(Actually being written on 2/11/05)

I put in a placeholder for this entry quite a while ago, but it’s taken me this long to go back to fill it in.

When I got home on Christmas night, I had decided that I wouldn’t write down the details of what went on. There were many reasons I told myself I should do this: I just wanted to get past it, there was no reason to dwell on the negative, I was going to have a long break from J1 now that the holidays were over.

But then, a few days after Christmas, I changed my mind.

The tale really starts on the 23rd, when I received a frantic email from my mother while I was at work. J2 had a take home test in math, she wrote, and he had no idea how to do it! It was due by noon! My reaction was one of irritation (misplaced, as I later found out) with J2, who is notorious for slacking off until the last minute and then relying on others to pull him out of a jam. Being neither very good with statistics, nor possessed of any free time that morning, I plugged the text of the question into google and came up with a page that had the answer. I dispatched it back to mom and that was that.

Bob and I arrived at mom’s house on Christmas Eve afternoon. I was run down and tired, as I usually am after a week of work, but I was looking forward to the holiday. It could not, I figured, be any worse than Thanksgiving, which had, overall, been bearable.

After arriving, I saw little of J2 and J1 for some time. They were upstairs doing last minute wrapping and otherwise engaged. Bob, mom and I made Christmas cookies, and then the two of us stayed at home while mom and the J-team went to church.

Our peaceful evening was shattered by their return. J1 was furious at mom and continued to berate her long after they got back to the house. Her crime? A woman seated in their pew in the overcrowded church had fainted during the mass. Though she was not alone and her companion was helping her, mom had the temerity to be merely sympathetic from afar. From this he launched out into other perceived failures on her part, and began to lecture her on the proper way to raise J2.

Mom was eventually made so upset by his behavior that she retreated to her room. I went up to see if I could help, but we were soon followed by J1, who resumed spouting his ridiculous opinions on her parenting skills. She told him a few things about his accumulated behavior that I won’t repeat here, and a conversation then ensued that I attempt to recreate, because mere description cannot do it justice.

Mom: *talks about how J2 tells her things*
Mom: You never tell me about yourself. What you’re doing, how you’re doing.
J1: I’m not a girl.
Mom: …
J2 (who’s come in by this point): Uh…
J1: You want to know about my life? I go to work, I come home and eat, I go to sleep. That’s it. That’s all.
J1: I can’t tell you about my life. You couldn’t handle it.
Me and J2: Uh…
J1: You don’t know! You have no idea!

Yeah. So, we really just had no clue what to make of this. About all it served to illustrate was that J1 is crazy. Everyone suggested he seek professional help.

Things calmed down after that, and the remainder of the evening passed without much incident. I offered to stay up and put together the icebox cookies for the next day, and what with that and insomnia, I didn’t fall asleep until about 3am. Bob had to leave to catch his plane really early the next morning, so when the alarm went off at 6:30, it was so loud, and I was so disoriented, that I woke up with a yell. I was so freaked out! I thought it was a fire alarm.

The adrenaline made it difficult for me to fall back asleep. I managed it eventually, and was then woken up by J1 about an hour later, shaking the bed. It was far too early to get up, so I told him to go away. He did, then returned a few minutes later to pull off the sheets. Again he left, and then came back a third time to take all the covers from the bed, shove the matress around with me on it, then take off downstairs with the sheets and quilt.

At this point I’d had less than 5 hours of sleep. I was exhausted. Bob had had a cold and I was feeling like I might be getting it myself. I was so upset and so furious that I seriously considered packing up and driving home right then and there. If not for the fact that it would have made mom even more miserable, I would have done it.

My rage at J1 simmered all morning and into the afternoon, and I avoided talking to him as much as I possibly could. I departed in the evening with great relief: the holidays were over, and there was no reason for me to have any contact with him for at least the next several months.

Or so I thought.

I can’t remember now if I wrote about my problems with J1 and job hunting. But as a preamble to this next incident: in May I graduated and started looking for a job. J1 was eager to ‘help’ and pestered mom until she finally convinced me to send him my resume, with her assurances that this would satisfy him and cause the nagging to cease. He began forwarding job postings to me. Random jobs, for which I was not qualified. On the day we all went to Fenway, I tried to drive home this point: he did not know what skills and experience I had, so it was a waste of his time to continue sending these things to me. I told him flat out that it needed to stop.

I thought I had gotten through to him, until the day in August when I got a call out of the blue from some company to whom I had sent my resume. Except, of course, that I hadn’t. I discovered that not only was J1 sending me job postings, he had set up a yahoo ID and was applying for jobs PRETENDING TO BE ME.

I was pissed and not a little frightened. I have no way of knowing exactly what he told these people my qualifications were, or what misrepresentations he may have made. I told him to stop, and then I reported him to Yahoo for identity theft, trying to get that account shut down.

I again thought that was the end of it, until 3 days after Christmas, when I got an email from him. “I submitted your resume for this job.” he said.

I could not believe it. How could he possibly think that this was okay? He had been told multiple times to stop pretending to be me, to stop this unwanted, unnecessary and freakish assistance. I fired back a furious email.

He had the temerity to reply and tell me that he was doing it for my own good(!), and that dad would have expected him to do this(!!), and that I was ungrateful and should basically fall at his feet that I had such a wonderful brother as he.

At that point I told him that I was done speaking to him. That if he continued to pretend to be me, I would be forced to contact an attorney, and that I was setting up my email to filter any messages from his address as spam.

And that is also what decided me to write this out. Because I wanted a record of his psychoness.

Harry Potter 6 release date is out.

Here’s to hoping she has a better editor this time around.

I have a link to this blog in my sig file; usually when sending e-mail to RL personages (such as my boss, or my mom), I delete the sig before sending the mail. But sometimes I forget, and so apparently mom got a mail with a link in it and clicked on it.

So hi mom.

Now back to waiting for the phone to ring… want this bloody table.

So, spoilerific for the movie, though also perhaps inaccurate spoilers.

Read More…

It’s no secret that I’ve been desperate to see this movie since it was announced. The desperation has only increased since the film was actually released in Japan, back on November 20th. (It had been screened at some festivals prior to this, but was not in wide release.) However, once it had been released, I knew it was only a matter of time before a copy showed up on the internet.

Last weekend, I managed to find one, after searching at intervals for weeks. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t as impatient as myself: it’s a low-quality mpeg video taken from someone seated in the theatre. Raw and not really centered, it’s definitely NOT the way the movie was meant to be seen.

But I was past caring about that; I sat down today and watched it through.

I have to say that my response at the moment is… mixed. I am not fluent in Japanese, but I understand enough and am familiar enough with the book to understand that while the movie resembles the book, faithful adaptation is not a phrase that springs to mind. In fact, unlike the Lord of the Rings films, I came away feeling that the movie had in fact attempted to change the central point of the novel. It was much more like Sprited Away redone with a grown up Haku and Chihiro. As an adaptation, then, I would rank it down there somewhere with Chamber of Secrets and the most recent version of Vanity Fair.

As a movie evaluated on its own merits, I think it was lovely, and I will probably enjoy it a great deal more when it’s a good quality copy and with a translation, so I don’t miss things when people start talking in paragraphs. The vision of the world was interesting, and the chopped and reassembled plot was, as far as I could tell, fairly coherent — if not resembling the book much at all. Howl and Sophie were both character designs I approved of. Not so much stuck on the scarecrow or the Witch of the Waste, who felt too reminiscent of past Ghibli films rather than their Book counterparts. Calcifer was great.

The plot as I understood it was this: Sophie works in her mum’s hat shop, but has low self-esteem. One day while on to visit her sister, she’s harrassed by some soldiers and is rescued by Howl. The Witch dislikes this and comes to visit; Sophie reacts badly and she is left turned into an old woman. Sophie runs off and meets up with the helpful Scarecrow who leads her to the moving castle. She meets Michael and Calcifer and announces she will be the cleaning lady. Howl doesn’t put up much of a fuss and soon she’s travelling around with them. Howl is involved in the war in some fashion, and eventually Sophie is dispatched to Sullivan-sensei’s to meet with her. The Witch is there also and stripped of her powers. Sullivan tries to attack them all, but the Howl-gumi escapes back to the castle. Meanwhile it seems that Howl, perhaps as a result of the fire demon that he has made a part of himself, is becoming less and less human and more demonic the more he uses his powers.

Sophie’s view of herself is central to the second half of the story, but she’s still wildly affected by how she thinks others percieve her — when she feels confident, she shifts back to a younger self, and when she feels embarrassed or made fun of or sad, she grows older again. The army begins to attack the moving castle, and Howl goes out to fight, telling Sophie to guard Calcifer for him. The Witch, who has moved in with them all along with Sullivan’s dog, sees her chance and tries to snatch the fire demon. In the ensuing fight the castle is wrecked and Sophie finds herself fallen apart from the others. She locates a door, a door to the past, it seems, and there she sees the young Howl making his bargain with Calcifer. She falls back into her own time to find the present-day Howl there in a bird shape, and he takes her and the Scarecrow back to the remains of the castle that are still staggering about the countryside. Howl there collapses and Sophie takes Calcifer back from the Witch.

There are some Beauty and the Beast-style pyrotechnics, and then both Howl and Calcifer get their happy ending. And the Scarecrow turns into the prince.

So, summary verdict: Good. Can’t say it’s great yet, but it’s possible. Do not expect the book story, just another story with some of the book characters.

The scene:
Today at work. Co-worker L, a Chinese woman probably a couple years younger than my mom, is telling me about a disaster at her house.
L: We have no heat and hot water at our house! We’re getting our basement remodelled, and the switches [I think she's talking about the circuit box in the basement?] are all rusty! They are okay if you leave them alone but if you flip them, they won’t go back.
L: Yesterday my husband, he flipped them all! So now we have no heat or hot water.

* L calls her husband, and they have a conversation in Chinese. She sits back down and 10 minutes or so pass. *

L: I think we’re going to have to go to a hotel tonight.
L: But I’m worried that the pipes will freeze.

* some more time passes *
L: *abruptly* Oh! I know. We can turn off the water and drain it all out of the pipes, then they won’t freeze.
L: I better call my husband and tell him.
L: *stands up, then sits down again* He was in a bad mood. I better email him instead.

* about 10 minutes later*
L: Hey, this means I don’t have to cook tonight!

E (or perhaps it was Carl) procured free passes to see In Good Company in Boston last night. The usual shuffling ensued, and at the last minute, E offered us a ride in rather than for us to take the T.

Great. Save us some money, though I didn’t anticipate saving any time; the red line is usually fast, even during rush hour. We met up with E without any difficulty, and had a smooth trip in until we hit the rotary at Charles/MGH. There E (with our blessing) decided to head for the Commons garage rather than swing past the Central Plaza. Big Mistake. Directly we found ourselves buried in traffic, and we crawled slowly up Beacon Hill, taking as long to travel about half a mile as we had to get from Cambridge to Boston in the first place.

As we finally emerged onto the streets surrounding the Commons, we saw an old man standing on the sidewalk on the wrong side of the iron fence. He caught my eye initially because he was quite well dressed, even for the area; I nearly made a remark about the old dude in the nice suit when E, peering hard at the man who was now in the street talking to someone in the traffic jam, observed, “Is that Menino?”

And sure enough, it was. We watched (since our car was not going anyhere :P) as he wandered on and off the sidewalk and finally passed behind our car. The traffic parted around him as the people coming from the opposite direction gave him wide berth.

So we didn’t hit him. But we damn well could have.

Things did not go well after that for a while; we left Bob at the theatre to discover that tickets were not being given out in advance, so he and Carl couldn’t go in to save our seats. We swung round the corner of the Commons to discover that the garage was “Full” and we couldn’t enter.

So, after diving back into the traffic and retracing our steps, E and I raced down to the movies to find that no food had been ordered for her. She and Bob waited at the counter and Carl and I went into the movie, which had started about 15 minutes previously.

The movie was good. There were a lot of funny bits that were especially amusing because they were true. I don’t think I would’ve regretted paying for it, but I’m not sure I’ll pay to see the 15 minutes I missed at the start.

…is a skill in short supply at work, apparently.

Today our team was forced to spend the whole day dealing with yet another snafu caused by the other team’s complete lack of communication.

Basically, a decision was made to create a product that was, essentially, taking several older products, mixing them up and putting them into a new package to be targetted at a different market segment. Not a bad idea in and of itself. However, no one on our team (who made said products) was aware that this was happening. Until this morning (note that the new product was supposed to be released at noon yesterday) when people started coming in and asking us odd questions. I was approached by one person with a printout of a screenshot which showed a dialog box behind another graphic. I pointed out to him that in the original, the graphic that was in the way was not there and told him how it could be fixed. Then someone else came in with the same problem.

Something was afoot. We soon discovered that unbeknownst to us, it had been decided, by people who are not really familiar with the products, that the changes were merely cosmetic and would not affect the running of the software. Thus there was no need to schedule time for QA testing.

Except, of course, that things are never that simple. And if anyone had bothered to ask any one of the people who actually created the products, we would have pointed out exactly what they discovered to their chagrin yesterday and today.

So a large portion of the mess of correcting the problem was thrown onto us. We all had to stop what we were doing and deal with it.