letter to mom

dear mom,
i am sorry i forgot whether PM meant morning or evening. i'm sorry i freaked out and asked you what day it was. i was not having a stroke. i am just very tired this week. this tiredness probably also explains my irritability about things like our fast food nation and aclu put-downs. i had looked hopefully to a monthly calendar for an explanation of my irratability, but the calendar offered no clue, which only suggested that it was not hormonal, but rather just who i am. however, if i leave work right now and get some sleep before my early dentist appointment, perhaps i will not be an Angry Young Woman tomorrow (i will be a slightly less angry young woman, just waiting to bake wallace something). also, you may tell dad if you wish that after he suggested i not get this elective dental procedure done, i moved the appointment up by a few weeks. not to be spiteful, but because he's not the boss of me, or my two front teeth. good night.

love,

filia

eponymous rage

This story keeps breaking my heart today, therefore, I must share it with everyone.

This story is a story about the family my brother stayed with while evacuated in Austin. It's about his main 'foster brother' E, but when E was 3 years old. He'd just healed from a broken leg his older brother had given him--the cast had come off two weeks before. But then because of a miscalculation, and RoboCop reflexes, his dad, in trying to stop him from falling, grabbed and twisted the same leg, and felt it snap.

Later at the hospital, as the social workers descended, E kept sadly wailing, and I picture him so bewildered and upset as he yelled: "Why did you crack me, Daddy? Why did you crack me again?" Which is funny in the context of the social workers being there, but for some reason just the phrase is like the saddest sweetest thing a child could say. I feel all Hallmarky or Lifetimey about it.

Luckily something that made me laugh a lot was this Overheard in the Office today:

Frustrated employee: I'm gonna build a robot named Microchip, and it's going to look like a microchip and it's going to kill people.

Weaving

It wasn't till Lauren spent the week here that I realized I haven't giggled uncontrollably in well over a year. Luckily, she's the kind of person who can fix that.

Things that cause uncontrollable giggles generally don't translate well in the telling. I took pictures, in the hopes I would remember, and others might enjoy, too.

---

So, we had brunch at Mother's Restaurant. They've got all kinds of crazy hippie art in there, you know, and over our table was a weaving; this one:

In case you can't quite make it out, here is the description that was under it (important to the story):

During the meal, we talked a lot about the weaving, but more about the description beneath it. The first thing we thought to do was to move our drinks and then food away from the piece, as it was composed largely of trash from a river. Then I noticed that the 'E's in the description were inconsistent, as you can hopefully see. A bit later, Lauren said "I think I know when he puts a vertical line on the E. It usually happens after he's done another letter just before that has a vertical line in it." Which, as you may see, is a very good theory, though it doesn't account for every single instance, nor does a vertical line definitely mean he forgot to do the pretentious version. It was however, a better theory than my own, which was that he was having tiny strokes or aneurisms that caused his handwriting to change momentarily.

As the description invites comments (though the implication is he's open to criticism from the highly visible community of weaving purists), Lauren wrote this on the back of our meal receipt:

It was really the first part that I found the funniest. "I like how it suggests currents and eddies."

But then we decided it might be mean to really leave the note, especially if he was actually just being pretentious with the handwriting. Lauren said we should come back and put proper lines on all his Es when we had a pencil.

---

ADDENDUM
Lauren emails today:

I'm going to check out the website for the weaver, and if he has an email address, I'll anonymously review his work. If you go back to Mothers and all the E's have lines, but the paper's stained with tears, you'll know who's responsible.

two stories lauren has already told to my extreme amusement:

her brother kept playing lots of songs he wanted her to hear, but she was trying to sleep. so, being the agreeable sort, she just lay in bed and took it, but secretly rebelled. he was playing her lots of east coast rap music, and underneath the covers, to herself, though she didn't care either way at all, she did the west coast rapper symbol (which she taught me, because i know nothing about nothing, even though this hand symbol was featured in sealab 2021). she herself thought this secret defiance was very funny.

her brother (maybe the same one) gave up lying and sinning for lent. which her family thought was kind of silly. because you're already not supposed to do those things.

craigslist

Okay, this has got to be my favorite Craigslist posting of all time!

Schlotzky's Coupon -- 75 cents off 1 pizza purchase. $1

Will take $1 OBO. Pick-up only, no change given. Will barter for any type of nasal spray or allergy medication, or almost any 90's cd.

Pics aren't good; this coupon really is good for 75 cents off of a pizza.

new movie rating system

From now on, I can rate movies as a value between "0" and "however many times I can say the phrase 'what the hell, man??' during the movie." The added benefit of the rating system is that the longer the movie is, when it's bad, the worse it's rated.

Pirates of the Caribbean has earned a 45 under my new rating system. It also revealed a flaw in my rating system because I can say the phrase in a different, more emphatic cadence in the time it would have taken me to say "What the hell, man?" twice. I'll have to tweak that. Maybe something like:

"What. The. Hell." = 3 "What the hell, man?"s
"What the...... hell? Man!" = 2 "What the hell, man?"s
"What the hell man!" = 1.5 "What the hell, man?"s
"What? The hell?" = 3 "What the hell, man?"s
"Why does not a single piece of dialogue or detail about movie go anywhere? Why is Keira Knightley famous?" = 15....

Anyway, honestly, don't see it. We saw it for free, and felt really ripped off. We spent the hour-long ride home trying to remember scenes from it and shredding them apart (it's hard to remember any scenes from it because none are funny, and none have any bearing on anything at all later in the movie). If you happen to see it, despite my most sincere begging you not to, you'll know what I'm talking about, so I won't list every scene in the TWO AND A HALF HOURS. However, if you can tell me what the point of the jar of dirt (and for that matter, that witch lady, who because of the jar of dirt loses all credibility) was, let me know, maybe I'll be less angry at a world with so much wealth going towards making movies like that.

we are tivo

Original plan was: No TV in house.

New plan is: Build self a TiVo.

Lauren is visiting. I have a new cat, have named him Cringer temporarily (hopefully he will morph into Battle Cat soon; I have his little saddle ready). There is no salt in my house. I have not seen Superman. I initially read the CNN.com headline "Crack found in foam on shuttle's fuel tank" as some bizarre drug trafficking scheme bust. Sometimes, I imagine a scene like in the Buffy episode "The Gift" when they live in the alternate universe where by a fluke, Buffy didn't come to Sunnydale, and Giles is about to destroy the alternate universe and Anyanka says "You fool! How do you know the other way is any better?" and Giles says "Because it has to be," and of course it is; I imagine this, and I imagine the 2000 election as the fluke where people in 50 years who switched realities would be shocked at how much a different one little supreme court election decision can make. Somehow that idea that I live in the scary universe is consoling, mostly because it's the idea that maybe this isn't all there is. Alternate universes seem pretty common, from what I've seen on TV. I'll do more study of the phenomenon after I build the TiVo.