Lucky Charms, they're magically delicious

I slept through my alarm this morning. For some reason I was cuddled up all over Michael last night, which is unusual for me, sleeping is a solitary thing and I cherish my dream space. I had to be in contact last night though, legs all wrapped and fitting together as we do so well. I suppose I just love him too much to fit into a day, and needed some night to finish saying what I left unsaid while I was awake.

I spent my evening at my creation center, my desk of joy, in the midst of happy young people. I was making a magic charm for Nadia. She is going to face some fear today, and I am going to go with her and hold her hand, or if that puts me too much in the way, see if they'll let me place my hands on the soles of her feet. I intuitively chose my materials, and only researched their meanings this morning. At the desk, I was only concerned with beauty and balance, and making something pleasing to the eye and soothing to the heart. The laughter settled into the piece hopefully, that's like glitter and adds an extra shine.

I stole a bit of something she gave to me, and used it as my prayer stone in the piece. She loves me and I love her, and I gave a bit of that back and made it the center grounding point. I hope she doesn't see it as me destroying a gift that she gave me, I want her to know that I will remake her gift into something that is incorporated with other magic things and worn in a way that I will draw great power from.

Nadia has some health lessons going on, much like my own. We are going to go through them together, because she is my sister, my daughter, my friend, my random Universal gift. I think part of staying connected with Michael all night was to charge up the love I need to be there for her this morning in the way that will best comfort and serve her best. I am rapidly growing late in my process of getting ready to go on this mission, so today I will be short.

Here is a short list of the materials I used to make her talisman.

Ancient Egyptians used the amethyst guard against guilty and fearful feelings. It has been worn as protection from self-deception, as well as a protection against witchcraft. The amethyst has long been used to open the spiritual and psychic centers, making it one of the power stones. It is also used as a meditation aid when worn as a necklace.

Carnelian is an energy booster. It helps the insecure person to find strength within them so they can come into their own. 

Lapis Lazuli is used with other stones when parts of the body need to be purified and cleansed and should be only used by a healer. Lapis Lazuli has high intensity and can open many of the chakra centers. This must be done only with love in the heart and comprehension in the mind and wisdom in soul.

I love you Nadia, and together we're going to be fine. Know that with every stone I placed I said a prayer for your well-being.

A gift from beyond, yet right down the street

When my friend's mother died, alone in her apartment full of stuff and empty bottles it was his job as her only son to go through it all. Take some home if it seemed to have value, throw a lot of it away, fill recycling boxes with the empties that were so profuse. We bonded a long time ago around the idea that our mothers had no idea how to mother, and had no business having us in the first place. Neither of us have any siblings, but we have plenty of memories. I know my mother didn't really start drinking until my older years, I'm not sure when his did. We both can tell plenty of stories of drunken mis-behavior from the women who held us hostage until we were able to get up and out of there.

So his died alone, and brave man that he was, he walked into her cave of loneliness and dealt with her stuff. Some of it got a cursory glance and was brought home as-is, because he was not sure if there was anything of value in there, for him or for her. Were Dottie to drop dead I don't know if I could do the same thing, not without a lot of help. Just to smell her again, that cheap perfume, that old lady floral miasma that has existed long before she was old, it makes me shudder. I suppose parents, if left alone long enough go on with their lives too. They write things and save things and clip things out of newspapers, God only knows what you might find. 

One part of her story he's never really told me is that she was an artist. Maybe not a painter, but an artistic type who seemed to work a lot with paper of different types. He grabbed three or four bags of that sort of thing and it's been sitting at his house. If that kind of thing were left over from Dottie's life I know I would hear it ticking, but maybe he had it stored in the recesses of the garage or something. He brought it all to me yesterday. A dead woman's art as yet unmade.

There were sheets upon sheets of interesting paper, some handmade with flowers pressed inside. There were many flowers that had been pressed to dry after being first taken apart. If one knew what kind of flowers they were then they could be reassembled into their original shapes. They are old, some of them are so tissue-paper thin that a breath will lift them off the page and send them drifting. I imagined her hands, picking those flowers, carefully laying them between sheets of heavy paper to dry, and the years that must have gone by since that happened. I can feel that she was younger and happier when the flowers were originally picked and carefully laid flat. There are many of the same type, and I can see her in a field of flowers gathering in sunshine she planned to preserve and use for art later. There is some hope pressed thinly between those pages, but it's old hope, long gone and only a wisp of it remains.

The paper; oh my God the sheets of delicious heavy paper that were there for me to find. Heavy, some with fibers visible from the back. Some that look like slices of geology, the way you can see thousands of years in one rock if you cut it or wear it away with time. Heavy, hand-made, thick paper with flowers embedded just under the surface. She made that paper. While my friend was busy needing a mother her hands were creating this beautiful paper. Maybe she made it after he had left for good, some substitute of beauty where it was love that had been called for in the first place. All of it jumbled into bags, as though the process of creating lost interest for her, or she stopped believing in beauty all together.

There are hundreds and hundreds of greeting cards, thick blank, colored paper, with the blank white insert for writing on the inside. More envelopes than even that. Who was she going to write, or thank, or invite? Maybe she was going to make and sell. The jumbled nature of the bags clouds my pictures, and all of those are overlayed with the stories I've heard of her. I have a different image to add to her in my mind now though; former elegance gone to seed like those large roses that bloom and then become overblown and only reluctantly drop their petals. Bags of  potential art, all stuffed into there on top of itself. Did she keep it that way in a closet somewhere or was that the way he packed it for transport? Gold-foil sea horse and butterfly stickers by the dozens. Stars, dots, long strips of decorative paper just waiting to be applied to who knows what. Bags of junk, weighted with the past for my friend, a pirate's chest of treasure for me.

It was joy to not only discover each new thing, but to watch his face as he saw how much I wanted, no, needed to have this stuff to add to my own collection of art supplies. There are things in there that are old, too old to go re-purchase now. The paper itself was worth the carrying of those bags through years and distance to lay at my feet. 21 brass bells, of varying sizes and tones in one bag, what were they going to be? I had to string them all up on some found winery oak that Michael brought to me just the other day. I didn't hit my bed till one o'clock until the bells were in place waiting for whatever they will become. They may already be what they will be, in rough draft. If they are going to live like that they are begging me for some beads, wooden and rustic, and a better alignment in height so that none touch each other. I couldn't find my rest last night until they were out of that bag and hanging though, they carry an importance of their own.

Now what I need are boxes. Unfinished wooden boxes, or that kind of pasteboard that is strong and holds its shape after you paint it and add layers of image and paper to it. He asked me what I would do with all that stuff that just looks like stuff to him, and I showed him my file of words and images that I've been carefully clipping out of magazines for years. The envelope of mouths, the one that has only eyes, the random images that grabbed me, like the rat being injected with a syringe or the giant scorpion, the head with a heart where the brain would normally be. And words. Thousands of words and phrases all cut with precision and waiting for the time that I would combine them into a kind of poetry on objects. Paper, words, they call to me like a sailor to the sea. Since he's never seen or received any of that kind of art from me he had no idea of the value I would find in those bags. It was a gift of major proportions.

Now I have a dead woman's things, and I'll make him something. I'll channel Annette (That was her name) and try to give him just a little of what she had yet withheld, for whatever her reasons. I'll make something beautiful out of his dead mother's bags of jumble. Then I'll go on doing it until I die myself and my own kids have to figure out what to do with all of the leftover art supplies I've never managed to use. There's no accident that I've slowly taken over almost one whole wall of the living room with my art desk and neatly arranged supplies, I was able to make it all fit right in and there's no extra mess to be seen this morning. A month ago I would have pawed through the bags and said "Thanks" and it would have gone in the  pile with my own chaotic things. I prepared a space for it and it came.

Thank you Cheng. Thank you Annette, I'll make beauty out of your chaos, and I'll love and connect more than you ever did. Maybe I'll make a piece for you and leave it wedged into a piece of driftwood at the beach, or feed it to flames that it may carry it's spirit to wherever you are now. I'll forgive you, since I can't forgive my own mother yet, maybe that will help me on my own journey. In the meantime I can't wait to get into all that paper, it is calling my name even as I type.

Party Invitations

My Big Daddy reads my blogs every day, and sometimes prints them out. I think he used to print all of them, and then realized that he liked some more than others and now he's selective in his use of paper and ink. Or Carol, the mom I should have been born to, is busy upstairs and reads it first and she'll print it out and bring it down to him. They have the marriage I want to have in twenty years, they give each other a lot of space, and yet are together most of the time, especially when they're touring the continent in their most giant of motor coaches. I don't know how they share one email address though, I'll have to draw the line there.


He referenced the blog I wrote the other day (http://wordworldoflaurabee.blogspot.com/2009/09/straight-teeth-imaginary-money-and.html) and said he was really happy to hear that I'm actually a Republican. That's like hearing that even though your parents gave you a girl name and you grew up thinking you're a woman you've actually been male this whole time. A Republican? Me? He quoted a few lines and said that this is how Republicans think. He softened the blow by saying I was probably a Libertarian. I wasn't writing politically, I was just asking questions about the economy and voicing my alarm at the way things are going. That one statement made me realize that I need to research what exactly the baseline party platforms of the Big Two actually are.


Seriously, this hit me like finding out I had been adopted as a baby would. I have been so anti-Republican my whole thinking life, and yet I think all I really know is what the media spins about the two parties and what they're doing and who they are. Add to that the fact that most networks slyly support one or the other but don't tell you which side they're on, and I see that one could choose a party simply because they like the people saying the endless words about the world, and that it was imperative to choose the opposite party of my dear Father in the interest of spirited political debate. I've suspected for quite some time that both parties have deep and ridiculous flaws in them, and that I'm really neither, but I tend to lean toward making sure everyone is taken care of rather than ensuring the top two percent of the rich get to keep all the money.


One thing that really disturbs me is that the Christians have not only ridden on the coat-tails of the Republican party, they seem to be wearing the whole coat these days. Not the quiet Christians who follow that set of beliefs and try their best to live the life described in their book (like my Grandmother or Carol) but the radical, scary, sign waving people who will gladly bash your head in with the same bible they say is their "Word of God."

These are the people who say that hurricane Katrina and 9/11 was caused by God's displeasure at the country's tolerance of homosexuality. They believe that HIV/AIDS is God's punishment for homosexual behavior. They want to take away a woman's right to reproductive choice, and yet deny her any funding to raise babies she couldn't afford in the first place. They carry signs that are mean and ugly, like "God hates Fags" or "How many babies have you killed today?" They plot and bomb clinics that preform abortions. They want to put their prayers in schools where children who have two same sex parents, or a different religion than the prayers they're pushing. They say "In Jesus' name" at the end of everything, and I think if Jesus were alive he'd flip them right over like the money changers in the temple in that one story from the bible. They want to use random snippets of that book as statements of fact when arguing their point of view, which I reject as a platform of logic. They believe the world is only a few thousand years old, and that Satan put dinosaur bones in the earth to test the faith of the true believers. They scare the shit out of me. 

I have actually done hours of study in bible groups, back when I hoped it was all true, and then just to gather ammunition to debate these people. I'm familiar with the book. I came across a version once, where all the words attributed to Jesus were in red, and the rest of the words were printed in black. I read the red words from start to finish and skipped the rest. Jesus was a really cool guy, and he and I would have shared many of the same beliefs about life and how we should treat people. If you skip the virgin birth and the resurrection, which are myths and archetypes you can find in many stories dating long before his arrival, I'm totally down with Jesus. It's the Christians I take issue with, and they've infested the Republican party like termites, and this old house is going to fall down soon, I'm really afraid it's beyond repair.


I've always been a Democrat, sort of by default because of this. Come on, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton VS Richard Nixon and either of the Bushes, it's easy to see who would win that battle even if they weren't allowed to use weapons and had to fight bare-handed. Even if Dick Cheney slipped in under the ropes with a metal folding chair to unfairly participate in the fight. If I were to be honest though, and you have to promise not to tell my Dad, I'm not so sure I like how the Democrats handle money. Shhhhh.


So now I'm left without a position to debate him, which is one of the greatest joys in my life. Winning even one point against my Dad is precious and worth more than gold. He's very crafty and will turn my own points against me. I think I have scored maybe three times in my whole life, and I wear those around my neck like that big-eared, pot-smoking swimmer from the last olympics with his eight gold medals. What will happen if I start to agree with him? We'll be reduced to discussing the weather. He's very tolerant about all my passionate equality issues, there's no real debate there. He's not into any religion so we agree on that. How will I even get through the second half of my life if I start agreeing with my Dad? He used to say "When you get older you'll understand." which is the most obnoxious and provocative statement you can make to a young person. Just try saying it to my daughter if you want to test that theory, she knows everything already, and she'll come at you with her claws out. Really though, what if he's been mostly right about everything this whole time? I can't digest that thought.


Since I won't be having a gravestone, what if I have to wear my epitaph on a t-shirt that says "You were right dad."? I just won't be me any more. 


Astrology, past and future lives and communicating psychically with animals. That's where I'll get him!

How many ten thousand hours?

I woke up thinking this morning that I will most probably not live to be a hundred years old. By calculating my current age with the average life-expectancy I came to the conclusion that I must certainly qualify for a mid-life crisis. Do people still have those, or were they just an excuse for new sports-cars and younger wives back in the 80s? If I'm entitled then I certainly want mine. Just how would that manifest in my own life though, I'm not sure.


I certainly can't just go out and get a tattoo, or dye my hair a strange color, or pierce my lip. I've been thinking about doing that actually, the lip thing, but my daughter would swear I only did it to copy her and I don't want the grief. Maybe it's not about doing or acquiring out-of-character things, so much as looking at how much of life has already been lived, and wondering about it. Where did all that time go? Why didn't I go to college non-stop for all these years so that I would be an expert on so many of the things that fascinate me? I already am who I wanted to be professionally when I grew up, I'm not talking about education so that I'd be able to have a different career. I could just be an expert on world history, art history, and gold-smithing, and psychology and higher mathematics. I would like to know all of these things. I could have, but they all take a lot of time. Malcolm Gladwell says it takes ten thousand hours to attain true mastery at anything. I don't have that many ten thousand hour spans left now.


Even my Kindle disappointed me at first, the new version has no room for SD storage and so only holds 1500 books. Then I did the calculations, and at 50-60 books a year I probably won't live long enough to read 1500 more in the first place, who needs extra storage?


Maybe it's just this general feeling of not really knowing yet who I am or who I'm supposed to be. Once again, I don't mean professionally, I've got that wired. I mean as a person, a human walking the planet. A person thinking about what, if any, footsteps I'll leave behind me or if I've been treading sand this whole time. Are my kids the only testament to the fact that I was here? I had always thought when I was young and idealistic that I would change the world in some way, make something better, invent a newer and therefore better way to do something. Maybe I would bring peace where there was strife, or discover a new concept. I haven't done any of those things, and am most probably not likely to do so now. Mostly I entertain myself with questions about who I am, and who I want to be. 


Somehow, I've lately been cast in the roll of wise older woman, the one you go to with your troubles to get comfort, suggestions, even occasional answers. In those phases that the moon acts out for us every month, waxing, full, waning and new there has always been corresponding lore about women. The virgin, the mother and the crone. I was born in a waning moon, and have been an old woman, I think, since I was little. My Dad says so anyway. Maybe I have always been this way and only had to make enough trips around the Sun to justify this role in my personal society. I'll be doling out the advice, richly laden with personal experience, and realize that I'm more than twice the age of my querent. I guess that does make me an old woman, the "wise" is a matter of opinion. 


Maybe I had to set down my own anger and resentments to shine the Hermit's light that brings them up my hill in their seeking. That could be as well. No one wants to ask a bitter old woman what she would do in a sticky situation, if "Poison them." is the only answer you ever get. I find it strange that people seem to come to me for answers when I have so few for myself. Is that the crisis? Knowing and loving for so many people and yet having naught but a pocket of questions for my own fare? 


Magic, the intuitive type, not the make-the-lady-turn-into-a-tiger kind seems to be right outside the grasp of my fingertips. I find myself weaving things into my artwork deliberately on an energy level. My hands are becoming very sight oriented when I lay them on people, and I can see their light and energy. No matter what the question, it seems that "Love" is the base metal of its answer. Am I just feeling uneasy or "in crisis" because this is unfamiliar territory to me? What if all of a sudden I realize that the aliens are coming down to take us all home and have the urge to slap on a pair of Nikes and drink the Koolaid? I used to have the brash certainty of youth, I knew what I believed, who I was and where I was going. These days it's much more like a leaf on a stream, not a rushing torrent, but a meandering rivulet still. I just go where the water goes, and for some strange reason I'm not sinking.


What exactly is a classic and classy midlife crisis, and where do I apply? I'm sure I qualify by now.

Tactile VS Digital, I lose.

My digital picture frame died. It was my answer to showing examples of my work to clients that came in the shop. There were maybe 250 pictures on it, that would cycle through every ten seconds in no particular order. As an Aquarian I found this to be the perfect way to display photos, it had an SD card, it was electric, it had settings and a little remote control. How high tech can you get? I suppose people thought it was nice, but they were forever saying "Wait! I want to look at that one again!" or "Where's that black and red one, I really liked that one." and I usually knew just which tattoo they were talking about from the description, but the best I could offer was "It'll come around again, just be patient." It really wasn't such a great way to display a portfolio. I even made a graphic about how we do all custom work and use all single-use and disposable needles, tubes and ink caps that came every ten photos or so. I worked hard on that, and while being extremely cool, it just wasn't very effective.


People go straight for Jim's books. He's got a lot of old stuff in there, even line drawings from tattoos he's done in the past. They pore over those books and pass them around. The thing I was missing was that people like something tactile, something that seems real. I'm the one with the love of electronic technology, and not everyone shares it. I learned the lesson that people like things they can hold.


So my frame died, and I vowed to make my own books. Of course mine would all match, not only in shape and color but thematically as well. Since I hadn't updated the SD card in the frame for well over a year I gathered all the photos from various computers that are of newer tattoos and put them all into a file. Then started to sort them. Each category would have it's own file and become a book. Sounds simple enough, right? Now, take over four hundred pictures and put them in coherent groups. "Butterflies" OK, there's a group, but so many butterflies are with tribal, or suns or flowers, and those were three other categories, so which one does it go into? I decided that "Flowers and Butterflies" could be one group. The dragonflies are just ending up in there by default. Then there were the suns. That one ended up grouped as "Hearts, stars and suns" which will have all the planet kind of stuff in that one as well. This goes on and on, and I'm not even done yet and I already have 13 files that make sense. Thirteen books to keep track of is going to be ridiculous. 


So I think, Ok, I could have different categories in the same book with divisions that let you know you're moving from one thing to another. Butterflies and flowers could have a divider that says "Hearts, stars and Suns" and then all those pictures could come after in the same book. How am I ever going to get all these assigned to their categories and then do that? This is way more of a project than I knew. I want it to be easy to find the one you saw though, and doing it this way seems to be best for that. 


My grand plan is to have them printed on card-stock, glossy, then bound into books at Kinkos that can't have pages removed. That's one of the reasons that I went digital in the first place, people take pages or single images out of books.


Like the late great Billy Mays says though, "But wait, there's more!" I need to crop many of these photos individually. There's no reason that some of the smaller ones couldn't be put two or three on one page with a photo program, and what about the ones in progress like Mel's leg or Michael's arm? Those would be nice to see in sequence, to show how tattoos grow and change through multiple sessions. This project keeps getting larger and more daunting in it's scope, and I think that like most Aquarians, or artists I am a master of making even the most simple thing into something complicated. I'm not even going to think about all the text I'll want to put in there, as public education you know, I just have to get these pictures sorted.


My goal is to have five or six fat books that you can hold and pass around and look at and see what I do and how well I do it. I hope it doesn't take me six months to get this accomplished. I did get my hands on some lovely french oak blank domino shapes yesterday though, and I have some interesting ideas about how I would like to paint them. I have to make some progress on this though, or I'll feel too guilty to paint, and that will probably spoil what I'm trying to do.


So I'm off to move my pile of sand with a teaspoon. I'm nothing if not dedicated and self-disciplined right? You'll say "right" until you see my back desk.


Ciao!

An empty box and a fickle french woman

I went to my word box this morning, to gather supplies for a blog. Apparently no delivery was made in the night, maybe it's because of the holiday weekend or something. There are a few ifs, ands or buts rattling around on the bottom, but as for finding enough words to string together for a whole essay I just couldn't come up with them. I did have enough to make the sentence "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country." but that is hardly a blog, that's a test for any common typewriter, the kind with a ribbon.


Sometimes, after having a story for every person who wants one, and a design for everyone who is in line, and a blog for every sun that comes up I just find myself kind of drained and empty. This is one of those mornings. If anyone, it's myself I let down when the box is empty, I expect to be an endless fount of creativity. That's who I am. That's what I do. 


I have had a string of very bad days physically, and I'm afraid that like white blood cells my body has been sending words to fight off the intruders that are attacking my body. I think the cure for this is to read more, I may have to do an extended session of that today, at least until the next delivery arrives. Art has a fickle muse, she grabs me and shakes me and holds me at my desk without sleep or food, then like a french woman who smokes her cigarettes in long thin holders she leaves me for the next attractive lover. Production art is a different matter entirely, I can do that with my eyes closed, which is a metaphor, I wouldn't dream of working blind. Often my clients bring me what they want and I just reproduce. Or retouch. Such is the case today, it won't require any great creativity on my part to pull it off. I can feel the Sundays coming on, where I just end up re=booking everything I have on Sunday because I'm out of Plutonium fuel for the week and need to rest up for the week to come. I used to work 7 days a week for years, and at this moment I can't imagine how I did it.


After this piece, I have the words Aardvark, exponentially, semi-square, tertiary, cruciform, relativistic, and hedgerow left at the bottom of the box. Do with them what you will, I think they're still there because I so rarely use them myself.

Straight teeth, imaginary money and a mountain of debt

Well I payed the giant past-due balance at Molly's orthodontist, plus a little more out of her child support and we are going to see them today. We all agree that her teeth look great and it's time for the braces to come off and the retainer to go on. I'm a doctor sometimes, and a professional CSI, but I have to admit to not really being an orthodontist. I look at her teeth though, that used to have the two giant front ones sticking out like bunny teeth and are now a straight white row of star-power glitter and I think they're beautiful. Any fine-tuning they want to do they can do with a retainer. This is all thanks to Grampa, if he hadn't given me the money to pay for the first half she would still have her original teeth, the ones she was so badly teased for when she was little. Teeth play a large part in our self-confidence, the way we smile says so much about how we feel about ourselves.

Turns out that Western Dental, the Wal-Mart of dental care, will "recontract" you one time as a courtesy. No one has ever mentioned this to me before as they watched me fall farther and farther behind as I tried to pay the remaining twenty-six hundred dollar balance myself with more occasional help from the Big G. If we get to write a new contract then I want a whole new contract. Not one that just finds a way to refinance the original 24 month treatment plan that mysteriously morphed into 32 months, but a "Thanks, but we're done now." kind of plan that will somehow come with a lowered final tab.

I hear commercials all the time when I'm in news relapse and listening to CNN on the car radio, talking about credit card debt and debt in general. I don't own a single credit card. My personal debt, not counting the braces is just around one thousand dollars. I'm into a car we really could have afforded if we hadn't had to tack what we owed from the last car we couldn't afford onto the loan, but at a much better interest rate. But as debt goes, compared to most americans I feel like we do fairly well.

"Do you owe more than twenty thousand dollars in credit card debt? Let our company help you pay pennies on the dollar!!" I hear these commercials all the time. "In trouble with the IRS? Do you owe ten, fifteen or even fifty thousand dollars? Let our company help you settle this debt for a fraction of what you owe!!" I don't understand this. How does anyone get that far into debt? My little orthodontic balance seems like a pittance next to that, yet it can still keep me up at night. If there are real companies that are settling enormous debts for pennies on the dollar then who is paying the rest of the balance? Is debt real in the first place?

What about all those loans for the millions of homes that have been foreclosed on in the last year? Where did the money for the loans come from, and what happens now that they are not going to be repaid? Is the money even real? Can those pennies on the dollar companies help with the billions and trillions that went to the car companies? My dad the Republican would say that my kids and my grandkids are going to pay for that, but was that money real in the first place? Why weren't billions and sasquillions of dollars given directly to us to spend on things to stimulate the economy? I would have flowed it all back out there. I don't understand money other than the idea that no matter how hard we work we never seem to have enough of it and it's only prayer and miracles that get everything paid every month.

That's a macro view, the truth is in my micro world I'm going today to "re-contract" with Western dental and even if they drop my payment from one hundred dollars a month to fifty it's going to be a challenge to pay it. I keep praying for that thyroidectomy so I can be healthy again and go back to overworking myself and possibly catch up, but how long is the recovery time for that? Take me out of the game for more than four days or so and my personal economy crumbles. Michael knows he needs a higher paying job, but he's just enrolled in college which is a really good long-term idea for increasing our family income so I have that on the list of extremely important things he's doing. We're not in giant debt, but we ride in the stern of the boat of debt that we're all in.

There was a time, possibly in my own lifetime that a man could get a job, keep his wife pregnant and staying home with all those kids and support the whole thing with his one job. I wouldn't stay home with kids as my career unless I could tranquilize them and make various art all day, but you see where I'm going with this, don't you? What happened? How did we become a country of rats on wheels running and spinning and no one able to satisfy the mountains of debt we all seem to have incurred? Don't make one single Democrat or Republican blaming comment to me, it's happened over the administrations of both parties. Save it for someone of your own party and go out for beers and bash the other.

As usual, I need to back down from my elevated view, lower the camera view to my own life and look at just what's before me. I'm taking Molly to the orthodontist today, and I have a chance to restructure one of the small debts that plagues my own life, and hopefully get the braces off her teeth. She's beautiful, and she's done with them. It's been almost three years that they've been on her teeth and they originally said it would be two. I'll get the rest paid off then go back to wishing I had a giant mortgage to pay. Call me what you like, but don't add consistent or rational to your list. Do you know I've paid approximately 132,600.00 in rent on this house alone in the last 13 years? In this market that would have bought a house. The auto bail out money may not have been real, but that rent I paid sure was.

Color, Fear and Sheep

Michael and I noticed a while back that the news media seems to thrive on fear and alarm. "Something terrible has happened, news at eleven!" and for the rest of the oatmeal-flavored drama we were watching before that we wondered, gosh, what happened? Even my good old standard "Good Morning America" with it's well-groomed familiar faces will run segments on "poisons in your food" or "ways to protect your family from home invasion or pesticides or microwaves or whatever." I started thinking that maybe keeping us in a state of fear and readiness for disaster was a deliberate thing that they were doing, and started pondering why.


Right after 9/11 there were the colored alert levels. I remember one day we were on Orange. How alert must one be to comply with that color? Should I be crouched under a piece of sturdy furniture? Ready to duck at any time? Just not making travel plans? How alert is Orange anyway? The one time I remember them upping the ante to RED status I said out loud "The only way I can be any more alert is to throw myself screaming onto the floor and freak out!" Thank God the regular color updates have seemed to calm down, I don't know how to relate color to fear. 


Now that Bush is gone to the glue factory I still notice that the news is still at it. All the presidential messages seem to be words of hope and progress, but the news itself is still full of dire warnings. I didn't let Molly go to school for days when Swine Flue, later called H1N1 Virus became the disease du jour. Really though, the news is fear, disaster, dead toddlers in a mass shooting, words about government people whose names I no longer have memorized, who's been secretly gay all this time, or who's having an affair while they're supposed to be governing a state. I always feel a bit dirty yet better informed after watching.


In the last few weeks I've done something that I never thought I'd do. I turned the TV off, and the music on. I've always listened to music, but only in between bouts of TV. Turning on the TV was the first thing I did when I woke up, or walked into the house. There might be something I really needed to know, some developing situation I needed to keep up on. Some new name in the administration I needed to memorize, some outgoing cabinet member I needed to know about and why they were leaving. Some disaster either near or far, something to watch out for. I turned it off.


I have some friends here on FaceBook that are well known publicly, who write only political commentary, and I am rapidly losing touch with what the hell they're talking about. I used to feel very smart, knowing immediately the names and situations that the intelligent people were discussing. Oh, the hours I've spent debating with my Big Daddy about current issues, I would be completely unprepared to enter into one of those contests these days, I am becoming unaware. It alarms me on some level that is off to the side and down a few levels, what if there's something I really need to know about and I'm missing it? I'm starting to believe that there always has been, but the things the media chooses to report are a smoke-screen to keep me busy being afraid of inconsequential little things so I never take the time to think about the larger things that are truly frightening. The sad truth is that I have absolutely no control over any of these things, either large or small. 


What about genetically engineering the food supply? It's not on the news, but it's happening. What about the Federal Reserve and the way they print money that didn't really exist in the first place and then use it to create more debt that none of us will ever be able to get out from under? That's happening too. So many things are really happening and deserve my attention while being outside my sphere of influence, and none of them are on the news.

I turned off the TV to see what would happen. I'm writing more, making more art. I'm trying to lower my stress level to see if it helps with my headache. I feel less fearful for the country and have a smaller and possibly more manageable fear for myself and my family. It's an experiment, but I find that I'm not missing Diane Sawyer and Contessa Brewer, CNN and MSNBC as much as I thought I would. I would still like to put a pillow over Nancy Grace's face and hold it till she stops struggling, but that's just on general principles.


What we do watch is the Science Channel and the History Channel. There are a lot of things there that I find interesting, whether they are speculation or not. The History Channel over-does it a bit with the God VS the Devil stuff, I refuse to consider Christian theology as history, but hey, the remote is in my hand, I can flip. The Science Channel so far is my favorite. Speculation about what that star did thirteen billion years ago is not current, but it doesn't raise my blood pressure. I have learned not to let Michael hold the remote, or we'll end up watching two movies at once by flipping between them. He loves Star Trek and the Terminator, and I'm sorry, but NO. If neither of those are on he'll just flip every twenty-two seconds or so, endlessly. This makes me build a rage that I am unaware of until it explodes and I yell at him to "just pick something dammit!" and by "pick something" I don't mean some stupid old movie that's halfway through anyway. Do you see why we're better off without TV?


What has begun as an experiment may just become a way of life. Here's the thing though: Part of my self-image is that I am an incredibly well-informed person who can discuss current events with ease, and possibly stay one step ahead of any conversational partner. What would it mean to give that up for good? Feeling superior is one of my greatest loves and character defects, I have a deep and abiding need to feel smarter than anyone I'm talking to. Not that I flaunt that like a big obnoxious know-it-all, I just quietly think "Yep, I'm smarter than you are." What if this means I'll have to give that up? Who will I be then? Will I be able to maintain that secret personal edge by having read more books than almost anyone? Do I even need to feel that way at all? For the moment, yes. Otherwise I might just become another one of the sheep, and that would be like dying but still walking around. Smart and funny, a theme I return to repeatedly, it's always been my one beloved asset, I've left the rest for the pretty and thin girls, and we all know what happens to them at fifty or sixty don't we?




I'm like a butterfly, wings still damp and emerging from my chrysalis, what color will I be? I hope it's not the Orange or red of high alert, I've had enough of that.

Blindsided

My 16 year old daughter, who is already finished with high school and taking a college class spent the evening teaching me skills that she has and I don't last night. She's taking Stagecraft, which she thought was going to be more about makeup for the stage than costuming, but it turns out that what they do is sew for four hours two days a week. She just got her first sewing machine for her birthday this year and I tried to find her a sewing class, but there was really nothing great, and then she chose this class because she wants to go to cosmetology school to learn hair and makeup.

There are only 7 people in a 4 hour class, and the teacher is very relaxed, so based on the needs of  the drama department she can do just about whatever she pleases. Yesterday she made a pair of lined women's pants, size 22, with an elastic waist and a zipper. Blue fabric with white polka dots. Other students are making vests with white fabric and blue polka dots for an  upcoming clown show, and her pair of pants originated from the question "How do I make something with a zipper in it?" The teacher added a zipper to that garment and Molly made it, in her second, or is it third week of class? She is starting to handle a sewing machine like she's been doing it all her life.

We picked fabric for curtains for our living room, and together we got one panel done last night. I was the apprentice and did the cutting and ironing, and she told me what to do and showed me how to sew a curtain. All day I just wanted to do my own art, and the first half was putting away boxes and boxes of my 25 years of supplies and the second half was having a sewing evening with my daughter. So much better than my own plans would have been. To see her confident and competent and let her teach me was an experience that does not echo my own teen years with my mother.

Speaking of parents, my Dad reads my blog every morning and it turns out that he prints them all, for what purpose I don't know. Maybe they're making the Rotary Club circuit in Mission Viejo or maybe they go into a box. He said that he and Carol were making their wills and what things of his do I want when he dies. 

I dropped that paragraph in there, in the midst of something completely different, to give you an idea of what it was like to hear that. Out of the blue I have to not only consider my hero, my first true love dying, but try to remember what stuff he has and call dibs on it. Mostly I don't ever want him to die, he's the touch stone, the olly-olly-oxen-free that means I've found my way safely home to base. He's the man I've measured every other man against, and then accepted their shortcomings because we all know there's only one Clark Kent. What do I want when he dies? What a practical question, what a heart-slayer of a thought. 

I don't even know what he's got, stuff-wise that would mean anything if he weren't here to talk about it with. He's already given me the book of love poems his father wrote while courting my Grandmother all those years ago. When my Grandmother died his sister swooped in and took anything good that I would have loved to have of hers, and it was her mother after all, she had a right to do that. The blue glass vases, the jewelry, costume or not, the artwork. My father's side of the family are not savers, anything of value they have is given in person and is not tangible anyway. I suppose I would like to have anything he ever crafted out of wood, he's a brilliant woodworker. I've given him many framed pieces of my own art over the years, those would be nice to have back since they were drawn just for him. But really, how can I even answer that question without falling apart?

I took a nap yesterday, and cried myself to sleep thinking about this. I told each of my kids about that question and cried when I told them. I'm crying as I type right now. I only have one parent and I need him more than some "small sack of stuff." 

Now Molly has never had a problem with this, she's been asking me about my own stuff for her whole life. "Mom, can I have this when you die?" and it's stuff like my Grandmother's butter dish, or the matching yellow cream and sugar set on it's own little tray. She wants all my jewelry, basically she wants every cool thing I've ever had. I tell her that I have to leave something for her brothers, and I think we've settled on the two perfectly round rocks that I've had for years. They each get one. I'm sure they'll be happy. She wants the dresser my dad made me, and all of my wooden boxes. All of the polished heart-shaped stones, and my tattoo business. She could run it, she could hire an artist and know if she was getting someone who knew their business, and run the whole place, I suppose she should get it. I can think about myself dying, that causes me no distress at all. Ideally I would die at the same moment as Michael so neither of us went first, but otherwise I'm ok with it. Thinking about my Dad or Carol though, well, in my current emotional state it was just too much. It was that kind of non sequitur.

In yesterday's blog I said I can cry at the drop of a hat. He asked me that question and I burst into tears and said "Dad, you just dropped your hat." I managed to get through the conversation, then told him I never want to talk about it again. He said he tried to work it into the conversation casually, and I told him that if he's looking for another career in retirement then the casual working in of emotionally devastating ideas should not be it. 

So Molly and I spent a whole evening together, till long after midnight working on a project where she was the teacher and I was the student. She's a fantastic designer, her ideas for color and form are just a natural part of who she is, and we worked without a pattern. She's only 16, I would rather see her spend these next couple of years taking classes out at the college and just loving school before she jumps into the 8 hour a day grind that cosmetology school is. I would like to see her have some fun, pick up some additional skills that she will want and need later in life, and fall in love with drama and the stage in general. She may want to be a hair and makeup stylist, but there is more to the art of beauty and illusion than just hair and makeup. I want to know that by the time she's my age she'll have so many supplies for so many arts that it will also take her days to get them all arranged in a studio to have them at hand for her projects. Molly is Drag. Molly is Mardi Gras. Molly is her own parade. We have things to teach each other and last night it was her turn. My daughter is feather fans and strings of pearls and jewels worn on the face and forehead. She's scarves and large false eyelashes and custom couture. She's not going to learn all of that in beauty school, and once she passes the state board and starts an internship with a renowned stylist it's going to be nothing but cut and color for years before she has the chance to learn these other things again.

Why can't we plan our kids' lives the way we know is best for them? Why can't we convince our parents that they simply must never die? Why can't I find my box of acrylic paints when I know I had it so recently? These mysteries are driving me crazy, and some of them make me cry.