A little bit about me
Growing up, I was the musical one and my sister was the artistic one. I played piano and clarinet; she drew horses and princesses.
She drew a lot of horses, honestly. Had a real horse fixation. Shocking, I know, in a young teenaged girl.
She’s a year and a half older than me; the way that school enrollment deadlines work where we grew up, she was two years ahead in school. We went to the same elementary school, but when I hit the fourth grade she had graduated to the sixth grade: middle school.
That year, my fourth grade, there was a school-wide themed drawing competetion to celebrate the Year of the Horse. I entered a drawing of a horse in mid-leap, drawn from a reference photo I found in the school library. It wasn’t a great drawing—my sister later aptly (if a bit viciously) christened it the Weiner Horse—but it was pretty decent for a freehand drawing by an untrained nine-year-old.
And it won. And that just killed my sister. Killed her dead, not so much because my horse had too long of a body but because she would surely (and this is no doubt true) have won the contest hands-down if she hadn’t gone off to middle school. That was kind of hard on her.
The second place winner was a large, impressionistic portrait of a horse head that would have been really goddam impressive if it weren’t a tracing of the large, impressionistic portrait of a horse head featured on the poster advertising the contest. Talk about brass balls, kid.

That made me laugh out loud at work on a Saturday! Brass balls…thanks. What a dork that kid was. I guess plagiarism doesn’t apply when you’re that age.
Savanna - January 6th, 2007 at 10:16 amWallace! How you doing, kiddo?
And yeah: if you can’t spell it, it’s not enforcable! Or something like that. I like to imagine that he’s working in the cookie-cutter manufacturing industry.
Josh Millard - January 13th, 2007 at 7:02 am