::Don't Tease Your Husband for Being Old::

Medieval Festival

Dad dying of Heatstroke:

Uncle Doug:

Our clever disguises:

Art Modeling


I signed up to be a head model for the art students at the beginning of the year. What's a head model?, you might ask. I will tell you, friend, it means you sit and let people draw your head/face. There was also the option of being a figure model—which means your whole body has to stay still while they draw you—and you have to wear a black sports bra and shorts...
….
Do I need to say I didn't sign up for that for you to know I didn't sign up for that one?

I'm debating selling my blood (plasma) and my soul (call center), but there are some things I will never do, and that's: sell stuff or be a figure model.

Anywho, first day there and there's this girl who looks dreadfully familiar. “Do I know you?” she says.

“Yeah, I was gonna say... you look really familiar...” I say.

“Do you know Brandon Bowman?”

“No...” I was like, I don't remember Brandi Bowman's brother's name, but I know it wasn't Brandon...

We keep talking and I find out that she's from P.G. “Well, that explains it.” The students have started drawing me by now, so I'm trying not to be too bad of a worker... so I don't press the situation.

“Do you know Brandi Bowman?”

Oh! She realizes that I miss-heard her the first time. She must not have said Brandon... how embarrassing! That's how I know her! She's one of Brandi Bowman's friends. I liked the first group that drew me. They talked to me, so I could stay awake the whole time.

One of the girls (already forgot her name) says, “I always wanna talk about people while I'm drawing them and tell them what's interesting about their face.”

I say I wouldn't mind if she says stuff about my face. I am fascinated with the differences in people's faces so I love to hear other people talk about it. I thought she was embarrassed after I said that, because she didn't say anything for a while until.

“You have really interesting eyebrows. They look more relaxed than a lot of other people's.”

That's ironic. I think I have a tendency to look TENSE a lot. I probably do have naturally relaxed shaped eyebrows, but they ain't relaxed a lot. I've actually been trying really hard not to pinch my brows so much. It's really hard to smile at people when you're making that face, but I can't help it—well, perhaps I can I just haven't been able to yet. I'm not really a light-minded or overly cheerful person, and I think it shows. Probably one of the reasons I don't date... but I'm not like that in social situations. For some reason, when I'm at a place where you're supposed to meet people I don't make that face—I smile the whole time—I don't stop even for a second. But when I'm at school I have to make serious conscious effort to try not to frown. I even try pushing on my brow to make it stop being so scowly—doesn't work. I'm a scowly person. Any advice? I ain't got none.

Later, a gray-haired assistant teacher comes by to look at the pictures and give helpful advice to the students. She's a dynamic personality you never forget because she's always smiling and so unbelievably sweet. (I remember her from my figure drawing class—the only art class I've taken in college, sadly).

“I'm struggling,” says the English-guy-fellow (the other two guys drawing me are Asian fellows speaking Chinese or some Asiatic language like unto it). “It doesn't look like her.”

She bends over, and with her Bob-Ross-Quality voice starts explaining the flaws in his picture and lightly sketching on it to show him what she means. My eyelids stop drooping. She gives the chills the way her words drawl out—and flip. I'm so tired all the time! I can sleep at anytime! Contacts aren't gonna be safe in my eyes...

“You can make her lips look more feminine. And she has beautiful lips.”

Thank you. I smile. I can't help it. My lips are the one thing of my face I've always liked. As Gary the Cucumber would say, I love my lips.

“You know what my art mentor said to me? And he heard this from Norman Rockwell—you know the lips are finished when they look good enough to be kissable.”

I exchange smiles with the fellow—not a flirting smile, but an—artists say the funniest things, don't they?—smile. The art students talk about her soothing voice after she's left, they feel the effects of it too. Now that I think about it, Brother Call (my figure drawing teacher), had that voice quality too. Maybe it's a prerequisite for being an art teacher... Now that I'm still thinking about it... my art teacher Victoria did it too... weird. Maybe it's just an artist thing, because I've heard cooks talk like that while they're cooking too, “Slice the vegetables... very gently...”

The next group didn't talk to me at all—they were more serious artists—and because it was late I was starting to dose. Hopefully I wasn't nodding...

Brother Hunt's 30th Birthday

My teacher decided to do story-time for some unknown reason. He starts out by telling us about how he was turning thirty and his wife was teasing him endlessly, giving him a hard time about being old, and so he finally went out to ride on his motorcycle to avoid her and her jokes.

When he got back, he climbed up and sat on the roof to keep avoiding her. While he was sitting there in his cowboy boots, he saw the tramp by the house... Yeah, I can make that, he thought.

He stood up, backed up the roof in his cowboy boots and ran. His wife, doing dishes in the kitchen, hears a clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, from up above and thinks... “What the...?”

My teacher drew us a diagram of his angle of descent—he didn't quite make the tramp. One leg went over the bar, the other hit the ground and shattered. His wife pulls the car up into the driveway and waits for him to crawl to it so she can take him to the emergency room.

When he gets there, the doctor is like, “Now, what did you do?”

Six months later, or whenever his leg's healed:

He's got tennis shoes and he's on the roof again. His wife has gathered the neighbors. He thinks if he can run in his tennis shoes and land in the middle of the tramp he'll be safe. He makes his run, and jumps.

My teacher draws a diagram on the board again, “I forgot my physics,” he says, “you see, when you hit something at an angle, you bounce off at an angle and back here... was my shed.”

Yep. He did manage to hit the tramp, bounced off and broke his ribs and the side of the shed.

Back in the E.R. The same doctor says, “Wait... how did you do this again? We had this guy before who... Oh!” Because he realized it was the same fellow who broke his leg doing the same stupid thing because he wanted to feel younger on his birthday.