Christmas Crafting and Low Self Esteem Dreams

I was up until 1:00 this morning creating what are quite possibly the worlds' ugliest Christmas Cards. I mean they are so horrible that I'm not even going to photograph them. You will just have to imagine how terrible they are. I had this brilliant idea wherein I would marbleize cards and then do potato print snowman in glitter on top of them. In my imagination these cards were utterly beautiful, abstract, sophisticated, modern and elegant. In reality they look like something some alien being, and not a friendly one, would make for Christmas as part of his disguise. Christmas Cards by Invader Zim.

The problem, as usual, was that I figured I could just wing this whole project in one night without knowing any of the processes involved or having any of the materials except potatos and my giant horde of miscellaneous antique art supplies. I found this nifty site that told me how to marbleize paper using shaving cream and watercolor by just sort of floating the watercolor on top of an inch of shaving cream. "Shaving cream?!?" I thought. "Cool!" First I tried my shaving cream. It's gel, not cream, and it didn't quite work. Moreover, the smell of an entire pie dish full of it is a bit , uh, overpowering, and anyway I was nearly out. The cards looked muddy, and it was hard to get the shaving stuff off, and my kitchen sink was full of technicolor shaving cream. So I went to BJs, bought shaving cream (Colgate, Arctic Fresh) and a 6 pack and some cigarettes and came back home to start again. The smell of a whole pie dish of Colgate Arctic Fresh is something to be reckoned with, let me tell you. It was so arctically fresh in here that my eyes teared, and when I left the room for a minute I realized that I was nearly blind. Driven mad by the fumes, I decided to use acrylic craft paint instead of watercolor. It makes hideous mud so much faster, after all. Then I cut a potato into a deformed snowman (form of: a hideous mutant snowman! Go wonder twins!) and poured glitter paint onto a paper plate and tried to stamp it. Wow, cool, puddles of glitter paint everywhere. I tried a stencil and a silver pen. Huge glops and blorts of silver ink everywhere - green and purpleish mucky fingerpainted background with blops of silver - how appealing. How charming. How, uh, childlike. Put it over there, behind all the other cards. No, wait, just burn it with the Yule log, and quickly . . . wait, what's that smell? Aaaurrrghh! Burning Arctic Fresh!

So I wisely gave up and went to bed, where I promptly had a dream which tells of extremely low self esteem. Note that rhyme; it would make a nice depressing country song. It was a sex dream, about a person I know on the internet only, and not actually a person for whom I harbor any of those feelings, or at least I didn't think I did, and also he got kind of mixed up with a fellow student of mine from MICA years ago. Anyway it was a wonderful sex dream and everything was great and in fact afterwards we were walking hand in hand and a whole bunch of people we know online were there. It was beautiful and romantic movie like, with a soundtrack, lacking only cartoon birds and flowers and then - he ditched me hard. At which point everyone laughed at me (including my brother who was suddenly there at a desk selling concert tickets) and even the ones who didn't laugh at my face were talking to each other about what a fool I was. I was running around, unable to believe it, trying to hope that it was just a mistake, looking for him, calling him, and realizing, wow, he really did just walk away from me with no intention of ever seeing me again. I actually woke up in tears, real tears. This isn't funny, is it? Damn. It's funny in a really pathetic way, yes it is. I swear.