Jenni: The Origin - Chapter 1

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My name is Jenni, and this is my diary. For some reason, I decided to keep track what happens in my life, even though there's nothing special about it. I just live through each and every day, watch TV, listen to music, sleep, and repeat. Sometimes I play a video game to split up the usual monotony. Do you see what I mean? My life is excruciatingly boring, and when it's not, it's just tedious.

Take the other day, for example. I was having more memory and concentration problems than usual. I went to the emergency room, thinking that I'd be there for a few hours, at most. However, that proved to be a major underestimation on my part. After I waited for eight hours, I asked the nurse when I would be seen. It turned out that the doctor had actually gone home!

I waited for another half-hour before he finally came back. After all that, I waited for another hour to get an MRI done, and then was told that the MRI machine was broken. The doctor instead gave me a CT scan. Thankfully, that machine actually worked. Because I waited so long, the hospital paid for my CT scan so I didn't have to worry about whether my insurance would pay for it. The doctor joked that I had been in the hospital so long that I should be put on the payroll. I definitely was there long enough to have worked a shift there.

All in all, I was in the hospital for 11 hours. The most annoying thing is that after all that, the results came back and I just had a head cold. Ugh.

I haven't been a drinker since I was in my twenties, but my emergency room experience is enough to make me want to take it back up. I used to love drinking, especially while playing drinking games. I always thought I'd make a good one actually as I absolutely love animation. If we had to drink whenever I talked about cartoons we'd all get really drunk. Now that I have the drinking game, all I need is to find someone to drink with. It's sad to drink alone.

Meh. I probably shouldn't drink anyway. I swore that I wouldn't drink after that time I got so drunk my heart stopped and my sister had to give me CPR to restart my heart. My heart stopped long enough that my lips started turning blue. I stopped drinking cold turkey after that. Almost dying is a good motivator, and thinking about all of that is certainly a good reason to not start drinking again... even though my life is so boring right now.

My mom brought me out of my thoughts when she asked me if I wanted to go to eat at the Ēn Ēn Chinese Buffet with her and Ron. She surprised me as I didn't even see her come into the room.

She hasn't been with her boyfriend long, and if i went then this would be the first time I dined out with them. However, I definitely could go for some Chinese. Well, I could actually go for anything, really. I need to do something after wasting all that time while waiting to be seen at the hospital.

"Sure. I love Ēn Ēn", I told her. It takes about half an hour to drive there, but it's worth the trip since the food is delicious.

To my surprise, we're not taking our old cargo van, but Ron's nice new family van instead. It's certainly a much nicer experience, plus it's neat how the doors open by remote control. It makes me feel like I'm being waited on. It's also nice to ride in a van where the sound from the muffler isn't louder than the music from the radio.

The nice ride made the trip go by super fast. Before I knew it, we were at the restaurant paying for our meals. After we got to our seats, I make no short time in getting up to the buffet line and try at least one of everything I see, with extra helpings of my favorite, General Tso's chicken.

When I bit into a baked mussel with cheese, my mom said that I'd try anything, just like the Bizarre Foods guy. I'm not sure about that. I don't think I could eat the things he does, especially things like pig brains. Although for my own television show and all-expenses-paid trips, I'd think about it...

If, for some explicable reason, anyone from the Travel Channel happens to be reading this, I'm available.

After we all ate two heaping plates worth of food each, we took our fortune cookies and left. While we were on our way back, I looked at mine. "Perseverance wins the race." I always get proverbs instead of fortunes. Well, who knows? Maybe, if I keep doing my daily routine, something interesting will actually happen for a change. I doubt it, but it doesn't hurt to be cautiously optimistic.

Ron dropped my mom and I off home, and I realized It was getting late. While I got ready for bed, I looked at a news aggregator online, and saw that it's April 21, 2010, the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day. I'm now in my thirties, and sometimes I feel like I'm getting old. However, It's nice to read about holidays that I didn't realize were older than me. I remember celebrating Earth Day in elementary school, and for some reason I thought that the holiday started then. I'm glad that it's about a decade older than me, give or take. It makes me feel younger than I am.

After avoiding the rest of the news after the unexpected pick-me-up, I turned off my computer and pushed the keyboard back into its slot under my desk. I then headed upstairs, got under the toasty covers of my bed, which are definitely appreciated in New York in April, and I promptly fell right to sleep.

I must have been using my computer too much, because I dreamt I was sitting at my computer desk trying to come up with an idea for a story to write. The weird thing is, in my dream, I thought I'd take a nap to decide if I could come up with an idea to write about. Then, I actually had a dream within a dream. In my double layered dream, I still couldn't come up with an idea, but I did notice the weird guy that I always see at parties wearing a slate gray bucket hat. The weirdest part of all is that the hat guy was flying in the sky.

I woke up really confused. I hope that I actually am awake, and I didn't just wake up from my second layer dream into the first dream. Ugh. I'm starting to get a headache. I guess that means that I'm actually awake, since you can't feel pain in your dream. Or is that just an old wive's tale? I should really stop over thinking this or my headache will turn into a migraine.

I don't know if anyone else gets migraines like I do, but when they get really bad the world isn't just in the usual black and white, but all of the colors out there. I'd see colors ranging from white and silver, all the way to slate gray and black.

A good example would be the other day when I went into the living room to watch television and can't find the remote anywhere. I dug through the cushions, and I found a pair of fangs from Halloween. I stick the fangs in my mouth, and looked down at the all-black top and slacks I'm wearing and then at at the plain white walls of the room. I started getting a headache, and suddenly things started looking like the dithered grays of the old Nosferatu film. If people could see what I was seeing, I'm sure I looked like a true vampire at that moment.

Shaking off my thoughts, I looked out the window and, sadly, saw that it was raining like crazy outside. I guess this will be another boring day. My cat, Baby, took that moment to meow at me to get let out, and I dutifully opened the back door for her. She looked outside and then back at me with a look that seemed to say that she thought that it was my fault that it was raining out. I wondered what she thought about technology and wondered if she thought that I turned on the sun when I turned on the kitchen light. If she did think that, I guess I could see why she was giving me dirty looks. If I could turn on the sun for myself, you'd think that I'd be able to turn off the rain for her.

Baby eventually decided to give up trying to go outside and ran back into the living room. I shut the back door and followed her into the room, intending to start using the computer for the day. However, after I opened up the keyboard drawer, the whole drawer dropped right out and the keyboard dropped to the floor breaking into pieces.

Groaning, I realized that I needed to go the the store to pick up a new one. I decided to take a nap before I headed out, hoping that the storm would be over by the time I woke up. I leaned back on the chair, and, happily fell right to sleep. I was just getting into my dream of being in a one-piece swimsuit in Hawaii getting served tropical drinks, when my sister's 170-pound mastiff decided to start barking and woke me from my reverie.

My mom wanted to get away from the noise too, so we both went to the computer store to pick up a keyboard. The storm had thankfully stopped, so we were able to get into our old cargo van without getting wet. Once on the road, I started to shout, as usual, so my mom could hear me. She surprised me by saying that I didn't have to shout as she was sitting right next to me. I forgot that she had gotten the muffler fixed.

Like the trip to the buffet in Ron's van the other day, the trip to and from the computer store went by super quickly. The keyboard only ended up costing five dollars, so it wasn't a bad day after all. I spent the rest of the day using a no-programming-needed game making tool called DreamWeaver to make a quick and dirty maze game where the object was to clear the geometric shapes on a wall before removing the scrunchie tie from the hair of my cartoon doppelganger. It wasn't much of a game, but it was fun to make, especially in the short time that I worked on it.

After I was done, my mom called me into her room. She had a laptop her desk that was covered in cobwebs. Her computer's battery wouldn't charge, plus it was hot in her room last summer, so we both used the desktop computer in the living room instead. She told me that if I wanted to have it, she'd give it to me, since she was used to using her smartphone now.

So, that brings this diary up to the present. I went back to the computer store and purchased a used battery for the laptop. Even though it was twenty days later than my original plan, as all my plans seem to be, I typed up all of the above events.

I had intended that to be the end point of my first diary entry. However, I have to mention the scene I'm witnessing right now. A mustached man in a steampunk chair just materialized in front of me!

I guess this diary isn't going to be so boring after all!

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Comments

How much

Angharad's picture

is autobiography and how much is wishful thinking. I use my experiences all the time in my fiction, obviously cleaned up to protect people's identities, but then I've probably been doing the living and writing as a woman a bit longer.

Angharad

At this point, it's about 98%

JenniBee's picture

At this point, it's about 98% autobiography. This is kind of a writing challenge I decided to undertake, as it is novelizing my web comic. When it was updated daily, for the first 13 comics, it was about my life. It became kind of a chore to keep up with and I stepped away for it for several months. I then decided to make it a sci-fi/fantasy comic with bits of my life mixed in.

This first part encompasses the first 13 comics (and a tease for the 14th, when it becomes fantasy). I was able to give context I couldn't in a three panel comic strip format, as each strip came from my life. I could write about my actual experiences that were touched upon in the comics, but I won't have that luxury for the next 30-ish comic strips. It should still be fun to expand upon the fantasy aspects, since there's a lot you can do in a novel that you can't do in a comic strip.

In this case, I got permission from my mom and her boyfriend to include them in my comic. My mom even drew and wrote one of the comics. My mom pops up occasionally when it switches to fantasy, but her boyfriend doesn't show up again (yet).

Proverb cookies

"I always get proverbs instead of fortunes."

Yes! Proverb cookies are so annoying!