Bride Prices

So this past weekend, me, Ciel, Lulu, and Hunny decided that if we had bride prices back in a village before modern civilizations what they would be, and this is what we've got:

Hunny: We decided that her mom would probably be ruler of the village somehow, and with her multiple skills she would be a desirable bride, so she has:

 Three working horses and a herd of cattle.


Ciel, comprised almost entirely of cuteness, has been gifted with such:

A hutch of bunnies, two baskets of chicks, two spring chickens, and a baby pig.



Apparently thanks to my skills at awesome, mine is the following:

A sow, three chickens, a mule, and a few cows.

Finally Lulu, for being talented in many ways and also because in our imagined village she was the daughter of the most amazing family of farmers known for growing squash and melons of outrageous sizes:

Two stallions horses, three milking cows, and a handful of chickens.

We totally expect you to pay those before you're allowed to marry us, too, so...

Kit and Lulu (and Hunny)’s Adventures in Spanish!

Unlike most people I don’t really have a mom or dad, or any real family in general. I mean… yeah, I did have a mom, who I miss a lot, and I do have a dad, who I never see any more, and I have a ton of cousins and aunts and uncles, most of whom could die without me ever caring about and who wouldn't bat a lash if I died, but I don’t have a real family. Get it now?

I won't lie,  though... I had a pretty lonely childhood.

Instead, I have friends, and they’re the most important people in my entire life, you know, my Hedgehog aside. Three friends in particular have become more than friends, they are my sisters… that’s not to say that I don’t love my other friends, some of which have been around longer and know me better, but these three… I can count on them no matter what.

Hunny

Lulu

Jess

And a couple of years ago or so when I found myself homeless, the first time, not the second time when I went to live with the Home, they became my family.

Group huggle.

Yeah, bad stuff happens to me a lot, not much that can be done about it now, but it’s made for a lot of interesting stories and has led me to where I am, so I’m content with it even if at the time I was pretty miserable… Anyway, it was about to be spring break of my senior year in high school, and thanks to my dad’s Girl-Fiend home wasn’t exactly so safe and home-like anymore.

... There's no easy way to draw stringy bleached hair and leathery skin...

Oh gods you have no idea how much I wish I were kidding... She used to wear this skintight lime green track suit, and one morning she walked around in a tight blue shirt that came to just below the curve of her butt and nothing else: literally nothing else. She was mean, too, like... a thousand times more vindictive than I've ever been, but I digress...

Shirtless because that's how I always see him.

I’d already run away from home for a couple of days at a time in the past, so I knew that neither the Girl-Fiend or my dad would care or really come looking for me, so I took up an offer Lulu’s dad had made and decided to stay with them for a couple of weeks. He's pretty awesome, actually, and he jokes around a lot. Every time I see him he asks me how prison is, and then goes, "But seriously, you're looking good. Glowing." He's an awesome guy, he calls me Kit the Car.

I get the reference, but I can't help but imagine it like this...

I spent many a happy night.

Living with Lulu was a lot of fun, at least while the rush of freedom still had a hold of me; not that it didn't continue to be fun, it's just... after awhile I couldn't shake the burden feeling I always get. The first night there she set my bed up underneath the Twilight poster she had on her closet door and told me, “Don’t worry, Jasper’s nipple with protect you.”

Anyway, to the reason for the particular title of this post, Lulu’s family is Puerto Rican, and as such there is a good amount of Spanish spoken at her house. Well, I’m not exactly fluent, but I know enough of it to understand it and even respond in really simple cases… You know, what time it is, how I'm doing... I understand it better than I speak it, that's thanks to a Latin class I took in high school, and normally people stick to the simple stuff cause I'm just so white, so I can normally chirp back my short reply and feel kinda awesome from remembering stuff.

I could never do that with Lulu’s dad, though. When he came in all, “Como esta?” I sat there, panicking, wide eyed, staring at him. He was just so intimidating to me somehow, maybe because he actually spoke it. Most other people didn't really speak it that well, or were learning, or did it in a joking way and kept it short and simple and not often; he would speak sentences at me, things I understood, but it made me afraid. What if I said the wrong thing? What if I messed up?

Not that Lulu was any better. When she speaks Spanish you have to speak to her really slowly like she’s “a really slow retarded five year old”. That is a quote from Lulu herself. This made things really interesting around the house. Her dad would be there, just saying really simple things… asking me about my day and how things were, in really simple Spanish I could understand and reply to, and I would panic really badly… and Lulu wouldn’t help because either she couldn't or she thought it was funny.

It was all because I was a super quiet house guest, too. I don’t require much to keep me entertained, and I’m actually pretty shy and quiet on my own… I made him uncomfortable, he couldn't tell what I was thinking, and I knew it, which is why I later went to stay with Hunny; her family forced me into talking by poking and prodding and joking.

And me and Lulu and Hunny had some fun ourselves, like this one time we were hanging out at one of their favorite Mexican restaurants… Now, before anyone accuses me of being racist, I would like you all to know that I know the waiter spoke Spanish, I had heard him speaking it with one of the other waiters on the other side of the room just ten minutes before the incident… I have to commend the guy, too. Through all of our insanity he didn’t so much as crack a smile. He was really serious about his job.

As we were sitting at the table, we were talking about how there were really only two phrases that we knew in Spanish, the first one was “es un oso”. About the time Lulu said this the waiter came up to refresh our drinks. He had to be wondering what bear we were talking about and where it was… Or at least wondering what was wrong with us.

A few moments later when he came back to give us our check, Hunny announced to the table the other phrase we knew, “tengu en gato en mai pantalones.” … Despite hearing this, he didn’t even laugh, didn’t even smile, though she had just announced she had a cat in her pants. We all died laughing, however, when he walked away.

Did I?

Happy Birthday, Hunny!

Believe it or not, if it wasn’t for the Blonde One, I would never have met Hunny, or even Lulu and Tiffy for that matter. Heck, if it wasn’t for the fact I was so ridiculously talented, I never would have met the Blonde One!

No, seriously. We were in the same art class, and one day I’m sitting there drawing this anime style winged guard for a story I was writing, and she just sat down across from me and started talking about how awesome it was. By the end of class we were friends and she invited me to sit with her and her friends; I almost didn’t do it, since I normally ate lunch with Mir-Mir and her friends, but for a while there I kept feeling left out of conversations and awkward, so I thought I’d try this whole “making new friends” thing all my other friends were doing… That and I have abandonment issues, so I thought I’d get back at them for daring to make friends other than me.

This is the group I walked up to: find Hunny!

Can’t? She’s the blonde one… no, the one on the bench.

They were in a class lower than me, well, except for the one girl,  but we all loved anime and manga and art and writing and all the creative things in the entire world like acting and movies! Hunny especially was talented, what with her adorable kitty drawings and writing abilities, and her website, and her piano and flute, and sign-language, and clothes designing skills… We were awesome and full of win and spread our otaku goodness across the entire school! WOOO!

For her birthday that year, we all went out to the local Chinese buffet place, and we got the cute waiter:

He had anime hair.

It was the perfect start to a perfect storm of awesome, later we went to her grandmothers place to stay the night, and we made up a game called the Blushing Game. It was a hilarious game, using each other anime crushes and our creative abilities, we created mental images and stories to make people blush, and we even had a point system.

I remember that Tiffy like Sasuke of Naruto fame, and Hunny liked Dark Mousey… but I can’t remember who the Blonde One liked… it might have been Satoshi from DNAngel… I remember that I didn’t like anyone, I was past that point of fangirling and had moved on to writing my own characters and fangirling over the awesomeness I had made, but for the night they made a human form to the kyuubi no kitsune, and thrust him, half-completed and full of badassery, at me.

Eventually things downgraded into bad porn, though, when the Blonde One started talking about Dark throwing Hunny on tables and covering her with Buckets Of Butter… I fell asleep…

And then the Blonde One swore she saw the Tooth Fairy in the pendulum of the clock, so we all hid in one bedroom, and I slept in the doorway to protect everyone.

If You Read This, The CIA Knows...

What doesn't help my case:  this freaks me out somehow...

 Okay, by this point in time I doubt there is anything I could do to make you guys think I don’t freak the fub out every time something slightly weird happens,  especially not with the following story supporting evidence against me… I mean, telling you all I love horror movies and creepy pasta would probably do nothing to sway you…

Anyway, when I went to the Renaissance Faire with my friends, the night before we went, me, Lulu, and Tiffy shared a bedroom. Tiffy and Lulu had the bed, while I laid on the couch at the end of the bed, and after the lights went out we laid for a while and started talking; and after a while Tiffy started to fall asleep.

At first we talked about the NaNoWriMo contest and how I was competing with an old friend of ours who thought she was an amazing writer but who made Stephanie Meyer look like Shakespeare. From Stephanie Meyer we fell into how libraries are destroying books and we all want to move to Canada. From that we fell into how the US government could  pretty much care squat about the average person, and the fact that most of them are just in it for money and power. Ultimate power ultimately corrupts, after all.

While I’m not exactly an insane conspiracy theorist, I pay attention to evidence, and when talking about the government, I can’t help but to bring a specific something up: “I still don’t think we went to the moon. I saw something on television once, about how in this one picture you can see the crosshairs behind the lunar lander. I saw that picture in my science book that year. It’s true.”

Somehow other things we doubted about the government kept coming up, and the more we talked… the more the room started to feel creepy  and defiled. Shadows looked like they were jumping in the corner’s of our vision. It felt like being little again and afraid of the dark and monsters under the bed.





What if there were members of the CIA laying underneath the bed listening to us talk, ready to pounce at any moment?!

It got worse when I brought up something that had never made sense to me: “And with black boxes being virtually indestructible, able to be found even in ocean crashes, how is it we never found a single one of the 9/11 ones…?”

That was it, we couldn’t take it anymore. Getting up both at once, Lulu and I rushed for the bedroom door and opened it a crack, letting light from the bathroom fill the room. Instantly we were relieved, and I let out a sigh.

Feeling safe again, Lulu and I went back to bed.

Thanksgiving: Redux

Okay, so I thought I’d get rid of all the awkwardness of my freak out from yesterday by redoing my Thanksgiving post. Bigger. Better. And with more awesome pictures.

How do I stop alienating my audience...?

So I’ll start this way:

Surprisingly and amazingly delicious!

So me and the Hedgehog decided that we were going to make pumpkin soup for Thanksgiving. It’s a recipe we stole from Legend of Zelda, and thought we’d enjoy since we’re huge gamer nerds. Though it’s seen again in Skyward Sword, you get to see some of the ingredients in Twilight Princess (pumpkin, onion, garlic, fish) so it wasn’t so hard with both of our creative and cooking abilities to make some. We made a pot weeks before Thanksgiving and it was amazing, so  we were ready to go!

This message has been Link approved.

Okay,  well  I made sure I was pretty because for a girl, looking pretty is like wearing armor for us.

A consequence of my Viking DNA: dramatic hair.

Well, because I was terrified of his mom and I didn’t know most of his family, I spent most of the day hanging out and talking to his step-sisters, despite a gap of four or more years between us.  It’s okay though, because they’re pretty darn awesome, and the Hedgehog treats his sisters like they’re  his best friends in all the world,  so after we had Thanksgiving dinner (more like late lunch) me, the Hedgehog and the younger of the two I’d met before went out walking.

It was a nice day out and we walked out to the mud pit, this huge open place where people go mudding, only we were walking on the path next to it. It was fun, we all talked about ghosts and crazy  things we’d seen, and the Hedgehog and his sister reminisced about stuff.

Then we broke beer bottles against stuff.

I Need A Job

Forewarning: I am angry. That is all.

I had been planning on writing this post out when I could think clearly about the events of the 11th when I had to watch both the Spawn and the Terror, and in fact was going to put it up today. After all, I had calmed down significantly since then and could think objectively about the whole day... Last Friday I was supposed to be paid. Now, if you read this blog, you might think I've been paid a couple of times since the first post on this blog... Well, I haven't. Today was only the second time I've ever been paid since I started watching the Terror.


The first time I got paid $85. Today? I got $80. I did the math on that... I'm still pretty much getting paid $8.50 a day to watch her kid.

Alright, deep breath Kit, don't get mad... just tell everyone what you planned...

On the 11th I had to watch both of the kids at the same time, and as you may know, the Spawn seems to think it's his job to terrorize the Terror and get her behavior going a thousand times worse. He was okay first thing in the morning because he was focused on his game, but... he beat it, and not 30 minutes after my post, he came out of his room and helped to cause near non-stop chaos for the rest of the day.

On top of their usual behavior of dashing up and down the hall and jumping on the couch, the talk of buttholes continued... non-stop... through every conversation... no matter what they were playing. Sometimes they changed it up and talked about dooky. I got them to stop for all of 15 minutes when I made up a game where they could only use five words to talk, all really weird words, like "ceiling fan"... That occupied them until the Terror kept on talking about poop and butts... I couldn't make it stop.

Before I move on, I will tell you the good things that happened: we all had a good laugh over the questions for the FAQ and my answers, and I had a couple of nice game conversations with the Spawn... There was even a kind of touching moment when I explained that when I was yelling at them to stop, I was yelling at both of them, not just him. They were both doing things that were wrong, and he should tell me when she was bothering him, so I could take care of it...

... You know, as opposed to getting a hard pillow and slamming it across her face while screaming at her.

That was pretty much the only good things that happened. The rest of the day was spent trying to make them play nice with each other, trying to get the Terror to stop trying to shove her finger up his butt, to leave him alone when he wanted to go back to play his game, to get him to share with her...

They had pillow fights and wrestled and stacked pillows on each other and jumped off of the couches onto each other, and for the most part... I let them. So long as they weren't screaming or arguing, I let them be and play with each other.

I could remember being six and playing with my older brother. My older brother terrorized me. We were both in Judo, so he called it "practice" and my aunt let him pound my head repeatedly into the floor or ground while they watched. Also, he was in football, and would use me as a target to practice tackling.

While the Terror and the Spawn pretty much screamed and hollered non-stop and made me wanna strangle something, they pretty much were having fun. Aside from taking an iPhone or iPod (don't own one and can't tell the difference nowadays...) and recording him talking and not sharing, and above incident where she was bothering him and he wailed on her, and all the times she tried to shove her finger up his butt, they played pretty well with each other.

Of course, that doesn't mean they didn't drive me nuts with the constant chaos, and the Spawn played his usual game of ignoring my authority and laughing at me when I tried to get them to stop, or getting way too offended and storming off... But talking with the Hedgehog cleared all that up later. You have to feel sorry for a kid who thinks everything's his fault.

So looking back on it, it wasn't as bad as it could've been... even though they made fun of me and hit me in the head with a pillow when my back was turned, said I had a "monster face" and that I was fat.

But my point is... would you deal with all of this for $8.50 a day?

And would you really pay the person who watches your precious child from 8am to 8pm some nights for 3 or 4 days a week so little...?

How I Got Curly Hair (a hint, I wasn't born that way)

In case no one has seen the awesomeness that is my adorable little self with my cute blonde hair in paint form, here it is.

I put the bow on so you know I'm a girl!

In case no has seen my normal paint self, which causes me to wonder who you thought that was all this time, here it is, too.

Clearly the most epic person on the internet...

 Now, unless you're the kind of person who knows a lot about hair and how it can change, you might be a little  suspicious about why I was so cute and blonde when I was little, and why I happen to have dark curly hair now, you might also be wondering about the glasses, but that's explained way more easily: I was near sighted my whole life and no one noticed me squinting really hard to see until I was in middle school.

I have two things to say about this picture... Yes, my hair looked like that, and looking at it, I have to wonder why I wondered why people always thought I was mistakenly mad at them...

 Of course, that creates interesting pictures and makes you wonder why no one ever noticed me making that face, and I really wish it could help explain why exactly I was so bad with faces, but it doesn't... I'm just bad with faces, and names. I once became friends with a girl because in gym class I became friends with this girl who was tall, thin, had straight blonde hair, and glasses. The next day in gym class I saw a girl who looked vaguely familiar and started talking to her... She was short, had a huge butt, and had short, curly, red hair... the only thing they had in common was glasses...

 I thought they were the same girl...

Clearly something is wrong with me, but you already knew that.

Clearly there was also something wrong with them if they became friends with this face...

But this isn't the story about how I'm so awkward with remembering people that complete strangers sometimes come up to me and start conversations during which I sit there the whole time trying desperately to remember where I know them from, or how I managed for years to pass eye exams while making a face that some people only make on the brightest day of the year when they're at the beach and the sun is glaring directly into their eyes... This is the story of how I went from thick, straight, super long blonde hair to having short, still thick, dark curly hair...

 My head was shaved.

When I was six years old I was living with two of my aunts, both of their husbands, two of my cousins, and my older brother. This was a household that was... how shall I say this simply...? They were pretty open to my tomboyish ways.

This did happen... And that kid didn't go to school the next day.

And I was quite the tomboy. I played in traffic, thought I could walk everywhere, got into fights, ignored other little girls because playing with dolls was dumb, and really only played with boys because they were all I had to play with and I wanted to live up to the expectations of my older brother... I was a lot like the Terror in this.

Brrrooooooothhheeeeeerrrrr...

 Still, I was a pretty open and friendly little kid, super outgoing, really mischievous, and I let everyone play with my hair. Who wouldn't want to? It was thick and long enough it reached past my butt and strawberry blonde. I loved my hair. I washed it all by myself every morning and kept it clean and brushed.

 My head was the perfect storm for lice.

I spent most of the 1st grade out of school because I kept lice. They never left. Every time I went back to school they had returned, magically, overnight. I practically bathed in lice shampoo. My clothes were kept in black bags. I wasn't allowed to sleep on a bed... of course, that might be because my aunts were the embodiment of pure evil, but I digress...

Eventually the effort to win the war against my lice became so bad that my aunt decided to cut my hair.

First to my shoulders...

Then to my ears when she realized she couldn't cut hair to save her life.

And it was still crooked...

We thought that was the end of that and I went back to school, feeling cold and lightheaded, by when I passed the school nurse's lice check, I was happy. Looking more like a boy that before, my behavior wasn't considered all that weird anymore, but I still looked slightly like a girl.

Then they did another lice check and my lice had come back... bigger, stronger, and looking like super lice. I can still remember the school nurse standing over my head saying, "Why are they invisible? Should they be transparent? This isn't normal..." to herself.

With no other options remaining, my aunt shaved all of my hair off, and we won the war against lice...

 Only now I didn't look like a little girl at all, I looked like a little boy, and I got treated like one. No one told me I was "so cute" or "so pretty" anymore, or asked to play with my hair, or if they could brush it or braid it... I didn't realize how much I'd liked the attention until it was gone.

That year I went back to live with my mom and she was devastated. I was practically bald and didn't look a thing like a little girl, and my momma was a very girly woman. She dressed me up like a girl in all pink so people would know I was a girl, kept me from playing in the road, and stopped me from playing with the boys... not that I had much choice, that was the stage where girls were icky to them and they refused to play with me... and the girls refused to play with me because I was too rough.

I only had one friend, the boy who lived across the street... and that was because he liked me. He kissed me on the cheek.

 It was a few more years before my hair got to my shoulder blades again, only now it was more of a dark dirty blonde and it was sort of wavy... Mom loved it. She highlighted it champagne blonde and curled it up like hers, and I managed to become a little more girly for all her efforts...

"Are we really twins, mommy?!"

 And then one day when I was twelve she looked at my had and told me, "I bet if we cut if off it'll be curly... Look at that wave, I bet you that the weight of your hair is the only thing stopping it." With an inability to predict the future, I let her. She was right, my hair curled right up, and for all of a day I was super cute...

The only problem was, I didn't know how to take care of curly hair. I brushed it when it was dry, had no idea about conditioners, didn't know what to do with it when it was frizzy... before long it looked like I was making a half-assed attempt at an afro. It kind of wilted in the middle too much to be a real afro, and it hung down too low in the back...

Also,  I made this face...

 The first day of middle school, four boys licked Skittles and threw them at the back of my head to see if they would stick... I was teased relentlessly, every day, about it... When I graduated from high school, I was still dealing with people yelling, "Skittles, taste the rainbow!" at me in the hallway... then again, the accident with the hair-dye in 7th grade probably didn't help refute that...

... It actually looked worse than this...

There are reasons why I'm an awkward not-quite-member of society.