7 June 2001
Last year: Summer is my least favorite season, but it does have its good points.
Irony. No, Mr. President, it's not an adjective describing the smooth crispness of a freshly-ironed shirt (though I'm willing to grant you that such an adjective might be nice on occasion).
Ashby and I decided we wanted to have an off-Hall session with our Cute and Cuddly duo, Sanriel and Tarri. And then we agreed that there wasn't a specific plot or character advancement we wanted to do - that we just wanted to wallow in their adorable sweetness for a while.
That made it something of a guilty pleasure - along the lines of admitting to reading bodice-ripper romances, or eating an entire pint of ice cream in one sitting. We were both embarrassed to admit it, so rather than change our IRC nicks and advertise what we were up to, we ran the session through IM, staying in IRC to chat with everyone else who was logged in.
Sometime after midnight, we found ourselves in the midst of irony. And irony, my friends, is running a role-playing session between two bashful virgins in the throes of new romance in one window, while in another window you're having a lively discussion filled with dark humor concerning methods of torture and the writings of the Marquis de Sade.
Yup. That's irony, all right.
Gosh, I have me some weird friends. Boy, am I ever lucky.
In addition to playing Tarri and San together, Ashby and I have been exchanging e-mail for a couple of weeks. I think it started when I complained that I never get any e-mail, so Ashby sent me a three-line e-mail that essentially said hello and then teased me about the spam I'd been complaining about.
Now, I talk a lot. I mean, a lot. Ask Matt - he'll tell you. I hardly ever shut up. And (a trick I think I picked up from my mother) I'm just as happy to follow a tangent as the original thread of the conversation. But here's the thing: In e-mail, you can do both. You can make whatever tangential references you like, and then the original topic is still there to remind you of what you were going to say before you got sidetracked.
Ashby does it too, to a lesser degree. And that three-line e-mail has exploded. I wrote the latest iteration yesterday. It took me over five hours to write, and - keeping in mind that I delete almost everything older than the previous e-mail (I hate looking at more than two >'s in the margin) - when I sent it, it was 77K. Seventy-seven kilobytes of e-mail. For those of you who don't usually pay attention, most e-mail is 2-3K. A longish letter might hit 7 or 8... We're up to ten times longer than that. We've wandered over such disparate topics as famous firsts (first kiss, first sexual encounter, etc.), our high school activities, regrets, self-image issues, depression, suicide, drugs and alcohol, computers... It's all over the place.
And it all grew out of a three-line joke e-mail. We are both astonished. But delighted.
"If so much of it wasn't so personal," Ashby told me yesterday, "it might be interesting to compile it all into a novel!"
My return suggestion was that we should compile the threads, and then save it all as our joint memoirs, to be released after both our deaths.
Kris had her ultrasound yesterday, and the long-awaited news is... It's a girl!
So now I'm no longer anticipating the "Peanut" - I'm waiting breathlessly for the arrival of Emma Elisabeth Brandt. Who, no doubt, will be just the cutest baby I've ever seen.
If you'd like to see the ultrasound pictures (and a couple of them are almost startlingly clear) you should look them up at the baby's website. (Something's wrong with the Java or whatever that's being used to display the thumbnails on the page. Just click on them, and the picture will display in a second window.)
And everyone think happy thoughts for Braz and Kris! YAY! (Braz is going to be so adorable with a little girl that I just can't stand it. I'd offer bets on how long it'll take her to have him completely wrapped around her finger, but I don't think I'd get any takers.)
All right, I'm off in search of coffee.
Word of the Day:
restaurateur - the operator or proprietor of a restaurant
Currently Reading:
- nothing
Current Projects:
- drawing
- Hall stuff
- garden