Tongue Ring

march16
Originally uploaded by Lucky Haskins.

You wouldn't believe how hard it is to take a picture of your own tongue. This was the best I could do after roughly twenty tries.

I'm in the middle of the Focal Plane Challenge, and between FPC and my own mission to take a photo every day in February there's no longer anything I can photograph in my apartment. So I'm getting...um...creative.

I just put in a new barbell yesterday. Classy!

Author & Illustrator

I was sitting in a department meeting yesterday, listening to a presentation on a new reading program that was so effective, so astounding, so engaging, and so amazing that the district had gone and bought TEN WHOLE COPIES. Never mind that the district had fourteen elementary schools and four preschool facilities, so ten copies wasn't enough to give one to each building, let alone one to each classroom in each building. So as the woman waxed poetic I did what I normally do - I doodled.

I had just filled in a margin of my paper with a picture of a spiky-haired boy when the woman next to me poked me and whispered, "Hey, that's good. Do you do that professionally?"

"No," I whispered back, "Just for fun."

"But you're really good," she replied.

"Yeah, but nothing sucks the fun out of something like doing it for money," I replied softly. I had learned this the hard way one fall when I volunteered to paint faces on small pumpkins for a local farmer to sell at his stand. He promised me $1.50 per pumpkin and gave me a hundred to paint. A hundred and fifty dollars sounded like a lot since I was a freshman in college, so I willingly said I'd spend the weekend at home painting pumpkins. Well, fifty pumpkins later I was so sick of it that I hoped I'd never see a paintbrush or a pumpkin again. My mom and sister pitched in to help me finish the last of them, me doing the drawings in Sharpie and them painting on the color, and I'd learned my lesson. Never again would I put my doodles up for sale.

"I bet you could just do some freelancing," the woman continued, after a pause for us to nod enthusiastically at the presenter. "Like illustrations."

"Well..." I said. "Actually...my husband has a degree in journalism, and he wants to write a children's book someday. And he thinks I should do the illustrations."

The children's book is an idea I really think Mike should pursue. With his imagination and writing skills, I think he could really write a good one. And if I could give him a few pointers on making it educational too, that would make it all the more marketable.

It's really hard to write a children's book, though. I mean, how do you get started? With a novel you pretty much know the format for submission - type it all up, put it in an envelope, and send it in. But how do you do it with a children's book? Do you send in just a manuscript? Do you have to have illustrations, or will the publishing company hook you up with an illustrator? I figured that if I did anything I'd just draw some rough sketches to give the publishers or illustrators an idea of what Mike wanted, and then they'd find him someone to do it for real. It's all very confusing.

Since Mike is usually more interested in people just enjoying his work than in making money, he suggested that we simply write and illustrate a book and throw it on the internet for people to download and enjoy. I, however, would like to make money.

So I'll let you all know if he ever publishes a book. Until then, both of our work will be confined to his LJ and my margins.

Book

On Saturday Mike went to a booksellers' convention being held in Milwaukee. He came home with an armload of free books, which isn't unusual...at these events publishers often hand out copies of books that were published recently or are going to be published soon, so they can generate some publicity.

Mike handed me three books, informing me that "these are lady books" that I might enjoy. I'm not too knowledgable about "chick lit" as a genre, but those three books seemed to fit the label. I was pretty excited because I love reading as a pasttime, but during the school year I try to avoid anything too difficult, time-consuming, or depressing. I used to be ashamed of my affinity for light, fluffy books, but during the school year it's all I can handle. During vacations I like to dive into heavier stuff...for now, I'm just looking for the literary equivalent of television.

I glanced at the dust jackets to see what they were about, and snickered at a book entitled "Still Life With Husband" by Lauren Fox.

"I'm surprised you gave this to me," I said.

"I know, I know, it's a book about a woman who has an affiar," Mike said stoically. Lately he's been turning up his nose at TV shows and movies that glorify divorce or adultury, criticising them in the same voice my parents used when I was little to tell me that shows like "Saved By The Bell" and "The Simpsons" were a bad influence. "But it's by a Wisconsin author," Mike said. He believes strongly in supporting local authors.

Since I wasn't feeling well on Sunday, I spent a good chunk of the day reading and I raced through the first half of the book. It is indeed about a married woman who falls for another man, and keeps pushing the boundaries between "appropriate," "inappropriate," and "cheating" until she's finally sleeping with the guy.

I think Mike was slightly alarmed by my interest in the book, considering its subject matter. For me, though, it's similar to the times I see pictures of spiders or huge bugs on the internet. I'll spend long moments staring at them before recoiling and shreiking, "Ew, gross!"

Yesterday I managed to finish it, and while the ending isn't exactly happy, you get the definite impression that the main character is going to be okay. That kind of bugged me. By the end of the book she's thrown several lives into disarray, but she's going to be alllllllllright. I would have liked to see a little more repayment for transgressions, a little more repentance for her sins. As someone who is married and has been cheated on (the guy I married and the guy who cheated are two different guys, it should be noted) I don't have much sympathy for people who cheat on their significant others.

So yeah, Mike shouldn't worry about me running off anytime soon. But I do need to find something new to read.

Sickly

My mom's parents used to take her and her seven siblings to Mass every Sunday. There's a story in our family about one day when Steve, one of the younger boys, started feeling nauseous during Mass. He started to throw up and my grandmother, the devout Catholic, couldn't bear to have him hurl all over church. So she whipped out her coat and put it under him to catch all the vomit.

She was pretty hardcore.

That's what I was thinking about as I sat in church today. I woke up with a cold, but felt okay right up until the end of Mass. I felt myself getting hot and I started to feel a little nauseous. When I got lightheaded I leaned over to Mike and whispered, "I don't feel good...can we go?" We stumbled out of Mass before the final prayers, and as I walked out I was seeing black spots in my vision. When we got out into the foyer area my knees buckled and Mike caught me. My vision cleared for a minute and I lowered myself into a wheelchair that was sitting in the foyer.

Mike brought me two cups of water from the cooler and after that I got up and we walked home. He held my hand and warned me about patches of ice. He asked if I was pregnant but I just laughed. I felt better in the cool air and once we got home I just layed down and napped for an hour. I woke up and, aside from my cold, I felt as good as new.

I have no idea what the problem was, but I'm not too concerned. That stuff used to happen from time to time, and my doctor said it was probably just dehydration. I drank a couple bottles of water today and even though I still feel crappy with my cold I'm not worried.

Mike, however, has spent the day periodically reminding me that I could just go lay down, or that he'd do things for me. When I remarked that my friend Alec was taking good care of his fiance Elaine while she was sick, Mike said, "I'd take good care of you if you'd let me," in a voice that implied that I should definitely be in bed with a cold compress on my forehead.

I know I coddle Mike when he's sick, and whenever he has asthma I watch him like a hawk. And I imagine that if I saw him collapse in church I'd hold him in bed for the rest of the day. But it does make me wonder how I'd react or how he'd react if the other person got seriously sick.

Hopefully we won't find out.