Podcast with Carla Sonheim

I love Carla's work. For years I've had three little iron-on-transfers from her drawings--she sent them to me to use, but I couldn't bear to iron them on something I might wear out. Imagine how happy I was when she told me she had a book coming out--Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists, just released this month. Now, I've got a bunch of drawing books, and I've got a bunch of books by artists I know. But this is one of those I bought brand new, full-price, as soon as it came out. And I love it. Seriously. And nobody paid--or even asked--me to say that. I like it that much. While you can't use the "look inside" feature here, you can at amazon.com, so you can check it out for yourself.

And imagine how I was even happier when Carla agreed to talk to me about the book, her art, teaching. Yowza. And then she did the coolest thing--I ask her during the podcast if she'll offer an exercise for people who need just the tiniest bit of encouragement to draw something. I figured she'd suggest something from her book or her blog, but no:  she jumped right into the coolest guided exercise for you, right there: all you need is a pen or pencil or something to draw with (with which. . . ), or--if you want to do it like she has her students do it in class, a piece of cardstock and a Sharpie pen. Of course, you might want to grab your sketchbook and draw as you're listening to Carla talk. Then you'll want to go to her website and her blog.


As always, if you can't make this little player work (below), you can click on the podcasts over there in the sidebar, and it will take you to my podcast blog at libsyn. Or you can download any of the podcasts from iTunes at Notes from the Voodoo Lounge.


Now here's Carla--enjoy!

The Perfect Pen

Oh, lord. I don't even know why I'm tackling this subject. If I had The Perfect Pen, I wouldn't be here. I'd be 1) sitting happily somewhere, writing my life story by hand, sipping a drink with a little umbrella and watching the ocean waves because 2) I'd be stinkin' rich. Because *everybody* would buy my Perfect Pen. Right? 


The Perfect Pen would:
~~be comfortable to hold. Neither too fat nor too thin, not too squishy but soft enough so you didn't get that callus on your second finger


~~be cute. It would come in colors and patterns, with customizable skin, just like for your laptop and iPhone. Maybe bells!


~~come with ink in any color you could imagine. 


~~would not cost an arm and a leg. It's a PEN, people! It's not a super-sonic intergalactic rocket launcher with the additional capability of erasing under-eye wrinkles. It's just a pen. Come on!


~~never skip, blotch, drip, glop, or dry up. It would last FOREVER.


~~would have a GPS device in it so you could track it with your iPhone for when it inevitably gets lost. Except it would be so cheap and so readily available that you could go into any convenience store and buy three more, so it wouldn't matter. Except in your own house, where you'd want some way to keep track of it when the cat steals it and hides it under the sofa and you're not in the mood to go out and get another in Ripe Tangerine right then.


~~it would never, ever, EVER smear. This is one of the Biggies for me, as a left-hander. I HATE smearing. Check it out:

(Have you ever tried to take a photo of that side of your hand? Who knew it was so awkward?)


So that's my hand yesterday, when I was checking out pens for my new Strathmore Visual Journal.

I do this on the last page of a notebook with new, unfamiliar-to-me paper. You can see I marked some possibilities, but none of them are fabulous. The pens that did OK are pens that fail to meet one of the above criteria. The Le Pen, for example, is teeny tiny thin and not comfortable to use. The Prismacolor Premier doesn't come in cool colors. Plus I think the pen itself is ugly. The Flair, my favorite in high school (we adored the orange and the olive green, omigod:  we used these on purple notebook paper to write multi-page notes to each other in the evenings when we were thought to be doing our homework (which I'd already done in class but which was a good excuse to hole up in my room and--duh--write Notes About Boys)). Anyway, these are cool but always smear at least a little. Plus:  get the page wet? You're pretty much screwed.

So that's my testing. I don't know what pen I'm going to use in this notebook, but if I can't settle on one I like, I won't be buying any more of these, never mind that the paper is nice and thick and the price is pretty good. 


And it's not like I don't have a lot of choices. I have a few writing implements:

Now, in my own defense, in case you're thinking I take out loans to buy all these pens and stuff, I will point out that the Primsacolor pencils you saw up there are what was left when my father got a new set of map pencils (he was a geophysicist) at work and brought home what was left in the old set. We're talking almost 50 years ago. As you might guess, some of the colors--the pastels, for instance, and the really bright non-primary colors--were almost unused. Not a lot of need for Blush Pink when you're color-coding geological survey maps, I'm guessing.


And those big sets of markers--that one:

is what I got on clearance because a couple were missing. So instead of getting 100 markers for $19.99, I got like 98 markers for $10. A pretty good deal, if you ask me.


Anyway, these Pilot Precise V5's are the newest, something someone rec. to me. I'm going to try them today and see how it goes. 

You also see the Pigma Micron up there, next to the V5's and the wooden mechanical pencil. Those are my favorites. I have a ton of them, bought with the 40%-off coupons that come weekly in the Sunday paper. There's not a lot I covet at Michael's or Hobby Lobby, since they're not exactly the world's best art supply stores and excel more in the area of Frou-Frou Crap for Your Home, so I use the coupons for pens.


If I had to pick just one pen? I have no clue. One with widths, like the Pigma. But more colors. A more comfortable barrel. And even less smearing.


Help. 


[I hope Kelly Kilmer doesn't see this--my method of storing pens is WRONG, so don't do it! Store yours lying down, OK? I'm ruining mine this way, I know that.]


OK. So that's all I know about pens. Please tell us what you've discovered in your Pen Explorations--I'd love to hear about it!

Hey, KarlaRose!

You win the little sketchbook--congratulations! Send me your address, please--

Clarice Loves Journals!

Thanks for indulging me with the photos. Here are some more. What can I say?

Cool Stuff by Itkupilli

If you are one of the few, the brave, the bored--who scroll allllll the way down to the bottom of this page, you'll see a brand-new little badge I fell in love with (with which I. . . .) this morning and snagged from Itkupilli, who designs these and offers them free on her blog, here. 
I sent her a note thanking her and asked if there's anything else I'm supposed to do, but I figured since I thought it was so cool, the least I could do is tell people to go there and have a look. 

The Perfect Notebook

~~would be a Magic Notebook. When I wanted to write something, I'd open it up, and it would have lined pages. If I wanted to write something with a Sharpie, I'd open it up, and it would have lines on 110 lb. cardstock. If I wanted to draw? It would have thick paper. If I wanted to make a diagram of something? Graph paper.


But it would not have these in different sections:  here a swath of watercolor paper, here a chunk of graph paper. Oh, no! Because that's where the magic would come in:  whatever I wanted to do, when I opened the notebook to the next blank page, the Perfect Paper would be there, ready for me.


And size? Size does matter, just like the sultry-voiced announcer on Sirius radio claims with annoying regularity. When I wanted to tuck the notebook into my bag, it would be a nice, handy 5" x 8.5" If I wanted to slip it into the back pocket of my Levi's, it would be, what? 3.5" x 5"? (I haven't ever measured the pockets, in truth). If I wanted a travel journal, it would be 9" x 12", but it would be that only during the times I was actually working in it--the rest of the time, it would be teeny, teeny tiny. So as not to take up any room in our already-packed vehicle, right?


Sometimes it would have a spiral binding, for when I wanted to fold it back on itself. Sometimes it would have sewn signatures, for when I wanted a whole two-page spread. Sometimes it would have signatures sewn into a cool leather binding, for when I wanted to feel all retro-ish.


In short, it would be perfect, and Magic, and just wonderful. Alas, it doesn't exist. And, in real life, where there is no magic, I'm stuck with trying to figure out what kind of notebook I want to use. No, I do not want to bind my own. Not right now. There're a million other things to do, and I don't have the desk set up that I used for book binding--it was a parson's desk, a heavy wooden desk with a sloping top, just the right height for standing and working. It's out in the storage building, and there's no room for it inside right now. Plus I don't have any paper--for years, I got regular loads of paper from the printing company and always had tons and tons of paper in every size and weight. Now if I wanted to bind books, I'd have to go source paper, find what I wanted, order it--aieeeeee.


So here are the things I'm thinking about as I think about the journal I want to use next. I don't like the Semikolon one--I wrote about it yesterday--and find myself avoiding it. When I was at Kelly's house this summer, she had her journal lying out on her desk, ready for her to make notes and paste stuff in, and I just loved that. Sadly, I don't like the one I'm using enough to have any kind of relationship with it. And that's what it is, for me:  a relationship. A good notebook keeps me company, and I in turn fill it and give it meaning. 


So here are my considerations. You will have others of your own--I'd love to hear about them. The truth is that, as much as I love finding a good notebook, I love the search, the hunt. I love talking about notebooks and looking at notebooks and feeling the pages of notebooks. I love listening to Roz talk about how important it is for hers to be square, and I love listening to Wendy talk about why she makes sewn-signature bindings so that the covers of her journals can fold back on themselves just like a spiral-bound book. So jump in!


1. Paper. I hate paper that's too thin so that the ink bleeds through. I also hate paper that's got too much sizing so that the ink doesn't dry immediately--I'm left-handed, and I learned to write the Old School Way, where my hand and arm curl up over the top of the page. I need the ink to dry faster-than-fast so I don't drag my hand through it. Because I REALLY hate smeared ink (which reminds me:  I plan on doing a post on The Perfect Pen. Like I've actually found that). The paper has to have no tooth--my pen has to slide across it effortlessly--with arthritis, you do not want any more stress or pressure on your fingers than is absolutely necessary. I want my pen to float on the paper. For me, right now, the best paper seems to be cheap 110 lb cardstock. Very smooth, very white, very thick.


2. Binding. I don't know. I need a really sturdy binding. I could never use a three-ring binder or any of those binding systems that let you remove and add pages. I read a book about some journaling system, decades ago, about which everyone was raving at the time. You set up a three-ring binder with all these sections for various parts of your life. It sounded cool, but I knew I'd never be able to do it. Three-ring binders are for work, not for notebooks/journals. I need the binding--whether spiral or sewn--to be really tight and sturdy. I've had cheapo notebooks in the past sewn with cheap thread, and you'd paste stuff in and then try to shut the book, and the threads would pop and signatures would begin to come loose. Guess how crazy that made me. Lately I've been liking spiral bindings because they work better in the car--I can have 8.5" x 11" pages but not have to deal with a huge spread. I do hate that the spiral gets in the way when I write, though, so that's not good. I'm still iffy about the whole binding thing.


4. Covers. While it's nice to have a soft flexible cover, like the Moleskine cahiers,[and, oh, my! when I go to the Moleskine (moh-le-SKEEN-uh) site and start looking around, I want to use only Moleskines for the rest of my life. Wowza.] I like a really hard sturdy cover so that I can hold it and write at the same time without having to find a hard surface to lay it on. I do keep small cahiers--some I've made myself--in various pockets for when I'm walking, and I'll tuck one in the pocket of my jeans in the winter when I walk (I don't wear jeans in the summer--too hot by far).


5. Size. Ahhh. This is another really tough one. While I love to have a notebook that is so portable I can take it anywhere, a little bitty tiny notebook is just, well, tiny. Little bitty. Once upon a time I could make tiny little letters, very neat little printed letters that would fit, many to a page, in a tiny little notebook. Those days are long gone. Today my fingers have enough trouble making a pen work at all, never mind making a pen work very, very small. And while I love the room and expansiveness of a 9" x 12" notebook, there's no way it's going to work for me:  I like to be able to take my notebook with me to, say, Starbucks. Without a suitcase on wheels in which to carry it. Most of my notebook-keeping life (almost 40 years), I' ve bounced back and forth between 5.5" x 8.5" or so and 8.5" x 11" 


So those are the things I think about:  ease, comfort, portability. And something else, some undefinable thing. How the notebook feels, how *I* feel when I pick it up and open the cover. It's often hard to tell on the first meeting. I may be distracted by the cool-looking cover (as was the case with the Semikolon, with its bright orange fabric cover), or I may be thinking about what a great travel journal it would make when, in fact, we're nearing the end of a trip, and I'm already in the middle of a perfectly good travel journal and won't need another one for many months, by which time my needs and liking will certainly have changed.


When I began keeping a notebook regularly, back in 1973, I used spirals. Big, thick spiral notebooks, because that was part of the assignment in Mrs. Hines' English class. The first time I accidentally bought one with micro-perf pages, I bought a huge roll of Scotch Magic Transparent Brand tape and went through and put tape over the perfing on every. Single. Page. Yes, I did. 


Later, when I had my own money, I'd buy sketchbooks from the craft store--Strathmore, Canson--you know. Then, after Teesha Moore sent me a box of her hand-made journals to look at (yes, I know how lucky I am--this was in the days before she started doing elaborate collages in her books, but I was just as entranced as you can imagine), I started binding my own. I did that for a long time, even going so far as to buy rolls of brown craft paper, cut the pages, tea-dye all of them, wrinkle them, iron them, and then bind them. I would buy old yearbooks, and one had a fabulous hand-tooled leather cover. I gutted it (saving the insides, of course) and used the cover for my own book. Here--I'll go find it and take a photo for you!

It was the 100th volume of the journal notebooks. Duh. Bet you guessed that, huh? I sewed in paper:

put a bunch of cool stuff on the ends of the binding thread:

kept the endpapers:

I didn't feel bad about gutting this yearbook--in it, there was a page about an athletic trainer who'd been at the school forever and had recently died, and the title of the page was, "He was only a Negro, but. . ." So, yeah:  gut it and make it into something better.


It has the ticket stubs from when we went to the Inwood Theater in Dallas to see Amelie when it first came out:

various things I was thinking about:

Stuff like that.

Here's a cool leather-covered one--I covered it myself in Mardi Gras colors and glued on this thing that my BFFHS had attached to my J. Peterman photojournalist's vest--I gave it to her to embellish for me, and she seemed to get me confused with someone who actually wore lace and pearls. I tried to wear it once, and it was like I was in drag. The vest--a very expensive vest, I might add; The EGE has one, too, and I dyed his acid green and he wears it all the time, loaded with lenses and flash cards and who-knows-what, and I'm very envious. But I don't miss the glued-on lace and pearls. Sigh). Anyway, so I kept this thingie and added some New Orleans stuff on the threads--stuff we bought there the summer I was using this notebook.

Here's the part of the bookcase in The Voodoo Lounge with the journals. 

I've started tossing the older ones--I have no desire to go back and read stuff I wrote 30 years ago--when I run out of room on the shelves, I go to the oldest ones and see if there are any project ideas I want to salvage--that's why most of the first 40 are gone. Nothing but writing, writing, writing. Boring. *Really* boring.


OK. That's my musings on The Perfect Notebook. Talk to me. Show us yours. Tell us about the things you love and the things you hate. I'm going to be waiting patiently (snort) for the mail, as the email notice says my new Strathmore Visual Journals will arrive today. Will I love them? Will I be disappointed? I have no idea, but the anticipation is worth the money I spent on them, you know? Sometimes we mammals just need to hunt.

Keith Lo Bue's "Poetical Modesty"

Here's something I think will make you happy: 


To see/read more about the construction of this marvel, go here. To see still photos, go here, and then click on the first image to see more.


Now wasn't that fabulous? Doesn't it fill you with joy knowing that somewhere in the world is someone who imagined this and made it come into existence? 


Ahhhh. . . .

My On-Going Search for The Perfect Notebook

That's what I call them:  notebooks. I don't think of them as "journals" so much, although sometimes I call them that, too. I think it was because the first ones I ever kept, past those little locked diaries from childhood, were spiral notebooks. That would have been in 1973, before the days of micro-perf pages, thank you very much.


Anyway, so I talked about choosing The Next Notebook, and some of y'all suggested that I go with the orange Semicolon book I got at Kate's Paperie in Manhattan. Good call--I liked that one a lot. And so I began it. 

And now I just don't know. You know, I really don't like being picky--really! I swear! Just because I *am* doesn't mean I *like* it--but here's the deal:  if you know how to do something, and you've done it rather a lot and have worked to learn to do it correctly, it's kind of irritating to spend money for something that wasn't done with quite the level of care you would have put into it yourself. 


See this binding?

See how the end paper doesn't hold the cover tight to the text block?

 This makes the cover kind of wonky. When you open it, it shifts ever-so-slightly. Because I learned how to bind books The Real Way, years ago, and spent over a year making dozens and dozens and dozens of them, I know how a book should feel when I open it.


This one doesn't feel that way. And it makes a noise--yes! Kind of a squeak when I open the cover.


I paid $28 for this.


The "draw" was Water-Marked Pages, which is supposed to be a big deal but is not. I have stacks of cotton paper with watermarks on it and am like, "?" I liked the faint lines--those are nice:  you can use them, or you can ignore them. 


But the paper is too thin:

And it absorbs too much ink:

And the cover gets dirty:

And I'm not happy with it. I think I could deal with everything except that crappy binding.


So the search is still on. I have stacks of journals here and am going to think about which one I want to try next. I may play around in this one some more--I don't know. I hate having shelves full of half-full notebooks, but I know if I don't like something, I'm not going to use it, gritting my teeth and just powering through. Nope.


Anyway. So that's where I am now. What are you using for your notebook/journal/sketchbook lately? My new Strathmore Visual Journals are supposed to arrive tomorrow, so that may be the solution~~

And Yet More Books

So I finished some of the books and had to check them in and, of course, picked up some more, as you can see:

There were some in the first batch I couldn't read. Perfect Reader, by Maggie Pouncey. 

It sounds wonderful, but I couldn't read it. For one thing, I read a couple dozen pages and couldn't figure out where it was going, even though I *knew* that, sort of, from the dust jacket blurb. And the other thing is that no matter how logical I am, and how I loathe the whole wallowing-in-misery-and-celebrating-sad-anniversaries thing, even I can't sidestep this time of the summer. The day after tomorrow would have been my father's 84th birthday. Tomorrow he will have been dead two years--yeah, he died the day before his birthday, which is really lousy. Two weeks after his birthday is the "anniversary" of my mother's death--she's been gone four years and spent the last month of her life in the hospital. And two weeks after that is my birthday, which was always hugely celebrated by my mother. And only my mother, so that my birthdays were always about me and my mother. And are now pretty much unremarkable days just like any other. (Except last year, when I took myself shopping for purses, which as you may remember, was WAY fun.)


So even though I tend not to dwell on this stuff and see no reason to "celebrate" the "anniversaries" (where do we get such language, anyway?), these random memories keep popping up. Plus crappy dreams.


So I'm not going to be reading Perfect Reader, about a woman who is named her father's literary executor and goes to his house and meets his girlfriend, about whom she knew nothing. And how she weeds through his stuff and remembers her childhood with him. Nope.


I'm also not going to be reading Revenge of a Middle-Aged Woman, by Elizabeth Buchan.

This one's about a woman whose husband leaves her for her secretary--that's right:  her secretary. Which ought to be clever, but still, I don't think that's what I want to read, either. Her anguish and misery in the first couple of chapters brings back too many memories of my mother's own anguish and misery, which permeated our lives until I left home.


See? Even I am a total weenie. So I ditched those books and got some new ones. Because I figure, you know, how dangerous can it be to read about string theory, anyway?

This Week's Give-Away

As I've been going through my collection--not an intentional collection, as in "I collect blank book," but one that has accrued as I continue my decades-long search for The Perfect Notebook--I keep weeding out the ones I know aren't going to work. 


Like this one. It's a Reflections Sketchbook, and you can see it here.

5" x 7", double-wire, 70 lb paper. Hard black cover. Sounds perfect, right? It is--and I was quite excited about it--except:  micro-perf pages. Grrrrr. Why--WHY--do they do this? Oh, sure--some people want to be able to tear out pages. But you know what? Hello:  it's spiral bound! How difficult would it be to tear out the spiral-bound pages? And if you then wanted to clean up that edge:  paper cutter. 


But no. They apparently *love* micro-perf. It's like someone figured out how to build a micro-perfing machine, and everyone went completely nuts. I'm surprised we don't have micro-perfed underwear. Micro-perfed toast.


As you can see, these babies are on sale, so if you think you'd like a bunch, you can go ahead and order. Otherwise, toss your name in the hat--tell me something about micro-perfing--who knows, maybe you'll change my mind? (snort)--and then check back on Friday.


XO

Enjoy Life

Our friend Jenny owned a couple of restaurants--one here, one in Lubbock--and had worked very, very hard to build a business and make a life in the US. She came from Taiwan, with a long, exciting story of hiding under overpasses and fleeing, with her husband and two-year-old son, from the authorities. We knew her because her son had played football for The EGE, when he was coaching and teaching, something she attributed to American hamburgers:  how else to explain this child who should have been the size of his Taiwanese parents but was, amazingly, not. Not even close.


We used to go at least once a week for dinner, arriving late in the evening so that, as the customers cleared out and the staff began cleaning up, Jenny could fix herself a plate, bring out a bottle of red wine, and join us to visit. Once my ear tuned to her speech--which took a while at first but got easier as I learned to adjust more quickly--we'd get her to tell us stories. Sometimes we'd ask her what she would do if she took a vacation, or went home to visit her dad, or had some time off--she never did any of these things except on Chinese New Year every couple of years, when she might take a short trip home. 


What would you do if you didn't work all the time? I'd ask, knowing she'd never had time to cultivate any hobbies and didn't have time for friends or shopping. She sigh and smile and say, "Enjoy life." 


Those words don't really seem to mean anything if you just look at them: enjoy life. What does *that* mean, anyway? But when Jenny said them, I could get this sense of ease, of leisure, of someone just sitting back in a chair on the porch, no tv, no radio, nothing to eat or drink or do or think about. Just enjoying life.


She had a nice house. She and her husband drove Mercedes. Her son drove a Jaguar. They were successful. But what she dreamed of was not a bigger house or trips or jewelry--it was just the time to Enjoy Life. For her, time was the luxury she didn't have.


Whenever I think of this, I hear the words in Jenny's voice--"Enjoy life"-- with her accent and her smile. We've lost track of her--we went to Lubbock and went to the restaurant to eat not long after my mother died--we always took my mother to eat there when we went to Lubbock, and Jenny treated her like a revered elder and listened to her talk and patted her arm and hugged her. I hated having to tell her that my mother had died, but we got through that. After we sold my mother's house and settled her estate, we didn't go back for a long time. The last time we were there, to see one the dermatologists, we went by the restaurant and found it was now a Mexican Food Buffet. We don't know where Jenny and her husband are now, and we don't know how to get in touch. Maybe they moved somewhere else in Lubbock, or maybe they've come back here. Or maybe they've moved to Houston, where they knew people.


Wherever they are, I hope Jenny is getting a chance to Enjoy Life. I've been thinking about her, and about Enjoying Life, a lot lately. I've recovered from being sick, but I'm still taking it easy, trying to spend less time frantically working and scrambling and planning and pushing, pushing, pushing--and more time taking it easy, sitting out on the porch, doing nothing, just Enjoying Life.


It seems the kitten appeared at a most opportune time. A kitten climbing into your lap and collapsing into a kitten nap, as only kittens do--where one minute they're going 100 miles an hour and the next they're lying limp, paws twitching, every switch turned off--is an absolute inducement to rest. You can't do much with a kitten in your lap, not if you don't want to disturb them. You sit, you relax, you slow your breathing. If you're lucky, you're on a porch, with a breeze. Maybe there are birds, or wind chimes. Maybe the kitten purrs every once in a while, or maybe someone you love comes and sits down nearby, and everything slows down. At first, it feels odd, but it doesn't take long--which is, as you can imagine, a total surprise for me--before you realize:  you're relaxing! This is what other people talk about doing, and it's not so bad, not really. Yes: you're relaxing. You're chilling. You're hanging out.


What you're doing, amazingly, is learning to Enjoy Life.

Someone Asked for More Cute Kitten Videos?

How could I refuse? 


Here's Clarice trying to get Humphrey to play with her this morning:
And here she is trying to get Moe to play through the storm door:
And here she and Humphrey demand to see what we're eating--splitting an apple bran muffin from Starbucks--and then clean the plate. No, we do not normally give sugar to cats. None of the other cats have ever exhibited a bit of interest in anything sweet. I have no idea why these two chubby cats wanted this--The EGE suspects catnip in the batter:

Hi. I'm Ricë; I'm a Vertebrate.

I know I've written about this before, but I can't help it today. Something's set me off, and I'm ranting in my head.


"So what do you do?" Isn't that the standard question? At cocktail parties, in line at Starbucks, when you meet someone for the first time--don't they ask what you do? They don't--not unless I'm even more out of the social loop than even *I* suspected--ask, "Who are you?"


We don't ask that. And we don't want the answers we'd get: "I'm a postmenopausal human female cohabiting with my legally-wed male spouse in the city of Midland, Midland County, Texas, USA, planet Earth, in the year 2010."


And then I could go in and add racial designation, education level, income, blah, blah, blah.


Eh.


When we ask, "What do you do?" we want to know one of two things. Often, what people want to know is:  "What do you do for a living so I can decide whether you're 1) interesting enough to talk to 2) of sufficient social status for me to be seen talking to and 3) in a position to be of some benefit to me at some point in the future."


Or, if they're cool people, what they want to know is, "What are you interested in enough to spend your time doing so we can determine if we have enough in common to make getting to know each other fun?"


I like people who mean the latter. I'll bet you do, too.


Mostly, people want to know how you spend your days. What do you do?


And when people ask me what I do, I usually tell them, "I write." I don't say, "I'm a writer." They didn't ask me who I am or how I define myself. Even if they had, I wouldn't want to do that--while writing is what I do for a living and one of the things I love most in life and the way I entertain myself and communicate with others, I do not walk through life thinking, "I am A Writer." 


If I had to attach any label to myself, it might be "human." It's not that that's the thing I am about which I'm most proud--"I'm proud to be Human!" (I typed, "I'm Proud to be Hymen," which would be a whole nother blog post, let me tell you, which makes me think about re-virginization and Women of a Certain Age, and let me just say this:  if you're 45 years old and are thinking about having surgery to make *any* part of your body resemble that of someone, oh, say, 25 years younger? Don't, OK? Don't even go there. Don't call a plastic surgeon; call a therapist. Then go hang out with some happy middle-aged women who are *not* thinking of having their pookies sliced away to virtual non-existence, OK? Omigod, I could go on about this at length, indeed. Thinking about the things grown adult women are doing to look like pre-pubecscent girls just makes me absolutely nuts. And creeped out by the underlying motivations).


Human--because it's really kind of obvious that I'm not the same thing as most of the beings in this house. But even that--human--isn't that big a deal. Maybe "vertebrate" would be better. Hi. I'm Ricë. I'm a vertebrate. Being a vertebrate is probably the most important thing I am, I guess. Or I could be a chordate, embracing my cousins, the sea squirts.


Nah. I don't like labels. I like telling what I do, what I like, how I spend my time. So instead of, "I'm a writer and artist and cat owner," I would say:


1. I write.
2. I make stuff.
3. I take care of cats.
4. I hang out with my husband.
5. I live in Midland, Texas (notice I did not say "I am a Midlander," which would call to mind a whole set of attributes that have nothing to do with me)--so people would be able to place me geographically. And, as is often the case when we travel and tell people where we're from, feel sorry for me.
6. I walk (if I said I was a walker, you'd either think a) walking is my life and perhaps I spend quite a lot of time in ugly shorts and thick socks trekking through the wilderness or b) yeah, so what? I'm a 'walker,' too. And a 'breather.' Also a 'sleeper.'
7. I blog. I am not A Blogger, which I see as a title held by someone who blogs for a living or for fame or just to stir up as much trouble as possible in a real gotcha kind of way, a la Andrew Breitbart .


It's something to think about, because how you define yourself to others reflects how you see yourself your own self. If you think of yourself as a label--any label--who will you be when that label changes, as it inevitably will? If you're A Doctor, and you retire, then what are you? Who are you? If you're a stay-at-home mom, who will you be when your kids are married and living their own lives? Who will you be, and how will you change? If you constantly re-define the way you think about yourself in terms of the changing circumstances around you, then either 1) you have no real core sense of yourself as an individual or 2) you're very, very zen.


While I like to think I'll be doing the things I like to do until the day I die, I don't know that that's the case. I might not be able to say "I'm a writer" when I get to that point. Or a walker. Who knows what I'll be doing, if anything much at all? Of course, if I want to grab hold of a label, there's a pretty good chance that, right up until the last breath, I'd be able to claim that I was a vertebrate~~

Who Are You, Really?

Is it just me, or are there more and more women describing themselves online as "stay-at-home mom" or "stay-at-home wife and mother"? This just boggles my mind, and I've got some stuff to say about it.


Hello. My name is Ricë, and I'm a stay-at-home wife. 


If I were a part of this back-to-the-1950's time-warp weirdness, that's how I'd have to introduce myself:  I don't work outside the home (because I'm working my butt off INSIDE "The Home," (which, gee, I'm sorry, but it sounds like a place you really don't want to go unless the judge has signed papers forcing you to spend a little R&R time there, you know?) That would be in my office and studio. Where I'm *working*, only apparently that part isn't important. And since we seem to have reverted to defining ourselves not by what we do or what interests us but by our familial relationships, then "wife" is the one I'd have to use, since I'm not a mother or grandmother or sister or daughter.


I'm a stay-at-home wife. This is completely true. And nothing could be further from the truth.


Why do women label themselves by their relationships? Why say "I'm a wife"? Goodlordalmighty--then, if anyone does this, *I* should do it. I've been a wife longer than almost anyone I know. If wife is a profession, then I've been "practicing" my profession of wifeliness for over 33 years. I could retire! And I'm more married than almost anyone I know--I spend almost every day with my husband, hanging out, talking, taking coffee breaks, traveling. He's my husband, partner, lover, best friend--you know, all that shit people say when they're waxing poetic about their storybook marriage of approximately 2.5 months. But it's true: I'm a happily married, loyal, companionable wife. Marriage agrees with me. 


I am A Wife. 


Holy moly. [Note to Tonia: see? No F-Word!]


And stay-at-home? Oh, honeys, nobody is more stay-at-home than I am, not unless they're physically incapable of leaving the house (or mentally incapable, but that's a whole nother thang, and we don't want to even go there, since my mother became more and more hermit-like in her old age and I will be watching myself *really* closely for that day when I start keeping the blinds closed and pay some neighbor kid to go out and get the paper and lay it right beside the front door and then go away quietly. Never mind that I don't read the newspaper. . . .)


I am A Wife. I Stay At Home.


Stay-at-home mom/wife/grandmother sounds like you're confined somehow, as if you never get to leave the house. Well, that would be me--I hardly ever leave the house. Hell, sometimes I go for days without "leaving" except to go for a walk.


Why do women do this? Why do they define themselves this way? It's such a throw-back to the days when being a wife or a mother was the be-all and end-all--it was why you went to college:  to find and "catch" and marry a college man. Never mind your own education--the only reason you'd need it would be to sound interesting at the dinner parties you hosted for your husband's business acquaintances.


So I stay at home, and I am very happily married. But defining myself as a "stay-at-home wife" would never, ever even occur to me. Why does it occur to so many women who are decades younger than I am, women who grew up with even more choices than we had, women who believed they were so hip and cutting-edge that we, the women who came of age in the 1970's, were Old School to them?


(We won't even get into reproductive rights here because that's a whole 'nother rant, but the lack of support for reproductive rights among young women is appalling. Because they've always had them, they can't imagine what life would be like without them. Ditto career choices.)


If these women choose to be full-time mothers, why don't they say that:  I'm a full-time mother. It's a full-time job, for sure. Of course, it's also a part-time job, or an additional, second full-time job, for all the millions of mothers who have to go to work and support their families. But never mind them.


Because you know what? I suspect that "stay-at-home mom" is actually a code phrase. It's not so much about being a full-time mother as it is about saying, "I'm married (unlikes you single mother ho's) and my husband makes enough money so I don't have to go to work (unlike you women who didn't choose quite so wisely in the marriage game), and I've successfully reproduced (unlike you fertility-challenged losers). Nyah, nyah, nyah."


I go to a blog and read the bio/intro, and the first thing I read is "Hi! I'm Cindi, and I'm a stay-at-home wife and mother to two adorable boys!"


I can't tell you what I'd say, because I promised Someone I would try not to use The F-Word for a couple days. But what I would say would be something along the lines of "Oh, please just slap me now." Only better.


Because here's the deal:  if what Cindi is telling me about herself is what's important, then what she's going to be talking about on her blog is 
1) staying at home (and, as previously mentioned, I kind of know rather a lot about that both from personal experience and from not-so-happy family experience, so why would I want to know more?)


2) being a wife (ditto, and since my mother was an unhappy wife, I have perspective from both sides, lucky me!)


3) being a mother (which interests me about as much as periodontal disease, i.e., I've managed, through much diligence, to avoid it in my own personal life and don't really have any desire to listen to anyone else talk about it).


And here I've got to add:  to me, in my own warped little world, "stay-at-home mom" is right next to "home-schooling mom," because in Midland, Texas, one often equals the other (if your kids are school-aged, and you're staying at home, then what, exactly, are you doing while they're in school? Do you get an 8 hour break? And if that's making you spit and sputter and go, "Oh, Ricë, you have *no idea* how much work there is to be done keeping a house and raising kids," then I want to know how so many other people do that plus have a job, and they don't get 8 hours off in the middle of the day. Because you didn't say that part of your job is "keeping house"--you said you were a stay-at-home mom, and that means that's what you do. And if your kids are in school, what? You go with them? No:  I'm thinking you're home-schooling them. Yeah, yeah--I told you this was just my own personal quirk, but here, in Midland, there are a lot of home-schoolers, and almost every. single. one of them is home-schooling because the schools are too liberal and have kicked the bible out of the schools and don't put God in the center of life and~~


You get the idea. I have listened to these people. I am not making this up.


How do I want you to label yourself? Please. You know the answer to that:  I don't. I don't want you to say "I'm a lawyer/teacher/writer/spelunker." I want you to tell me who you are and what you do and what interests you so I'll know if what you have to say might be interesting to me, too. 


Hi. I'm Ricë. I write stuff. I rant. Sometimes I make things.

And the Winners Are~~

Congratulations to Penney and Poetic Dreams! Y'all send me your addresses, and I'll get your copy of Somerset Studio in the mail as soon as I can.


Thanks for playing, everyone--I really appreciate it! Check back Monday--I've got to find homes for some of the journals I'm not going to use and hope to start offering them~~

A Passel of Horribly Cute Kitten Videos

OK, so I uploaded a bunch of short videos of Clarice, The Unbearably Cute Kitten, to YouTube. I'll post them here, just in case you might want to waste a few minutes going, "Awwwwwww." Nothing earthshaking; just a kitten fix for your Thursday. Sorry about the wind noises, but the wind is what's keeping the mosquitoes away from the porch.

Jesse Reno Paints 2010

We love Jesse Reno. Not only is he wildly creative, he's also a really nice guy. I work with a lot of artists, and Jesse is one of the best--professional, enthusiastic, complimentary. Just a great guy to work with.


This morning Jesse sent me a link to a video he and a friend of his just made via stop-action photography. They took 30,000 photos of Jesse painting and made them into a video--this is something I want to learn how to do~~


Anyway, I've seen him paint In Real Life, and this film is about as close as you can get without being there. It's amazing to watch him work--check it out!


It's 22 1/2 minutes long, so you'll want to grab something to drink, sit back, and watch Jesse paint.


jesse reno paints 2010 from jesse reno on Vimeo.

Need Something Else to Worry About? Try Top Secret America

Courtesy of the Washington Post, the culmination of a two-year investigation of the top secret agencies run rampant since 9/11, investigated and written by Dana Priest, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, along with William Arkin. It's a frightening unveiling of what's going on behind the curtains in every state in the US, but perhaps just as chilling, it's a story of what they're doing with those billions of dollars of tax-payer money that we let them take, believing them when they tell us it will fund programs to Make Us Safer, which is a crock if you've ever heard one.


Here's just one snippet from today's installment (part 2 of, I believe, 3) of Top Secret America:


"Someone says, 'Let's do another study,' and because no one shares information, everyone does their own study," said Elena Mastors, who headed a team studying the al-Qaeda leadership for the Defense Department. "It's about how many studies you can orchestrate, how many people you can fly all over the place. Everybody's just on a spending spree. We don't need all these people doing all this stuff."


Get that line? "Everybody's just on a spending spree." That's what's going on in a country where the long-term unemployment is holding steady at 6.8 million human beings, where schools are underfunded and public libraries are being closed due to budget cuts.


I could go on about this at some length, but there's a reason I limit my exposure to news. I read stuff like this and feel just ever so slightly completely fucking insane. 


Go read it for yourself. Read it. And weep. 

Strathmore Visual Journals

Diana Trout posted a note about the new Strathmore Visual Journals on my artjournal yahoo group, and that set me off looking for them. They were nowhere to be found, not anywhere where you could actually order them yet, until my friend Paula Hagar, another artjournal list member and one of the Women Who Say Fuck posted a note about finding them online here. I promptly ordered two of the 5" X 8" drawing ones, as I wanted 100 lb, rather than 90 lb, paper. 


And then I thought, "I wonder what Roz has to say about these?" Because Roz is pretty much, for me, the sine qua non of anything journal-related. Of course, she weighed in on these back in June, when Strathmore asked for her review and then sent her a case--24!--of these babies, which she promptly distributed to her local visual journal group (and now don't you, more than ever, want to go live in Minneapolis?)

So mine are soon to be on their way, and I can't wait to see what they're like. I'm not an art journaler, but I love art journals and visual journals and just plain journals. So anything new that so impressed Roz? Whoa.


I'll try to remember to let you know what these are like when I get mine. If you're one of those lucky people who's already gotten your hands on one, let us know what *you* think, please~~