It's My TV….It's My Peanut Butter

This week’s time vampire is a true testament to how low you can sink while unemployed.  During my year of the great job hunt, I wound up clicking through some junk mail from Disney.  They told me I could design my own Pixie.  Well, really, how cool is that?

So off I went.  And despite the fact this site is aimed at the invariably annoying pre-teen set, I couldn’t help it.  I got drawn in.  What started as me killing a few minutes designing leaf-and-petal-based outfits for wide-eyed pixies who are about as realistically proportioned as Barbie, turned into a few hours of my exploring Pixie Hollow, which then morphed into a few days of playing the random little games which were actually pretty entertaining.  Unfortunately, they started to give me badges for playing, which made me want more badges, so I found myself spending countless hours flying around to “collect” acorns or bits of fluff and more badges and….basically I was like an addict.

I should probably be ashamed, but really, the games were well designed (I’m rather partial to “Harvest Hustle” myself), and incredibly well-paced.  I say well paced because often these kinds of games aimed more at the younger set don’t have any real advancement in difficulty–these games do, and they do it on a nice scale.  Nice enough that even I can avoid too much frustration.

So, if you’ve got time to kill and a penchant for flash games, slay what’s left of your dignity and fly off with the pixies.

I  found the “masterpiece” I wrote at the ripe old age of eleven again today. I was actually looking for something else. I forget what it was I was trying to find because I’ve been laughing my ass off at this piece of trash. I kind of feel like I’m living that scene from Anne of the Island where Anne finds some of the old stories from the Story Club, including the ever-tragic “My Graves” and gets a good laugh out of it.

It was called Cassie and the Camp Wiggee-Hama Ghosts and though I was quite proud of it at the time, I look back and see a story riddled with one cliche after another, filled with the kind of things that seem incredibly cool when you’re eleven and told from the point of view of a character which I know now was nothing but a Mary-Sue of myself.

Opening lines?

“Oh, 99 bottles of beer on the wall….” chorused most of the bus.

“Ohhhhhh,” I moaned pitifully.

“The headache strikes again,” said my friend Helen sympathetically.

“If I hear that kid,” I said, pointing to a girl two rows ahead of me, “hit that wrong note again–”

“You’ll scream,” Helen filled in.

“No, I’ll calmly rip out her vocal chords and place them in formaldehyde.”

Out of the mouths of babes, I tell ya.

I wanna know how I learned to spell “formaldehyde” when I was 11 because I really don’t think I could spell it now if I weren’t looking at it.

Just be glad that the internet was still an experimental toy of DARPA and certain Universities, or a broader swath of people may have suffered exposure to this particular exercise in amateur writing.