A new frame for my mug, and a new mug.

I am currently working on a guest post for a well-known Deaf travel blogger, but I can spare a few minutes to give my blog some love.

When I visited the mainland a few weeks back, after the bike ride with Zoée, I went on a short mission downtown. You see, I came across a post on Instagram that featured a pair of glasses that were practically designed for me:

Thus began the debate in my head: Do I need them? Not exactly, but I haven’t purchased new eyewear since 2014. But I already have four great frames in rotation. Do I really need these? No, but… look. Look at them. Ok, what if… what if!!! I tried them on first? Maybe they won’t look that great?

They did tho:

So, here I am trying to show off my newest eyewear while my round son attempts to give my locks a crude trim.

Many people have no qualms about spending hundreds on shoes, which sometimes only last a year. It’s socially acceptable to own more than four pairs of shoes. Somehow, when it comes to something that you wear right on your face, four pairs of eyeglasses seems excessive.

So be it. I now have four pairs in rotation. As far as eyeglass frames go, all four frames are fairly out-there. I don’t have to deal with reactions such as, “Whoa, that’s… different.” Instead, I get, “It’s so you!” And then people can forget that I have the most boring wardrobe ever.

It’s a good thing that I’ve been asking myself whether a purchase is justified, but it’s also the reason why, after six (!) months, Yann and I have just three melamine plates. Our apartment suite has a dishwasher which we’ve never used because we don’t own enough dinnerware to justify using it.

I’m not cheap, just super selective about what I spend my money on. I also can’t deny that advertising doesn’t work on me. Nice job, Instagram.

I was recently gifted a coffee mug:

Unlike the frames, this mug was actually made for me! Well, for me, Katrina, and Robbie.

Katrina and Robbie are two of the people who went on the Quadra Island climbing trip. While hanging out at the campsite, Robbie was like, “Hey, let’s play a game.”

He explained that it was kind of like The Telephone Game. Oh no, I thought. I associate this game with being completely left out in elementary school. In elementary school, one of the teachers’ solution was to have the interpreter listen to the message, interpret it to me in sign language, and then have me repeat whatever she just interpreted to the next person, which she’d have to interpret again anyway. It was fucking pointless.

But the way this game worked was: The first person writes a sentence on a piece of paper which then gets passed on to the next person. Person #2 has to illustrate the sentence. The third person then provides their interpretation of the illustration.

I was the one who started the game:

“I pledge an atom.”

Miraculously, after two rounds, the atom remained in the game, but a ghost and a casually dressed Gandalf cropped up. This was the penultimate interpretation:

I love that this is Katrina’s handwriting. More than that, I love that Robbie thought to get custom mugs made for us! Now the three of us have matching mugs that originated from the nonsensical phrase, “I pledge an atom.”

It’s wonderful. It’s also wonderful how I indeed needed more mugs to dominate the space in the kitchen cabinets, which are currently filled with pencil crayons, loose change, sketchbooks, and chargers rather than actual kitchen-y stuff.

Katrina was slightly bashful about her handwriting, which she called chicken scratch, having been preserved on a drinking vessel. As someone who has had to decipher thousands of handwriting, I can say with confidence that Katrina has above-average handwriting, particularly for someone under the age of 50.

My handwriting does not get noted for its beauty, but its output speed. As a teenager, once I realized how often I’d need to handwrite just to communicate with people, I devised a way of writing that used the fewest possible pen strokes. This is why I don’t even tittle my “i”s. Frenetic, but legible chicken scratch is what I have.

The mug doesn’t show any of this, but my genius has been sunken into it.

I pledge an atom.