A Bunch of Miscellaneous Stuff on A Friday

Good morning, my little chickadees! I am so very amazingly proud of myself in a total Donald Trumpish sort of way, minus the dead-ferret-on-top-of-the-head hairdo, that I figured out how to enlarge everything on this monitor. When I bought this super-duper iMac last year, I got the largest screen available--27"--so I could, you know, see stuff. And while it's groovy and all, everything is the same size it would be on a much, much smaller monitor, with just a whole bunch of white space on either side. I knew I could click on the "AA" up there on the toolbar to make it bigger, but I never did. I just kind of squinted along. And then yesterday, for some reason, I started clicking that every time I opened a window, and whoa! What a difference. Now if I could just figure out how to make it stay that way, from window to window, all the time without my having to do anything about it. Nevertheless, I'm happy. It's silly to have a huge hulking screen taking up over half the desk if you've still got a 12-point font.

First, before I whinge and stuff, I want to make sure you've been over to CreateMixedMedia.com this morning, where my post is about this cool thing we're going to do related to small-art-business questions. We're collecting your legal and financial questions about starting an art business, and we'll get An Expert to answer them. That's the beauty of my working with these people: they have a TON more resources than I ever would. So go over to The Creative Life, read the post, send us your questions (and I say "us" in only the loosest sense, because you can rest assured that I am not going to be giving you any legal advice. My idea of legal advice? Don't do anything anywhere with anyone or anything ever because you know how most people think, "Oh, I won't get caught"? Yeah, well, we're the kind of people who would ALWAYS get caught. So don't do it. Just sit there quietly with your hands folded on the desk and don't suck on the crayons.

Oh, wait. I was channeling Miss Sterns, my third grade Art Teacher from Hell. Never mind.

Where was I? Oh, so go there. Read that. While you're there, read Karen Wallace's excellent column about boundaries. I read it this morning and am really thinking about what she said. While I'm good at setting boundaries and have few problems, I do have one person I see now and then who seems to think that, since I don't have A Real Job, I owe it to the few liberals (maybe 12, I think. In a city of over 100,000) in the community to be more involved. He's always suggesting stuff, and when I say, "Gee, you know, I don't really have time," he rolls his eyes. I come away from every conversation feeling both hopeless about the dire state of affairs and how we're all doomed and how it's only a matter of time until there's nothing left, and guilty for being such a total slacker.

I hate this about myself. Because of the way I was brought up, blah, blah, blah, I internalized the belief that hard work is the measure of your value as a human being. If you work hard, you're a good person. If you don't, you're not. But you can't work at just anything! Oh, no. Working hard at being an exotic dancer? Non. Working hard at being a stand-up comic? Nope. Working hard at being, oh, an exploration geophysicist? Alrighty then! I even thought of majoring in geology, just to impress my unimpressible dad. The one and only course I took quickly convinced me that the only thing AT ALL interesting about geology was the part about dinosaurs, which I adored. The rest was as dry to me as day-old toast. Without the butter and strawberry jam.

For the most part, I minimize contact with people who think that, because I stay at home all day and often don't get out of my pajamas until after noon, I am a complete and total slacker. People who think I should volunteer or take part-time work, who wonder why I'm not still subbing or working for animal control or trying to get my Ph. D. and, you know, Do Something with My Life. Former employers, family members, neighbors--to them, I'm just someone who doesn't have a job.

Yeah, I got my buttons pushed. It's been a week where I've made the deadlines just by sheer willpower, plowing doggedly through one after another, holding the carrot in front of my face. The carrot? The carrot is making the balsa wood dividers for the drawers I'm going to use to organize my embroidery floss. I'm really excited about that, so it's my carrot. Have I worked on those this week? Not yet, but the carrot is still there, dangling, just out of reach.

Now, I know enough about psychology, which I think was my minor (I can't remember, and I feel all Dilbert's Boss about that: in one comic strip he tells Dilbert he can't remember his major in college, and when Dilbert professes amazement, he says, "I don't bother remembering things I can write down." (No, I didn't remember this: I have it laminated and stuck to the door of the refrigerator.) Apparently, I don't have my minor written down anywhere. I could probably google myself and find out, though.

[Here I actually snorted.]

Anyway, I know enough to know this is about *me* and not about anybody else, not about the guy I talked to or my parents or whatever. It's me thinking I don't work hard enough. Even typing that makes the sensible logical part of me laugh like a crazy person, but there you go. I obviously have Issues still to work on, even at my age. And isn't that a surprise?

OK, I've got to speed it up here--I just got a phone call and have to go shower and get dressed--more on that shortly.

It's been an unsettled week, starting out with the antibiotics for the ear infection from the second piercing. Then, on Tuesday, Moe had what we think was an allergic reaction to something--I got off the phone from an interview, and he was pacing and licking himself, throwing himself down and trying to lick his back, quivering like horses do when they've got flies on their back. I brushed him and wiped him down with a damp washcloth, trying to help. He said he was having trouble breathing (he looks me in the eye and breathes through his mouth and then shuts his eyes, very plainly, and makes an adenoidal noise). I called his vet. He used the litter box and then threw up twice, and I called her again. She came and gave him a short-acting steroid, and he was better, but he obviously feels lousy. This morning I started him on the antibiotics she left--they usually help. But I can't relax when someone I love is sick--it's one of the things that makes me crazy (and, yeah, I know:  there are rather a lot of those things). So I'm checking up on him all day, asking him how he feels, petting him so he knows I'm trying to take care of him. He's not happy with me At. All. If he's not loads better by Monday, we're going to have to try to figure out what's going on. I don't even want to think of the possibilities. Please don't tell me any cat-health-related horror stories. Please.

I've been thinking about something else, something I've noticed from the podcasts. I keep track of the stats through my podcast host, noting which ones get a lot of downloads and which ones don't. We--I and the people I talk to--notice the comments here and on the site, and I'm always thrilled when they get to read how much people enjoyed listening. The podcasts are kind of a big deal to me. I pay every month to have them hosted, and doing them takes a lot of time. For a 30-45 minute podcast, I start with about about 60 minutes of conversation. I edit it, which takes 3-4 hours because I listen, go back, cut, listen, go back, tighten, listen, go forward five seconds, go back, cut--all the way through. I want people to like how they sound, and I want listeners not to have to listen to Skype noise or long pauses. Then there's the text, the images, uploading to Dropbox (for CreateMixedMedia), the host website, my blog. All together, it takes a full day to get a long podcast ready to go. I try to find people to talk to who will be interesting and informative, who are comfortable talking, and--big deal--who have the time to talk to me for an hour without a script. I don't want to do the same people who've done all the other podcasts and who've been talking about their work for years, saying pretty much the same things. But you know what? Those are the people whose podcasts get the downloads and the comments. When I podcast someone with something to say, like Tom Braxton, who's not only a terrific musician but also a brilliant guy and a lifelong teacher who has really thought about creativity and the work it takes to make a life of it, guess what? Or with Greg Davis, a photographer who quit his corporate job, bought a camera, and began traveling the world taking photos? These are fascinating people, but do people listen? Do they comment? No. I was embarrassed. I find these people, ask them to do me this favor, take up their valuable time, and for what? As far as they can tell, no one's listening.

Oh, sure--y'all listen. The subscribers listen. And some few people really get into what I'm trying to do, talking to creative people from other fields. But then I do a podcast with someone who's been everywhere and talked to everyone, and they get a ton of downloads and lots of comments, and I realize that while people may claim they want to be introduced to new people doing cool stuff, what they really want is to find out more about the few famous people they already know. And you wonder why you see the same people on all the blogs and in all the magazines. Fame sells, and don't you ever doubt it.

This makes me tired.

OK, I'm going to quit before I start grousing for real. I've got to go shower and stuff because I've got to go pick up orders for some blood work. I went in yesterday for the hand x-rays to find out what's going on with my thumbs, which are newly irritating and giving me some grief. He got the results--this is the chiropractor--and called this morning and says he can't see anything with the thumbs but that the fingers don't look so great, and he wants to try to find out exactly what's going on, whether it's just galloping (no, not his word) osteoarthritis, passed to me from my dad, as we've long assumed or whether there's something inflammatory going on. Everyone has always asked if I've had blood work done, but because the distal joints of my fingers--the ones at the ends--are the ones affected so far, we've all assumed that kind of ruled out RA (with RA, those joints are seldom affected--I wonder why that is? If I had time, I'd do some research. Oh, wait! I have plenty of time because, you know, I just sit around at home in my pj's! Well, gee--I'd better snap to it, huh?)

So that's the boring, self-involved round-up from here. Sorry not to have more interesting stuff to share, and sorry this week hasn't been full of exciting stuff to show and tell. But you know, there was that podcast earlier in the week. . . .