you were, like, nine. and you sent away for the catalogue and spent hours poring over over Samantha's petit fours and Kirsten's Saint Lucia dress and and Felicity's pet lamb and you made up five hundred thousand wishlists and no one ever bought you so much as a hairbrush? I never even had a Barbie doll and I never even wanted a Barbie doll, because I had Legos, but by God I wanted all those little dresses and desks and books and dolls (because dolls have to have dolls!) and everything.

I dragged satyadasa to the American Girl Place in Manhattan when it opened and he was either strangely fascinated by the plethora of miniaturized paraphernalia (which exponentially increased with the creation of the modern American Girls to go with the historical ones, since they can do everything ever, like tapdance and climb mountains) or doing a really good job of humoring me. More recently, I got to help set up the American Girl doll display we have at our library, which is very popular with pretty much everybody, especially now that we have Kaya, who has five times as much loot as all the other dolls with her tipi and her horse and her wolf and and her fur rugs and her her campfire on top of her dresses and doll and food and the other usual stuff. Naturally, I reminded my mother of the angst and woe and deprivation I suffered during my childhood. Because, you know. That is what you do.

So this morning she comes home with ( these two ). Who are just so gosh-darned cute that I am powerless to resist brushing their hair and and hugging them and squeezing them and calling them George. (Notice approximately one-third of my BSC collection in the background there, to complete the whole actually-I-am-eight effect.)

Somebody send help! Airdrop tennis players if you have to!

EDIT: ( Dolls who play dressup )

(This icon has pretty much nothing to do with my post; I just wanted to use it.)

My little brother's team placed second in the state in scholar bowl! He has a second place medal to match mine! I actually captained my team, whereas he mostly supports his by wearing amusing outfits like the plaid jacket he had on today, but still!

Kids these days don't know anything about classic science fiction, apparently. In the matches I watched, neither team could identify the author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, nor could they say who can regenerate twelve times, is being played in his tenth incarnation by David Tennant, and is a Gallifreyan Time Lord on a classic British television show and dear lord why is no one ringing in on this question yet? At least on that question there were five of us in the audience, including the timekeeper, who claims to have watched every single episode of Doctor Who, who were seething with incredulity and horror at this wanton display of ignorance.

Oh! And there were a couple of questions about tennis and I answered them (on my piece of paper, discreetly, of course) and my dad just looked at me, like, wow, who are you and what have you done with my daughter? It was fun.

My little brother has a Mac mini with a SuperDrive and a wireless keyboard and mouse!

This means, for all intents and purposes, I have a Mac mini with the above! Until he moves out!

He also has a tux for prom, but it doesn't fit, so you'll have to wait to see it.

This is very exciting. I can burn all my Tenipuri to DVDs! I can make everyone watch it on the television in our basement! Muahahahahahahaha!

My family used to respect my taste in music. Sure, some of them complained about it being boring, especially my mother, who has threatened to run our van off the road and kill us all if I kept playing the Art of the Fugue. (Some kids do it with heavy metal. I do it with Bach.) But at least there was respect.

Now they're all mocking me and my seven-and-a-half-hour Prince of Tennis playlist of DOOM. The woman who listens to Then The Morning Comes by Smash Mouth on repeat for hours and whose other favorite bands are Green Day, the Barenaked Ladies and O.A.R. is mocking me. This is so not right.

This week's episode of Life on Mars sounds pretty awesome, based on my squinting at spoilery posts in the course of carrying out my modly duties at lifein1973. My torrent cannot possibly download fast enough. *hides from spoilers*

My mom and I have developed a relationship of symbiotic thrift store enabling. She pays for the massive stacks of books I unearth and not only does not make fun of me for trying to collect all the Baby-sitters Club books, but finds them and waves them at me and asks me if I already have them, while I veto all the shirts she wants to buy in colors that she should never, ever wear and do, in fact, make fun of all the vases and candy dishes she buys, not that this stops her for a moment.

The only problem is that I keep finding so many books every time we go out, my bedroom will implode.

Today was 50s day at my little brother's school. He elected to go to school ( wearing a poodle skirt. )

My mom and I thought this was fabulous. My dad just shook his head and wondered where he'd gone wrong.

My little brother paid me a rather nice compliment the other day. He said that he hates it when I edit his papers because he looks at whatever changes I made and wishes he had thought of them first.

Today is, of course, Guy Fawkes day. We will celebrate by blowing up City Hall. Or possibly just by burning things. This is the kind of holiday my family can really get behind, raging pyros that they are.

For the record, I really like it when people read my fanfiction and suffer from fits of outrage, especially when they declare that they can never read the source material again. It greatly inflates my sense of self-importance, and is really fucking funny besides. Keep it up! Whilst I cannot reveal what fandoms I'm volunteering to write for yuletide, I will say that there are a few I'm just dying to be asked to write for that whole "your head asplode" effect.

NaNoNonsense:

6,722 / 50,000 (13.4%)

This is so much fun to write, veering sharply as it does between the awesomely awful and the deeply mediocre. It is also teaching me a lot about novel writing; to wit, never write this novel again.

My iPod has a new battery in it now. This is a good thing, because my iPod is two and a half years old now (wait, that means there was a time before I had an iPod. I am confused) and its battery, which was kind of the weakling sibling of the iPod family to begin with its mere eight hour published spec, was now holding about an hour and a half of charge, tops. And that's assuming that you didn't actually do anything with the iPod during that time except press the play button. And even that was pushing it, sometimes.

I did not get this battery from the Apple Store. The people at the Apple Store are pretty nice about most things, like the time I dislodged my H key by pounding on my keyboard in rage when I was unable to copy files off of my brother's corrupted hard drive and I brought it it into the Apple Store and they did not merely stick my H key back on, they replaced my whole damn keyboard FOR FREE, which was a little above and beyond the call. However, batteries are a weak spot with the people at the Apple Store. Batteries die, and some batteries die faster than others, and this is a fact of the universe that Apple does not particularly want to be responsible for, although they seem perfectly happy to accept responsibility for me banging on my own keyboard like the short-tempered idiot that I am, so I think, cosmically, it all balances out. But, in short, batteries from Apple == expensive and mayhap == poor. So.

I bought my particular battery from iPod Juice, whom I at least tentatively endorse, although I have not actually used their product except insasmuch as it did cause my iPod to turn on, and it is charging now, so this is, at least, a good omen. They included a blue plastic poky thing and an instructional sheet, which makes it look SO EASY to separate the two halves of the iPod. Easier than twisting an Oreo, which is not something I ever experienced a great deal of success with, owing to the fact that a.) I am clumsy, b.) my mother never bought Oreos, and c.) Oreos are actually kind of gross, unless you embed them in ice cream, which magically turns them awesome.

These instructions LIE. It is not easy AT ALL.

I enlisted my brother for this task, as he is the Designated Doer of Things That Require Tools in the family. (My father used to be the DDoTTRT, but he doesn't see so well any more, and Danny managed to replace the hard drive in his iBook himself, so he is indeed fully qualified to take over.) This was somewhat difficult, as he only lives in our house in the most technical of senses at this point, but I cornered him last night and he took the blue poky thing to the dead iPod to try to make it see reason.

Nothing happened. Well, at one point, he caused it to make a scary snapping noise, panicked, and then snapped it right back, but this is not what I call progress. Then he claimed that he was tired and that muscles hurt in his fingers that he didn't even know that he had, and he retired for the evening (by which I mean, went and played around on his own computer).

However, this afternoon he came home from school early (they were tired of him, I think) and brought his friend Nathan with him. Nathan is at our house at least as much as Danny is, and possibly more. Sometimes I call Danny's cell phone and Nathan answers, which is slightly disconcerting. Nathan watched as Danny applied the blue poky thing to the iPod and accomplished nothing.

The scene, if you will

"Here, let me try that," Nathan offers, seizing the iPod.

"Did you read the directions?"

"I looked at the pictures." Nathan vigorously plies the poky thing.

"You need to read the directions!" Danny yelps, scandalized. Danny read the directions.

The iPod is already half-open. "Be careful!" Danny admonishes. I occasionally peek through my fingers, moaning.

"Stop, that thing is very fragile!"

"What thing?"

"That ribbon thing! Here, hold that exactly where it is while I look at the directions!"

"I'm taking out the hard drive!"

I moan some more, handing them the new battery at the same time.

"There!"

~~~

It made a violent snapping noise when Nathan put it back together, but nothing seems to be broken, except the bit of plastic at the bottom around the part where you plug the cable in, which is definitely broken but doesn't seem to matter. And now my iPod claims to be charged, so if you don't mind, he and I are going to go spend a little quality time together. Taking long walks on the beach and such. You know.

My ickle brother made me a bracelet out of a fork.