Kerrville Folk Festival 2013

I recently returned from the Kerrville Folk Festival in the Texas Hill Country, which I attend pretty much annually. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times before.

It’s a phenomenon that’s not very easy to explain to people who aren’t already familiar with it. This time I tried a new variation on my standard description.

I got a new response, too.

This was a fair question, as I had left out an important part: I love aging hippies. All my festival friends are aging hippies. I’m afraid of the ones in my age group, who are much more cool and tan and alternative than I am.

It’s intimidating.

Generally, the previous generation suits me a lot better.

I’m not sure how I managed to become simultaneously forty-five and eight years old, but there you have it.

Come to think of it, I know exactly how this happened. It’s clearly caused by the genetic material inherited from my two favorite aging hippies.

Thanks, guys.

Gimme Five

High fives work best if you focus on the other person’s elbow.

I learned this bit of wisdom a couple of years ago, and just a few weeks later it proved to be spectacularly true. A friend and I achieved, thanks to elbow sighting, a perfectly formed forearm arc culminating in a flawless thwack that rang out around us.

I stood back for a moment to reflect on the beautiful thing we had created.

Just then, someone else bounded across the room to congratulate us on our technique, which had impressed him from twenty feet away.

The Elbow Trick: It can’t lose!

Of course, solid fives also require situational awareness.

A few weeks ago, a client called my office with a problem that eventually took me, a department manager, two off-site staff, and half a dozen phone calls across three cities to solve. Later in the day, I was upstairs delivering mail when that manager spotted me.

Then she extended her hand at an angle right between “handshake” and “low five.”

I assessed the interpersonal factors involved as quickly as possible…

…and opted for the five. We made contact with a satisfying, elbow-targeted smack.

Then the person standing behind me placed the cell phone that the manager had been waiting for into her still-outstretched hand.

The Elbow Trick: It can still lose.

Every Time You Go Away

I’ve been drawing pictures for work again.

They’re very logo-centric illustrations, though, and I’ve been keeping the name of my employer off of my blog in case the organization is not especially thrilled to be represented by this advanced level of neurosis. For literary purposes, then, let’s all assume that I work for that renowned charity, the Yellow Circle.

We’re throwing a potluck at my office later this week, and the party announcements called for a certain amount of fanfare.

Everyone is a little emotionally conflicted, though, because the event is a going-away party for four likable people all at the same time.

In addition to general motivational efforts (“Sign up to bring hotdogs or we will be stuck with just salsa and cake!”), I’m also in charge of signage for the event itself. There’s a standard, thoughtful banner, of course…

…but I felt like the occasion called for some graphics as well. It turns out that “We are sorry to see you go but really hope you all enjoy your new jobs in four completely different locations and industries!” is not a very tidy sentiment to illustrate, so I went with something a little simpler:

Unfortunately, I forgot to pick up my Mournful Circle from the printer tray until the next morning. That’s when I found Emmet carrying it around the office and making sure that he didn’t need to stage a workplace intervention.

After that, I decided to go in a different direction for the party decor:

Everyone had better watch out, though. The next person who throws away recyclable paper is going to meet up with Mournful Circle.

 *************************

P.S. I just noticed that this is my 100th post. This one is already written and drawn, though, so instead of publishing any landmark-related material, I’m planning to celebrate by myself with 100 Oreos.

Pretempathy

I am not always exactly the tops at compassion and human fellow-feeling. Various individuals who have been patient enough to live around me over the years can attest to this quality; they have all discovered my impressive ability to get aggravated over offenses that, in retrospect, might not actually require a full Red Alert.

As far as I can tell, this penchant for escalation is not a universal human trait. A few people I know seem supernaturally capable of seeing the best in everyone.

I, on the other hand, am considerably better suited to making up nonsense than to consistently appreciating the value of humanity. Luckily, this is a power that I can use to disguise my shortcomings.

In order to infiltrate productive society, I’ve started to artificially approximate empathy by inventing stories to explain other people’s behavior. It works particularly well with the phone calls I get at work.

These calls come in a variety of flavors, so I get a lot of practice.

My own demeanor, of course, never requires explanation.

NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for those who are saving the extra syllables for use in their literary efforts.

The idea is to write at least 50,000 words of a novel over the course of the month, which averages to about 1,667 words per day. It’s not too late to start, but you’ll have to put in some overtime.

I am not participating, since I am too much of a sissy for serious fiction. As we all know from high school, a book cannot have literary merit unless terrible things happen to any characters worth liking. Whether an honest farming family slowly starves on the way to California or Death Eaters slay a loyal house elf, the good guys have got some suffering coming.

I have taken a few creative writing courses, but my short stories always chickened out when I reached the possibility of anything important happening. I had just made up lives for all these people, and it didn’t seem right to invent them a bunch of pain.

As an alternative, then, I am celebrating NaNoITrToWriInFoGrMo by presenting excerpts from the Novel I Tried To Write In Fourth Grade.

Most of my memories from that year involve the ambitious plans I had for my world-changing contribution to literature. I worked on it during every writing hour and rainy-day recess, filling double-spaced pages and occasionally leaking previews to my teacher so that she could enjoy the privilege of witnessing my genius.

As a basically show-off-y kid (who totally grew out of that), I wanted two things to surround this epic: Absolute secrecy, and universal knowledge that I had something super amazing and was keeping it to myself.

I installed a homemade lock on my spiral notebook, limiting access to only advanced masters of paperclip-and-string technology. To foil those remaining wily invaders, the first few pages were filled with warnings and cunning deceptions.

The problem was that my security measures worked. No one cared about seeing my story, and no one from school could access its hiding place under my dresser. The only audience left was my little brother, so I had to whet his appetite for my sweet, sweet, secret magical prose. I “accidentally” revealed my storage spot. I started leaving the notebook in the middle of my floor, with a hair across the pages to detect tampering. I held little readings of the most impressive parts and dropped tantalizing hints about the plot.

The plot in question was the combined product of my all-consuming Dog Phase and roughly twenty viewings of Babe, specifically the parts with the border collies. I also saw a local production of Camelot and discovered the dramatic potential of betrayal and revenge.

WARNING: Top secret material below! Continue at your own risk! If you tell anybody, I WILL KNOW AND GET YOU!

“Blaze was a one-year-old workdog on the McLoftlen farm….He had a happy life on the farm. Hearding seep, and chaseing rabbitts, birds, and butterflies. But one day he was afraid that it would all come to an end—much too soon for Blaze.”

He is out herding one day when a duck brings him a threatening, anonymous note about how the farmers think Blaze is responsible for a recent sheep killing. Sure enough, the farmer’s wife tries to shoot Blaze, but fortunately she is as bad at aiming as she is at maintaining a consistent personality from page to page.

As Blaze recovers, his most feared enemy dog, Mordred, shows up in the field. An epic dog battle ensues, featuring the grittiest action I could conceive: “First Mordred jumped at Blaze, then in a burst of fury, Blaze would jump back. This went on for almost an hour, and then Mordred slyly slunk away.”

The farmer and his wife tend Blaze’s wounds while producing authentic country dialogue such as, “I reckon’e got in a fight with a’other dawg.” Farmer McLoften calls his neighbors about their dog bully, and they hang up on him.

…and with this cliffhanger finish, I stopped writing my masterpiece and forgot what else was supposed to happen. Probably a lot more jump-fighting and apostrophes.

Despite all my careful buzz cultivation, chances are good that I just got distracted. The next thing in the notebook is this piece of fine art:

I remember spending most of 5th grade on these and stussies. That specific distraction is the biggest threat to NaNoWriMo, from what I hear.

Who Do You Think You Are?

As you may remember, I am the local receptionist for a large nonprofit organization. This job does not specifically require me to recognize familiar faces, but that skill would be really helpful.

I know that a lot of the world has trouble with names and faces, but since I like to feel special, I prefer to equate my problem with a bona fide perceptual handicap. As an added benefit, this interpretation relieves me of the responsibility to do anything about it besides think up plausible-sounding explanations.

In this battle over identification, sunglasses fight me the hardest. They work just like those black censor bars on incriminating photographs—if I can’t see your eyes, I don’t know you.

This may be why I never remember much about jazz, blues, or Edith Head.