Overcoming one of my deepest fears

I have never explicitly admitted this to anyone:

I am afraid I will fail.

Every day, I am afraid I will fail.

Sometimes, I catch myself thinking maybe it's better if I don't try at all on something because if I don't try it then I can't fail at it. What a terribly paralyzing thought.

That's why there's some deep part of me that's delighted by the story of the 80 year old lady in Spain who set out to touch up an antique painting at her church and it didn't quite go as planned.

Left: The original painting.

Middle: The deteriorating painting, before touch-up.

Right: The painting after being attacked by a sweet old lady with good intentions. The result was described by a BBC reporter as "a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic."

I'm not happy at her failure, but I'm happy that she was still willing to try. Granted, a $3 craft store canvas may have been a better place for her to try, but it delights me that she's trying.

Liberated and inspired by her brassiness, I turned my Doing Dial up a notch and touched up some classic artworks, myself. I think they turned out splendidly, don't you?

The Mono Lisa

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The Birth of Ill-fitting Tunics

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Hairy Gothic

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Girl(?) with a Pearl Earring

Anatomy of an Eye Cookie

A patient brought these cookies in as a thank you after eye surgery.

This may just be arising from my jealousy over those long luscious eyelashes, but I still think something *might* be anatomically wrong here:

The Many Faces of Elmo

Dave's cutie niece is having a birthday soon. The birthday party invitation looks like this:



I am Elmo. The one, the only, Elmo.



But the first time I saw the invitation, it was hanging on a refrigerator by means of a round black magnet, so it looked like this:



Naturally, my question was, "Dave, why is your niece having a Marilyn Monroe Elmo birthday party?"  Naturally, his reply was, "That's more than a Marilyn Monroe. That's a rather large, potentially-cancerous growth."  Poor Elmo.



Hijinx ensued. The next thing we knew poor Elmo had other problems to worry about: 

Elmo has a concussion. 

 Then things went from bad to worse:

Elmo is very very VERY excited. Or scared. Or has a problem with cocaine.

 Poor Elmo. It's hard being a Muppet these days.



Birthdays are for the young

As I accumulate years, I feel like I pick up a little more wisdom, a few more gray hairs, a few more little wrinkles that don't go away even when I relax my face, a few more souvenirs, a lot more memories. I worry that I pick up a little more jadedness, too. I think I was a sweeter person when I was younger -- before I learned about sarcasm, criticism, irony, and loss.

My mom had her first stroke when I was about 12 years old, and has had several more since then. Each one has whittled away parts of who she is and what she can do. My mom's strokes changed a lot of things for her and for our whole family, but one of the beautiful gifts that came from such a terrible disease was that she lost a lot of that hard-edged cynicism that brands us as adults. With the hard edges removed, there's this wonderfully authentic sweetness that bubbles up to the forefront. She's my best role model for staying young at heart. 

File this under the very large category of "Why I love my mother." 

She sent me this for my 31st birthday, with total sincerity: