I have come to the conclusion that the world's problems could be solved if everyone just lowered their expectations. This 'shoot for the stars' nonsense has to go.

Observe: I no longer 'hope' (such an outdated word) for a good day at work. Instead, I set my sights at not having actively homicidal tendencies when someone says "Good morning". Granted, I am not quite able to achieve that yet, but you know, I feel this is a goal that might, one day, be met.

It's like with Child. I understand most parents look at their offspring at birth and think "S/He will be president/discover a new planet/win the lottery/marry well/never own cats." My goal: "He will not be tried as a serial killer and end up a major cult figure among disturbed teenagers with too much eyeliner who write myspace poetry about him." So far, the plan proceeds apace, but well, who can tell the future? My second goal is "not get anyone pregnant before the age of consent" by running condom pop quizzes at him every so often. Okay, I lied, that part is actually how I entertain myself when I'm bored.

Like this.

"What do we do when confronted with a vagina?"

"Condom!" Knee-jerk. Doesn't even have to think about it. That happens when your mother's been doing this to you since pretty much the age of understanding verbal language and both your aunts took up the cause just because they ran out of things to do.

"Remember: fun is fun, but always wear your raincoat."

"God. Stop."

"Is it raining?"

"MOM SHUT--oh. It's--actually raining outside."

Me: *cackles*

Achievable goals. Don't reach for the stars. Reach for the bottom of the hill! It's not as steep and you won't get tired as quickly. But you know, have fun with it. And if you can make someone have traumatic sex-talk flashbacks every time it rains outside, well, that's just icing.

Not Related

So Child's computer is dying (really horribly) and I had to quickly budget to get him a new one because of course I'm sending him to a school that has more powerpoint and research projects a year than I did throughout all of college. So I spent many merry hours not raining blood and toads down upon my place of employment configuring systems, and then accidentally ran across a link to a paired system of a laptop and a netbook. I stared at the price for a while and then wondered if I was hallucinating, that the desktop I'd been configuring very carefully was more expensive and less neat than the laptop and then, well, netbook combined. So obviously, I bought them before that page vanished. Obviously.

To be fair, this is not a case of expectations exceeded, though oh my God, Dell, did you forget about that offer still being around? Somehow--no idea how--I cracked the front bezel of my laptop over the left hinge. It's a cosmetic repair, but it's a goddamn complicated one and I have to both order a new bezel and basically take my entire display assembly apart, which requires me to take the entire front part of my laptop apart and remove the keyboard, then remove the entire cover and LCD, because the way they assemble laptops is fucking schizophrenic, and I'll be hitting a lot of delicate wires that do things I'm still not sure of. I won't even start on the adventure of trying to track down what this thing was called so I could replace it as Dell hates joy--I just kept entering search terms until a picture appeared that matched.

I like taking my computer apart. I do not like taking it apart when a liquid display is involved in the proceedings and has to be disattached in various ways that will probably end in tears (me) and tragedy (what I will do if I lose Adam). And I really don't like it when I don't have a diagram or easy access to the internet when I'm playing, so this is waiting until I get the netbook and can have that and Child's new laptop both open to see what I'm doing. No, I don't mean Dell's breakdown either. There are a minimum of four things in here the last time I had to do a repair that did not show up in the specs, and one of those things I"m pretty sure came through a Stargate.

I really wish I could say this is not exciting, because that really says so much about my life I'm not sure I really want to admit. However, I have hunted up the screwdrivers and have bought new cleaning clothes and compressed air. Even abject disasters should involve dusting the fans clean and peering excitedly at my chip array.

Child's essay for class for Thanksgiving.

...no, really. Just. Um. {} are my additions

What I Am Thankful For {by Child}

On thanksgiving I had said I was thankful for my loving mother. I was thankful for my three cousins {Niece, Niece Two, and Nephew}. But last I am thankful for my whole family and this glorious country of America.

free right

It was a cold Dec 7, 2012. In a post-apocalyptic world, dead bodies had lined the streets in black body bags. Cars were abandoned. I was in the middle of 100s of infected people with a bomb. But let me back up to when it all started. At midnight on January 1, 2012, a mass zombie outbreak had happened because a mutated meteor had hit the earth. The people in {unknown word} had died but kept walking to be {unknown word}

****

Child: What do you think?
Me: So it's genetic, huh?
Child: *bemused*

He's gone to type and finish it.

So. Apparently, destroying the world in fiction is like, a gene or something. Or maybe it was too much Torchwood?

*bewildered*

ETA: Second draft is lingering lovingly on the details of the rotting corpses. I may never sleep again.

ETA 2: Holy God, he thinks he's writing a children's book.

So I started Christmas shopping via Amazon as Planet Earth went on sale (the boxed set of Planet Earth, Ganges, Wild China, and Galapados of course immediately dropped price right after I purchased Planet Earth and Galapados, which is just my luck) and I am seriously excited about watching this Christmas Day with Child. There's also a documentary on Yellowstone, but I'm trying to find the one that says we'll all die in a fire when Yellowstone volcano goes off, because that's just awesome.

( geek parenthood; game consoles are a right not a privilege )

Oh Christmas. My favorite time of year. Also, I really want to take Child to Disneyworld. He's tall enough now that we can go on all the roller coasters together and be sick together afterward. I seriously, seriously have to figure out how to make this happen.

VVC!

Home from VVC!

It was the usual amazing, but even moreso, because we made taraljc cover her ears and jump up and down to avoid hearing us reading badfic (as one does), and svmadelyn organized a Chicago outing on Thursday for fangirls, which was amazing.

VVC is literally the most amazing con I can imagine; this year, I also picked up something which is icky and potentially causing a great deal of congestion and unhappiness, but totally, totally worth it. svmadelyn assures me it is not swine flu. My ears haven't unclogged from the flight, so I reserve judgment, as she can't even see my pathetical state.

I'll do some vid reviews later; unfortunately (well, for reviewing), the bar was extremely good at mixing drinks this year and there was much dancing but not a lot of concentration during Club Vivid, and I missed part of premieres, which I am watching tonight.

The Saturday night Reboot party went swimmingly (security was called! Fine, maybe not everyone thinks that's a sign of success, but I totally do), and the Merlin Sunday night had cheese dip and we drank for the words "destiny", "fate", "two sides of the same coin", and two drinks for every time Arthur did the wrist twist with his sword.

...we could walk afterward. Really.

Child

Child's hair is still--orange-copper-blond. It's really traumatizing. I'm trying to work out if it's really that wrong to forcibly dye his hair green already and destress, because holy God, pictures do not do it justice. It's just--insane.

For those who spoke to Child last night (Including taraljc)--the first thing Child asked who were all the girls that talked to him last night, and I didn't roll my eyes, but it's hard, since Child kind of considers himself betrothed to taraljc and I don't know exactly how to explain at family reunions how my son met my daughter in law who is my age. See, he's twelve and wants to go to Northwestern, and I get this horrible feeling in about seven years I'm going to get a call from Tara from Vegas who is frantically trying to explain how it came to be that Child got her to a chapel there and has no clear idea how this happened.

(Note to Tara: he's reconsidering the bronze. God, thank you . Thank you.)

Panels

The panels on crack vids and meta vids were kind of awesome, and I do not say that just because svmadelyn, talitha78 and nightchik moderated those, respectively; it was incredibly fascinating to see the range of what's considered a crack vid and the different types of meta that exist in fannish culture. I want to--hopefully--go into more about the crack vid panel, since the range that Mad and Talitha used for crack were fascinating, since not all of them were funny or all that obviously cracky on first watch. There's a lot of interesting things that can be said about fandom's view on crack, what it is, and why we developed the terminology and the (loose defintion of a) genre.

I kind of also want to hit on meta vidding, because in retrospect, I'm not sure I got across how I felt about the SGA vid about John Sheppard not being like, a roiling hatred of vidder and vid, but more my emotional connection to what the vid was about and how I interpreted it.

Vid Watching 101 was excellent and I liked the way everyone described their viewing method and experience--which reminds me of my general feeling that being able to enjoy a vid purely on aesthetics is great and I'm all for it, but being able to reach the level where you can interpret what the vidder was trying to do--and being able to work out what you yourself got out of it--is possibly the only thing that reconciles me to Lit critique. And everyone who reads here knows that I consider lit interpretation a tool of the devil, so it weirds me out to find myself using the same terminology about vids that people who do lit analysis use for lit and liking it. I'm not sure why; I have a feeling that the people in fandom that do this stuff make it much more palatable as an expression of enjoyment and criticism without the overtones of absolutism that made me hate The Yellow Wallpaper.

cesperanza ran the Vidding Town Hall, which turned into a fascinating discussion on what's going on in the world with vidders, youtube, imeem, and various sites for vidders to put their vids.

This Is An Incomplete List

Had a blast with svmadelyn, which is like, pretty much the reason I love Chicago and who showed Twilight to me, nightchik, talitha78, and frostfire_17 in her apartment Wednesday night. I hate myself for my unironic love. And it is unironic. I swear I avenged my sixteen year old self watching one scene and totally feeling Bella's smugness.

Met shinetheway finally and she was a lifesaver getting the Reboot and Merlin parties going, and also a really good dancer and lacer of corsets when one has decided halfway through VVC to change clothes (did I mention the drinks were amazing and after being requested to change into something more festive, I thought bracing myself against a wall and holding my breath for Shine and amireal was like, a fantastic idea?).

(It was a fantastic idea--I need to get more wear out of it, and really, where else would I wear it?)

norabombay was hysterically funny; I met hellpenguin who was deeply awesome and has an incredibly dry sense of humor; and three other people, one of whom we traumatized last night with badfic and glow sticks that became like, the Merlin party DIY project while drinking for the word "fate" (comes up a lot!), and okay, who are you with the fantastic hair that helped do Reboot cleanup? I meant to thank you and didn't get the chance. And all the fantastic fangirls who went on the Chicago tour, including par_avion, who I hadn't gotten a chance to talk to much before.

In other words, this is my platonic ideal of incredible fun, a lot of thinking, and so much vid watching. And the VVC concom were marvelous--elynross, you and absolutedestiny and the rest of the com outdid yourselves on making a fantastic com.

I am going to lie down now and visualize how it feels to breathe without congestion and for the love of God, how it feels to hear without ears still not popping from flight. Oww.

Child came in to ask me if he can stay up an hour late since he was such a good boy today, yadda yadda yadda. In between his pleading and my rote "No, go to bed, no, go to bed" child casually stepped into a pair of black leather flats I had in the floor, straps dangling around his instep as he continued his argument, pacing to and fro before my bed in pretty black shoes while wearing nothing but his bedtime boxers and a t-shirt and his hair still wet from the shower.

They fit him really well.

He got thirty minutes. He wandered out of my room, pleased and wearing my shoes. That's actually worth an hour after bedtime, tbh.

So it's not like I don't think it's my duty to educate my only child. I mean, I don't, I think that's TV's job obviously. And media, of course. There, he can learn exciting life lessons about rape and the women who love their rapists and so forth. However, every so often? The media fails me and then I have to actually interact with the brat and like, teach him stuff.

Important Life Lesson: Guarding Our Borders From Those Brown Peoples

Now, you might make the mistake of thinking I'm informed or something about this, which is insane, because I cannot point out enough, I'm on Ritalin for a reason, and it's not because of the high (as apparently, I can't do that, my body uses it for the practical purposes of making sure I keep two thoughts coherent and in order, which as you can see, is working wonderfully), but I will admit, with shame, I was reading through CNN the other day (it was an accident) and saw the blurb, shivered at this intersection with reality, and moved on to look for something shiny that required less critical thinking skills.

But no, then it had to show up yesterday while I was trying to eat cake as my son said, from the computer "I am patrolling the border!" Granted, my son also says things like, "I am cloning you!" and "I didn't do that!" so usually, this is a dirty lie. So imagine my shock when I went through the effort of looking at the screen (and missed a bite of cake, because I forgot to stop the fork) and indeed, he was patrolling the border and was hoping to make a report. With this like, red report button. Right there on the screen.

In the last year of my son's life, everything changed, and I think I changed the most.

( answer this for me )

So granted, this is going to prove my unfitness for a parent, but just go with it.

Today, Child got beat up by a girl.

( okay, maybe less dramatic than that )

Least traumatizing but most terrifying way of explaining female menstruation to a boy ever....

Place it in context of recombinant DNA to create a lizard/mammal hybrid artifically, since I just reduced complex genetics to the concept of zippers. I so fucking made up words you have no idea. Let us all thank God and wikipedia, yeah?

You all totally want to be me right now, don't you? Right up until he asked if he can have a gene sequencer for his birthday and create an artificial womb.

...you all get one day I'm going to mysteriously vanish and later there will be a clone army of lizard/mammals, right? Just, you know, I love you all and I promise I will leave a very firm note about being kind to my flist.

Two days of overtime would usually mean I'd get a little hyper, because work and then extra work set off an endorphin rush like you would not believe. No, really. I mean, it's not like something I seek out, but when it's inevitable, it's fun. After I get home.

However, not so right now, since I suspect a.) one of my supervisors is trying to catch me loafing off and b.) I am loafing off because I finished everything I could finish and yet c.) I still have to do the overtime.

There's an entire thing here that makes me tired and less inclined to write people having sex. Or fun. Or like, happiness.

Hmm. I am trying to think of other news that is actually interesting.

Ah.

A.) For people who like small children and Dr. Seuss, buy two get one free at amazon, which I took shameless advantage of. Unfortunately, it's literal, as in, you cannot buy four and get two free. So that was three separate orders, with me sitting there carefully calculating by price to get the best discount. However, my nephew now has three small board books for when he starts reading, four larger ones that will be read to him, and two that are regular sized, and all Dr. Seuss, who I did not realize was this awesome.

B.) Got Gran Turismo Prologue for Child and for me, because I love that damn game so much. The rest of the Wii stuff delivered, and despite my desire for Mario Kart, I think three games plus the Wii board are enough to entertain everyone for a while.

C.) Miscellaneous shopping left blah blah blah.

...unexpectedly saw 1man1jar. No, you can google if you want to see it. I'm still processing how exactly this will manifest in my daily behavior, but I am thinking that psychosis is not out of the question. Because you know, goatse? Wasn't as terrifying as I'd been led to believe. I really didn't have time to work this up into something horrifying and be pleasantly surprised by appalled. No.

*waves hand* Carry on. I have been told I haev two more days of overtime left. Pretty sure clinical insanity is not far behind.

The meaning of true fannish desperation.

I took a short break from Due South reading to explore--I have no idea, but I blame sdwolfpup and out_there for the entire fact I am reading in a fandom where my understanding of the canon is based on a vid and a horrified write-up by amireal. But no. It's worse.

In your One True Fandom (or two, mine are SGA and dS currently), it's acceptable to read the badfic. I mean, I can rationalize that to myself; it's a slow day. Fraser crying while pregnant with Dief's puppies or Rodney--well, insert a terrifying fic idea there--that's okay. It's your fandom. You may curse their names and fic, but they are yours and even the most deformed and diseased of bunnies are still, you know, family. You look at them with tolerant hate and admit you are a junkie.

I just don't have this excuse for reading bad Prison Break. Or possibly bad American Idol fic. Or really bad....never mind, just, no excuse. No reason. But there I am at two in the morning reading Part X of Five Billion Badfic and just hating myself so much while I click Part Next. It's so sad.

In other news less traumatizing....

Wii

Since I have the Wii and the Wii Fit, I started research to find what else I will need--er, Child will need--so as to have a satisfying gaming experience. And I found there are Wii Zapper and Wii light sabres (LIGHT SABRES! OMG! SAY IT! WII LIGHTSABRES!) and Nerf sports stuff and and Wii Surgery Kit and WiiCooking Kit. Click on links. Because wow.

So this begs the question when I saw my list was officially Way More Than I Can Afford....

Be honest. Is there a Wii Sex Toy? Because basically, that is all that is missing here.

Also, for those with Wiis, what are the necessities? I started a list, but I'd like to know what I really need and what I probably won't or don't need immediately.