Finger Fire

Wishing all a Warm New Year

....but maybe not too warm.

Our younger son expressed an intense interest in creating a video of himself setting his fingers on fire (courtesy of alcohol based hand sanitizer, I think) 

I tried to fulfill the wish without any physical hazards.  If this ever happens in real life, it definitely won’t be on the Union Square platform for the L train. But since we will soon be mourning the absence of the L in 2019, it seemed like a nice venue for manual pyrotechnics.

And yes there has been a lack of napkins over the last few days. I dropped into a weird knitting hole for a few days. I volunteered for the “finger knitting” booth at the kids’ school’s holiday fundraising fest (so, so, so many sticky little fingers!) 

The finger knitting thing was not such a gratifying experience, but it reminded of my decades-past previous life as an obsessive knitter. (Three very disturbing facts: I worked at a yarn store. I owned a knitting machine. I hand knit many things, including a sweater that had two realistic cats on it- one of them a calico)

The yarn that I bought to experiment with for finger knitting turned into a hood project (with needles, not intensely annoying fingers)

I somehow couldn’t help myself. Perhaps I needed to prove I could still do it? Or I just reactivated an obsessive compulsive disorder? 

At any rate, hopefully the knitting itch has been scratched. No one will ever actually wear the thing, but there it is. 

(And, did I successfully thwart online face recognition software in both pictures?)

More non-knit things in 2019.... 

Helmets on the Subway

What if we could all wear our favorite helmets on the train?

Everyone is absorbed in their phone on the subway- a sort of digital, mental helmet.

But wouldn’t it be more fun to wear a Fortnite or Halo helmet? And you could worry less about other people sneezing and coughing on you.

I started thinking about this after watching our younger son wear a cardboard helmet on the way home from camp.

I seem compelled to draw things on the subway, though the environment is clearly way too complicated for my skill set (and maybe the napkin genre) 

Just struggling to put one thing in front of another lends a weird outsidery art quality to the endeavor. And as a teacher at an institution that grants MFAs, I am afraid that my outsider privileges have been permanently revoked. Hashtag “notoutsiderartjustawkwarddrawing”

And despite the crowded train scene, I only managed to include 7 helmets, just the tip of the desirable helmet iceberg around here.

NYC Subway

Handheld Puppies:

(What if everyone on the train had a personal puppy instead of a cell phone?)

I might be on the edge of becoming a full blown tinfoil hat wearing crazy person at any moment...but I will spare those not in my immediate family my thoughts on the topic of radiation. Let’s just say that I have a suspicion that maybe it is not a boon to one’s health to spend a lot of time underground in a metal tube full of cell phones that are constantly searching for a signal. 

These sorts of thoughts don’t stop me from riding the subway daily. But I am grateful that our younger son is tall enough that strangers on a crowded train can’t hover their phones directly over his skull while they scroll Facebook between stations. 

But wouldn’t be nice if we were all looking at our own personal puppies instead of phones?

Dogs have been clinically proven to improve the health of their human companions, but they are not exactly encouraged on the subway. 

Pizza Rat Visits the L Platform

If we were to imagine the Venn diagram intersection of rodents, fast food and the internet...

Well, we don’t need to imagine it, do we? 

A short video clip of a rat dragging a slice down the NYC subway stairs became a social media sensation known as “Pizza Rat” back in the fall of 2015. 

There might be an excess of rats, pizza and internet memes in my life recently, so Pizza Rat seems freshly relevant.

To explain the overdose of pizza and memes, I can only report that I have two teenaged children. 

As for the rats: of course they have always been our constant companions on our daily NYC subway commute. And I had been idly considering the possibility of a pet rat for the pet deprived kids...

But I am thinking about the local rat population much more now since our trash cans have become a busy rat buffet. Our robust, well-fed local rats have proved themselves capable of repeatedly gnawing well-fed-rat sized holes in our heavy duty plastic cans so as to not be denied constant access to our building’s trash.

No doubt they are motivated to enjoy the leftovers from our sons’ frequent pizza dinners. 

Last evening, as I dragged our trash cans out to the curb for pickup, one of our furry pizza crust eaters made an emergency exit, launching his (or her) well-fed body out of the hole into my backside and using the length of my leg as a ramp to scurry for the sidewalk.  

I was disappointed to note that the rat was not carrying any pizza at the time.

(If you are interested in the tale of Pizza Rat, there is always the crazy Zardulu angle to mull over)

Pet Fox

Pet Fox rides the NYC Subway:

The main benefit of the pet fox discussion might be that it makes dogs seem easy and reasonable by comparison.

Unfortunately, a pet was not among the birthday presents for our son today. I wish I were able to produce an appropriate companion animal. 

The napkin is a poor substitute. Particularly this one. He looks particularly disappointed doesn’t he?

Turkey Train

Happy Turkey Day:

I can’t really explain this one. We spend a lot of time on the subway, and this one man’s bright orange sweatshirt hood just seemed like it needed a wild turkey head. 

Koalas Wait for Their Train

Fluffy and cute, but not necessarily friendly or motivated.

Another very late watercolor completion of an inktober drawing.

Mollusc Oxytocin

Mollusc Oxytocin 

Inktober 2017 / Hideous Progeny Drawing 20

My younger son has developed the habit of telling me that he "needs to boost oxytocin" when he wants a hug, like when he is stressed out on the way to school in the morning. 

The closest thing we've had to a pet recently was a slug I brought home on a bunch of radishes from the local farmers market. Much to my husband's dismay, I managed to keep it alive for a week on a steady diet of fresh organic radish leaves. 

I may have been overinvested in the welfare of the slug. 

But eating all the extra radishes was probably not bad for the rest of us.

I neglected to post this one back on October 20th, although if was just a black and white drawing then. 

Subway with Pets

Still finishing the watercolors for inktober. (This was from October 24th)

My younger son asked me today to please stop drawing his face. I reassured him that this was the same old drawing from a few days back, just with some color added.

Back to napkins soon!

Subway Homework with Not So Bright Fish

Yes, still inktober. 

I liked the fantasy version of the watercolor portion of this one that I had in my head when I didn't have time to finish it back on October 19th.  The fish was really jewel-like and translucent. 

I forget that my cheap student-grade watercolors do not have the same color saturation as my non-archival markers on napkins.

Arboreal Marsupials in the Subway

"From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition"

(But don't let my parents know)

Inktober 2017 / Hideous Progeny Drawing 25

Did you know that because of their low nutrient diet, koalas sleep 20 hours a day? That they are "asocial" and "spend just 15 minutes a day on social behaviors." They also have the smallest brain in proportion to body weight of any mammal. Koalas are therefore definitely not innovative thinkers. According to Wikipedia, "when presented with plucked leaves on a flat surface, the animal cannot adapt to the change in its normal feeding routine and will not eat the leaves." 

Perhaps those koalas were busy watching YouTube videos while reclining on the couch and were hoping if they remained motionless long enough their mother would heat the leaves up in the toaster oven and serve them?

But they are cute! 

Maybe...

Are they still cute? I remember hearing that they were adorable, but when I look closely...

Who was I talking about?

Just kidding guys. I really just wanted to draw you with animal heads. Among other creatures, I considered birds and snakes, but nothing seemed more appropriate than Koalas.

You may disagree.

Strangers and Familiars

"I believed myself totally unfitted for the company of strangers."

Inktober 2017 / Hideous Progeny Drawing 24

What could make the stressful morning commute in subway cars packed full of strange humans better from my son's perspective?

Perhaps if everyone brought pets.

Sympathy Fish

"Pitiless as you have been towards me, I now see compassion in your eyes"

Inktober 2017 / Hideous Progeny Drawing 19

Doing reading homework on the train on the way home is pretty damn difficult...even for those who are not a tired, distractible 10 year old boy.  

But I can't afford to be too sympathetic, or else, we will never be finished, and never get home.

It finally happened. I had a good run of 18 days of finished ink and watercolor drawings. this Inktober. But there is no way this one is going to get a color treatment tonight unless I stayed up extra late, and I am no longer allowed to do so.

So here it is as a monochrome. The fish was going to be a really lovely reddish orange to contrast with the florescent light of subway. 

Please use your imagination to conjecture what a nice job I might have done with that.

Sadly, when I finish it later when I don't have a deadline, I will probably fuss over it and kill it. 

But it is safe for now.

Commute

"We must continue our course with the rest and learn to think ourselves fortunate"

Inktober 2017 / Hiseous Progeny Drawing 17

Hard to be grateful during the morning commute on the NYC subway.

But cold weather and the approach of Halloween does present the opportunity to dust off the skull neck gaiter- and to reveal one's essential undead nature.

Subway Portrait Napkins

Public Degradation with Absorbent Paper Products:

(Perhaps not one of our more successful "napkins in the real world" photo sessions.)

I thought this year's napkin portraits should be staged in the subway since our rides back and forth to summer camp were a notable feature of the summer...for me anyway. I biked the boys back and forth to school for five years, so we did not see much of the trains on a daily basis then. And for the last two years, they have been at separate schools, and a three person train ride was relatively rare. Next year, perhaps they will be going to camp without me having to chaperone so consistently. 

So, I thought commemoration was in order.

Or, it is possible that I was just being a sadist.

The kids are always not up for having their picture taken with napkins (or without napkins, to be honest). And this time, I added the adolescent-mortifying twist of doing it in public with a selfie stick. My older son described our seven minutes on the subway platform as "just about the worst thing ever." He added, "Mom, this is why I resist leaving the house, because then stuff like this happens." 

Indeed. Leave your seat on the couch, and the next thing you know, your sadistic (and masochistic) mother might be forcing you to do dumb stuff on a subway platform. Well.... there was no actual forcing. I did bribe them with a somewhat indulgent lunch, so I don't think they suffered all that much. But I'm sure the psychological scars are deeper than I can imagine.

Nobody on the platform gave us a second look. It is New York. We have all seen so much worse in the subway.

Dragon Claws

No One Notices Your Dragon Claws on the New York City Subway:

(Adolescence can be rough, with ones body changing all the time.)

This image was based on some origami "dragon claws" (google it- they are a thing) that my older son wore all the way home from camp on the subway. 

But only on one hand. He needed the other hand to use his phone.

Charmander Rides the G

Pokemon: Unsafe at any speed underground in NYC

We somehow managed to dodge it for a while, but Pokemon Go obsession has finally seized our older son.  The younger one is not all that interested in the game itself, but is amenable to reigniting the general obsession with things Pokemon. Thus we have the two napkins picturing each of the kids' favorite Pokemon of the moment. The younger requested Charmander, and the older, Wigglytuff.

I inserted them into our morning subway commute to summer camp.

The MTA is clearly concerned about the safety of people playing the game in the subway. As am I of course. While a game that actually encourages our older child to put his pants on and leave the house is not a thing to be scoffed at, I am worried about his inattention to the surrounding real world.  Below is the MTA poster telling commuters to not fall onto the tracks while trying to catch Pikachu.... or maybe not to try to save Pikachu from a certain and horrible death by subway train....

 These napkins were rather casually executed, Due to health issues, my staying up late privileges have been permanently suspended, probably permanently. I pretty much have to go to bed at the same time as my kids, minus some hurried lunch packing and laundry doing. A two napkin evening is definitely a thing of the past, so I had a hard time finishing these two in the morning while we were trying to get out the door for camp.

Pug in YOLO Cap Poses in Front of Mr. Robot Poster

YAOYO: You're only young once. 

But you can always be a Pug.

There is a yearly summer event in our Brooklyn neighborhood called the Giglio Feast in honor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The celebration hails from a small town in Italy where most of the area's original inhabitant emigrated from. (Now they have been replaced by hipsters with parents wealthy enough to cosign their condominium mortgages.) 

The Feast includes engaging cultural elements like an enormous saint-encrusted totem which is danced down the street on the shoulders of a crowd of red hatted Italian men. 

In addition to the charming cultural event, it's also just a standard New York City carnival replete with the usual potentially intestine-devastating food, overpriced rides that have clearly seen better days, fixed games, and merchants of mostly reflective junk. 

Our kids have always loved going to the Feast, and start clamoring to be taken as soon as they see the trailers arrive for set up at the beginning of July. Before it has even opened, they are arguing that we should visit multiple times this year. It always seems that last year they did not get enough opportunities to win a dirty stuffed animal with twenty dollars worth of ping pong ball tossing, dart throwing, or water pistol squirting. 

Let me be honest, just in case it is not already clear. I don't like the carnival aspect of the Feast for many of the obvious reasons. My most significant gripe, however, is that I really do not enjoy my interactions with the carnival workers (is the term "carnie" considered derogatory? Or am I confusing it with other "y"/"ie" ending slangy descriptions of people?) 

The endless shouting at "Mommy"  to throw money away on my children's behalf somehow bothers me more than it should. Not to mention the intense pressuring that is rolled out should we actually stop in front of any game to consider it.

But, let me wrap this up quickly as you are certainly wondering what this has to do with a pug wearing a hat... Suffice it to say that the problem was easily solved this year, possibly never to return.

I decided that the kids were definitely old enough to manage their own currency this time. I made this assessment despite the fact that they are not good in crowds and are also remarkably poor at holding onto paper money in a discrete fashion. I thought it likely that the cash would be taken off of them before they even had a chance to spend it, but decided it was well worth the risk.

On the way over, I handed them each some bills and explained they could spend it however they wished, but that there would be no more forthcoming. 

Actually holding the money themselves instantly sucked all of the joy out of the carnival for them. Suddenly, they concluded that the food and the rides were overpriced, and that the games were a waste of money because they were fixed. 

Of course, I had been making this argument for years, but had been unpersuasive when the money seemed to be coming out of (to their minds) a potentially endless fount in mom's backpack. 

They did each play the try to toss the ball into a bucket game once because the supposed prize was a PlayStation 4 and that was too entrancing to completely bypass. Mysteriously, it was ever so easy to put the ball in the bucket during the "demonstration throw" but then totally impossible to keep it from bouncing back out when they were playing for the actual prize. In the past, they never believed me when I told them that this game in particular was obviously fixed. But this year, they were convinced after spending only $5.

And the game operators were much less obnoxious about trying to take money directly away from children, so the whole experience was much less stressful for me.

Less fun for the kids of course.

But I feel I've done my job as a parent when I've managed to suck the joy out of something for my kids. Just kidding.

They did not, however, take the remaining cash home and put it into their college fund. They pooled their remaining bills and bought the silly "YOLO" hat ("you only live once"- if that needs explanation) for the younger kid. 

On the way to camp wearing the hat, he posed in front of the Christian Slater poster on the subway platform. It seemed like a napkin worthy juxtaposition....as long as his face was replaced by that of a pug.