new photos up on the devart.

Sketches and Thoughts from France and Elsewhere

Cat's Version of the Casting Call for Lord of the Rings:
Casting crew: Do you have a horse?...Can you grow a beard?...Excellent, you're all in. Don't bathe for a week. The scruffiest and smelliest among you shall be your king. You there, what's your name?
An actor: Viggo.
Casting crew: You're king. And you, the other one.
Another actor: Bernard.
Casting crew: You can be the other king. Not quite as important, but you get a better palace.
Bernard: Sweet!
Casting crew: Now, which one of you is really crazy... John!
John: Yeah?
Casting crew: Do you want to light yourself on fire?
John: Hell yes!
Casting crew: Excellent. Now, who looks like John? David and Sean, you're his sons.
*David and Sean high-five*
Casting crew: Now, we need two women... There are two women here... And one of you speaks Elvish! Excellent!

7th Sea Thoughts

Scene: Samuel Bastos' apartment. Carol sits in an uncomfortable chair with impeccable posture. Samuel swirls a glass of wine in his hand.

Sam: They despise me, Carol.
Carol: I know, Sam.
Sam: They truly hate me. I give them too much work, they say. I set odd class hours and ignore proper punctuation.
Carol: I know, Sam.
Sam: I don't know what to do. (sighs) It's all going according to plan. Nothing to do but sit back and wait. Sometimes it's truly boring to be a mastermind.
Carol: Do you honestly think you can get away with it? (she struggles against her bonds)
Sam: Of course I can. They're so exhausted from running all over Besancon that they have no energy left in their little American brains to figure out obscure French university-educated plots.
Carol: You would think so, wouldn't you? (she smiles internally; the cat on the windowsill nods) I'll be free of your prison in no time.
Sam: (laughs) They'll never finish this jeu de piste! What makes you so sure the little drunkards will find _you_?
Carol: (with her small smile) You fool, Samuel. You sent Katie and Bess to the 17th century Citadelle.
Sam: (his face falls into a glare) What was that?
(Carol doesn't answer. Mincie bats a shiny d10 across the windowsill.)

L'enfance qui ronronne... ~Carla Bruni

I think my childhood purrs. It was fairly happy, and remembering it makes me smile. It's comforting to look back, about as comforting as a cat against my stomach or on my feet.

To ensure that the rest of my life purrs, I shall become a cat lady. I will live in a small apartment in Besancon with two cats. Small children will come to my apartment and ask for American cookies with "pepittes de chocolat" and pet my cats. My cats will purr and I will be happy. I will have smile lines and white hair.

Dicethoughts

For the moment, we wait. Huddled in our satin strings for warmth, we rest. We wait to generate random events that fall into a plan and out of the sensible. Life doesn't need to follow rules; you need to make your own corebook.

Writing Journal Feb. 29, 2005

“Why won’t you clean your room?” Mom bellowed up the stairs.

“Because it is my room! Because I can have no other!” Cat shouted back. She was big on twisting literature to suit her arguments. Besides, we were never going to get that disaster area anywhere near clean enough for Mom’s standards.

Cat flopped back down on the bed next to Pug. His name is really Bruce, but it’s just so much more fun to refer to him by his breed. You can call out “Pugpugpug!” and he’ll come running, too-big tongue flapping out of his tiny mouth and skidding around corners. The little thing doesn’t even answer to “Bruce,” much to my brother’s dismay.

Anyway, she flopped down next to Pug and opened her textbook. I was sitting on my bed knitting a scarf (the only thing I can knit) and reading a story for class. The cat, who was non-chalantly lying next to my leg, pretended not to notice the yarn, so that I wouldn’t suspect when she found an opportune moment and pounced on something else.

“I hate modern literature,” I muttered as the cat bit the hem of my pants.

“Why-ever so?” Cat asked with biting sarcasm as she stabbed at a photo of Hemingway with her mechanical pencil. “Stupid Hemingway.”

I dangled my shirt sleeve in front of the cat, who promptly attacked my shoe in a fit of jealous rage. “Because the writers of this bleak era have decided that nothing exciting happens anymore.”

“Oh, quit whining about it,” Cat said. “I have to deal with Hemingway again.”

“Yeah, Lenz loves Hemingway,” I said. That was understating the situation. Cat’s English teacher adored the writer, practically worshipped his every word. “We’re kind of in the same boat, you know? You have to read ‘Indian Camp’ for the second year in a row, and I have to read every aspiring author’s attempts to be Hemingway.”

“Hah, your life sucks,” she said, throwing Pug across the empty space between our beds and landing him on top of the cat. The cat immediately flew onto the top of my dresser and settled down between a vase and a stuffed raccoon. Pug tried to follow, squashed his face further, if possible, than usual, and jumped back onto my bed as though nothing had happened. He has the shortest memory of any dog I’ve ever met. Well, of any pug, anyway. Pugs aren’t really dogs. Cat and I decided that a long time ago.

“Maybe it does,” I said, stroking his soft ears and examining the ugly-cute face, “but I don’t have to publish its every detail to prove so.”

“Amen, sister,” Cat hollered, throwing her hands to the sky before hurling her textbook to the floor in righteous happiness. It flumped softly onto a pile of dirty clothes that I should have picked up last week.