For starters, the little plastic cover over my keyboard, the one that protects the pricey notebook keys from things like sneezes and Cheeto dust (not to mention Cheeto-dust laden sneezes and the occasional Dr. Pepper snort as I tickle the living daylights out of myself) is wearing out. I didn’t mind it so much when the letters began to fade, because, well, peeking is cheating, you know, and I hate to put spell checker out of a job. But now, under the stress of NaNoWriMo, the plastic is stretching. There’s a little bubble or hill that comes up over the G-H nexus. Talk about typos, I’m getting some that are more worthy of a chick with plastic fingernails than a nice, stable, granny-type person like your humble blog hostess.
Fascinating as the above paragraph might be, it is not the topic of this post. Look here:
This morning I read a blog by some writers who are also playing NaNo. One of them did a cool thing: she found a photo on the net that looked like her hero, and she uses that to motivate herself to get to work every day. Now, that’s pretty smart. Of course, for me, the photo would have to be of my mortgage with the words “Paid in Full” stamped in huge type right across the face of it, but that’s not realistic.
So, quick as a granny on a Blue Mountain buzz, I hauled over to Google Images and asked the search engine genies to show me pics of “ruggedly handsome.”
Boy, is this stuff subjective!!!
Orlando Bloom? Cute, sure, cute as all get-out. Ruggedly handsome? Not.
Viggo Mortensen? Closer, but I said “ruggedly handsome” not sweaty and covered in Orc blood.
Other guys, models and actors whose names I know not, but who are nothing like my hero. Buff guys without body hair (cute in their way, but Not My Dish). Guys whose faces can’t be seen in the shadows, which put me off because I so did not google “headless torso.”
Several who were just regular guys whose wives or girlfriends had labeled them as ruggedly handsome. This gives me hope for the world, specially since many of them didn’t meet my “second glance” criteria–but to the women who loved them, they were gorgeous enough to post on the internet with the label “ruggedly handsome.”
And, because I did not specify “man” in my search criteria, two puppies and a Chevy.
I guess all of this is okay, because really, my hero is more rugged than handsome. In a way, he reminds me of a neighbor. We lived next door to each other for ten years and he always scared me. Then one snowy spring, his sister and I went a thousand miles to visit his ex-wife, his daughter, and his grandson. His daughter was the spitting image of my scary neighbor with one exception: she smiled. When she smiled, I could see what my neighbor’s face might look like if he ever gave in to that expression. During the trip, his sister talked about their lives, which had been harrowing at best, and about his heartbreak at losing his wife’s love. When we came back, I was not afraid of him, though I still figured he didn’t like me much (mouthy broads get used to this effect). But I did something nice for his sister, and it broke something in him, and he took to smiling at me from time to time. Priceless! And I heard later that he had found a woman he really liked, and she liked him, too. Their lives are still hard, and getting harder as we all get older, but I’ve seen him smile! His face didn’t crack, but the freckles on it kind of shifted around. Not danced, just shifted, made room for the smile.
So, Google Images let me down, but my memory and my Muse have come through. My hero doesn’t look exactly like my neighbor, and his history isn’t as dark, but I’m getting to know my hero better, and that is a great thing.
As for the deformed keyboard protector, well, tomorrow is trash pickup day. I guess I can do without Cheetos till December 1.