FLYING PURPLE KITTEH



I find it strange that you somehow don't know of Kitteh yet.

And then I remember how long a story it is, and how long it would take to tell it.

 

So I'll just tell you now.

 

It originally happened on facebook, when I didn't have as many friends and people didn't know me as well. Usually, I am very quiet around older people I don't know. Therefore they think I am just some awkward little towering teenage girl who doesn't say much and is all sweet and innocent and whose head is probably okay on the inside, but who never really cares to show it.

 

And then, somehow, through one facebook comment after another and the rediscovery of Microsoft Paint, I proved them all wrong.

 

And they loved it.

 

 

So here is the story, through pictures and facebook comments, of how The Adventures of the Flying Purple Kitteh and Land Shark came to be like my new full time career.

 

(I couldn't really take a screenshot of the facebook bit, so I had to take away most of the comments and stuff, but I left in some of them just to show how the story developed. The story pretty much just made people I didn't really know like me more, which is weird, but it's what happened. I just thought, if you wanted to know....)

 

 

It started out of sadness.

 

 

 

I was sad so i decided to draw Happy stuff to see if it affected my mood.

 

 

 

And then all that Happy just made me more sad so I drew a dragon that scared away all the Happy because it was STUPID.

THE END.

 

 

Pen: WHAT DID YOU DO TO THE KITTEH. D:

 

Shady: Those are scratch marks. It scratched itself. Dragon claws would have left a deeper mark.

 

Pen: WHY THE FLIP WOULD IT DO THAT.

 

Shady: Because.

 

Shady: Wait- I guess that doesn't really make any sense...

 

Pen: YOU DONT SAY? D:
 

Shady: Okay, I'll draw another one.
 

Jason(my stepdad's friend from college): Kitteh was freaked out by the dragon so it went berserk and started scratching everything as Kittehs do...see - I get it. It all makes perfect sense.

 

 

 

 

Okay, so it turns out there were all these little knives raining down everywhere and that's how everybody got scratched up. Because apparently it doesn't make sense for a cat to scratch itself. -,-

 

 

 (I then realized what Quiet Internet Shady had done to her reputaion)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I apologize to everyone who was disturbed by the previous drawings. I am sorry for your eyeballs. Here is the kitteh and he's all better now. Look! He's even doing a little jig in the sky. :D

 

 

 

Pen: DAWWWWWWW.♥

 

Jason: Her's all betteh now...until...Bwahahaha 

Shady: o.o until...?

Julia: yes, Shady make an until picture!!!!

 

 

 

I might have gone too far on this one. But don't worry, this isn't the end...

 ...or is it? O.o

 

"Kitteh had been receiving death threats in the mail for some time now. Apparently, if he didn't jump now, a sniper was already prepared to kill his wife and children."

 

And then...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

And it wasn't JUST a Land Shark...

 

it was a LAND AND SKY shark!!

 

 

 

 

And you thought this was the end!! ;)
 

Jason: It's like batman and robin.

 

 

 

Just like Batman and Robin.

 

 

 

 

Jason: Such a good team...

 

And thus followed other adventures, in Depression and Autumn and Mathland, with Massah and dead sunflowers and such. It's a never-ending kind of thing, and somehow, drawing and writing with such a sick sense of humor makes me, and the rest of my facebook friends, happier.

PS: Oh, that's just the worst tree I've ever drawn...I still can't get over it, even now...

today

My day's events...

Music

I play the cello.

His name is Gerald.

Here is his picture:

Oh, he's such a pimp.


But anyways, what I was meaning to say was that it's nearing that point to the concert deadline where we're really starting to get good.

Good as in, we're an eighth grade orchestra and we know mostly all the songs we're supposed to be playing. I'm not sure why, but somehow, this orchestra is actually kind of alright. Last year I remember all these other conductors and random musicians from the state would come in to hear us, and our conducter would just stand there smiling at them. We'd play our hearts out then, and Isaac would rip his bow across his viola and tear my eardrums out, and Huong would just move her spastic vibrato violin fingers like lightning, and Pen would just get in there, deep, deep in the sound, and forget where we were or what else was happening- we'd just play.

It's a good feeling, playing in an orchestra. It makes you forget yourself, makes you just want to be a part of something bigger. A bigger, deeper sound, that you get to be a part of.



I'm second chair. I sit in the front. Pen's first chair, and Isaac is second chair viola- (out of two ;)- so he sits by me, and Huong is over in second violin section, and we all do well together.

My only problem is that I don't really listen to music the way most humans do.


I mean- I really, really don't listen to music.


I have a two inch by one centimeter ipod shuffle, with like 20 ed stockham songs on it that I listen to when I'm working on my stop motion film and need to get 'in the zone', but that's about it. Otherwise, orchestra is forced into my brain every day after first period.

So we'll just be in the hallways, derpin' around, and it gets really intense, right, and everything's moving so fast and suddenly you come up and you're about to intercept someone you know, and it's
all adrenaline and hormones, and suddenly you just want to SING.

And you're searching for words, a song everybody knows, that everybody would want to join in singing; just a few perfect, fist-pumping lines, but the only thing is- you play the cello.

"BUM BUM, BUM-BUM BOOM, DAA DEH-EH DUMMMMMMMM!!!"

._.

Usually when I feel that this is about to come out of me, I try to keep it quiet.




...Or another cellist starts singing with me. ;)

A Thought on Kindness. And wings.

So I was just internetting it up out here when I remembered something.



I went to buffalo wild wings once with Elmer (best friend since ever. loves taylor swift. not gay.) and Sara (small. asian. chipper. A+ perfectionist. best friend since ever.) And we sat at this table and got wings and were having a good old time and listening to people sing karaoke and we had this waitress named Emilee, and she was like REALLY freaking nice.

She would give us like a hundred napkins every five minutes, and would like just keep coming over and asking us how we were doing, and touching our shoulders and stuff people do to go out of their way to make your day, and it was a really busy night, too.

And we had chips and salsa, and I decided we should leave a note thanking her for being nice in a world full of mean. So we got a napkin and dipped our knives in the salsa and wrote on the napkin, saying "You're really nice."

Elmer said he would have said something other than nice and I told him not to be creepy.

And we left a seven dollar tip and the napkin at the table and left.

I'm not even sure if she got the note or not.

But it just reminds me that there are people being shot in the streets and there are rapists and meth labs and dead cats in dumpsters and war and starvation and yet, somewhere, somebody is holding their umbrella over someone else's head.

I don't know.

It's just a thought.

Narnia, the Book Closet

This past Thursday, at Book Club on my first day as a Sir, I was put in a group with Pen and these two poor sweet quiet sevie girls named Rose and Alyssa who were so small and nice, and we were just so very frightening. Oh my goodness.

I had written out all these questions on the book And Then There Were None, and was getting really passionate about Agatha Christie when it turns out one of the girls didn't have a book.


"i um don't have a book..."

"You don't have a book?" I said.


I had to get really up in there faces to hear them. Oh glob I was so scary.

"um, no-"

Pen and I jumped up and raised our hands and pounded the table, screaming, "NARNIA! NARNIA! MS. COMMA, NARNIA! WE NEED TO GO BACK TO NARNIA!!!"

Oh, why do we always do this, Pen?

But she smiled her "oh my goodness" smile and handed us the Golden Key and we ran out of the room. Sally turned around. "You guys going to Narnia?!"

"Yeah..." we said. "Sorry."

And then we ran, ran down the stairs and past the janitor and through the teachers talking in the hallways and were somehow under the illusion that we were being 'sneaky', and slammed our bodies against the door in the wall by the Comic Board.

Pen put the key in.

"I am so excited dude, we're going back to Narnia! I love Narnia!"
"I know, and we're gonna be with Aslan and all them and then we can jump out and be all-"

"Where's your fur coats?"

We stopped, stone silent, and spun around.

Mrs. Baker, the most frightening science teacher known to the world was standing there smiling, and she loved us.

"If you're going to Narnia, you're going to have to have a fur coat."

Pen couldn't speak. She has this obsessive kind of crush on that woman.

"Well I have my striped jacket, so I think we're good." I smiled all awkward and laughed.

Pen was spluttering. "Haha yeah ha I um my arms-"

And I took the key and put it back in and it turns out the door had been unlocked the whole time, Pen just didn't know how to open a door, and I joked about it for a minute until we ran inside to escape the terrible social entrapment.



The first time we had gone in, we had had no idea what it was like. Ms. Comma just was all,
"Shady and Sally."
Pen: *devestated expression*
Ms. Comma: "And Pen."

We ran up.
Ms. Comma: (holds up a brass key) "This...is the key to Narnia."
Us: *fangirling*
Ms. Comma: (regretting saying that) "Haley, do you know where the book closet is?"
Sally and I: "Yes."
Ms. Comma: (intense face) "Go there...and get me six of these books...okay?"
Us: "Yes. Yes...y-yes. Oh yes."
Ms. Comma: "Okay go."

We went down the stairs with small, quick steps, freaking out because we were getting to go to a place full of books called Narnia.

Sally did a CSI agent somersault around a corner and hurt her back, which she clutched for the last few steps to the closet door.

It was wonderfully creepy, and we opened it.

It was so tiny, with one of those old overhead lights and HOLY CRAP THERE'S A BEE ON THE SPEAKER. WHAT THE CATS. NOW IT'S BEHIND THE COMPUTER. WHAT.

Okay never mind. So it was awesomely creepy, and smelled like old books, and after we found the books we were supposed to bring back, we found The Lion, The Witch, and the the Wardrobe, and Pen grabbed it and said-
"Dude, we found Narnia in Narnia!!"
"It's a paradox!!" I said.

Then they kept on wandering around the small space like balloons, hypnotized, and I was like "Guys, we should be heading back..." and Pen was all "Time doesn't pass in *Narniaaaaaaa*..." and I was like "Oh glob."

So we stayed there like it was ours, and we ruled it, and we started acting really, REALLY weird and giddy from the old-paper fumes and then Sally found this book from the 70's with this guy on the cover on an ice skating rink with rainbows coming out of his hands, and it was called something like "Dancing Carl," and by then we were way out of our minds and I practically had to push them out of the room and turn the light off, and by then we had been gone for like twenty minutes.

So this time, Pen and I didn't stay as long. We just got a couple books and derped around for a while and came back, and it was magical. Mrs. Baker was in her room with the door open, and she just heard the Narnia door bang open and Pen quietly scream "For Narnia!!" while I was saying "If you shout 'for narnia' as we walk out, you're going to do it alone."

And then we came back all out of breath and gave the kids their books and tried to avoid scaring the children any more than we already had.

I've never even read Narnia.

I've just been in the closet.

:3

WHY

Reading an entire blog backwards and then getting to the end is like watching Benjamin Button die.

Friday Faith (written yesterday)

Today was Friday.

Sally has a thing about Fridays. It doesn’t even have anything to do with the upcoming weekend, or anything- at least, we don’t think so. It’s just her thing. Almost every other day last year, she’d suddenly look up, slamming her hand on the table, the one eye that was visible under her hair sparkling, and she’d go “Duuuuuuude…it’s *FRIDAY!*”

“No, it’s Tuesday…” we’d tell her. And ever since then, it’s been her day. A day of stupid, unreasonable happiness. For everyone.

Even after the end of that happy year and the start of this awful one, where nothing is the same and everything seems ruined, Fridays remain Fridays.

Sally, Isaac, Miley and I used to go to the vending machine after school sometimes and get fruit snacks, and throw them into our mouths, purposefully missing, leaving a trail across the field on the way Home. Oh, we had a grand old time.

Which is why, a few days ago, when I found some quarters in my pocket, I dragged everyone back inside and trudged all the way to that vending machine. “SOMETHING has to be the same!!” I told them, desperate and spluttering. “Just like old times, remember?? Just like old times!!”

We waited, we cheered, we scraped up our money and found the machine completely and absolutely broken.

The screen was cracked. The buttons weren’t lighting up. It was so broken it wouldn’t even TELL us it was broken, it just kept flashing different statuses every other second- “Out of Order” “Temporarily out of order” “Please choose a selection” “BROKEN. BROKEN. BLEEEEEEEP!”

We just stood there for a minute. The devastation was hard to describe.

It’s been like that all week.

It’s been terrible.

Which is why, when Sally came up to my locker today after school with a dollar and said “Let’s go to the vending machine!” :D I told her we couldn’t. Not again. Not after what happened.

“But…but I have faith. I have faith because it’s Friday.”

Her single eye was so sad. And her faith was so strong, her hope so sure.

"And also my dollar is really crisp. This is a really crisp dollar."

I got everyone together- Sally, Isaac, Miley, Pen, and Morgan. We stormed down the hall, a big brigade, and I kept on explaining to everyone the importance of them all having faith, all at the same time, long after they stopped listening. And the less they listened, the louder I became.

“Believe! Believe with everything in your entire being that this time- THIS TIME- everything will turn out okay. And if we all believe at the same time, it’ll work. It’ll work. Have faith that it’ll work. Complete and utter absolute faith that THE VENDING MACHINE WILL WORK TODAY!!”

Pen and Morgan left through the backdoors, and it was only the four of us again.

We rounded the corner as a herd, and saw someone reach down and pull red vines out of the bottom of the machine. We screamed and fist-pumped as one being, and ran over and frightened the poor little sevie girl so much that she gave us her spot in line.

We were on the verge of tears.

It was a very emotional experience, especially for Sally.

And so we got fruit snacks and stale sour gummy worms, and walked home with a renewed sense of power and trust.

How I was Dubbed Sir Shady

Yesterday was book club.

Ms. Comma was pulling up chairs in front of the room after snacks were passed out, those random plasic blue and orange chairs no one ever really uses, all up in a line- six of them.

The Original Six stood silent, hanging around her like balloons that were almost out of helium, laughing and talking and trying our best to be as obnoxious as we were last year, and failing badly. This was important. This was our moment.

All the sevies sat watching, waiting, crinkling their fruit snack wrappers and talking and murmering about what was going on.

Pen sat seductively on the table at the side of the room.

She looked over at me.

She smiled.

I gave her the you're-sitting-seductively look and she sat up fast and looked over my shoulder again, unused to feeling so excluded. I wished she had been of the Original Six. As fun as that original year of book clubs had been, it would have been funner with her.

Ms. Comma had all six chairs in a row. "Sit down," she told us, in her laughing-serious voice.

We sat.

I was smiling wider than my face was capable of, resulting in what I assume to be a kind of painful and awkward look, trying not to laugh. She went over to the window, took her name off of the yard stick resting there, and handed us little blue slips of paper, titled "*SIRS"

I could feel the idea of an audience watching us, although they were only a rag tag bunch of book-club sevies, talking, spread out around the room. They stopped to listen to me, though. I don't know why, but somehow they love me.

Ms. Comma finished passing the slips of rules and regulations and signatures of Sirs and stood beside me, at the beginning of the line. She started explaining then, and everyone was laughing inside, but not out.

No....no, Pen was laughing out loud then. Funny then, for an actress.

"Shady," the teacher proclaimed. "Stand and say a little about yourself."

I stood.
I was a monster.
Already their eyes were growing wider and their heads were turning up.
I was wearing my brown striped jacket, and hugging my arm.

I liked being a monster.

"Why hello there." Giggles. "My name's Shady. Um. Balsom." Laughter. "I'm of the Original Six, as these guys are. Well, not so much Jake. He's just here for the wings." Yelling from the Six. Jake showing signs of self-defence.

The teacher interrupted.
"Jake, you can defend yourself later. Shady, continue."

It was all very light, everyone trying not to laugh, trying not to be serious, in a pretend-serious ceremony Dustin had invented that everyone had hated. "I would like to be called Sir Dustin," he had said on that first practice Thursday of the year. "Oh, so now you're the Sir? Aw nah. If you're a sir, I'M a sir! What, you think you're better than these guys?" I told him. Oh, it had been fun. But it ended up being actually a good idea. And so there we were.

I finished awkwardly and sat back down. Ms. Comma went up in front of me.

"Shady. Do you hereby agree to the aforementioned statements?"

"I do." I said it like I was getting married.

"I hereby dub you-" the yard stick tapped over my shoulders- "Sir Shady."

And everybody clapped, and Pen laughed. And clapped. And said my name.

I was smiling wider than I had meant to, showing more emotion than I usually allowed myself to show. It was stupid how happy the Sirring Ceremony made us. It was like it was real, you know? Like it was your moment. Like no matter what happened after this, or how low you got, you could always say, "I was a Sir once. I was dubbed Sir Shady."

It was our moment. It was our life. Our chance to be somebody special, to be a Sir, to be more than the sevies we used to be, to even be more than we already are. To sign an unevenly cut blue slip of paper, to promise a title, to become something. To have a yard stick tap gently each of your shoulders, to bow your head, to smile. It was our moment. It was my moment.

And we could carry it around like a plastic trophie, a Burger King crown over our heads, forever.

It was a good feeling, and we like the smell of books fresh out of Narnia.


And so we have book club.

So nice to see you there.

:)

Something about September

Something about September makes me feel like a cloud.

Well, not so much like a cloud as feeling like I'm in a cloud.

And I'll watch the office for 6 hours on a Saturday and then Elmer will call me and be all "Summer's over," and Sally will text me and say "DUDE it's dark outside!!" because they know they have to tell me these things or else I won't ever look out a window.

I like the word September. It makes me think of rotten crab apples on the way home from school and almost killing Quoc and sitting outside with my dog and dead grass and lost hope.

But whenever something smells like lost hope, I try and smile and pretend that what lost hope really is is a found hope- a hope of snow- and what I tell myself snow means is that I can wear a big jacket all day so no one will see how scrawny I am and I can fall onto the ground and not get hurt and nothing can ever touch me. And that the cold outside makes the inside warmer.

And there can be fire inside a house and nobody can get hurt because of it, which for some reason is unheard of in the summer because of all these wildfires, and you have to strip off giant boots at the backdoor and leave a puddle and watch it melt to make sure the baby doesn't eat the dirty snow, but somehow she does it anyway.

But all September means is that time is going on- or, rather, that time is staying time and I am simply riding through it, like the log ride in Portland, and looking behind me and watching the past get older and the snow start to fall.

And that I have more math homework to do.

Which I'll probably end up doing by the end of the night.

And then tomorrow in math I'll suddenly lose it and someone will go "Hey Shady, what's the answer for-" and then I'll spin around, snap a pencil over their desk, and turn back around and scribble, which usually results in silence from both friends and strangers. The only difference in their reactions is that the friends stay and watch you for a moment, and the strangers laugh and leave.

Then you lean over to your friends and whisper 'what did you get for-' and they'll lean over and dance their unbroken pencils across the paper and open your mind again to this impossible task they themselves aren't quite able to accomplish. Then, you figure out the answer and a few moments later show them.

This is the great concept of Math Class, and I hate it.

HEY Y'ALL

Hey y'all.

I think I'm starting a blog now. Because I have math homework I don't want to get done.