Before
Growing up, my sisters and I always carved pumpkins for Halloween. Being the least artistic child (well, Janay and I are probably tied), I always did a poor job of it, choosing to stick to the classic "two eyes and a toothy grin" model. Mom and Dad always pretended that it looked as good as the others, but in my heart I knew I was a brutal pumpkin carver.
Now that I'm a grown up, I don't carve pumpkins anymore; I usually choose to appreciate them from afar. For example, Pinterest has lots of cool pumpkin carvings that I browse through during boring lectures. I'll never understand the people who look at these designs and think to themselves, "I'm totally going to try that." For me, that's akin to looking at a pyramid and thinking, "Can't be that tough to build."
But this year, my dad grew pumpkins in his garden and I was encouraged (required) to take a few with me back to Regina for Halloween decorating. So here I am, the night before Halloween, preparing to decorate one of three pumpkins so I can say I am both a good daughter and a generic celebrator of Halloween. (The remaining three pumpkins go to my boyfriend, who's more of the ambitious type.)
But rather than carving out my normal grimace, I'm going to steal an idea off Pinterest. Because on that site, there are tons of people just like me who cannot wield a steak knife to create a masterful gourd.
I'm going to melt crayons using a lighter to create an artistic design full of colour. This is a good idea because I have lots of crayons I'm not using and I can add sparkles to the melted wax to make my pumpkin super pretty. There's also a lower risk of me cutting myself with a knife, and I don't have to scrape out the inside of my pumpkin and make a huge mess in my apartment. The risks include: burns, burning my apartment building down, running out of crayons, glitter everywhere.
I think it's worth a shot. I'll finish this column with the results.
After
Relative success. I didn't burn myself or anyone else, so that's good, but my short attention span really hurt the overall quality of my work. It would have taken me probably an hour to do a good job, but I scraped out a decent project in 30 minutes. So that's something. On the plus side, I used the time I saved to bake an apple crisp pizza and watch season three of Community!
Tonaya Marr had a nightmare that her professor was in her room demanding she come up with a focus statement for her dreams. But she couldn't think up a focus statement, so he made her stay awake until 4 a.m. In other words, midterm stress has hit, and it has hit hard. You can reach Tonaya at tonaya.marr@gmail.com or on Twitter @TonayaMarr.
