Alice's Diary: Prologue
Thursday May 17 2007

I am the air-powered alto accomplice of the person who normally writes here. I'm a dependent, sadly - reliant upon someone else providing the air and manipulating its flow - but I am nearly always reliable if in the hands of someone who knows how to handle me.

The bad news is that I have spent my time so far in the hands of someone called David, who has never handled anyone like me in his life. And it really shows - he can't even feed me with air properly, it just shoots out to the side, probably spitting too, machine-gun bullets of dihydrogen monoxide. Failing that, I'm left in pieces, though the fluffy case I live in is really comfortable!

Thankfully, however, I was in the hands of someone called Gemma today. Gemma knows how to handle me, and as a result I was finally able to do what I do best, providing a stream of lovely sound. Better yet, Gemma was actually helping David today, and he was just starting to get the air in the right place! Occasionally he caught me a bit, and that made me jump and squeak, but other times I was able to do what I normally can. However, if I'm dependent on David, then David is dependent on Gemma to provide me with my own dependence... it's a vicious dependency circle!

Apparently someone called Chrissie is seeing me tomorrow, and she's going to help David too. This one's for the long run, he says. Not sure how it can be when he's talking about matrix algebra, functions of two variables, partial differentiation and all those other things that... I would say it goes right through me, but that would be wrong. It's air that goes right through me. If only it were doing so more often...