Buttons Taste Like Candy When You Close Your Eyes

So I know the topic this week is short stories (or at least, I think it is), but since I'm brand spanking new here and am still fumbling around the neighborhood, walking my dog where I shouldn't and making blunders at next door's barbecue mixer, I thought it best to just to stick to something safe.

Like maybe introducing myself. Just ignore that pork chop I accidentally threw at someone, when trying to make a point about some program no-one else watches. Pretend I didn't spill punch all down the dress I shouldn't have worn, while almost standing on Mrs Finnerty's cat.

I'm normal, okay. I'm totally normal. And to prove it, here are the top four normal things I totally do all the time:

1. I write things. I write long things and short things, things about sexy times and menages and things about zombies and spaceships. Just ignore the fact that I write said things while wearing a towel on my head, eating midget gems and watching something awful, like Grounded For Life. Seriously, has anyone else seen that show? What is WITH the Dad? Where did they find him? He's almost grotesquely ugly, he's covered in a kind of ginger fur, and he seems to think panicked shouting makes him a) funny and b) likeable. I gotta tell ya - it does NOT. I'm only hanging on watching this thing because Brett Harrison is in it and he looks like Scott Valentine and I just want to snog his weird mouth.

Ooooh, is that punch over there by the hotdog buns??

2. I put on clothes and go outside. No wait - I honestly do. I know sometimes it probably seems as though I just jealously guard my lair (or "bedroom", as ordinary people call it) like a huge great furry wild animal, claws lashing out at anyone who dares to enter, burning eyes staring out from beneath a mat of hair that only happened because I fell asleep with that stupid towel on my head. And I know it kind of looks like I'm a hermit who's been permanently fused with her laptop, and doesn't understand words like "sun" and "people".

But I swear to God, yesterday I opened the front door and waved my hand out. No lie. I really did it. And then the sunlight turned to acid on my skin and I scurried back up the stairs to lick my wound, while crouching next to the fort I've made out of DVDs of shitty TV shows.

3. I talk on Twitter!

Wait. Is that considered normal? My normal-o-meter is kind of on the fritz, at the moment. Yesterday I ate a button because I thought it was a midget gem.

What? It's dark in the writing den, okay? I can't see because of my hair! The sun just burned me! Give me a break, okay?

4. I cry when The Sims 3 won't work.

Okay, I know that this one is not strictly normal. I mean, most people cry when they go outside and ultraviolet rays melt their hands like that scene in The Fly - yeah, you know which one I'm talking about. But not me. I cry when I'm happily making my Sim have my exact life - complete with aversion to social situations and need to obsessively sit at her laptop, writing - and then suddenly she turns into an old lady because I neglected to turn aging off and she only has a 90 day life.

There's a lesson in there, but I don't give a shit what it is. Instead I'm just crying now because I took aging off and started a new game, and now the fooker's glitching like nothing else. It keeps freezing! Why won't The Sims let me be great? All I want to do is take care of my little Sim, have her lead a happy life of hermititude and writing and possibly woohooing with the Armie Hammer Sim I made to live next door to her, and what happens?

It jams up on me!

And then I cried like a little baby. There's probably a lesson in that, too, I feel. Something profound, something about not letting precious seconds slip away from you, or never allowing yourself to be stuck in the same pattern.

Or even better: just buy Sims fookin' 2, instead!


Charlotte Stein is now going to leave a self-conscious third person biography for you to read at the bottom of this post, to introduce herself in a more sane fashion. She's published with Black Lace, Ellora's Cave, Resplendence, Total-E-Bound, Xcite, Cleis Press and Constable and Robinson, amongst other things that might be happening soon and that are making her giddy and stupid. Her work has been called "and" and "the" in many reviews by Jane at Dear Author, Michelle Buonfiglio and Wendy The Super Librarian, and you can usually find her over at http://www.themightycharlottestein.blogspot.com/ (mightiness is wholly imaginary on the part of Ms Stein), where you'll also find evidence of her books, and of the other blogs she frightens on a daily basis. She lives in West Yorkshire with her terrified husband and their imaginary dog.