An Instance of Intern Insomnia – Arts n' Crafts
This post is not about rock n' roll. Not that anybody was asking for one, but ya know... This is a post about left over Christmas... gum. Yes, Christmas bubblegum. Somewhere along the line, some clever marketing guy at Double Bubble Yum O-Rama decided the kids needed gum in their stockings. So they slapped a shiny green and red wrapper on their seemingly normal pink bubblegum. But, to all those lucky kids' surprises' on X-mas morning, when they tore apart their stockings and were immediately drawn to the aforementioned shiny wrapper, they didn't find a regular pink lump of sugary gum that was destined to lose its flavor in three minutes flat. Oh no. When they opened that wrapper, they found a pink cylinder of gum with a super special green pine tree-shaped middle... that probably takes the flavor down to two minutes. A magical new take on the old hard Christmas candy, a new take that's way better to stick in your little sister's hair.
Now, I'm definitely not a little kid anymore, sadly, but I happened to be near my parents for this past Christmas, and only the Grinchi-est of Grinches would tell their mom not to bother with a stocking. You can't tell your mother - who will always think you're a kid - that you really don't eat candy very much anymore, and you definitely don't need a stocking full of the stuff. So, you guessed it, filling more than the toe of my cheesy felt stocking, was a whole bunch of this amazing Christmas bubble gum. Unopened, the fistfuls of shiny red and green wrapped gum were moved from my stocking to a ziplock bag, then from my parents' house to my apartment, where it sat, still untouched, on the kitchen table. It kept the oranges company in the fruit bowl.
It's been almost two months now - not bad, considering there's a Cadbury egg in the fridge still from last easter - and I was almost about to return the ziplock bag of various x-mas candies, including the gum, to my parents' house. My plan was to tell my ma that I had had enough, and suggest that she leave it in her candy dish on her desk at work, let her office visitors have at it. I didn't want to seem ungrateful, because I'm not. I dig the fact that she wanted to be all festive 'cos all us kids were home for the holidays this year. And of course the bubblegum marketing people deserve a pat on the back for convincing my mom that gum is, in fact, Christmas-y. I just, well, really don't eat candy much anymore. I figured I might as well find a way to get rid of it, without actually tossing it. That just seemed too sad, I guess. (Yes, I was one of those kids who would never get rid of a stuffed animal because they had FEELINGS!) Or, the guilty little kid in my head thought that it would be bad karma, or would just be psychically mean to my mother... or some weird guilt trip. Whatever. Shush.
But then, a couple nights ago, this other Annie (she's head honcho in this band called Giant Drag. I'm sure you've heard of 'em, if you're on here...) asked me to monkey around with the idea of a digital fan art gallery. The idea is to have a good collecting place to let the fans of Giant Drag show off their art. 'Cos everybody knows Giant Drag fans are a weirdly fantastic and steadfast bunch. Maybe fantastically weird, as well, which I'm pretty sure is even better. Anyways, there's a bunch of different Giant Drag-related art – paintings, drawings, photos, t-shirt designs, everything – out there, hiding here and there all over the Big Bad Internet. It would be spiffy to have one central place to look at all of this art, right? Right. And hey, if Giant Drag sees your Giant Drag-inspired art, and they are inspired by YOUR art, how freaking cool is that full circle of arty inspiring goodness? Pretty dang cool. Pretty dang cool.
So what does this have to do with gum? I'm getting there! I swear!
So here I am, clicking away, making a good little internet home to share with the world all this art that I'm picturing (ha, get it?) will just roll in. I'm choosing background colors and filling out page descriptions and setting fonts and... oh no. I need a header picture. But... but the Giant Drag Fan Art gallery isn't up yet! I don't HAVE any art! I can't draw! I can't paint! It's three AM and I want to get this done without just slapping up a band photo. (But a lovely shortcut, that would have been indeed.) Wait. I have crayons. Oh yeah, can't draw. Wait... I have crayons and I can sure as hell spell the band name....
Do you realize how much crayons ROLL? Especially when you live in part of a leaning old house that recently swayed like you wouldn't believe in the last earthquake. And I guess I don't really want to advertise the crayon brand. Good luck finding tape in this apartment, and it would show anyways. What to do to get them to stay still? What to do...
Eureka!
I really hope my neighbors were watching me through the window. Here's this chick, dancing around in her kitchen in the middle of the night, bringing in lamps and ladders, playing with crayons and... EWWW, did she just pull gum out of her mouth and stick it on that crayon?!
Yep, you bet she did. AND took a bunch of crummy photos. Take that.
So nobody's really using the final result. I had to over-photoshop it because I just have a cheap-o camera and the color was awful (and I have no clue what I'm doing). It's just a placeholder on a site that's not even going to be used for the fan art gallery. But, I did appreciate that silly Christmas bubblegum after all. And now I'm really into seeing what gets submitted to the fan art gallery, after all that. Because lemme tell you, it's gotta be better than this crayon and gum mess:
And okay I lied, it was about rock n' roll. A little bit.
Don't swallow your gum (or put it in your sister's hair), kids. DO submit awesome art to the Giant Drag Fan Gallery. Let's get this full circle of arty inspiring goodness rolling.
