Typing in the Icebox

Sitting in my bracingly cold office seems to be waking me up again, which is good. I was starting to zone out as I finished this latest batch of papers, and I have a bit more work to do before beddy-bye, so the briskness is useful.

Another bracing fact revealed to me this weekend is the fact that my mother is reading my blog on occasion. Gracious. So from now on, you'll see a lot less of the blasphemous profanity I'm wont to use, and a lot fewer discussions of how my childhood and upbringing warped me into the hideous mutant you read about in these pages. No, those disgusting habits of thought and self-destructive tendencies all came from the example of my shiftless friends in high school. Shame on them.

I heard this news at our now annual pumpkin carving party, held on Saturday. For the last few years it's been a delightful event: our family all crowd into our little house and spend an afternoon and evening... well, carving pumpkins. I am brutally mocked every year for taking the longest to produce a jack-o-lantern or, in the worst cases, not getting one done at all. I'm afflicted at those time with the same malaise that kept me from posting here for so long: my desire to do a terrific job keeps me from starting the job at all. I'm so overwhelmed with the possibilities for error and misstep, and so unable to make a decision as to a course of action, that I spend all evening fretting and almost none of it carving sweet pumpkin flesh. Not only that, but a handful of us--my mother-in-law, my wife's brother-in-law, and my father, as well as my eldest niece and nephew--have been striving these past years to create ever more elaborate 'lanterns, complete with shading, see-through panels, and copyrighted characters; my mother-in-law went so far as to graft clear marbles into the pumpkin skin to enhance the light effects. This year saw outstanding renditions of Scooby Doo, Darth Maul, Snoopy asleep atop a Peanuts-style pumpkin, and little Nemo (I fully expect legal squads from Hanna-Barbera, LucasFilm, Disney, and the Schultz estate to come barrelling through the door tomorrow evening, lawsuits in hand). Of course, these people spent hours at the carving table working with tiny awls and planes, but we were impressed.

This year, I only handled one pumpkin, and my carving was all done at the direction of the boys, so I actually finished the first pumpkin. Granted, it was a simple two-eyes, one-nose, spooky-mouth job, but it existed. I felt okay this year, simply because I feel like I'm putting creative endeavor into other areas, so my squash-slicing skills are not as vital as once they were. Now if only I could produce something at some point, I might validate that instinct...