up in the air

Sometimes life is just up in the air...as soon as I want to nail something to the floor, gravity gives way and its space camp all over the place. Unfinished business is stressing me out lately. Speaking of that...
Here is a piece of unfinished business. I began this felt wallart a few months before E was born. I was going to put it in his nursery, I let K pick all the colors that she liked. But then her mother painted everything in primaries and it didn't match and I never finished it. EXCUSE ALERT! Oh man, I'm good at that. I just picked an excuse and ran with it to avoid finishing something that could've been amazing. So now I've lost the zest for that piece and I probably STILL won't finish it but maybe I can do SOMETHING with it. Make it into something new. I think I will cut it into 3 pieces and stretch them over frames. That would be cute and pass it onto my niece, Ayda.

In better news, here is something I did finish. Another blast from the past.
I thought about this and collected film strips for this for 4 years before I finally DID the lampshade. Sure it took a long time to conceive but I think it's one of my first actual finished products. Its been a learning process. I never had anyone to teach me how to start a project and finish it. Sometimes I still get overwhelmed by the process of taking the first step, having breaks in the middle and then accomplishing my goal. I think I also get caught up on the goal looking EXACTLY like what I had hoped, but little by little I am letting go of that. What goes up must come down, so hopefully things will come back to Earth soon and I'll be able to stand upright instead of feeling like a human cherry suspended in the gelatin of life. Oh! I also just realized I have this pre-concieved notion of Life Always Being Chaos! I'm going to leave that one in outer space so I can have a nice, quiet existence of making stuff and being happy.

Throwing myself

Leap and the net will appear.
Does this work? We’ll see, I suppose. I am trying to put my 2 weeks notice in at work. But my current supervisor (only of the past few months when my boss left for Atlanta) is never in his office. Monday, he was out all day “waiting for the contractor” who never showed up. Yesterday he was out for a dental appointment. Today, it’s a different contractor issue and 10 am and he’s still not in. BLARGH!

But I have gotten a part-time job with Trader Joe’s (free benefits, yo!) and I’ll have the freedom to do workshops with Youth Speaks Nashville. My first workshop was with middle-schoolers on Monday. Inspiring kids to love and be creative with language on a regular basis is heaven to me. I felt absolutely magical afterwards. The writing exercise I gave them was so fun to read.

I am thinking of doing some personal archeology, taking it on as a project, with interviews and everything. After the writing group last year about ‘firsts’ I’ve really been interested in writing a memoir. I don’t know if anyone would want to read it but I’m of the ilk that if you need to write something you should rather than writing for an audience. I had a wicked crazy childhood, no sense in letting that story be forgotten.

writing workshop

This weekend I took part in a critiquing workshop at the main branch of the Public Library.

The creator of the workshop sloppily foretold in emails what s/he was planning. Declan, an obscure male traditionally-Irish name, turns out to a be a young woman. She is probably in her early twenties and proactively decided to begin her own writing workshop to built her resume. I appreciate the gutsiness.

About 12 of us show up, as soon as I walk in I see my son's grandmother. The woman who served us with papers filing for full custody at the behest of her son, who took part in the brief time when we were denied access to our child until the courts rectified that. This all took place after a painful and unfortunate accident that left our son injured, a time when he needed his parents (all of them) the most. I was shocked, but being who I am it was easy to hide shock and I only said, "hello".

She didn't recognize me at first then, registering shock in her wide blue eyes, she stuttered "I'm so happy to see you here."

It was all I could do not to say "I'm so NOT HAPPY TO SEE YOU here." I felt invaded, scared, irritated, angry. Then, I took a deep breath, let her sentence hang in the air and said something non-descript like "what a surprise."

In typical steam-roller fashion, I had agreed to share one of my poems at the first meeting. I waffled, thought of reneging then just decided whatever the world has in store for me, it will out. So I guess I'll go back next week. I am thankful that such a program exists in this city for broke writers such as myself, even if it comes with unwanted lessons in forgiveness.

the iNterNet

The internet is freaking me out today. I was searching for a contributor online because sometimes our contributors fall off the face of the Earth and I still have to pay them. I stumbled across the website, ussearch. I'm not linking to it, it's too creepy.

I typed in MY NAME and it knows where I live, how many addresses I've had where and promises more information like annual income, value of property and current address (verified by utility bill payment!) arrruuuugghghhgh! Freaky!

So imagine I accidentally call some guy who is crazy because I push a 9 when I meant 6 and he gets pissed off and is will to spend $4.95 (!) to look me up on the internet and hunt me down because he's crazy and he knows the only way you get away with killing someone is by not knowing them at all! Of course, his number would be in my phone but only once and if the police called him he'd probably say it was a mis-dialed number. Then he'd laugh to himself at home, rubbing his hairy hands together and remembering my corpse. SO CREEPY. I am NOT friends with the internet today.