laptops and ladybugs

i'm home right now because last night, denis and niki and weil and many others met up at the beach house to finally hang out again. we ended up on the beach, after everyone had had a few beers, and i'd had some rum straight (i refuse to drink beer, most of the time), cracking up about how difficult it is to walk in sand when you're out of your head. i had to leave early this afternoon to tend to my broken laptop, whose destruction was a new and exciting development when i got back to my apartment from campus yesterday. i came home from a meeting with joel to a passed out macbook that smelled like burning, and immediately cursed my terrible, terrible luck with electronics. luckily, though, the computer was still under warranty, and because i hadn't really had anything to do with its demise, the "genius" at apple's "genius bar" told me they're just going to give me a brand new one. that's really, really amazing, and is such better customer service than any i've encountered in my many experiences with fucked up PCs. i'm going to be computer-less for a few days, but i'm almost excited about not being connected twenty-four, seven. a lot of this excitement comes from the fact that i know that i am not, in fact, totally owned, and will be getting a new functioning computer in three to five days.

i spent the entire day with clay. he came with me to my computer appointment, in order to escape having to go to another one of my mom's democratic club meetings, and spent forty-five minutes playing the first three minutes of the tetris demo on my cell phone over and over again. my cell phone currently has zero battery. we bought tons of see's chocolate and wandered over to best buy, where i bought a few movies, including "kiss kiss bang bang," a totally fabulous movie that i definitely recommend.

clay and i then decided on dinner at the alamo, because we're both fatties and like our mexican food lardy and heavy. i love spending time with him. he really never ceases to amaze. he's so smart and funny, and i spent the entire dinner laughing with him about music and his crushes and his dream of living in outer space, far away from bird, which scare the shit out of him.

we then came home and freed a container of ladybugs my mom had sitting on the kitchen counter. apparently, aphids are eating my mom's artichoke plant, and the 1500 ladybugs are her biological warriors. releasing 1500 ladybugs is actually sort of terrifying. they lose much of their mytique and adorableness when they're swarming, and clay said something about he won't ever think they're lucky again, after seeing so many of them at one place at the same time.