Summer Reading Give-Away: Art Journal Freedom

I've got a stack of cool books here that need good homes, so I'm hosting (at least) half a dozen give-aways in conjunction with my blog over at CreateMixedMedia.com. Each Monday I'll list a new book, with links to more information about it and a Book Notes video that I've done showing some of the contents. If you want to play along, you'll post a comment here and then be sure to check back the following Monday to see if you've won. If you have, then you *must* send me an email with your address, and that address must be in the US. If you don't live in the US but have someone here who will get stuff to you, you can provide their address and then work it out with them. I'm sorry, but I'm not shipping stuff outside the US. I've done a ton of give-aways over the years and have learned a bunch of stuff, so this is how I do it.

That said, there's this: in order to get you to go over and visit my oh-so-very-groovy blog at CMM, I'm going to give you TWO chances to win each book: one for commenting here and one for commenting there. Now, it gets complicated because I'm having to schedule these out ahead of time, so I can't provide an exact link to each one. You'll just have to go to CreateMixedMedia.com each Monday, find my blog post (there's a link to it in the upper right-hand corner of the CMM home page), go there, read the post, post a comment. You know you'll get extra points for watching the video, right? Of course you will! You're making me look good!

Anyway, so here's the first give-away and all the info you need to know:

Our first Summer Reading Give-Away is Art Journal Freedom: How to Journal Creatively with Color and Composition, by Dina Wakley.

You can find out more about it in the shop, and you can watch the Book Notes video here. 

Post a comment here and on CMM, check back next Monday (when you'll also check both places for the next give-away), and good luck!

Trying to Get to Funky

This is the post I've been putting off writing forEVER because, honestly, I don't even know how to describe the dilemma. I could just show images, but I don't have any of my own and am loathe to just pick online images to paste here. The Web Image Police would surely show up and smack me. Or, more likely, someone would send me snarky emails about how I'm stealing other people's stuff. I get those, and it's the reason I show a lot less than I'd like--and also the reason I quit using rubber stamps and gave them all away. But this is what I've been thinking about for as long as I can remember, and it's been especially vexing lately. It all really exploded (in my head) at a gallery opening last Friday night. The work there had nothing to do with it, at least not overtly: it was Andy Hancock's photographs and Danville Chadbourne's sculptures. 

[Note: Andy is one of The EGE's former students and the nephew of The EGE's best friend in high school, a tall, skinny white basketball player who grew up to work in his dad's oil business and be a huge fan of Rush Limbaugh. When Andy was in school, his uncle, The EGE's friend, gave him a Rush Limbaugh Bake Sale t-shirt to where whenever I subbed for his mother (Andy's mother, The EGE's best friend's sister, who was also his journalism/photography/yearbook teacher. Andy always made sure I noticed the shirt, hoping to make my head explode. This was before Rush became a junkie, so it was more fun back then and you didn't have to feel sorry for his pathetic self.

Got all that? I'm not sure I do, but anyway~~this is why we went to the opening: to see Andy and his parents and the rest of his family, all of whom The EGE knows from when he hung out with them during high school.]

Anyway, so I was sitting on a bench looking at a piece of Chadbourne's work while The EGE was in the other room visiting. I didn't particularly like Chadbourne's stuff--it's OK, but the titles irritated me, and the artist was a little pretentious. I like artists who talk about what they do without trying to make it sound like rocket surgery or working to attain world peace, and the ones who are too filled with their own fabulousness are just tedious beyond words. I've listened to a LOT of artist talks, and here's my advice if you're ever invited to do one: pick out the part of your process that fills you with delight, and talk about that. Your love for your work and your enthusiasm about making it are WAY more attractive than a half-hour monologue about the awards and honors and busy-ness you experience as A Famous Person.

Where was I? Oh. So I was sitting there looking at this piece, which wasn't anything special but was giving me an idea for an appliqué based on the general shape, and suddenly this same conundrum that's been gnawing at me for years just swept over me, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. It is: how do I go from my innate anal-retentive self to the looser, funky, spontaneous stuff I want to do?

OK, let me try to show you what I'm talking about. It isn't just garments. Here's the kind of stuff I was making before I focused only on clothes.  (It's the page, "Stuff I Make")

You've seen the appliquéd stuff, the garments with one appliqué right in the front. Everything's balanced, neat, coordinated. Nothing wrong with it, not at all. But it's not what moves my soul. If you have Native Funk and Flash, you can turn to almost any page and see what I love. You can go here and look at her bags, or here and look at the stitches, or here to look at Sara's stitching, or Jude's, here. Go here to see what India Flint does. (I'm way more interested in the shapes of the clothing than I am in the dyeing, although it's marvelous, too.) Talismans, tribal costume, remade and salvaged garments. When I sit down to eat brunch, or whatever meal it is, I allow myself that time to browse Pinterest, looking at garments and stitching. If I don't see anything, I may do a search for "lagenlook," because sometimes that will turn up stuff, as will "gypsy" or "boho." The problem with all of these, though, is that they're too polished. AND: ruffles. Lace. Frou-frou-ness. I love the rumpled and the asymmetrical and the funky stitching, but I have real opinions about lace and ruffles on adult people. Also small dogs. And I didn't like them when I was a little girl, either: they were scratchy and got in the way of climbing trees.

But I digress.


I can't even begin to express how frustrating this is for me. I see things I love, and I can tell where it is I want to go. But I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to get there, how to leave this place where I am and travel to this place I want to go. There have been a few times I've found my way there, and I treasure those. There was this head I made from wool I'd felted/fulled:

I sat down and started stitching, having no idea where I was going or what I was going to do. I ended up with this, and I adore it. I just this minute went out and rescued him from the freezer, where he's been for the last couple years after the bugs chewed holes in his neck. That's what you get for being wool.

What I love most about this guy is his total funkiness. There was no planning, and I grabbed whatever I had at hand. I didn't try to make the stitches even, nor did I try to make them uneven. All I was doing was trying to see what the wool felt would do. I knew I wouldn't use these colors for anything else, and I wanted to see how easy wool would be to sew by hand (a moot point, since I can't wear wool). I loved the challenge of the teeth, which are my favorite part. Well, next to the needle-felted eyeballs. The teeth are individually stitched--and that's OK: the funkiness I'm after isn't about haphazardness or laziness or sloppiness. I still want seams that will last and clothes that work on the body, rather than fighting against your shoulders or waist or neck.

Getting to that place with garments has proven almost impossible for me. I've got this:

but it's only partway there. It's still too tight, too controlled.

I don't know how to get there, I really don't. These last few days I've been thinking about little else, and I can kind of feel some movement--like when you've got a dead tree that's been sitting there for a couple years, and sometimes you go out and kind of lean on the trunk, and for a long time, it's still solid. And then one day you can feel a little movement, and if you start to work it back and forth, like a barely-loose tooth when you were a kid, eventually it's going to start moving, and then eventually you'll be able to topple it and take it out. That's what it feels like, but this old dead tree has really, really deep roots. I find myself making half a step forward and a step backwards, a step forward and half a step back.  I look at the projects I've started (I showed you some of them yesterday), and I can see where some of them might be forced to go looser, but I can see that some of them just won't. They're going to be tight and controlled, and while they'll be OK and wearable, they're not taking me where I want to go.

I'm deliberately looking for garments that are in need of serious, shape-changing help--things that are pretty much unwearable in their current form. I have one of those now, and working on it last night, I could feel something--like the faintest path visible on the forest floor, something that would lead me somewhere if I'd just get down and brush the leaves away until it was clearly visible. I think part of me is afraid if I get down there and look for it, though, I'll be bitten by snakes. (This may sound like a sloppy metaphor, but it makes perfect sense to me; I hope it does to you, too.)

On the one hand, I want to make some more Jumprons because they're useful and fun to wear, and at some point I might have something more I want to do to them. But for now, I don't want to embellish any more of them. It's become really frustrating to me, and I need to find more ways to force myself to work looser (not "more loosely" but "looser").

So that's what's going on internally, along with the weeding out and decluttering that's going on on the outside. It's tough, fighting against your lifelong inherent need for order and balance and--eeeek!--dare I say "perfection"? But it has to be done--I don't want to never find out what's possible, what totally groovy things are lying just on the other side of Anal.

Wish me luck--and any eye candy you find, I'd LOVE to see it! XO

Current Projects

You know one of my greatest fears is waking up one day and not having anything to work on. I try really hard never to finish anything at night even though there are other projects underway: I want to wake up and have that energy waiting on me. Consequently, I have rather a lot of things going at any one time, just in case. Plus I need different kinds of things for different times of day and different places. For instance, I don't take beading out in public; spilled beads are dangerous on non-carpeted floors, and no matter where you spill them, they're going to be a pain to pick up. For public work (like at The Wine Rack, where I do most of my out-of-the-house stitching these days), I like something easy that doesn't require any thought (we're usually visiting), so I usually take something with just straight stitching. No pins, no beads. Sometimes I try to remember to take something interesting because the other regulars we see there sometimes want to see what I'm doing. Even the young men, The EGE's former students, are often polite enough to ask in a sincere fashion that I just love (and try not to take advantage of by pulling out a ton of stuff and explaining things for half an hour). So simpler projects that don't require a lot of attention. I do the beading usually first thing in the morning over coffee, before I start work for the day.

There's a full-sized garment rack of stuff to be worked on, and there are bags of projects ready to go. For this post, I photographed only things I've actively worked on in the past week. Those are the only ones that count as "current" to me.

Here's the current beading project, a long and tedious exercise I can't WAIT to finish. Like that's going to happen any time soon. I'll probably still be beading it next winter.

 The beading tray, above. I carry it with me around the house.

Here's the back, below. Lots of stitching already done; very little of the beading finished. It will take a long, long time. It's called Desert Sunset. I made it last summer, I think, and then I decided I didn't like the color and over-dyed it a while back. Then I cut out the appliqués, which are two layers of jersey--red and golden orange.

Then there's this green Flax tunic. I dyed it, and I've worn it. Yesterday I decided to use it as an exercise in loosening up. Oy. This is so difficult for me. I saw some stitching online and wanted to try it, and then my brain said, "Oh, let's put a flower on there!" and that seemed like a good idea, but as I thought about it, I realized it was The Old Way, and that's not the way I wanted to go. So I'm going to try something else--I printed out a couple of poems by Dylan Thomas with lines about "green," and I'm going to stitch those words along the sewn parts. I think that's what I'm going to do. We'll see how that goes.

 It's wrinkled because it's been in the bag, ready to go. I did the stitching while we watched something on Netflix on the computer--on the evenings we don't go to The Wine Rack, we've been sitting here in the office watching Netflix on the iMac's 27" screen. At night, when we eat dinner, we watch Netflix on the Roku player in The EGE's den. I can get a *lot* of stitching done during Netflix. It's almost as good as a road trip for pinning me in one place and forcing me to sit still.

 I'm really intrigued by this surface treatment and want to explore it more with something that's too big. On this one, I couldn't do too much because it would take up too much of the fabric and make the tunic too tight. I think it's a size small, so there's not much room to play with without ruining the drape.

 It was a fun little challenge to make the stitches look good from both sides--usually, the wrong side of my stitching is too small to look balanced. Yiiiii: "balanced." See? That's what I deal with.

 Here's another bolero I'm slowly starting. I made it last summer, I think, but couldn't ever figure out what I wanted to do with it.

 This is just the rough beginning, but I had to put something on there so I could start stitching to hold the layers together before cutting into them.

 The exercise here is adding two additional layers of fabric to the finished garment, stitching them in place, and then cutting back the edges so the layers all show. I have no idea how this will work, but it sounded like fun when I thought of it. I'm having to do some preliminary stitching around the appliqués first to hold the layers in place in the middle.

 This, below, is the longest-running project. It's a Cynthia Ashby jacket, asymmetrical, black-and-white woven linen. It begged me to save it, and I've been whip-stitching all the edges for over a year--it's the kind of thing I pick up and work on when I'm tired and don't want to think at ALL. That's not very often, so it's been slow going. I worked on it last night after dinner. It's not really good for taking out in public because there are all those bits and lengths of thread, and I get them everywhere. I have to be careful of them here at home, too, though, because of Clarice.

 Because of the way it's made, there are a TON of edges. A ton. Seriously!  The good thing is that I'm using up bits and ends of floss.

 I'm kind of excited about this one, below. It was an off-white jumper I got at Deja Vu. I dyed it, and then I took off the brown wooden buttons and sewed the straps in place--those buttons were right over the breasts, the kind of thing you look at and go, "Huh? What were they thinking here?"

 I moved the ends of the straps in some so it wouldn't keep slipping off the shoulders. It has a zipper in the back, but I'll probably stitch over that, since I can put it on without unzipping it.

 In my ongoing effort to loosen up, I hacked off some of the bottom in the front and cut some jersey binding. I used to love red and blue together before we got all into that US flag rah-rah-rah in the Reagan years, when everyone and their poodle were wearing flag shirts and flag hats and flag ties and flag vests, and I had to get rid of my favorite suede flag clown shoes and flee like a ghost on fire. I think I can go there once again, but I may hate the finished piece. Again: we'll see. I maybe have to add some orange or something to be able to deal with it.

 This one, below, is also exciting to me. It's a cool black linen jumper thing I bought at Deja Vu, and it begged for my help. The facing was on the outside (I think I showed you this one a while back), and it was hemmed and stuck out oddly and was Just Wrong. I opened the side seams and released the facing and cut off the hem of it, and now I'm going to meld it to the jumper with stitching. I've started going around the top-stitching, just to get a feel for the fabric, and I'm enjoying the process of thinking about how to salvage this AND make it funky--no appliqué of a little green snake right in the middle of the front! No, Ricë, we're not going there! Resist that urge~~

It would be cool though, that little snake. . . .

 I totally love this stuff here and am trying to get closer to this way of stitching. Bwahahahahaha.

 The side parts that were freed from the seam. I'm going to try to just overlap them and stitch the fire out of them. We'll see how *that* goes, too.

So those are the current projects. These have been cut out this week--three Jumprons and, up there in the right-hand corner, the first pieces for a bolero, cut from an old Peter Max t-shirt:

 and I've started thinking about what to do to this new Cynthia Ashby jacket in linen that's really funky:

It looks like it was woven out of two colors, and I want to play with the lighter color and see what I can do with that, also using the various panels as parameters. 

Whew. I've made myself tired just looking at all this. But thanks for coming by--and I'd love to go look at what you're working on right now. Links, please!  XO

Paisley

Here's the latest Jumpron (sometimes I'm tempted to put a © or ™ symbol there, just to make myself laugh). I wanted to do something with a paisley to see if I could get it like what I have in my head but made out of fabric and floss. I thought maybe I'd put them all over the whole thing but quickly realized that was just way, way too much work. While it would look fabulous, it would make me crazy.

OK: full disclosure. I cut out the paisley, pinned it in place, tried on the Jumpron, took it off, adjusted the placement, fused it, stitched it, and then--and only then!--realized I'd sewn it on the BACK instead of the front, where I wanted it. Many, many Very Bad Words were said. Many. And then I started over, this time on the front. The back isn't stitched nearly as much:

I thought about using beads, but I've pretty much decided to save the beadwork for the boleros--they're much smaller, and I can get way more bang for my beads: you don't have to sew nearly as many beads to get the all-over effect I love. You know: sparkly-shiney!

 I decided I needed to work on my French knots, just to make sure I could still make them nice and even. It's been a while, and I love the way French knots look when you do a bunch together. I have to hoop fabric to do them--there's no way I can get the tension right on un-hooped fabric.

 The smallest knots were created with two strands of floss. I ordered Anchor because DMC doesn't have the right color, and I dyed only two skeins, which I didn't think would be enough. Turned out it would have been, but I didn't know when I started and wasn't about to box myself into a corner where I had to go dye more. Oh, nonononono.

 I tried some weaving in the center of the flowers. Not sure I like the effect enough to practice it:

 The function of these lines is to make the seam lie flat--I press the seams open and then stitch through and catch them to make them lie flat. I like this much better than the way I was doing it--French seams, I think: turned the raw edges under and sewed again on the machine. Mine always puckered. Everything I do on the sewing machine is going to be iffy and a little wonky.

 I've got a couple more of these cut out and ready to work on, and I'm changing up the bottom edge: I don't really like it the way it is and want more contrast in the length between the front and sides--I used a pattern I made, and the bottom goes straight across the full width of the yardage. What I'm going to do now is to have it curve up and then curve back down. We'll see how that works out on the next one, which is orange and ready to work on.

I'm going to post the current projects next--I went in and got photos of them and will try to get that done next.  I'm doing a lot of very serious thinking over here about the direction I want to go. For years I've struggled with my anal-retentive, perfectionistic nature, and I've got to get past these issues. I know what kinds of clothing I want to make, but every time I start something, some part of my brain kicks in and starts making all the lines straight and all the seams perfect (well, as perfect as a sloppy machine sewer like me can make them) and all the *everything* just be really nuclear and anal and I HATE IT. It's like I sit down and start something, and I stand up weeks later, when it's done, and go, "Who the hell made that thing?" because some other person takes over in the middle and measures things or something (I know it's not I because I refuse to measure unless forced at gunpoint). I'm working really hard on this, trying to figure it out, trying to figure out how to get around it, enlisting The EGE to help me, never mind that I can't even really articulate what it is I'm trying to get away from. It's not that I want things to be sloppy or poorly constructed, but I DO want them looser, funkier, not as, as, as BLEH. I don't even know how to explain what it is that I do that drives me nuts. I'm currently reading Second Skin, by India Flint, hoping that will help. I hope so.

Anyway, so that's what I'm working on in my head, and I'll post in a second what I'm working on in the studio.  XO

To Mend

Did you know that "mend" comes from "amend" and means, in one sense, "to make better, improve"? Man, I love etymology! If, like most people in first world countries, you grew up thinking that something that was mended was something that was less than, make-do, a temporary solution for something you were eventually going to replace, then the whole idea of mending as an art is a foreign one. You might, as I was, be surprised to find there are groups about mending.

[Note: in trying to find the one I'm thinking about, I googled "mending as an art," and discovered that Elizabeth Berg has a novel titled The Art of Mending. I love Berg's writing--not the subjects, which are too dramatic and girly-girl for me, but the way she writes--and own copies of most of her novels and, of course, her book on writing. So I had to stop for a second and order a copy. Used, of course. For a penny. Back to our conversation~~]

There's a Flickr group called "The Big Mend," with photos of mended clothes and shoes, slippers and jeans. It has photos of thread and tools and of people sitting and mending. Does anyone remember mending baskets, where there were all the tools and supplies needed for repair, and your mom would sit down with a little pile of stuff and the basket in front of the TV at night and repair everything? My mother did invisible repairs, tiny stitches, matching thread. I loved these--to me, they were a sign of love and of handmade things. And here I think again of how much I longed for hand-me-downs when I was a kid. I so envied the kids who had soft, faded, worn clothing that someone else had worn and loved. I had no one to hand things down to me--I was an only child, and I was large. Not fat, but the third tallest kid in the entire elementary school, after Sally Graham and Peter Burkett, who were always the only kids taller than I was.) I never had hand-me-downs, and so of course I'm making up for that now, by buying and wearing and loving other people's cast-off clothes.

So: I have always loved mended things, and now, in an age where nobody mends anything and just goes out and buys new stuff, I love them even more. But unlike serious, Mom-Style mending, I love obvious mending: patches you can see, mismatched thread, big, obvious stitches.

As you know, we have cats. And if you have cats your own self, you know that they, um, well, let's be frank: they throw up rather a lot. Anything can set off their delicate stomachs. Moe is overweight, and he's always starving (he thinks), so he gobbles his food. And then, at least once every couple weeks, he throws up on the rug. So throughout our house, we have small rugs on top of the larger rugs: small, washable (in theory) cotton rugs that can be tossed in the washing machine.

Alas, they are not expensive rugs, well-made rugs, fancy rugs. They are cheap cotton rugs we've picked up whenever we found decent colors on sale. Some are dyed. And although they are in theory washable, the laundry process is not their favorite thing. In the past I would use them until they were literally falling apart, tucking in the various pieces and strands, and then move them outdoors to be used as bedding for the cats there until there was nothing left of them. Recently, though, I smacked myself upside the head (yeah, I do that rather a lot here lately) and, instead of sending the falling-apart rug outdoors, mended it. And I was so very pleased with the results that I wanted to go through the house and tear up stuff just so I could mend it. Well, I thought about that. Briefly. It's not like there aren't enough other things I could stitch. But here's the rug, which I had dyed chartreuse from a paler, boring green:

 I used two strands of a greener shade of embroidery floss. I wanted it to be funky, with obvious stitches, but I also wanted it to be sturdy--I don't want mending just for show; I like mending that's functional. (So those artfully ripped and pretend-mended jeans are ridiculous to me.)

 I used a big crewel needle--I like the size 18 and 20, and I have a lot of these. If I were mending something that was even more loosely woven, I could have used a blunt-tipped tapestry needle.

 I sat in the sunny window and just went over and around and back and forth, not stressing about it, not really thinking about anything but pulling the thread through. If I think about Having to Make Something Perfect, it's a whole different, not-nearly-as-satisfying, irritating kind of thing. I'm so working on being more random. Oy. It's a long, long process for me.

I'm very pleased with this. Every time I see it (it's on the living room rug), it makes me happy. There's another one in there that's in really bad shape, and I'm going to see if it's salvageable. It may be too late for it, though; it may have to go outside.

So: mending. If you have photos of mended stuff, I'd LOVE to see. And if you're at Flickr, do a search for The Big Mend. Google "boro," too.

My next mending project is going to be The EGE's hat. He has a black wool felt hat he loves, and tiny moths ate tiny holes in it. I offered to try to needle felt brightly colored circles over the holes, and he likes the idea. I've got to go out and find the box of needle felting supplies--somewhere out there in the storage building. Wish me luck~~ and thanks for coming by. XO

Part 3 in The Series: Simplifying and Having All You Want. And Other Ramblings.

I should come up with a better name for these posts, shouldn't I? Something catchier. But I'm all excited about y'all's comments and stories, and before we go any further, I want you to go here and read what Caatje says about her new life. Caatje is also Carin Winkelman, and if you visit CreateMixedMedia.com, you may have read a couple of guest posts she's written for me. I've always loved what she has to say, but right now she's my total hero. She lives with her cat in a house on a little Dutch island, and just recently she's cut back her work from a full-time job to one that gives her four full free days a week to do the things she adores: walking, reading, making stuff. She's not planning to turn her work into a business, and she didn't suddenly come into a pile of money. Nobody is supporting her, and she's still working, but she sat down and thought about what she wanted from her life and how she might be able to arrange that, and then she did it. So stop right now and go here and read her post about this, please.

I can't even begin to tell you how much this inspires me right now. It's not a novel idea--other people have cut back and have written about it--but it's timely. I have no desire to work less than I do: I love the work I do for Stampington and CreateMixedMedia.com and Art is You, so that's not it. But I do not have a full-time job. I work at home. I live in Midland, Texas, which is in the middle of a huge economic boom. Everyone is making more money, everything costs way more than it used to, living is way more expensive than it used to be.

And I have often felt both guilty and scared about money: about not making more, about not having more, about not caring enough about figuring out a way to do either. Money is one of those things nobody talks honestly about. Oh, sure--people hint at their fortunes or whinge about how poor they are, but nobody tells what their economic lives are really about. Money, for most of us, is how we place a value on what we do and, frankly, on who we are: the more money we have, the more important we are. I don't really understand this, because it's not that you're worth more because you've been really successful at doing something lucrative: the highest pinnacle of worth is when you haven't ever had to work at all but come from a long line of people who have just kept inheriting family money. That's what makes you ultimately valuable: not having to work at all and still having a huge, dazzling fortune. My inability to appreciate this demonstrates that I am a peasant, I think.

In Midland, money-and-wealth is a huge deal. Even more than most other places, you're judged--and you judge others--on how much they have and where it came from. Since moving here decades ago, I have had many amazing and amusing conversations in which it eventually became apparent that people were trying to peg me and were hoping I was doing the same and becoming impressed. But something was left out when I was being raised. My parents were born and raised during the Depression. They grew up poor, they were poor when they married, they were poor in college. I think this was embarrassing to them, but the odd thing is that when my father got a good job and my mother didn't have to work, they didn't change the way they lived. They didn't acquire fancy stuff, and they didn't hang out with people who did, and they didn't talk about money or people who had money. They were thrifty and seemed--think of a word here between "appalled" and "disgusted," please, because I can't think of a suitable word right now--by people who weren't. When they had extra money, they put it in the bank. They bought things and then kept them until they wore out. My mother mended clothes, not because she had to but because that's just what you did. So money hasn't ever impressed me, and the people who have a lot of it and expect you to be impressed by that don't quite know what to make of it when you aren't, or when you've never heard of them or don't recognize the name of their watch or handbag or neighborhood. And when you have a self-confidence that isn't tied to what you do for a living or how much money you have in the bank--that's the real baffler. I had a man not long ago who kept trying to place me. "Do I know you?" I said, "No, I don't think so." "Who are you?" I told him. "What do you do?" He just kept on, and I kept giving the short answer, watching where he was trying to lead me: you seem to be happy and confident, so you must be Someone; impress me with who that might be. Perhaps he thought I was an aging actress passing through town.

In Midland, everyone knows the people who have money. But even though we moved here when I was 13 and I've lived here ever since, I never knew that. My parents never talked about that kind of thing, so the names that everyone else knew--Cowden, Scharbauer, Holt--I'd never heard of except as the names of streets until I was well into adulthood. I didn't grow up wanting fancy stuff--my mother made my clothes, I drove a used Volkswagon I loved, I hung out at the library and brought home huge stacks of book. Who Has Money just wasn't the kind of thing that was a big deal.

Lately, as I get older and Midland gets richer and more expensive and my husband retires early from teaching because it's no longer "teaching" but has become "doing tons of paper work and making sure the kids pass the standardized tests," I've felt a lot of guilt and worry about money. Should I go out and try to capitalize on this boom by getting another job somewhere? Should I try to find a place to live where things aren't so hideously expensive and getting more so? I didn't want to do any of those things, but everyone we talk to is on these amazing journeys of earning and buying and spending and traveling, and what happens when you're around that is you forget there's another way to live. You feel guilty for being a slacker in the whole accumulating-wealth area, especially when you know a lot of people who aren't. Trust-fund babies, people who retired in their 30s because they had all the money they'd ever need. People who tell you, a little stunned, that they are making more money than they ever imagined. Bonuses, gifts, bequeathments. Amazing transfers of wealth.

Caatje reminded me of another way to live, one that's about living, not about getting. And once my eyes were open, I started finding other people, like the people in Danny Gregory's latest book, An Illustrated Journey, about travel journalers. I got this book a while back and mentioned it over at CMM, but I hadn't read it page by page yet. I started that recently, and omigod: there are people out there who make sense to me in a way most people do not. Enrique Flores, for instance, who lives in Spain, has published more than 100 books, and explains his life by writing, "I  live an old-fashioned life, with no car, iPad or mobile phone and an object as fragile as a paper sketchbook ties me to the slow lane."

And one of my favorite sketchbook keepers ever, Andrea Joseph, who writes, "These days I'm pretty poor. I live to draw and, as yet, I haven't quite worked out how to make money from that. But as long as I have enough to get by and still have time to draw compulsively, I'll live with it. It means, of course, that there's no money for travels. But, you know, when one has access to the Internet he can always travel."

Whoa. Here are people who have figured out what they love, and what they need and what they want, and then they have figured out a way to live that enables them to have these things, never mind what it is that the world tells them about being "successful" or "living a big life." This is what I'm thinking about now, in addition to paring down and weeding out things I no longer want cluttering up my space. It's more of a challenge than you might think because of the climate of the place where I live. If you read the newspaper or listen to the news or drive around and see the construction or listen to people's conversations, you can forget, again, that there's a way of life that's *not* about getting as much money as possible and then finding impressive things to do with it, most of them involving going to Dallas and Houston to find things to bring back with you, things that other people here might not have yet and that, therefore, will impress them, at least for a while.

I've also been thinking about The Cult of Busy-ness, and that's a whole nother topic, about how everyone on Facebook talks incessantly about how busy they are, especially those who, like me, do not have full-time, outside-the-house jobs. I understand: for years I, too, did the Busy Dance. "How are you?" "Busy, and you?" "Oh, wow. Really busy. Man." And then you shake your head ruefully, as if you hate being busy, but what everyone means is not "I sure wish I could be less busy" but "Look how successful I am, now popular, how much in demand! I'm so very busy it must mean I'm doing great! I may not have a full-time job, but I flog myself to work 16 hours a day so I can justify my existence on the planet! I swear!"

I don't want to dance that dance any more. You might think it would be easy, not saying, "Oh, wow, yes" when people ask, "Been busy?" as they always do. But it's tough; you've been saying it all your life, and now you want to quit. What do you say instead? "Nope, not really." And then it sounds like you're depressed or have no life or whatever, when that's not what you mean at all. I'm thinking of saying, "Thankyoujesus, no. Not at all!" just to see what response that gets. It might make for interesting conversations about the cult of busy-ness. You think?

Yeah, right.

More daunting than conversation, of course, is the mental part, the part of not thinking you *need* to be busy. The part of accepting that you do your work, you finish the things you need to finish, and that's it. Then you can do what you want to do, but you don't have to be "busy" about doing it. You don't have to justify your day by making it busy, not even in your own head. I am learning to finish an assignment, check it one last time, send it in, and then get up and go do something else instead of sitting in front of the computer and figuring out what I need to do next, tweeting and posting and trying to market myself, which I was never good at. What is it but trying to sound important? I am trying to learn that the work is enough, that I don't have to stretch it out or make it sound more important than what it is. It's good work, and it's work I love, and I don't need to flog it and go on about how busy I am. But man, it's tough. There are days when I still mutter about it, about being beyond busy. I try to stop and ask myself what I'm really muttering about, and it's usually, down in there deep, about feeling I should be doing more to--all together now!--justify my place on the planet. 

And that's just silly.

Having Everything You Want, Part 2

Here's an example of having everything you want. I talked about that last time, about how you can have everything you want if 1) you know what it is you truly want and 2) you figure out the things you only thought you wanted but, in truth, don't.

Maybe a meandering example, maybe not entirely on point, but here goes: I love clothes. I don't love fashion; I love soft, worn, well-made clothes that I can Do Something With. The EGE has heard me say it for so many years that it's automatic for him now:  "You could do something with that." It's how we think about stuff automatically. I don't need clothes; I have enough clothes to wear for the rest of my life. But I love them: I love dyeing clothes and cutting into them and making them into something amazing. And I'm a bit of a snob: I don't want to do this with cheap-ass clothes from the dollar store, and I refuse to play with polyester. I adore linen, and I like good linen: Cynthia Ashby, Completo Lino, Bryn Walker, Flax, Heart's Desire. Stuff that's way too expensive when new: there's no way I'm paying several hundred dollars for a garment, and there's no way I'm cutting into something that cost even a fraction of that. So: I don't need clothes. I love doing something with good quality clothes. I like having *a Lot* of clothes to choose from. [And, no, I have no desire to do this for someone else, so it wouldn't work for someone to let me mess around with their clothes for them. That's not an option.] And I don't want to have to ever, every throw any clothes away. Ever. That's like a sin of some kind.

Saturday we went to San Angelo, to Deja Vu, the only place I shop any more. And when I say "shop," I mean shop: I spend at least 2-3 hours there when I go. The EGE drops me off, says "hi" to everyone, and goes off to photograph water lilies and get the car washed. Lana and her girls load me up with things to try on, and I spend the next couple hours happily playing: I go through everything and weed out the stuff that just won't work. Then I got back through it and do another weed-out. Then I try on each thing that remains and think about what I could do to it: what color? What parts would I cut off? What does it need? And--here's the important part, especially recently: what could I try that I wouldn't try on something I already own? What new thing could I learn? I can do this because Lana and I have established this relationship, and what's marvelous about it is that it enables me to have everything I want. I buy things, bring them home, work on them. Sometimes I keep them, and sometimes I take them back and resell them. I go through my closets and storage building and weed out everything I haven't worn more than once or twice, or anything I haven't worn in a couple years or, recently, everything that no longer fits me, which is rather a lot: loosing 15 lbs over the last couple years has made a bigger difference than I thought, and lots of things just won't work any more. I have actually gone dancing with safety pins holding up my layers of dancing skirts because I hadn't realized ahead of time that they wouldn't stay up.  Lana buys those things from me--happily, because most of it is like new--and here's the kicker: often no money exchanges hands, which makes everyone happy.

And shoes. Omigod. I did not think of myself as someone with a lot of shoes. I don't have A Shoe Thang. But when I started going through all the shoes I've accumulated over the years, I realized I had a problem. There were shoes I'd never worn--shoes I bought for When I Got Old. You know: dressy sandals with kitten heels, those ones that you could wear without hurting yourself but would look OK at a wedding or a funeral. What on earth was I thinking? I'd rather hang myself than wear those shoes. Everyone who saw those shoes went, "Huh? You bought those on purpose?" Not because they were hideous shoes; they were just so definitely not the kind of shoes any of us could imagine me wearing. Ever. But when they had these cute-but-safe shoes on sale at Dillard's, I would think, "Someday I might need those." And I'd buy them. I must have had half a dozen versions of The Cute-But-Safe Shoe. I also had heels I loved, but after breaking my toe and then realizing around the same time that sometimes my knee is going to "give out" (as my mother used to say) unexpectedly, and that that is not something you want to happen when you're wearing heels, well. I figured I'd better find new homes for any shoes that were 1) so silly I wouldn't wear them unless the alternative were walking barefoot over a field of goat heads or 2) potentially disastrous if you were wearing them when some arthritic joint or another temporarily failed you. You know: you're wearing the cute heels and going up a couple of steps and your knee goes and WHOA!

Much weeding out of shoes. Baggy clothes. Fabulous clothes--like the drop-crotch pants I bought in Dallas at the opening of the Desigual store at NorthPark Mall, pants that were so groovy and hip I paid full price for not one, but TWO pair (not identical, thankyoujesus) but then wore each only once because, duh, I don't wear pants. I wear 1) jeans and 2) leggings, and that's it. But I had to have them, back then.

You're kind of getting the picture, right? Lana has helped me with all this, cheerfully buying my hardly-ever-worn clothes and finding new homes for everything, and in the process, I get to buy new-to-me clothes from her. She's sold some of the stuff I made but was never going to wear, and that's really nice, too. In return I bring home stuff and dye it for her. So if she's got brand-new Cynthia Ashby that hasn't sold and is an ugly color, I bring it home and work with it. I've got half a dozen pieces here now waiting to become a more fabulous color than they were. It's not like I'm working with someone else's clothes; I just put these in with whatever I'm dyeing already. I'm going to try replacing a broken zipper  on a really cool asymmetrical jacket, fixing it with a huge snap. If it turns out I love it, I can pay for it and keep it. If not, I just take it back and let it go to someone who will love it.

This past trip I got everything I wanted--fabulous stuff, linen I loved, new things I couldn't afford in a retail shop, things that are almost fabulous but need a little help--everything I wanted. With the things I'd taken in to sell, it was an even trade. Everything I wanted, at no cost to me. This is an amazing thing: everything I want at no cost, plus knowing that if I don't wear it, it can go back and be recycled yet again--is that amazing or what? It's truly no-guilt shopping--it's really important to know that I'm not contributing to any waste--and the best thing about it is that, during the hours I'm trying on stuff and thinking about it, I get all kinds of ideas. I check seams--how are these sewn? I look at raw edges on $300 jackets: how little stitching can you get by with and still not have to worry about fraying? How much fraying is acceptable, and when does it become a problem in construction? I've learned a lot from having unlimited access to Cynthia Ashby clothes, for example. Nobody cares if I sit down on the couch and turn something inside out and study the way assymetrically-cut pieces were put together--nobody hovers over me, wondering if I'm going to try to avoid buying the jacket by going home and copying the pattern. They know what I do. Nobody cares if I wander around the shop in the dress muttering to myself about sleeves and armhole construction. I come home from San Angelo every time with my brain buzzing with new ideas.

The key here is that you can find ways to have what you really want once you know what you really want. Specifically want. I have thousands of dollars worth of clothes I love, many of them never worn, bought for a tiny fraction of their original price, much of it in trade, all of it things I Can Do Something With ("things with which. . . ."). I figured out what I want: I want cool used clothes that aren't intimidating to me: I can dye and cut and add and embellish without feeling like anything's being risked. I realized I don't want new clothes, or fashionable clothes, or clothes I think I need "someday" or "just in case." I have the clothes I need; I want clothes I can Do Something With without worrying about ruining something or wasting something or going into debt.

If there's something you want--tools, or supplies, or whatever--you need to figure out what it really *is* that you want. Do you need to own the drill press? Or do you just need access to it once a month because, truly, you don't really have a place to set it up? Do you have to have cotton yardage, or can you get what you need form thrifted garments, as I do with the cotton jersey I use? Over the years I've amassed a collection of beads. Some of them I bought new, on purpose, but many of them were purchased in lots at estate sales. Some were worthless, but I got a ton of beads (and buttons and sequins) I use on clothing for a tiny fraction of what they would have cost in the store. Do you really need to go shopping to buy supplies, or do you have things already that will work? And then think about the things you no longer need: where can those go? Can you trade them for something you need? Give them to someone who needs them or will use them? Sell them on Etsy? Donate them? I think it's more and more important to think about where things are going in the end: not to the landfill, oh, please! I like to think of having things that can be used over and over and turned into other things that are used over and over until, in the end, they are just threads put out for the birds to use in building their nests. I'm nowhere near that, but I dream of it.

When I was stamping and making paper stuff and working with tons of paper, I figured out how to get almost all my paper for free. I've told y'all about that: printing companies gladly saved their scraps (and by "scraps," I mean everything up to 11" x 14" paper of really nice quality, not just tiny cheap-ass scraps), happy to do it because they didn't want it to go to waste.  Because I wasn't picky and didn't demand specific sizes and textures, I could have everything I wanted and more than I could ever use--I had plenty to give away to schools and churches and other paper lovers. When I talk about finding ways to get the things you want, I mean in a good way, not by scamming someone or wheedling or trying some sneaky way to get companies to donate stuff to you. I mean ways that make everybody happy. Ways that feel right. If, for instance, I were getting these clothes and then turning around and reselling them at a profit on eBay, that would be creepy. I'm not talking about if I remade something and then sold it; I just have a problem with people flipping stuff because so many people here in Midland do that: they show up at estate sales and get first in line and rush through and buy everything, tons of things, and then take it to their shop and mark it way up. Regular people don't have a chance to buy at the estate sale unless they want to camp out all night and fight their way in with their elbows. I don't even go to them anymore because I just get grouchy at the greed.

Here's what I'd like you to think about: as you think about how advertising tries to lure us in, think about the ways you can resist it. Instead of buying new things you see advertised just because they might be fun to have or useful to use, think about what you need and what you really want and how you might get that without having to go into debt or take on a job laying pipe in the oil field. By really thinking about this, we can resist advertising and its power over our desires, and we can begin to live more thoughtfully, having everything we need and much of what we truly want without inundating ourselves in excess and without playing the competitive game of amassing stuff we really don't need. I like to imagine that if I had my life to live over again (and I'm glad I don't, because I think it would be way tedious, especially those icky high school years and, oh, yeah, the years with undiagnosed endometriosis. And don't forget the years of acne. And awkwardness and lack of any appreciable social skills. And~~), I'd buy much less stuff. I'd have more money in savings, more space in my house, less stuff for which I'm now trying to find new homes. But I'm learning a lot about myself in the process of decluttering and simplifying, so I'm thinking maybe I wouldn't change a bit of it.

Except  for the part where I bought those shoes.


Yeah, I have more to say about all this. I'll be back later~~

The Truth About Having Everything You Want, Part 1

There are big changes going on in The Voodoo Lounge. Oh, not ones you could see if you dropped by: I'm not moving, nothing's being torn up or torn down, I'm still doing the same paid work I love. No: except for the piles and boxes and bags of stuff that have gone away, things look pretty much the same. What's changing is more internal, and I want to write about that, mostly because writing about stuff is how I think best, kind of like talking out loud. Which I also do, rather a lot. I'm not technically old enough to be that Crazy Old Lady Who Talks to Herself, but you'd never know that if you were a fly on the wall here.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what I want. I'm lucky to have the things I need: a house, food, insurance. Because I don't lack the necessities, I have the luxury of thinking about the rest: what do I want beyond the things I need?

Let me stop here and say, though: people have been asking me what prompted all this, this getting-rid-of-stuff, this navel-gazing (erk), this soul-searching. A lot of things, I think--I've been trying to figure it out myself. Part of it is getting older and wanting to stay in this house the rest of my life and wanting to make it livable, rather than some burden that demands more time and energy than I'm going to have when I get older. I do not want them to find our old, mummified bodies buried under piles of old newspapers from 1962. OK, that probably won't happen, since we don't have any old newspapers, but you know what I mean. I don't want to be the corpse with its face chewed off by starving cats, only nobody finds any of us because there are 7,462 shoe boxes packed into the house, stuffed with every receipt for everything I ever paid for, ever, since childhood when I bought Liddle Kiddles with my allowance.

So there's that. Then there was the whole truck burglary thing in Dallas, in which a bunch of our stuff was stolen. Because of the kindness and generosity and just amazing thoughtfulness of Sallianne and Ellen and the Art is You family, we've been given an opportunity to replace some of that. Other people--and I don't know if they'd want their names mentioned publicly, so I'm not going to do that--have given me gifts to replace things that were taken: a spare iPod (yes, someone had a spare), a beautiful green leather Coach briefcase. The kindness of all these people has given us the chance to think about what we need as well as what we want. What things were taken that we haven't missed? What things do we wish we still had but don't really need and don't want to replace? What things do we have to have? The EGE is replacing camera stuff--the chargers and lens and batteries he has to have to take photographs. I ordered fabric and dye--the thing I have watched myself still regretting losing was the project I was working on. It's made me really think about what matters. Oh, sure: health, loved ones. Sure--we all agree on that. But beyond that--what matters after that?

Let's do this: let's say you lost all your stuff--the stuff you don't have to have. You have your house and your furniture, your food, your family. You can get by. But everything else is gone. Then you're given an opportunity to replace half of it, if you wish. But you don't have to if you don't want to. What would you replace? Or would you replace anything? I've heard people say, people who've lost everything in a fire or storm or flood, that after the huge trauma of the event and after mourning the loss of photos and things that can't be replaced, they felt a huge freedom--freedom from the burden of stuff that they never could have gotten rid of but that they really don't miss. Some of them replace very little of what they lost and say their lives are much better because of it: they can focus on what's important, whatever that means for them.

So I've been doing a lot of thinking about that: what would I have to replace if I lost everything, and what would I not miss all that much, if at all? And I've been trying to find new homes for the things I wouldn't miss. Some of it is stuff I loved and got on purpose; other stuff I've had since childhood--little knickknacks that I thought meant something but now realize just don't. I can't remember where most of them came from--just that they've been around, on some shelf or another, for as much of my life as I can remember. I thought I loved them and would miss them but now realize I wouldn't.

I've been thinking a lot about that almost every day because here's the truth: it's tough knowing what you really want and what you just have because you're used to having it. It turns out that, for both of us, what we really want are the tools and supplies that allow us to do what we want to do: taking photographs and videos, making stuff from fabric. The gift of the iPod was huge--having access to music in the places we work is vital. Having a good bag to carry work from one place to another--that's an amazing gift. But there were other things that were taken that made me go, "Huh. I could make one that was better than that," or "That didn't really work that well in the first place; I bet I can figure out a better solution." This is in large part about the sewing stuff I carried--the ways I had of carrying and organizing scissors and pins and the tools I have to have. It gave me an opportunity to think about whether I wanted to replace the Gingher scissors or not. I had a little pair attached to a long leather cord I made, and that was attached to the sewing bag. It worked great, but the leather point guard had gotten lost, and sometimes I stabbed myself on the point of the scissors when I reached into the bag. Rather than spending the money to replace the scissors, I realized that it would work much better to dig out the little circular metal thread snip, put it on a leather cord, and attach that to the new bag. No more stabbing myself, and this one can go on the plane with me: no sharp points.

That's a very simplistic example of what I'm talking about and what I've been doing, which brings me to the "having everything you want" part. If you're like me, you've heard it millions of times: the key to having everything you want is to adjust your expectations. So it's not that suddenly you get everything you've ever wanted; it's that suddenly you learn not to want stuff. If you're like me, this seemed pretty pathetic: you say, "Oh, I never really wanted that anyway," but secretly, you know you're lying: you would have LOVED having a Porche. Seriously. That whole "adjusting your expectations" thing just seemed like convincing yourself of The Big Lie.

But! Tie that in with what I've been thinking about since stuff was stolen, and I realize it's not a big lie after all. For me, the things I would have said I wanted turn out not to be stuff I really wanted--I don't want it enough to try to replace it. Given the opportunity to replace stuff I lost, I didn't want the cool toys and knickknacks (have I ever mentioned that we do NOT "travel lite" and carry rather a lot (snort) of stuff with us, including, you know, toys and stuff?); I wanted just the tools and supplies I need to make the stuff I want to make. I don't want to try to replace the Alabama Chanin-style poncho I made; I want the fabric I need to make another one, a better one, a fabulous one that incorporates everything I've learned since I made the one that was stolen (and I have to say here that I love how my brain works: instead of telling me how fabulous the old one was, it tells me, "Eh. You didn't do such a great job the first time; let's see how much cooler you can make the next one." I thank it for that.)

This is the kind of thing I've been thinking about here lately as I work on figuring out what I want out of the rest of my life. Another big part of it all is living here in Midland, Texas. I keep trying to give y'all a better picture of what it's like here--maybe we'll go and take some literal pictures, some photographs to try to give a better idea of what it's like. It's insane, and it's obscene, and it's unbelievable for most people. We're into over 38 straight months of economic growth. And population growth. Thanks to the huge drought, and to the use of water for fracking, we're in serious trouble with water, and everything's dead or dying: trees, landscaping, grass. It's dry and hot and brown and dead and windy almost every day. The streets are full of huge, expensive trucks--oil field trucks, sure, but also trophy trucks, huge tricked-out pick-ups. The topic of almost every conversation is money and the boom. People who had retired have gone back to work, and people who had a regular job have left it and "gone to the oil field," which can mean literally working out in the field or just getting an oil-related job. Shelves in stores are empty--people shop reflexively, buying more and more and more stuff. You see guys in oil-company coveralls and muddy work boots in Wal-Mart loading up multiple baskets with cleaning supplies and towels and underwear. They probably use it a couple times, throw it out, go buy more. They can afford it; they're living in Man Camps (there are no apartments or available motels), they're working 16-18 hours a day. Everyone says, "You've got to get it while the getting's good," meaning that, whatever you're doing, you need to get another job, change jobs, take on extra hours to make as much of this oil money as you can before the inevitable bust. Money, money, money. Midland has always been about money, but it's more itself than it ever was. For me, it's been interesting to watch myself, to see how I've thought, "Gee, maybe I should try to get an extra job doing something for an oil company, make some money and get a new car or something." I've caught myself feeling guilty for not doing that: for not trying to jump on board and get rich. And then I recently stopped and slapped myself upside the head (figuratively: I like myself too much for actual slapping) and went, "Wait a minute. That's not the life you want."

We've all been conditioned by society and advertising to want more and bigger and better. The economy would grind to a halt if we didn't. But what most of us don't realize is that the concept of shopping as a form of recreation extends back only to the middle of the last century. Before there were malls and chain stores of cheap merchandise, people didn't organize their weekends around trips to the mall. They didn't--as people in Midland have always done--fly to Dallas or Houston to spend the weekend shopping. If you do a little research, you'll discover that the concept of shopping for recreation  is relatively new and the practice of leisure travel--travel for fun--for anyone other than the leisure (i.e, so rich you never have to work) class is also new. So when it became possible for working people to spend whole days shopping and then, a couple times a year, getting on an airplane (I'm old enough to remember when flying was rare, and you dressed up for it, and you did it only for really important things) travel off to shop somewhere new, advertisers began working to convince us that doing this meant we had Made It, that we were part of the privileged class, that this was a sign we were successful. The economy needs us to spend our money, and what better way to get us to do it than to convince us to travel and buy things and aspire to this life of conspicuous consumption?

There is none, and we've bought into it completely. But! BUT!! Not everyone has, and there are some people out there who are going their own way, and the beauty of the internet is that they can share what they're doing so that the rest of us can read and look and think and go, "Hmmmm. That might be possible for me, too." As I've been thinking about this, of course I've come across these people--just like when you buy a new car and then, right away, start seeing that exact car everywhere you go. You start thinking about a simpler life, and suddenly everybody else is thinking about it, too. They were always there, but you weren't looking for them.

Next time I'm going to talk more about that. And about having everything you want. And about who knows what else, because I'm kind of obsessed with this whole idea/process/adventure and want to share it so others will tell me where they are and what they're reading and what others they know are doing.

Talk to me, please~~

Life is Too Short For That.

This should irritate me a lot more than it actually does. It's cool here this morning--69 degrees at 11:30, which is a HUGE deal after Tuesday's high of 111 (according to various thermometers). I've got the windows open to catch the breeze, which is ESPECIALLY delightful because--omigod--it RAINED during the night. Yes, I'm shouting. Yes, it's that big a deal. Rain. Whoa. Of course, the huge thunder woke everybody up at 4 am, terrifying the cats. And I had to get up and put trash cans under the vent out here in the office because of the *&^%$#@ leak (the roofers are supposed to be here at 9:30 on Tuesday to do a water test, at my suggestion (and now I'm trying to figure out how to make sure they know how to do this without insulting them/ pissing them off). And then, of course, it didn't really rain all that much. The ceiling didn't even leak.

And it's been a tough week of work, trying to finish a piece for which I have way, way too little information, for a variety of reasons. I've been struggling, laying my head on my desk and searching behind my eyelids for metaphors. (Note: they don't live there. I don't know where they hide.)


And then here's what it sounds like today in the office, from the roofers next door:

Wow, right?

You'd think it would be driving me crazy. *I'd* think it would be driving me crazy. I overslept this morning (see above), I've been struggling with this week's work, I loathe other people's noise. Blah, blah, blah.

But I don't much mind it. The guys are working. They've had a hard week: they framed the roof (they're putting a new roof on the house to the east of us) one day, and then the next day they came back and tore it all down and started over. From scratch. Did I mention 111 degrees? On a roof. I kept expecting to hear cussing and the sound of bodies hitting the ground, but they seemed fairly calm for a bunch of guys who've got to be beyond miserable.

And I seem fairly calm, too. I'm trying to imagine that I'm mellowing a little. I like to try to believe that. Who cares if it's mellowing due to, you know, just mellowing, or getting older, or the drugs. Who cares! Because, for me, mellowing couldn't be anything but good.

Excuse me while I chortle happily at that idea. Me. Mellowing. Snort.

But, really, even before The Drugs, I'd gotten better. Less prone to ranting and stomping. Less likely to do as I once did, at 5 am, when the drug dealer across the alley was still there and customers would drive up and honk at all hours, and one morning I'd had enough and stomped out in my little nightgown and yelled at them. I came in and got back in bed and The EGE said, "You're going to get shot," and I huffed, "Yeah, but at least I won't be pissed off any more."

I'm better now: I hardly ever stomp outside in my nightclothes and yell at strangers.

Now it's noon, and the chimes from the huge church are playing. That should irritate me, that everyone within blocks and blocks is forced to listen to religious music at least once a day. But that doesn't bother me, either.

 I recently heard myself saying, many times in the course of a conversation, "Life is too short." This isn't something that sounds normal for me, but I mean it: life is too short to hold grudges and to be irritated and to be angry. We were talking about someone who's always angry, always getting into arguments, always on a bandwagon about something. Life's too short for all of that.

I have no idea if this is a permanent change into sanguinity and general easy-going-ness, but I hope so. Life really is too short. I think of my mother's last years, how she was still bitter about so many things. Yes, some of them were things worthy of bitterness, indeed. But at what cost? If you're bitter and angry, irritated and fuming, what benefit do you receive? (Answer: none. Being irritated does no good at all; if you're spurred to action, that can lead to something, but sitting around stewing never leads anywhere) And who is hurt? (Answer: "Duh.")

I think I'll believe that this new calmer me is, at least in part, a result of the clearing out, weeding out, simplifying everything I've been doing. More space, more air, more light. More calm? We can hope.

Something to think about this weekend: what would make your life calmer, more pleasant, less filled with irritants? Maybe it's about getting rid of the things that irritate you, but maybe it's about becoming less easily irritated.

I don't know, but its' an interesting exploration, isn't it?

You Don't Have To Be Who You Think You Are

One of my favorite mental exercises is one I read about years ago. It's for contemplating the nature of change and the impermanence of the self--or, really, the myth of the self.

You get a photo of yourself when you were a baby, as young as possible. You ask, "Is this me?" And then you go on to think about things like: if this is you, why couldn't you walk? Why didn't you have teeth? Where did those teeth come from? Why do you no longer crawl?

Your answers will usually be something about how you grew, you learned, your body developed mass and converted energy into things like hair and larger muscles. Then you think about how much something can change and still be the same as it was before: if you had a Rembrandt painting and painted over it and then cut out parts of it and then stretched the canvas until the paint cracked, would you still have a Rembrandt? If so, would it still be valued as a Rembrandt?

The idea is not to get caught up in arguing semantics but to encourage yourself to think about the nature and inevitability of change. I love this exercise, of course, because I have very little sense of myself as the person I was even five years ago, much less 55 years ago. I can't remember much, especially about how I felt or what I thought about. Oh, sure: some stuff is there. But not a sense of being able to grasp what it was like being, say, the five-year-old me. It is as if I am, literally, a different person. I think that, in many ways, that is true.

And that's what I wanted to talk about today: I hear/read so many women who are moving into--and beyond--middle age, and they're unhappy. They don't like their lives and where they've spent them. They're dissatisfied with themselves and what they're doing, yet they think it's too late to do anything different. They bitterly imagine "what if"--what if I'd gone to Paris, what if I'd married Joe, what if I'd had kids/not had kids, what if I'd been rich, what if I'd written a novel. What if, what if, what if. They think they can't do other things not only because it's too late but because "that's just not who I am." This always baffles me: how do they know it's not who they are? And how do people know exactly who they are in the first place?

I've never known. I've often *thought* I've known who I am at a particular point in time: I am someone who teaches English. I am someone who likes to travel. I am someone who adores MST3K. When I was in high school, my best friend and I were making lists in our journals, and she said she might date a black guy someday but she could never, ever live with a man before she got married. I said I could imagine living with a guy, maybe, but I wouldn't ever date a black man. Never.

I grew up assuming I'd get married, have kids, keep house--but I never thought about it because it seemed so bleak. I never knew I had any other choice. I dated a boy for a couple years, had a ring, had agreed to get married at some point, and was filled with a sort of grey hopelessness about the future, imagining a life that stretched out in its sameness for decades upon decades. Because I had thought that was what I was supposed to do, if he hadn't dumped me, I would probably have gone through with it. I can't even bear to think about what my life would be like now.

Until I was in my mid-forties, I would have told you my (thigh-length) hair was the most important part of my body, and I had given The EGE instructions to cut it off and save it when I died. Then one day I was done with it, and I had no more interest in it than I did in clothes I no longer wore. (I did save it to make voodoo dolls with.)

Until I was 45, I didn't even know anyone who had a tattoo. I'd always thought they were tacky and were a sign of someone's being either 1) an ex-con or 2) trailer trash. If you had shown me a photo of what I look like today, I wouldn't have believed it was a photo of me, not for a second. Then, on Interstate 49, somewhere between Natchitoches and Opelousas, I turned to The EGE and said, "I want a tattoo."

None of this is about craving change or being a risk-taker or deliberately trying to shake things up. I don't like change for the sake of change. I like routine. I am a nester, not a wanderer. Risk is not fun for me. I don't gamble, I don't like to leap off things (I once jumped off a garage roof, but I was very, very young, and it hurt, and that was the end of my jumping-off-things curiosity). I don't like fast cars. I have no desire to climb to the top of things just because they're there. It's not like that. It's that one day I'll be doing something and an idea will arrive in my head--"I want a tattoo," "I want to paint all the walls orange," "I want to quit doing X or start doing Y"--it's as foreign to me as anything could be, yet it also seems as if it's exactly what I should do. And once I do it, I can't remember what it was like before. I can't remember how it felt to be the person I was before I did whatever it is, as if the change was always there, waiting.

I have learned that change is going to happen. No matter how stable we believe things are, how set in stone our lives and personalities and jobs and families, things change. They always change. There's no way to keep them from changing, no matter how happy we are with them just the way they are. That's scary, but there's a flip side, and the flip side is that no matter how solid something seems, something that we don't much like but can't figure out how to get away from, it can change, too.  It can be big stuff, like relationships and jobs and geography, and it can be little stuff, like our hair and the color of our walls and the number of animals with whom we share our space.

You can go from this:

 to this:

or the other way around. It's not much, but on the other hand, it's a huge change. It's an outward manifestation of an entire life-shift about work and energy. I can look at these two photos and tell more about myself and the changes I've gone through than I ever could from reading what I wrote back then.

You can go from this:

to this:

or the other way around. The physical appearance is just, of course, an exterior manifestation of an interior shift. The woman in the first photo had entirely different beliefs about the world than the woman in photo #2.

You can go back to school (my mother got a second degree in her 50s), sell everything you own, write a novel, learn Spanish (my friend Wendy started studying Spanish in her 50s, immersing herself in it in Mexico). Join the Peace Corps (a friend in her 60s has been thinking about doing that). Find a new love, reconnect with an old love, renew your true love. Get away from the people who hold you back, put you down, stifle your ideas and hopes and dreams. Learn something new (an artist in her 80s is having a blast learning to design using the apps on her iPad). Unless you are the parent of small children or the sole support for the health and well-being of someone who is totally dependent on you, you're not responsible for anyone else's life and choices and happiness. You *care* about their life and choices and happiness, but it's not your job to oversee it.

What *is* your job? Ah! I'm so glad you asked for my opinion, because I just happen to have one. Of course I do, never mind that a couple years ago one of my new year's resolutions was to have fewer opinions (I have fewer, but I still have enough). Your job is to take your one, singular, beautiful life (to paraphrase Mary Oliver, badly) and figure out what it is that you're supposed to do with it. What is your passion? What can you do that makes your heart sing? When you do what it is that you're supposed to do, you know it, and everyone with whom you come into contact can feel it. Your joy will radiate and warm strangers. Your enthusiasm will spark enthusiasm in others. Your sense of peace and well-being will send out little ripples of calm to everyone around you.

The first step, of course, is realizing and accepting that change is not just possible, but inevitable. The more effort you expend trying to hang onto where you are right this minute, the less energy you'll have to embrace wherever you're going next. Because whether you believe it or not, whether you want to go or not, you *are* going. Change will come for you, and you can either try to lock and bar the door and hold it off as long as possible or open the door and greet it and find out what it has for you.

What about you? What change would you welcome if it came knocking?