Selfies, Gloom and Madame Bovary

Hey Guys!

School has started up again and I am busy as all get out, but I still want to be faithful to my dear blog friends. I was interviewed in our school's paper a few weeks ago in an attempt to "Get to Know Your School's Cartoonist". In my interview I told them how I began cartooning by recapping events from my day. I would draw myself in any of the situations that had been embarrassing or meaningful throughout my day. We are not talking reams of material. It was more like a cartoon here and there dispersed throughout my commonplace book.

So, I thought that I could do a series of daily "selfie" cartoons for you in the style that I used to do as a self-conscious middle schooler. I am still very self-conscious. But thank the Lord, I am not in middle school any more!

I expect to do about one a day until February.

I hope that you all are doing well. Perhaps you too are getting back to school. I hope that you have some joy in these winter days. They can seem so monotonous and bleak. I know that for me it just seems as though I am going through the motions and the only things I look forward to are sleeping at night, coffee and carbs. Today in English class we were talking about monotony and how for the modern era BOREDOM is the worst of all evils. We are reading Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert. The character of Emma is terribly discontent with her life and she dreams of a life of blissful chaos and adventure with her secret lover.

This is her dream:

Behind four galloping horses, she and her lover had been faring for a whole week towards a new land, never more to return. On and on they went, arm linked in arm and uttering never a word. Ever and anon, gazing down from a mountain top, they would descry a splendid city with domes and bridges, and shipping and orange groves, and cathedrals of white marble with storks' nests in their airy towers. And the pavement would be bright with bouquets of flowers which women in red bodices would proffer as you passed. Bells would be ringing, mules whinnying, and the soft strains of guitars would mingle with the plash of fountains whose soft mist, lightly wafted, brought coolness to the piles of fruit heaped up in pyramids at the foot of gleaming statues that smiled beneath their canopy of spray.

Wow! That is crazy! Imagine all that happening to a person constantly. It sounds exhausting. Even so, at this time I am tempted to similarly spend time in day dreaming myself out of dreary winter in Illinois where I do the same things every day. But I think that the Lord has things to teach me during times of sameness. This is a time when I can be faithful to pray and faithful to rise in the morning with a word of praise even when I want to sleep longer.

I pray that you may have a good winter! I hope that my silly cartoons can bring a smile to your day. Or maybe just a cheery spot of colour.

Love,
Lucy Rose