Group membership
I had never seen so many Venn diagrams in one place before this.
I had never seen so many Venn diagrams in one place before this.
This has been the endless weekend. I remember that there was a yesterday morning, and I remember salient points all throughout, but it feels like I'm standing at the edge of a monstrous natural formation, looking over my shoulder, thinking, "Huh, you'd think I'd be hungrier after all that hiking."
Sometimes I forget what the first weekend of real spring is like. I can go outside, so I go outside, and climb all over everything, and look at everything, and run and play and throw stuff and remember what it is to be alive. This spring especially. Spring has sprung from ruined blackness. Miracle. Also, commonplace. Which makes it even better.
Spring is kind of here!
My trees are budding out. My bulbs are sprouting. I am home from work and sunshine is streaming through the window. I have a terrible desire to run out into the yard and start digging holes for plants that will die a horrible frosty death if I even think about planting them for another two months, but I'm holding off, because I CAN.
I have been spending a lot of time on projects. Why? Because they keep me from feeling adrift in a sea of evenings. At work, I can budget my time and fill every minute. At home, for some reason, I can't do that as well. So what do I do? Mostly, I read (I've been sent down the dark path of Terry Goodkind), and I write (the short story that sprawled first into a novella and is now heading full-tilt for novel territory) (oh, and I have a new poem up at The Journal of Asinine Poetry ... check out the front page, too, for a good friend of mine's work), and I do needlework.
When I was twelve years old, I learned how to do counted cross stitch, like any well-brought-up young lady. (Can't fault dear Mother for trying.) I was fascinated by it. Making thousands of tiny stitches in different colors and patterns created a new picture--like pointillism, but stabbier. I may have mentioned how my love of the needle arts is mostly my love of stabbing things, and it's not socially acceptable to take out that desire on anything animate, so, I stick with making scarves and stitching samplers. I finished a sampler just the other day, actually, and after ironing and framing it, I have spent time looking at it and thinking ... "Man. Gaudy." As it happens, this sampler came to me from Mother, who, while cleaning out her craft supplies last month, came across a sampler she'd started before either of her children were born. This sampler. Woo. It's something else. It would have been beautiful. It has flowers, a butterfly, a happy platitude across it. But the colors. O, the colors. Remember 1972? Remember the idea that colors should not be harmonious, but should SCREAM their clashes? War was in Vietnam, war was in the color scheme. And so we wind up with a sampler colored in baby blue, Girl Scout orange, pepto pink, mustard yellow, olive green, drab brown, and this other color that I can't even begin to describe. And I, being the inflexible thinker I am, went ahead and stitched the whole thing in the floss provided. Because what else am I going to do with it? And it was already separated out for me so neatly.
Mom had stitched the border and the lettering, but given up at that point. She shoved the whole mess into an envelope to be discovered 36 years later. I took it home and went to town on it. I'd quit needlepoint in high school. Dunno why. But when Mother handed this barely-started sampler to me, something long dormant in me, awoke. A connection to something larger than myself, maybe. This idea of craft.
Over the weekend I watched a documentary from PBS, Craft in America. It touched on the idea that craft is humanity expressed. And I can't disagree with that. One of the ladies they interviewed is a basketmaker, and she learned the craft from her mother, who learned it from her mother, and on back for hundreds if not thousands of years. In my home, I have needlework displayed from my great-grandmother, grandmother, and now mother and myself. Needlework is a constant along my family tree--all classes, all generations, for at least a hundred years are tied together by a needle and thread singing through fabric. I don't quilt, not yet. I don't have the patience or the finger strength. Great-Grandma used to be able to get five stitches at once onto her tiny little needle--she'd push so hard the needle would bend. Whereas I sew with a very big needle, a tapestry needle if I can get it (a tapestry needle is roughly three times the size of your quilter's needle), and my stitches are less decorative and more about holding together a stuffed animal. Been making dolls and such for more than half my life, with no sign of letting up anytime soon. I just made a stuffed owl last night out of a shirt I haven't worn in three years, and it has been pronounced cuddlesome, if a little spooky. Which is the best kind.
My point being, crafting is what I do. I craft with words a lot, and with physical things. Fabric, feathers, paint, pressed flowers, beads, barn wood, anything I can get my hands on. I'm about to start a project with dried beans and macaroni that will be spectacular, in one direction or the other. I've tried not crafting. I really have. This compulsion used to frighten me--this inability to keep my mind from working in that direction, to keep my hands from grabbing up every found object that might work with some collage/doll/bracelet I'm thinking about. I used to wonder what was working in me, or through me, but now I imagine there's no outside force. It's just how I'm built. It's my talent. I am not gifted with the ability to program Java, for instance, or be a sous chef, or protect people from themselves. But I can make a cuddly teddy bear for a child to love, and that doesn't scare me at all, anymore.
I love how, on news programs, there's always talk of the Giant Ice Storm Blanketing the Midwest!, as though this kind of thing never happens. As though we aren't used to insane weather patterns. As though it wasn't sixty degrees last week, and by Monday it was sleeting so hard windshields were re-freezing as one drove through the storm.
Not that I had that problem. Hurph. Hurph.
No, the drive from my job to my house is mercifully short, and I made it back with a minimum of personal damage. Didn't see a single person out on the road, because no one else was as much a moron as I was. And when the sweetie made the trek across town from his job a bare hour later, it took him close to 45 minutes to make what is normally a five-minute drive.
It's now Day 3 of our internment in the house, and all told it hasn't been bad. We've had power, phones, heat, food, water, internet, craft projects. (I made a stunning ornament from some Van Gogh prints and a little glue. If I'd only had some purple glitter!) Plenty to keep ourselves occupied. Plenty to keep our minds off the intermittent snow showers and status of our coffee situation. (Flatlining.) Blake's return to work is imminent, but not mine--the office is without power, so there isn't much use trying to get down there. Especially since there's a security gate, and without power, it won't open. So it's another day of internet surfing, Netflix watching, and writing. At least while Blake was here, it was easier to forget that we were essentially stuck inside the house. Seriously, it's almost impossible to walk outside--the lawn and stairs and walkway are coated in at least an inch of solid ice.
But the view from the window, it's amazing. Breathtaking. I've taken pictures and have not uploaded them yet--lazy! Actually I can't find the cable, because I haven't looked. Although I did finally go through the last three boxes that were still packed from our move. Six months ago. Ahem.
I'm telling you. Super-productive, that's been me these last couple days. Perhaps I'll be able to carry this over into my daily life and not spend so much time staring blankly at episodes of The Venture Brothers from my position on the couch. Who knows, it's been a week of miracles already. One more can't hurt.
The days blend together, so many tangles of memory and thought that I am hard pressed to distinguish them. I have myself halfway convinced that this is a fine way to be. That adulthood is about realizing adolescent dreams of happiness and contentedness in one's life are just that, dreams, and have no bearing on the real world. Last night I dreamed I was playing a video game that was more fun than any game I'd played before, and that game doesn't exist outside my own head. See. It's all the same. And I'm being melodramatic at a time when I have so much to be happy about.
A good friend told me yesterday that I'm earthy--connected with the land in ways I am loath to admit. Also that my sense of humor tends to the mildly coarse ... my great dream is to one day live deep in a forest where I can be surrounded by trees and plants and animals that I can subsist in harmony with ... um ... I'm learning to fish, hunt, trap, tell poisonous plants from nutritious, tasty animals from those not worth the struggle, tour the woods with a sharper eye for industry ... ahem. Means nothing. Right?
Regardless--there's snow outside, melting lackadaisically and smirking at me from the more shadowy regions of our yard. I hate to watch snow melt. All that cool white, so peaceful and insulating, disappearing back into the ground, which gets muddier and more sullen as the winter strays into spring. Ugh. I used to think I ought instead to spend my time living in a clime without seasons, but I never have gotten around to that. Maybe this mild depression is linked to seasonal change, maybe it's not. And somehow I think that if it isn't, and I've spent the time and effort to get to a new place, well--I'd feel like an idiot, and that is the one thing that is not allowed. Not that I don't feel like an idiot most of the time, and it gives me agonies. So there.
Not sure where the point has been buried, in this bit, but maybe the point is acorn-like, and a mighty oak shall henceforth spring, a hundred years from now. Or it might get run over by a lawn mower. Gosh, I'm cheery tonight.
Happy 2008!
We rang in the new year surrounded by friends taking pictures of each other, while people smoked cigarettes around us (because this ain't Illinois, THANK you) and a very loud band performed so beautifully ... I wept.
And today we've been playing Guitar Hero and having deep discussions.
It is good. Getting better.
I do hope everyone's having a merry holiday. Myself I'm finally winding down after an intoxicating thrill-ride of giving, receiving, wassailing, caroling, and Elvis.
In that order.
After we returned to our awesome house from our awesome family shindigs, I spent some high-quality time trawling for what can only be termed "obsessions"--those things I collect, not only because they are awesome, but because they are outrageously expensive, and this keeps my house from becoming Red Patterned Glass Mania A-Go-Go, because my only identifiable personality trait is that of Cheapskate. I resisted buying a few pieces that were alluringly cheapish, but have decided that if I really needed a candlestick holder for only $16 (but that includes shipping!), I'd already have a display cabinet set up. On a related note, how many pieces of a fancy collection does one need before a display cabinet becomes a vital part of one's existence? Perhaps I am too much a clodbuster to have such things as fancy collections. I shouldn't collect anything anyway. Have you SEEN the sheer volume of books I have? Started collecting those about twenty years ago--in earnest, ten years ago. Then got jobs at bookstores and everything was lost. This is why I have never worked in an antique mall, though sometimes I think there are more antique malls in this town than residents, so clearly, if I were to choose a job based on economic viability and community growth, that'd be the direction to go in. But somehow I don't see myself standing behind a counter, listening to a middle-aged lady shrew at me because we don't have THE Looney Tunes glass she's looking for to complete her granddaughter's collection.
Most of my energy these last few days has been devoted to not dying of the common cold, which by now i ought to have medaled in, if it were an Olympic sport. Which it should be. Fortunately, while I was wasting away on the couch, I managed to get a lot of writing in. It's intense, here, with stories and poems and magazines my wildly-successful alter ego is being published in. They're so underground, if they'd get fertilized, they'd be stemmed and fruity. And while I used to wonder why people were so proud to be published in these underground mags, now I kind of get it. There's a lot of talent in these things that I'd never see normally, not in my everyday world where I hear a lot of NPR and talk to exactly three people (two over the phone) on average. There's a sneaky subversive thrill to it. I don't think of myself as subversive though. I'm too in love with sunshine rainbow pony magic for that. I mean. For pity's sake. You're talking to the person whose collection that doesn't include red glassware is housed in a box marked "MB's Unicorns--Fragile!"
And suddenly it makes perfect sense why NO ONE has guessed my pen name's true identity. I reckon he'd go after those unicorns with a vengeance. Probably because he lost an arm-wrestling match to a unicorn in a bar, and he's been haunted by the scene ever since. And now I am haunted by the scene, too. Perhaps this is why there are porcelain unicorns everywhere, and no porcelain hims. Har!