A letter to a very special band.

Dear Say Anything,

A year and a half ago you got an email from a kid in Michigan, describing to you a friend who was was pregnant. This child was giving her what she felt was her only reason to live. Her family was telling her she was making a mistake, and to get an abortion. She was thinking that maybe it was better to... just do it and hate herself, than disappoint everyone around her, because she didn't think she was worth even having a reason to live.
You wrote this kid's friend, me, a song.

That baby is alive and happy, and he just turned a year old. That I had the courage to do it was due in large part to you. If you ever wondered whether you made a difference in someone's life, I want you to know that you did. That I had the support of people I admired, who had never even met me,
in a time when I was vulnerable and terrified, means the world to me. You saved two lives when you sent that song.
I thank you so much for that, and so does my son.

Kelli Amanda Renas

More silly d&d drawings. . .

. . . to make up for my horrible stalling in writing a new entry with *fancy artwork*. Or any new entry at all, really. I'm sorry, folks. I get internet back tomorrow night, so you should be getting like, FIVE new entries of varying caliber before Wednesday.

These are all from our campaign last summer, but they're silly enough to warrant posting.

Those are the celestial things Kelsey and I, as a cleric and a wizard, were allowed to summon. Yes, the porpoise has wings. Why? Because it's celestial. And that means it can fly. They also inhibit its movement underwater like you wouldn't believe, and I bet anytime a shark gets close it wishes it was dead, but right now, that porpoise doesn't even care, because it has wings and it can freaking FLY.

That in the corner is Tragg, our party's minotaur, played by Zack, thus the sideburns and silly hipster glasses.

This is an angry octopus.


And this is what that angry octopus would look like if it were a silly Snidely-Whiplash-type villain who could make bear sounds.


Shit, I don't know. Don't ask me.

These are newlywed crabs on holiday in Spain! They are quite fancy, as you can plainly see.


I was drawing a lot of crabs around that time, because we had just watched The Matador, in which Pierce Brosnan was just this god-awful sleazebag who wore ankle boots and a gold chain and a lot of open-collared shirts, and had a terrible moustache. Of course I picked up some paper and draw what you would get if you slept with Pierce Brosnan, which are sleazy douchebag crabs wearing ankle boots.

And this is A GODDAMNED OWLBEAR.


It's not an owl, nor is it a bear. What it is, is a terrifying nightmare-machine that will eat your face off. And that's not a lazy drawing; that is, in fact, a chillingly realistic portrayal of this awful creature. Just imagine that thing hurtling toward you in three horrible dimensions, screeching its ghostly face-eating wail.

And now, what you've all been waiting for: probably one of the more offensive things I've ever drawn.


That's supposed to be Whitney Houston, but it looks more like Diana Ross. And that is offensive to me.

Yes, there is someone stuck in her MASSIVE hair. It's his own damn fault, really. You get too close to crackheads, you get stuck in their hair. Everybody knows that, and when you think about it, it's really a metaphor.

But then again, aren't we all?

Easily Distracted Kelli is easily distracted.

I have a short attention span. This is a fact I've been dealing with since I can remember. I don't have ADD (and that's a professional's opinion, Mr, Smarty-Pants, not denial), but I can't focus on things for more than a short amount of time. The only exception to this rule is movies, which seems like a pretty big exception, but it's not.

School used to be hell for me. I've always gotten. . . "eh" marks. This isn't because I'm stupid, or incapable of doing the work, but because about fifteen minutes into a lecture or video or class discussion I lose it and get the wiggles, and draw stupid little doodles all over my notebook, as well as my desk.

Take math, for example. I'm good at it. If you can explain a theorem to me in short, concise bursts, I will rock that shit out. I will be all about the theorems. But if the explanation includes diagrams, or letters that need exposition, or overhead projectors. . . I'm lost. And there's not really anything that can be done to get me back.

Why am I telling you all this? It's because of D&D.

I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons on a fairly regular basis since I was sixteen. My friend Jon is the Dungeonmaster in the campaigns I've been playing the last year and a half or so, and he's great. He's really good at keeping things interesting and not letting them get stupid and contrived. Usually, I can follow along with what we're doing, at least to the extent that I can splurt out a short summary filled with "uh"s and "umm"s if someone shows up late and has no idea what's going on.

But there is only so much good storytelling and madcap encounters can do. After a certain point, I get antsy.

And then this happens.

You see that? That is an alien face-hugger. A really gross, inherently evil alien face-hugger that is attacking Carli, a fellow member of our party. Why is it attacking Carli, of all people?

Because it wants to lay eggs in her brain, and because why not.


That's "nice-butt", folks. Like a medical condition.

My scribbles always get progressively weirder, and after a certain point I always end up grabbing one of Jon's dry-erase pens and scrawling my goofy stupid doodles all over the game mat for everyone to see.








I think we had recently watched Hercules? What a silly movie, right? I still don't know how this happened, but it did, and I guess I'm glad I got a picture of it.


At one point last summer while gaming, I drew this huge and inaccurate cartoon of someone who was supposed to be Whitney Houston, and scrawled "CRACK IS WACK" over her head in huge messy letters. I don't have any idea why I did that! My brain just messes with me when I'm trying to pay attention to something. I honestly can't help it.

I've gotten off-topic enough at this point that I'm not even sure how to concisely end this entry.

Note to Kirsten: Email me any and all pictures you have of my stupid D&D drawings, so I can post them in here.

Colin Meloy Shouts

Ben Folds Presents: University A Cappella

I just downloaded this album and I think it's wonderful. My readers are similarly wonderful, so I figured I'd recommend it!

It is, in fact, an album full of Ben Folds songs sung a cappella by men's college choirs, and Ben Folds. Sound weird? It is. But a fantastic kind of weird, like when you find a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich on the dining room table, and a glass of ice cold milk, and a nice note from your mom, but you know your mom died three years ago. You know what that's like?

That's what this album is like. Like your dead mom doting on you. You'd like that, right? Of course you would. Download this album. In fact, if you have disposable income, by all means go out and buy it. This is an album I'd happily blow money on.

I JUST GOTTA CATCH 'EM ALL.

Lately, Zack and I have been playing a lot of Pokemon. If you've been around us at all in the last two or three weeks, you probably know that and are annoyed by it. We bring our Pokemon cards everywhere with us, and we actually drove out to Roseville two weeks ago to buy me a used DSLite. . . because it came with Pokemon Heart Gold, and a Pokewalker, and it was a decent price. I gave Zack my old DS and we've been pretty inseparable from the damn things ever since.

In light of all this Poke-mania, I thought I should tell you all about the time I decided to start collecting Pokemon cards.

I was in fourth grade, merely one year after arriving at that school. If you know anything at all about my childhood, you know that I got made fun of a lot, and got into a lot of fights because of it, which also resulted in a lot of detention.

Everyone in my class had Pokemon cards. I didn't really have any idea what the cards were supposed to do, but I watched the show sometimes before school, and I thought it was okay. My classmates, though, were batshit about the stuff. Kids were trading at lunch, battling during Silent Reading, talking about who had the coolest holographic cards, and some even bragged about their legendary Japanese cards. Of course, nobody else could see those, because they were priceless.

One Thursday after school (Thursdays were detention days), my teacher left me alone in the classroom, presumably to go do teachery things that didn't involve sitting behind a desk doing nothing while one spazoid kid, who is also doing nothing, stares intensely at you. As soon as she left I got up and walked to her desk, knowing exactly what I would find.

There, on the upper right hand corner of her desk, in plain view, were eleven Pokemon cards. They belonged to a kid one grade below me, who'd been playing with them during class, and Mrs. Lambrecht had taken them away for the day. . . but she had neglected to give them back.

All at once, I had this ridiculous vision in my head. I would transform from being the geeky kid everyone picked on, to the coolest kid in school. All I had to do was take these Pokemon cards. So what if they'd belonged to somebody else? I'd take better care of them, mostly because I had no idea what they were used for. It was his stupid fault for getting them taken away in the first place. He didn't deserve them.

I stood there for about five minutes, waging this epic mental battle, with what I considered my own personal Dark Side telling me that I should, no, needed to steal those cards. I had a right to them. I was the finder, and everybody knows that Finders Keepers, Losers Stupid Little Crybabies Who Get Things Taken Away During Class And Given To Somebody Else.

I snatched them off the desk, stuffed them in the pocket of my jumper, and ran back to my desk just as Mrs. Lambrecht came back into the room. She didn't notice anything when she went back to her desk.

For the next week, I was super cool. I was in possession of eleven Pokemon cards, and one of them was a holographic Snorlax. I couldn't believe my luck. No one else had a holographic Snorlax.

It became a major scandal in my school once it got around t hat someone had stolen Matt Cherenzia's Pokemon cards right off of Mrs. Lambrecht's desk. Unfortunately for me, he remembered exactly what all of them were. . . and wouldn't you know it, I only had eleven cards, and one of them was the holographic Snorlax he was so proud of.

Oddly enough, I didn't get punished for it. My teacher was mad, but I think she actually completely understood. Like I said, it wasn't exactly a secret that I was a huge loser, and the teachers were usually pretty sympathetic to it.

Anyway, that's the story of how I got my first ever Pokemon cards. Needless to say, it's a lot more fun now.

ATTENTION READERS.

I GOT A NEW BOOK.



I'M SO EXCITED TO READ IT. I haven't been this excited to read a book in like, forever. At least, since Half-Blood Prince came out.

But even that book wasn't about THE SHAT.

I hope James Spader comes into play at some point. I really hope so. I am literally bouncing. I am hanging on the EDGE OF MY SEAT.

Be excited for me! That is all.