Thursday, August 04, 2005

scared of the point

due to her newly launched business, my sister now sews the whole day. yes, she S-E-W-S. she attaches beads to plain shirts and resells them for a higher price because the shirts now have "manual labor" written all over them. manual labor, i immediately found out, comes in the shape of flowers, fruits or strange-looking animals.

i have to admit the shirts look pretty good, considering my sister never really liked sewing – or pretended not to.

(i'd like to point out my use of "–", the en dash that i was never able to use for blog entries because i didn't know where it was on the keyboard. in word [the program], i used to select it from the symbol list or just type in a hyphen, a space, a random character, and autocorrect would transform it into the longer en dash. this, of course, does not work in html-based [oooh] blog entries, so it was always "--" or some other mark, such as ":" or "^" or "$." recently however, i accidentally found the highly useful combination of keys to produce that blasted dash. which makes me ask the same question i asked myself when i discovered that if you refrigerate an open bag of chips, they stay crisp: "why don't i know these things?")

(there's a good chance i'll get a scathing comment from a friend about the previous paragraph: "i don't get it.")

ANYWAY ...

another important fact to introduce at this point of my rambling is that many things scare me. and i won't give you the full list right now (although i suspect i may have revealed some fears in previous blog entries already. thank goodness it's not easy to access my blog archives) because, you guessed it, it will lull you to sleep.

recently, however, my sister uttered the scariest sentence i have ever heard in a while. we were in front of the tv – she was sewing, i was on a break from working – when she said, with the seriousness of an actress in a bad horror flick:

"i wonder where my other needle is."

if you don't understand why that musing is scary, then you're probably not afraid of being stabbed while plopping on a seemingly safe sofa ... or bed. after that incident, i've had to run my hands across the surface of anything i've had to sit on in ... my ... own ... house.

to this day, the missing needle is still missing but we are all still intact and no blood has been shed. yet.

i'm going to suggest my sister take up knitting instead. or, at the very least, invest in a pincushion.