April's Diary

I've been using this as a warm up exercise the last few days, so it kind of drops off in the middle of things. I'll update as I go along.

Dear Diary,

It seems obligatory to start a diary entry with that salutation and I shall not disappoint, even though I'm hoping that nobody else will ever read this. I may have to lock it up in a safety deposit box when I'm done. If you're reading this for some reason, like if I get killed and you're all packing up my stuff, then this was the ranting of a drunken girl. Yeah, that's it.

Dear Diary,

I've also decided not to add any dates. For some reason it feels safer. Ever since I met the boys I've been doing lots of those kinds of things. Where I can't explain why, but it feels a lot safer and I would never have thought of doing it before I met them. But I suppose it's worth it.

I had class this morning with Professor Wiggins. It's a 3 ¾ hour class and I'm about ready to chuck a piece of petrified wood at him while he's doing his weekly classroom performance. The man is a professional actor, or wishes he were anyway. The only reason he teaches this class is so that he can force us to watch him pause dramatically and rant and rave how he has an altar in his closet dedicated to Darwin and such nonsense.

I asked Donatello the other day if he would ever build an altar to Darwin. He liked the idea, but I think it was mainly because it he thought it creep out his brothers. He seems to be very motivated by that. Sometimes I think we're going to end up have a conversation that ends with, "Yeah, he was always so quiet and mild mannered and seemed so normal. Who would have thought that he could have done something like that?"

Speaking of awkward Don behavior, he followed me straight into the bathroom the other day. This is par for the course for him, mind you. He's only lived with his brothers and his father and so doesn't seem to get the clue that the bathroom should be off limits. This time, I was standing there in my bra and underwear. I was so shocked that I just stood there while he gave me a lecture saying that he thought I might have black mold in my bathtub and wanted to culture it and try to raise it as a pet or something. Or else that Mike had a pet and he wanted to get rid of the mold. I don't really remember. I hit him in the face with my loofa and he just raised his eyebrows, or where his eyebrows should be, and left the room. He shut the door, knocked and walked straight back in.

Raph walks in on me sometimes, but he does it strategically. Don does it because he's in too much of a brain-daze to know what he's about most of the time. Raph is usually trying to catch me literally with my pants down because in his mind he thinks I'll be more likely to say yes to weird requests. It scares me that that line of reasoning is starting to actually make sense to me now. Like if he catches me when I'm embarrassed enough, that I won't notice saying yes to really strange requests. One classic instance went something like this.

The door opens and I'm standing there, with a towel around myself. He looks and says without a trace of surprise," Oh, you're naked."

"That's right, you little pervert. Get out of here."

"Can I drive your van to Canada?"

"Canada? What's up there?" And I'm usually so curious that I forget to kick him out. So I suppose it works.

"I want to buy some fireworks."

"Can't you get them here?"

"Well, not the good stuff. Do you want me to suffer with low grade explosives?"

"Well, it's not that far to Canada. We'd have to spend at least two nights."

"Road trip!"

He left the room, probably planning a list of contraband to smuggle back before I realized that I had just told him I would drive him to Canada. I hurried out of the bathroom, still not dressed, mind you.

"Wait! No Canada! What's wrong with you? I have class tomorrow!"

I don't recall Leo walking in on me. He almost did once and then sent me a bouquet of flowers to make up for it. He's the little gentleman.

Michelangelo seems to see it as a good opportunity to case my place and take my stuff. Then he tells me that the others did it. He's such a brat sometimes. That little klepto.

I don't know how I got on to this subject. And now I must go buy Splinter a new grooming set. His hair is really coarse and he goes through them pretty quick. I've thinking about getting a pet grooming brush and taking off the tag because I think he would be insulted if he knew. But the bristles are stronger.

Dear Diary,

Well, the weekly movie night is finally over. They usually turn into weekly movie weekends unless somebody gets kidnapped on Saturday or something and then they turn into "Rescue [insert name] Weekends."

It started out the usual way with Raph jumping out at me while I'm changing my clothes so he can ask if he can invite his loan shark over. I'm starting to get really worried that he likes to actually hang out with his loan shark. Turns out he was going to buy something probably illegal from him and he didn't want to waste the energy of going to the rendezvous point. Thankfully, Leo heard him and after dragging him physically out the bedroom, while he had his eyes shut and apologizing over and over, he soundly screamed at him for being ungentlemanly, hanging out with criminals and blah blah blah. The usual stuff.

I can never predict how these episodes will go. Sometimes they end up dueling each other and breaking lots of stuff or taking off chasing each other. In the worst case I've ever seen, Raph had an emotional meltdown and cried for hours. That wasn't much of a fun night. It was like being in a parallel dimension where everything was running backwards. This time he tried to argue, but he's not good at logical argument, so he just let it go. I have a feeling that he didn't care that much about it in the first place, otherwise they would've broken some of my stuff over it.

Hanging out with ninjas isn't as fun as it sounds sometimes. Especially when they're all about 15 and have a tendency to beat each other up to resolve conflicts. I asked Splinter once if he'd like to come, but he looked put out and said it was good for them to get out of the house and spend time with me. I think he meant that it was good for him to get them out of the house sometimes so he can have time to himself.

Well, Mike made a very nice dinner, like usual. Then we had the inevitable Don-speech giving. He likes to criticize/ praise the meal; with him you never can tell and then he philosophized on the origination of the nacho and the history of corn as it was cultivated by Mesoamerican people in ancient times. I geek out with him more than I'd like to admit, so I'll just pretend that I was sitting there bored, like the other three. Well, Mike seems to only know how to break up these speeches by threatening to withhold food from Don. I've never seen him actually carry out on the threat, but I have a feeling that he has because it usually shuts Don up.

I know that Leo has some dastardly ways of shutting up Don when he thinks he's talking too much. He grinds up Benadryl and slips it into his food, knowing that he'll have to go to bed within an hour. He only does this as a last resort, when he's being unusually obnoxious or else making Raph or Mike nervous. They're both prone to acting out wildly then they get upset, so I think in Leo's mind it's a good way of keeping them both reined in. I've only seen him do it once, when Don seemed to do nothing but follow Raph around and tell him that the whiskey he'd been drinking had been strong enough to polish chrome and that he was pretty sure that if he'd drank more than one pint that it would eat through his intestines. Of course, Raph had drunk a lot by that point. Come to think of it, Don does a lot of talking for being described by the others as being shy and quiet. I think they block out about 80% of what he says and so they vastly underestimate his real output.

Then came the agonizing hour when we debated on what movie to put in first. This hour of agony usually only applies on the first movie because chances are the argumentative party will be asleep or gone or otherwise occupied by the time the next movie is put in. Usually Leo is the only one who makes it manfully to the end. Mike is the first to succumb to sleep, which is funny because he makes a big deal about the movie line up and he gets so excited. It's actually pretty cute. Then Raph looses focus and disappears for a while and then comes back when the movie's over. He doesn't seem to like anything. I'm wondering if he just challenges the movie choice to see what the others will do. And then Don tries very hard to stay awake, but never lasts. I find this inability to get through movies pretty strange, since they're all master ninjas who fly around the city all night long. They can't watch Pirates of the Caribbean all the way through.

Usually Leo lasts till the end and we have a little chat while the others sleep. He's nice to talk to. Very polite. He tends to always bring up Taoism though, and I have to force myself to pay attention to what he's saying. He also calls Don and Mike, "the little ones," which is really adorable, to me anyway. When he calls them that to their faces they tend to jump him. I have a feeling that he'd make the ultimate boyfriend. You know, if he were human and also an adult. Friday night he said that he thought he'd adopt the philosophy of legalism and model his disciplinary practices with the other three after it. I was falling asleep by this point and asked him if he meant to go to law school. He didn't answer so I think I said something stupid. It doesn't help that he has this jazz DJ voice that would relax anybody to sleep.

At about 4am on Friday night, Raph snuck back in. I only knew because I was in the bathroom and he barged in, saying that he wanted to buy a boat and that the deal ended at 6am. He wanted me to go with him with the van to hitch it up. I asked if the boat came with a trailer as I tried to hide behind the door and he said that he didn't know. Mike had woken up at the sound of our voices and also came in the bathroom and said that it might make it hard to haul a boat if it didn't have a trailer, but he was all for trying it out. I was getting kind of worried because I knew that they would try it. But then Don came in the bathroom too and said that he could make a trailer out of a box spring and my entertainment center. Leo was up by this point and I thought I was saved by his reasoning and responsibility until he stood there in the bathroom door way rubbing his eyes and saying that a boat trailer needs tires and where would they get those. I was forced into the bathtub by this point and had a grown up tempter-tantrum. I said that I didn't know where they would even put the stupid thing because they certainly weren't leaving it here. Mike said that they could park it at the end of a sewer grate by the Bay. Then I asked how they would sail this thing. Don has Googled sailing. Of course. So then I pulled out the big guns and asked if Splinter would want them sailing in front of people. They're supposed to be ninjas. This didn't have the effect that I thought it would because Leo said that they could actually use it in case of waterborne danger and such. I lost it and tried to shove Raph out of the bathroom by pushing on his chest, but it was like trying to push a brick wall and he just laughed.

Leo shook his head, like he was shaking water out of his ears and finally said that he assumed this boat was being sold by Johnny No Thumbs and it all sounded like bad business to him. He's not too good when he's been woken up and he takes a while to wind back up. Then he told them all to go to bed. They listened, except for Raph, who pulled him aside into my bedroom to have a man-to-man or a hand-to-hand or something. Don and Mike seemed to go back to sleep right away. I tried to resist as long as I could, but I eventually broke down and tried to listen to what Leo and Raph were saying in my room.

I didn't hear anything. I decided to let my curiosity be my guide and opened the door. Great. They both had fallen asleep on my bed. I had no idea where I would sleep. Looking back on it, I could have pulled out a sleeping bag and slept on the floor, but I'm suppose I'm too much of an aristocrat for that. Mike was on the couch and Don was on the floor. I considered rolling Raph and Leo off the bed, but they were both too big to kick out of bed. I knew Raph slept with his sais within arm's reach and Leo was known to blindly choke anyone who woke him up if he was in the right sleep stage, so I just stood there for about fifteen minutes, trying to figure out what to do. I grabbed a few blankets and tried to bed down in the bathtub.

Well, I don't know if any of my nonexistent readers know how it feels to sleep in a bathtub, but it isn't exactly comfortable. So I had the brilliant idea to try to sleep in the between Leo and Raph. There was some space between them and lying there really still seemed like a better option that not sleeping at all in a bed made out of porcelain, or as Don later informed me, fiberglass.

So I got in between them and congratulated myself on my idea. Then after about half an hour, I realized that it was a little claustrophobic and it wasn't like I could move either of them. And it didn't help that Leo's shell was facing me and I had this horrible idea that he would roll over onto me and kill me. So I turned to face Raph, who was facing me. I never realized what funky breath he has. I'm thankfully never this close to notice. So I tried pushing on his chest again, but I might as well have pushed on the rock of Gibraltar for all the good it did.

But I did get a few moments of amusement anyway. After a few minutes of lying there, silently cursing them for daring to sleep on my bed, I heard Leo mumbling in a high pitched voice, "Quit it, Don…" He was quiet for a minute and then he whined, "No, it's mine!" I've never heard him whine before and I had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing.

I'm assuming I fell asleep after that because I had a dream about when Don answered my phone and told my mother that I was living with four men. And then Splinter married my mother and we were all on a sitcom about a typical 25-year-old woman and her wacky mutant family.

But I had a horrible awakening. I thought I heard a deep man's voice in bedroom and thought right away, "Holy shit. I'm dead." Then I opened my eyes and there was Raph. He was still asleep and mumbling, "Don't let the cat out," in this scary deep voice. His voice is really deep anyway, so it scared me out of my skin. It was light out and Leo wasn't in bed anymore.

I apologized to Leo in case finding me sandwiched between them made him uncomfortable, but he just said that it just kept him from getting kicked by Raph, so it was okay. He was making breakfast and huffing and complaining because the little ones weren't awake. He was going to go over to Mike and physically assault him in his sleep but I pictured lots of broken furniture. So I told him that I'd prefer it if he let them sleep and he usually listens to what I say. I asked him why he wasn't complaining that Raph wasn't awake yet. He didn't really answer but mumbled about Raph getting up when he wants to get up.

Well, Raph got up at that exact moment and instantly demanded food. Then he put his arm around me and asked where we would register for our wedding. I had hoped he hadn't noticed that I was in bed last night because I didn't want to take this all-day ribbing from them.

I said I'd have to marry Leo too, and asked Raph if he needed to gargle or something. Because his breath smells.

Well, it was a typical breakfast with the turtles. They wash dishes in record speed. As soon as I thought about them, they were done. They don't clean up that much, but when they do, they clean like four cleaning machines.