#uncoffeed...

You remember my bestie, Abbey the Cockatiel. We're even better friends now - she  flies across the room, smacks into the blinds and falls to the leather ottoman, and then yells at me to help her down because she claims she can't get to the floor from eight inches up. "Go for it, Abbey," I tell her. "Just jump. Or fall. You'll be alright." It can't hurt worse than smacking into the blinds. But she holds on with her beak and inches her feet down until she's no longer comfortable with the grip. Then she creeps back up to safety and yells at me some more. Wait...is that my book? :) I let her get on my arm and she crabwalks up to my shoulder. If I look at her, she hisses, but if I chatter my teeth in response to her doing same with her beak, she inches over and kisses me.  And if I seem to be turning my head she bites me. This is love. Yesterday I went into the neighborhood without her; Abby took a nap.  I chatted with some artists wh...

at Macaroni Grill, Terminal 2 at ORD Today I found myself wishing I was married, or otherwise had someone I could call to come over and make me some tea. I want to stay in bed, reading. It's nice that I have time and space to do nothing but read in bed but my brain's running the list of things I should be working on, asking whether staying in bed is really appropriate. Wondering if I might be depressed.  No, brain; shut up. That's societal expectation talking. That's over-analysing. You can check, brain, but then stop checking. The answer will be the same in 2 minutes. You can't be on the hustle 24-7. Every spare minute is not an opportunity to push your agenda. Downtime is necessary and should be scheduled as part of the hustle. I really dislike the trend in self-help these days: everyone has a recipe, if a genuine sense of goodwill, and they'd like you to give them a dollar, please. I get it; just it's boring. People are boring, because they act...

My day-job has been insanely busy for several weeks now - not just in sheer volume, but with complex challenges. I like that; I do. And it was planned so I was able to allocate mental and spatial resources. In the coming days I have to prep for Texas . Now we're in the eye of the storm, and all my projects are still waiting. But there's no toggle switch - I can't just move over and pick up what's been tabled. Downtime is weird, especially when there isn't much of it. There's some decompression happening, some unfolding of what was packed under pressure. It makes sense, of course, but I'd forgotten to plan for the unfolding when plotting out my life.  And I should have known better:  I've been unfolding for a year and a half out here in Annandale.  I'd smoothed out some wrinkles and was cutting into the fabric to make something new, but I had to put it aside for the paycheck that keeps me free and legal. I need to not start admonishing myself...

Not teenage me - might as well be. I spent a minute today remembering the awesome awkwardness of being a teenage girl. While I waited in the grocery parking lot to get in my car, a mother coaxed her daughter out of their SUV's back seat. The girl was lanky, blushing, unsure of the outfit that her friends probably approved. Her mom smiled behind her and winked at me as they passed. She was really happy with her girl. I was a teenage girl, you know, between the tree-climbing moments, the bookworm moments, the crazed artistic moments when I threw and broke things I'd made with my own hands. You feel yourself growing into new bones. You know other people - mostly boys and nosy aunties - are checking your front-side for bumps, signs of some imagined ripeness you can't comprehend. Sometimes you actually do feel ripe, and it's both glorious and horrible; you wonder if you should choose. You can't choose, vacillating between that thresh-hold of newness and the te...

Processes are nonrigid, and resemblance to linearity is a mirage. Creative process has to alternate like electricity or cricket batters. I use input/output methods like playing the same song over and again until a painting is finished - the song builds the world and keeps the tone while I interpret what the universe has shown me. What I read is an important input to what I write, even when what I write is my own nonfictional experience. Favourite authors sculpted my understanding of what literature should be. Ray Bradbury is at the top of that list. I met him once at a book signing in Palm Springs, California, ca. 2001. He was more adorable than I'd always suspected he was: those red suspenders and khaki shorts, comfortable shoes and trouser socks. He'd just found out that  Fahrenheit 451   would be assigned reading in France, and he was so happy for his characters. They remained very real people to him, he told me. We had a great conversation before the media showed u...

June 17 is the birthday of Maurits Cornelius Escher. You know his work; if you didn't know his name before, now you do. You're welcome. I've told you before about my awesome book club - we're reading Gödel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter for over a year now. It's a pretty dense book. The scheduled meeting was June 16, the day before Escher's birthday, so I thought we needed a birthday cake. Möbius Cupcakes?  Möbius Chicken Strips! And then I remembered reading how a bagel can be cut so that the two halves are linked. ( You, too, can make a Mathematically Correct Breakfast. ) I hied me to the dollar store, looking for plastic ants who could march along my cake like the famous Escher etching of ants on a möbius band. No ants, but I did find alligators, which relate to a different Escher work. I bought a bundt-style cake at the grocery and attempted to cut it möbius-style like the bagels. My plan was to cut, and then f...

Our accountant is a wonderful, naturally supportive person. My empathic sensors (and logic) tell me that she has her own set of problems but she doesn’t let them get the best of her. She asks me regularly whether I plan to ride my bike to work on Friday.  She shares pictures of her grandson and tells me about her quilting group. Last week, my Project Get Over Myself project was bringing some of my paintings into the office and letting people see them; now I’m flagged (read: outed) as a painter. She sent me a link to a fine arts festival happening over the weekend. As usual, I have two points I have to digest. I dislike the bins people put me in, and I dislike art fairs. I have to get over my knee-jerk when people stick a pin in me that has a label attached; it’s not as serious as all that for them, and it also means they find me interesting and are trying to connect. The thing I want the most is the thing that scares me the most. Accountant is awesome because she does n...

Only it didn't *just* happen. It's been marinating. It spoke to me some little time ago - not that long ago - in the middle of a conversation about somebody else's vision.  Visions are sneaky like that. They move like electricity, making leaps, and they can shape-shift. They don't necessarily mean the same thing to the same person, or the same thing at the end of their travel as they did when they started.  It doesn't matter. My job as an artist is to convey messages which already exist in time-space, and try to do it as clearly as possible when you don't have access to the language which was the original conveyance.  It's my favorite game. This is done now for the second time, and at the heart of the message is a feather given me by someone else who apparently received the message. Stay tuned, Etsy-friend...our story is leaving the ground. Today I bought the Coyote a new suit, in the form of a $4.99 thrift store frame. I brought the painting i...

Last night I worked out some business card designs, because I realise I need them. I've come to that point in the conversation a few times recently, and I had no business card to hand over. So. My waking thought this morning was that business cards are actually a huge deal. HUGE. They signify that I'm willing to BE IDENTIFIED, not just in the moment, but also later. That I am willing to let select individuals be able to locate me and ask me to do things for them, that I will consider their proposals. I am not only admitting but committing to the Universe and to myself that I will do things. Envoys take what is offered, Takashi.   I have to brand myself, like a tattoo. Unlike a tattoo, I can change my brand later (well, sort of like a tattoo - even there, we have options.)  And that's always been one of my pet neuroses:  avoiding a label.  I can't stand it when someone asks me, "Are you a ________________?" Writer, artist, poet, chef, dancer was...

I've been exposing my authentic self by working on art in public. Recently I took a booth at a restaurant so I could eat and keep working. People stopped intermittently to compliment my work, and I said, "Thank you!"  And I meant it, and I didn't get all awkward, even when someone wanted to discuss further. I Advanced the Discussion. Gimme a patch for that. Sunday morning I checked into Beanetics  for a French Press, a pastry, and a table to work. This is where the magic happened. The little Barista-chick who likes my illustrations is leaving; next Saturday is her last day making our coffee. We - she, I, and the other regulars - joked about getting matching coffee bean tattoos on our wrists. The Scottish guy doing genealogy work at the next table was polite or uninterested, but a dancer named Heidi leaned in close to check the detail of my work. Her mom appeared later and asked whether Heidi had seen my work; yes, she had. Heidi's mom is named Margi, h...

I'm wrestling, as always, with art - I have bruises. It's wrong to merely follow a set of instructions; it needs to rise from my gorge on its own volition, force me to vomit it out. These are too many words. But when you birth children, you want at some point for others to find them as wonderful as you do. And you listen carefully to the judg(e)ments made over them. And when they are not separate humans from yourself but things which live only in clay or on paper , you have the option to act on those judgments, or not. You have the opportunity which you don't with human children: you can adjust them, make them closer to perfect. It's tempting, and the struggle begins. A-grades were always easy for me.  I knew the correct answers: I gave truth and it met the parameters set forth by the instructors.  I felt the envy of my peers, and for one split second it felt good before it turned ugly. A part of me wants to recapture that feeling and I start craving, manipulat...