Azure Jane Lunatic (azurelunatic) wrote,
Azure Jane Lunatic
azurelunatic

Letter to Good Ol' Shawn (edited)

Hi there, Shawn.

I don't know how you do it. I've just become the full-time auntie of a hyper four-year-old boy, and it's driving me up the wall. I don't even have time for work anymore. It's insane.

My best friend and I just moved in together, and she's got a son. Since my job pays the worst and is the most expendable, I've been drafted as babysitter. I hope I have enough time for school.

I find myself quoting Pokémon in the oddest situations. Pokémon videos are what gets him down for his nap in the afternoons, and down to bed at night. Today he was too wired to nap, so by the time Mommy came home he was crashing so hard.... I find myself wishing for the powers of Jigglypuff. Did I mention that he has only the one Pokémon tape, which is of course his favorite tape in the whole video library? Heaven forbid that he should watch Sesame Street sometimes....

He's so wonderful and adorable, and every time he starts bouncing off the walls I get so worried, because while he's never fallen off the couch and smacked his head on the bookshelf before, he might this time....

I still don't know how you do it.

Tay-tay said she stopped by and said hi the other day. She also mentioned that you have good taste in videos... ;) Quite the change from the sheltered little darling she used to be.

School is still going well. I'm pretty much the only person in my math class maintaining good grades, though. I’m one of two acknowledged class geniuses, the other being a guy named Sam with my general taste in books. My high school taste in books, rather; my interests have shifted and focused somewhat since then, though I still adore science fiction and fantasy for relaxation purposes. Incidentally, I recommend Icefire by Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens. Don’t blame them for anything they helped Shatner with. My math teacher's a wonderful guy, but his teaching style lacks a little something. When I say "a wonderful guy," I mean the same caliber of "wonderful guy" the father-figure on Titus is. There was a class discussion on the subject. Fortunately the teacher had not seen that particular show. I decided that this teacher was not the best somewhat before that, after he and I had a five minute dialogue on the topic of rates of interest, and how when it doesn't say otherwise that you should assume that the percentage it's giving you is over the time span of one year. I was trying to ask my question and phrase it properly, and he interrupted me right in the middle of it to answer the question he thought I was going to be asking because that was what everybody always asked about. I couldn't get my question through to him, and he couldn't shut the hell up so I could ask it properly, so I finally gave up, said "This class sucks," and stomped out and mentioned the incident to the Dean. The quality of the class has since improved, imagine that.... The rest of the class is fairly well divided between thinking I'm totally nuts (so what else is new) and thinking I've got incredible balls for saying what everyone's been thinking but nobody's said because the teacher is after all The Teacher.

I absolutely hate moving. My new roommate and I had fun with a U-Haul a couple weeks ago. We had planned on doing a leisurely move over about a week and a half, getting the bare essentials first and then getting the rest of the stuff into the apartment. But first her car started completely crapping out on her (it's a 40-mile commute to school from where she used to live) and then her parents got a little huffy, so we had to move her in one day. And then the other people who were going to help us move sort of flaked out, though to give the guy credit it wasn't really his fault; it was his mother. Their families do not get along at all. The only reason there hasn't been a full-scale clan war over the issue is that the families involved have been cheerfully oblivious to what the kids have been up to.


We started out moving at 7 on the morning of Monday the 16th of April. Between everything that happened that day, from her breaking up with her boyfriend to the ants (she's allergic) to the U-Haul and the dismantling of the bed, by 10 that night the little teeny tiny bug-bite on her upper lip had swollen to the point where she was doing impromptu Mick Jagger impersonations.

When it had gotten worse, not better, the next morning, I hauled her behind to the nearest clinic that she said was covered by her insurance, where we learned (after waiting half an hour for it to open) that the doctors would not be in for another hour and a half. By this time she was in absolutely no shape to drive, babbling rather incoherently about shooting her severed head from a cannon at the White House if she should die from this, so I braved Phoenix traffic in an elderly Buick with a dying automatic transmission. This was my first introduction to Phoenix traffic as anything other than a pedestrian or passenger. She wasn’t much help, as she was lying in the back seat giggling about the misuse of pager codes and how to properly classify different types and intensities of legal difficulty in a few concise numbers.

When we finally reached the hospital, after having gotten lost (the nice nurse at the clinic had forgotten to mention whether it was third *street* or third *avenue*) the receptionist took one look at the sorry couple we made and immediately fetched a wheelchair for my daughter.

She's 25. I'm still not of legal drinking age.

She managed to recover, despite your typical level of emergency room unhappinesses including a nurse who somehow managed to miss the nice large juicy vein in her elbow when trying to inject the stuff that was supposed to keep her throat from swelling shut. Fortunately for my peace of mind, my friend Darkside had loaned me Robert Jordan’s latest in the 30 seconds in which I’d dashed into school that morning to let him know what was up and why we were going to be invisible that day.

Much great fun was had by all. I think we’ve recovered nicely, though.

This is another one of my epic letters, isn’t it.

In the light I remain,
Joanie
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