Crane Gang

I've been a plushie snob since before I started making them...in fact, it's part of the reason I picked up my needle in the first place. I'd seen plenty, both on the interwebs and later in person last year in Denden Town, but I remained convinced that nobody could make a plush as cute as mine.  Until Hiroshima, where I changed my tune (well, slightly...read on, MacDuff).  I had just visited the Animate and found myself in an arcade full of crane games, and without anything much better to do for the rest of the night, I decided to drop a few hundred yen, if I could find a prize worth fighting for.

Now, a thing you have to realize about me is that I suck at crane games.  Really, truly suck.  So when I came across a glass cabinet full of huge Hozuki plushies, my heart was filled with the utmost despair.  Even though I was hoping to find something I wanted enough to play for, the irony was that if I did, I wouldn't be able to win it.  The size wasn't even really the issue.  I had failed to ever win a prize of any kind - even candy - by grabbing it in a claw, whether back home, where they truly are rigged, or here...I dragged Five into several game centers this spring to try.  So I walked past the machine.

Down at the end of the row, though, I found Hozuki again, dangling by a pink nylon string.  I'm sure I must have seen the Barber Cut game before, but it must never have been loaded with a prize I wanted.  Now, though, here he was, dangling like Kandata from the spider's thread.  It was destiny - with my understanding of space honed through years of teaching art, I could do it.

Now, here's a little myth-busting/confirming for you.  To win the Barber Cut game, you have to line up a little pair of scissors with a string.  Depending on who you ask, this is either the easiest game in Japanese UFO game centers, or the hardest.  Since I found it, I've read that some places dull the blades, so that even once you're able to line it up, you still have to get several cuts.  This seemed to be  the case at the NAMCO in Hiroshima.  When I finally lined those scissors up with the string on my seventh try, I knew I had it.  Hozuki was as good as mine.  But the string didn't break - it merely frayed.  And that put me in a terrible position, because it was my last 100 yen, and apparently there are vultures out there who swoop in and steal others' prizes when they go off to get more change! Fortunately the girls who walked past my game didn't try anything, or I might have had an exciting blog to write you about prisons in Hiroshima.  Instead, I came back with 10 more 100 yen coins, and before I got to the last one I was the proud owner of my own scary-cute* demon.

Mine, all mine - mwahahahahah!

It is possible that I have been a little judgey when it comes to Pachinko addicts.  Personally, I can't understand the appeal of spending all day in a loud, smelly room plunking money into a game designed to make you lose.  Spending a little time, though, in a loud but not smelly room plunking money into a game from which you might walk away with some kawaii anime swag...that, apparently, I understand, because ever since coming back from vacation I've been wondering whether or not it was a fluke, and if there might be more games I can win.

I began in Akiba, which I'm definitely going to write about in depth one day.  There are TONS of arcades in nerd central, and while some of them will give you a free try, most of them didn't have the string game...the few Barber Cuts I found looked sketchy, and there was nothing I wanted to win.  The last one I came to, though, had some little Hozuki swing plush all stacked up in a huge pile in a traditional crane game, so I sank about 5 bucks trying to win one before admitting defeat.  That's another thing about these games in Japan - you're paying a dollar each turn rather than a quarter.  Pricey, compared to back home, but I'd rather spend $5 and win on the fifth try (or, you know $16...considering the size of my prize, this still wasn't bad) than $1.25 and walk away empty-handed and demoralized.

I lived to fight another day, and decided the following Friday after school to hit up the arcade I kept going past on my way up to Daiso in Kawasaki.  I love Kawasaki.  When I went to a festival there once upon a time, I walked past this shopping district and could feel its potential but I had bigger fish to fry back then.  Now it's just one stop away from my nearest train station.  It didn't take me long to find a crane game with those damn swing plush from Akiba, but this time there were three of them laid out individually, close to the edge.  There is plenty of advice online about how to win at "UFO Catchers" and I'd read a little since my last attempt, but after 10 tries. Hozuki had moved so far to the back that the claw couldn't even reach him.  Now, sane people would call it a loss and walk away at this point.  I have never been one to pride myself on my sanity, though...I walked away, but only to find one of the attendants to ask for a "resettu."  This is another thing you can do in Japan - if the prize is turning out to be too hard to get or like this dumbass, you manage to shift in too far in the opposite direction, the people working there can fix it so it's easier to win.  He moved my little prize and I began again.  This time, Hozuki ended up next to another one of the prizes, and in the process of working on mine, I ended up with both.  I've started doing math like Five, and I think this means instead of wasting $20 to get a prize, I wasted $10 each on two prizes.  It sounds much better that way.

This is where I should quit.  I should definitely not be thinking to myself, "I wonder when prizes change, and what else might be offered."  But that IS the next logical step.  So I looked online and while I failed to find a comprehensive listing of upcoming prizes, by searching MyFigureCollection I found some of the prizes that came out when Hozuki No Reitetsu's first season came out, and the truth is, it's all over.  I'm officially in training, because there will come a day when the only way to get the prize I want is to have mastery over the claw.

In the meantime, there's no chance of winning those old prizes...but I've read I might be able to pick some of them up secondhand.  I'd briefly stopped into Nakano Broadway the day I went to the Koenji Awa Odori, but I'd been carelessly meandering in and out of Mandarakes at that time.  When you're on the hunt though, it changes everything.  Let's start with books.  I'm a sucker for art books, and being an art teacher makes it a justifiable expenditure...I might even be able to claim that on my taxes, if I filed them (oh, wait - I did file my taxes!  Like most things in life, actually doing it was less hassle than I imagined it to be in the...well, let's not think about how many years it had been).  I found several Hozuki no Reitetsu books online, and had been trawling the shelves of Book Off looking for them (and picking up the manga volumes along the way, which, no, I can not actually read...yet...) but hadn't found them.  The first Mandarake I stopped into on Saturday, a foreign employee asked me if there was anything she could help me find, so I pulled up the photo on my phone, told her the title, and in like 5 minutes I had the book I wanted in my hand.  It was AWESOME.

There are three floors chock full of otaku goodness in Nakano Broadway.  A lot of the stores are the tentacles of Mandarake, which means that you can ask at their information and they can search it for you and direct you to the right place.  But if they don't have it, there's still a chance one of the other dealers does, and since you're in the same building, it's a lot less hassle to search them all than in Akiba.  It was a good day of shopping and I managed a pretty decent haul, although I didn't find any plush.  Maybe this is just as well, since the closer I get to finishing my own Hozuki, the more I'm reminded that nobody makes a plush as cute as mine. 

*It amuses me to no end that this is koai-kawaii in Japanese.  They are almost the same word.

It's the Wind-Up...Aaaand the Pitch!

So back at Christmastime, at the end of the trip from hell, Five proved the fact that I did not, in fact, plan to never leave Mongolia again by saying that she was thinking of using her Korean Air miles to go somewhere for spring break.  I immediately responded, "If you go to Japan, I'll come with you!"  We discussed what the possibilities were in Tokyo versus Osaka/Kyoto, and she chose Door Number 2.  So here we are.  But here's the thing: I waited until she'd talked to Korean Air, and I bought the itinerary they reserved for her.  When she went to actually book it, they told her that date was sold out, so she had to fly out the following day.  This meant I had to figure out what to do with myself for 24 hours.

Me being me, this wasn't a problem.  For starters, I went to Omi Jingu.  At some point in the last week I was panning over Kansai on Google Maps (this was obviously before I figured out that you could play Ms. PacMan on them) and when I saw it's name, it immediately rang a bell.  Most of the anime I've watched since New Years' has been stuff I've already seen, partly because I've been too lazy to try to find new ones, but mostly because I sometimes miss subtitles when I sew, and it bothers me less when I already know what's going on.  This is important because one of the animes I've rewatched is Chihayafuru, which is kind of like a sports anime, except it has class.  The sport in question is karuta, in which two decks of 100 cards each have, respectively, the first two and second two lines of 100 poems written on them.  The point of the game is to identify the second line of the poem being read and take it before your opponent.  The national championships happen at Omi Jingu, aka, the place I had just scrolled across on Google Maps.  This being one of my favorite anime that I watched last fall, I definitely had to go.

I got to Kyoto around 1:30, and after a quick stop in the train station to exchange money and reserve some tickets, I checked into our hotel, dumped my stuff, and headed out to the metro.  It turned out to be possible to get to Otsu with only two transfers, and along the way there was some nice scenery (although I feel a little cheated...when I went to Tokyo two years ago sakura season was in full swing.  Here it's hardly started).  Otsu is on the shore of Lake Biwa, and it was pretty chilly, standing on the platform of the second transfer waiting for my next train with the wind blowing in, but when I got off at Omi-Jingu-Mae I felt warmer.  The neighborhood was pretty small and quiet, and the walk up to the shrine was through a heavily wooded area.  There was hardly anyone there, which I loved - there's tons of people in Kyoto right now, and I even stumbled across the entrance ceremony for Ritsumeikan University this morning - and it was unmistakably the shrine from Chihayafuru.  Now, I'm not about to go full-blown weeaboo on you and visit every site of every anime, but it was still pretty cool.

So that took care of last night.  This morning I had leftover plans from 6 months ago.  When I came in October, there were two things I was going to do on Sunday, before I found out that the Saigu Procession took place that day.  The first was yuzen dyeing at the Kyoto Museum of Traditional Crafts.  The museum is free, and for a small fee, you get to use traditional brushes, dyes, and stencils to decorate the item of your choice.  Since making cool shit has kind of become my thing, and now that there were no festivals in my way, I was all in.  The museum was awesome, and made me realize that there are way more traditional crafts to try in Kyoto than I realized.  Probably enough that I could fill up several more trips with them, but we'll have to see where I end up next year, or if I even get a job (it feels a little hopeless right now).  I chose to make a bag because I am getting tired of taking my backpack everywhere with me; it's a little more expensive - 2,000 yen - but they let me put a design on each side, so I thought it was well worth it.  It's an interesting technique.  You basically wipe off ALL the dye, then brush what's left onto the fabric through the stencil using a circular motion.  This means you can get some really cool ombre effects and make different tones...and the fact that I get totally jazzed about experiences like this make me think that maybe I shouldn't give up on the whole art teacher thing just yet.

My second course of leftovers was the antiques market at To-Ji.  These happen twice a month...the bigger one is called Kobo-san Market and happens later in the month.  That was the one I missed by going to Arashiyama.  However, today's market had more than enough to ogle - including one shunga print that I found while looking through a stack of antique ukiyo-e prints.  There was so much stuff - it's fun to look at, even if you have no intention of buying anything.  I, however, had every intention of coming home with something.  I've been envious of my friend Racy LaRaye ever since she brought an antique kimono back from Japan during my final stint in Korea, and I thought that was what I was after today.  

However, at some point since I started making plushies I became interested in making accessories for them.  And by accessories I mean swords.  Is it just me, or are swords the freaking coolest way to kill people of all time?  They are beautiful, they require skill, strength, and grace.  They don't kill by accident.  So yeah.  Swords are cool, and since I'm generally more interested in shounen anime, many of my favorite characters have them, and I've considered making some in miniature.  So when the first booth I walked past had swords and pieces of swords, all possibility of me walking away with an antique kimono evaporated.  Although I did find one place that was selling remnants for 50 yen each, so I bought several pieces.  Because you can never have too much fabric.  I mean, unless you are moving all your shit to some unspecified destination in two and a half months.

Now, if you have never considered making a miniature katana, you may not realize how freaking many pieces they have, especially if you come from a Western background.  It's a lot, and they all have names.  At the To-Ji market, I think it's actually possible to buy everything you'd need to make a Frankensword.  But be warned, each little piece is an antique, and the Japanese are fond of their swords.  I ended up buying the hand guard piece, called a tsuba if Wikipedia can be relied on, and wanted to buy a couple of other pieces, but after spending 6,000 yen on a less expensive one, I couldn't quite bring myself to shell out another 8,000 for the ones I was looking at.  If I had been willing to look a little harder, or try a bit of bargaining, it might have happened, but I was due to pick up Five from Kyoto Station, so I left it at that.

Working/Holiday

Since coming to Mongolia and moving back into a secondary art position, I've been constantly stepping up my game as an art teacher.  I've seen teachers do amazing things with elementary art, but (in spite of teaching elementary students for seven years) it is really not my cup of teach.  In the last four years (sometimes it's hard to believe I have been in Mongolia for four years!), not only have I worked harder IN the classroom, I've participated in professional development outside the classroom - actual, art related PD, by the way, not the typical sort of thing I've attended as part of life in a school that never really applies to me - and, as amazing as it is when you know how little effort I put into my general teacher ed courses at university, I LOVED IT.  So when this school year was in its early months, I asked my principal if I could have time off to go to the national art teacher convention sponsored by my professional association each year, this time in Chicago.

This is not my teaching blog (that's been on hiatus even longer than this one was), so I'm not going to tell you about the conference, other than to say, if you're an art teacher reading this, to try and go, if you ever have the chance.  It was awesome.  This IS, on the other hand, my travel blog, and seeing art is one of my raisons de voyage - it's kind of my thing (along with spirituality, culture, and one or two other things that I won't mention lest I scare off any new readers).  So I watched with interest, as people on the facebook Art Teachers group I subscribe to started posting about different works of art you could see during the conference.

Now, there is a LOT of art in Chicago.  One of the best art museums in the world is right there in the loop - the Art Institute.  Less than a block away is the very famous Cloud Gate (so famous that I didn't even realize it was there and go look at it, which is a shame, because my students keep asking about it...oops).  There are potholes filled in with mosaics and tons of other public art and art galleries and basically, a shit ton of art.  In fact, it's way too much to see if you're going to take your art conference seriously and do any shopping at all (which I for SURE was).  So I narrowed it down to 3 - the Art Institute, the Cultural Center, and the City Gallery.  I'm not going to tell you anything about the Art Institute, which I visited Tuesday after I dropped my stuff at the hostel (which was my first legit hostel stay, and if I trusted that they'd all be that great, I'd never stay in anything else).  It is big and amazing - there was a van Gogh exhibition that I got to see while I was at it - and although looking at its collection online is cheating and not the same thing as standing in front of its works of art in person, you can at least get an idea of what it was like without me attempting to wax poetic about it.  But the other two...they had some unique opportunities.

Wednesday after my preconference workshop for secondary teachers on the national standards and AP (which I'll be teaching next year), I moved to the Chinatown Hotel (actual name, which was weird since it smelled like corned beef and cabbage on St. Pat's), then took the L north of the river to the Water Tower.  I'm sure it is a historic piece of architecture, but I didn't read the plaque outside, because it was 6 by then and it closed at 6:30.  The City Gallery, inside, was hosting an exhibition about Cards Against Humanity, and yes, that was the reason it made my list.

Now, I don't know if you love Cards or not.  When I added my own post about this exhibit to the Art Teachers group, the first comment was that we should, "Boycott that racist, sexist game."  It is true that it is NOT politically correct - unless you can argue that by embracing all stereotypes and being prejudiced against every race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc, you are, in fact, supremely egalitarian.  I believe my Dark Lord and Master once made that argument, so that lends it some legitimacy.  That said, if you took it seriously, it could be incredibly offensive.  Fortunately, most people don't take it seriously.  However, it would be equally easy to dismiss an art exhibit about the game, since, if you've ever played it, you know that it has a very basic black-and-white design.  Surprisingly, though, it was a well-curated show - it had a lot of info about the typefaces and graphic design the makers used, and I took lots of photos to show my students the next time I talk to them about text as an element of art.

What really drew me in was the recent stir over their threat to cut up a Picasso print, Tete de Faune.  This year I've been trying to get my students reading more about art topics, and when I came across the story of their Eight Sensible Gifts, I knew this was one we'd read and discuss when we did printmaking.  Basically, for the past couple of years Cards Against Humanity has done a promotion where 150,000 people buy into it and they are given 8 Hanukkah gifts.  This year, one gift was the Picasso, which the participants had to choose to either donate to the Art Institute of Chicago or cut up into 150,000 equal-sized pieces.  After the votes were in, the decision was to donate it, but before that happens they displayed it as part of the show.

The following night was the big NAEA St. Pat's shindig, welcoming all.  I'd signed up for it, but figured I had enough time to hit the Cultural Center first - my last chance to do so without blowing off part of the workshop, and I wasn't going to do that.  But I did want to see Theo Jansen's Strandbeests, which have fascinated me ever since I first came across them scrolling through my facebook feed.

As he puts it, his creations are "new forms of life," the basic material being basic yellow tubes.  Using the power of the wind, they shamble along the beaches of the Netherlands (where I might have tried to find him, if I hadn't been able to see them in Chicago).  You actually can't understand how cool these things are, so I suggest going over to youtube and watching some of the videos.  Otherwise you won't get a proper idea of how plastic tubes and wind can make something that looks so organic (and possibly a little bit creepy, but you know what?  Who cares!)

The actual mechanisms he uses to make the Strandbeests are fairly simple.  Sails, joints, and wind stomachs are basically what it boils down to, and the exhibition was fantastic, with a few different hands-on displays that you could use to get a feel for the structures.  They also had daily demonstrations of actually walking the Strandbeests, but I was too late for that (so sad).  In fact, the simplicity of the structures makes it possible for other engineer/artists to create their own, something that Jansen encourages - he sells books and kits, and the exhibition included mini-beests by others.

This was actually my first time visiting Chicago since I was a kid.  The two times I went with Mrs. Andrew's Bright Ideas class, we visited the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum, both of which were absolutely incredible and left a lasting mark on my impressionable young mind.  Academically, I knew that Chicago was like that, but on an order of magnitude that you can't really understand unless you've been there for longer than 24 hours.  Besides the awesome conference and the fantastic art, this trip also showed me that I need to spend more time in Chicago.  At some point.  Probably not in the near future, though.

Back to the Start

I can't even begin to name all the ways that my first trip overseas made me who I am, but nevertheless, studying abroad, even for only the month it was, had a huge impact on young, (relatively) innocent me.  Today I've come full circle, made it back to the beginning, and so I thought I'd write about it.  Venice was my first, unless you count Canada, which none of us do (sorry, Engrish), and even if we did, I didn't choose it.  In the fall of my fourth year of college I took printmaking and my professor, Subler, talked about a program that the University of Iowa did in the years of the Venetian Biennale (those would be odd-numbered ones), and I knew I had to do it.  I hadn't been obsessed with Venice the way I once was with Paris, but the thought wouldn't leave my head.  I HAD to do this.  That's how my dad ended up driving me to the Kansas City airport early in July 2001, slipping me a $100 bill when I was ready to go through security, "For emergencies" (he does that), and turning me loose on an unsuspecting world.

Well.  Not quite yet.  It takes a little more than an hour to fly from KC to Chicago, where I spent the night before my first trans-Atlantic flight, and maybe that long to get from Midway to O'Hare, which a number of people were very helpful in helping me to manage.  It's hard for me to believe this now, fourteen years later, but when I tried to figure out how to take the L between the two airports that day, I was made nervous by a single, simple transfer.  I've come a long way, baby.

Back in the day you could get some kickass deals on hotels with the right site - although I can't remember which one off the top of my head - and I stayed in the O'Hare Hilton for $35 bucks that night.  I got checked in and got my luggage to my room, sat on my bed, and basically burst into tears.  I should tell you (if you don't already know) that I cry at the drop of a hat, but even so travel's a big old ball of emotions, and fear and sadness factor into it at points.  You put yourself in a giant tin can and hurtle across distances that were imposing, less than a hundred years ago, and in the (relative) blink of an eye, you're a third of the way around the planet.  You've taken a machete to the jungle and cut it back.  "The world is not just books and maps, it's out there," at once much bigger than you could have imagined and much smaller than it used to be, because now you're in it.  That's cause to mourn, as well as to be a little bit afraid, because you don't know what's going to happen out there, and how it will change you, and when you get back, you won't be the same person you were before.  You can't say if you'll be changed for the better, but you will be changed for good.  Or at least you will if you do it right.

So I cried in the room and went to sleep early and managed to pull myself together for my first international flight from Terminal 5, where I met up with the crew from KC as well as the students from the U of I and wherever else we came from.  We had a layover, in Belgium, I think, and although I remember feeling like it took forever (7 hours was a lot of time for me then - now I think it's a short flight!) we eventually made it to Marco Polo airport, where we collected our luggage and were herded outside to get a water taxi to Campo San Maurizio.  I leaned over to look at the water, and promptly had my sunglasses fall in the drink, but hell, sunglasses are overrated.

We were whisked off to Campo San Maurizio, where the 20 students participating in the program were staying in two apartments.  It may have been crowded, but honestly I don't remember thinking so at the time.  During the days we were in the studio or scattered, doing stuff, and in the evenings the veterans of the group taught us newbies the game that would make a card shark out of me...Canasta!  Some of my flatmates cooked, but most of the time I was out eating pizza and gelato, and believe it or not, I lost 5 pounds that month.  Lots of bridges, 'nuff said.

The month was daily routines punctuated by activities.  The routines were my morning walk through campos still waking up, stopping to buy a croissant - some days crema, others cioccolata - at the bakery up the calle from the studio and a bottle of aranciata, before starting my artistic endeavors for the day (which did not amount to much - fiddling around in my sketchbook for the most part).  The activities ranged from the Biennale to a puppetmaker's workshop, a maskmaker's workshop to trips up the Brenta canal and to Padua.  There were the strains of the Brandenburg concerto (charming the first day or so, but they got annoying pretty quickly) from the guitarist who busked next to the well in our campo, afternoons on the beach at Lido, the night Piazza San Marco flooded and a couple of my classmates and I went to splash in water sparkling from the Plessi installation set up in the windows of the Museo Correr.  There was taking the vaporetto out to Murano and Burano and the Cimitiere, and the bus up to Mestre where I went to church a couple of Sundays.  And in the end there was my first art show, staged for one night only in the entry to our flat, just off the campo, for which one of the KC crew made tzatziki, which I'd never had but fell in love with that night.

It was over too fast, and while at the end of the month I was ready to go home, the magic of that month lingered.  Walking along the same routes each day convinced me that slow travel was the only way to go.  The lady I bought my croissants from knew me, knew I would be there every morning and what I would get.  I had a place I fit, and that set the tone for my future expat life.  As a high schooler, I was really disappointed that I didn't get to do the "grand tour" thing with a band group like my friend did, but who knows?  If I had, I might not have ended up coming at the world the way I have.  

What I've Been Up To

If you haven't noticed, I haven't been as focused on my blog over the last few months as I was during most of the last year.  Which is not to excuse myself for late posts or whatever, I just haven't been doing that much to write about.  It's not Mongolia's fault, and it's not really mine, either.  It's just life.  I feel damn lucky to have a life as interesting as I do...but sometimes what I'm doing is just not good blog material.

For example, I've been having a helluva good time with my new friends...doing things my old friends and I did last year that I've already written about.  New people make all sorts of things new and exciting all over again.  Quiz night, for example.  We've been doing the Hennessy's quiz off and on over the last year, but only managed to take the first place prize again last Saturday.  (There should be a special prize for the most second place wins, because we would get that.  Alas, there is not.)

I'm also spending a lot more time trying to be what I consider a better teacher.  Teaching art is tricky.  You want your students to enjoy class, to be challenged, to be engaged, to learn, and to make things they'll want to keep forever.  I don't consider myself to be a tough teacher, and sometimes I feel like I'd be a "good" teacher if I were.  But would that make my students learn more, make me more effective?  I don't think so.  Instead, I'm trying to focus on making my time with them more engaging, and to be a better advocate for them, showcasing their talents and achievements more.  To that end, I went looking for the ceramics studio in town, and have spent a lot of time researching galleries that are around, in hopes we can put on a big junior/senior art exhibit this year.  It's not very exciting, legwork, and it doesn't make good blogs, but it's important.

I've also been reinventing Apples to Apples.  If you've never played it before, it's hilarious and a ton of fun.  You have green describing cards and red noun/verb cards from which you must pick the most appropriate comparison.  Well, toward the end of last year, somebody decided that we should make a special edition of Apples to Apples with cards relating to Mongolia and our school (I like to call it Apples for the Teacher).  We made it up on the penultimate day of school (the students were gone and the teachers had nothing to do) and played it that night at dinner.  It was so fantastic that this year I went all out and made templates on MS Publisher, typed the words into them, and printed them in color.  If you want to try your hand at your own edition of Apples, here are my templates.  But do yourself (and me - copyright infringement was SO not intended, Mattel!) a favor and buy the actual game first.  It will help you with your brainstorming and give you an edition to play with people who either won't get it or will be offended by your snarkiness.
Green Apples Template
Red Apples Template

 

Finally, forgive me for using a phrase as hackneyed as this, but I've been working on myself.  Or rather, failing to get back on the wagon of working on myself.  About a year ago I determined that I needed to cultivate some improved habits.  I did exactly that, but around summertime I kinda fell off the wagon, with the exception of my morning constitutional (a phrase which, in this instance, refers to a walk, not to a bowel movement!) which I've been neglecting for the last three weeks in the interests of my feet.  Part of this campaign was to get back some of the self-confidence I lost during my association with Socrates.  And to that end, in May I started taking a selfie every day (when I remembered), so that I would see myself as I actually was, the good and the bad.  I determined I would do this for 100 days, and although it took longer than 100 calendar days to complete it (thanks to my lack of memory at times), eventually I did.  I'm still not the most self-assured person on the planet, but it's helped.