After breakfast and coffee (pop quiz: what did I have for breakfast?), I go to the gym. Specifically I go to a tiny gym and meet with a boxer with whom I train on a once a month basis. Such training is spendy, which is why I do it infrequently. However, despite my physical appearance (think a wet sack of flour with Rutger Hauer’s face), I love boxing.
A downside to boxing is that hitting things makes my hands tremble for the rest of the day. Not like smokehound DTs kind of trembling, just a little on the shaky side. Lucky for me the final for the illustration job I’m working on isn’t due until tomorrow. I get a passable sketch done, and then work on the design of an album cover that my husband’s record label is putting out. It is here that I have to tell you, Reader, that I am appallingly ignorant of production matters. I open up InDesign and cry a little. It isn’t anything like Photoshop. I am too old and too dumb to learn anything. Maybe this is why, seventeen years after having graduated high school, I still have dreams about having missed an entire semester’s worth of classes. I put out the bat-signal to my friend Baly, who knows everything, and she comes over to save my ass by walking me through how to put this thing together. Baly, you are the best.
Emily Flake is an award-winning illustrator, writer, and cartoonist. Her work appears in Time, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Forbes, The Nation, and many, many others.
