Man.... the 12 year olds playing the online game I'm into are driving me NUTS. I really hope I wasn't like that when I was 12.

But here's something about them I found less annoying and more amusing: last night a friend and I were playing it together, and we were doing this repetative cycle where we'd catch fish, cook one type of fish but not the other, sell the raw fish to the fish store, and sell the cooked fish to the general store, and go back to the fishing spot. Then, this random guy starts following my friend around and giving her tons of free fish. We found it creepy that he was following us, but kind of funny at the same time. So I tried to creep him out back, by pretending I all liked him. Except instead of giving him fish, I kept trying to give him burnt fish. Burnt fish, though not harmful to have, is utterly useless for any purpose in the game. So I just spent a hugely long time trying to make this guy take my burnt fish for no other reason than annoying him. And I think it did annoy him, because he wouldn't take it. Then I started asking him typical 12 year old questions like, "How old r u?" "Are u a boy?" etc. and I'd have to ask him 8 times before he'd answer me.

THEN, another random guy joined us. We turned into this string of four people walking around together. This guy WOULD take my burnt fish. And he was nicer to me in general than the other guy, especially when, as an experiment, I took the armor off of my character to make her look girly to see how the guys would react. Man... I almost WISH I were a sick guy pretending to be a girl character, just to show them how weird it is to glom onto a random character with a skirt on. And guys have started following my character around before, I just found this instance particularly hilarious because we had two, and my friend's stalker was particularly persistant.

In other news amusing only to me, my mom's been sorting this huge pile of photos that needed to be put in an album. How backed up is she? Some of them are from New Years Eve 1990. I actually remember that New Years because I was so excited that it was the first time I'd seen a new decade. Much more excited, in fact, than I was 10 years later when the new millenium started. It's sad how much growing up sucks the magic out of things.

Anyway: onto the amusing part. She had doubles that she let me look through to see if I wanted, and I found the BEST picture EVER. My sister graduated college the same year I graduated high school, so there's a couple of pictures of us together in our caps and gowns. One of them, my mom apparently didn't warn us we were on camera, because my sister's looking off into the distance with this lobotomized look, and I'm scratching my head and looking somewhere random. I love the irony of us being all smart and graduated, but looking like morons. Honorable mention goes to a picture I found where my sister is literally picking her teeth, and a picture of my mom with sunglasses where one side is much darker than the other and it looks like she's wearing a pirate eyepatch. I wish I had a scanner to show them to you. But I do not. So you'll have to live with my overly complicated explanations.

A picture my mom loves of me, is where I'm laying somewhere and giving the thumbs up sign. I told her I knew exactly why I was giving the thumbs up. There used to be a funny series of Kodak ads, where all these people were explaining that you have to have a pose ready for whenever someone turns a camera on you. And there was this one guy that his pose was thumbs up. And he goes through his different variations on thumbs up, while showing them. "There's the classic thumbs up, the double thumbs up, *pause* ...the sexy thumbs up." And back then, I was obsessed with that ad, and I would as a joke give people the "sexy" thumbs up all the time (first making sure they knew about the ad as to not freak them out). And even now, I probably give the thumbs up sign more than most people, but I'd forgotten why I started until I saw that picture. True story.

Oh, and just to make this entry even more bloated, I have a piano story. Well, a piano observation, anyway. I've been learning from a child's piano book* and I've started actually reading the words to the songs and I've decided whoever wrote it was subtly trying to warp children. There's this one song, "Money can't by Ever'thing." And it starts out being like, money can't buy you this, money can't buy you that, which you would expect, given the title. But the last bit is, "But of one thing I am sure/money doesn't make you poor/money doesn't make you sad/money can't be all that bad." Which totally undercuts the rest of the song, and is the opposite of what most people would tell their kids. Which, okay, if you're dead poor maybe you'd have a different philosophy, but if you're that poor you're probably not someone who has the extra cash to be buying a piano/keyboard and books on learning it.

The other song is called "The Clown." Which, I wasn't looking at the words at first, but this song has a lot of minor notes and is really sad sounding, so I'm like, "Why is a song about a clown so sad?" And again, most of the words to the song are happy, being all, see the funny clown do this, or that. But the last bit is, "Always be a glad clown/always steal the show/when you are a sad clown/never let us know." Which gives me this truly disturbing image in my head of legions of clowns out there that are secretly dying inside. And again, is a bad model for kids. The message is basically, "Repress everything or people won't like you!" Which, again, I think is a bad message for kids.

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* We do have an adult piano book, but after I'd been playing it awhile, I complained to my mom that I still didn't know how to READ the music, I just guess until it sounds right, and then I memorize it. So she was like, "Okay, we'll start even more at the beginning" so I've been stuck with this kid's book since then. And I still don't know how to read music.