Why Would I Write

  • Coffee Shop Sketchbook


    Coffee Sketching by PascalCampion

    “Ooh, whatcha drawing?”
    An angel he wanted to say but instead, he responded, “just a scene in my head.”
    “Can I see it?” she asked eagerly, leaning forward over the table.
    “No, not yet,” he said as he tilted the sketchbook towards his chest.
    “Come on! I won’t judge.”
    “I’ll let you see it when it’s complete.”
    “You always say that, but you never do.”
    “This time I will.”
    “That’s what you said last time.”
    “It wasn’t complete!”
    “Hmph! You better be finished when I’m done with this chapter,” she said, turning back to her book with a sly smile on her face.

    Ben smiled and continued with his sketch. He liked it when Orla acted assertive and commanding. It was a total contrast to her usual submissive and quiet demeanor. He found it extremely endearing. After all, the two had met because they were the quietest people in their art history class.
    (more…)

  • Eye Have Got My I On You

    Yesterday, I welcomed my second nephew into the world. While my sister didn’t start flooding her social media feed with pictures of the kid, she did share some photos with us on WhatsApp. She did the same thing when she had her first child. Trust me when I say she’s not the only one who does this. I’m at the age where people around my age are having kids of their own and it’s something I would have been oblivious to if it wasn’t for my Facebook feed filling up with pictures of babies.

    I’m not complaining and it’s not a bad thing. I have no qualms with what kind of photos people want to post up. If I don’t like it, I just ignore it or block it, no biggie. It’s just interesting to know that in today’s day and age, kids are digitally imprinted the day they are born.
    (more…)

  • Humpty Dumpty

    Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
    Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
    All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
    Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

    The other day, I was driving home from work and for some reason the nursery rhyme popped into my head. For no good reason. Anyway, there it stayed, stuck for a bit. I thought about the lyrics and then realized that nowhere in the rhyme does it ever mention Humpty Dumpty being an egg. So how come every children’s book I’ve seen with the rhyme has an accompanying illustration of an anthropomorphic egg?

    Why would an egg have a name? Why would an egg need to be put together again? Why was the egg talked about as though it was a living thing? These questions flooded my mind, so I decided to look it up. Thanks to the very detailed Wikipedia article I learnt a few things:

  • Humpty Dumpty was said to be an egg when the rhyme was told as a riddle.
  • Humpty Dumpty has also been illustrated as a human boy before.
  • “humpty dumpty” was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person.
  • There are multiple variations of the Humpty Dumpty rhyme, the most common one being the one I posted.
  • The character has also been referenced many times in pop culture and literary works.

    • Anyway, I guess the mystery is kinda solved. I won’t ever have to think about the strange egg again.