Next time punch a live one

It's not often I read the newspaper cover to cover; after all, there are six free to choose from in front of the library where I work every morning. Today, however, I'm terribly glad I did. There, on page 10A was the story about vandals in Paris, breaking into the Musee D'Orsay and punching a Monet painting. There's something about that that just makes me giggle. Punching Monet, you hooligans.
There was a time in my gifted enrichment classes in the second grade when my classmates and I would have happily punched a Monet painting, or Monet himself, for the chance to move on to another freakin' artist already! Then in the third grade we did move on...to the rest of the Impressionists. We didn't get the chance to study any other period, because the year after that we didn't do art, for some inexplicable reason we moved on to gardening. As a side note, aren't gifted enrichment classes the best? In addition to our higher grade level math and reading and such, we got art and music and logical reasoning... if I am an elitist snob today, there's your reason right there.
But back to the canvas punching. Do you think Parisians get force-fed Monet from a young age? Are any of them upset at all at this act, or are they all secretly thinking, "God, I've wanted to do that for years"?

In other news, slightly related to the French, my quest to become the biggest dork ever continues right on track. Just looking up the family history stuff wasn't enough, I'm now going to a meeting of the Beausoleil Broussard Family Association. I'm quite sure I'll be the only person under 50 there, and get plenty of funny looks because my momma married a Yankee. Actually that's probably not right, they'll all know my dad. Everyone knows my dad, whole damn Vermilion parish. It's eerie.

Crushing is a fun word

I think I've just buried my father, and he's not exactly dead just yet. This summer I thought up a whimsical little piece of fluff about a little girl who lives next to the city cemetery. A few days ago I decided to use that idea for my second story in my fiction writing class. But I couldn't make it work, nothing that I thought of to happen to this little girl was worth writing about. Then I hit on a young woman who comes into the cemetery looking for a grave so she can change out the flowers like a dutiful daughter and go away, but she has no idea where the grave it. Enter the little girl, who decides to help her.
About halfway through the story it became quite clear to me that this was no longer the little girl's story. The woman had taken over, with her crushing guilt over leaving home and abandoning the life her father had given her, and the failure she felt she had always been as a daughter. I barely bothered changing the names, it was like channeling the transcript of a conversation I'm likely to have with a strange cemetery urchin a few years from now. It felt good, though, something I suppose I needed to deal with so that now I can hopefully be more aware of the relationship I have with my dad, because let's face it, with his health and work schedule it's not like I've got a hell of a lot of time to make things right again.
It's not amazing, but it is one of the better things I've written since I got all blocked about my writing a couple years ago. It's just a complete shame I can never show it to my family. "Hey dad, I got a great review on this story." "Oh yeah, what's it about?" "Nothing much, I just killed you off and used your grave as the setting for my own self-realizations." "That's nice, Amy, since you're here could you help me with these portrait orders, I've got three more weddings to edit and I have to be back at the paper at 8 in the morning." Who wants to come out with a revelation like this one and have it completely ignored?