Come on!!!

This picture was enough to get me through my Bioengineering class today. Here's what happened:

Today was about Biomechanics, and we spent a lot of time talking about joints. I have this thing about joints, especially joint injuries. If you ever want to send shudders down my spine, just mention the word... I don't even want to type it... dislocation. Anyway, actually please don't do that, I'd appreciate it. Any way, my teacher put a big diagram of the knee joint along with its ligaments up on the board. Then he proceeded to explain exactly what happens when you tear your ACL and I just about lost it.

I couldn't even look up, and even listening to him talking about it made me shudder. So I told myself, "I really need to become distracted!!!" so I just started drawing. I ended up with this guy. first, it was just the guy, but my teacher was still talking about tearing ligaments (he now had a graph of stress vs. deformation of the ligament, which, for a simple curve on an x y plane, disturbed me more than any other graph has). So I continued to draw.

I gave him the hat first, and then the balloon, and then the ice cream cone, and then the ice cream on his face. Then i pondered him. I hadn't meant for him to have so much stuff when I drew his mouth and eyebrows. But for some reason it made a lot of sense. I think I might have subconsciously drew a representation of one of my firmest beliefs, that stuff doesn't make you happy. I also have a related theory about stuff as a heuristic for happiness. Maybe I'll write about that sometime.

that's where the speech bubble came from.

I don't know what my deal is with joint injuries. The pictures weren't graphic or disturbing at all to any of the other 165 people in my class.