It’s All an Illusion: The Jason Bishop Show, In Which I Covet the Ability to Make People Disappear.

In Midland, we have the Phyllis and Bob Cowan Performing Arts Series. In perpetuity—a really, really long time—this will fund four events a year—a speaker and a performer in the spring, and a speaker and a performer in the fall. These events are all free to the public—you can pick up tickets the week of the event, or you can sign up on-line and have them mailed to you. This is an astoundingly generous gift to the community, and lots of people take advantage of it. And I do mean “take advantage of it.”
Last night the program was Jason Bishop, billed as “America’s Hottest Illusionist.”
It’s free. It’s magic. It’s packed. Now, I don’t know how you feel about magic shows; but, to me, they’re right in there with clowns and circuses and dressed-up animals doing tricks.
And you read that and go, “Oooh, she thinks all that’s beneath her, I guess.”
Wrong. I don’t like opera or live theater, either. So there.  Phbbt.
What I like, in the way of live entertainment, is a couple of guys sitting down on some old folding chairs and opening up their beat-up cases and taking out their horns and playing for a couple hours, sweating and talking to the audience and having fun with it. Or stand-up comedians doing improv. Go back and read about street art—about talented people just doing what they do.
That’s not to say that illusionists and clowns and circus performers aren’t talented. No. It’s just that it all seems so fake and so staged. So elaborately planned.
Duh.
And what is it with the props magicians use? Those boxes they use to make their assistants disappear—could those things be any more nuclear? All metal and sharp edges and straight sides—those things make me itch just looking at them. They remind me EXACTLY of the metal food carts used in institutions to wheel the trays of gruel to the inmates. Why can’t those things be cool? Wood, painted, or maybe upholstered, or maybe with collage? Maybe a lamp on top and some tassels—would that be too much?
But no:  magicians’ props are just butt ugly. But! Since the magician himself is Hot (see above) and since his assistant is Hotness Itself, it really doesn’t matter if one grouchy old woman in the audience is aesthetically offended by the trunks and boxes. Right?
Did I mention grouchy? Oh, yeah. That would be me. Because in addition to the hoards of people flowing like water into Chap Center, there were the kids. Tons and tons of kids. You know “people” and “kids” are two separate categories, right?
Do any of you people remember, way back eons ago, when kids were expected to Behave in Public? Or am I just a fucking dinosaur, one of those incredibly stick-up-the-butt white people who go around bemoaning The Way it Used to Be? But no: The Ever-Gorgeous Earl is neither white nor stick-up-the-butt, and he spends a LOT of time shaking his head and thinking about what his daddy would have done to him (think: filicide) if he had ever, for one moment, even HARBORED THE IDEA of acting up in public. Or private. Or even in his dreams.
The EGE’s daddy did not play. Would that there were more like him. Lots more.
Back maybe a quarter century ago (if I’m going to Be Old, let’s just go all the way and use the terms to make me REALLY old, shall we?), we had friends who had small kids. When the second baby was tiny, we’d sometimes go out, maybe to a movie. Usually the baby would nurse and sleep, but sometimes he would wake up and start to cry. And before that first syllable of whininess had left his lips, one of his parents was already carrying him out of the room. We’d take turns—yes! Even I!—walking him in the lobby until he went back to sleep. Remember those days? Civilized people knew how to act in public, and they knew what to do with beings who were not yet old enough to know the ways of civil society. They took them out in public and began to train them from the beginning about what was expected to make the cogs of civilization turn smoothly.
It is to laugh. There is no longer anything known as “civil society.” There is now only the overwhelming mass of The Great Unwashed, a couple of generations fed on the pop culture diet of It’s All About Me, Me, Me! And all they know or care about is what they want at any given time. And if they’ve gone to the trouble to haul their fat ass up off the couch and trudge down to the ticket office and pick up a dozen free tickets for the whole entire clan, then, by god, they’re going to watch every single goddamned minute of that show.
Except, of course, the half hour they’re standing in line to buy popcorn and soft drinks.
So we find seats. I have an older woman on my right, and The EGE has a hip young guy on his left. The woman has obviously, just before leaving her house, taken her entire outfit out of the storage closet where she keeps it safely buried under a mound of mothballs during all the other 364.75 days of the year, and the young man has just as obviously stubbed out his 2,479th cigarette of the day just moments before sitting down beside us. Mothballs on the right, cigarettes on the left.
So when the announcer asks everyone to move toward the middle, we’re only too happy to comply.
Oh, our folly!
While the mothball woman moves away, the smoking man follows right along with us. And we end up sitting in front of The Family from Hell. There are half a dozen large people—meaning adults and older children—and then three small people:  a little girl, a toddler, and an infant.
You know where this is going, right?
The show begins. Jason Bishop is very young, very hip, actually quite funny. I enjoy his comedic patter even more than I do the illusions, but there’s a problem:  while much of what he says is funny, there’s also much of it that I don’t understand. He makes lots and lots of pop culture references, none of which make any sense to me. Sometimes I look blankly over at The EGE, who’s laughing and will lean over and think a moment and say, “Actress who was arrested,” or “Singer who’s in jail” or something. I do know who Paris Hilton is:  she’s very rich and makes purses that people actually buy. I think she has a small dog, and “Hilton” comes from the hotels. That’s all I know, so while I can appreciate jokes involving her name if they center on her family’s wealth or the tackiness of her various crafting endeavors, references to other aspects of her famousness don’t mean anything to me.
I mean, come on:  It wasn’t until recently that I realized there is an actual human being named “Jessica Simpson.” For years, I thought people were talking about Homer’s wife and couldn’t figure out why they were so fascinated by the antics of a cartoon character.
So I wasn’t the target audience for most of the banter. But he was good, with great delivery. And I enjoyed it. Except:  someone kept feeling me up.
I was sitting there, trying to see the stage, listening for the random reference I actually understood, and I felt a cold hand go up the back of my sweater. Huh?  I leapt about a foot into the air and whirled around, and there, looking up at me through the back of the folding chair, was the toddler. I glared at her pointedly and turned back around, rigid, heart pounding. I mean, it’s quite a shock to be sitting in public and have a hand slide inside your clothes. It turns out that she was walking up and down the row, trailing her nasty little germ-infested hands (because, of course, every toddler is down there on the ground, picking up cigarette butts and wads of spit and the random boogar and tasting them and rolling them around in their fingers) along the back of the chairs. And then, periodically, poking me with a sharp little finger. And I’d always jump and turn around and glare at her, but by then she’d toddled off down the line.
Why, you ask, didn’t I say something to her parents? It wouldn’t have done any good:  they wouldn’t have understood me. Perhaps they could speak English, but I don’t think so. They weren’t speaking it, and they weren’t laughing at the jokes, either. Just when I’d decide that, the next time she touched me, I was going to whirl around and yell, “NO!” which is pretty much universal in its ability to convey, “Your child is an annoying little shit, and you need to exert some parental discipline right away, before she hits puberty and starts building bombs in the basement,” she’d go away for a while and I wouldn’t feel her back there. I think she got tired, or maybe her hands got so sticky she fell down and stuck to the floor and they left her there, among the popcorn kernels and tobacco spit.
Intermission came. I hate intermission. What is it with intermission? Oh, I know:  they have it so you will go buy outrageously expensive, oversalted popcorn and then have to buy even more outrageously expensive soft drinks. But for me? It’s just stretching things out. Just get on with it, people! Like I’m going to get up and go into the restroom, where everyone in the building has packed themselves into tiny stalls doing all sorts of disgusting things involving bodily functions that should be taken care of only in the privacy of your own home, thank you very much.
So I sit in the chair and wait. And, just before the second half begins, the people’s other child wakes up. The very smallest one. And begins to cry. Not a little, tiny fretful cry. Oh, no. These are not the kind of people who would have an infant who made tiny little noises. It would never fucking get noticed if it made tiny little noises. No! This kid had some lungs, and it was using them. And I turned to The EGE and said brightly, “Well!  At least I can blog about it! And think how much funnier it will be if the crying goes on through the entire second half, non-stop!”
Do not tempt the gods. They are a testy lot, apparently. “You want baby crying? We’ll give you baby crying.”
The baby cried the. Entire. Second. Half. People would turn around and glare at the parents. I would move out of the way so the laser beams shooting from their eyeballs wouldn’t singe my hair. It made no difference:  these people were completely fucking oblivious. They had come to see the show, and by golly, they were going to see the show.Every last stinking second of it. Never mind that even those hip and savvy enough to get all the references in the jokes were no longer ABLE TO HEAR the jokes. What did they care?
Me? I sat and chuckled happily. Not only did it make a good story, but it vindicated me:  I’d been jumping in my seat all during the first half, with the woman next to me surely wondering what kept me fidgeting and turning around, glaring at this nice family behind us. Now she—and everyone else in the building—was in on the fun.
I’m willing to bet these are the same people we once saw changing their baby’s diaper on the table at the pizza restaurant.
So. You’re reading this, shaking your head at my grouchiness, going, “Then why don’t you just stay home, Ricë, you whiny bitch?”
Exactly. If you’ll remember, I go days without leaving the house for this very reason. To wit:  I went to the post office yesterday ($51.39—yeah, I had a relapse):

The line was so long that it reached all the way across the lobby and blocked the doors. After several more people came in behind me and couldn’t get out of the way of the doors, I set my many packages down on the floor and squeezed up to the front of the line and asked, “Could y’all kind of move the line up and curve it around here? We’re blocking the door and people can’t get through.”
And they all looked at me as if I’d just walked in and asked them to strip nekkid and do the bunny hop: with that exact same stare of “You’ve gotta be kidding.”
Granted, many of them probably had no idea what I’d said. But others did and just ignored me. I went back to the end of the line and shrugged and said, to no one in particular, “Well. That worked well! I might as well have saved my time.” And we all laughed.
THAT’S when they moved.
People won’t respond to a simple request that they be civil and make things easier for other human beings, but if they think they’re being laughed at? Ah. Another thang entirely.
So what I should have done last night is to turn around and point my finger at the little kid and laugh uproariously, in a way suggesting she was the most ridiculously funny thing I’d seen in days.
But, with my luck, she probably would have come and sat in my lap.
Sigh. OK. In order to try to bring some civility back into society, something we so desperately need when there are so fucking many of us, with more being born constantly—and what the hell is up with that? The global economy is in the tank, there’s not enough food and water to feed people, the climate is changing in scary ways, there aren’t enough jobs, overcrowding is a huge problem in many places all over the world. And we keep having more kids. Why? Because it’s Our Right to have them. Never mind that we can’t guarantee their future and that we don’t have insurance to take care of them or an account set up so that they can go to college, if there are even any colleges left in 18 years. Never mind that:  it’s Our Right to have children, as many as we want. So, because that’s the attitude, and because that means that things are going to get more and more crowded and more of and more of us are going to be sharing every single fucking INCH of public space, here are some rules.
1. Don’t stink. When you go out, do not carry with you the odors of

a. dog
b. sweaty sex
c. cigarettes
d. beer, esp. beer that you consumed and then regurgitated
e. mothballs
In fact, do not carry with you any odor. Leave it at home. If you wear perfume, it should be so subtle that only people hugging you go, “Whoa. They still make Chanel No. 5?”

2. It’s not about you. Really. Nothing is about you except what goes on in your own head. Otherwise, you can trust that nobody else is thinking about you at all. Unless you’re Paris Hilton, and then Jason Bishop might be.
3. Nobody cares about your private conversations. Sure, your life is brilliant, your drama captivating, your business deals extraordinary. But, really? The rest of us don’t give a shit. Hold it down.
4. You don’t get all the space. Just because you’re huge and are carrying a purse the size of Montana, that doesn’t mean that you get three chairs or the whole park bench or the entire cereal aisle in The Dreaded Wal-Mart.
5. The rest of us don’t want to share your music. You may think it’s the most fabulous thing in the history of audio, but if we wanted to share, we’d have brought a splitter and our own set of earbuds.
6. Leave your kids at home. Unless it’s a playdate at the park or the Saturday matinee at the circus, there’s no reason they need to go. There’s no excuse to pack up all your kids and their various cousins and haul them, hungry and whiny, to the community theater production of Rent. They don’t want to go, and nobody else wants them to be there.
7. When you’re out in public, you’re out in public. “Public” is that place that you do not own and so must share with other people. You do not get to do the things you do at home. It is not the place to fart, or to pluck your eyebrows [a young woman in a booth at McDonald’s] or to floss your teeth [a teacher at the table in the teachers’ lounge during lunch]. We do not want to share your odors or sounds or the feel of your sticky, sweaty skin. We do not want you to brush your hair so that the hairs land on us. We do not want you to spray your cologne so that we must make our way through the produce aisle reeking of “Eternity.”
8. If someone in your party begins to cry or whine or have bodily fluids coming from any orifice, it is your job to take them away. Immediately. Do not sit around hoping that they will stop. Whatever it is, it’s already gone on too long. The rest of us do not care about the circumstances. Sure, it’s harsh, but the truth is that if your Uncle Morty is coughing up big chunks of his lungs, he needs to be at home.
9. In short, you have no right to do anything loud or smelly or disgusting while sharing a public space with other human beings. Or animals, for that matter:  it frightens them when you fart, OK?
10. Yes, you ARE your brother’s keeper. If your brother is a clueless cretin and thinks it’s perfectly OK to stick his hand down his pants and scratch his balls while shopping for apples, no. Tell your Aunt Martha not to clean out her brush in the lavatory in the library, and make sure your sister doesn’t help herself to a handful of chocolates from the bin in aisle 9 [a grown man sent a little girl to get a handful of nut clusters, which he then ate as he continued to shop]. It is your job to help enforce the rules. If you’re civilized enough to give a shit, you must help. If you’re not, you must stay at home.
Make copies. Post these everywhere.

I Drive Myself Crazy.

We don’t have to do a lot of laundry. I work at home, so I tend to wear the same clothes over and over. The EGE wears his clothes more than once, as well. We don’t get really dirty, and we usually do 4 or 5 loads on Sundays, counting towels. Yesterday I thought maybe we could do laundry every two weeks, instead of every week. This idea came to me mostly because it was 9 o’clock at night, we hadn’t eaten, and we hadn’t started the laundry—we worked outside all afternoon and evening. I try not to do laundry on weekdays because it tends to make feel like a housewife:  home in the middle of the day folding clothes and ironing.
Which is a big fat lie:  I have never ironed clothes in my life, and I learned that I can usually outwait my husband when there’s a pile of laundry on the bed waiting to be folded.
So we didn’t do laundry. But then, this morning, I wanted to mend The EGE’s jeans. These are some way-cool jeans we got at—where else?—a garage sale years ago. I think they look fabulous on him (low on the hips, very sexy) and so have kept mending them as he gets new holes in them. They’re in pretty bad shape now (he wears them only at home, which is a Very Good Thing, as the crotch isn’t holding up well at all. Not to mention the knees, which are gone, and the back, which is hanging by threads). He’s ready to let them go, but I’m determined to save them after all the work I’ve put into them so far).
But they need to be washed before I work on them. So I heave the big sigh and start the laundry—if I’m going to do one load, I might as well do them all. So much for Being Green. I ain’t no damn frog, anyway.
I do the jeans. I do the next load. I start taking the second load out of the washer and putting them in the dryer. What’s this? What’s that smell? And what’s this chunky stuff?

Well. You know how I told you we have these cats we know in the neighborhood? And how we carry food for them when we walk? Well, Someone forgot to check the pockets and washed not one but TWO baggies full of cat chow. All over everything, wet, ground-in cat kibble in Every. Single. Garment. Socks, my underwear, my pajamas.
(I’m sorry, but I can’t help thinking it’s a New Thing:  tie-dyed chicken-scented panties. Mmmmm.)
So, instead of Being Green and doing half a dozen loads of laundry every two weeks, I’m washing this load TWICE. After gathering it all up and carrying it outside and shaking everything out, piece by piece.
I am Housewife; hear me sigh.

What I Finished This Weekend, and A Lesson Learned

Remember I showed you the piece I’m making for “Party Animals,” the fund-raising auction project for Bernie Berlin’s shelter?
Here’s what it looked like then:

Here’s the finished piece:

I had no idea, until I looked at these photos, how much cat fur I sew into my work. Amazing. Especially since I go over it regularly with those sticky-roller things. Good grief.
I meant to do a lot more handwork on this. I had all the beads ready to bead the background and put lots more on her hat, and do her eyes, and the outlines on her face, and, and, and!
And then I stopped and remembered: I’m not going to do this any more:  put a ton of work into something for somebody else. I’m just not. Over the years I’ve made things for people, things as gifts, things to sell, things as projects for editors. Sometimes I have put a lot of time into those, imagining how pleased the person would be to receive them. Then, years later, I come across whatever-it-was stuffed in a drawer or crammed in a closet. Or it would get sent home all crammed into a little box. Recently I worked for weeks on a piece, dyeing and stenciling and appliquéing and stitching and stamping and beading and photographing, and then was told they didn’t need it after all.
And I said, “Never again.” Never again am I going to spend weeks of my time making something for anybody but me. If I later decide to show it, or sell it, or give it away, fine. But I’m not going into a long involved project unless it’s for me.
I’m happy to support the auction. And I spent many hours on this. And, by the way, it was a total pain in the butt. Those stitched letters? The stitching goes through 5 layers of fabric held together with 4 layers of fusible webbing. My thumb was so sore from forcing the needle through all that bulk that I had to wear a tape thimble around it. It was miserable.
Here’s the back of the auction piece:

And here’s the back of the piece I made just because I wanted to:


That’s the difference. And it’s something I’m going to remember. It would be lovely if other people valued our work and recognized the time and effort put into it, but it doesn’t really matter:  you have to make what you make for yourself. It’s the process of bringing something into the world, making an idea concrete. You have to find a way to make that enough, because the truth is that no one else will ever know what went into it, and no matter how much they like it, it will never mean to them what it did to you.
Here’s the front of my piece, We Save Art:

And details:



The text was stamped on a piece of muslin that had been run through the printer for the background text. I stitched over each letter, even the little ones—it took forEVER. Everything else was lightly fused and then stitched.
When I finished the auction piece yesterday, I was filled with such joy. Sure, it was nice finishing it. But even bigger, for me, was the freedom I felt from my decision while working on it. I’m happy to offer something I’ve already made for an auction. But I don’t think I’ll ever be making anything like this again. I’ll do what I do the way I want to do it, and if it goes out into the world later on, great. If not? Well, I’ve got a lot of empty wall space still in the living room.
For me, it’s about the joy in making. The joy I feel in thinking about how cool it will look when it’s finished, the joy in putting thread through fabric, the joy in figuring out how to make something work. If I don’t get that joy, there’s really no point in doing it. I might as well sign up for cable.

This Week’s Give-Away

No journal this week. Instead, I’ve got a book I think someone might like to have.

I bought this new, something I hardly ever do unless I know the author, which I don’t. But I know some of the participants, which is cool.
How to describe this book? I think the only way I can do that is to say it’s “touchy-feely,” but that’s not a good description at all.
It’s hard to explain. I like books that tell you what they’re going to tell you and then give you specific examples and details. I like some left-brained-ness in my books.  Kind of a lot, actually. I like a lot of concreteness and illustrative narrative stories. I’m not crazy about esoteric generalities. I think that’s just me. It’s a lack of Girly-ness, I suspect. Because when I was thinking about how to describe this book, the word “girly-girl" kept popping up.
Here’s a quote, “I begin to aim my psyche in the direction of my intention. Can I begin to imagine what it would feel like to live in this creative, resonant state? I cannot just create a ‘picture’ from an idea of it. I must embody it, to draw it there.”
I am not saying there’s anything wrong with this; I’m just saying that this means absolutely nothing to me. I do not have the kind of brain for which that computes at all. I kept reading the book, and I kept thinking, “OK, there are obviously some Girly Hormones missing from me somewhere, never mind that I take a shitload [technical term which here means .5 mg.] of estrogen, because this makes no sense to me.”
There are also projects in this book and some cool punch-out cards for The Transformation Deck, which I also didn’t understand but which looks way cool. I sometimes do wish I could make my brain work differently; but, at this late stage, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Anyway, it’s a cool book, with contributors you’ll recognize and enjoy. If you’re very girly-girl, intuitive, dreamer-ish, into feelings and emotions about creativity, this is the book for you. Post a comment and tell me about this, and I’ll pick someone on Friday.

Seven Things

OK. In the Spirit of Being a Good Sport—and because I told Rob I’d try again—here are seven (more or less) perhaps interesting (and perhaps not at all) things about me.
Sigh. This may take all day long.
1. My teeth are very odd. (remember the “perhaps not interesting” part!) I am 52 years old and still have  baby teeth. I had 6 until I hit menopause and had to have two replaced with bridges. I also never got either lateral incisor (the teeth on either side of your two front teeth), so my teeth have always looked slightly odd. I used to pretend I had fangs. Plus my jaw is wonky and has kept shifting, so as I’ve aged, I’ve become buck-toothed (I had to type that over and over:  I kept typing “fuck-toothed,” and am sitting here giggling like a goober).
2. I have very few human ties. I have no children, no siblings. My parents are both dead, and I have no contact with any of their families. I have no contact with anyone I knew before I graduated from high school.
3. I can write backwards. In cursive. This is not something I taught myself how to do or that I practice. It’s not beautiful script, but it’s easy for me. Perhaps because I’m left-handed?
4. I eat with chopsticks. They’re easier for me to use. Plus they come in cool colors! I didn’t learn to properly hold a fork until I was 13, and I never mastered that switching-the-knife-and-fork thing. This was not my parents’ fault.
5. Color is my life. Seeing certain colors makes me immediately happy, like turning on a switch. Other colors—muddy colors, pastels, neutrals—depress me. Many shades of browns and greys are physically painful. I cannot wear colors I don’t like.
6. Although I like people and like being around groups of people I like (workshops, classes, art retreats), I need to spend a lot of time alone. When I’m not with my husband, I’m by myself. After being around people for several days with no time by myself, I start to itch and get jumpy. Plus reallyreallyreally grouchy.
7. I understand cats. I usually know what they’re thinking and make friends with them easily. There are cats all over the mile radius of our neighborhood who come out to meet me when I walk. They are not child replacements:  I do not think of them as children. They are just regular beings, albeit short and wearing fur.
8. (Whoa! She’s on a roll now!) My mother said there was one time, when I was 4, when I said something about having a baby. She said that was the only time I ever made any mention of any interest in having one. I don’t remember this, of course, and I can’t remember ever for a single moment ever in my life wanting to have a child. The idea has always been horrifying. I have no interest in babies or children and try to avoid them, as I can’t ever think of anything to say to them/about them. I’ve always thought it unfortunate that humans have such a long childhood. I thought that when I was a kid, too—I wanted to be a grown-up and get on with life.
9. I know nothing about babies. The first time I saw our nephew (we were married; I was in my 20’s), I was amazed that his eyes were already open. I had always assumed that humans were like cats and were born with their eyes shut. Made sense to me.
10. I have never changed a diaper.
Well, we got off on a little Baby Thing there, didn’t we? Pretty boring. But then, almost any list that’s All About Me is going to be boring, no matter who we are. But, funny thing:  like Rob, I love reading those lists about other people. They fascinate me. Tell me the coolest/oddest/funniest/most interesting thing about you. Or post a list and give us a link. We’ll all be entranced, I promise!

Do You Do This, Too?

One of the very coolest—and least expected—things about keeping a blog is finding out that you’re not alone. You know:  you write about something weird that you do, some quirk that your family’s made fun of your whole entire life, and it turns out there are a bunch of other people who go, “Hey, me, too!” And suddenly there’s a whole Tribe of People Who Twist Their Hair. Or whatever. Obviously, this post isn’t about hair twisting, since that is pretty much out of the question for me.
No. It’s about the song that starts in my head when I wake up in the middle of the night. I wake up numerous times during the night. Every night. I have done this for as long as I can remember—which is high school. I wake up, get up and pee, get back in bed and go back to sleep. When I’m under a lot of stress about something, though, it’s like this:  I wake up, and a song is immediately playing in my head. It’s whatever song I have heard more than once in the past couple days. Right now, it’s “Tea for the Tillerman,” by Cat Stevens. It’s the end song for the series Extras, which one of You People, probably one of the Fabulous Canadians—although I may be wrong—recommended we watch. I love this show! It’s hilariously funny to me, although Maggie’s idiocy drives me INSANE. And I like “Tea for the Tillerman.” But I could do without it playing in an endless loop in my head at 2:30 am, and 4:13 am, and 5:30 am and 6:22 am.
I know why this happens. When I’m stressed about something—Cutie Pie has had another relapse this week, with more fever, more pain, another trip to the vet, another shot, two more prescriptions, another $100; and Moe is jealous of the attention he’s getting and has taken to beating him up:  I hadn’t left the house in two days, so when The EGE got home, I went out for a walk and came back to find that Moe had attacked Cutie Pie and The EGE had doused Moe with water (which he hates) and Cutie Pie was freaked out and and Moe was cowering under the bed, wet and terrified. It took me an hour to get everyone sorted out, and I had been gone only 20 minutes. And we’re supposed to go out of town next weekend. How is this possible?—anyway:  so when things are stressful, my brain would normally latch onto whatever-it-is and worry it to death. In the middle of the night, of course, that means you won’t get back to sleep. So, in order to protect itself, the brain, as soon as it wakes up, starts the endless loop of “Tea for the Tillerman,” so that there’s no room in there for going, “Gee, I wonder how Cutie Pie is doing. I wonder if he’s asleep. Maybe I should go check on him. Maybe I could get online and see if there’s some other treatment the vets haven’t thought of. . . I wonder if he’s going to be better tomorrow. If he’s not, I wonder what I’m going to do.”
I’ve read that a song playing over and over in your head has something to do with the power of auditory stimulus, and I know it’s common when you’re awake. It’s fascinating to me, though, that it happens in the middle of the night only when I’m stressed out.
And just happen to hear a really catchy—aka Annoying As Hell--tune, over and over and over. . . .

Fabulous Street Art!

Hey, Jude sent me to this video. It makes me so very, very happy to know that there are people like this in the world.

The Myth of Scarcity

Roz has been posting about Journal Myths, and today she talked about scarcity, and it was so excellent that it made me want to talk about it, too.
Here’s what she had to say. Have I mentioned that the woman is brilliant? (What you don’t get is how funny she is because it doesn’t come across in print—I had no idea until the first time we talked on the phone and ended up lying on my back in the floor, laughing so hard tears literally ran down into my ears. It was wonderful. Also tickle-y.)
Anyway. Scarcity. You know I’ve been thinking about that lately, what with the on-going sorting and weeding out process around here. Although I had never thought of it when I was younger, I think I’ve always operated on a belief in scarcity—you know, that there’s not enough to go around, that I’ll never have enough, that I’d better get as much as I can and save it for The Bad Times.
When I first heard of the concept of scarcity, I kind of gulped and went, “Oh.” And did a little thinking—not too much, because it makes my brain hurt to think about these kinds of things—and think I figured out where it came from.
My parents grew up during the Depression, when they had next to nothing. I grew up in relative affluence, BUT:  I grew up on a Party Crew, which was the group of geophysicists, etc., who moved together, finding oil. And we had to be ready to move at a moment’s notice—so my dad would come home from work one day and tell my mom that we were moving the next week. And everything had to be packed up and ready to go in just a couple of days. We had a little green trailer, and everything we owned fit in that trailer. I’m talking tiny—because, in some little towns, we lived in basement apartments or hunting lodges or whatever was available for the few months we’d be there. There was no possibility of buying an actual house; that would be ridiculous, because you knew you wouldn’t be there for even a full year.
Needless to say, we did not own a lot of stuff. I had a bunch of toys, of course—as the spoiled only child—but other than that, it was mostly just 1) the basics and 2) nothing that was going to break or get torn up during a zillion moves.
So when The EGE and I bought this house, I was totally into the nesting thing. We’d been married 12 years, but we’d lived in a mobile home, which never felt permanent to me. I can see that, just as my mother allowed herself to have clothes and shoes and things for her house, when she finally owned a house; so did I begin to amass collections of things I loved:  paper and fabric, books and art supplies. There was, as I’ve mentioned many times, an entire room full of paper. Shelves of paper, stacks of paper, boxes of paper (wonderful paper I picked up from the printing company that saved it for me).
When I was little, my dad brought me Berol Prismacolor map pencils from the office:  when they got down to the stub ends and he got new ones, he’d bring me the old ones—plus whatever colors he didn’t use on maps.
You know what comes next:  while I loved those pencils and will always like Prismacolors best, I had to have some brand-new, full sets of colored pencils. Not just the stubs of red and blue, but the whole array of every shade, all nicely sharpened and new.
And it went on like that. And what was worse that I learned my mother’s belief in scarcity, in which you always Save the Good Stuff, so that you don’t wear your best pajamas or use your china and silver or drive The Good Car. You save it, because if you mess it up, you’ll never be able to replace it.
I had Nice Clothes I never wore but saved, Just In Case. When we got married, we bought two sets of dishes with roses on them—my husband loves roses—but we ate off a set of ugly plastic plates that came with the mobile home when we bought it new. Saving those good dishes.
My mother finally wore The Good Pajamas when she was in the hospital. I gave her dishes and sterling to her next door neighbor when we emptied out the house.
That’s how I learned:  you don’t need to hoard things. You don’t need to collect things. You need what you need, and you need to use it, enjoy it, wear it out and use it up. I’ve had closets full of clothes in my life—hundreds and hundreds. And my favorites, the things I wear all the time? The Levi’s 501’s I find at garage sales, all soft and worn pale and frayed. My favorite shirts? The ones I buy at Goodwill, similarly broken in and soft on the skin.
We got rid of the rose dishes:  we realized we didn’t really want them. (We got rid of the plastic plates, too.)
Whatever it is, don’t save it. Don’t hoard it. Go through your closets, your shelves, your garage. Find the things you have and decide whether to keep them or give them away. If you keep them, use them. Read the hardcover books (some people buy two:  a hardback copy and a paperback. They put the former up on the shelf and read the latter. What possible reason do they have for this unless the book is a signed first edition? And even then:  that book was meant to be read, not collected.) Use the dishes. Wear the velvet coat.
Most people have, somewhere, a box of things passed down to them by their grandmother. These things are taken out every couple of years and admired briefly and then wrapped back up and stored away. I don’t get that. I have the tintype photo of Whoever That Is (I can’t remember, and I’ll never know now because I have no one to ask; so all I know is it’s a grouchy-looking couple that had some responsibility in my being here, genetically speaking) propped up on a Buddha statue on a shelf. I have the mobile that was over my crib now hanging above the computer. Eventually, these things will break or fall apart or somehow get lost. But so what? There is no magic in them that will keep me from dying or save the world or turn lead into gold. I put them out, and I look at them, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.
When my Moleskine journal is full, I’ll buy a new one. If I can’t afford to buy a new one, I’ll buy a $2 composition book. If I can’t afford to buy that, or if I don’t like the paper in the composition book, I’ll go to the printing company and take whatever scraps they have and make my own with embroidery thread and a cover made out of paper bags. Go to Judy Wise’s blog for journal-making ideas. This week she posted photos of her latest, and in the past she’s shown the one made from paper bags.
Use the good journal. Go read Roz again. Wear the shoes. Eat off the good dishes. What you may find, I’m guessing, is what I found:  The Good Stuff isn’t really the stuff you thought it was, the stuff you’ve been saving because it belonged to your grandmother or you got it as a wedding gift. The Good Stuff is the stuff you use every day, the worn, the comfortable, the useful. Don’t hoard things:  the belief in scarcity makes it real. If you think there’s not enough to go around and hoard things you don’t need and will probably never use, you’re making it come true:  you’re hoarding, stashing away things you don’t need but also won’t share. It is not true, that idiotic bumper sticker:  He Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins. Bullshit. He who dies with the most toys was a selfish greedy bastard. You know who wins? He who dies with the most completely worn out and used up stuff:  the pencils worn down to nubs, the fabulous handmade journals full to bursting and held together with a rubber band, the shoes with the soles danced off, the dishes chipped from being taken outside for cake eaten under the stars. That’s who wins:  the person who used up everything they had LIVING THEIR LIFE.
Don’t be a slave to your stuff. If you’re not using it, you’re curating it. You’re storing it, cleaning it, making room for it, insuring it. If you’re renting a storage building and actually PAYING to hoard stuff you’re not using, you need to pour yourself a cup of coffee and take a long, hard look at what you want out of your life. A collection of Nice Things, or a big, messy, life filled with just the things you need and a lot of leftover room for adventures? I’m serious:  think about it. What do you want in your life? Stuff, or Life?
Don’t be afraid to let go. Having plenty of everything—extras of everything you might possibly need—that’s not freedom. That is fear. Freedom is having just enough to use and do the job but nothing else that’s sitting around getting in the way.
I’m still learning. This week, I had to think about why I had so many, many sets of pencils and markers and pens and chalks. I had the several full sets of colored pencils, but guess what? I used only the Prismacolors, and I’m willing to bet you that, in there somewhere, there’s some nub of a pencil my dad used on a map over 40 years ago. And I saw that that’s all I need: just enough of a little stub of pencil to do the job. Everything beyond that is just fear. Let it go.

And the Winners Are:

Vicki Holdwick, the little journal is yours.
And the collage material goes to Sharon. While I really applaud those of you who wanted to share with kids and people at senior centers, etc., this might not be the box for you:  I think there are some Nekkid People in there—some photocopies of those old cards of naked women, etc. I can just see someone taking that unopened box to school and setting it down in front of an art class full of sixth graders. Or in front of The Ladies’ Craft Guild at the Baptist Senior Center.
Aieeeeee.
And since it’s already completely wrapped in red duct tape, I’m not about to open it up and do a Search & Rescue for The Nude. And Sharon sounds like she’ll have big fun with it—so I’m happy. Thanks so much for helping me out. I wish I could personally deliver a huge box full of collage fodder to each of you.
Remember all those pens and pencils from yesterday? I went through and kept one set of each kind and bundled much of the rest and boxed it up:

It’s going to my friend Terry in Minnesota—he’s an artist (you’ve seen his fabulous postcards) and teaches art and shares his art supplies with some of his students who don’t have their own. So he can always use extras, and I know the pens and pencils I love but don’t use will have an excellent home.
Thanks, y’all!

More Lennie Lulu

For your viewing pleasure.
Click to see her larger.



And here she’s just being weird:

It’s Obscene.

I had never put all my pens and pencils together in one place. Now I wish I hadn’t.

Click to embiggen.

Rob Tagged Me. Ouch.

I don’t do these tag things. While I love reading other people’s lists of odd facts and stuff, the whole thing about Following the Rules and Tagging Other People is just not for me.
But I thought I’d be a semi-good sport and do the “7 Things That Might or Might Not Be Interesting” thing just this once., since Rob wanted me to.
So. Huh. I have no idea what to put here.
1.


OK. I give up. I can’t think of a single interesting thing. Geez. I’ve gotta go throw some more stuff away.

AT&T Sucks The Big Winkie, But At Least They Have Herb.

That would be a guy named Herb. Please.

I am slowly, slowly beginning to extricate myself from Phone Hell. It’s not over yet—oh, no!—but at least I’m making some progress. Or so I’m letting myself believe.

Yesterday I got an e-mail saying my account was past due and that I owed them $90 and something. I had already talked to someone last month who assured me that all was taken care of and that I would have a credit on my account.
This did not make me happy. I hate people telling me I owe them money. I do not owe anyone any money. Oh, sure: the mortgage. But that’s it. Everyone else gets paid before the due date, every time. And I checked (of course I did!) long ago about when to cancel the phone service, etc.

So I got on the phone (that would be the phone that is currently Being Ported from Vonage (which is going to be a whole ‘nother bag of fun, I’m sure) to Clearwire). AT&T is a distant memory. Only not quite. I spent a couple hours on the phone last night, mostly on hold, being shuffled from one person to another. One would tell me that yes, indeed, AT&T was going to owe me money. The next would insist that this was not the case and that I owed them over $90 and was now A Horrible Person.

Finally one person put me on hold for what seemed like forever, and I slowly came to realize that the call center had closed for the day and that they had all gone home to dinner.

Happy? Um. No.

This morning, bright and early, I begin the game again. I talk to some guy, and then to Heather in Accounts Receivable, and then to the brother named Herb. He is their only saving grace, because the behemoth that is AT&T is just one big sucky pit of hell.

I’m sitting here, looking at my account history chart online, where it shows a credit of $14.23 for my local service and a credit pending on my long distance. The problem is that AT&T is not ABOUT to send me any money. So they’ve got to figure out a way to make it look like 1) they don’t owe me any money or 2) there’s something I don’t understand. I argue that the payment I made was actually a pre-payment, and that, since I didn’t use the phone service for the whole month, they owe me money. It shows right there on the screen that this is the case. Herb argues that AT&T doesn’t bill in advance, and that I actually owe them for a partial month but that he has very generously zeroed out my account.
I am no fool. If AT&T thought I owed them any money at all whatsoever, the fact that I put on my Big Girl Vocabulary and tossed around words like “arrears” would not have impressed them at all, and they would still be hassling me this very minute. The fact that he was so very willing to zero it out, while I was sitting looking at a screen that showed that they owed me money, proved my point.
But of course they won. After a while of Herb being all sincere and shit, assuring me that AT&T never bills in advance and that he’s doing me a favor by wiping out whatever I might owe them from the partial month, I heave the big sigh and say, simply, “OK.” They win. I never expected the Evil Bastards at AT&T to actually send me a check.

Plus I have to save my energy for Vonage.

Another Horribly Cute Cat Video

I’m sorry. Forgive me. I cannot resist. This is just pathetic if you know how it happened:  I put this on her head, and she was totally into it, all like, “Ooooh, I’m even cuter than usual! If that’s actually possible. Which I doubt.”

Because first I put it on the other cats—Cutie Pie and Lennie Lulu’s brother, Moe—and both of them shook their heads and sent it flying. Lennie? She was all posing and turning this way and that and going, “Where’s my wand now?”

I live a very pathetic life.

The Ever-Gorgeous Earl would tell you that his life, Totally Ruled by Cats, is WAY more pathetic. He is so wrong. He NEVER puts things on cats’ heads.

You decide how pathetic my life is.

What Made Me Happy This Morning

Actually, there are several things that are making me happy this morning, but this is the one that’s got me grinning. I’ve moved into the sewing studio and am sorting through drawers in there. I’ve found someone local—the Lovely Miss Julia!—who’s taking pity on me and is accepting a Load of Stuff (I mean: A Fabulous Haul! is what I mean) tomorrow--hooray! And so I’m going through things in there and I find this:
Click on these to read them--

I’ve had a wad of these forever but have never really looked at them. In trying to roll them up neatly and pin the ends, I saw writing on the back:



Is that just the ginchiest thing or what?
I like to imagine they were all pet cows, of course, needing their weight to be estimated for, oh, Easter outfits. With bonnets, of course. Nothing quite as happy as a cow in a hat, although, in principle, I am firmly opposed to Making Animals Wear Clothing.

Collage & Journal Fodder 4 U

Good grief. After figuring out how much I spent in postage last year, you’d think I’d give it up, go cold turkey, right? Nah. In cleaning and sorting the files today, I came up with a box full of collage stuff—photocopies, tea-dyed maps, stickers—just a box full of stuff to play with. It’s one of those boxes file folders come in—you know, about 10” x 12” x 3.5”, packed full. You might love it; you might hate it. Only one way to find out. Post a note telling what you’d do with this stuff, and I’ll pick on Friday, along with the regular journal drawing. I’ll pick someone who sounds like they really want it and will have fun with it.
I’d save a ton on postage if I could just learn to Throw. It. Away.
Or, in truth, add it to the 4 containers ready to go to recycling.
But no.

Cyn Jon ♥’s Bernie, As Do We All

How cool is this:  Cyn Jon asked if I’d mind posting a link to his post about his friend, Bernie Berlin, only he didn’t say it was about Bernie, and so I didn’t know until I got there. And I was all like, “Whoa. Tiny world, man!” Because not only do I know Bernie In Real Life, but I’m in the middle of working on a piece for an auction to raise money for her work. Some artists were invited to make something to be auctioned off and also shown in a ‘zine to be sold to raise money. The theme is Party Animals. Remind me to take a photo when I get the hand work done.

In case you don’t know about Bernie, go read Cyn Jon’s post and then follow the link to her blog. If you love animals, this is a good place to send some love. Sometimes you want to help but aren’t sure how much you can trust the people who say they’re raising money for The Cause, you know? This isn’t one of those times. This is Bernie, and this is a real life’s calling. Go check it out.

One Drawer Down

It’s not weeded out as much as I’d like, but given the magnitude of the contents—my entire writing life—I figure this is pretty damn good.

--On the left you can see the corner of the recycling box, overflowing. Next is the stack of stuff from high school and grad school and teaching—what I think of as My English Life (there was My Animal Life (SPCA, vet assistant, Animal Control), My English Life (grad school, teaching, writing and submitting poetry), My School Life (subbing, tutoring, doing basketball games), and My Art Life, which blends with My Writing Life.
--Then, above and to the right, two of the three Abandoned Novels. The other is on the computer—guess I should print out a copy.
--The stack of True Life Stories.
--Book contracts.
Time to tackle the next drawer. Hope it’s not as scary as this one.

Yikes! It’s Even Worse Than I Expected.

I see now why I hadn’t tackled the File Drawers before. Goodlordalmighty. My entire Writing Life is contained therein. Check this out--
My poetry notebooks from high school:


Stuff from my thesis in graduate school, also poetry:

My syllabus from when I was teaching freshman comp:

Cat Fancy with a piece I did on stamping with your cat, with a photo of My Best Friend, Maxwell, who had his own stamping drawer:


The contracts and information packets from my first two books, which I need to keep to remind myself how very, very little I got paid for these:

And then here’s where it gets really scary, because I hadn’t ever really realized that I’ve written a substantial chunk of three different novels. This one has NINETEEN chapters! Good lord. I mean, I knew I’d written stuff, but to sit down and realize that I spent kind of a lot of my life working on these things and then just abandoning them. And a confession? I’m chicken to go back and read them to find out WHY I abandoned them. I suspect it’s because they all sucked the big winkie, is what I’m guessing. Jesus. I could have come up with a cure for cancer in the time I spent on this. Well, if I knew anything about science and stuff.
What you don’t see are the charts, the lists, the big 3’ x 4’ sheets of paper I had taped to the wall.

And then the fun part:

I hadn’t ever really thought about this, so it was fun to see What I Did Before I Blogged. I don’t know about other people, but I was doing my own version way back when, before I had a computer, before e-mail, before I ever even met the internet. I was writing up what I called True Life Stories and illustrating them with rubber stamps and then sending them in the actual mail—gasp!—to my correspondents. Remind me to show you some of these—I even decorated some of the envelopes.  It’s cool to realize that what I’m doing now—telling stories about the things that happen in my life—is what I’ve been doing for a long, long time.
And that’s something else:  in that last post, I said that stitching—beads and thread—was my first loves? Not entirely true:  my first love has always been telling stories. It’s good to do this cleaning, sitting in the floor with all this crap, seeing the threads of my life and realizing what’s always been important (for those of you following along at home, that last sentence is:  “is and has been important”)
Back to work. Thanks for keeping me company through this huge chore!

“Creative Clutter”

And isn’t that a lovely way of putting it? I could more honestly titled it Piles and Piles of Crap, but then who’d want to read it?
Well, WE would, of course. Because I’m figuring a healthy percentage of y’all are moaning softly and shaking your heads and going, “Man. I did so NOT want to think about that this morning.”
But it’s Officially Spring, and I’m nothing if not a fucking cliché; so here I am, tackling my own idiosyncratic version of Spring Cleaning. I.e., throwing crap away. Putting stuff in boxes to give to the UU garage sale in May (oh, how I wish it were sooner!) and generally trying to clear things out.
Has this happened to y’all, or are you all too young or something? I’ve found that, in the last couple of years, I reallyreallyreally do NOT want a lot of stuff. For several reasons:
1. I have no one to leave this crap to when I die. I do NOT want it to be tossed out, and I don’t want The EGE to have to live with it.
2. It’s amazingly silly to me to have stuff stored away. For what? If I’m not going to use it, why have it? If, at some point in the future, I wish I had it, I can go buy more. If it’s something I can’t buy, then I can do a search or put out a plea or something.
3. I need more of two things:  Space and Light. I want windows on every outside wall, all across the wall, and I want enough space to work without having to move things.
4. Clutter drives me nuts. It didn’t used to, but it does now. I need it to be gone so I can think.
5. I can’t think—creative thinking—when there’s so much stuff. Too many choices, too much stuff demanding I Do Something with it. It’s like all the art journal supplies. Let’s face it:  I’m never going to be a real art journaler. I’m just not. Yet all the stuff I’ve bought to use in the journals I imagine myself keeping? It mocks me, it keeps asking, “When are you going to use us, huh? Huh? Huh?” Just nagging the shit out of me. It seems to me that, as I’ve gotten older, I’m more easily distracted. Or that there’s more stuff in my head demanding my attention. And if I’m sitting in a room full of possibilities—fabric and beads and stencils and paint and thread—my brain hops from one to another, endlessly.
See, I have this fantasy of myself sitting somewhere, in one of the many little spaces I’ve created throughout the house (a comfortable chair or couch, good light, a little table nearby—I have one in every room) stitching for hours. I love to stitch. On road trips, I can get so much done, and I’m always happy about it. At home, though, there are the distractions. Sure, part of it’s the cats and their demands. And part of it is the computer and its demands (and lures!). But part of it—a large part—is that there’s so much STUFF catching my eye and asking why I’ve neglected it.
When I clear stuff out, it feels like I can breathe more deeply. It feels like weights have been taken off me, and I think that’s really what’s going on:  if I have stacks of unfinished projects, they ARE like weights. And here’s what I’m thinking:  if I didn’t finish them, there was probably a good reason. And if I didn’t do it then, what makes me think I’ll do it later? I’m pretty good at carrying through to the end, and if I don’t, it’s almost always because there was something wrong and I completely lost interest.
Am I alone here? I don’t think so, but what do I know?
All I know for sure (look! I’m channeling Oprah!) is that I’m going to weed out more stuff. I went out in the FE (the Fucking Edifice) to rearrange the growing pile of Garage Sale Stuff, and I could finally open the drawers to the file cabinets. Since The Book is far enough along now that I don’t need to have the huge glut of hard copies of stuff—the chapters, the questionnaires, the CD’s of artwork from all the artists—in the actual house (you know, to grab if there’s a fire or tornado), I needed to put it in the file cabinet out there (it’s actually safer out there in the steel and concrete building, but never mind that), and I found three of the drawers stuffed with stuff I’d forgotten about. Stickers, for instance. Jesus. I only vaguely remember those. And then one drawer held all the hard copies from the last book. One whole file cabinet is full of copies of articles. Two drawers hold all the ones I wrote for Rubberstampmadness. I’m not writing for them any more. I donated all the issues to a teacher at The EGE’s school. But I still have the file folders. I can’t decide what to do with those. I kind of like having that whole file cabinet full of work I’ve done, but it’s silly. Who cares but me? My god, some of it was done before I had a computer—so there are no records of this work except in the file folder. But I’ll never need it and never look at it—I’m not big on sitting down and looking over stuff from the past. I’m thinking I may go through every single folder (aieeeeee!  someone offer to come hold my hand!) and throw away all the notes and keep just the final copy. But still:  why?
As it is, I’ve got two drawers to clean out today. I realized that if I can get rid of the crap I don’t need, I can buy some pocket file folders and file all my ephemera and images in the file drawers, instead of in the little plastic drawers all over the studio and the shelves of the FE. And if I can get rid of those, then I can find room for another bin, and if I have another bin, I can get the huge mound of batting off the shelf in the studio and put it in a bin. That will free up shelf space for getting stuff up off the sewing machine table, making it easier to actually sit down and sew (there are two sewing machine tables with two sewing machines, but there’s so much other crap piled on them that I hate even trying to sew anything. Oh, and here’s what’s worse:  there are two more sewing machines in the FE. This is obscene. There’s my mother’s olive green Elna, with all its cool little gear thingies for the decorative stitching she used to do on my clothes and doll clothes. There’s the Singer my mother gave me that’s hardly even been used. There’s the trusty all-metal Kenmore The EGE bought me when we got married—my go-to machine. And there’s the Janome I bought myself a couple years ago. The Kenmore and the Janome are set up in the house; the others are in their cases in the FE.)
I’ve got a three-foot-high stack of magazines to go to the hospital. I’ve always loved magazines, but here’s another change:  in the last couple of months, I find myself not reading the stack of magazines I’ve bought. I still have some from February.
And here’s a BIG thank-you to Cyn Jon for turning me onto Book Mooch. I love it that I can list a book and, sometimes within the hour, I get the address of someone who wants it. Books are relatively cheap to mail, and I love knowing that they’re going to people who really want them. Plus, when I think of a book I’d like to have, I can ask for it. So cool!
I feel, in short, as if I’ve been scattering my energies, as if they’ve been dissipated by clutter and too many side trips. I like to stitch. I like to make stuff out of fabric. Everything else is getting in the way. I can tell this because, as I’ve gone around the house these last few days, opening drawers and looking at stuff, I’ve noticed:
--when I’ve opened a drawer with paints or crayons or glue sticks, I feel a weight, a responsibility to use this stuff I’ve collected.
--when I open a drawer with beads or embroidery floss, I feel an excitement, the tingle of ideas, like there’s a whole slew of possibilities contained in those drawers.
I’ve loved beads and thread as far back as I can remember, and it’s time to clear out more of the things that take up time I could be spending with my first loves.
Sure wish y’all were here:  I’d fix us something to drink, and you’d sit out here and keep me company while I went through stuff. You’d happily take all the stuff you could use and load it into the back of your U-Haul, which you’d handily thought to bring along, and we’d both be ever so happy.

Omigod!

OK, so y’all’s ideas about The Mystery made me go back and look more closely at the other photos. And look at this one!

See the guy in the upper left? Isn’t that the same guy? (I promise you I do NOT have the answer—I hadn’t noticed this until tonight.) And, gee, could the poor groom be any more dorky? Poor guy.

A Little Mystery

I’m beginning another Huge Purge here, with the attendant dust and mess and frustration and, for a change, a little mystery.
I love a mystery. One time, years ago, I went to an estate sale and bought a box of letters and diaries that had belonged to one of the women who’d lived in the house that was being sold. The woman had been quite something in collage, with lots of friends and beaus. I read some of the letters—they were pretty boring, actually. But one diary had, in the very back, microscopic script so tiny I had to go buy a magnifying glass to read it. And there was the other story, the story of how this woman had met the woman whose house it was, how they had fallen in love and fought and struggled and finally decided to live together. It was fabulous!
A while back I went to another estate sale and bought a photo album. It wasn’t old enough or funky enough to be really cool, but I didn’t want it to languish there—it was the last day, with only the unwanted stuff left, marked down to 50% off . It was a wedding album, with page after page of photos of The Big Day.
Here’s the bride and groom:


Then, at the back of the album, there’s the photo of her taken for the style section of the newspaper, as A Society Wife, and then, at the very back, her obituary and the program from her funeral. She died in her 40’s, I think.
But the mystery! Hidden between the photos of her wedding was this one:

What do you think?

This Week’s Give-Away

I found another of these little Canson notebooks. 100% recycled paper, drawing weight (“suitable for all dry media”), 4” x 6” and 100 pages.

Post a comment and tell me your favorite thing to do when you travel. I’ll all into Traveling Mode this week, even though we’re not going anywhere until April. Still—I love to hear about possibilities.

I’ll pick someone on Friday. If you toss your name in, that means you PROMISE to check back then so I can get your address if you win.

Journal Spank: Adventures Where You Live

The Ever-Gorgeous Earl has lived in Texas his entire life. I have lived here since I was 13, but it feels like I’ve always lived here:  we moved around constantly, but both my parents were born and raised in Texas, so this is where Family was and where we always came back.

But The EGE and I have realized that there are big chunks of the state that we haven’t seen. Sure, we’ve been to the big places—Dallas/Ft. Worth, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso. We’ve been to all the High School Sports-related places, like Abilene and San Angelo, Lubbock and Amarillo and Plainview, Seminole and Andrews and Pecos and Alpine. And the tiny little United Girls’ Softball places, like Monahans and Crane and Coahoma and Sweetwater and Colorado City.

But we haven’t been to Marfa or Del Rio, Harlingen or Brownsville. Or a whole slew of other places we’ve somehow missed. We’re setting out to remedy some of the oversight:  we’re planning at Birthday Trip for him that will take us way down into the tiny little southernmost tip of the state. Just to see what we’ve been missing. Who knows? An adventure may be waiting for us!

What about you? Where in your state have you always wanted to go but haven’t yet? What is it you’d like to see? Unless you’re in Alaska, you won’t have nearly as far to go as we will – 501 miles one way. Maybe an adventure awaits you just a couple hours from home. Or at least in the pages of your journal:  plan the trip you’d like to take inside your state. When will you go? What will you take? How long will you be gone? What will you see and do? If you can, make travel arrangements. If not, draw travel photos just as if you’ve already been.