15 August 2002

This month's topic for On Display is: I don't know why, but I couldn't resist...

I don't know why, but I couldn't resist fidgeting with the paper napkin ring.

I've always been a big fidgeter. I can't keep my hands still. If I can't find anything else, they'll fidget with each other, which is why my fingernails always look so awful.

Anyway, K.T. and Kevin and I were at Ruby Tuesdays, after having gone to see XXX. (Which was a fun movie, but extremely predictable and brainless. I couldn't turn my brain down enough. It kept trying to introduce logic into the picture. Logic, bah!)

While we were waiting for our drinks, I couldn't resist: I folded the corner down to measure, folded, and tore off a neat square. While Kevin ate his salad, I creased it into a cootie-catcher.

When I was in elementary school, we called them fortune tellers, and wrote a complicated system of letters and numbers on the flaps, and under the flaps we wrote the names of boys in our class. And there was another complicated system that dictated how many times you recited the little rhyme and worked the fascinating little device, and when you lifted the flap, that would tell you the name of the boy who (had a crush on you / was going to marry you / was your secret crush). We played with these little things for hours - or at least until the "right" name came up.

Anyway, a month or so ago, I guess, Matt and K.T. and I were at TGI Fridays, and KT made a little cootie catcher out of her paper napkin ring. A little teeny one, just about the size of a fingertip. Matt had stared at it for a moment, wide-eyed, as if it was some unspeakable horror, and then snatched it from her hands and eaten it, provoking peals of laughter from both K.T. and myself.

So rather than fidget with my sweet-n-low packet, I made a little cootie catcher, and we giggled about it.

I tore off another square, and pondered. It was an itty-bitty square, not much more than an inch to a side.

Also when I was in elementary school, my best friend was a Korean girl, Nam. She taught me how to do several varieties of origami. My favorite, and the only one I can still do without instructions, is a crane.

But that piece of paper was only about an inch square.

I don't know why, but I couldn't resist.

--Liz