I am soooo done! I’ve been loyal for years, denying alllll others, being faithful and true. But no more! Nooo! Betrayal is thy middle name, o putrid vermionous tripe! Thou hast spasmodically befouled my attentions with gregarious apparitions that move and speak, yay, even bellow and wail. When I find myself toiling feverishly, scarcely do I ever wish to be interrupted by the piercing shrieks of Lindsay Lohan bemoaning her lost luck. My attention is mine own; I do not wish to have my peace violated by obnoxious moving advertisements. So let it be written henceforth: AOL Instant Messenger, thou art dead to me!

    All funny words aside, I’m ticked at AIM. I’ve been using that program for years, pretty much since I first started using the Internet oh so long ago (I remember when 56k was an exciting breakthrough in speed!) I’ve usually been pretty happy with AIM in the past – the program was much more compact and simplistic than the competition, making it fast to load and generally easy to use whilst multitasking. Sure, it had ads, but I usually don’t besmirch a free service for having a few small unobtrusive advertisements.

    But then those small ads got bigger, and then they started moving, and then they started talking… Those ads weren’t very common, though, and at least I could make them stop and they’d go away. Throughout this past week, however, every ad at the top of my buddy list has been moving, all of them have gotten progressively louder. But worst of all, they won’t freaking stop! Sure, they tease you with a pause button at the bottom of the video screen. Go right ahead and push it, it’s right there so clearly they must mean you can stop the ad if you don’t want to listen to Lindsay Lohan anymore.

    But NO! It keeps GOING! I literally hit that stop button about ten times this afternoon before I finally got so mad at the stupid thing that I signed off and – in a great moment of frustrated triumph – uninstalled the whole freaking program. Goodbye, AIM! You’ve lost a loyal user, and you can thank Lindsay Lohan for that.

    Heh, as you might have guessed, it hasn’t been that fabulous of a day. My pain medication isn’t exactly helping and pretty much every little teensy thing that could have gone wrong has. Nothing really major, mind you, just all that little stuff really adds up. It started with AIM, so that’s getting the brunt of my frustrations. Thankfully I have a chatting alternative – I said hello to Trillian and welcomed it into my laptop home. I had tried it several times before but was never really happy with it. The latest version, though, kicks butt! I love it! My favorite feature by far, though, is the built-in encyclopedia and dictionary! I loves me a perty vocabulary, and it’s always fabulous to easily learn new things while chatting with my friend. I was talking to Sujit earlier and you wouldn’t believe what all I learned!

    I bet you didn’t know that “crap” has another meaning, one much older than that funny word for “feces.” (Hehe, the study of which is “scatology” – where do you find that college major?) Apparently “crap” stands for “Carbon Residue & Associated Products ” – you know, that gunk inside of a rifle. Soldiers used to be told to “clean the crap out of their guns” after a battle. 🙂 Cute, huh? And speaking of Huh, guess what! In Egyptian mythology, there was a god named Huh, and he was the personification of space and infinity. But more importantly, he had a frog head! How randomly fun is that? Don’t you feel smarter already? You know, they say that if you make an effort to learn something new everyday, you’ll have a better chance at avoiding Alzheimers when you’re older. So the next time you say “uh huh”, be sure to remember our infinite frog-headed god friend.

    By the way, I think “Infinite Frog Heads” would be a great name for a band.

    Anyway. Something else annoying happened today, but it was annoying in a deja vu kind of way. Remember that iPod that my friend Sabbrielle bought for me? Well, I had put that iPod on my wish list as a sort of pseudo joke. Don’t get me wrong, I really really wanted it, but I never in a million years thought anyone would buy it for me. The reason I put it on the wish list, though, was to kind of get back at my brother Kevin. Months ago, long before the wish list, I received a package in the mail, addressed to me, from Apple. I opened it up and found a new lovely pretty gorgeous shiny black video iPod inside. I was thrilled! I’d just spent weeks and weeks entering about a million and one contests to win a video iPod, and apparently I had won! I was special, I got a free iPod; I was over the moon with pure glee!

    That was, until I opened the packaging and saw that it was engraved with my brother’s name. That’s when my Mom saw the iPod in my hand and my look of sheer happiness fall right off my face. She informed me that Kevin had just ordered an iPod just like that. Sure enough, Kevin had ordered the iPod but somehow my address ended up on his Apple account. I still have no idea how that happened, but all I knew was that my happiness had been crushed and I was really, really mad. Reluctantly I gave Kevin back his iPod, but you can bet I was trying to figure out a way to keep it. Hell, he was even supposed to get a free iPod later from someone at work, what was he doing getting my hopes up like that?

    Of course, little did I know that a few months later my lovely friend Sabbrielle would get me my very own video iPod, one I could call my very own. Naturally, that iPod means so much more to me than any other iPod ever could. But I didn’t know that at the time of the now infamous iPod iNcident.

    But back to this afternoon. I’d been feeling miserable all day. In fact, I was so miserable I hadn’t gotten more than an hour of sleep all night, but I had managed to take a short nap in the afternoon. I was woken from my nap by my Mother who brought a gorgeous big brown box into my room and happily announced that the FedEx Man had brought me a present! Ooooo, I thought, some other nice person sent me a present!

    I tore it open, and what was inside? A pretty Mac Mini! Sure, I already have a Mac Mini, but it’s the smallest model available. And although I love it, I’ve also been entering a million and one contests over the past few months to win one of these. I thought I’d won, I was about to go over the moon, when suddenly this felt all too familiar and I was struck with a very painful memory… iPod… Kevin… errrrgh….

    I immediately spun around in bed, hopped online, and asked Kevin if he had ordered a Mac Mini. Much to my disgust, he said he had, and proudly proclaimed that he was going to use it as a bit-torrent machine and hook it up to his TV. Oooooo, like I care! What the heck was his Mac doing being delivered to me, in my name, at MY house a whole 10 minutes away from HIS house, AGAIN!? And he didn’t even say he was sorry… that darn frog head of a brother.

    I was mad, as you can probably tell. I’m at least glad the memory resurfaced when it did, before I really got my hopes up too high like last time. But still! Egads! Fix the freaking account, man! Quit teasing me! It’s just mean, teasing your sickly bedridden little sister…

    Ah well, maybe it’s a sign; maybe I should go put one on my Amazon Wish List and then maybe someone will buy one of those for me too. It’s all just a little bit of history repeating. 🙂

    At least the day ended considerably better than it began; Jay came over for a ‘Lost’ marathon since he’s never really seen the show, but he wanted to start getting into it. As a Lost purist, I couldn’t stand by and let him watch it all out of order, so I insisted he come over so we could watch it all in order, since I have the first season DVD set. He brought me pizza from my favorite pizza place, and I actually went downstairs for the first time since surgery!

    Of course, then I promptly fell asleep halfway through one of the episodes… oops. 🙂 It was fun anyway, and nice to see a friend after a week of being sequestered in my room. Now if only everybody could be as nice as Jay… He’s most decidedly not a frog head.