Who Do I hate Tonight?

(Subtitle: Monster of the week)
One of the best roleplaying books I’ve ever read was the Storyteller’s Guide to Vampire. Not so much because of game information, but because – unlike many other books – this one provided tips on how to GM. It discusses plots and moods and story ideas and to have stock NPCs and locations on hand for when your group decides that they absolutely MUST wander off in some completely new, unexpected direction. (No, I’ve never had that happen, have I? *sigh*)

One of the sections talks about Vampire games frequently degenerating to a common theme – who do we hate tonight? Vampire and the Jihad is a constant mood of paranoia with people out to get everyone else, lots of fights that you don’t always understand how you got involved in, and dead end stories that just go nowhere. (You think. Maybe you missed something.)
In Anime, this sort of thing is called a “Monster of the Week” piece. Zenki, for instance, is a monster of the week show. Each week someone gets corrupted by a demon seed. Chiaki and Zenki have to find out who, Zenki must transform (Vajeru On!), beat up the demon, eat the seed, and get un-transformed. End of episode.
Recently, I’ve felt sort of like this: every day, I have a new problem. It’s almost completely unrelated to the problem I had yesterday and solving it won’t keep me from having a new problem tomorrow.
Some examples:
Saturday, I really, really hated my husband. And Rob, just for completeness’s sake. For some reason, Kevin decided that Rob needed pelting with stuffed animals. I have no idea if Rob actually did anything to inspire said pelting… and, of course, neither of them could be bothered to PICK UP the fracking stuffed animals that got thrown at Rob. He wouldn’t throw them back at Kevin, either. So, rather than being mostly near the toybox, they were piled in an untidy heap near the sofa.
Which Jess found to be exceptionally entertaining the next day… I mean, seriously, I know she usually drags her toys all over the place, and that it’s an awful lot of work to clean them back up. I try to do so every day while she’s taking a nap, but sometimes I’m tired. And Kevin almost mever does anything more than kick a toy out of the way if it’s bothering him. Most of the time he can’t even be bothered to do that much. And she has way too many fracking toys. It takes me upwards of half an hour EVERY DAY to put her toys away.
And she’s mising lots of them. 3 out of 5 balls for her fun fair are missing. I have 16 of 20 stacking blocks. We can still find 6 of 9 shapes for the shape-sorter (and the front of the box is missing entirely). We have 5 of 7 tiny people – altho I keep finding Mrs. Claus underneath the seat-cushion of the glider. I don’t even know how many books are missing… she used to have 4 Spot books and 12 tiny alphabet books. I couldn’t tell you how many are left.
Yesterday: I am stupid, you know that? I can’t keep track of the 15 million account names and passwords I have. I have bugged Matt about four hundred times for my login and password to the Hall’s website. If I write it down, I lose it. If I save it in my saved passwords list, my harddrive crashes. If I don’t log into the Hall Wikipedia for two weeks, it logs me out and doesn’t save my password.
Karen – bless her heart – seems to have entire volumes of the Hall’s history memorized. She’s sort of Tolkien-ish that way… loads and loads of background information and she checks and cross-checks everything. She’s got an amazing memory for Hall trivia.
I, however, am more Stephen Kingish. I’m making this shit up as I go. It makes it hard for me, sometimes, when I’m running a plot, because I don’t always check my facts before I make something fit into my story… and sometimes it means that what I said directly contradicts something else I said.
So, last night in a Hall session: I have always intended for there to be some sort of psionic’s guild… and it can’t be sponsored directly by the school because Tyl knows too much about the shadier dealings of Marsember to risk being examined closely by the city’s authority. So, someone else.
At one time, I actually wrote up a fracking school roster. I have no idea why I did this. So, Karen’s character’s asking for information about the psionic’s guild. And, because of the afore-mentioned password problems, I didn’t have access to my roster. So… thought process: shit shit… I can’t just make up a name because Cat will want to know why she doesn’t know this person. Fuck. Cat’s been out of school for three years now, could it be someone new? No, they wouldn’t have been in school long enough… well, maybe they knew a lot when they came to the school. Sure, that’s a good idea… I mean, some people just learn how to do their psionics… a new person. Name… name… make up a name… ah, that’s good. ::watch the screen for a moment:: Oh Bloody Fuck. Why didn’t I see that coming… now it’s all the big bad stranger’s fault, because obviously someone who just came into the story now has to have some ulterior motivation. They couldn’t just think making a guild was a good idea…. now she’s all into the idea that some psionic bad guy is controlling everything and is going to TAKE OVER THE WHOLE CITY, MUA HA HA.
So Karen’s all pointed in the wrong direction for my plot because I can’t be bothered to remember my own FUCKING PASSWORD.
Still mad: Neopets.
Ok, I know this is stupid. It really, really is. I have this pet, you see – a neopet. And I’ve been playing this game for three+ years now… in that time I have accumulated close to seven million neopoints (the currency in that game).
I had all my pets painted the way I liked and was pretty much resting on my laurels.
Just before Christmas, my pet got zapped by Boochie the Bruce who turned my pirate aisha into an ugly, whiny little baby aisha. YUCK. I immediately checked the prices for a pirate paintbrush to paint her back. 1 million neopoints, plus.
Ack. So I ended up painting her Christmas colored, as a temporary measure – I take perverse pleasure in hoarding my neopoints, so the idea of spending that much sort of bothered me.
I was mostly happy with her being Christmas…
And then a few days ago she went from being delighted! and bloated to DEPRESSED . Which turned her into a BLUE aisha. ARGH. And super argh. I mean, give me a fracking break already…
…..
so… who am I going to hate today?