Presenting Problems

I've done a lot of terrible presentations in my time.  If you ask my mother, they were all genius.  

Well, I'm not delusional.  I know what horrors I have committed, and I've decided to share some of them (the ones I remember) with you.

Sometimes, I'm fairly certain, I actually based some presentations on whatever I had around me.  

For example, I had these ridiculous slippers that looked like fuzzy muppet bird... horrible... things.  

I decided they looked a little like the guys from the Labyrinth.  

You know, the David Bowie/Jim Henson movie.  

They looked like the red bird horrible things that take their heads off and sing "Our Gang" right?  

So I did that. 

I stood up there, in front of a class, and danced in those slippers to that song.  

Yep. 

Moving on. 

The next one was also a musical, stupid ass thing.  

Simon and Garfunkel began to play with, "I am a rock, I am an island" as I moved cards which each sported a drawing of a personified rock and island respectively, illustrating the song as I went.  

It gets worse. 

You see, I loved Happy Days.  

LOVED Happy Days.  

I used to watch it right before bed as a way to tell myself what my bed time would be.  

Somehow, I managed to rope a few of my friends in... what?  

Fifth grade?  

I managed to convince them to don poodle skirts, use hula hoops, and lip sync to "Rock Around The Clock"... Which, by the way, is sung by a man.  

Some tiny little girls, lip syncing to a man voice.  

I remember being incredibly nervous.  

I don't even know why I wanted to do it at all.  

I hate going on stage for anything.  

Perhaps, part of it was that I didn't have to speak.  

A lot of my stage fright does have to do with my voice, after all.  

Along those lines... 

A mandatory stage play in the third grade meant that I got two parts.  

You know, since I didn't want any at all.   

My teacher decided I was going to be two different birds, because, and I quote, she thought I was very, "bird like"...

Having low self esteem meant that I took this to mean something about me having a beak of a nose and squawking a lot.  

I will say, my mother was brilliant here.  

She made one costume work for two by simply having a removable red chest piece. 

 During a poetry week, I recited a poem I had memorized... 

Poe's The Raven.  

I was always that kid.  

I did presentations on serial killers about a bazillion times... 

Of course, I did presentations on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...

 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as presentations on Robert Louis Stevenson himself...

Actually, that one kept getting interrupted by two rude girls right in the front of the class.  

They weren't scolded for it, but I was for stopping in order to try and get them to shut up.  

It led to a very early Deddrie strip, in fact.  

Of course, there were presentations I didn't do... 

I didn't have a Bat Mitzvah, even though I went through all the schooling for it... 

I also took ballet, jazz, and tap all at the same time. 

 

I was best at tap dancing and I liked jazz the most.  

I was terrible at ballet and I hated doing it.  

I chickened out of the recital, unfortunately after my parents had already paid for the very expensive (and very itchy) costumes.  

...I'll have to do an edit eventually once I figure out how to illustrate the Little Mermaid thing.  It was a dance with a sheer green fabric.  I was told the dance was very pretty.  

At some point, I was roped into this fish based play that I only vaguely remember at all.  

We were to make our paper costumes and then kind of hold them in front of us... somehow. 

Mine was a clown fish.  I was super happy about it.  

That isn't sarcasm.  I really wanted to be the clown fish.  

Sadly, I was seated by an idiot.  He sloppily splashed blue paint on a bit of my fish.  

I sighed, realized that once it was dry, I could just paint over it.  

The teacher's assistant saw this and decided I was in crisis.  

...

THEN I was in crisis.  

She said I shouldn't be sad and that I should just splash more blue all over the fish.  "SEE???"  

I'm still angry.  

*breathes*  

I was also in choir for a few thousand years.  

My family is known for singing, so even though I had some issues with my speech, it was assumed I would also go in front of people and sing.  

They'd give me solos without even asking me to audition, and I'd hand them over to my friends who had talent or at least a want to do this thing that everyone but me seemed to want me to do.  

Mind you, these days, it would be nice to be able to sing, play piano, play guitar and all those things.  The only thing stopping me is my own blind fear based on shit (mostly just in my head) from when I was a kid. 

I remember Cats more than anything.  

Anyone without solos couldn't wear tails.  

I wore one anyway because I had been handed a solo and my giving it up did not mean I was giving up my right to a tail.  

By my fourth and final undergraduate college, I was presenting crap like this: 

I swear this was for a fashion course.  

I'm Cleopatra!

This has been my birthday weekend.  
In fact, today is actually my birthday. 

If you've been paying attention,  you know my birthdays are kind of hit or miss.  You can read about some of them here. 

Today is family time and dinner with a possible pumpkin pie.  

Yesterday wound up more exciting than I thought it was going to be.  

My friend and I had been trying and failing to see this particular exhibit at one of the bazillion museums around where we live.  

An Egyptian exhibit, I was assuming a cover price meant the museum would be... bigger.  It was still a nice place.  
...And I still prefer the giant one I volunteered with for a while.  It's free and there is a carousel.

But this one was neat and a bunch of friends joined! 

...I was trying to take a picture of the Christian Science window because I was entertained by the knowledge that they can apparently create zombies by waking the dead.  

Instead, I got a nice shot of bird shit.  This poor man's car was attacked by birds.  Some of the poop is speckled with blood.  Obviously a dying bird. 

Hey, maybe they brought the bird back and it's a zombie, shitting bird?  

I took notes throughout the visit via sketchbook, so I'm going to post them here and do my best to decipher them for you.

I love these.  The imagery, the meaning, the use even when they are "dummy" jars...  

I told my knight that when I die, I want this to occur.  
He misheard and seemed to assume I was going to kill him sometime soon and steal his organs.  

Next up was a mummified dog:

I wondered if it had been left to die before mummification, or if the dog was killed just to be buried with the master.  

Because my brain had already concocted a story involving a mummy coming back via curse and just wanting to find a better replacement limb for an old fake one, I added that perhaps he was also looking to raise his dog from the dead.  

...
I want this table.  
It looks better than I drew it (which goes for everything, really) but it's awesome and I shall make a replica and it shall be mine.  ...Yes.

My knight and I wandered into a little room with a television just as lights went on beyond a glass wall.  I felt as though we were seeing what was meant to be unseen, as it seemed to be a window into the storage area of the museum.  

...Just...  Walls and shelves of chairs, couches and pianos, as far as the eye can see. 

Eventually we wandered to other areas of the museum.  

They aren't even sure who made it. 
...
Chickens. 


*ahem* 

Well done marble sculptures are amazing with how an artist can capture fabric, hair, and even flesh in ways that aren't even easy enough to paint.  

I was particularly intrigued by a few set into little alcoves in the walls going up the stairs.  

Of course, every now and then, you catch something that isn't quite right.  

For example, if you look at certain pieces by Michelangelo, you'll start to see that he knew how to capture incredible amounts of detail, and he understood the male form to a degree which still astounds, but he actually wasn't so great at painting the ladies.  

Part of this is because of the times, and part is just that they seem to be dudes with effeminate faces and little boobies tacked on in ways that just don't happen in human lady bodies.  

Even female body builders don't look like whatever the Hell he was doing. 

In this image by Nehemiah Partridge in 1721, we see that either he ran out of room having planned the composition poorly, or he forgot around the middle that he was painting a three year old girl.
Her face is haggard and her arms are incredibly long.  
...And her body is... wrong.  Just wrong.  



I mean, maybe she was a three year old who looked like an adult and had been cut off at the knees and forced to wear shoes on her stubs?  Maybe?  

Or perhaps the poor girl was somewhat orangutang in shape?

Actually, one of the first paintings we came across involved a double rainbow:  

  
I felt the need to point it out.  

Later on, my companions happened upon a sort of hidden image within an image.  

You see, from far away, it was a highly detailed landscape.  

On closer inspection, there are two men discussing something on the road. 

...Then you notice their dogs.  

Maybe the dogs were just poorly placed, but holy crap.

Some of the modern art was neat.  
The modern stuff tends to be hit or miss for me, as a lot of things are items I would consider an intelligent practice or for fun, not so much something to hang in a museum for others to contemplate.

One of my favorites looked like an ocean from far away, and when close up...  

As you can tell, even right up to it, I had trouble figuring out what the white lines were.  At first, I thought they were white paint strokes in little ribbons, but they were too uniform, so I thought perhaps it was actually string... 
Nope.  Fucking claw marks, man.  Gouged paint in this thing.  Really neat effect.  

The other one I liked a lot was a wall thing involving birds and guns.  

Yep. 

We went to the gift shop (of course) where Rob and I found a little scarab to put in our collection of stuff from things we've done together.  

The plan is to look through said box on our anniversary.  
That'll be fun to figure out what the Hell some of that crap is from.  
Not everything is labeled.  

Then, from the suggestion of a friend, we went to an arcade/bar/food place.  
...Restaurant.  The word is restaurant.  

Said friend handed me a card and a few tickets and I went to town on the skeeball machine.  (Sometimes "Ski-ball" or other names.  Depends where you go.)  

I was rocking it until I was being watched.  BUT tickets were achieved.  Of course they were still only enough for random crap...  

So we got some glorious random crap.  

Ol' Benjamin there is on a pack of cards.  We didn't win money.  

Good times.  

Goooood times. 


 
  

Playing Chicken

I hate chickens.  

Don't get me wrong, I love eating them...  
In fact, I think my hatred of them as an animal just makes my love for eating them all the sweeter.  

And you know what?  
They started it.  

Actually, I have no idea how it started.  I just know that as a child, I didn't like seeing chickens unless they were fully cooked.  Their eyes creeped me out.  

To add to this, my fear of enormous animals led to a chicken... maybe a rooster, actually, mocking me.  

Let me explain that one.

Because I was afraid to ride the horse, the owners of said horse placed the fowl on said large animal to show me that I was more chicken than the chicken.  

Screw that chicken.

Mind you, my mom has fond memories of a rooster named Elvis.  He started as one of those dangerously dyed pretty colored chicks for Easter (which we don't celebrate) and grew up instead of dying from the poison or just a general failure of the average child to take care of a chicken.  

But this was not my personal experience.  

Chickens creep me out.  

I'm a big fan of Ripley's Believe it Or Not, and generally we're all good... 

And then there was this: 

Instead of dying like it was supposed to, this guy stayed alive without a head for years.  He was fed through the neck hole. 

A. Why would you ever do this to a living creature?  Just kill the fucking thing.

B. I cannot respect anything that can keep on walking around while missing that much of it's head, and all of it's basic thinking brain parts.  

Also, there was the "Big, Scary Chicken" incident...

I wrote about that already a bit here. 

Eventually, my well meaning friends started calling me by making chicken noises.  
This was actually unrelated to my hatred of chickens, oddly enough, and just that my legal name sounded like a chicken when said in the most obnoxious way possible to utter a sound.

This was made even worse when I left for the other side of the country and lived next to a bunch of chickens.  

I'd wake up thinking they were calling me.  

Guh.

You know, I actually have a lot of chicken stories...  

But I'll leave it at this one last part... 

My first real meeting of Rob's mother was a thing.  

Lovely lady.  I like her a lot.  

One of the first things we talked about was how she wanted a pet-

And I responded with, 

*Note:  Eyebrows thickened for emphasis* 

I actually said the word "veto" at a woman I was just meeting and trying to impress.  

I immediately regretted it, thinking I'd be thrown out, stoned, and/or burned alive, but she just chuckled and asked why...  

...and I went on to tell her all about the crap on this very post. 

 

What I Wore and Convention Madness

I'll start this off with the first chunk of the 30 day "What I Wore" challenge... meme... thing.  

Day 1 was me dressed for a presentation.  I was nervous as all Hell, even though it was with a group.  
I still can't tell if I screwed up or not.   
Also, I love vests.

Day 2 was me being grumpy because it was Halloween, but I had class from 6-9PM and couldn't do anything fun.  
We didn't even get trick or treaters.
That pink sweater is becoming my favorite Winter item though.  
It's too big and really soft and lovely.   

Day 3 was somewhat exhausting, but in a good way.  
My household is one of introverts, so we aren't great at crowds or entertaining friends for long periods of time, even when we'd really like to do so.  
This day was me entertaining a couple friends I hadn't seen in a long time, followed by going to a loud bar to meet two of my knight's old friends.  
So.  Yeah.
The outfit was dark jeans and a neat, oddly warm top with lots of sparkly things.  I had to push up the sleeves because they are only 3/4 length and it was driving me crazy. 

Day 4...  Why did I look so unhappy?  
I had my gore pants on...  Invader Zim shirt... Comfy hoodie...
I remember.  Headache.  Headache and utter fear of my then upcoming half hour solo presentation.    
This entire semester has been utterly insane. 

Day 5 involved a Batgirl shirt and plaid pants that were given to me when a friend hit puberty and couldn't fit in them anymore. Conveniently, I'm about the size of a child.
No shoes because screw it.   

Day 6 during the day was just jeans and a black tee, since I was going to be meeting with my advisor at some point.  She had a puppy in the room because he was training to be a therapy dog.  Also, my advisor is really nice and helpful, which is new for me.  
The hanging pants are my workout pants.  ...Actually, I reversed the color of them somehow.  (Shows how often I actually workout...)  
Hitting the gym as though I’m healthy!  Yay!

Day 7 was drawn really super tiny before it was scanned in.  I have no excuse for this fact. 
Trigun shirt and blue jeans. 

Day 8! Again, full of angst. 
Again, angsty because of the half hour presentation.
On the bright side, that sweater is comfy.   

Day 9 was presentation day.  I was terrified, but I did my best to pretend I wasn't.  The teacher had a lot of discussion points and I'm still not sure if that was a good sign or a bad one.  
Was she trying to correct me?  It was mostly clarification purposes... Was I not clear?  
Does she just respect me enough to want a discourse?  
Am I going to fail?  
Questions?   

Day 10 and the drawing looks nothing like the actual top.  
The top is silky and has red, grey, and pink flowers, but it's much less simplistic.  
It ties in the back and the grey part over the cleavage is a separate under shirt, needed for obvious reasons.
The choker necklace has the sign for Scorpio. 
My clutch there is awesome because it not only has my cards, cash, whatever, but it also fits my epi-pen and chapstick. 
...The epi-pen is a little more important than the chapstick.      

Day 11 was a day I did not leave the house.  At all.  
Wore my “Cry baby” shirt and drank tea from one of my tiki mugs.
My chair (from my knight's sister) is actually much more awesome than what I drew. 

Aaaand day 12, which was today.  
Again, I'll be doing this for 30 days, but I figured I'd stop and do a post here because today was a convention and I wanted to mention that I went.  
The comic I worked on wasn't quite ready to show yet, but it'll be at the next one!  
Here, I'm dressed as Cassie Hack from Hack/Slash.  

My knight was dressed as Vlad, so he bought a plain mask, I built Vlad's mask on top of it...

and then my knight painted it. 

That's my lap.  

We didn't stay long at at this convention just because the three of us (the other one was Deadpool, by the way) were all kind of peopled out by the time we got there.  

Still, we saw some friends, looked at a lot of stuff, and managed not to buy anything. 
I also learned that in or out of costume I'm terrible at recognizing anyone I know.  

I can tell what character he or she may be dressed as, but I won't know where I know the person him or herself from, let alone his or her name.  
I'm memorable, as are the other two of this household, so this can be an issue. 

Last time we went to this convention was memorable due to 11 leftover House of the Dead credits someone had walked away from while playing.  

Knight and I took over. 

Turns out that my aim isn't bad, but I'll automatically shoot anything that moves.  
As I result I one shot...  

...two of the scientists. 

BUT I killed a lot of zombies too.  

Greater good and all that, right? 

Foil Rose Because I Can't Function

I am so stressed about tomorrow that I can't even explain... things. 

I am going to be presenting for half an hour about a subject I know very little about and I hate everything. 

So, I made a thing. 

 I bet I can do it better. 

It's supposed to be a rose.

...A rose of Dove wrappers.

One day, maybe even this weekend, I won't be so full of stress.

When that day comes, you'll get a real blog post again.