tongue and groove

dream extreme

i read a post this morning that i loved so much that i felt compelled to make a Wordle out of it.  need something to kick-start your Monday?  go read this post from Danielle LaPorte..."Look, if you, like dropped acid and wrote your business plan, what would it look like?"

interview

it's been a long time since i participated in Sunday Scribblings..but i liked today's prompt, "interview."

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let's start with the basics, shall we?  where were you born?  what was your family life like?  where did you go to school?  give us an overview of your childhood.

i was born in Crescent City, California, in the NW corner of the state.  our big claim to fame is that we're the only town in the mainland U.S. to have been hit by a major tsunami, in 1964 when i was nine. it wiped out the downtown but didn't affect our house...it only went up to about 4th Street and we lived on 8th.  i have one brother, five years younger, who's married and has three kids; he recently moved his family to rural South Dakota.  my Dad's been remarried for over 30 years (my Stepmom is great) and i have two stepsisters and two stepbrothers...we're like The Brady Bunch...three girls and three boys.  my Dad still lives in my hometown, as do many of my relatives.  my Mom left her marriage at the beginning of my freshman year of high school and i stayed with my Dad.  she lives alone in North Las Vegas.  (she was married a second time, but has been divorced for a long time.)  i went to kindergarten at a public school and then spent my 1st through 8th grade years at a very small Catholic school where i was taught by nuns. we had to attend Mass every day before school and on Sundays.  my grandmother did the church bulletin for years and i'd often accompany her on that task on Saturdays...so really there was no getting away from the place. (it only dawned on me about a year ago that while i was trudging off to Mass on Sundays, the rest of my family was sleeping in.)  the school was across the street from Lola's Beauty Nook where my mother got her hair done and would take me to get mine cut into a Prince Valiant cut (which, needless to say, i hated).  Mom forced me to take organ lessons (even though i preferred piano) and i had to play the organ for Sunday mass when i was around 9 or 10.  i hated it and would never practice.  i'd set my alarm for 3 am on Monday mornings (the day of my lessons) and then lie to the music teacher nun about how much i'd practiced all week.  we had both religion class and music class (which was really singing class) 5 days a week...for 8 years.  our uniforms were red plaid wool jumpers with white blouses.  in 6th grade i was picked for the 'honor' of cleaning the church every day after school, along with a 5th grade girl. at the end of the school year my 'reward' (payment) was a small white ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary.  (that made it all worth it.)  Catholicism (Christianity) never made sense to me, even as a 1st grader.  i'd get A's in religion class, but sometimes the nuns would write comments on my report cards along the lines of "Marilyn seems to be staring out the window during religion class."  (no shit.) i used to wish i was anywhere else but in that classroom. my Mom had been the town's first beauty queen when she was 15 and she ran the local beauty pageant and offered 'charm' classes to high school girls. i was her little helper, even though i eschewed the trappings of glamour.  i equated things like applying make-up as time-wasters...since often my mother would spend more time primping than actually paying attention to us.  but she always seemed to be the prettiest mom and she was certainly the best-dressed for that tiny town.  i'm sure she must have thought there'd been some horrible trick of fate played on her...plopping her down in a small town full of hayseed types (in those days)...when she probably thought she should be singing on Broadway or at least modeling on Seventh Avenue.  i had N.Y. dreams myself...fantasizing that i'd move to the Big Apple after high school and morph into some fabulous Broadway dancer/model/actress/world traveler/photojournalist hybrid.  "That Girl" was my favorite TV show.  i used to read Seventeen magazine religiously and dream that i'd have a studio apartment in N.Y. someday that looked just like the models' apartments profiled.  i liked to make people laugh and did impressions...but it must have been a bit unsettling to see a skinny 10-year-old girl in white cat-eye glasses mimicking the drunk character from "The Jackie Gleason Show."  (little did i know i'd grow up to be a drunk myself.)  i got straight A's all through elementary school but was bored out of my mind in class...it seemed the nuns always taught to the lowest common denominator and they didn't believe in allowing kids to skip grades.  when i started high school (there was only one in our county, but there were 1200 kids there when i attended), i felt like i'd been paroled.  i hated the schoolwork, but loved the social life.  i took part in activities (cheerleading, assemblies, drill team, pep club, etc.) and had plenty of friends.  even so, i always felt like 'the weird one'...the shy smart-ass who's always the friend in the corner.  some things never change, i guess.

we are larger

it's not so much a matter of turning things on their heads...or thinking outside the box..or going against the grain...or teaching an old dog new tricks...or...  maybe it's just a matter of remembering exactly who we are. not who we'd like to be...or who we used to be...but WHO WE ARE...right NOW.  you know how sometimes car mirrors say, "objects are larger than they appear"...?  well maybe it's time to step in front of a mirror and remind ourselves that what's most important can't be seen in ANY mirror...our hearts, our minds, our souls, our fears, our joys, our dreams, our passions. 

WE ARE LARGER THAN WE APPEAR.

reset

like i imagine most of you, i listened/watched in horror as the events of the Fort Hood shootings unfolded.  i happened to be at my desk when the news started breaking on twitter.  those are the moments when, in my opinion, twitter is at its best...when it's a valuable information-sharing tool in times of energency.  the tweeting in my stream (including by me) wasn't speculation on motive or what the ethnicity of the shooters might be (at the time reports said there may have been three)...rather we were trying to stick with the facts as they were being reported by the major news outlets and by officials.  (i follow the Army account.)  there were tweets coming from Texas that blood donations were desperately needed at a hospital that had several of the victims.  and the Red Cross tweeted a number where people could check on their loved ones and/or report that they were okay.  a little later there was a hotline number that had been set up by the base which was extensively retweeted. I could tell by some tweets that others were seeing some pretty hateful and ignorant comments in their Twitter streams.  i retweeted something that ABC reporter Jake Tapper tweeted which summed it up perfectly for me:

"This is a time for the best in Americans to come out, not the worst. Let's donate blood, pray, have well wishes, stick to facts."

I didn't watch the TV news or any cable pundits.  I was on Twitter for about an hour while the story broke and then I laid down with a book of poems and took a nap. 

I had Facebook open while I was on Twitter and would occasionally pop over there as the news was unfolding to see what was happening.  given that I was off FB for years, it was my first experience of it during a tragedy/emergency.  I updated a couple of times there about the shooting (just a couple of sentences apiece)...but NO ONE i follow at FB said one word about it.  that sort of blew me away, especially since Jeffrey's FB community had offered him so much support when his brother died recently.  it was particularly heartbreaking to read the tweets of those who had loved ones and friends at Fort Hood and were unable to reach them to make sure they were okay, so it sort of stunned me that i was reading such an outpouring of support and thoughts and prayers on twitter...and on FB it was all Farmville and funny videos and silly chatter.  i really don't get Facebook.  i'm sorry if this offends anyone, but it sort of reminds me in a strange way of this town where we live.  it seems cool on the surface, but once you really get settled in, you find it's not really very welcoming, sort of clique-ish and leaves me kind of clueless as to how to maneuver my way through since it doesn't feel like just being myself is acceptable.  it feels like there are some sort of rules that everyone knows but me.  maybe i'm just so used to experiencing so much twitter-love that FB seems like a cold, distant relative in comparison.  :)

so tonight, post-nap, after checking in at Twitter for the latest developments, i  sat down to watch a little CNN and thought maybe i'd make another collage at the same time.  i gave myself the challenge of using just one magazine.  it's not that i don't have several at my disposal, but rather than clipping images out of several mags to get the 'best' ones, i wanted to see if i could look a little deeper to create from what is.  (because that's a lesson i'm trying to play out on several levels in my life.)  the magazine i grabbed at random was a Time with a cover story about exercise.  i knew sort of where i wanted to go with the collage, but couldn't imagine how i'd do it with the issue in my hand.  but as i listened to former soldiers talk about how in the military they're taught to not seek mental health help, i felt really sad that we train our soldiers to be killers and ask them to perform extremely violent acts...and then tell them afterward to just 'suck it up.'  that's a really broken system, if you ask me...and i started thinking of all the ways in life (both personally and communally) that we could really use a big, fat RESET button.

there weren't many images in the magazine that appealed to me, but i did clip a few.  and just to let you know the kinds of thoughts that were roaming through my head as i listened to coverage of the shootings while flipping through the magazine, i'll share a couple.  that photo of the empty Congressional chamber that i placed upside down (and doesn't it sort of look like a Pharaoh's crown?) has the word "love" at the end of the aisle. that's to remind me that even when we're 'across the aisle' from someone...even when we feel our beliefs and ideology are the complete opposite of someone else's...there's really only one true path in life that supercedes all that head stuff, which needs to be turned on its head anyway...and that's love.  i placed the "RESET" button at the base of that figure because i think that when we really want to impact fundamental change within ourselves, we must start first with our baser instincts.  i put a suit jacket on that beautiful man to remind me that even in our most rigid roles, we have the opportunity to be beautiful warriors...but not warriors for fighting...warriors for love...with the ultimate endpoint to get to a place where we can feel even just a tiny bit (that's why the type is small) more evolved...

keeper of secrets

yesterday on Facebook, Elizabeth (hello, old friend...remember what i said yesterday about being genuinely happy when bloggers you've 'known' for years start hitting?  E falls into that category, too.) linked to these Teesha Moore videos on collaging tips.  good stuff!  though i'm not really into the whole lettering thing...mainly because i have no talent for it.  but i really liked when she showed how she makes borders for her collages...i'm not used to doing that. 

around late morning, as J went to run an errand, i gathered up a few supplies and moved to my funky wooden white $5 desk on the front porch.  it was a gorgeous day and as the sun streamed through the bamboo shades, i started rifling through what was left of that SOMA mag i'd used for the collage in the last post.  i have plenty of magazines lying around, but i felt like starting with that one.  (as it was, i started and finished with it.)  i thought we had some cheap watercolors on hand, but i couldn't find them.  must have left them behind in St. Thomas...which goes to show just how long it's been since i looked for them. so i used construction paper rather than a painted journal page as my base.  the paper's just a touch larger than the scan screen...the borders don't actually go all the way to the edges of the paper.  next time i'll know to trim the paper before i make the collage.  

it might appear that i had the name (phrase) in mind while i was making this, but the opposite is true.  i was done with it...picked up the mag and rifled through the pages once more...and that phrase jumped out at me.  looking at the finished piece, i thought:  of course, she's the keeper of secrets.  look at that body...as if she's been hoarding her own and others' secrets and they've engorged her.  she has to light up to take the edge off.  ;)  i think of the floating head above her as her outward manifestation...she only looks like an old lady (with the old lady hair)...but beware what's underneath...

then i had to laugh. i look at others' collages and they seem so artful and sweet and adorable and inspirational.  mine just seems kinda...twisted.  :)

but i like the border idea and when this was done, i thought it might be fun to do a whole series and make a deck of cards out of them.  note:  i didn't say i'd actually do that (i.e., follow through)...just that it occurred to me that it would be a fun idea to play with.  lord knows, i'm brimming with ideas...being an idea generator has never been the problem...it's having one hold my attention long enough to actually do something with it.  because, you know, keeping secrets takes a lot of work.  it's actually quite draining.  ;)

2 collages in 2 days?  i'm gonna say this is for Art Every Day Month.  :)

dreamboard

i'd been afraid to look at my blog to see how long it had been since i'd posted.  (a couple of months.)  i keep meaning to post, but given what's been happening in my life, silence sometimes seems the best option.  i saw a tweet yesterday that sort of sums it up...

    "say nothing often."  ~Liturgy

(seems ironic that it would have been said by a New Zealand pastor, since i'm not remotely religious.)

depression is a demanding taskmaster. she constantly seeks your time and energy and attention.  selfish bitch.  i'm not down about any one thing...it's that there's been a constant stream of things over the last year or so.  it all just sort of piled up. until the next thing you know, you feel like a blog-mute. like maybe it's best to just not say anything at all...especially since so few know what's actually going on.  a few close friends know large chunks of the story, but almost no one (even family) knows everything. 

i had good intentions about November.  there's a smorgasbord of stuff to choose from to get one's ass in gear.  i could do NaNoWriMo, but knew i wouldn't because even though i like to write, fiction's not my thing.  i could do NaBloPoMo.  i could post daily--hell, i did that a lot for years before someone picked a month and gave it a name.  but i didn't post on Sunday and then didn't on Monday and by Tuesday i thought, oh, screw it.  i could do Leah's Art Every Day, a fabulous project from someone i adore.  Leah's one of my oldest blog pals, going back six years.  surely Leah could inspire me.  but...art?...every day?...when my productivity level lately on any front has barely registered above zero?  i'm not saying i won't participate at all this month...just that i don't feel up to committing to it by adding my name to the list.

on Monday Jamie posted on Facebook that it was time for full moon dreamboards.  I left her a comment that that might be just what i need right now...a dreamboard.  she commented back that great, she'd look forward to seeing it.  then i thought, oh crap, now i really have to do it.  :)  but Monday morning brought news of a death...and after we heard the news, J and i began rifling through old photos to see if we had any pictures of the man who'd passed from a tour they'd been on together.  next thing i knew, hours and hours had gone by...with me tumbling down the rabbit hole of memory lane.  so no dreamboard got made on Monday.  but i was awake very early Tuesday morning and saw that big bright moon outside, so while the coffee was brewing, i stood at the kitchen counter at 4 am and made one. i didn't have any poster board and didn't feel like going through a whole stack of magazines...so i used one issue of SOMA (which had been in our room at Hotel Lucia) and used the heavy card stock of the cover for my board.  it dawned on me while i was making it that i used to make them all the time...before anyone knew to call them dreamboards or visionboards. my bedroom walls were covered with them decades ago. and i thought about this pattern i have of letting go of things that bring me pleasure...collaging, dance, listening to music, fashion, writing, photography, poetry.  it's like i feel like i must let go of those things as some kind of punishment...yet i'm still not sure what the crime is. 

one of the best things about being a long-time blogger is the joy i feel witnessing bloggers bloom over the course of years.  it makes me genuinely happy when i see people really take off...Leah and Jamie fall into that category.  i think the mark they're making in the creative community is fantastic.  so this is for Jamie...she'll wanna know what i'm saying here...

see that tiny "love" in the upper right corner?  there's a reason it's small...love is always #1 in life, but i've spent a good 15 years doing almost everything for the love of others...so that's a reminder to me, as is the "M ONE," to put myself first for a change...to begin with self-love.

the street shot reminded me of New York...a place i used to go a lot but haven't been to in a long time...even just walking down the street there can feel like "showtime" to me...i miss that kind of energy.

the label on the lapel says "photographer" because that's one of the things i am...and always have been...even when i don't let others see it.

the boot is a reminder of the style that lives within me...even when i suppress outward manifestation of it. 

the water photo looks eerily like a shot i once took that always make me calm when i look at it.

the list of creative things...isn't it great that they were all right there in a list for me to just cut out?  :)  and check means that, yes, i'd like to be paid for my creativity.

i'd love an iPhone or some type of smartphone.  "book" isn't necessarily pages bound together. i've been encouraged by friends to write a book...but i'm not sure a traditional book is where my heart is.  in jazz, book can mean a band's reportoire. i mean it more like that...i want to create my book through various mediums...more of a virtual book...hence "personal ID."

and that, my friends, is what i wished for on this November's full moon.

6 years

It was Labor Day 2003 when I looked at Jeffrey across our condo living room on St. Thomas and said, "I think I'll start a blog."  It seems astounding in retrospect because at the time I barely knew what a blog was.  I think I'd seen exactly one--and that was a news-related one.  But I've documented that process already--if not on this blog, then on others.

It's been an interesting journey over these past six years.  When I started blogging I couldn't have begun to predict the impact it would have on my life.  And back then I hadn't yet heard the phrase "social networking," nor did I have any idea what it meant.  I was an early Flickr user, but had my account for years before I started adding contacts. 

When I think back to my early years of blogging, it occurs to me that we were sort of creating our own social networks via our blogrolls.  In the blogging circles I moved in, our blogrolls had huge overlaps.  It was the primary way we found new blogs and made new blogging friends--by poaching each other's blogrolls.  And I say/mean that with affection.  There's history there.  People made connections and some of those connections turned into real-life friendships.  I still see that history and those connections playing out many years later.

Everyone has blogging preferences.  Some people love platforms that annoy me and vice versa. But I've tried to be open-minded about trying new ones.  Over the years I've had a presence on many, including Blogger (many blogs), Flickr, TypePad (still my primary platform), 43 Things/Places, Squidoo, WordPress (short-lived), Vox (which I loved but comment restrictions kept some readers away), LiveJournal (I maintain only a log-on there), BlogHer, MySpace (still maintain it for music connections), Ning (several networks), Twitter (I'm a huge fan and a tweeting fiend), Tumblr, Utterli and Facebook (just reactivated my account after a two-year absence, but still not getting why it's so popular).  :)  There are many that seem unappealing to me right off the bat and I never try, but I'm still open to finding new ways of doing this.  The latest one that seems appealing to me--though I haven't tried it yet--is Posterous.  So I may be an old dog, but I'm definitely open to learning new tricks.

Platforms aside, what keeps me blogging in various forms is one thing:  community.  I have some wonderful real-world friendships and I'm lucky to have some friends in my life that I've kept for a very long time.  But I've never experienced the kind of unconditional acceptance, support and love from such a wide variety of people as I have through blogging.  Some of those connections have bled over into 'real life' ones. And a funny thing has happened along the way.  The older I get, the more I find my virtual friendships flourishing and my 'real life' ones sagging a bit.  It took me a long time to figure out why that is. 

Through blogging, I found my tribe.  Geographic proximity does not a tribe make.  Just because I live somewhere doesn't mean I'm going to find deep kinship among its residents.  That's what's so beautiful about the virtual community--tribes know no boundaries.  I can live anywhere and be anything and reach out to anyone.  And I can belong to multiple tribes.  Sometimes we start out connecting through one interest and it moves with us into another arena.  There's my blogging sisterhood tribe (with a few males included for good measure)...the poetry tribe...the Darfur tribe...the 'let's all get in touch with our creativity' tribe...the political tribe...the music tribe...etc.  My primary frustration with blogging is that having to earn a paycheck cuts into my tribe activities.  Two tribes I love but haven't had time to explore the way I'd like to are the travel and photography tribes, and those are two of my earliest loves.

And blogging platforms aren't the only things that have changed over the years--my voice has, too.  Blogging has filled different niches in my life at different times.  I gave up years ago the idea of ever being taking 'seriously' as a blogger, and that's okay.  To do so, I've have to niche myself and I can't imagine doing that.  

And sometimes the voice just won't come.  I didn't blog much over the past year, but returned to it this summer.  I was all gung ho for a few weeks and then life got a bit messy and suddenly the idea of writing a blog post sounded draining.  And even when it didn't feel like it would take too much energy I felt like I had nothing to say.  Nothing. But here's the beautiful part of that.  I've been doing this long enough to know that blogging--at least for me--is full of surges and ebbs.  Sometimes it flows and sometimes it doesn't, and that's okay because the connections remain.  The history.  Or maybe I should say, the her-story.  Because that's my story...and I wouldn't have it written any other way.

"What about just doing it for fun?"

L'Enfer

In 1964, Henri-Georges Clouzot set out to make "L'Enfer" starring Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani. He was given an unlimited budget, but spent much of it on camera tests. Three weeks into the production, the film was shut down. The footage wasn't seen again for decades, until a chance encounter in an elevator between Serge Bromberg and Clouzot's widow.

Bromberg and his co-director, Ruxandra Medrea, made a documentary called "L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot (Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno)" which screened at Cannes in May and will be at the Toronto International Film Festival next month.

The images of Romy Schneider in the trailer are extraordinary...and you'll never look at a Slinky the same way again. :) You can read more about the film here and here.

I love everything about the idea of this film...unexpected beauty resurfacing...the magic of art (Clouzot created these images without present-day special effects)...chance encounters...one's art finally being given the due it deserves. It looks like a beautiful film. Here's the trailer:

accommodations

The other day a teacher popped into the library to ask if we had some materials she would be needing for one of her special education students this year.  When special education students are placed on IEP's (Individualized Education Programs), the plans can include special materials, but also classroom accommodations. 

It got me thinking about accommodations.  Not the classroom kind that can level the playing field for a kid, but the adult kind we take on in order to conform to a situation, an environment, a relationship. 

Sometimes those adjustments are subtle, a slight tweak.  No, really, I don't mind going through life with my head turned 10 degrees to the right so my viewpoint can match your own.

But often the accommodations are so intensive and invasive that one day it dawns on us that we've been going through life with one foot stuck inside an ear and a hand covering one eye.  And we wonder why we're tired...

Milton in Office Space is the classic example of someone who's been asked to accommodate beyond reason...

Whether one works in an office or not, we've all been in situations where we've had to make do, in one sense or another. It's the make-do-ing-ness that lies at the heart of these types of accommodations. Long ago, I was called to do a temp job in San Francisco. When I got there, I found that they wanted me to spend the entire 8-hour workday standing in front of a copier on a linoleum floor in a window-less, unventilated room, making copies. Because I pride myself on being professional, I performed the job as requested. But at the end of the shift, I called the temp agency to say I wouldn't be returning for the second day of the assignment. I'm all for the art of compromise and for being a team player (in a work or personal setting), but I'm not going to morph into an automaton to get a measly check. Not to mention that if that was all they needed, they could have hired a kid with no skills or experience.

As I've grown older, I've become focused on creating more ease in my life. And one of the best ways to do that--at least for me--is to say no to certain types of accommodations. I think for a long time I equated ease with laziness. Like if things felt easier, then I must be slacking off. Not pulling my weight. Not giving the 150% I've always prided myself on giving. Until it dawned on me one day that the 150% I was giving was all being given to someone else.

If you look up the definition of accommodation, you'll see it mentions convenience. The trick is to understand exactly who you're making things convenient for.