Oh, many things going on here. Sarcasm Girl is applying to college. When I was a young sarcastic person the process was less hedged round with terror and paranoia than it is now–they start telling kids in 6th grade: “This is going to count for college, you know. Schools look at your grades. Schools look at your community service. Be afraid, be very afraid.” So Avocado, aka Younger Girl, is just moving into the earliest stages of College-Terror, whereas poor Sarcasm Girl is up to her hips in it (all while carrying a full course load with two AP classes). I suspect that actually being in college will be less stressful than getting into college. And in certain ways I think that applying to college is less stressful than dealing with all the agita about applying to college. Someone must be benefiting from all this–the prep course businesses, the Educational Testing Service, sadists everywhere. I don’t like it, but if you don’t play the game you don’t go to college. Ech.

Meanwhile, Avocado’s softball team won the city Middle School championship yesterday. First time for the team. Much rejoicing, and now she gets to focus on her math and science. Middle School is a crazy time: the kids are making all sorts of cognitive shifts, the hormones are surging, and their teachers are asking them to do things, get organized, be Citizens, while the number of things they can do and want to do multiplies. My job appears to be to say No on occasion, and try to make things happen in the meantime.

And here’s a cool thing: my friend Ellen Klages, author of The Green Glass Sea, a wonderful book about kids growing up at Los Alamos during WWII while their scientist-parents are inventing The Bomb, has a link up at her LJ to a video clip of a kid recieving his own piece of Trinitite, the green glass made by the original Trinity test. You write a book, you hope it turns out well, you hope people like it, but you so rarely get feedback from people you don’t know and probably never will know, about how your work affected them. Years ago a woman drove forty miles to meet me at a convention because she’d read a story of mine about a little old lady and an alien border; she worked with the elderly, she loved the story, and just wanted to tell me so. It’s weirdly humbling when you find that you’ve really grabbed someone that way; it’s what you want to do when you write, but it’s also, in the words of my children, awesome.

And finally, via Making Light, this really-o truly-o scary advertisement for a gun rack that will keep your shotgun right beside your bed. Aside from the general horrificness factor, I look at it and all I can think is that I’d have the worst bruises on my shins ever. Ow.