Made a new website!

Hey folks! I've made a new website!
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www.benbrooksby.com

The Gym

Often times older people come to the gym. for whatever reason they always say yes when they sign up and get asked if they want to pay extra for a trainer. 

The trainer leads them over to the ellipticals and explains to them, "This is an elliptical. You get on it by putting your feet on those foot shaped pedals and you hold on to those ski pole things with your hands." 

The person climbs on uneasily and tries to make it go. It's awkward- like newborn calf awkward. The trainer smiles, "Good! See? Just like walking. do that for an hour. " They go back to the desk. 

Well this fella comes to the gym in his stone washed jeans and rugged outback sneaker/boots. He's got the same shaggy brown haircut he got after he saw the Beatles back in 65. He's wearing really thick glasses, the kind you can't see through from this side. so his eyes are kinda magnified wich makes his confused expression more pronounced. 

They stick him on the machine a few down from me and leave him there. 

Now the nice thing about the gym is that all the ellipticals and treadmills have a TV attached with a little headphone jack so you can plug in and channel surf your hour away. The controls are fairly simple to figure out. There's a power button, a hole for the headphone cord, and two arrows for channel and volume. They're pretty prominent too since they're on a separate box bolted to the control panel on the machine. 

I'm watching my own screen with my headphones in, not really paying attention, but I start noticing this guy's leaning over weird trying to see around his screen and messing with the buttons on the machine. After a minute or two more of this "wrestling match"- reminds me of the old Nature programs when the cheetah finally catches up to the antelope and has to kind of jump on/start eating, except he  doesn't do it so gracefully. I guess he was pretty exasperated. He shouts out to the trainer at the desk, "Hey How do you get some television on this thing!!!" the trainer comes over and I guess decides he'll be safer sitting on a recumbent stationary bike. As he staggers off toward the bikes, I notice The big white T-shirt he's wearing. Looks like it has a marijuana leaf on it. I wondered though because I'm going off illustrations on the bathroom walls in  junior high. And the guy's at least 47. You don't really expect that from this age group. Then I saw the slogan. In big green letters it stated, "Don't step on the grass!!!" 

Good outfit for the gym. 

The Worst Restaurant EVER

I like trying new things

...with food anyway.

 Probably because last Christmas was my first experience with Sushi and I love it. I need to include that fact since what I'm about to tell you would be negative no matter how good the food was if I distrusted unfamiliar foods. I don't. So what I'm going to tell you is doubly disgusting if you do.

And now the story of how I found the worst restaurant I've ever been to in my life.

My cousin told me about this little Sushi place downtown with half off Tuesdays and Thursdays. Most people don't trust half price sushi in a landlocked state 700 miles from the beach, but Sharlene and I were feeling adventurous so we went looking for it.

We found a window along the street with a few flags I didn't recognize and somewhere must've been the words “sushi” or “Asian” or something like that so we parked the car and went in. The withered hostess seemed to be from somewhere else since her answer to, “Do you have sushi?” was to lead us back past the buffet and Mongolian barbeque to a table with some little teal plates wrapped in cellophane..

Lest you picture this wrong let me describe. The entire place from the carpet to the upholstery was a seafoam greenish blue so it felt like climbing into the behind-the-seat area of an old station wagon. And the place was completely empty except for the hostess and a fat man wedged behind a table gulping down noodles. The Mongolian barbeque wasn't on. And, I'm not sure why, but at that moment the raw meat sitting out buffet-style in front of it didn't make me worry. “It's a restaurant.” I thought. “Surely the food is safe.”

It was $8.99 for “allyoucaneebuffet” so like an idiot I said, “Sure.”

The hostess motioned to the back wall smiling and nodding her head. We looked. It was an old stand up freezer filled with dented old chunk encrusted freezer-burned ice cream.

“Oh. Ice cream.” I smiled.

She nodded profusely and went to get our Sprites.

They came free with the buffet. Meanwhile Sharlene and I grabbed plates and started our search for anything sort-of-fresh looking. Our first plates were the most exotic with selections of pork and I think chicken and some fried green bean things. Sharlene took advantage of the sushi table taking three or four little plates. It looked like salmon on mine. As I passed the Mongolian barbeque I chanced a closer look at the meats sitting out in the open.

They didn't look healthy.

Imagine opening a fresh frozen Styrofoam bottomed package of boneless chicken. You unwrap it, turn it upside down, and dump it on your kitchen floor, turn up your heat, and go on vacation. What you see when you get back is what was laying there. It needed buried.

As I got back to the table Sharlene had already pushed aside most of what she had on her plate and was cautiously unwrapping one of her sushis.

She didn't eat it.

I tried some of mine- makes me gag now.

I still remember the smell when I unwrapped it. It was like opening the fridge after a fishing trip and your trout are laying there on a plate with a little bit of trout blood surrounding them, and they're all staring wide-eyed at you like they still can't believe you did this to them.

It was that.

Not like real sushi. Not with tasty spices or whatever it is they roll in there that makes it taste good. This was half an ounce of white rice with my dead goldfish laying on it.

I didn't eat the other piece. The hostess came back out to check on us. Like an idiot, I nodded and smiled, not wanting to hurt her feelings.

I think there's something wrong with me.

Sharlene snuck her unopened sushi back to the buffet while the hostess wasn't looking. I figured as long as it was all-you-can-eat I should get my money's worth. So I searched the buffet again for anything I could safely eat. As I found some shrimp on ice I thought, “Hey! Something refrigerated!” Then I noticed someone hacking out a lung in the kitchen. How appetizing. But maybe whoever it was wasn't working when they made the food yesterday or the day before so I took the shrimp. 

But it smelled like a dumpster.

Sharlene sat across from me with that look.

“What?”

“You shouldn't pay.”

“But we took food... And Sprite!”

“I just don't think you should pay.” She sipped at her sprite.

I looked down at my two unfinished plates. “We could try the ice cream.”

She didn't smile.

“If we hadn't eaten yet, it'd be different, but-”

“We haven't.” She gestured to the unfinished plates.

“So just tell her... I'm not paying?”

I sat uncomfortably for another five minutes fighting my conscience over how to put it tactfully. The hostess finally came out to see if we wanted anything else.

“No. We're done.”

Have you ever realized mid-story that you should have done something differently, but you can't now because you already did what you did?

Well I looked at the lady and then at the food and said, “I'm sorry, but this isn't edible. We thought you served food here... but this is garbage. Have you obtained the proper licensing to serve food publicly? Because this is unacceptable.”

I stood up and took Sharlene by the hand. She beamed back at me with all the love and admiration a woman can beam with. The old lady started apologizing and offering gift certificates for free dinners. We passed them to a starving homeless man sitting just outside on the sidewalk. He grinned toothlessly and lept to his feet to hug me. A reporter for the nightly news was out doing an interview with the mayor but stopped when she saw us helping the poor stranger. The entire camera crew rushed across four lanes of heavy traffic as the music swelled-

I signed the dang receipt vowing never to try miscellaneous “Asian” buffets ever again.

The door swung open and four smiling men came in sniffing the air hungrily. Apparently they'd been here before because the host remembered what each of them wanted to drink. One of them hoped loudly that they still had that sweet and sour pork he loved so much.

We staggered out. I felt a little green. Tossing and turning that night, I was sure I'd be waking up around 3am with that awful churning stagnant garbage-in-your-stomach feeling of food poisonings gone by. But I didn't. I was fine.

Amazing.

So there you go. That's how I found the worst restaurant I've ever been to in my life... and PAID for it.

It even topped the Dollar Wok In next to my first summer job at a jet ski rental shop.

That's pretty bad because that was in Tillicum. 

But that's a story for another day.

Here's my impression of the sushi there. If you want to make things like this from pictures you find with google images like these: 
Then get photoshop.

Blazing Clouds of Mediocrity: This end.

I graduated.

Against all odds I graduated.

Normally you take general requirement classes in the BEGINNING years of school so that at the end you're free to focus on your major.

But I didn't know how all that worked when I started.

Advanced writing, Physical science, and Statistics: the bane of human existence. The only thing standing between me and a degree. I just got the grades back and by some miracle I passed them all with C's. I got an A on my interpretive essay with comments, which means I must have totally bombed that final paper.

Most people wouldn't be very happy with that.

I'm ecstatic.

The enthusiasm meter was at an all time low as this semester started. I'd planned on finishing these classes in the Fall to make room for a capstone film project this semester, but the car accident, doctor's appointments, and recovery usurped the classes, and sianara to los capstone. This was the unfinished business semester. The last burning hoop to jump through for my bachelor's degree.As the semester progressed I struggled to find time for my classes in the slew of writing, photography, and film work I was planning. I'd started this new thing on my net book...The Nag List. A text document subdivided into categories like school, work, freelance, photography, writing, makeup, film and so on. I used to write lists on the backs of envelopes and the margins of notebooks to remember stuff when it got to be too much.

This was the same thing but in digital form with more categories to help me remember projects that slid to the back burner and beyond. I was excited. I'd never lose a great idea again. Whenever I had one, I'd jot it down for future development. The list grew. So did my confidence. But my grades didn't. I couldn't find time in the day for all my homework. Each unit test would bring lower scores. My ship was sinking. I was going to fail.

Faced with this strong probability, I halted everything else I was doing.

The nag list was all still there, but my focus fell on only the top two categories, School crap, and Urgent School Crap(the one marked in red). I stopped going to work, stopped writing. The mountain of photos I'd taken last Christmas would have to wait. I stopped everything to focus brain, body and mind all day every day on minutia. Nothing else existed for me.

...Loved it.

I remember the feeling I had walking out of the testing center following my Science and Stats finals. I was sure with both of them that I'd ride out with a high F. I'd already flunked Stats last winter so I found no comfort in knowing some of the answers. The bulk of it was incomprehensible to me.

I walked out to the scan-tron machine feeling like a firing squad victim. It'd be nice if I they missed, but hitting their target is what they do and these tests weren't designed to help anybody. The kid at the machine took my test and slid it into the machine.

He said, “Thanks.”

I moved to the monitor displaying scores with a ten second refresh rate and random placement in the line up to protect your privacy. 

“Cmon sixty!” I plead to myself. 

I'd done the What-if calculator thing they provide online and felt that if I could just get a solid 60 or maybe even a 59, I could ride the curve and pass the class.

 I scanned for my student number I neglect to list here for fear of privacy violation. 

There it was.

 0505. 

And just to the right of it-

My jaw dropped.

I checked the student number again.

Seventy WHAT! 

I'm naturally bad with numbers, but after a three hour bout with that garbage I'd be hard pressed to spell kat correktley. I turned around and went back just to make sure I'd read it right.

Oh five oh five. Seven and another number! (note: bad with numbers. I don't remember nor does it matter with scores in the low end of mediocrity) I'd done it! I'd more than done it! I did that both days!

Most people would feel pretty jipped about that, but I was happy.

It was finally over.

The last couple of days have been sort of blurry as I regain my equilibrium and catch up with stuff at work. I've felt broken. I haven't been able to write or draw or do anything. My desire was just kinda dead. I worried that school killed me. But today I felt it again. I still feel rusty as I type this, but my light's coming back.

I deleted the School category from my nag list.

Now I can start looking at what I left behind. Turn a few burners back on. I feel my life coming back.

I've got to get back up.

Good things are coming.

-Stay tuned

Pursue your dreams

Find your passion and perfect it.

Made me smile to see someone pursuing something they're good at. Lovein it at about 1:38. Chariot's of Fire- "God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure." I like to think everybody's got a little of that in them. Too much minutia gets in the 
way too much of the time.

So find some way to do what makes your heart sing like this cause without it the world dies.

My Story Boarding Class

I'm taking a class on story boarding from Kee Miller. He reads us part of Tremors every week and we sketch up boards for each shot. Its getting better. Here's a guy getting chased by a worm thingy.

SDIF Episode 1: Cruddy Combo Clan

You can't buy things here. We sold it already.

Unlike most of the posts on this blog, what follows is true and not exagerated at all.

 The eggs at Wal Mart were decimated.

Publish Post

Winter semester started and all the students went there to get new food. 

The only bread left was that crumby generic white stuff you can use if you run out of toilet paper.

Joel says to add some explanation...

Sharlene and I ran over to Walmart because we needed groceries because like everybody else here, we just got back from the Christmas break. The place was absolutely ransacked. When we got to the eggs, it was so unbelievable that I had her get her phone out and take some pictures.

Hot to make a five minute post for New Year's Eve

I wrote something and then did a quick google search for a clock. I saw the dancing cartoon one and thought, "Wow. That looks dumb."

So there it is. You too can make millions doing this same thing! Call now for my free tape that tells you how to order the booklet that has more information in it. I get them for free from my doctor's office but you can buy them now for the low low price of 6 cents.

For those who depend on this blog for all your news...

Today is the last day of the year. Please update your clocks accordingly.

-The Management

On a lighter note,

Here's a horse with its head stuck in a tree.

neither the horse nor the chainsaw were hurt during its removal

for the whole story go to: http://www.yourhorse.co.uk/Your-Horse-News/Search-Results/General-news/October-08/Oct-21-Mare-gets-head-stuck-in-tree/

Sometimes children have the same problem

This would be really bad if it was your arm

That sure would be awkward.

Why Nobody Likes Santa

Every year thousands of Children are placed unwillingly on the laps of men dressed this way to fulfill a desire no child has.

Here's the problem: A parent will say, "Santa Claus is at the mall. Do you want to go sit on his lap?"

The child nods his head about a million times on the way to see Santa, but the lap is there, and screams of agony ensue.

Why? Didn't the child want this?

No.

When a parent says, "Santa Claus is at the mall. Do you want to go sit on his lap?"

All the child hears is, "Santa Claus --mall -- - want?"

Maybe a mathematical equation will help to illustrate.

According to grown-ups the North Pole is full of toys, and Santa's basically King. So you're telling me that this old man with nothing better to do than give away free toys is sitting at the mall right now waiting to take orders?

What sane kid's gonna turn that down?

But then you get there and its not even close to what you expected. The guy smells like someone else's stinky laundry detergent. There's no flying deer anywhere and when you ask him about it, he gives you some lame excuse about them being back at the north pole because the elves wanted to play games with them.

If you had flying deer, would you leave them at home?

Who is this guy?

And why can't he stop laughing?

So as you begin questioning the legitimacy of the experience he tells you to sit on his lap.

Fat chance Dirt Bag!

So there.

I wasn't any more interested in sitting on an old man's lap than any other kid in America. 

The only reason any of us ever waited in that dumb line was to make sure we got on the "Commercially Successful Toys" list so we wouldn't end up with that boring wooden crap the elves were always making in movies.

This was honestly supposed to be worth staying up all night for.

For the protection of our readers:

Please be cautioned this holiday season of the dangers of cup cakes in personal vehicles. Be advised. Cup holders are not for cup cakes. The design fails completely. You will loose the use of both the cup holder and the cake, also your fingers will be covered with a lot of sticky icing from trying to get it out.

What if you don't have a chimney?

Only slightly less popular than the Tooth Fairy or Easter Bunny was Santa's estranged nephew, Larry, who used to sneak into houses by climbing up through the toilet to leave presents for the children in the hallway or on the stairs to be discovered later by falling parents. The tradition never caught on and was finally banned by the Imaginary Persons And Creatures Board of Responsibility on grounds that the public at large neither recognized nor celibrated the tenth of February. He now practices psychiatry in Saskatchewan. 

Bed Wetting

It's interesting that as a child you think you're the loan freak when in fact the truth is that most of the kids at school only knew what it was because they did it.


You're really only one step up from diapers. I'm pretty sure a few kids in my kindergarten class still wore them.
Imagine you didn't know what it was.
Imagine the shock of first finding out that it even happened; that people actually went to the bathroom while still laying in bed... all over themselves.


Imagine that reaction.
Then compare it with how they all acted when somebody actually got accused of doing it.


Not even close.
They knew very well that feeling of relief; the growing warmth; the unstoppable dread as you realized that you weren't in a bathroom at all! It was a dream! This was a bed! Your bed! You tried to stop but it was impossible. So then you'd have to lay there covered in a gallon of your own urine at 1:13 in the morning wondering what to do next.


They were guilty; every last one of them.


Accusing the ugly kid made everybody feel better though.

Don Poncho

Don Poncho at work from Ben Brooksby on Vimeo.

Why Visiting the Doctor is Among my Favorite Activities

The cackling latin lady in the next office was going berzerk. Then she told us all how funny it was. According to her she couldn't breath.

Wish that were true.

I'm pretty sure if she wasn't breathing then that sound wouldn't have been there.

Anyway I better explain my doctor's visit just now.

I got there ten minutes late. The shady kid in front of me wearing a camouflage shoplifting coat says he's here for the same doctor I'm seeing. The receptionist twinkles a happy, "I'll get you checked in." and the kid skulks to a chair. 

I walk up to say I'm also here for that doctor.

She doesn't twinkle. I can sit over there. Preferably in the garbage can.

I don't know if there's a lot of paperwork that has to be done, or if someone has to drive to his house and remind him he's seeing patients today but it always takes a long time. I thought maybe by getting there late, they'd be waiting for me and I could just get rushed in since they were planning on seeing me ten minutes ago.

no.

I pick up a magazine to thumb some pages and find out there are people out there making horse magazines. Kind of interesting if you want to know which splint to buy this season in case one of your thoroughbreds gets a sprain. I put it down to entertain myself with the wallpaper and ceiling tiles.

After another twenty minutes, the nurse comes out and asks for the shady character. He shuffles back with her with a suspicious look on his face as if he might have some of the magazines packed away in that coat. I sit for an arcane amount of time before she finally returns for me. Then its the weigh-in, and the temperature, and the blood pressure and the pulse oximeter. Finally she finishes and leaves me in the little exam room to wait another half hour or so by myself while the doctor gets a cappuccino or something.

My doctor is from Israel. But leave the joy stained imagery of Fiddler on the Roof out of it. This particular visit is one of the last two I will have to endure.

As a sidenote, I'd better backstory this a little. I was in a big accident three months ago. Broke my neck. Had a post op infection and got re operated on and the fun of having a PICC Line installed. If you're a doctor and I used the wrong number of letters somewhere in there, don't correct me, I don't care. I know more about PICC lines than you will ever know even though you went to school for umpteen years so you could do something frivolous like save lives.

No. A PICC line simply means you get the joy of playing hospital every eight hours for the rest of your life or until they take it out, whichever comes first. The way mine was going I thought it might be the first choice. Anyway, during the ten weeks I'm playing hospital I get to meet with this doctor every week to bolster my confidence and cheer me along the way. Oh and get stabbed weekly by a nursing student.

Enough background.

I'm sitting there somewhat elated that before too much longer I won't be seeing this doctor again or get stabbed, when he tells me once I'm done taking antibiotics, I'll still have a high risk of the infection coming back because all they really do is suppress infection. Since I have permanent hardware in my neck, "It has maybe..." he wrinkles his face trying for optimism,

"fifty fifty chance of returning with hardware."

He grins.

"In that case, if spine has fused, we take hardware out and repeat treatment." His eyes glint hopefully.

"If it hasn't fused then you'll be in a cast for..." he pauses to soak up the joy of conveying such news, "six months... sometimes longer." I stare back blankly, unwilling to give him the shock and amazement he's hoping for.

"A full body cast then?" I ask.

He nods vigorously. I feel my neck.

"That'd be inconvenient."

"Oh yes! I remember I was finishing medical school back in the late 70's. I used to moonlight as a... a nurse."

I nod.

"Two schoolmates of mine; they were from my high school in Israel, got into a car crash and both had to wear spine casts in the ward I was working."

He smiles, deeply satisfied by the memory and the thought that one day soon he might relish the same satisfaction seeing me in such a cast.

"Was very embarrassing for them." He chuckles. "They shouldn't have crashed their car."

Wise man. I bet they never thought of that.

Reassured that my weekly doctor visits might not actually be coming to an end, I skipped happily to the lab to get stabbed once more by a young lady of almost steady-handedness who I assumed knew what she was doing.

After-all, she was wearing pink pajamas. 

How I Won The Crayon War

Thought I'd better explain the header on this blog.

For those of you to which numbers have a great deal of meaning and happen to know my age, the label at the top of the blog might have you a bit confused. 1987 doesn't seem to be a significant year in my life.

The answer is to be found in just how many years after my birthday on the first of July 1982 the September of 1987 had me.

Five.

I was five and it was school that became a part of my life that year like a relative moving into your attic with no plans to vacate the premises for a good long while.

You see, my mother was an artist and so i guess it never occurred to her to correct us in our artistic endeavors at home because art is art and children are apt to do whatever they like including coloring outside lines.

But when school became a welcome guest in my life, it soon became unwelcomed and loathsome because of the idea in my teachers' heads that there is a right and wrong to crayons.

Now I'm an adult I can see that crayons have very little application in grown up society and if any of the A grade receiving children of days past moved on to jobs coloring maps in map shops because of the precision with which they first outlined each country, then filled in the body while keeping painstakingly within the lines, I'll swim to Bangladesh with the next herd of reindeer going that way.

Not that keeping within lines ever concerned me. I didn't much care how teachers "liked" or didn't like my work. My first memory of really being frustrated with teachers using art as a vehicle for societal conformity happened because it was a requirement for leaving the classroom at the end of the day.

My kindergarten single-wide trailer sat in a swamp in South Carolina. My teacher, Ms. Bailey, decided this particular day to reinforce the idea that we were prisoners she ought to make it harder to leave. Our assignment was to color a self portrait and bring it to her to be ridiculed before returning home for afternoon cartoons. I felt confident I could do this and so soon had my paper in hand, my bag on my back, and myself in the line forming to head out to freedom.

She stopped me when she saw the hair.

In my childhood I had very light blonde hair. Being light blonde and five I assumed in my ignorance that a white crayon might work since other children sometimes called my hair white.

I had eight crayons. It didn't take long to see I was deficient in "light blonde."

She frowned at me and explained why I was confused and that "your hair isn't white Benjamin."

I turned back to the table. Only the five or six really mentally retarded kids in my class remained.

I tried to erase the white and found out that doesn't do anything but smear the white with a lot of black from the outline.

Yellow.

Add yellow to white and you should get blonde. Right? It was worth a try. But the yellow just sort of smeared over the top. It looked really crappy.

She looked angry this time. I wasn't sure what she expected me to do, but this obviously wasn't it.

"Your hair is not yellow Benjamin." You may start to understand why I go by Ben.

This went on for about a half hour.

Me being told what color my hair wasn't, going back, and continuing to see how inadequately equipped my stupid kindergarten crayons were at recreating realistic lifelike colors.

I think the paper finally ripped as I tried unsuccessfully to mix brown and gold into the mess my head had become. Ms. Bailey, its a wonder the kind soul never married, finally let me go home because the afternoon kids were filing in and an eight year old returning for his third try wanted the seat I was in.

Another pleasant experience in coloring came what seemed like years later because we moved to Florida in between, but was really just the next year in first grade.

We were in my math class.

I guess I should elaborate. For some strange reason the entire school besides the office and the library consisted of trailers connected by covered walkways patrolled constantly by power hungry fifth graders in orange road construction vests. Many of them I believe are  still wearing one.

It was this math class where for a number of weeks our time was spent numbering graph paper. We sat busily filling in each square of graph paper with numbers. I think the teacher called this "counting exercize".

I apologize for the lack of detail on the teacher but I had seven. I think my goal in school at this point was filling my folder as thick as I could before the end of the year. This was accomplished by never turning anything in. Every paper I got whether homework assignment, permission slip, or note to my parents about my lack of drive was added to the two inch thick collection I proudly carried with me.

I also remember spending much of my class time pushing my eyelids from the sides to make the room go sideways so the teacher seemed to stand on the wall. It was a productive year.

Counting exercizes lost their intrigue when I reached a hundred and realized the numbers just started over again like the double digits. There were no new numbers. 
1-9 was all there ever would be. This really disappointed me. I remember thinking adults were a lot dumber than I'd imagined if the only things really  separating us were this and height .

Some of the more eager students at my table got all the way into the four and five hundreds.

One day, as a result of a parent teacher conference or threats of firing my math teacher gave us something else to do.

Worksheets.

All I noticed was the picture of the turtle smiling back at me. I heard the word crayons and so put two and two together- MATH- and got mine out to begin coloring. Here was an assignment I could sink my teeth into. As the other children at my table began solving the addition problems at the top of the page to unlock which colors went with which number in the picture, I gathered up every ounce of observable reference material in my head and began.

My brother had two turtles at home. I was familiar with the complexity of colors making up the shell and skin of the North American Terrapin. I pulled out a brown crayon and started on the rim of the shell. Whoever drew this hadn't looked at real turtles much. It was way too curvy and I'd never seen a real turtle smile.

Gasps of horror suddenly exploded from the ignoramuses I was forced to share table space with. "What are you doing?"

"You're not even in the lines!"

"I'm telling!"

A hand shot up followed by the other arm rested horizontally across the head to help hold up the signal arm. She would wait however long it took to ensure my demise.

I'm not sure if the teacher ever got around to helping my dismayed table-mate or not. I guess if counting was really considered challenging, then addition was bound to stump a few in the audience. I apologize for the lack of detail here but I honestly don't recall any response to my work.

I was proud of what I'd accomplished with some white and yellow here, and some greens, browns, and oranges there. It really resembled Tom. That was my brother's turtle, the browner of the two. I was really pleased with my work and who cared what a bunch of kids with boring green turtles thought of it. I was sure my teacher would appreciate my creativity if she'd seen it, but of course, if she didn't come over to answer the raised hand, then she missed her chance.

Like everything else, It went in my folder.

Hence the blog undertitle, Coloring outside the lines since 87.

Its kind of funny. From my failed experiences coloring as a child, you'd think I'd never qualify for a coloring job. But I did.

I'm a colorist.

That means I'm in charge of the color balance, saturation, and contrast of footage in the TV shows, commercials, and movies I work on.

So I guess if you or someone you know is struggling with school, I'm a bad example. But I'm happy because its much better than filling graph paper with numbers for a living.

Brooksby Color Demo Reel from Ben Brooksby on Vimeo.