Bricks

I thought about Isabella today. When I first created Isabella, she was young and carefree. She was in her twenties. She was not very sophisticated. She looked like this:

Ballpoint Pen on Moleskine Ruled Notebook

Throughout the years Isabella assumed a different look and outlook. She had many adventures. She went through several transformations. She became more introspective. I also drew her in different ages. I drew her as a second grader, a high school and college student. One day I would draw her as a mother or wife and the following day as a young woman who just graduated from college or a young girl playing with the neighbors.

Isabella is not always dark. In fact she has many light moments. She is like beer, even though she does not drink beer: Dark, Pale, Lite, Regular. I am not really sure about the last label but you get my drift. I don't drink beer either, so I really don't know all the classifications. This is an Isabella Lite post. Today a friend sent the following email. I usually glance at them and then delete them but this one was sent by a very smart friend who knew I don't like joke emails so I figured it must be worth reading. I came up with this drawing. It is what Isabella would do with 400 bricks. This is a far cry from yesterday's post.

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How to Properly Place Employees

1. Put 400 bricks in a closed room.


2. Put your new hires in the room and close the door.


3. Leave them alone and come back after 6 hours.


4. Then analyze the situation.

A-If they are counting the bricks, put them in the Accounting Department.
B-If they are recounting them, put them in Auditing.C-If they have messed up the whole place with the bricks, put them in Engineering.
D-If they are arranging the bricks in some strange order, put them in Planning.
E-If they are throwing the bricks at each other, put them in Operations.
F-If they are sleeping, put them in Security.
G-If they have broken the bricks into pieces, put them in Information Technology.H-If they are sitting idle, put them in Human Resources.I-If they say they have tried different combinations, they are looking for more, yet not a brick has been moved, put them in Sales.
J-If they have already left for the day, put them in Marketing.
K-If they are staring out the window, put them in Strategic Planning.L-If they are talking to each other, and not a single brick has been moved, congratulate them and put them in Top Management.

Finally, if they have surrounded themselves with the bricks in such a way that they can neither be seen nor heard from, put them in Congress.

Coming Up Next:

The Sadistic Teacher or How To Lose Your First Best Friend

One Day, Part II: Oh Damn!

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Isabella did not see it coming. Before she could react he punched her on her left eye. She feared the worst. She struggled.

The mugger got more than Isabella's necklace.

The mouse got the cheese.

The cat got the mouse.

Isabella lost her eyesight for two weeks. She lost not just her necklace. For the first time in her life she really knew what hatred felt like.

She gained unwanted and surprising lessons in life. Young Isabella, egalitarian, always thought the best of people, no more. Her life was forever changed.

"Oh!"

One Day Part I

Okay. I have been informed by friends who know me that my new blog Ces and Her Dishes Part II is totally uncharacteristic of me. They know me as a happy person with a positive outlook and a contagious love for life. Now they don't know how to react to my blog. I told them to just admire the illustrations but they are not taking it. They looked very sad and very concerned and they were frowning.

To all my friends: I am having fun writing about Isabella. Maybe I was a closet melancholic and decided to come out, maybe I just love drawing in black and white. Someone I love suggested that I should draw Isabella catching the biggest bass and the most number of fish in a tournament held against three men several years ago. I could do that too. Still my friends want color. I am considering these suggestions. In the meantine,

One day...

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Isabella decided to stay in the new place. She told herself it was only temporary. She lived with her best friend Elizabeth and another woman named Joy. She met many other women who were very kind and wonderful to her. In no time she had many friends. The women loved to dote on her because she was the youngest...and they were curious to meet the young woman who made waves on the first day of her job! Isabella was fun to be with and was very funny. She got invited to all the dinners and parties. The women invited her to go with them wherever they went. They treated her like a younger sister and she in turn treated them like her older sisters. There were so many parties to attend and places to visit. She was absorbing life in many angles, opening her vision and her mind. She even found the strange and scary place rather quaint.

One day within a month and a half after she arrived in the place, Isabella donned her fedora and fall coat. A block from where she lived, she walked to the bank in the corner of Grand and Market streets.

Something happened and it affected her for the rest of her life.

An Unexpected Place

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Isabella got off the train and immediately realized the place was not as she had expected. It had a beautiful name. She thought it was one of those New England towns with little white chapels and homes with picket fences. It did not help that her friends who lived in that place sent her beautiful photographs of themselves posing in beautiful parks which now she knew was in another city. She pondered her options and one of them was to turn back and leave.

Beware, the grass is not always greener on the other side of the mountain.

Don't Kill A Cockroach With A Shotgun

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The world is full of pests. The most annoying are those orthopterous insects in the family Blattidae. They move their flattened bodies rapidly. They are supposed to be nocturnal but when she was a young woman Isabella saw them at her friends' apartments. They loved to appear during parties probably disturbed by the noise of the revelers and the smell of food.

That is why Isabella did not cook. She had an asthenic figure and had to buy her clothes in the Junior's department. She was a Size 0 and the adult section of her favorite apparel store started at Size 3.

So she ate at her friends' and they loved to dote on her because of her charming personality. She hated cockroaches. One flew smacked right into her ear one night when she was dating a young handsome man in the tropics where cockroaches flew and harassed people. She hates them with a passion.

And A Little Side Discussion:

"Don't kill a cockroach with a shotgun."

I said to my daughter one day.

She replied,

"Mommy, cockroaches don't have blood."

I replied,

"I know."

"Then where did the pool of blood come from?",

she asked.

I said

"Not from the cockroach."

Then I added,

"It's best to just squish them with your foot."

"Some solutions have a certain unexpected finality."

A Mother Is Never Off Duty

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POOPED

She walked all day. She just implemented a project and had to support her clients. She talked to them and answered their questions until her throat became dry. She was so tired and exhausted. When she got home she did not even take off her clothes and shoes. She just propped herself on the giant ottoman and leaned her legs and feet against the wall.

.

As she laid there she stared at the hideous wall paper. In her mind she was stripping the wall and it gave her a sense of relief. She forgot about her aching legs. She admired her well polished shoes and how it contrasted with her checkerboard trouser socks. It felt good to relax. Then she heard a voice that said "Mommy, I am hungry, what's for dinner?"

"A mother never goes off duty."

M.V.I.C.M.W.

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I wanted to post my Illustration Friday entry for "Hide" but I have not figured out how to post a link. So I am skipping it this Friday. If Illustration Friday was a course, I enrolled in it last fall and have yet to attend a session...

M.V.I.C.M.W.

She loves to straddle her feet. She likes laying on the floor and propping her legs and feet against the wall or on the backrest of sofas and love seats while she lounges. Something she frequently did when she was a little girl.

She lives among the pages of appointments, notes, numbers and recipes picked up from dinners and parties. Her full name is Maria Victoria Isabella Christina M. Wellesley.

After she graduated from college she went to San Jose for a mandatory community service internship. She went home in spring the following year. She looked forward to spending time with her best friend who was pregnant with her first child. That summer her best friend died.

"In the garden of life the roses wither and their petals fall off and then only the thorns remain."

May I Please Introduce Ms. Wellesley

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I am sorry for the abrupt departure. I am unable to sustain my blog as it was. It took a lot of time away from my roles and responsibilities as a wife, mother, friend, neighbor, painter, chef, laundry woman, housekeeper, hostess…you get the point.

I am keeping my web address because last night after I deleted my web page it immediately became available and could have been grabbed by anyone. I don’t think it’s that popular of an address but I did not want my cousin in La Carlota City searching for “Ces and Her Dishes” and finding something inappropriate. However, I need to change the title and I don't know what to call this blog yet. Maybe you can help me give it a new title.

I am not going to talk about dishes, gush over our family pet rabbit, post photographs (with a few exceptions), talk about polarizing topics, at least not me. Instead, I am going to let Ms. Wellesley do the talking. Ms. Wellesley is a sweet young woman (at least she thinks she is young) who is very impatient but is forced, have been forced, will be forced to patiently WAIT. That’s all she does. She waits. She appears in waiting rooms like her opthalmologist’s waiting room, her gynecologist’s waiting room, long queues and sometimes just waiting for her family to get ready. She waits and waits. Once she waited for 23 hours at the hospital and when she was discharged, she had accumulated a $13,000.00 medical bill and a lot of aggravation.

Ms. Wellesley lives in a Moleskine ® notebook since the year 2003. She has a very long name. She loves shoes. She is a smart woman but sometimes she says stupid things, especially to people very close to her. She also swears, though in silence. She does not like blogs with swear words. She pretends not to care, but she really does. She has been waiting for three years…

With Ms. Wellesley I hope to be able to post entries for Illustration Friday which I signed up to join last year, that is if I can figure out the technical links.

Isabella, Living In A Vicarious World