my smiley faces look demented

My students told me several classes ago that kids these days (they know, they explained, because they have little brothers and sisters) don't have to be as creative as they did. I am normally skeptical of such claims, because of course it'll always look like that, but then today I went to a popular midwestern craft store and was bowled over by the amount of stuff geared toward kids. "Everything comes in kits now," my students had said. "They have play-sets. We just had toys." I had kits, too, although they were more along the lines of "Hey! Here are some little plastic tubes and a patterned tray! Go get an iron and go to town!" (I cannot for the life of me describe what I'm meaning well enough to turn it up on google. Does anyone out there remember those little white trays with the little spikes that you would set little colored plastic tubes on and then iron so they'd melt together? Once, as an April Fool's Day joke, I hid some of those spiked trays in my brother's bed and then encouraged him to take a running start to jump onto the bed. Hilarious!)


At any rate, the paint-by-numbers section was bigger than my house.


And aside from the vast wasteland of colorful make-stuff kits for kids, I had a disturbing experience at said midwestern craft store. Now, I'm no anatomist, didn't even take anatomy in high school, but I'm pretty sure that the main job of skin is to keep all your important body elements on the inside of the body. Maybe I'm glossing over some finer point like temperature regulation or prevention of infection, but it seems to me like the biggest problems with the skin start when it's no longer doing the job of holding everything in. (As my brother once said, in a panicked tone, "MY BLOOD IS ON THE OUTSIDE!!!" I'm pretty sure this was not after the aforementioned spikey-trays-hidden-in-the-bed joke... but it could have been.) Well, when the temperature gets above about 55 degrees F, my hands are perfectly fine. And as it has been, like, 70 for the past several days, I got lax in my hydrate-round-the-clock routine and the temperature dropped to the mid-30s and of course my punishment is to spontaneously bleed from the hand in the middle of said midwestern craft store. Normally it's like, hey, my hand hurts, oh look, my skin has cracked and you can see layers of skin you don't normally see -- look how pink! But today it was like, ahh, there's blood all over my hand! It sucked.