What I learned from the laugh

Why is all that important? Why does that story of Ward saying that and Dave letting that laugh out matter to me? Because when Dave let that little laugh out, it showed that he believed all those ridiculous stories I had told for the last four years. That was cool. I admit some of those stories, I would not believe if I was not there myself. No matter who I play with or who is looking at the cards, every single time, there is a handful of cards that get picked out every time that everyone asks about unless that were actually present for that event.

Again why does this matter? Because have you ever noticed that after a while you remember things but even your memories of the events seem to mellow out. My friend, TJ, has told people the story of how I crashed his prom so many times it’s lost its outrageousness. Don’t get me wrong T, I’m not saying stop. I’m just as proud of it today as I was then and I still love having been at your prom very much. I love the story every time you tell it. It also makes me smile that it meant enough to you that you tell it to people. It’s just my mom found an old pack of pictures from when we always carried a disposable camera with us everywhere we went and they surprised me.

We used to go through disposable cameras like water. It was before every teen had a cellphone, let alone a cell that could take pictures! We always had the camera and my video camera.

For those of you who were there it was the day TJ borrowed Matt’s baseball hat, and my beloved trench coat and walked around impersonating Silent Bob. (And we used someone’s eye liner for the beard.) For those of you who were not there I am sure you are figuring it out. I remembered this day. I knew this story pretty well. It was the other things going on in the pictures. The subplot of the pictures that I truly found amazing. I knew we were trouble makers but really! There was just pure ridiculousness going on behind this masquerade in December.

My mom and dad were both still sitting in the room with me as I looked at these pictures. I found myself pulling the pictures close. (Like there isn’t a statute of limitations on this stuff!) As I looked at these pictures the first time in most likely a decade, which were 99% of me and TJ, I realized I didn’t know the two kids in the pictures anymore.

At least that’s how I felt the first time I looked through them anyway. The first time I looked at them I thought I didn’t recognize either of us. I didn’t recognize the kids who were loitering in a Mickey D’s for the past few hours. The real life stoner was smoking a cigarette and impersonating one of the most famous stoners after Cheetch and Chong. The girl in pictures had short hair. She had lost her hair after she had cut it off in a fit of rage which she was prone to having at the time because that girl had a nasty temper. At first glance those are the things I noticed about them. I saw their faults at first.

But for some reason I couldn’t put those pictures down. I just kept looking at them and looking at them. When I looked at the pictures the other friends in the photos I saw seeing the same things, I was seeing the negative aspects of them.

I showed them to my boyfriend. I don’t know why, he wasn’t a member of the group. Since our group was together for years he asked how I knew these pictures were ten years old. And was even about to pin point them to the exact month. I showed him little things like garland in the background at the mall and my hair length. But when I realized they were taken in December of 2004, I looked at the photo that had the guy who is getting married on the 27^th in it. This picture was taken six months before he met the women who was going to be his wife.

He wasn’t going to meet her for another six months. Then they would spend nine years together and continue on after that in marriage. I still had the picture, but more importantly, I still had the friendship.

My best work as an artist

When I was a senior in college I had to have a senior review where all the art professors came looked at all my most recent work, what I was currently working on and what I was planning to do for my senior exhibition at the end of my senior year. I remember being so nervous. I had my hoodie rolled up in a ball because it was too hot to wear but I made sure that out of all the marvel characters on it, Nightcrawler was on top so he could give me support. I was proposing to do something new and experimental that had never been done at Keystone College before and I was terrified of being ripped apart.

One thing my friends and I used to do all the time was play board games. I was posing designing and making model board games. All I had for my senior review was an extremely rough prototype of what would be the keynote game of my exhibition. At the time of the review, it didn’t even have a title.

The bases of the game was set though. It centered on cards and dice. Each turn you got a card. On the card was a one or two sentence story. Some were illegal, some were funny, and almost all of them resorted in a good time. You rolled the dice to see if one of three things happened to your playing piece. You could get completely away with whatever the card said and move a large number of spaces, you could just barely get away and only move one space or you could get busted and have to move backwards.

I had many of these cards written out and spread out on tabled during my review. At that about sixty cards at that time. I remember two young female professors that I had had several times just pouring over the cards and having a lot of fun looking at everything on each card. I remember the former head of my department suggesting that I should see about the new 3D printer the department had just gotten but no one had used for any projects yet. I had been a student in the class of every one of the professors in the room (at least once) except for the current department head. Since I knew the other’s tastes and had presented work to the others before I was still nervous but less of them because I knew them at least a little. I knew very little about the department head and that scared me.

The best memory of that review was when he was looking at the cards. When he was scanning everything that was on the cards he complimented me. He commended me on being about to think of ideas and situations that where fitting to teens and young adults today. My graphic design professor had been standing behind me and I almost lose my composure when I heard him lose his under his breathe. That’s right, Dave! I hear that little laugh under your breath. ;-)