You Only Like It Because

In which Ducks rambles about things rather incoherently because things never sound as good on paper as they did in her head

You know how when you're younger adults always ask you those questions? How old you are, what you want to be when you grow up, what your favorite color is? I guess it's a requirement for all teachers and friends of Mom's and Sunday school helpers or something, to bombard small children with these questions.

Anyway, when I was younger and they would ask me those kinds of things and they wanted to know what my favorite color was, I always said brown. Every time. Just “brown”. And then I'd hide behind Mom's legs because I was not an outgoing small child.

My older sister, who like all older sisters was a bit bossy and controlling and thankfully has grown out of that phase, pointed out that I only said brown because it was the color of horses, who were then- and still are- my favorite animal. And, as that was indeed the reason, I felt as though she had uncovered some sort of big dark secret that no one should know about. I felt ashamed, and started telling everyone that my favorite color was blue.

Now despite my rambling, there actually is a point to that story, and the point is this: I had no reason to be ashamed of saying my favorite color was brown. There was no reason to be ashamed of liking the color brown because it reminded me of all the horses I did not yet own. Obviously my seven-year-old brain did not understand that, especially as at the time I idolized my sister and did whatever she said, but looking back on it now I can see that I was right. And maybe this example is a little silly and a little impractical, because who cares about favorite colors anymore? But I've found that though the story is silly, the point does still apply. Because people get this all the time. “You only like that movie because your favorite actor was in it.” “You only like that game because the graphics are good.” “You only like wearing that because your friends do.”

People don't seem to understand that there is nothing wrong with that. It's like saying “you only like kittens because they are soft and cute.” Well, yeah. What other reason is there to like kittens? That's what kittens are.

Life does not come with a manual of rules that say “You must like Thing if and only if you like all parts, the parts as a whole, and the pieces that make up the parts, equally, and you must prove to everyone that this is the only reason you like Thing.” No. People are different, there's no denial of that, and being different, they have different tastes and different aspects of Thing that they like. And that's fine. If they only like the Lord of the Rings because Orlando Bloom is in it, well, that's their problem and not yours.

*gets off soapbox*

In Which Ducks Tries Upcycling and the Stars and Planets Must Be Aligned Because it Actually Works

My terribly anticlimactical story of how I persevered in a skill I'm no good at that will probably not yield satisfactory results again, to gain a shirt I can't wear because of a freaky blue face.   

I am not a crafty person. I have many talents, but crafting is not one of them. Really. Things that are not supposed to explode tend to explode when I do crafts with them.

So I went through my closet a couple of weeks ago because my roommate moved out and I was kind of cleaning up after her and putting away all of the things that she didn't have time to pack or room to take with her. And for some reason that led to going through all of the t-shirts that I've ever owned and picking out ones that were stained/too big/too small/too ripped to be recognizable. And, realizing that I had quite a lot of these, I decided that for once in my life I was going to Be Crafty. I was going to take these shirts and Do Things With Them and they would be Cool. Which sounds fantastic in theory but in reality is just a little harder to execute.

After numerous forays into the worlds of YouTube, Pinterest, and various craft blogs, looking at many many kinds of t-shirt projects that, of course, look perfect in the air-brushed professional blog photos, I decided that I was ready to dive in. I was going to make a scarf.

It was a beautiful, dazzling failure. I didn't have enough fabric and I cut the strips too thin and the shirts I was trying to use didn't even match. I didn't have any idea what I was doing, on top of that, because instead of actually reading the tutorial I just looked at the picture and figured I could work from there. I'm an idiot like that sometimes.

That project is currently sitting on the floor in my bedroom, waiting for me to dispose of it in proper fashion (probably something involving blowtorches and gasoline). But! It did not deter me from my adventures in upcycling.

My next adventure involved a very small shirt and a lot of string and you know what? I'm not even going to go there. This project has also been disposed of. And still, because I am a stubborn mule, I forged on.

A couple of weeks ago my father went to a computer geek conference thing with his fellow computer geeks. For some reason they had all these shirts, dark blue with a freaky face on them, and for some reason he decided to get one for each of us even though they were all obviously too big. His kind of souvenir, I suppose. Whatever makes him happy. Anyway this morning I unearthed my blue-freaky-face-too-big shirt from under a pile of things and thought Ah-ha!

Usually when I thing Ah-ha things generally turn out terribly but this time--I ruthlessly scissored the shirt, without any sort of pattern or tutorial and only a very vague idea of what it was going to look like, and surprisingly , it turned out all right. I mean, nothing spectacular, but it's the right size and mostly symmetrical and there aren't any pieces sticking out where they shouldn't, so I'm pretty pleased with it. Of course, there's the slight problem of the freaky blue face staring at passersby from somewhere between my chest and midsection, but, you know, you can't have everything.

And that is my terribly anticlimactical story of how I persevered in a skill I'm no good at that will probably not yield satisfactory results again, to gain a shirt I can't wear because of a freaky blue face.