Well, “woo-hoo!†Things are looking up and upper. I’ve got most of my voice back. I sound a little Betty-Boop/Joey-Lauren-Adams-ish, but I consider that a small improvement over sounding like Marge Simpson, and Marge is a vast improvement over sounding like a badly damaged bagpipe. Over the weekend, I mostly sounded Marge-y, so I had a great deal of fun with that. I did impressions of Marge and Lisa, and discovered that a semi-recovered state of laryngitis is ideal for many karaoke selections. Pretty much any of the nasal, squeaky 1960s Motown girl-groups, any of Janis Joplin’s voice-breaking songs, the wheezier, yowlier Alanis selections, and AC/DC are all excellent laryngitis-karaoke fodder.
I wasn’t feeling that great on Saturday, and therefore I missed the bike race. I just couldn’t get up the gumption to give half a shit, and I had a vast many errands to run that would have been damn near impossible to accomplish with a block sawed out of my day that finding the racetrack, riding the race, and getting back to town would have entailed. Basically, it would have involved me navigating, driving a long distance, and riding around like a mad thing in the dead heat of an unseasonably hot late-spring day, so it wasn’t hard to talk myself out of it. I hate competitive sports anyway. Top way to make me stop caring about and cease enjoying an activity is to score it. It becomes even less appealing if my poor performance results in me “letting the team down.†The team can bite my slacking ass if they can’t take it easy and cope. Sports are games, y’all. Games are supposed to be fun. You know, recreation. That’s something you do when you don’t have anything better to do, to pass the time along. That’s all there is to it. Dicking around, goofing off, kicking a ball around, or something. When it gets all serious and “destroy the other team,†“no blood no glory,†with yelling coaches and pressure and all that shit, I’m of the “fuck it, I need a beer†mentality. Hello, once again, it is a damn game. It is an abstraction and a distraction, and something to do when you don’t have anything better to do. That’s why we play sports. Playing, by its very definition, is goofing around and enjoying yourself. Getting all serious and aggressive is definitely not something I find enjoyable. When I get into an aggressive frame of mind, it is a hot, angry place, where I wish to rend flesh and generally fuck shit up. I try to avoid that place, because it is a very ugly place. Besides that, I suck at most sports, because my lazy eye means I don’t really have any depth perception. Hand-eye co-ordination is one of those golden attributes I am sorely lacking. I can do quite respectably with soccer—apparently foot-eye co-ordination is not so much a problem, and my endurance is a thing of wonder and joy. Stuff like running, swimming, and, of course, biking is as manna to me. They’re mostly individual, solitary sports, though it is a lot of fun to get a bunch of people together and splash around, or go on a trail ride or Critical Mass rally. Anyway, it grates on my ass when I do get roped into a sport, be it what seems to be a pickup game of volleyball at a party, or a 5k run or something like that, and it turns out to be all competitive and screamy. I won’t even start on how much professional sports, pro-athletes, and pro-athlete-salaries irritate my oily hide. That can be saved for another entry, probably when football season fires up again. Actually, no. Right here, right now, I am sharing with you my brainstorm crackpot scheme for the re-organization of pro sports. There are no more big-sponsor leagues. Every player throws $10 into a slush fund, and every fan throws $10 into the fund for his/her team. Losing team gets the entire fund, and has to buy pizza for the winning team and ALL of the fans. Sorted.
Anyway, back to the present, and backing away from the rant, I finished the wedding dress I was working on, and I think it turned out rather pretty, and I am hoping its owner finds it as satisfactory as I think it is. I’m pretty stoked about it. This one was my own design, hand-drafted and made from my first wholesale-fabric purchase. It went together really easy, which I find to be a common occurrence when working with my own drafts, possibly because I have put so much brainstorming into the design and construction details that I already know the instructions by heart, and I can just go ahead and put it together without consulting notes, diagrams, etc. Also, I suppose I do design to my strengths and preferences. For example, the neckline is lined to the edge, but the armholes are faced. It seemed like a sensible way of approaching the lining issue, as the lining is firmly anchored from the top, but the armholes have a more tailored finish. I find it is hard to get as crisp a finish with lining-to-the-edge, but at the neckline, with the weight of the full-length dress and lining pulling it flat, this technique worked beautifully. Also, I was not at all looking forward to the maneuvering that would have ensued if I had to turn the lining back through itself if I had lined it to the edge on the armholes, too. You have to leave a seam open in the lining (usually the shoulder seams) and turn the lining right-side-round through those openings. Since this design involves a narrow shoulder strap, this would have probably been impossible. Anyway, enough of this semi-technical rambling; pretty much only I am interested in this.