Me and My Aching Back

It was first grade and I was about to bring home my first report card.

"I'll give you a dollar for every 'A'," my dad told me.

Not that I even had a clue about money in those days (er, still don't) but I figured this sounded like a pretty good deal. Only, when I brought home straight A's, guess what? He reneged. I think I'm gonna have to call him up and ask him about that today.

Anyway, I exaggerate. Not quite all A's. One A MINUS...in, of all things, posture. (The minuses in cleanliness--messy desk!--came later.) But I remember thinking, huh? Geez, if the teacher singled out that one area for markdown, I must've been slouching off to Bethlehem, all right. (Obscure reference to Joan Didion there.) As a result, I overcompensated--I trained myself to sit up so straight I think I incurred permanent damage.

Flash forward to the computer years. The hours and hours spent sitting at a desk hovered over a keyboard. My newest obsessions (making book trailers and--shhhhh--creating a website) have left me practically crippled. All because I sit up too straight (damn first grade teacher!). Literally, when I get up in the morning, I am unable to slump. If I could only snap my lower backbone in two, it seems, all would be good.

Either that, or I need to give up this new addiction to the web. Man, I mean, did you ever stop to think about how many fonts exist in the world? Who knew that there are people out there whose sole purpose in life is to sit around creating new ones. And that they were available for me to download for free! 'Course first I had to learn how to unzip 'em...then I had to discover that you can't just throw them up on the web 'cuz not everyone'll have 'em on their computer (resulting in my cool script turning into some boring default)...then I had to learn to make 'em more interesting by painting a picture behind 'em and turning the whole thing into an image by saving it as a jpeg.

Oh, and did I mention, I'm not good with color??

Yeah, so multiply by ten, the times it takes me to come up with anything decent.

This isn't the final result, but...I'm getting there.

That is, unless, my back gives out entirely.

And, yes...upon further review, I screwed the bars up toward the right-hand side! Back to the drawing, er, painting board....