![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
While I am vain, I try to be responsible about it. I assume myself to be interesting and that people read me or don't as I interest them. This is how my brother came to insult me on the streets of Boston.
He and his girlfriend are expecting their child about a month from now, and invited everyone up not for a baby shower but for a celebration of imminent babyhood or something lightly hippie flavored. (I don't mind the light hippie flavor.) Plus it got me the chance to see his apartment, and pets, and get a second meeting with his girlfriend.
As we walked to a vegan restaurant for dinner my brother mentioned to my other brother that he'd stopped reading my Twitter feed because all I did in it was complain about my father. When we got back I reviewed all my tweets, about four or five a week going back to the Rally to Restore Sanity, and found four which mentioned my father at all, and two of them were pure jokes (``I give up. For Father's Day My dad's getting AA batteries and Tostitos Scoops''). If he finds me dull he can say so and I can take it; to give a provably false reason --- and to stick to it after I show it false --- is insulting.
Nevertheless, dinner was fine and we had a good time comparing notes about how we got up there (my mother drove me and my sister, that day; my other brother and my father went up the day before so they could wander around Boston more) and what we'd seen and what his area of Cambridge (actually) was like. I advised him to go to the Buster Keaton movie playing at the local old-style theater on Sunday. My sister and I accepted our brother's invitation to stay at his place overnight, so while I missed bar-hopping with our other brother I didn't feel at a loss.
Also at dinner we got into an argument over Moxie. Where this comes from is my sister-in-law and niece were not present, as there was a gathering of other Chinese-orphans-and-their-adoptive-parents somewhere around Portland. My brother chose not to go (apparently, he finds the other parents in this clique a bit much). I joked about the niece getting her first taste of Moxie, provoking my sister and father to declare it was awful, and me to declare it's great. The argument kind of stalled out there. However, my brother and his girlfriend said they'd look for it around them, in case, to try out something different and certainly, these days, local. The vegan restaurant had some weird local diet soda that I also thought pretty good.
At the apartment I got to meet the girlfriend's pets, a half-dozen degus which ... well, here's how it goes, as I understand it: several years ago she nursed an injured squirrel back to health. After releasing it to the wild she missed having small rodents around, even as everyone she knew started giving her squirrel-themed everythings whenever a gift was appropriate or they saw something with a squirrel on it. (Clearly she's some manner of devilbunny symp, but I lacked the chance to ask her about the squirrel enough to find out what kind she is. Possibly she's just obliviously useful to their cause.) She saw a Craigslist item offering three degus up for adoption and leapt at the chance despite not knowing what degus were. She picked up another pair from an animal shelter which was closing, and then the last from some pet-finder site, put up after its partner had died and it needed the company of other degus. So that's how they have all these really rather cute, personable animals who're way into sesame seeds and willing to come out of their cage after just about fifteen minutes of observing the strangers.
The girlfriend's also working her way through the New-Effects Star Trek and appreciating how interesting the stories are, particularly in the way they had fifty minutes and spent them all on a single plot back then. We took in ``The Arena'', which doesn't offer many chances for the new-effects people to meddle with the effects. I admit surprise at how little I resent the new effects.
My sister got the sofa; I got the air mattress, which my brother tried to wow us with by showing how its skeleton stretched out by itself when you turned the air pump on. At least, it was supposed to; it kept getting stuck in the carpet. But it was a nearly smooth inflation. It also needed some help folding back up when we deflated it in the morning. We just expected it was fully automatic once you turned on the pump, is all. But it was surprisingly comfortable. My father had billed it once as ``the most comfortable mattress you'll ever sleep in''; it's not, but it's above average for temporary-duty mattresses.
Trivia: On 17 August 1771 Joseph Priestly used a thin wire and candle to burn off the oxygen from a pneumatic jar containing a few sprigs of mint. Ten days later, lighting a candle anew in the jar he found the flame ``burned perfectly well in it'' --- revealing that plants somehow restored something fundamental to air. Source: The Invention Of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America, Steven Johnson.
Currently Reading: A Diplomatic History Of Europe Since The Congress Of Vienna, René Albrecht-Carié.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-17 05:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-17 03:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-17 06:56 am (UTC)Moxie I enjoy in small doses. It's worth introducing people to once at least.
--Chi
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-17 03:23 pm (UTC)I haven't dropped any people from my Twitter followings, although I did pick up and then drop a few public relations feeds for being too talkative and not interesting enough.
My brother-in-law can be a bit much (in volume and in shilling for his favorite corporations) but he's interesting or amusing enough in-between, plus it gives me my best understanding of him, even better than talking to him does. Plus there was the night he live-tweeted the sorry pile of resumes he was reading for work.
Moxie I'm sorry I can't find around here.