Post by bryndel on Jan 19, 2007 7:54:19 GMT
Heh X 0-) Okay, so here's what *I* wasted my night doing! Hehehe. I must be mentally disturbed, to find this kind of thing fun... but anywho, I'd welcome any and all critique you have for it (likely starting with the obvious ZOMG TOO LONG...lol). This is a first and rough draft, but I'm still all for improving my writing anywhere and anyhow I can... ; 0-D Which is a lot easier to do if people TELL you what they like and don't like, lol...amazingly hard to find that feedback sometimes, though. (Oh well. ; 0-P )
And I figured that people on this board, especially, might be able to relate to some of it (though I'll probably crosspost it to the TP and Arena. Max feedback=good. X 0-) ) ;D Enjoy.
Today, as I was happily scrubbing off my latest equine acquisitions, I realized something. I look around and see all the other want lists: MINTY! MUST be near mint! Need upgrade—NM or mint! My herd is much less…er…stellar quality, I must admit; I have maybe two? that don’t have at least minor flaws, and most have something relatively major. Firefly is still covered in penmarks over a decade old, though I managed to fade them a little; all my old ponies have terribly frizzy hair ends and usually a few scuffs and rubs as well. I very often (always? X 0-P ) pay a little more than I should for ponies I could probably find in as good or better condition at a thrift store (or on pony boards at the very least)—lazily don’t ask for extra pictures at least half the time—I buy even chancy Ebay ponies if they’re the ones I want and within my price range…and then when they arrive with unexpected dirt or spots I gleefully carry them off to the bathroom and start my experimentation. (Muahahaha.) My first few ponies, of course, I didn’t know any better, but now I have no excuse. Yet still, I find myself taking chances on the quality and condition of my toys, and am usually not very disappointed by the ones that fall below my expectations. (Although the Princess Sparkle photographed so that the chip out of her hoof was hidden was just scummy. X 0-P ) …For childhood treasures one would suppose the calm acceptance and even love for flaws makes sense, but for the rest, you’d think I’d want my collection, on which I spend virtually all my pocket money (if you can call over a hundred and fifty dollars earned over Christmas “pocket money”), to be a little nicer.
Yet even the ones I am a little disappointed in grow on me, somehow. I have two Moonstones; both are spotty, stained, a little rough around the edges, and one of them is very definitely faded (and likely both; if I had a mint Moonstone maybe I’d know : 0-P ). My collection is not very big; given the space and money I have to spare (no, $150’s not at all normal, lol) I originally figured on trading off a lot of them, and most certainly my doubles. But as I cleaned and brushed and styled my Moonstones, I discovered a quite likely very normal variation in dye on the hair—one looks pink, while the other looks very much more red coral. And beyond that, as I fluffed their flips, I found myself admiring them both and finding them quite beautiful, flaws and all—so what if her foot’s smoozed, look at that shiny rainbow of hair!.
So in the end, I’m keeping them after all. (Oh dear… at this rate, if I keep keeping all these, I won’t be able to move one inch in my pony-packed room, hah…) And then there was the custom bait lot I traded for from Manna—many ponies of which I examine head to toe, inside and out, and, however initially unpretty they were, I start to think, “Hey… she doesn’t look so bad…”
Can we all spell “sucker”? Ponies just hit my soft spot, it seems : 0-P Something about those generation one ponies really gets to me… to the point that that terrible crayon-covered Baby Blossom, that , and the little Apple Delight with no hair left all strike some chord within me and have me reaching for my pocketbook… lol. It’s not that I don’t like mints, honest…or even just that I’m cheap : 0-P Somehow those flawed, much-abused ponies seems special… beyond even the opportunity to fix them up and restore them, for even after the age spots and traces of tail rust on terribly chopped tails remain, those ponies still sneak up onto my collection shelf somehow, sharing space with my perfect, pink-haired Up, Up and Away and beautifully minty blue Ember (another Ebay risk, but one that sure paid off : 0-J )
Both of the latter ponies, by the way, are sitting on my bed right now, mixed up with many other ponies and getting their hair all tangled and mussed. They may even get rubs, zomg. Yet as I pick them up, examine these PERFECT ponies, twenty years old and how rare is that? (They’re the best and brightest of my collection, worth so much more than the rest! I should protect them, shelve them, put them under plastic and dust and clean them regularly!) I find myself shrugging and putting them right back among the untidy mound of plastic hooves. Maybe I just don’t have that “true collector’s” urge in me. : 0-J So many others are so concerned for the welfare of their pretty ponies, while I can’t even bring myself to worry about the basic welfare of mine when I paid all my dough out for them in the best possible condition.
I must be crazy. …And yet, as I was in the bathroom today, scrubbing away at Sky Rocket (another acetone bath candidate; she’s pretty scruffy) I found myself looking at it all in a different light. I unbagged my beautiful Kisscurl (whom I’d been keeping bagged in a specific attempt to not have her make contact with my much mankier other new ponies on the block (Gave that up. Gonna happen sooner or later, may as well be now X 0-) ) and whom I specially BIN’ed and shipped all the way from England on her lonesome—and yes, she has some two prominent spots on her display side—and all this, mind you, was after I’d begun to eye my accumulating costs and think, Hmm, I’d better be selective about how much more I buy… just those couple of “shipping combo” ponies now, perhaps…) and found the dark gray “mole” smack dab on her smiling cheek much blacker and more staring than I’d recalled (and this was one I’d asked for more pictures on, hah). At first I found myself starting to frown sadly at it, but in a minute or two more I found myself smiling. Wouldn’t this make a unique and wonderful “flaw” for her character if I drew her in a comic? She’d be the first pony with a mole, and so beautiful if only she didn’t have it, poor dear!
(And thus it’s a good thing my pony is ugly? Hummm…um. o.o;; Yeah, I know. It seems strange even to me.)
Do you remember when we were kids—well, most of us—and saw those awesome ponies in the store, so perfect and MOC? Did any one of them ever stay on that card in its bubble? Of course not—we begged and pleaded and screamed and threw fits to get mommy to buy it for us, and then we took it home and ripped it open just as fast as we could. (Or were you impatient like me, and ripped it open in the car ’cause you just couldn’t wait that long? : 0-P ) Despite the very real risk of ruining those ponies’ perfection, we destroyed that package if we had to, to get them out, and sent them off on wild adventures in peril of plastic life and limb. I took my ponies in the bath all the time—granted, I didn’t know that that was what was uncontrollably poofing all my pony hair, but I did at least figure out that Bad Things were happening inside Misty, my seapony, because eventually she started spouting rust out from her insides. Despite that, however, I did my best to “derust” her through uncountable rinsings but still kept bringing her into the bath with me. And the baby seaponies from the garage sale joined her. –I certainly didn’t love my ponies any less back then; if anything, I adored them much more. What was it that had me abusing them so?
Imperfection is the stuff of life, man—and boy can I tell you, my ponies were imperfect : 0-J And still are today, obviously. But those flaws never decreased my love for my toys as a child…and, as I stood there painstakingly trying my darndest to clean even my hopeless pony rescue cases to the best of my ability, I realized that I felt much the same today. We know better now than to draw blood in pen onto our ponies, to soak them callously in bathtubs or let them sit in the sun and fade. But why should flaws mean so much more twenty years later—when did ponies turn from my loveably imperfect toys to those distant ivory towers that must at all costs be kept mint? That sure wasn’t what made me love them as a child, and somehow, despite all those years in-between, that isn’t what thrills me today, either, as I gaze above my screen to the herd of Little Ponies crowded willy-nilly onto my dresser top—someone’s surely stepping on that tail I wrapped and curled so carefully two days ago and mooshing it into ugliness even now : 0-J What prettiness I lent sure didn’t last long.
But that’s not what I see. As I look at my cherished possessions, my eyes wander to poor penned-up Firefly in back, with his drooping, dry, frizzed hair, standing next to Bride Beauty, whose tinseled locks are twenty times worse, and I recall the fun-loving sense of humor I gave him as a child, and how many times he rescued Beauty from those evil, evil dinosaurs. And yes, the time he got run over by a truck, and then shot, and covered in permanent blue blood (there’s a terrible pun somewhere in there). And I smile. He’s flawed, but he’s mine, and special in a way no other pony ever has been or will be. And then I look at so-soft Posey, with her “lazy eye” from a factory flocking error, and think on how she’s to be mole-faced Kisscurl’s sister, and the dreadlocked McDonald’s pony rearing in front of them, whose hair I didn’t even bother to comb out just because the idea of a pony with dreads was so amusing. And they’re not the half of it: chopped-forelock Masquerade, symbol-rubbed Floater, and Dancing Butterflies who had rust so bad it sounded like gravel raining down inside now form a threesome of siblings, with DB the youngest and vainest of the bunch, and then my “good-luck pony” Tassels whom I always played in that merry-go-round game…
Each one of these ponies has a personality, and special memories that go with them. When I look at any one of them, I see not just a perfect plastic face wearing a banal smile, but a name and a character whom I created lurking behind that façade, with the plastic mold merely a jumping-off point. And yes, those flaws so agonized over, so determinedly rejected by so many and even, for a while, by me, are not really flaws at all—they’re part of them, a key piece of that personality and appeal. These are the things that shine brightest in my mind over a decade afterward; and many years from now I doubt I’ll recall how perfectly pink-haired Up, Up and Away looked, but rather that I nicknamed her U.A., assigned her as chaperone to the babies, and played out that fling with Steamer that never quite worked out, leaving her heartbroken when he married Mommy Sweet Celebrations instead (note: all events herein listed for Bryndel’s Ponyland (™) are merely theoretical and may or may not mirror actual happenings or Hasbro’s top secret future plans. Please don’t sue us. : 0-P ). And of course, I’ll be sure to remember Kisscurl’s mole, if not how minty her symbols were.
Though ’tis true they’re only plastic, in a way, this mirrors life. I can turn my eyes from the dresser to the foot of my bed, and see my rescued dog laying there (big ball of fluff snoring loudly, of course, as always. How attractive…he’s liable to moosh a few pony manes himself laying here, come to think). I don’t see his clouding eyes, dysplastic hips, or the huge, protruding eyes that were all I noticed the first time I saw him—and don’t much see that he’s blowing coat, either (haha… in midwinter, yes. The scuzzball : 0-P ). Now I recall how he graduated top of his obedience class, despite pulling his former owner down the street when we took him on a “test walk.” How he changed from a suspicious, undersocialized barker who growled at the occasional stranger to a clever, obedient dog with a sense of humor, who barks only when he needs in, quiets instantly when I ask, comes when called and uses toys to bribe me to the door when he wants out. And how many evenings we’ve spent here, sitting side by side just enjoying one another’s company. Dogs are even more impermanent than Hasbro plastic, unfortunately, and even less remoldable, customizeable, replaceable. I’m going to miss him when he’s gone, boogly eyes and all. Those flaws that made him unadoptable, that put him through four homes in five years and have left scars even after nine years (I haven’t even mentioned his crooked spin or formerly pinned leg, from when he really did get hit by a car—no penned blood involved!) have faded and changed, and made my dog into something unique and treasured. His colorful past is what lends him lively color now, and I wouldn’t trade him for the world…nor even those “perfect” show dogs I see trotting by on my TV screen, one after another, as cookie-cutter uniform as it is possible to make a living creature be.
Yes. This, then, is why I love my plastic ponies. And perhaps next time you scowl at a garage sale find’s huge blot of ink on her back, and prepare to toss it into the custom bait bin, think on how some little girl put that there when this pony boldly took a spear to save her friend Lofty’s life, or how that blot would make a perfect birthmark to mark The Chosen Pony destined to save all Ponyland from the evil wizard who it seems has been stealing your Princess variants’ magic. If we can look past the mere appearance of a pony to see the value in imperfection, perhaps we can begin to find it elsewhere as well—like in a person.
End of pseudo-philosophical thought for the night. I’m off to Ebay to find my next Chosen One, for there’s evil afoot…
And I figured that people on this board, especially, might be able to relate to some of it (though I'll probably crosspost it to the TP and Arena. Max feedback=good. X 0-) ) ;D Enjoy.
Today, as I was happily scrubbing off my latest equine acquisitions, I realized something. I look around and see all the other want lists: MINTY! MUST be near mint! Need upgrade—NM or mint! My herd is much less…er…stellar quality, I must admit; I have maybe two? that don’t have at least minor flaws, and most have something relatively major. Firefly is still covered in penmarks over a decade old, though I managed to fade them a little; all my old ponies have terribly frizzy hair ends and usually a few scuffs and rubs as well. I very often (always? X 0-P ) pay a little more than I should for ponies I could probably find in as good or better condition at a thrift store (or on pony boards at the very least)—lazily don’t ask for extra pictures at least half the time—I buy even chancy Ebay ponies if they’re the ones I want and within my price range…and then when they arrive with unexpected dirt or spots I gleefully carry them off to the bathroom and start my experimentation. (Muahahaha.) My first few ponies, of course, I didn’t know any better, but now I have no excuse. Yet still, I find myself taking chances on the quality and condition of my toys, and am usually not very disappointed by the ones that fall below my expectations. (Although the Princess Sparkle photographed so that the chip out of her hoof was hidden was just scummy. X 0-P ) …For childhood treasures one would suppose the calm acceptance and even love for flaws makes sense, but for the rest, you’d think I’d want my collection, on which I spend virtually all my pocket money (if you can call over a hundred and fifty dollars earned over Christmas “pocket money”), to be a little nicer.
Yet even the ones I am a little disappointed in grow on me, somehow. I have two Moonstones; both are spotty, stained, a little rough around the edges, and one of them is very definitely faded (and likely both; if I had a mint Moonstone maybe I’d know : 0-P ). My collection is not very big; given the space and money I have to spare (no, $150’s not at all normal, lol) I originally figured on trading off a lot of them, and most certainly my doubles. But as I cleaned and brushed and styled my Moonstones, I discovered a quite likely very normal variation in dye on the hair—one looks pink, while the other looks very much more red coral. And beyond that, as I fluffed their flips, I found myself admiring them both and finding them quite beautiful, flaws and all—so what if her foot’s smoozed, look at that shiny rainbow of hair!.
So in the end, I’m keeping them after all. (Oh dear… at this rate, if I keep keeping all these, I won’t be able to move one inch in my pony-packed room, hah…) And then there was the custom bait lot I traded for from Manna—many ponies of which I examine head to toe, inside and out, and, however initially unpretty they were, I start to think, “Hey… she doesn’t look so bad…”
Can we all spell “sucker”? Ponies just hit my soft spot, it seems : 0-P Something about those generation one ponies really gets to me… to the point that that terrible crayon-covered Baby Blossom, that , and the little Apple Delight with no hair left all strike some chord within me and have me reaching for my pocketbook… lol. It’s not that I don’t like mints, honest…or even just that I’m cheap : 0-P Somehow those flawed, much-abused ponies seems special… beyond even the opportunity to fix them up and restore them, for even after the age spots and traces of tail rust on terribly chopped tails remain, those ponies still sneak up onto my collection shelf somehow, sharing space with my perfect, pink-haired Up, Up and Away and beautifully minty blue Ember (another Ebay risk, but one that sure paid off : 0-J )
Both of the latter ponies, by the way, are sitting on my bed right now, mixed up with many other ponies and getting their hair all tangled and mussed. They may even get rubs, zomg. Yet as I pick them up, examine these PERFECT ponies, twenty years old and how rare is that? (They’re the best and brightest of my collection, worth so much more than the rest! I should protect them, shelve them, put them under plastic and dust and clean them regularly!) I find myself shrugging and putting them right back among the untidy mound of plastic hooves. Maybe I just don’t have that “true collector’s” urge in me. : 0-J So many others are so concerned for the welfare of their pretty ponies, while I can’t even bring myself to worry about the basic welfare of mine when I paid all my dough out for them in the best possible condition.
I must be crazy. …And yet, as I was in the bathroom today, scrubbing away at Sky Rocket (another acetone bath candidate; she’s pretty scruffy) I found myself looking at it all in a different light. I unbagged my beautiful Kisscurl (whom I’d been keeping bagged in a specific attempt to not have her make contact with my much mankier other new ponies on the block (Gave that up. Gonna happen sooner or later, may as well be now X 0-) ) and whom I specially BIN’ed and shipped all the way from England on her lonesome—and yes, she has some two prominent spots on her display side—and all this, mind you, was after I’d begun to eye my accumulating costs and think, Hmm, I’d better be selective about how much more I buy… just those couple of “shipping combo” ponies now, perhaps…) and found the dark gray “mole” smack dab on her smiling cheek much blacker and more staring than I’d recalled (and this was one I’d asked for more pictures on, hah). At first I found myself starting to frown sadly at it, but in a minute or two more I found myself smiling. Wouldn’t this make a unique and wonderful “flaw” for her character if I drew her in a comic? She’d be the first pony with a mole, and so beautiful if only she didn’t have it, poor dear!
(And thus it’s a good thing my pony is ugly? Hummm…um. o.o;; Yeah, I know. It seems strange even to me.)
Do you remember when we were kids—well, most of us—and saw those awesome ponies in the store, so perfect and MOC? Did any one of them ever stay on that card in its bubble? Of course not—we begged and pleaded and screamed and threw fits to get mommy to buy it for us, and then we took it home and ripped it open just as fast as we could. (Or were you impatient like me, and ripped it open in the car ’cause you just couldn’t wait that long? : 0-P ) Despite the very real risk of ruining those ponies’ perfection, we destroyed that package if we had to, to get them out, and sent them off on wild adventures in peril of plastic life and limb. I took my ponies in the bath all the time—granted, I didn’t know that that was what was uncontrollably poofing all my pony hair, but I did at least figure out that Bad Things were happening inside Misty, my seapony, because eventually she started spouting rust out from her insides. Despite that, however, I did my best to “derust” her through uncountable rinsings but still kept bringing her into the bath with me. And the baby seaponies from the garage sale joined her. –I certainly didn’t love my ponies any less back then; if anything, I adored them much more. What was it that had me abusing them so?
Imperfection is the stuff of life, man—and boy can I tell you, my ponies were imperfect : 0-J And still are today, obviously. But those flaws never decreased my love for my toys as a child…and, as I stood there painstakingly trying my darndest to clean even my hopeless pony rescue cases to the best of my ability, I realized that I felt much the same today. We know better now than to draw blood in pen onto our ponies, to soak them callously in bathtubs or let them sit in the sun and fade. But why should flaws mean so much more twenty years later—when did ponies turn from my loveably imperfect toys to those distant ivory towers that must at all costs be kept mint? That sure wasn’t what made me love them as a child, and somehow, despite all those years in-between, that isn’t what thrills me today, either, as I gaze above my screen to the herd of Little Ponies crowded willy-nilly onto my dresser top—someone’s surely stepping on that tail I wrapped and curled so carefully two days ago and mooshing it into ugliness even now : 0-J What prettiness I lent sure didn’t last long.
But that’s not what I see. As I look at my cherished possessions, my eyes wander to poor penned-up Firefly in back, with his drooping, dry, frizzed hair, standing next to Bride Beauty, whose tinseled locks are twenty times worse, and I recall the fun-loving sense of humor I gave him as a child, and how many times he rescued Beauty from those evil, evil dinosaurs. And yes, the time he got run over by a truck, and then shot, and covered in permanent blue blood (there’s a terrible pun somewhere in there). And I smile. He’s flawed, but he’s mine, and special in a way no other pony ever has been or will be. And then I look at so-soft Posey, with her “lazy eye” from a factory flocking error, and think on how she’s to be mole-faced Kisscurl’s sister, and the dreadlocked McDonald’s pony rearing in front of them, whose hair I didn’t even bother to comb out just because the idea of a pony with dreads was so amusing. And they’re not the half of it: chopped-forelock Masquerade, symbol-rubbed Floater, and Dancing Butterflies who had rust so bad it sounded like gravel raining down inside now form a threesome of siblings, with DB the youngest and vainest of the bunch, and then my “good-luck pony” Tassels whom I always played in that merry-go-round game…
Each one of these ponies has a personality, and special memories that go with them. When I look at any one of them, I see not just a perfect plastic face wearing a banal smile, but a name and a character whom I created lurking behind that façade, with the plastic mold merely a jumping-off point. And yes, those flaws so agonized over, so determinedly rejected by so many and even, for a while, by me, are not really flaws at all—they’re part of them, a key piece of that personality and appeal. These are the things that shine brightest in my mind over a decade afterward; and many years from now I doubt I’ll recall how perfectly pink-haired Up, Up and Away looked, but rather that I nicknamed her U.A., assigned her as chaperone to the babies, and played out that fling with Steamer that never quite worked out, leaving her heartbroken when he married Mommy Sweet Celebrations instead (note: all events herein listed for Bryndel’s Ponyland (™) are merely theoretical and may or may not mirror actual happenings or Hasbro’s top secret future plans. Please don’t sue us. : 0-P ). And of course, I’ll be sure to remember Kisscurl’s mole, if not how minty her symbols were.
Though ’tis true they’re only plastic, in a way, this mirrors life. I can turn my eyes from the dresser to the foot of my bed, and see my rescued dog laying there (big ball of fluff snoring loudly, of course, as always. How attractive…he’s liable to moosh a few pony manes himself laying here, come to think). I don’t see his clouding eyes, dysplastic hips, or the huge, protruding eyes that were all I noticed the first time I saw him—and don’t much see that he’s blowing coat, either (haha… in midwinter, yes. The scuzzball : 0-P ). Now I recall how he graduated top of his obedience class, despite pulling his former owner down the street when we took him on a “test walk.” How he changed from a suspicious, undersocialized barker who growled at the occasional stranger to a clever, obedient dog with a sense of humor, who barks only when he needs in, quiets instantly when I ask, comes when called and uses toys to bribe me to the door when he wants out. And how many evenings we’ve spent here, sitting side by side just enjoying one another’s company. Dogs are even more impermanent than Hasbro plastic, unfortunately, and even less remoldable, customizeable, replaceable. I’m going to miss him when he’s gone, boogly eyes and all. Those flaws that made him unadoptable, that put him through four homes in five years and have left scars even after nine years (I haven’t even mentioned his crooked spin or formerly pinned leg, from when he really did get hit by a car—no penned blood involved!) have faded and changed, and made my dog into something unique and treasured. His colorful past is what lends him lively color now, and I wouldn’t trade him for the world…nor even those “perfect” show dogs I see trotting by on my TV screen, one after another, as cookie-cutter uniform as it is possible to make a living creature be.
Yes. This, then, is why I love my plastic ponies. And perhaps next time you scowl at a garage sale find’s huge blot of ink on her back, and prepare to toss it into the custom bait bin, think on how some little girl put that there when this pony boldly took a spear to save her friend Lofty’s life, or how that blot would make a perfect birthmark to mark The Chosen Pony destined to save all Ponyland from the evil wizard who it seems has been stealing your Princess variants’ magic. If we can look past the mere appearance of a pony to see the value in imperfection, perhaps we can begin to find it elsewhere as well—like in a person.
End of pseudo-philosophical thought for the night. I’m off to Ebay to find my next Chosen One, for there’s evil afoot…
.
