Be careful what you wish for when there's magic in your midst

I love the combination of savory and sweet, of crunch and smush — enhanced by a dash of fluttering wing and the caress of hair — whenever I pop a little fairy in my mouth. As an added bonus, the musical embrace of a tiny scream enhances the full-bodied dining experience.

If only those damn fairies didn't make me so gassy, I'd eat them all the time.

. . . . I'm actually not a big fan of running around Second Life with things sticking out of my mouth, but Evangeline Miles of Evie's Closet forced me to make an exception to that rule with her laugh-evoking nom-nom Oops! fairy.

For a limited time, she's put one in each color of her latest release, the Whimsy Faery Outfit (375L). I believe they're also sold (now or in the near future) separately for 50L, according to Evie's blog.



Yep, obviously I bought the green version. It was a tough call between that one and the blue one though.

It's happy time for me whenever there's newness over at that store.

I've actually had fairies and magic and wishes and such on the brain lately. Why? Because I finally got a (RL) job! WOOT! I start Monday. It's only part-time but the pay is surprisingly awesome and I'll have a desk and all those little office things that I once took for granted — like a phone extension and a stapler and a drawer full of new pens.

It's not exactly a dream job though. In fact, it's a little embarrassing. It's one of those jobs that when you tell someone what you do, that person says, "How nice! Oh, no need to get into too many details! It sounds great though!" and runs away.

Also, when my new boss discovered I was single, she said, "Oh, we have a single guy on the third floor. You should meet him." It's a huge building. But apparently there's A single guy on the third floor. And now the two of us are like a rare pair of endangered albino giraffes. ("Hey, let's see if we can get them to mate!")

But before I tell you what the job is, I need to tell you about my magic typewriter.

But before we get to that, let's break up this text with a picture of me and my dinosaur:



Rock. (You want one? Get it from the Midnight Mania board at Neon Frog. If you're reading this before midnight SLT on Saturday, you still have time — I think the board's close to 500 hits now and it needs 700 people to slap it for the prize to be delivered.)

OK. I know you're not going to believe this story. Even I find it hard to believe. But it happened. I swear.

I went to college in California back in the early '90s before the Internet was widely used. Yep, I'm that old. We used word processors and electric typewriters (not to mention the library!) to write our term papers. Looking back now, I can't IMAGINE doing that again. Wow.

So once I got to college and got over being a disoriented freshman, I realized something crucial was missing in my life and I ordered a state-of-the-art electric typewriter/word processor. My roommate and I were so damn excited the day it arrived at our dorm room. No more slaving away on a borrowed one at the library or bumming one off someone else in our suite — woo hoo! We quickly put it to good and frequent use.

And then we discovered it was magic.

We stumbled upon this revelation by accident, as people who experience the truly magical usually do. I had just received a letter — yes, a LETTER! — from a high school friend who was majoring in journalism at Northwestern University. Her letter was filled with parties and excitement and boys and fun, and therefore I sort of wanted to slap her. My roommate and I, initially strangers, had bonded, thank God, but neither of us had a car, our school was on top of a mountain in Malibu, our campus was dry (meaning no alcohol allowed) and there was even a dorm curfew, so our weekends were turning out to be a lot of ordering pizza, listening to tapes (cassettes!) and watching "Beverly Hills 90210" (the original series!).

So when the magic started, I was writing a letter back to my friend and my roommate was helping me, um, exaggerate the hell out of it. Together we crafted a completely fabricated college existence that was so damn thrilling we could barely read it. Parties on the beach, celebrity encounters and hot dates were just the tip of our literary iceberg. When we finished, we printed it out, put it on my desk and walked out of our dorm on a quest for a mushroom pizza.

That's when we ran into someone who invited us to a ritzy party that a young prince (oh yes, I said "young prince") was throwing at his nearby beach house. Not only did we get invited, we were offered a ride, and when we got there we got drunk with Gary Coleman ("Different Strokes!") and we both met hottie Malibu boys.

It wasn't until the next day when the hangovers subsided that we realized that everything we had written in my total crock of a letter had happened!

We joked about it being a magic typewriter. We tested it by each typing a new sentence on a piece of paper. "Jim will ask me to go a movie tonight." "I will find 20 bucks on campus." (Laugh, gosh we aimed kind of low huh?)

Later that day I had a date to a movie and my roommate was 20 dollars richer.

You shake your head in disbelief, but would I lead you astray? No way!

We raised our wish standards a little:

"The cafeteria will serve rigatoni with Italian sausage three days in a row."

"We will see Tom Cruise at the grocery store today."

Check. And check! (It was Malibu after all. Up until that point, the only celebrities we'd seen were a ruddy Dick Van Dyke and the mom from "Home Alone." And Tom Cruise had not yet reached the "living in a spaceship" stage.)

"A tall dark-haired guy will ask me to dance tonight."

"I will ace that Religion 101 test even though I didn't study for it."

Bingo.

"Ms. Ryker will give us an extension on our term paper deadline."

"I will get a bid from Alpha Phi sorority."

(*Emerald pauses for a moment to proudly shout, "Alpha Phi! Alpha Phi! Alpha Phi!" and give you the secret sorority handshake.*)

Note that it never dawned on us to type anything like, "We will wake up tomorrow morning to world peace" or "All cancer will disappear forever."

Sadly, we were selfish little simpletons back then. But damn, that was such an AMAZING and DELIGHTFUL time, and we basked in the warm glow of our granted wishes with unfettered joy and gratitude.

Every day we used the magic typewriter to manifest college bliss . . . until one day it stopped working. It was dead. We tried to revive it. We failed. Finally we accepted the fact that we had used up all of our wishes. It was still under warranty so I sent it back for a replacement. The new one arrived. We tested it.

"My Public Speaking 101 class will be canceled today."

Fail.

It was just another ordinary electric typewriter, and we returned to our ordinary lives of actually studying for tests and eating cafeteria food we hated.

So now let's fast-forward to the present. But first, a picture of why I hate shopping at Truth on new release days:



Wow, look at that GIANT GRAY BEAST OF A WOMAN next to me! (Kidding. I really have no idea what that thing is.)

OK, so anyway. The other night I went to a mixer for public relations professionals. I started talking with a girl my age (gosh, I guess we're "women," actually) who was standing next to me at the bar. Her company happened to be lacking a PR director or anything close to it. Finally she said, "Hey, if you're up for it, I want you to come work for me while you look for a full-time job."

So I start Monday. It fell in my lap. No grueling job interview or sweaty palms. Just a nice low-key job that's gonna pay about $600 a week. Starting Monday, I'll be . . . wait for it! . . .

. . . running public relations for a company that manufactures . . .

Airplane parts!

WOO HOO! So exciting and glamorous! I'm trying really hard to be upbeat and grateful. I'm trying not to imagine everyone there dressed in a tarmac jumpsuit and baseball cap.

I'm trying not to wonder if on bad days someone yells out, "Folks, we're experiencing a little turbulence! Fasten your seat belts!" . . . or if I'll be the first one to do that.

I'm trying not to think about airplane bathrooms or "Will there be a movie on this flight? Hell no there will not. You're in for a long damn ride, honey."

I've seen the building. It's a nice place. So what if I'll be trying to MAKE HISTORY by encouraging reporters to get interested in airplane parts. Because really, when was the last time you saw anything about airplane parts in the news?

Oh wait, I forgot. We do see airplane-part coverage in the news . . . whenever a plane CRASHES.

I'm trying really hard to be positive. Today my new boss sent me a bunch of materials for my first assignment, an industry article I'm supposed to write on Monday titled, "[Name of company] reaches new altitudes as it soars to success." Yay. *waves a little flag* Let's soar!

And I'm trying really hard not to think about the fact that just a few posts ago, I wrote about Amelia Earhart and ran a photo of Emerald IN A PILOT'S UNIFORM!

GAH! I knew I should have bought the cigarette girl costume instead!!!!!

I forgot that when the stars are aligned just right and a fairy happens to be flitting by the window, sometimes we type things and they come true!

So um, that was my long drawn-out story about how a fairy costume at Evie's Closet reminded me of how I once got a bunch of wishes granted — and possibly got some of that leftover magic typing dust on my beat-to-hell laptop last week.

Hey, speaking of words, I know where you can get a wet T-shirt in four, uh, phrases:



I love finding bad typos in stores. Let's see if Photobucket kills that photo for "nudity."

If you're still alive at this point and not a dry husk of a skeleton slumped over your computer, thanks for reading! This'll be the last lengthy post for a while, I promise. Henceforth, they'll be short and sweet.

I'll be too busy writing press releases about wing flaps for much else. :D