Fear
thinking about my upcoming digital sabbatical
As I promised myself, this coming Saturday I’m taking a combination internet/knitting break, and I’m anxious about it. I’m allowing myself to use my computer to write, but not to go online. We’ll see how well I do with this; in the last few days, there have been several great articles (two in the NYTimes, including this lovely piece by Pico Iyer) about people taking digital sabbaticals. There’s something to it. I feel increasingly overloaded by all the information flying in, by my distracted and fractured nonstop word and image consumption — more blogs to read, more long articles to read, more insights to consume, more inspiration to absorb, more fiction to admire, more poetry to read, more thoughts to consider (oh! Must read Fareed Zakaria’s piece on the world.…). I feel wobbly, like I need to stop and make some priorities, and do some quality curating. I need to make time to process, to incorporate. I think this post about going on an information diet might be helpful, but I haven’t yet had time to read it thoughtfully — oh, the irony. Time!! I want more time, need more time. I have too many interests, and simply can’t understand people who say they’re bored.
Last year I grew in a very specific way: I became more self-possessed. That’s a very neat word, especially for someone who has always been other-possessed, past-possessed, history-possessed. Self-possessed means I take my own counsel, I have integrity and take my time, consider myself, pick and choose with the confidence of my true self. But I’m allowing myself to be overwhelmed, and it’s definitely time to stop, to take stock, to turn away from the easy seduction of immediate gratification and instead move thoughtfully and mindfully ahead. Easy to say, hard to do. I hope Saturday’s experiment gives me a start.
On Sunday my husband and I are driving to Atlantic City for a couple of days, to get out of town and keep ourselves busy and distracted while we wait for some news. We’re going ironically, and we’re Atlantic City’s worst nightmare: we don’t drink, we don’t gamble, we intend to lie around the pool or walk on the boardwalk or chill in our room, and we plan to eat.
It’d be much more interesting to go when Nucky was there, and Chalky, but alas. That’s a tv show. We’ll have a good time together making fun of the whole thing, the gamblers, the Snookies, the plastic glam and fake glitz. I’ll be taking my laptop, and since it’ll be after Saturday, I’ll be reporting live. From Atlantic City.
think I can pull it off?
I think the fact that this idea is so frightening suggests that I really really ought to do it — and not just do it, but commit to it for a specific period of time. I’m so scared I want to give myself a tiny little time frame, like once, but I’m going to try to aim for a little more than that.
For the month of January, 2012, on Saturdays I will not open my laptop at all, and I won’t knit.
I KNOW!! Isn’t that a terrifying idea? And honestly, I don’t know which part is scarier, the computer or the knitting. Can I really do it? Why should I? Would you attempt such a crazy stunt? I may need to think this through a little more; I may want to write (and in fact I do want to write), so should I instead say that I will not be online for that month of Saturdays? But if my computer is open and on my lap, how could I not just do one little email check, just take one little glance at facebook? Am I a woman, or a mouse?! [in fact, i am a mouse. a woman mouse.]
What would I do, instead? Well, actually, there’s quite a long list:
- take a walk
- do yoga
- write by hand
- read (read, read, read!)
- watch a movie
- go to a museum
- paint
- sew
- housework
- go to Central Park
- go out for coffee or brunch
- cook / bake
- meditate
And that’s just what comes to mind right off the top of my head, things I always want to do but end up not doing because instead I knit and poke around online the whole day. I think I’ll be a little bit of a weenie and just challenge myself to one Saturday, for starters. But let me take a kinder stance to myself: rather than seeing it as my being a weenie, I’ll decide to give myself the best possible chance to succeed! Yeah! Saturday, January 7, I will not open my laptop, and I won’t knit. I make this promise to myself, to encourage myself to explore more of what interests me.
Do you think I’m nuts?
finally, taking up this one big dream.
OK — here is my big leap, taking my vague handwavey post from several days ago and making it concrete. Once you put something into words, and even more, once you say it out loud, it’s real in a different way, and you’re accountable in a different way. It’s easy to have all kinds of half-seen dreams floating around, those “some day” thoughts that tickle, and as long as they stay there, they’re no threat.
It has always been so scary to think about this, and of course the reasons are obvious. As long as I don’t try, I don’t have to face failure, if I’m not actually very good. As long as I don’t try, I don’t have to be uncomfortable in that way. As long as I don’t try, I can keep doing all the wonderful avoidance things I do. Like “well, I’ll just run through facebook/google reader and then I’ll do it.” Ha, of course.
It occurs to me quite often that the only difference between me and creative people I admire is that they do it, they don’t just think and talk about it. They might be better or worse than me, but the important difference is that they’re doing it, and I’m just thinking about doing it. Or talking about doing it. Or talking about thinking about it. Oh I’m so clever at this avoiding business.
So here it is, my big dream. At the highest level, my big dream is to finally live a creative life. Me being me, I’ve made an Excel spreadsheet, breaking this down into a number of areas, but they all fall under this umbrella. I can so easily get lost in the pleasure of spreadsheets and multi-level outlines, with footnotes and cross references, but for this post I focus on just one very big piece.
I want to write a book. A novel. This is my desperate big dream. Working as an editor has really helped me get closer to this goal; I am so much better at understanding what makes a story work, what makes a story move or stall, what makes a character come alive or remain flat. I have a lot to say, and I believe that if I can just get out of my own way and unclench my jaw a little bit, I can do it. But I’ll never do it if I don’t begin.
I’ve thought a lot about what stops me, and one thing that almost always pushes the pause button is my elevation of authors and novels to such a vaulted place. Books saved my life as a child, and that’s not an exaggeration. To think that I might write something that a reader would keep in his or her heart, something that would give someone an idea of other ways of living and being, that’s about as noble a thing as I personally know. Art can do that for us, it saves us and creates us and helps us understand the world and our own experience. But thinking of it that way is intimidating.
One thing I want to do to help myself is to develop a creative routine. For a few weeks I wrote a minimum of 750 words every morning — morning pages — and boy did it cut something loose in me. I felt like a different kind of observer in the world. I’m also organizing my week so I do at least one expanding thing a week: go to an art exhibit or one of the fantastic museums here in town; go to a performance of some kind, theater, talk, reading; if ever there were a place that makes this goal easy and do-able, it’s Manhattan for heaven’s sake.
This is part of a bigger project, so it’s a kind of interlocking puzzle. It’ll be hard to make it work, since I also need to resume my strength training and I have other physical goals that require time, other social goals that require time. I’m scared and excited, and more than a little bit intimidated.
Thanks for the support you give me by visiting and reading my blog, and by leaving comments when you do. You’ve helped me on my way more than you know.
We all have our own life to pursue, our own kind of dream to be weaving. And we all have some power to make wishes come true, as long as we keep believing. — Louisa May Alcott
This is a question I’ve become kind of obsessed by. For the last year, there has been a simmering background potential that my life might change dramatically, and I’ve been spending a lot of hours thinking about how that might look. And I’ve been extremely specific about it, too — no vague handwaving about it. In the process, I’ve been thinking about moving ahead and doing what I want with my life, making it the way I want it. Not the way it is, necessarily, the way things just kind of develop, and you’re stuck with that table because there’s nothing really wrong with it so you can’t justify getting a new one. Instead, what if I could have what I wanted? Exactly what I wanted? What would that look like?
I actually started thinking about this several months ago, during my monthly writing group. We take turns bringing one-word prompts and each month we spend several minutes doing spontaneous freewriting on each prompt. So this one time, the prompt was different than usual, it was simple: write what you’d do if you had a whole weekend all to yourself, to do whatever you wanted.
Our faces lit up (we’re all women, this “time all to yourself” idea is so novel!), and our heads went down and the pens were scratching feverishly over the paper. Usually one of us finishes in a couple minutes, and the others wind up shortly after that. This time, we just kept writing. Pages were being flipped quickly, and the pens just kept moving. The thing that was so surprising, when we finished and we each read our little piece aloud, the others listened with wide eyes to what were essentially simple things…..but the writer always seemed to think it was some kind of crazy, impractical, impossible dream.
So for the last several months I’ve been thinking about this. Given where I am in my life, what is my big dream, now? At this point, so many of my big dreams have been achieved: my children are here, in my life, and they’re also out in the world living big lives of their own, and they’re wonderful people; I not only went to college, I finished graduate school and earned a PhD, which I never even knew to dream about; I’ve traveled a lot and seen places I’d never even heard of, plus so many places I never dreamed I’d see, and learned that there are other places in the world that feel like home; I earn money by reading and writing.
So it’s not at all about “gee, what’s left?” but more like ok: now, given this stage of my life, what is my big dream? And again, my thinking is focused, not some vague handwaving. Focused. What is my big dream now, given where I am in my life?
Before I tell you mine, I wonder about yours. What is your big dream? Specifically.
Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool.
p.s. Giving a shout out to women in my broad age group. We’re gorgeous! Check out this post on A Femme d’un Certain Age, see if you can find me among the beautiful others!
art can transform even the most horrible experience
I’ve written about this short story before, last May — Haruki Murakami’s wonderful and terrifying The Seventh Man. In the wake of the tsunami in Japan, I’ve been remembering the story, and realizing how much the story helped me imagine and understand the experience. Plagiarizing myself:
Have you ever read something that just haunts you? Everyone has, probably, in one form or another. But this story truly haunts me, it hovers around the edges, it has even shown up in a dream. The Seventh Man, by Haruki Murakami, was read by John Shea at Symphony Space. I’ve attended the Selected Shorts readings at Symphony Space, and they’re almost always wonderful. I haven’t read this story, and even if I did, I heard it read first, and that reading may partially account for the haunting nature of it — but I suspect it’s deeply embedded in the story itself. John Shea’s reading of it is just magnificent – dramatic, loud, whispering, terrified, exhausted. It’s a relatively long listen – 40 minutes (I think….time just stops when I listen to it, which I’ve done 10 or 11 times).
I’ve typed and erased several attempts to introduce you to the story, to make you want to listen, but whatever I write just misses the boat enough to make me afraid you won’t. It’s really an incredible story. At Symphony Space, it was part of a program called “Deepening Insight” so it’s about the main character’s insight into the most terrible and affecting thing that ever happened to him. If you like to think about metaphor and meaning and transformation and life, please please please give it a try.
I won’t continue to tease; if you want to listen, here you go, and if you want to read it, click here. [note: don't be put off when you start listening - the program featured 2 stories, and this clip begins with a snippet of the 2nd story, followed by the introduction of John Shea, who will then start reading. Be patient, the story starts around a minute and a half.] If you want to keep listening, the 2nd story is included in the audio, too, after the Murakami.
Terrifying.
Paging Alfred Hitchcock, paging Alfred Hitchcock.
Across the street from my apartment, on the 2nd floor of the building, something’s going on. From my couch, I can see the bedroom window. It’s a fancy one. It is more like a glass door, it swings open like that. There are no cross-panes, it’s just a full door-sized window. The owners open it when the weather is nice; they have one of those tiny little balconies sticking off the front of the building, just deep enough for a few potted plants.
For the last several days, the overhead light has been on 24 hours/day, and for the last 3 days, that window/door has been standing wide open. Last night I was up from 1-3am and there it was. Lights blazing, door/window wide open, despite the snow.
Now, the door/window has been closed but the curtain is still pulled aside and the overhead light is still on. I haven’t seen a person once; it’s not like I see them very often — it requires a coincidence of timing, I just happen to glance over as they just happen to be there. But it does happen often enough that I would’ve seen them by now.
So! Just enough ambiguity to leave me uncertain what to do.
Tomorrow: lots of knitting. Hope to finish knitting D&S, in fact. Fingers crossed.
my head hurts, and there’s no way i’m eating a tarantula, even if they ARE deep friend. and no, a grasshopper doesn’t sound better.
New things! A skin for my Kindle, courtesy of Decalgirl. Since I rarely carry it in my purse, seeing as how I’m home all the time, I don’t have to keep it in the heavy leather case. But I don’t want the white surface to get dirty-looking, so voila!
love the little boy in the dunce cap
even the back gets a skin cover
Also: the lace ribbon scarf I’m making for my friend is going much faster than the other two I’d knit in sock-weight yarn. Also, I’m a much more skilled knitter now than I was when I made the other two scarves with this pattern. No mistakes, no need to check the pattern, it’s as easy as falling off a log.
it's going pretty quickly in Rowan Felted Tweed!
Every variety show needs at least one kind of freaky sideshow, right? One thing that’s an acquired taste, not for everyone? Well, this fits the bill in a lot of ways. This appears to be one of the most common street foods in Cambodia. NOT FOR THIS GAL.
deep-friend tarantulas. but hey, the hairs burn off!
tarantulas not your thing? then how about.....GRASSHOPPERS! no? (me neither!)
I might lose weight on our vacation, but there are lots of things to eat besides bugs. I’m counting on it.
Today was one of those lost days, thanks to the terrible low pressure system hanging over our heads. Ugh, the headache, the too-many sudafed, the pressure on my forehead. I’m knitting and watching a yoga video on Netflix. Somehow, it’s helping. 
living in manhattan – hard times, man. your car gets towed and you might get bedbugs. enter: roscoe, the famous bedbug sniffing dog.
Two things happened today that are just so particular to living in NYC, so I thought I’d share. Each requires a tiny bit of background.
1 – If you have a car in NYC, as I do, you either have to pay an exorbitant monthly fee for a space in a parking garage (I’ve paid less for big apartments in other places than you might pay for a parking space in a garage), or you park on the street. That’s risky, parking on the street; I’ve had my tires and wheels stolen a couple of times. Someone smashed a window and stole all the airbags (yes, really!). Someone scratched the word “Niger” in the side of the car. Really? Niger? What’s that about. If you park on the street, you also have to deal with alternate side parking, which involves moving your car every other day. I won’t go into all those details, just know that you have to move your car every other day.
OK. Living in NYC means living on a movie set, on top of everything else. So many tv shows and movies are filmed here, which is great and awful. You just get used to watching for your neighborhood, when watching a movie or tv show. You get used to seeing all the movie trucks and gear set up everywhere. You hate it, but you deal with it when something is being filmed in your neighborhood and all the damned parking is taken up for days. So what happens is that the production company posts signs ahead of time informing you of the filming period. The signs are everywhere, and they’re posted AHEAD OF TIME. They’re supposed to be, anyway. This morning, I went out to move the car and it was gone. There were signs posted that hadn’t been there yesterday, and the car had been towed by the production company. When this happens, they do not tell you where they’ve towed the car. You just have to hang around and hope you see a tow truck, so you can ask them, and hope they know. Your alternative is just to walk blocks and block and blocks in all possible directions looking for the needle that is your car, in the haystack that is your neighborhood. Luckily, a couple of hours later I found a tow truck and was told where to find my car.
2 – Animal life. Each place in this world has its own kinds of infestation. For NYC, you’ve probably heard about our cockroaches and mice/rats. You can’t stand on a subway platform for long without having your attention drawn down to the tracks, to watch rats scurrying back and forth. You may find “evidence” that mice have been in your apartment. I’ve never had cockroaches in my place, but they’re a classic accompaniment to many apartments here in NYC.
Recently, NYC has been grand central for bedbugs. That’s a horrifying infestation, because they’re extremely hard to get rid of. Adult bed bugs can travel over 16 feet in 5 minutes. I’d heard about friends’ buildings getting infested, and I’ve been grateful it hasn’t happened in my building. Until recently. First one guy’s apartment got bedbugs. Even though we are all relatively well-educated and “sophisticated,” it was an uncomfortable experience discovering that I viewed him differently now. We all did; when he’d leave the laundry room, no one would want to use the dryer he’d just used. I’m sure he felt it, even though we all tried not to act that way.
On Monday, we all received a notice under our doors from the coop Board of Directors informing us that 4 apartments are now infested with bedbugs in our building. OK, that’s pretty frightening – and I just bought a brand new mattress, I’d hate to have to get rid of it, if it came to that. But our Board of Directors hired
Roscoe! The Famous Bedbug Dog Expert!
Roscoe at work - not in my place
He started working at 9 this morning, sniffing in all the apartments in our building. While he was in my place, I watched him work, sniffing corners and countertops and baseboard edges and anything covered in fabric – I watched a little anxiously….what would Roscoe do? Would he certify me as clean? Would he find a bedbug?
I have to say that Roscoe was adorable. You’d never find a cuter bedbug authority, anywhere. And I also have to say that I’m clean. WHEW.
What a day, man. What a day. We know what the remedy is, don’t we? KNITTING!
.
the wedding dress is nearly done!
marnie and tom, so cute
It’s getting close, Marnie’s and Tom’s wedding – July 17. A number of weeks. They’re really adorable, peas in a pod, and their wedding is going to be fun. They asked me to make the wedding dress, which really delighted me…..even if it also terrified me. I haven’t done any sewing to speak of in years. Little quilt blocks here or there, straight seams and who cares if they’re ready for others to see them. But I haven’t made clothing since my kids were young.
When they were here over the Christmas break, we went down to the garment district to search for just the right fabric. Marnie had already picked out a pattern, and given the setting of their wedding, we thought a nice green linen would be great. Here’s the pattern she selected – a vintage Vogue 1954 cocktail dress:
this, minus the gloves
It’s a simple dress, but since it’s Vogue and vintage, it’s not as simple as you’d think. There are bound buttonholes, a strange way of doing the straps, and darts and pleats deluxe….which means it’s got a lot of room for fitting it to her perfectly, and a lot of room for error. Since she lives in Chicago, the fitting part was tricky. She came here for a weekend so we could do a rough fitting, and it’s a good thing she did.
So I got it largely done, then hit a spot that totally intimidated me. I couldn’t figure it out for the life of me, and I so want this to look beautiful, not home-made. So many weekends, I’d say and write “and today I’m going to work on the wedding dress” but the fear and intimidation made me think “well…..I’ll do it tomorrow/next weekend, today I’ll knit.”
She needs it quickly, though, so my mission this weekend was to get it done. And except for some handwork, and making the self-covered buttons, it is done.
just a view of the back
I’m going to get it professionally pressed; we chose a relatively heavy Italian linen, and my little old iron, my no-ironing-board set-up, and my lack of proper pressing tools means it needs to have a professional press. Then I’ll put it in a large box and send it off to Marnie, with my fingers crossed for a good fit.
a multilayered story of experience, recorded for creativity boot camp
This word was challenging, as Maegan said it would be. I let it percolate in the back of my mind all day at work. I thought of one direction I’d go, but I wasn’t satisfied with it. Then, sitting here with my fingers poised over my keyboard, it hit me.
In 1988, my baby, my son, was failing to thrive. We’d moved from Texas to Connecticut. I didn’t know anyone. I was still hemorrhaging from his birth, the previous May. I had a 5-year old daughter, a 2-year old daughter, and an infant. I didn’t know it, but he was simply allergic to the corn syrup in his formula – but his pediatrician told me a devastating story of a failed life for my most precious little boy.
So, in the deep dark middle of the nights, I sat in my chair and pieced a quilt. Each little diamond, each stitch, soaked in my tears, dyed with my heartsick worry. I stitched and stitched, night after night.
Months passed, I figured out the corn syrup connection and changed his formula. We moved to Virginia, to Fredericksburg. He caught up, he ran and laughed. He lay under my quilting hoop and laughed when the quilting needle poked through the quilt. He laughed, my son laughed, and so did I.
my tear- and laughter-soaked quilt
It’s the first quilt I ever made, and I have layers of thoughts and feelings when I look at it – pride, and memories of the dark and the terror, joyful memories of his laughter. It’s impossible to feel just one thing when I look at it. The making of it is layered and complex. And now it lives in my oldest daughter’s home, in the first home she bought with her husband.
Meagan provided this perfect poem – so perfect I include it here, so it’s forever linked with my story.
The Journey, by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
What you had to do, and began,
Though the voices around you
Kept shouting
Their bad advice—
Though the whole house
Began to tremble
And you felt the old tug
At your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
Each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do
Though the wind pried
With its stiff fingers
At the very foundations
Though their melancholy
Was terrible.
It was already late
Enough, and a wild night,
And the road full of fallen
Branches and stones.
But little by little
As you left their voices behind,
The stars began to burn
Through the sheets of clouds,
And there was a new voice
Which you slowly recognized as you own,
That kept you company
As you strode deeper and deeper
Into the world,
Determined to do
The only thing you could do—
Determined to save
The only life that you could save.
schizophrenia is not always fun for people in the subway. take my word for it.
Maybe you live in a smaller city, or a town somewhere – maybe you don’t live in a teeming city like New York. Teeming is a good word for us, it means abundantly filled with especially living things. Boy is that ever New York City. “Abundantly,” yes. “Filled,” oh yes. “Especially living” – yowza. So anything that teems can have a wide variety of things in it; I’m sure in a teeming ant hill, there are a couple of wacked-out insane ants here or there.
one of my friendlier neighborhood schizophrenics
So if you don’t live in a teeming place, you may not have the same kind of casual acquaintance with schizophrenics. You may not casually note ‘oh, there’s that schizophrenic dude again’ and just keep walking. You may not pass the enormous fungal-smelling homeless schizophrenic guy who lives by the front door of your office with the same breath-holding ease, you may not even take a second glance when you see he’s standing up peeing in his pants. Again.
I was walking on Broadway one evening last week, and a very tall woman passed by, then stopped in the middle of the street and was having an extremely vigorous conversation with someone that only she could see. There’s something very unsettling about it, if you stop to think about it. And if you think about it a little longer, it can start to goof with your ideas about reality, the philosophy of what is. By now you may be feeling sorry that you don’t have the same opportunities I have. Well, let me balance the scales.
This morning, as I was entering my subway station, there was a guy just behind me on the street, and he stopped at the top of the stairs and started raging, which impelled me to race down the stairs to get away from him. His voice was roaring, it had a growl edge, he was absolutely terrifying. And he was speaking a secret language that perhaps he could understand, but the words themselves were unintelligible, even if the feeling and power were not. But now and then, regular English words came out – kind of startling, like when you hear English pop up in a French sentence — ‘allons au picnic’ or something. His version:
crazy crazy crazy MOTHERFUCKER crazy crazy WEST SIDE STORY!!! CRAZY crazy fucking crazy WEST SIDE STORY!!! crazy CRAZY crazy crazy!
Well, that’s fine I guess. I may have a mixed review of West Side Story myself, but to each his own. But he was truly terrifying. He was pure terrifying rage, roaring in an inhuman way, but with a very human capacity. For a long time, he was stuck at the turnstile and I was anxious, wishing a train would hurry up and come before he got through. He made it through, and was rampaging up and down the platform, coming nearer to me at the end, then turning around, then coming back, roaring and shouting. I was terrified that he’d get into my car – I’d have jumped out before the doors closed, if that happened. Of course, if he got on the train, he could just walk from one car to the next. I felt terrible for anyone in a car with him.
The train came, finally, and he was mid-platform. Far from me, at the very end of the train. When we got to the next stop, 7 blocks away, the doors opened and I could hear his roaring, pouring out of the car and resonating in the tunnel.
So “teeming” can be a mixed blessing. That’s my take on it.
pondering the meaning of ivory
Today is the first day of creativity boot camp, and the assignment is ivory. One of my primary — and most difficult — tasks will be to be kind to myself and just follow what happens without being mean and critical. That’s hard for most people, I think, and if you have a cruel and hateful inner voice, as I do, it’s just shy of impossible. But I am going to try – to step out and be daring, and just follow myself without offering explanation and apology.
high school graduation, 1977
Ivory is pale skin, skin that is lit from the inside, skin that is soft and beautiful. I have ivory skin; I always have.
me and my camera
Ivory skin is one ideal, peaches and cream, pale and beautiful. There are other ideals, too – tan and bronze and cafe au lait and olive and honey. But those beautiful colors do not make ivory their opposite, ugly – ivory is another beautiful way of being in this world.
Ivory is cream.
Ivory is precious.
I am ivory.
My hands are ivory. My hands are MY hands, they resemble the hands of my father, and my grandmother, but these are my hands.
my hands
Throughout my life, other people have commented on my skin – my lovely complexion – and I insisted on belittling it. I can’t tan, I’m pale and ugly, your skin is honey but mine is putty. But I was wrong, every time. I am beautiful ivory.
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
creativity boot camp. you know you want to do it.
Luckily I don’t have to shave my head, or worry about the current [flabby] state of my abs and pecs, because this boot camp is all about creativity. And it’s FREE. Sign up? I just did. It runs June 6-18.
I don’t know what to expect, exactly, but it might show up in my blog posts during that period.
My kids are extremely creative; my oldest daughter teaches 1st grade (and is Teacher of the Year, hell yeah) and she can whip up the coolest things without even thinking about it. The kids in her classes are lucky ducks. My second daughter is an artist (buy her work here please, at monkeyrope press…but you have to move quickly because her stuff is selling like hotcakes!). The work in her shop is her commercial stuff; she’s very much a conceptual artist too, but that work shows up in galleries rather than in her etsy shop. My son is just so gifted verbally, and he’s hilarious and creative without giving it a second’s thought.
Their father likes to draw, and I make a lot of stuff, so I guess they came by it honestly, but they took our meager gifts to new heights. I wish I were more creative; I’m a pretty good technician, but I wouldn’t say I’m creative, except with language now and then.
So here’s to boot camp, and to more creativity in the world!
gotta learn this new thing, what’s wrong with me?!
Fear is a funny thing. It’s a good thing if there’s a bear chasing you; fear makes you run fast. But it’s a silly thing if you’re afraid of learning a new knitting skill. Really, Lori? Afraid of Judy’s Magic Cast-On? REALLY? Come. On. It’s knitting, and I am holding the sharp pointed sticks. I can just stop at any time. Nothing terrible is going to happen; the worst thing would be if I got sweaty and was nervous and not figuring it out and therefore feeling stupid.
Is that it? It makes me feel stupid, like I don’t know anything? I already know that I don’t know all that much! But I’ve become comfortable. I can knit top-down socks with no stress. I get it, I know the tricks, I don’t make mistakes. On the other hand, I also don’t have very much time to knit, so when I do get to knit, I want to be knitting, not sweating with anxiety! But on the other hand, I also want to grow, and challenge myself, and learn new tricks, so as soon as I finish the wedding shawl, I’m going to do it: Judy’s Magic Cast-On and toe-up socks.
YIKES!
two socks at once! Double yikes!
Once I’ve got the cast-on figured out, I’ll learn the little heel tricks you use for toe-up socks. Then, with all that confidence surging through me, I’ll tackle continental knitting. I see big things in my future.
Read other bloggers talking about new skills they want to learn here: knitcroblo4
all aboard – ha ha ha ha – the crazy train
Maybe New York City mothers tell their kids about days like this, people like this. It’s not like I’m unaccustomed to some of the more colorful people one runs into in this city; we have our neighborhood schizophrenic who used to do push-ups in the middle of Broadway, and who once ran up and tagged me. There’s the schizophrenic who ‘lives’ in front of my office, the poor man you can smell before you even round the corner. There are drunks in the subway, not all that uncommon to see. Oh, and the occasional weirdo who picks up 2 reciprocating saws the workmen left untended, and starts sawing people on the platform. (That last one is really rare, I mean really rare, but it did happen at my subway stop so that makes it notable to me.)
But today was a real doozy. The trains were strangely empty; as we went along, there were always empty seats throughout the car. Weird, for “rush hour” on a normal week day. I get on at Penn Station, and the next stop is Times Square. Well, a totally drunk dude got on at Times Square. I wasn’t sure he was going to be able to stand up, or to stay upright in his seat. And I was afraid he was going to lose the contents of his stomach like the last majorly drunk guy I encountered. He wobbled, he wavered, he drooped, and he kept getting up and lurching around, back and forth. And he was right in front of me.
He rode along for 3 stops and then he got off, and I felt a wave of relief. For about 10 seconds. Another guy boarded, and he was happy! Like, really really really really happy – cackling and slapping his leg. Throwing his head back with his mouth wide open so we could see all 3 of his teeth, cackling. Then he’d jump up and down, then do this weird thing where he’d kind of squat and move up and down in a squatting position. Then he’d jump up! Turn around! Windmill his arms! Cackle cackle cackle! Maybe he was doing the hoky poky for all I know. Whatever reality he was in, there was a happy party going on.
Still, there’s something frightening about insane happiness, and he was so physical and all over the place. And – like the drunk – he was right next to me. What gives, drunk and crazy dudes?!
He finally got off at the stop just before mine. Today, apparently, I was aboard the crazy train. It’s not really all that much fun.
not-doing is so much harder than doing, but doing is pretty hard, too.
Stopping all at once – from following 435 blogs to not reading any blogs at all – that is tough. Since Google Reader doesn’t provide a suspend option, I just eliminated the gadget from my iGoogle home page. The choices are either to quit following, or see all the posts. I wish they’d provide a vacation option or something, but they don’t. So I know they’re all there, accumulating, showing up in the Reader that’s there but just not on my home page. They taunt me, the posts. I know there is beautiful knitting, gorgeous quilting, interesting thoughts, amazing design, fun and happy and curious and melancholy, all there just behind my screen.
But I am not reading. It’s hard. I wonder what you’re up to. Not reading hasn’t yet transformed my mornings, although I have done more knitting. I’ve also done a bit more writing. I think I have to overcome the thing underneath, the thing that made sitting and reading all the blogs so appealing, such a good alternative to doing. Inertia, laziness, general procrastination, fear. And that last one is such a funny thing – fear. I’m afraid to try toe-up socks. WHAT? Afraid to try toe-up socks? What is there to be afraid of? Afraid I’ll sit at my table and start writing and … what? It won’t be good? Does it all have to be good, and perfect, and finished, with my first effort?
Of course the answer is no, and of course the answer is yes.
this is my brain on distraction crack
Not the corpus callosum, the crack-like division between the two brain hemispheres. Not crack cocaine and what it does to your brain. No, the ‘brain crack’ of the post’s title is a phrase my daughter the artist uses to describe the way a creative person might get so involved in figuring out everything involved with a new project and never start, preferring instead to continue planning, tweaking, thinking. That process is kind of like brain crack, it’s fun, nothing is at risk, it’s a way of doing “work” without having to face the blank canvas, or the blank page, or the raw materials, and enduring that difficult process and the potential for risk and failure. “Don’t get stuck on brain crack, mom.” Because that’s what I do. (And here I’m not talking about the actual prep work, the swatching (though that could be done in a brain crack-like way), the material testing, the sample creation, etc.)
I’ll just answer these emails that are coming in, and after that I’ll get going. I’ll just organize my knitting bag and then I’ll get going. Oh wait, I should really read this book about design before I get going, it’ll probably save me a lot of trial and error. Oh wait, let me just clean the kitchen first. I’ll just run through my Google Reader real quick and then I’ll get started. I’m sure this is very common; I’ve read all sorts of pieces by writers who describe this kind of process they wade through when they’re having trouble writing. It doesn’t feel good to do this, there’s a kind of building desperation, you know you’re stalling and the thing is waiting, waiting, getting further away rather than closer.
During the week, I get up at 5am and spend about an hour (more or less, depending on the daily situation with my hair and how tragic it looks) sitting on the couch, drinking two cups of coffee, reading my Google Reader, and knitting. Some days I don’t knit, but usually I do. I leave the house absolutely no later than 6:30, and shoot for 6:15 as an average. I relish this quiet hour all to myself, and if I don’t get it I feel cattywampus all day. The street is usually very quiet, and I don’t listen to anything, no music, no podcast. It’s precious and necessary and I love it. I have aspirations of other things to do with that hour, and I continually plan to do them but the morning comes and I think well, this morning I’ll just do my usual. What I’d like to do instead:
yoga and meditation
writing
actual work on creative projects
walk in Riverside Park
explore my neighborhood and take photographs
I really want to do these things! I really do. Obviously, I couldn’t do them all each morning, and my silly tendency would be to regulate them in some kind of rigid fashion: yoga M and W; walk on Th and Sat; write on T; etc. What stops me, as silly as this sounds, is Google Reader. I subscribe to 435 blogs. I have them categorized in ways that let me skip to specific ones (knitters, NYC, food, art, photography, entertainment, fabric, design, creative multi, etc). If I’m in a real time bind, I always just read the knitters and the fabric (which means people who work in some way with fabric, sewing or quilting or dying or weaving), and try to fit in the creative multi – the people who knit AND sew AND do photography. I tell myself that one important purpose of looking at all the blogs is inspiration, and that does happen! There are some amazingly creative people out there who not only do good work, they write about it in inspirational ways and take amazing photographs. Of course, inspiration is a two-edged sword, because it can also make me feel like I’ll never be that good at anything.
I daydream of a balanced life, where I do yoga and walk, and have time to write, and have plenty of time to make things, whatever they are. Where I am careful about my food, and eat with the seasons, healthy and yummy all together. In this fantasy, I’m also calm and content because of the balance, and those two – the calm and the balance – feed each other. And me. Those weekends where I take a little adventure somewhere, Queens or Chinatown or somewhere, and where I take a little walk in the park, and I actually do some housework and also knit, I am much happier in a strange way than I am at the end of those weekends where I have just knitted on the couch for the whole weekend and watched good movies. It’s that balance thing, obviously. Of course, I don’t live in fantasy land, I live in a life that is mostly taken up by my job, family I enjoy talking with on the telephone, unpleasant tasks to do like laundry and cleaning up after dinner, etc., and then the obvious need for sleep. Not much time is left. Still, I do have that hour five days a week, from 5 to 6.
For a while, I’m taking a blog reading break. I hope you will still read mine even if I am on a temporary hiatus and [very painfully] not reading yours, though I understand if you unsubscribe. Blogging is a community thing – we get to know each other, we comment on each other’s posts, we follow the parts of our lives that we share. I find myself wondering how Jocelyn‘s class is going, what’s going on with Kty, over in Paris, etc. We are real to each other in a funny and kind of unreal way, so I feel bad turning away from reading all the posts I enjoy. But I’ve realized that I’m reading about others’ lives at the expense of living my own. You wouldn’t want to do that for yourself, either. I will continue to write on this blog for my own pleasure and documentation, and hope you stick with me. I’ve just got to get off this brain crack and get busy.
is he drunk, or a suicide bomber? how would i know?
Last night I had to take the subway downtown a little ways, and when I got into a car, the absolute REEK of alcohol literally made me gasp. Of course, when this happens I immediately begin to try to figure out which person is the drunk. Because I want to stay far far away from him. And it’s almost always a him. The last time I was trapped too near a drunk, he started vomiting and the car was so crowded, we were all just trapped, and on and on he went. Other times, the drunks are rowdy and big and loud, and kind of scary. Especially to me.
So, last night I grabbed a seat and started looking around, trying to ID him. I didn’t think it was the big guy sitting next to the door; he had a gym bag between his feet. I didn’t think it was the Sikh man standing, facing the door. Yeah, probably not him. (I know I’m being guilty of visual profiling!) No one looked drunk, but I figured it was probably the young(ish) guy standing in the middle of the aisle with his back to me. He wore work boots and a long jacket, and he had some kind of leather bag hanging down, which he wore under his jacket. STRANGE.
my subways
So that leather bag…..hanging inside his coat…..what’s that about? Who does that? Is he just some strange guy, or someone who was robbed once, so he learned to do that? Or is he some crazy subway bomber?! And that gym bag by the door, what’s really inside that zipped duffel bag?
Suddenly the question of whether the guy was a drunk was much less important.
Living in post-9/11 Manhattan, with the ongoing question of whether to prosecute the 9/11 suspects here, with subway bombings happening elsewhere in the world, with the occasional pair of murders happening (a double knifing on my own subway line a couple of mornings ago), you know? You pay attention in the subway. You get used to random bag searches; my assistant at work was routinely searched, but I’ve never been stopped. According to a story on Gothamist, “one rider said, “I feel the tension on the Metro. Nobody’s smiling or laughing.”" And that’s different from other days how?
To close on a much nicer note: Crow Kai-Mei:
Kai-Mei socks, madelinetosh sock in crow colorway
Isn’t that such a beautiful color, that indigo blue, with shadings from black to denim to lighter blue? I would never have thought to call it crow, but I guess madelinetosh was thinking of the blue-blackness of crows so I get it. To me, it looks more like denim but I’m no colorist. I’m only knitting these socks during my commute to and from work, so I get a few rows done at a time. At this rate, I’ll have one done by the time I finish my daughter’s wedding dress and shawl, but who cares! I’ll still have feet, and need socks, so there.
Popular posts: