Typical Day
It's 8:30AM, and Michael Angelo receives his typical wake-up call―a kiss on the cheek from the love of his life. It's not a bad way to start the day, especially considering that, unlike his husband, Luke, who's going to sit in forty-five minutes of traffic while driving to one of those office-executive-type "real" jobs, Michael is only going to be travelling about twenty feet, the vast majority of which is downward. He gets up and immediately gets down on his yoga mat. Time to limber up.
By 9:30AM Michael is feeling loose and limber, has eaten a delicious breakfast of scrambled eggs with avocado (a morning staple), and has finished reading the newspaper (well, the art section anyway). Wearing an extremely comfortable uniform of jeans and a t-shirt, he exits the second floor apartment and heads downstairs to the first floor. He switches on the lights, and behold: an incredibly messy ground-level art studio. Time to get to work.
This morning, Michael spends his time putting finishing touches on a full-scale relief he's created for a war memorial near the downtown area of the city. It depicts Civil War soldiers gathered around a general on a horse. As with the majority of his sculptures, the work is ceramic, or made from hardened clay. It's a hollow display, and since it's so big it features a lot of support beams made of wood and iron on the inside.
At 10:45AM, Michael is inching his way through the bowels of the horse, making sure everything's where it should be before he fires it up and makes the moldable clay a more permanent fixture.
Climbing back out at 11:45AM, Michael stretches out and steps back to survey his work. Two of the soldiers heads have deformed slightly, and now it looks like they're about to eat each other's faces off. Michael laughs, grabs his tools, and gets to work on the readjustment.
At 2:00PM, Michael gets his usual check-in call from Luke. The purpose of this call is more than just a nice "How's your day been?" Michael gets so caught up in his work, he often forgets to eat lunch. He also tends to get pretty hangry, so the call is really more of a safety precaution. No one wants to come home to a starving artist, no matter how talented he may be.
Having completed most of the final touches, Michael heads out to complete some errands at 3:00PM. The art supply store is first on his list, followed by the hardware store, the grocery store, the other art supply store, and finally the cheese shop.
Michael doesn't eat the stuff; he's lactose-intolerant. But one of his clients has commissioned him to create a miniature replica of the Eiffel Tower out of a wheel of cheese, and even though it isn't his forte, he does what he's paid for.
Michael gets back home around 5:30PM, just in time to start dinner. At 6:00PM, Luke returns from another day at the office, complete with another interesting story about Sheila's inability to collate properly. Michael listens intently, out of love and respect, but to be honest he has no idea what collate means. Much like he does when Luke brings up football, Michael tunes out the finer details (he's more of a hockey guy anyway).
At 7:00PM, Michael heads back to the workshop while Luke cleans up. He gets to work on finding the French landmark within the hunk of cheddar. While the work is on a much smaller scale than the massive relief now drying at the center of the workshop, the effort is the same.
Using equal measure of broad strokes and minute carvings, the top of the tower begins to take shape. By 9:30PM, with most of Mr. Eiffel's architecture copied beam for beam, Michael places it back into the refrigerator. He'll finish it up tomorrow; there's only so much cheese he can take in one sitting (amirite?).
At 10:00PM, after showering off a full day of clay, sweat, and cheese, it's time to get to bed. Michael slides under the covers and snuggles up close. It seems like only yesterday that he was staying up until four in the morning making his work, but now life has settled a bit and so has his sleep schedule.
Falling into a deep slumber, Michael dreams he's back in Renaissance Italy. He gets to work with some of the most famous artists of the day.
And wouldn't you know it: everything's made of cheese.