I turned nineteen today! I didn't have a big celebration or anything. No celebratory breakfast- actually, I woke up a bit late and didn't have all that much time to get ready.
Monday is my busy day for classes. I hurried through my rat lab, behavior, and horticulture classes, and then had the chance to breathe as I rode the bus back to my room. Mom had said she wanted to call me around noon to wish me Happy Birthday, so I dropped off my things and waited for her call.
After that, I headed up to the Aggie Marketplace and splurged on a birthday lunch at the buffet. Well... I got chocolate milk, grilled cheese, and fries (the fries are always really good here) and some nachos, which I'd been wanting for awhile but kept turning down on the grounds that they were more unhealthy than they were worth.
To top it off, I grabbed a scoop of chocolate ice cream and a scoop of cookies and cream before I headed out to Institute. Once Institute had ended, I returned to Blue Square, grabbed my things, and made my way to my chocolate class. I thought I gave myself plenty of time to get there, but I must have missed the last bus by about thirty seconds, because it was eleven minutes before the next one rolled around. My chocolate class is in the engineering building, which is the most remote area on campus as far as buses are concerned. I had a long way to walk (I ran for most of it), and made it just after class started.
My day was more relaxing once the chocolate class was over. I dedicated it to me, since I had no homework, and after glancing over my study notes, I spent the evening doing what I wanted to do. There's a scene in one of my stories that I've been stuck on for months. It's in Chapter 7, and I've kind of worked around it by finishing Chapters 9 through 12, in addition to many more later in the story.
The main problem with this section is that I have a quote-unquote immortal protagonist, and Chapter 7 is the bridge between early adolescence and the early 40s of adulthood. That's a 320,000-year timeskip. For a traveler with an obvious deformity and a sarcastic tongue which render him unable to stay in a single place for long. There were a few important scenes that needed to be in this chapter (Namely at the beginning when he interacts with early humanoids) and end (when he accidentally summons an annoying demon girl who was trying to plant a tree in a dimension with limited oxygen), so I couldn't skip it altogether.
I buckled down and wrote for a long while, and even though by its nature this is the most boring chapter in the story and I've been dreading it for the last two months, it's always exciting to see things coming together. Since one of the details in this story is that it's questionable at times whether our main character is more good than bad or vis versa, it pleases me when I draw together vague sentences like, "I took up work as a personal servant for another hundred seventy thousand years or so to a reclusive man called Cattahan before I was let go due to a rumor that I had been embezzling from his manor. No actual proof was ever found, of course. Someone had been careful".
Demetria and I watched a bunch of "ChalkZone" and "Fairly OddParents" episodes tonight too. "Hole in the Wall" has major foreshadowing for the rest of the series and "The Terrible Two and a Halfs" is one of my favorite episodes because Rudy can't accept that the people of ChalkZone think his two-year-old cousin is a good artist. He's bitter about their praise for her the entire episode, because to them, they think she's "A New Creator" and essentially a god, and all Rudy can do is snark about how "all she draws is steel wool".
Snap finally gets fed up with it and pulls him aside to give him a talk about how Rudy wasn't such a great artist when he was two, either, and "there are probably lots of silly squiggles around ChalkZone" that he drew at that age. Rudy ignores the message, of course. I love him. He's such a nice guy, but he absolutely cannot handle criticism, and he always wants the attention to be on him.
As for "Fairly OddParents", we watched "Love Triangle". This is my second-favorite episode of the entire series, because in this episode, Cosmo pressures his son to perform in the school play against his will. Poof even starts to bond with his anti-fairy counterpart Foop over their hatred for this play, until, of course, a new girl arrives in class and steals their hearts, thus pitting them against one another. In multiple episodes Poof has been shown to be obsessed with what the media portrays as desirable, so it's really funny to me that he fell for a pretty blonde girl with blue eyes and a Southern accent.
This episode is very silly because Goldie has both boys wrapped around her little finger, and she knows it. She ignores them when they're hurt and deliberately urges them to fight over her. And of course, she ends up with a lead role in the school play, so suddenly Poof and Foop are all over the chance to be Mr. Cookie so they can win her kiss at the end. When Foop ends up as Table Number 3 and Poof's understudy, he tries to wipe Poof out in order to take over that position... despite being synced up to Poof so that if Poof dies, he dies too (a fact which won't click for him until the following episode, when he actually does manage to erase both Poof and himself from existence).
Foop rewrites the play script so Table Number 3 is the star of the play and the script narration refers to Poof as "a big ugly purple thing who is really dumb", and it's quite amusing to watch a table "slay a monster with his handsomeness".
The blatant discrimination against Anti-Fairies is rampant in this episode, and it's just fascinating to watch Foop deal with it every single time one of these school episodes crops up. Actually, discrimination towards Anti-Fairies is kind of an underlying thing throughout the series. Every time Fairies and Anti-Fairies are competing together in something, no Anti-Fairies are allowed to judge. Only Fairies (and in one instance, one pixie). Competitions are always rigged in the Fairies' favor. The Fairies try to paint it as "That's because Anti-Fairies are the bad guys", but... it's pretty obvious that the Fairies are racist. They name-call pixies and genies on TV, too.
"Love Triangle" is also one of the few episodes where we get to see Poof act like a jerk, and it's wonderful. The popular kid laughing and eating popcorn while watching the nerd get beaten to a pulp... It's terrible.
It's just... It's so obvious that Poof is on such a bad course for his future. He's obsessed with the media, popularity, sports, pretty girls who are more interested in his looks than his personality, and there are some episodes where he just picks on Foop mercilessly (not that Foop doesn't pick on him first, but Poof is really not a turn-the-other-cheek type). I just think that's a really interesting choice for the child of the "good guys". Plus, Cosmo was designed to be in the "50s" era, and I just imagine Poof's teenage years in the "70s" era as a hippie and getting into all sorts of trouble... He already has a sugar addiction like his mom, and drinking soda and eating candy in this show is the equivalent of getting drunk.
After "Love Triangle", Demetria wanted to watch the genie episodes "Genie Meanie Miney Mo" and "Back to the Norm", so we did. We're working our way up to "Fairy Idol". Sanderson is really something special in "Fairy Idol".
So that was my day. Not the most celebratory birthday of them all, but it worked for me. I did have some more ice cream before bed so I could finish off the box in the freezer. Cake will come later. Check back on Friday.
