While it’s always an option, moping doesn’t help much with what needs to be done.   Tempting though it is, many times, to mope, moping is its own reward.

 Be of good cheer, he says cheerfully to himself.   It won’t do to dwell on the realization I had the other day, in the process of forbearing from telling an old friend that he was acting like an old asshole.   On the way to meet him, many hours after several anxious wake up calls I had no way to ignore, I jotted:  the reward for mildness, another chance to remain mild.

 “Yes!” he said cheerfully when I said it to him.

 “It’s very fucked up,” I said, never more truthful.

 Multiple recordings from Verizon inform me that my internet service will be out at least two weeks.  I am not the only customer affected by this outage, apparently there are thousands of us, phantom limbs waving as we recall a time we could pop on-line for any or no reason.

Doctor left me a message, less than a week after my first call.  My blood looks good,  excellent, in fact.   He invited me to call him back for another round of phone tag.  Hopefully his secretary has printed and mailed me a copy of the actual numbers.  I’m very much into stats, being a lifelong baseball fan.

 In the penultimate session of the rather sad compromise of an animation workshop that is the last one currently standing I found myself making lemonade yesterday.  Four of the twelve kids brought in model releases and I’d photographed the only one of the four who was there the week before.  He changed expression a dozen times and I printed a sheet of his heads, cut them out and made stickers out of them with a wonderful repositionable glue stick.   He was remarkably unproprietary about the use of his head.   His is the manic head of “The Bad Murderer”, an ax wielding stick figure drawn on a blackboard who cuts up another stick figure with his worried face on it.  

 The lemonade came in the form of a series of photos of the other three who posed for their headshots, and one particular sequence.  Once I saw those frames flashing by, the stern, serious face, kind of closed and tough, bursting into animated antics, and back to the stern, closed face, I realized I had pure gold in my hand.  

 Now, in less than five seconds, you see the magic of animation in progress, including the effect it has on the child animator.  The little girl glows as she clowns for the camera, her inventive, mischievous soul shows itself in a devilish flash of fun, then back to an anonymous social mask.

 Not a bad day’s work, methinks, as I prepare to go down to Darling Coffee for a cup of expensive tea and an hour on the internet.  Better to think of that kid’s wonderful star turn, and the fantastic five second ad for the program, than of all the other reasons someone without an income, or an inkling of how to have one, would find to mope.