Daisy139

Mark, I keep being amazed at how well you give different characters different voices. When i was reading this chapter, I kept tihnking "even if he didn't throw out the contextual clues, I would know this narrator is Wade." I picture Jeanine turning into some bipolar monster like Mr. Daisy's ex-wife... She's turning into quite an interesting character I think, being so out of touch with reality and self-centered. Anyway, I can't wait to see what drama unfolds in this story (there really is potential for a lot).... and for the record, I loved PMS And I'm very curious to see more from Wade.

If that skater was in the CA area, I have a feeling I know who you're talking about (did he represent a European country at international competitions but compete at US Nationals also?). Anyway, low key parties in (sort of) pre-internet times may not be a problem, because nobody is going to find out. But it's my understanding JJ will have his senior career in the early to mid 2000s, so he will have the internet to deal with. When he goes to nationa/international competitions, he will have USFSA peole trailing behind him and teaching him what to say at press conferences, what to wear for the draw, and who not to associate with. The USFSA will even select the journalists and photographers JJ may or may not talk to. At international competitions, the only times a US skater is not chaperoned by a USFSA person is in the dressing room, bathroom, on the ice, and on the bus to the hotel (sometimes). They will monitor his official website and check whether he has any other social network things going, a private blog in which he's easily identified, etc. Also, if a skater builds up a certain reputation, they won't get contracts for shows anymore. Happened just recently... And the thing about the family background was mainly the fact that Stef and Brad are among the world's richest people. This might make JJ particularly vulnerable to be approached by corrupt judges, or to the general rumor that "he just got a medal at Nationals because of his rich daddy." Nobdoy wants to deal with things like that, so skating under an alias might help that a bit. I guess everybody knows that there's more gay than straight skaters, but there's a whole lot of pretending going on. Everybody pretends to be straight, except Johnny Weir (who got to pay the price for it...), and a few select others (yes, including Rudy Galindo, but he gets away with it I think because he's a popular entertainer and doesn't make controversial comments...). Edited to say - the USFSA chaperoning at competitions I believe increased dramatically in the mid 2000s, and if I had to speculate I would say it was because of JW. But who knows. But in the early 2000s I did not observe USFSA officials trailing behind skaters everywhere they went, but a few years later that became the norm.

I like the smell of coffee and tea but not the taste... so I do a small bottle of coke zero or diet-something at lunchtime to stay awake at work (my work is way exciting and challening :2hands: *yawn*). Sometimes I do caffeine pills instead but they seem to have more caffeine than I can handle....

And in the winter, a hooded furcoat. Very inconspicuous Yeah, the orphan was Oksana Baiul. A lot of skaters have heartbreaking stories like that and often those are just half the truth. That picture looks perfect for an official website. Maybe they could photoshop a necklace with a cross in, because of course what got JJ through this hard orphan life and gave him the strength to become a dedicated figure skater...is of course his faith.

Could it be they're starting to realize their weird posters and signs will never ever convert a single soul? I'm glad they left so quickly. Thanks for sharing!

I'm an expert at embarrassing myself. Here's one of the first super embarrassing moments of my life. I was in 1st grade, and our classroom teacher made the whole class do a nativity-type play we had to perform in front of all parents. I was an unpopular kid, so I got to play one of about 9 or 10 trees (I was birch tree no. 1, to be precise). The day of the play came and my mum showed up with my then 3-yr-old sister. The school didn't have an auditorium, so they just put up lots of chairs in the main hall where we used to hang out during breaks, and the play was at the front. We did a decent job doing our memorized lines, until all of a sudden I saw my little sister running towards the non-existing stage and right towards me. I was holding birch twigs in both hands and she ripped the ones in my left hand from me and squeezed in between me and birch tree no. 2. Then, until the end of the play, she repeated fragments of every line that anyone on the stage said. Loud and clear for the audience to hear. I was sweating buckets and so was my mother. And that incident sure as heck did not improve my popularity level one bit....:nuke:

"that means you love each other" - that kid has it figured out! That's the definition of marriage Very cute video

I had actually never seen this fluff piece of Evan. I swear he read the script off a teleprompter, and the script was written by a USFSA person. He does not speak like that, and I doubt he even thinks like that. When Weir started to become too famous and, um, outgoing, the USFSA had a serious problem with the image of figure skating in the US, and Evan being JW's main rival (i.e., the only one who could beat him on the National level), they found him a girlfriend (ice dancer whom the USFSA had gotten expedited citizenship...) and made him say all these things about positive attitude, being humble, and showed him how to act straight. Very amusing. (and Evan certainly wasn't the first one to get a SO and attitude script ) Anyway, I agree with Jeremy, JJ would have to uphold a pristine image from a very young age on. It's not just about who becomes so famous that even the average football fan knows them, but it's about the USFSA having a pristine image internally. Figure skating parents don't want their kids to do a sport in which they see other kids partying, not having good grades, doing questionable substances, or having sex (or even worse, sex that the bible doesn't approve of). If parents start withdrawing their kids from figure skating because they observe too many Johnny Weirs on the junior level or above, the USFSA gets less money... And (perhaps unfortunately so) within the figure skating culture, people can become famous before they even hit the junior level. A lot of juniors already have official websites, agents, and internet forums led by 50-yr-old housewives with hundreds of regular posters who don't spend their days on Farmville but on the Jeremy Schluter/James Message Board, discussing cute photographs or how they emailed his mother and "she sent *such* a sweet reply!!! I'm totally friends with her now..." I'm not exaggerating. I would imagine that these days kids have to be even more careful about what they do in their private life because of facebook...

Oh God. I totally knew I shouldn't have clicked this.

I would really love to have kids (somewhere between 1 and 4ish), and I would adopt, too... but Mr. Daisy doesn't want to (and right now it's financially impossible anyway). Tough luck. I guess all my love is going to Mr. Daisy and our dogs instead now

Very interesting chapter Actually, the one American fatality was male, but that doesn't mean Mark can't twist things a little bit for literature's sake and tragically dispose of Kristin. Too bad for Gathan (although I started to dislike her attitude very much in that last dialogue...). But this was a great chapter

1. Passport and immigration docs, because without those, I could be pretty screwed; and puppy papers so she's not screwed either 2. laptop, because it has all my school stuff on it 3. My little pillow (can't sleep without it) I would also take my cell phone because it has unlimited internet, but it's always in my pocket so I would already have it on me anyway

I'm a dog fanatic. I grew up with medium size to big dogs, but next month I'm getting a toy poodle. That will be interesting. My first own pet, just for me to take care of. Well, except for the 4 mice I had in college because they were cute. Not so cute when one of them got out and into my bed in the middle of the night.

Teacher, singer, actress, journalist... and now I'll end up teaching college probably... and now my dream is to run an animal shelter or something like that. Anything but having to spend the rest of my life in school.

1. Dogs 2. Good food, good reads, good movies, good music 3. Mr. Daisy (all this is in no particular order....) 4. Sex 5. My sleeping pills (even though I can't take them very often) - they cause euphoria 6. Traveling 7. Hanging out with my mom 8. Days without school 9. Laying in Mr. Daisy's arms with his dogs on top of us, watching TV 10. Chatting with my brother.

Mr. Daisy still thinks homosexuality and lefthandedness are choices. I've tried all I could to convince him of the opposite, but somewhere he read some "research" that "proved" they were choices. And he's convinced if I chose to write with my right hand I could do it and I could be better off. When I told him out of my 3 siblings 2 are lefthanded as well, and one of them, like me, is bi, he basically argued that that probably means my parents let us do just about anything we want (i.e. let us get away with any choice we make) and that's why we have such high occurrences in our family. I don't know how to talk reason into him anymore :wacko:

When I was in elementary school, a lot of people where I grew up still thought being left-handed was some kind of choice that would lead to brain damage eventually. My parents and classroom teacher were so concerned they tried to force me to write with my right hand only (which gave me my first sense of "failure"), but after 2 weeks they realized it wasn't working and it was doing only harm, no good, and they stopped and told me I could go back to writing with my left if I wanted. I feel really lucky that my parents went against the spirit of the time and had some kind of intuition about what's right. It's so scary to see what grandiose nonsense people would come up with and call it science.... poor Kirk

I wasn't basing my view of Jeannine's parenting skills on what Will says but on how she interacts with Will. I wouldn't say Brad has been a perfect parent either (which may also have contributed to Will having certain issues).

If the disfigurement was severe, I'd do it earlier on. If it was just something "minor" I would only do it if the child really wanted it and asked me for it. I wouldn't want to say, "Look, you and I are going to have to talk about your nose..." But I would agree to it if the child made a good case for it. I wouldn't want my child to get the impression that they could come back again and again and tell me they didn't like this and that about their body... but if there's something that really stands out and begs to be made fun of by evil children (or adults...), why not. One thing to consider is if bullying is already happening the child may not actually tell the parents. I had something that would be considered minor (until I surgically corrected it), but I never told my parents I was bullied and made fun of for it because I was ashamed to even talk about that feature of mine....

I am totally amazed at how much Will and Gathan sound different from some of the characters back in the 70s and 80s. The way their language has updated over time is really well done I still side very much with Will here. He is a teenager, and how is he supposed to learn respect for other family members if his parents, especially Jeannine, exercise their rights as parents to dictate him around - like he said, like he's 2 and doesn't deserve any kind of reasoning. I don't see how Jeannine as a parent is teaching him any kinds of social skills or a sense of interacting with each other peacefully if all she does is commandeer him around without justification. And sorry, but "I cheated on my partner and now I'm sad she left and I don't want to be alone here" is not a justification to lock your children up, especially when they have a life, too. And especially, like Brad said, when it affects other parts of the extended family. Jeannine knew Will and John had problems that affected the adult generation of the family, yet when they were finally having a chance to work it out, she locks her son up like a prisoner without giving him a decent reason? What kind of a mother does that? I think considering that Brad and Robbie are often away and can't spend as much time raising the kids, and considering that Jeannine seems to be doing a shitty job at that, I'm totally amazed Will turned out so mature. I think the kind of willingness to think about how others feel like he did in this chapter certainly didn't come out of the great way in which Jeannine raised him - I think it's probably more genetic if anything, coming from Brad. I guess I'm off hypothesizing here.... I also like a lot how Gathan is developing. He's a very interesting character

I agree that Will is a very realistic teenager, and just how many teenagers would put up with Jeannine's attitude and still come out respecting their parents anyway? She treated him like a little turd. Sorry. It's very hard for me as an adult to respect other adults who are disrespectful to me, and I'd think a teenager would have an even harder time to do that, even if society says he's supposed to because he's her son. I"m not sure for how long she's been treating him like this... but his behavior isn't coming as a surprise in a scene like that one... I'm still not seeing the age difference as a problem. A friend of mine married a professor who was about 30 years older than her when she was in her 20s. They're happy, have a kid, have a cute house, he helped her get back on her feet jobwise after she failed out of grad school... they're perfect for each other. About Stef's behavior towards Gathan, I don't see him as getting too close to Gathan. Gathan is a teenager who just took a bullet for someone very important to him, and yes, they are having an interlude so he cares about him.... but not necessarily on a level comparable to JP or a close family member I would think. And given the interlude and that Brad maybe still isn't Gathan's best buddy, I can see why Stef would ride with Gathan, not Brad. Stef is still my all-time favorite character. Jeannine is really sinking in my list of likable characters. I really dislike it when parents treat their kids disrespectfully just because they legally can. There's no justification for that. And she seems like her moral compass is a bit off in general....I dislike people who take relationship problems as a justification to go cheat. Very interesting developments in that home life. Going back to Will....I actually think there's something cute about how he's trying to train/manipulate his 3 parents. I like him

Oh wow, he totally reminds of me of a Hayes guy. Good one!

Oh goodness gracious. I get 3 steps up a ladder before I start shaking and stop moving. Then I'm even afraid of coming down without someone holding the ladder. That would be my nightmare job...

The crashing plane didn't alert me to it yet (the second scene did though) - I figured, "yeah, happens every now and then, authors make it look like some really important characters are going to die but of course they miraculously survive..." So I sat there mentally watching the plane come down being totally calm and knowing that everyone would survive. Wow, I'm messed up Nice one. Second person who tried to get it today and I fell for it again.

Not sure if this was intended or an error, but I know it can't be fixed now... I've just always wondered why Stef Schluter actually spells his name "Stefan," because I can't imagine for the life of me that a Frenchwoman would actually use the German spelling for her son... for political reasons at the time, and also because that spelling would lead to a different pronunciation in French. They would have spelled it "Stephane." I had wondered if his mother had intended to make it go with his father's German last name... but it just seems quite odd...