because you can

i have so much stuff piling up to tell you about! i'll try to keep it to one thing at a time, though.

yesterday was our local walk to defeat ALS. short version: my only connection to the disease is that it's important to cr, and that's enough for me.

so we were talking about how i could help with this year's walk and i got it into my head to do a simple project of picking some keywords to put on some nice colorful signs and let people write short notes to hang on strings, like prayer flags.

of course because of MY disease (for which, to my knowledge, there are no walks) i can't just make a few brightly colored signs that look nice, but i have to launch into a full-blown art project and make these seven illustrated panels and i really don't know how much time each one took to produce but i know i worked on them for a week (nevermind i was down with a bad cold, which we may or may not talk about later) and on one day only i spent maybe fourteen hours on it.

worth every moment, though. later on i'll post for you the pictures of them and the process of making them, but for today i'll just offer you an observation and some images.

when you go to events for diabetes or cancer or something like that, everyone there knows someone who has died from the illness or may die from it or will die from it, but some of the people walking around can wear the crown of SURVIVOR.

nobody wears a title like that at the ALS walk; nobody survives it. you don't know if you're going to have months or maybe a few years but you don't have more than that and for now there's no escaping the inevitable conclusion.

it's hard not to notice the teams who come to walk in support of or in honor of somebody they love, but then somewhere between the printing of the t-shirts and the walk, their effort becomes in memory of.

it's easier not to notice, as an outsider, the people at the walk who look pretty good now but won't be walking next year. it's harder to miss the people who don't look so good now and you know they won't be there next year.

so when they talk about hope at the ALS walk, it is a different kind of hope than at some other events.

we raised a lot of money; not by the standards of a very famous organization that maybe does a lot of good work but also spends a lot of its budget marketing itself. you donate money to the ALS association and it means that somebody is going to get services that will make a big difference in their drastically foreshortened life. somebody is going to have a place to stay when they come to the clinic. it will make a big difference to somebody.

here's my slideshow.