Pennywise, Joker, and Birthday Child

Birthday Child with the Imaginary Uncles He Didn’t Know He Wanted at the Time

One of our kids just had a significant birthday, marking his transition into official teenhood.

The birthday elicited reminiscing about his receding youth. We spent some time looking at a disk of photos from kindergarten. (Though it was challenging- at this point, we only have one ancient computer in the house that has a disk drive)

For the birthday napkin- and to thwart facial recognition software-I thought I would draw him as a five year old. He is posed with two of his favorite characters from the present day...because violent and horror themed characters hanging around a small child is quite amusing to snarky teens. 

I’m pretty sure he was familiar with the Batman Animated version of the Joker as a five year old, but fortunately Pennywise was not present in any format. 

Sadly, the Nightwing t-shirt doesn’t fit anymore. 

Ok Boomer Baby Heads

“Ok Boomer”

I have to admit that in my basic boomerishness, I did not initially understand the intense appeal of this phrase for my kids. 

They enjoyed using it on one another. And of course it can be gleefully applied to any older person (parent) who might be trying to tell you something useful or offering any implied criticism. 

It is a verbal eye roll...an offhand dismissal of age and authority.

Of course our kids have been dismissive since toddlerhood. Arguably, even since infancy. 

I am not sure how we managed to produce such bizarrely empowered  small people. 

(Though I do have my theories about the difficulties of parenting without fear or the threat of physical pain in the toolkit....and then there’s the genetics of it. My husband and I used to often joke about where on the chromosome was the default no setting?) 

When both kids were quite young, strangers and educators often remarked on each one’s abilities to say no to adults. 

One son told his nursery school teacher that he could not do what she asked because he was too “dehydrated.” On another occasion, he could not comply because he was “too depressed.” She was quite effectively derailed by these statements. 

And they have always been particularly good at saying no to their parents. I am not sure what the evolutionary advantage of constantly verbally antagonizing one’s parents might be while one is still totally dependent upon them even for basic toileting and nourishment, but there is it.

In one memorable incident, as my husband was haranguing our younger son, age three or less, for some terrible toddler crime, our son replied casually, “Oh, take a shower, old man.” “Ok boomer” is an improvement I guess.

(These are the kids’ infant heads on their teenager bodies, if that needs to be said. We don’t own the shirts, but there seem to be widely available online)

Inktober 2019 Day 31

Don’t Turn Into A Pumpkin

Inktober 2019 Day 31

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. Maybe.

The main problem with my sleep is of course my not going to bed early enough.

I was a major offender in the poor sleep hygiene category for most of my adult life. Let us be honest: for all of my life with the possible exception of the last three years. 

Unfortunately, I now find myself in the role of bedtime enforcer for teenagers who are just beginning to discover the delights of staying up too late. And unfortunately, they are my biological children also, so the words, ‘I’m tired, I think I am going to bed’ have never been spoken by either one. They are always pushing for later, no matter what, and are always ready to put up a spirited resistance. 

So, for Halloween, and the last day of Inktober 2019: here is a pumpkin portrait of my partners in sleep deprivation crime.

(I try to have a pumpkin related drawing for the last day of Inktober

Aftermath of Area 51 Raid

What One Does to Relax After the Area 51 Raid:

I rely on my sons to keep me up to date on upcoming important cultural events like the “plan” to storm Area 51.... to liberate the aliens the government is hiding therein. 

I don’t think we will be attending, back to school and all, and so hear all the flights and hotels are already booked solid....but it was entertaining to think about what aliens we might be interested in bringing home:

Stitch from Lilo and Stitch, an Ewok, and the later day Ewok- a Porg, Gizmo from Gremlins, and one of the childlike but deadly aliens from Galaxy Quest....and a red panda, just because my son would really like to have one as a pet.

And what would you do once you brought all those cool aliens (and panda) home? 

Watch youtube on your iPad on the couch while wearing your skeleton onesie, of course. 

Our son was quite concerned that the Daily Napkins followers would not be familiar with Galaxy Quest or Gremlins, released in 1999, and 1984 respectively (ouch)

But he had seen both long ago, so I am going to assume some of the rest of our audience might have also.

that moment when ur doge

such doge

much homework

very stress

must scroll

Like most internet memes, I was completely unaware of the Doge meme iceberg, while being slightly annoyed by the tiny bit that my sons kept mentioning.  

A couple of years back, every time we passed a smallish, beige-ish dog, we would have to avidly discuss whether that was a ‘doge’ or not. It was finally made clear to me that a doge was a Shiba Inu...maybe.  But why was this so so compelling and important?

Again, like all things internet meme, I have read the exhaustive history, but am still sort of befuddled on the real why beyond the obvious “dogs are funny” and “it is amusing to imagine that they speak pidgin English.”

To attempt a brief summary of some bullet points from @knowyourmeme:

🐕The use of the term ‘doge’ for dog dates back to a 2005 puppet show video

🐕Pictures of a particular Shiba Inu were posted on a personal blog by @kabosumama (her present handle on instagram) back in 2010. 

🐕The meme spread in various forms and various dogs on Tumblr, Reddit and 4chan from 2010 onwards

🐕In 2013, YouTube inserted a feature that shifted text to brightly colored comic sans font when the search term ‘doge meme’ was used. Many of the doge images feature short words and pidgin phrases superimposed like ‘wow,’ ‘so hip,’ ‘very internet meme,’ ‘such wisdom.’

🐕Reports of the original doge’s death in 2017 were a hoax, but were very popular, and no doubt increased the meme’s popularity.

🐕Also in 2017, Dogecoin was introduced as a satirical cryptocurrency. At its height, one Dogecoin was worth $400.80. At last report, they are worth $0.00322634 each. 

🐕Enough?

For our part, we have a bit of a history with dogs’ heads on children. (Take that face recognition software.)

And the classic side-eye doge expression seemed appropriate for “That Moment When Your Mom Sees You Scrolling When You Should Be Doing Homework.’

All Star

Some 

Body Once Told Me

The World Was Going Roll Me

(I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.)

I had a reasonably good opinion of my own intelligence once. There was some outside corroboration- I did quite well in school. My academic success was very much a triumph of drudgery rather than of innate intelligence. But if one drudges long and hard enough, one can mostly outrun the fear of being outed as a secret dummy.

Maybe until you have kids. Or at least until you have my kids.

The fact that I had a 4.0 GPA in college is now at best a surprising and amusing anecdote.  The ability to perform well in school has been a pretty useless skill in my adult life.

You might think that I could at least help my kids excel at school: help them proofread their papers, share tips on how to study for tests, suggest how to budget their time, etc.?

No. No. No. 

Absolutely not. 

I might even have an inverse effect when it comes to fostering academic prowess in my own offspring. 

You no doubt are wondering what this has to do with the napkin. Maybe not much. But to continue:

Like all things meme related, I was slightly confused when I noticed a year or two ago that my that my older son was repeatedly singing the opening lines to Smash Mouth’s 1999 song “All Star.” I was perplexed at the time, as I was pretty sure the song dated from before his birth. I don’t think I even recalled its use in the opening credits of the first Shrek movie- also released before his birth. 

As usual, I though this repeated singing of the song snippet was a sort of special torture he had cooked up for the adults in the house.

...but no, I discovered later, it was everywhere online.

This “All Star” / Shrek meme is a decade long, deep dark rabbit hole...which is actually a rabbit warren of significant proportions. I can’t even begin to explain it here.

(Go to https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-star?full=1 if you desire an overview)

But one particular iteration is the “Somebody Once Told Me” photo meme. In the first movie, Shrek throws open the door and bursts out of his outhouse, just as this line plays. 

The related memes feature two images with the text split between “Some/body once told me”  The second image is often something  surprising, upsetting and/or funny that is suddenly revealed from behind a door. Many of them are just variations on how funny it is when things go wrong for other people: falling down, blowing up, spilling something, generally getting clobbered in a demeaning way. 

(For more on this: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/somebody-once-told-m

In summary, the people rolling me have definitely burst out of my own personal outhouse. But I can only say, “get your game on, go play”

Cringe.

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.... 

Inari Fox Selfie

Things are cuter and more furry on the internet:

We had some conversation about whether the “Inari fox” pictures you see passed around online are “real”... i.e. pictures of real animals. 

As you might imagine, no, they are not real animals, but they are real objects made by @santaniel_toys.

But if they were real, you would definitely bring one to summer camp and take a selfie with it.

Shark Headwear for Shark Week 2018

Chomp on Junior:

I hear it’s Shark Week. The folks at Fortnite companionably released a skin called “Chomp Senior” for some synergistic shark marketing. 

(The price and apparent desirability of Fortnite skins continues to boggle my mind...but I am a person who draws pictures on napkins for zero monetary compensation, so what do I know?)

Chomp Senior is a cool guy in a form-fitting shark-inspired outfit complete with a shark headpiece where his face is framed by the open shark mouth.

Sort of like this napkin, except I somehow forgot the important part which is that the cool guy is supposed to be wearing cool opaque black sunglasses.

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.

Fortnite Llama

Llama, Llama, Fortnite Drama:

Damaged as I am by 15 years of sleep deprivation, I cannot hear the word “llama” without mentally echoing “Llama,  Llama, Red Pajama.” This is the hooky title of a children’s book that I read over and over again to at least one of our kids. (The younger one claims no knowledge of it, but that probably means I only read it to him 50 times instead of the 100 times I read to his brother.) 

Five minutes of googling tells me that this 2005 book by Anna Dewdney has since become a “cultural touchstone” and a franchise (several sequel books, a Netflix series, a rap by Ludacris, etc) So I am no doubt not the only one burdened by the mental compulsion to echo all instances of “llama” with “pajama.” 

But there is a strange relevance here in regard to Fortnite and online gaming.... 

Ms. Dewdney’s book was about a young person’s difficulty with staying alone in his bedroom without his mama.

As I recall, baby llama’s poor self-regulation eventually led to much “llama drama,” boo-hooing, and wailing, which finally summons his annoyed mother to tell him to simmer down and go to sleep....while of course reassuring him of her love. 

The drama, wailing, and general poor self-regulation in our house is now less about separation anxiety and more about the frustrations of online gaming in general...and Fortnite in particular.

We had intense stress about llamas over the weekend. I cannot claim a deep understanding of these “llama”/piñata things’ role in the game, but their acquisition is essential. Hysteria can easily blossom when they can’t be found...or when, GOD FORBID, one is snatched away from under ones nose by another player.

Listening to my sons intermittently screech in frustration is perhaps unnecessarily traumatic for me. If only I, like the mother in the book, could successfully encourage less startling expressions of llama drama.

... but let’s be serious, I never succeeded in getting them to go to bed without drama.  

At least we did get a llama, so there’s that.

More Fun with the Giant Pet Rat

Riding a Giant Rodent to Peer Group Notoriety:

While we were on the pet rat topic, our younger son observed: “if the rat was big enough for me to ride to school, and then it climbed up the building...I would be the talk of the school!” Indeed he would.

The rat here is climbing up the facade of the building that houses summer camp. I think they might be more flexible about that sort of thing than would his regular school.

Mask in Blue and Gold

Mask in Blue and Gold:

The camp project was a clay face mask:

While other kids made cute animal faces, our son’s mask featured gold rimmed eyes crying blue streams.

I am resisting even attempting an interpretation of his imagery. 

But I did make a lessor napkin version.

Helmeted Knight with Background Dragon

Our younger son is working on a video at camp that features a knight and a dragon. We spent the Fourth of July making the knight’s helmet pictured here out of cardboard.

Fashioning compound curves out of corrugated materials proved way more challenging than I anticipated. I vaguely remember knocking out a cardboard “Captain Rex” Star Wars clone trooper helmet in an evening with time left over to draw the rest of the costume in Sharpie on white pajamas many years ago... So many years ago that my older son was young enough to develop a life threatening need for a clone trooper costume the night before Halloween...and apparently I was young and foolish enough to make him one. 

I don’t remember that helmet being so challenging, but perhaps I was just not sleeping enough at the time to form accurate long term memories.

Or maybe this loss of helmet building skill is a symptom of progressive cognitive decline: losing one’s keys, poor word retrieval, and the “inability to fashion helmets out of flat materials”

In fact, I am a little sleep deprived right now. Can you tell?

My son is now telling me that we need to remake the helmet over the weekend as he has decided that it requires a more complicated design.

At least the dragon is two dimensional.

Here’s the previous helmet from way back in 2009
Maybe it was more impressive in my memory...

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?

Familiar Funkos

Funko figures are much on our younger son’s mind recently. (He wants to buy them all)

In lieu of purchasing an infinite number of vinyl figures, I drew him & his older brother in the Funko style. 

Unsurprisingly, not a satisfactory solution.

The oversized heads, while perhaps metaphorically accurate, make it hard to pose them close enough to portray brotherly togetherness.

....and the hair... I know, not my best work.

Cool Skin Art

The Boy With The Dragon Tattoo:
(Or The Ballpoint Pen Doodle)

As a parent, I cannot say that I respond with overwhelming enthusiasm when my son returns home from school, clearly having spent a good chunk of time doodling on some part of his body or clothing during a class.

But I try to fight the tendency to become solely the upholder of rules and the critic of disorder in my son’s life. There is some much petty crap to carp about: the homework that is not done, the teeth that are not brushed, the pumpkin pie that is smeared on the couch, the pen scribbled all over the pants....

So I tried to shift my thinking about the self doodling by redrawing his hand dragon.
He told me that my drawing had made it more cool. This was high praise indeed, but I will try not to be overwhelmed. There is still food smeared on the couch and I am not sure I can do much to shift my thinking on that front.

(Yes, this is yet another holdover from the #inktober series, Hideous Progeny, fantasy portraits of my kids...and it is a watercolor, and sadly, not a napkin)

The original hand art: (His dragon drawing is more interesting than mine, but there is no opportunity for flames)

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. 

Cabbage Cross Patch Adolescent

Cabbage Cross Patch Adolescent:

Times are still tough...I am still tormenting my older son.

It’s for his own good. Really. 

And it might also be that I can’t help myself.

And, it’s still inktober around here.