cimorene

i called my mom today, hoping to use her as a plot consultant for my harlequin plot because she's totally the expert. i started absorbing the harlequins which were always scattered liberally around our house, as well as filling three floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a number of crates in her home office, around the age of six. so, right, i called and explained the plot i was using--proud defiant heroine refuses sexy millionaire's indecent proposal and then is forced to throw herself on his mercy to pay for her mother's cancer treatments, but he insists on getting married instead. she only offered me a couple of not-very-useful suggestions before getting distracted. we talked for a few hours about the local school systems and then for a while longer i listened in bemused silence as my parents argued with each other over the phone from opposite ends of the house. (sheppard and mckay really do sound like them, man.)

i also found out they've started watching and enjoying sga and firefly (which my mom called "firefox"), although neither one of them was sure what the characters' names were, and i had to describe john and rodney to them as the pointy-haired protagonist and the genius. when i told them i was writing sga slash now, they eventually agreed that since it had a plot, they would both like to read it. daddy explained very earnestly to me that his rule of thumb (that he's "always used", he told me) for when to read my gay porn is that he finds it interesting only if it contains a plot beyond the romance.

speaking of thumbs, the latest schoolteacher gossip is about a middle-school girl at the new eastwood who punched a guy in the face and then ran through the halls to her own classroom and slammed the door behind her, presumably to stay safe. an innocent bystander had his hand on the doorframe, and the closing door sliced off the tip of his finger. students in the classroom reported actually seeing the end of it bounce off the floor, and when the door was opened his finger was found to be "gushing" blood. so the teacher told him to go to the principal's office. the girl received only four days' in-school suspension because she didn't mean to do it.

and uh, this awesome icon is by