May 31, 2001

May 31, 2006.

5 years in America and counting. Lets see what happens next, eh?

May: Birthday, part III

[So apparently the music I listen to when I'm drafting a story in my head will affect the outcome of the story, and certain songs, such as Better Than Ezra's "Breathless" will result in happy fluffy things, despite of the chem class that immediately followed.

Sappy material included. You stand warned. Sorry Lucy, you'd had to suffer without the warning.

Oh and apparently Mike giggles like Jon Steward. I have no idea what that sounds like but will file it away for future references. ]

“…aaaaannnnnnnnd this one’s from me,” announced Mike happily, plunking a package in front of Nick with an expression that, he hoped, encouraged Nick to open the bag immediately. He was excited, almost in spite of himself, and as a result had very little patience for sentimentality which he suspected Nick was very close to.

“I have,” Nick said, after a moment of pause, “never owned an American video game before. Mike, is this the one…?” From that day when we went to the mall. About a week ago. And we stood around and goggled at things in that store and you made fun of my shirt for two hours straight? His expression finished for him. Mike grinned.

“Yep. Doyoulikeit?” They’d already consumed half of the candy, and had not even touched the cake yet. Mike was curious to what sort of thing that much sugar would do to him, at the end of the day. Sugar crash would probably be hell, but he didn’t really care at the moment.

“Of course.” Nick smiled and ruffled his hair. Mike stared at him.

“ ‘Of course?’” He said, feeling amused and slightly disappointed at the same time. “That’s it?”

“We-ell,” said Nick. He stretched and grinned at Mike. “If we’re in France I’d be hugging everyone right now, but that’s not the custom here, quel dommage. Americans, you know. Strange.”

“Pas vraiment. French people are freakier,” muttered Mike, horrified, and edged away from Nick. He wondered if cultural habits could be contagious. They’d better not be. He also wondered if he was doing something strange as a result of the sugar, like bouncing, which Zach had once informed him that he did when he got too excited. Or high on sugar. Or both.

“Ah the great cultural diversities,” murmured Zach, edging, in turn, away from Mike. Mike decided he might be bouncing. Just a little. “Alright, Gary, let’s see.” Zach continued, looking steadily to the opposite side of Mike.

Mike snorted softly to himself, but craned his neck to see what Gary was taking out of his backpack. Unlike the rest of them, Gary, who had never as much as set a password on his computer, had decided to be secretive out of nowhere and refused to tell them what he’d gotten Nick. And as much as Mike hated to admit it, he was intensely curious. Gary had been wearing the particular expression that was usually granted to someone when they had something big that they were about to let out of the bag. Like a metaphorical t-rex as opposed to, Mike supposed, the normal feline.

Zippers. Zippers. Backpack rustling. Mike wished his friend would hurry up. Finally, Gary did turn around and Mike’s eyes immediately fell from Gary’s excitedly nervous face to the…

“It’s a manilla envelope,” said Zach, sounding like what Mike felt which was, roughly, the equivalent of someone putting one and one together and incidentally realizing that the result was not equal to two.

It was, indeed, a manilla envelope, yellow and rectangular and otherwise unremarkable. It was hard not to stare at it. Hard not to wonder what the hell Gary was up to. It was entirely unfunny and therefore gave Mike an irrational urge to giggle. Which he strangled before it ever got past his throat. Michael Reynolds did not giggle. Ever.

Nick opened the envelope, smiling uncertainly, and pulled out papers. A packet, to be exact, stapled together neatly and with things printed on it. Mike peered over Nick’s shoulder, trying to read it. There were many fine prints and quite a few lines that looked like they were waiting for signatures, but the first word that caught his eye was the word “LEASE”. He stared at the paper, then at Gary.

“…Gary?” said Nick, sounding baffled.

Gary looked nervous. “Alright, so remember that apartment we looked at—the one with the four bedrooms, that we really liked, but we had a talk and decided that—that—you know, student budget and all, right?”

“Uh-huh,” said Zach slowly, dubiously.

“Well,” he beamed at them, albeit nervously. “I’ve mentioned it. With my dad I mean. And he’s goin’ to pay the difference between that rent and the rent we can afford. Er. Well, I mean what we’re expectin’ to pay at the other place that we decided that we’re probably goin’ to live at?”

“This’s the lease?” asked Nick.

“He agreed already?” asked Mike.

“What?” asked Zach.

“Yeah,” said Gary.

“Oh my god,” said Nick, for the uncounted number of time within the past hour.

Mike gave the thought approximately five second to process itself before he jumped up. “Yes! Oh my god.” This was definitely not sugar. Or maybe it still was, but it was also himself too. Or something. Whatever. “This is awesome! Hee!”

“Naugh!” commented Gary, who was pulled into a hug by Nick who looked as if someone had just whacked him on the back of the head with a dictionary and was unaccountably happy about it. .

“Nick,” said Zach, sounding dazed, “Nick, I think you’re strangling Gary.”

“Yemgh,” agreed Gary, upon which he was immediately released, a little breathless but laughing nevertheless. “So ‘m guessin’ you like it?”

“Oh. My. God,” repeated Nick, beaming. “Mon dieu.”

“Are you f--” Mike glanced at Zach. “—freakin’ kiddin’ me?” He paused, smiling helplessly, and added, “Wow. Nice present.”

Gary looked at Zach.

“I…um…” Zach rubbed at the bridge of his nose, a sure sign that, Mike knew, meant that he was at a loss. “This is…I mean…it’s…I’m….”

“He doesn’t know what to say,” said Nick, amazed.

“You’re not ‘xactly eloquent either,” pointed out Mike. Nick laughed. It was more of a giggle, really, which promptly set Mike off too. Soon they were all laughing at things no one really knew about and Mike reflected that if they treasured their sanity, they should avoid the cake and the rest of the sugary goods but who cared—sanity was boring. He took a deep breath.

“Right.” He gasped, gave them all a few moments to collect themselves. Themselves, meaning the three of them with Zach regarding them as if they’d all gone insane which, Mike supposed, they had. Not that he cared. Right. “Food. Sugar. Food. Cake? Cake, anyone? You’re cuttin’ it? Oh god I can’t watch.” To make good of his words, he turned around to face the other way, covering his eyes as he did so.

‘It is,” Zach reminded him from somewhere across the table, “his cake.”

“Yeah but he’s horrible with a knife. Violin? Sure. Knife? Noooo.”

“Cancel his future career as an assassin then,” replied Gary, and poked Mike in the back with something. Or at least Mike thought it was Gary, but he couldn’t see, as that his eyes were closed. “Hear that, Nick? Do not become an assassin.”

“What’s an ‘assassin’?” asked Nick.

“Cake, Mike?” asked Zach.

“Is he done yet?” Mike asked in response.

“Cake?” repeated Zach, sounding amused and faintly exasperated.

Mike sighed, gave in, and opened his eyes to accept the paper plate of cake with a fork stuck on top, a wobbling flag pole to salute the events of the day. There was, after all, no way anyone could say no to cake.

“And Mike… did I hear you say ‘hee’, a while back?”

“Cake,” said Mike, and dug in.

He hadn’t expected a lot from his birthday this year, with his family and almost all of his relatives across the ocean and everyone else he knew in France. There must have been some sort of foreboding, something that he didn’t want to think about, that he had pushed below his awareness. Birthdays were always a family event, growing up, with the entire family and a goodly portion of the relatives assembled to celebrate the passage of another year. Even if it wasn’t wholly enjoyable past a certain age, it was a tradition, and there was comfort in the known and the familiar.

Nick didn’t know what he had in mind for his birthday this year, exactly, or what he was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this.

Who knew, he thought, taking another bite of the cake and watching Gary insert yet another DVD into the player. Really, who knew what he would find here, so far from home?

So despite of being away from his family, despite of it being the first birthday away from home, and despite of being in a foreign country in a school where the midterms were always so inconveniently scheduled, Nick was content. Watching another wad of streamer sail over his head as Mike took aim for the trashcan, Nick licked the chocolate frosting off of the back of his spoon and smiled.

It had been, after all, a happy birthday.

look at me, i'm scary!

This picture makes me giggle almost uncontrollably xD And I can't tell if it is supposed to be a mock-scare picture or an actual attempt to look tough on Wolverine's part.
*looks at it again*
*giggles*

But usually he's hawt.

Random stuff

This is sort of interesting...


So when are you guys done with the quarter?
Is Lucy still planning on visiting?

Because I said I would

On the corner of o-chem note, so ignore the random scribbling.



Am taking a break from ochem right now.

Nick's birthday today

[See? I was trying to be consistent with the post title. Anyway, possibly the record number of grammatical mistakes in a while, and yet my editor managed to beta it in record time (almost freakishly fast, in fact o_O) which, I'm sure, Nick would appreciate if the logic of fiction, fictional characters, and real life ever got compromised and then sorted out. ]

May: Birthday, part II

Certain types of friends should come with warning signs, simply because they were the types of people they were, and had a habit of doing the sort of things that they did. Admittedly, it wasn’t because of anything bad. More often than not, the warning was needed just as a precaution because for certain types of friendship, randomness and surprises were an inseparable part of the package.

At the sound of the first knock, Zach lit the candles, hoping that Nick had strong heart and no genetic predisposition for panic attacks. He wasn’t sure if he had managed to get the point of dumping-things-over-other-people-is-bad across but, if it came to the worst, the cider and the food were on the table and Mike would have to get around him to reach them.

“The door’s open, you know,” Mike raised his voice. He grinned at them. Gary gave him a thumbs up and aimed—Zach saw with a sinking heart—several of the annoyances that people generally called ‘party poppers’ at the door. Don’t, Zach mouthed. His friends either didn’t see or, as was more likely the case, pretended not to notice.

He blew out the candle, positioned himself directly in front of the cider, just in case, and crossed his arms in the universal come-what-may gesture. The doorknob turned.

Zach hoped Nick had a strong heart.

The doorknob turned, squeaking slightly as it did. Gary made a note to file a room repair report about it and readjusted his grip on the party poppers.

“Are all of you guys here without me?” Came Nick’s voice from on the other side of the door. It was a complaint if Gary ever heard one. He grinned slightly wider and, as the door opened, yanked on the strings of the multiple poppers.

Which promptly exploded with the sound equivalent of a miniature fire cracker, about an inch to the right of Nick’s shoulder. Nick gave an undignified yelp and made a leap backward, but Mike was already there, hauling Nick, wide-eyed and shocked, into the room.

“Why look,” he drawled, unceremoniously shoving Nick into a chair half filled with bits of the crepe streamers that were now hoping to ascend to a better place. “It’s the birthday boy.”

Crunch, went the decorations.

“Happy birthday,” quipped up Zach. “We got food. And movies. And presents, of course. Which one would you like first?”

“Say food,” whispered Gary loudly, and was pleased when Mike threw the bag of chips at him.

“Um,” tried Nick. He looked at them, looked at the room, food, rented DVDs and all, fished a bit of confetti out of the collar of his shirt, and looked at them again. “Er.” He said, more urgently, after a moment.

“That’s a good start,” said Mike dryly, but he was grinning, just the same. “How about trying for a actual reco’izeable language this time? English? Français?”

“Polska?” added Gary, “Ducth?”

“Joyeux anniversa?” attempted Zach. Mike made a face at him.

“Don’t,” he instructed. “First of all, it’s joyeux anniversaire, second of all, most people ‘round here say bon anniversaire and third—your accent’s awful.”

“Thanks,” said Zach. His lips twitched. “I’ll keep those in mind.” Mike eyed him suspiciously.

“Oh my god,” said Nick.

“Oh my god the man talked!” Gary used his announcer’s voice—the one he’d learned from his dad. He held out an imaginary microphone. “Is there anything you would like to say on your special day, Monsieur Lucille?”

A smile spread across Nick’s face, slow and beautifully genuine. He laughed, looked around as if he was seeing the room, seeing them, for the first time, and laughed again. He still looked overwhelmed, but happily so. “Oh my god you guys!” His voice was a little strange, but no one mentioned it. “I cannot believe you did this!”

“I can punch you,” Mike suggested. “To make sure that you’re not, you know, dreamin’.”

“Mike!” hissed Zach.

“What?” protested Mike, unrepentant, “He looks like he needs it!” He pointed to Nick, who was grinning stupidly as he dazedly pulled out shreds of streamers from behind him, underneath him, and partially over him like brightly colored vines and dropping them onto the floor. Gary admitted that Mike did have a point since Nick did, in fact, look a bit as if he were in a dream.

Gary rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, but that didn’t quite erase the smile there. He opened the bag of chips that he’d been holding, offering them to Nick first.

“Chips?” He asked. Then added, “Happy birthday!”

[P.S. If I get a few minutes of extra time before my classes I'll experiment with baby Nick. Should be interesting.]

Nick's birthday tomorrow ^^

So I tried drawing a cute baby Nick :D



Kids are hard to draw. But the bigeyes! usually do it. Ok, now I hope Susan's going to make a post like she promised to :D

bah

I have homework to do that involves using the computer.
I sit down and start with a bit of surfing instead because I never sit down and start doing hw straight away. I just don't. It's impossible and goes against the nature of all that is holy.

And now, once again, I've spent *checks using the online radio she'd been listening to* ... 3 hours using the computer but not doing hw. And I'm actually tired of being here. Which means no doing hw at the moment.

This is like, bad consequence squared of procrastination.

BUT I REGRET NOTHING, NOTHING I TELL YOU!

May: Birthday Part I

[...]

Nick was under the impression that his friends were hiding something from him.

This tendency towards paranoia was not a strong trait of his, and neither was suspicion, but both of the threads in his not-quite-as-subconscious-as-he-thought subconscious had been tingling for the past few days. He couldn’t quite put his fingers on what was wrong, and there were no definite signs he could find which would justify either his paranoia or his mounting trepidation. More accurately, he had never tried to put a rigid definition on his friends and the friendships and therefore could not find anything concrete to compare his recent experiences with. For instance, he felt like his other three friends were spending more time together—which was fine, except it was more time together without him. He would’ve brought it up except there was, quantitatively speaking, no significant decrease in the amount of time he spent with his friends, and he wanted to be sure it wasn’t just his paranoia talking. That, and the fact that he did not like to bring up these sorts of things and tended to be rather bad at it.

So instead of paying attention during the lecture on resource economics like the good student that he strove to be, Nick found himself trying, instead, to recount everything that he’d done within the past few weeks in an effort to see if he’d somehow offended someone. Just because the initial search turned up a blank didn’t mean that he really did no wrong. After all, it was American culture and he was French, as Mike so frequently reminded him.

Sighing quietly to himself, Nick looked down at his notebook and made a face. Today’s lecture had featured, if he were to go by his notes, two lines on public sectors and half a page full of cartoon doodles.

Friends did strange things to a person, Mike concluded. You could be walking along, minding your own business, and then, just because you have friends, you suddenly start thinking about them and wondering what they were doing and when you could next hang out together or go to the movies or something. It meant looking forward to things, which Mike usually was quite apprehensive about. It meant wanting to make other people happy. It meant watching out for each other and feeling protective and irritated, sometimes one right after the other but more often than not at the same time.

“The ice-cream’s meltin’,” commented Gary, peering into a grocery bag.

“Well put it in the fridge!” replied Zach from amidst the other bags on the floor, sounding slightly aggrieved. “We do have everything, right?” He asked worriedly, for the third time in the five minute period that they had been in Gary’s room. Mike rolled his eyes.

“No Zach, we have forgotten something veeeery important.”

“Nick isn’t here yet,” said Gary. “He’s sort of important. Since.”

“Right.” Zach finished putting away the food and stood up, staring at the door of the refrigerator as if he could see through it. “Hm,” he muttered to himself. “Cake. Cider. Chips.”

“Alright,” sighed Gary, with the air of one who was about to bring a torturous trial upon himself. “Wanna try the decorations now?”

“Sure,” said Mike, eyeing the roll of tape. “So long that I won’t have to deal with the tape.”

Zach made a strangled sound that was between a cough and a laugh. Mike looked at him.

“I’ll do it,” Gary offered, digging out a packet of paper cups and plates that might be called festive or might be called “A Most Failed Attempt At Cubism”. Mike pointedly looked away from it. He was not about to look at anything with that combination of colors any longer than strictly necessary. “Do we really need to try streamers?”

“We should make the effort,” said Zach solemnly. “And if we’re killed in the process, I’m sure Nick would appreciate the thought.”

“Uh.” said Gary.

Mike sighed. “Well you know how May’s a really big month in France, right?”

“…Yes?” hedged Gary.

“They usually have loads of holidays and stuff, and I hear from Nick that his sister’s birthday’s around this time too and they usually—I mean his family, obviously—make this really big deal about it.”

“I remember Nick mentionin’ somethin’ like that.” Gary nodded.

“Right. So I figured…”

“It’s probably his first birthday away from his family,” added Zach.

Gary looked thoughtful, then he looked down at the packet of streamer in his hand with a determined expression. Mike vaguely wondered if he was actually trying to intimidate the strips of rolled-up crepe paper, and what the results of that sort of intimidation might be. “Right then. Streamers.”

“I’ll set out the other stuff,” said Zach. “Nick knows we’re here, right?”

“It’s Thursday. We always end up here on Thursdays.”

“You don’t have to get all peevish,” grumbled Zach. “Here, help me with the plastic wrappers—I can’t get them off.”

That was the thing about friends, thought Mike, salvaging a package of plastic forks from Zach’s lack of hand-eye coordination. You found yourself doing the strangest things for them—such as picking out cake. In a grocery store. In broad daylight. And stranger still, you found yourself not minding it. It was friendship. Certainly there was no other explanation for why he would check out a movie that he would not normally even come close to; no other explanation for why he would voluntarily struggle to get poked repeatedly in the fingers by the points of a multitude of plastic forks. There was most certainly no other reason why he should eventually, unaccountably, find himself standing on the table, taping streamers to the wall and what was more—catching himself whistling ‘Happy Birthday’ underneath his breath.

It was almost like a sickness, some bouts of mental insanity that preyed on the less wary minds and Mike, being entirely masochistic and completely unconcerned with himself as far as health was concerned, thankyouverymuch, decided eventually that he didn’t really want to get well. And certainly not get well soon.