"Worn"

My first thought for “worn” is that I’m worn out.  What happened to those days when I could stay up 3 nights in a row doing homework?  What about those days when I partied through the night and watched the sunrise?

I went to dinner with my coworkers, and they joked about how I am the “young one” in the office.  That’s one of the perks of my job; it makes me feel there’s still a lot more in my life to accomplish.  And even though I am the young one, I can see that my coworkers who are mostly in their 60s and even 70s have a lot more life in them too, especially when you compare them to some of our volunteers and donors.

Aside from bad genes, I think most of us decide when we’re old and start acting like it.  When I was miserably married in my 30s, I felt old and fat and thought that 60 more years of this kind of misery was more than I could bear.  Once the divorce was signed, I realized my body would start cooperating with me again if I just got out and had some fun.  I started dancing every weekend.  I felt better in my 40s than I did in my 30s.

Looking back on my life, I see that it’s been a journey of peaks and valleys.  When I’m happy, I’m fit.  When I’m depressed, I’m not.  Not being fit can lead to bad choices and too many cookies and more reasons to be depressed.

When my brother moved in recently, he came with a lot of exercise equipment.  Some of it’s in the living room, and he’s prone to jumping up during tv commercials to do pushups.  It’s kind of impressive, but I’ve never done a pushup in my life, and I don’t really anticipate a time when I would enjoy doing them.  He’s gotten me to exercise with my iron door stop instead.  5 repetitions of this, then that, then these optional movements, and then I can ignore fitness again and eat M&Ms while I read my book in peace.  Bro is actually a good fitness instructor because he isn’t too pushy about it – though he did mention running an 8 minute mile.  I think 8 minute miles are in the same impossible category as pushups.  I’ll stick with my cast iron door stop.

The point is, we’re only limited by our own thoughts.  If you want to be fit, you can be.  You can start at whatever point you’re at because “fitness” is a vague term.  You can be more fit than you are at the moment by taking the steps instead of the elevator or picking up something heavy a few times just cuz.  It isn’t necessary to eat the whole package of cookies at one sitting.  (maybe?)  After a while, we quit feeling as worn out.

I don’t want to imply that people don’t have real physical issues to get around.  People get sick, and all this stuff is harder when we’re sick.  It’s just a reminder that we can put some effort into feeling better with a little positive action.  Even 5 repetitions of something simple can help.

Our brains work the same way.  “Use it or lose it” has some truth to it, but it isn’t a finite truth.  If you want to be more creative, or smarter, or more charming, or whatever, work on it a bit and it gets easier.

At least I’m working with this theory until I feel like dancing again J

"Children"

This was my first printed full-color project long, long ago.  I labored over it.  I ran out of time before it felt finished.  What a waste of time.  I could do it better and faster now, but I remember my earnest effort back then and feel some compassion for my younger self.

I grouse about how kids today are too lazy to waste earnest time on completely pointless things like this, and I think about my current job and think about how I’m still wasting perfectly good time doing things that won’t matter in pursuit of a perfection that doesn’t exist.

Proof we did actual work in NH

I wrote a long blog yesterday that I didn’t post about my trip to New Hampshire this week, and it struck me boring – my recital of the trip anyway.  The trip was great.  My coworker Diane and I visited our software company, and we spent a lot of time pulling weeds in our database.  I wonder if I’m wasting the same kind of time as I did on this Prisma color black hole – yet at the same time the things I learned will be part of the tools I can use on the job later.  Sometimes we don’t see the fruits of our labor for, em, 30 years or so.

Diane next to the car we wished was our rental car

As for the trip, Diane is a pleasant travel partner, the software people are great, NH is a pretty state, and we even got enough free time to see the ocean in The Hamptons and visit Boston.  We even drove through Salem, but as far as I know we didn’t see any witches.  We didn’t see any famous people either, but we did get our fill on scenery.

We weren’t supposed to get this much free time, but the software company had an emergency and gave us an unexpected day off.  Woohoo!!  We walked all over historical Boston and saw all the main historical sites.  The weather was perfect and we felt like we were playing hooky.  It was the best work trip ever!

Boston -- the steeple is the Old North Church

I have an almost formed thought that there’s a lesson somewhere in this trip.  Like all that time I spent with Prisma colors, the free time Diane and I spent roaming around may turn out to be important.  When I was in college, I was killing myself on my homework every night while my teachers complained that I needed to loosen up.  One of my exbosses told me that if he wanted perfect, he would’ve hired a photographer.  It took years for me to see that a spontaneous blob of watercolor might be the thing that made a piece of art sing.  That my “style” came out in my unguarded moments, and that’s the stuff people actually like best.



USS Constitution, which is still an active Navy ship

I’ve often felt that if something comes too easily, it doesn’t count.  I’ve also seen that my laborious learning process pays off later, even if it isn’t obvious during my moments of self-flagellation.  Anyway, thoughts to ponder while I reminisce my way through New England’s major food groups, sun, sand, mountains in the distance, laughing kids at Paul Revere’s house, the cute boy with cupcake frosting smeared all over his face, and juggler Bob (as seen on TV!) making the kids laugh…

The Holocaust memorial is squished in a narrow median strip.  It seems simple, but facts and quotes are etched on towering glass squares, numbers Nazis tattooed on victims etched on glass reaching up to the sky.  Looking up the towers, it hit me how many it means when they say 6 million people died.  This simple-seeming monument struck me deeply.

  

Hi from Hampton Beach



Relaxed and happy - and thankful I packed a hat!



"Sweet"

I thought about ranting about my parents’ anti-sugar, anti-processed flour reign of terror for “sweet”, but that’s been done.  Let me instead tell you about my subversive tactics for lifting the restrictions of that awful regime…

I told Dad that there were ripe blackberries, giant, enormous blackberries that would taste wonderful in a pie, but alas, you just can’t make a pie without sugar and flour.  So sad.  No pie.  Such a shame too, because they were really sweet blackberries.  Wouldn’t hardly take much sugar at all to make such a pie.

I saw Dad’s resolve weakening.  He suggested honey, and I said that would make a gummy pie, but a touch of clove and cinnamon would really enhance those berries.  I let him gnaw on that a bit while I watched him swallow more than normally necessary and chew the inside of his cheek.

“Why don’t you go pick some of those berries and bring them home?” he said.  “No, it’s not worth the bother to bring them back.  I mean I would if I were making a pie, but you know berries won’t hold up when you’ve got to carry them that far.  They’ll get too smashed up.”

It was a standoff.  I watched Dad continue to swallow his Pavlovian saliva and contemplated my purple fingers.  Dad obviously wrestled with his conscience of healthy living and pie.  I could see pie was winning.

“Why don’t you take me to where you found them and I’ll just eat some there?” he countered.  “No way!  You’d eat them all.  Besides, they don’t care if I eat them, but they won’t like it if you go there.”  Check.  My 8 or 10 year old self could pick berries lots of places a grown man couldn’t, and Dad knew it.  I didn’t bother to tell him that the berries were on free land.

“Don’t you like pie, Dad?  It’s mostly healthy.  I mean, it’s mostly fruit, and fruit’s good for us.”

Dad’s conscience was on the ropes.  I licked my purple fingers and started wandering very slowly towards the door.

“Okay!  Okay!  One pie!”  Checkmate.  I made two pies.  After all, the crust recipe is for 2 pies, and you don’t really expect me to know how to half a recipe at that age, do you Dad?

I made sure there was some sort of fruit or berries in season for the rest of the summer.  We ate a lot of pies.  Mom made strawberry shortcake.  Eventually we even got cookies.  Dad bragged about my pies to Grandma, and she taught me to use ice water and not to touch the crust except to put it in the tin and crimp the edges.  Sadly, this pie wisdom has been rendered obsolete by ready-made pie crusts, but I still could make a crust if I had to, and I cut air vents in the top in a wheat pattern like our women always have because as Mom says, “It’s tradition.  We have to.” Or for the longer Mom explanation, wheat represents plenty.

Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?  Can she bake a cherry pie, Charming Billy?

For those of you who read my post about spring water, I took pictures of one of the lawnmowers and a bit of the trout pond.  The kid is one of twins and they were awesome cute romping around.

The irises and the birdhouses are pics from work in the secret garden that only me and Br. Gary ever see, and in case you can’t tell from my general good mood, I think the internal audit of my department at work went great J

 

"Tension"

I’m a problem solver.  I see situations and figure out ways to make things work better.  I cheer people up and look for solutions.  I suppose it’s all based on my very selfish need to have my world to run happily and smoothly.  It’s difficult for me when people won’t cheer up.  “Tension” is an over-nice word for my feelings when the world is chaotic.

It’s been one of those weeks when I can’t fix the problems.  I can’t resurrect the dead and I can’t make survivors happy.  I can’t keep certain people out of jail or self-destructing.  I can’t even find my brother’s cat.

When I told my brother that the word of the week was “tension”, he gave a derisive laugh and said I could blog about his life, “in fact, tell the whole sordid story!”  Well, I won’t.  I have self-imposed limits for this blog of keeping it to one typed page or less, and I’m pretty sure my brother’s love life takes more than a page.

Let’s just put it this way, his scheduled May 18 wedding day has come and gone, and he’s still single – and in the process of dashing those hopes and dreams, he lost his cat.  He’s missing the cat much more than the fiancé, and he isn’t missing his potential mother-in-law at all.  I have to admit I’m not missing either woman and am quietly thankful he very narrowly dodged a bullet.

In the meantime, we’ve spent the weekend moving his stuff to my place, and I am convinced that man stuff is much heavier than woman stuff.  His weight bench attacked me when I tried to pick it up, which just goes to show that exercise is bad.  I’m not quite sure why lumber also attacked me.  It was by the weight bench, so maybe it was in collusion with the exercise stuff.

Mom and I agreed Brian owns too many books, and way too many artists’ coffee table books.  Them things are extra heavy, no matter how much inspiration might be found inside.  He also has piles of old textbooks, books on philosophy, comic books, notebooks, sketchbooks… Paper is heavy.  I swear he’s responsible for the death of an entire forest for his current store of knowledge and creative writing and drawing.  He also is very fond of rocks and metal.

So, I can’t mend the world or broken hearts, and I can’t find the cat, but I figure I can put my brother on the market in search of a better life partner.  He’s 42, obviously fit because of all that blasted exercise equipment, just as obviously literate and artistic, and interested in various forms of philosophy.  He loves pets, and would probably be willing to love your dog or cat provided it isn’t one of those little yippy things that jumps on him all the time.  He likes dogs you can take for a 10-mile hike in the park.  He has some money too because I found a jar of coins.

As for the other unsolvable problems in my world this week, prayers are appreciated for Phil and his family, Chris, the heartbroken, sick, and catless, and oh yeah, that I get through an internal audit this week at work.

I’m going to spend the rest of my 3-weekend in the garden or find my kitchen counter under all the superfluous stuff from my brother’s kitchen…

These are doodles with my new Faber-Castell PITT artist pen.  It’s a marker that’s kind of like a brush, with waterproof ink, and comes in different colors.  I love it.  Much happiness can be found in new art supplies!

"Liquid"

I have an indulgence.  Every so often I load up my car with glass wine jugs I rescued from the recycle bins at City Hall.  People around here don’t drink much wine in jugs, or maybe people who drink wine in jugs don’t recycle much, so just finding and sterilizing acceptable bottles is the first step in my indulgence.

The next step is to sit back and take a pretty drive to the country to fill the bottles with spring water.  Spring water used to be free at a lovely spot alongside a river tributary, but people have built fancy houses uphill and messed up that pretty place.  Now I have to drive a little farther and pay 25 cents per gallon.  I think it’s worth it.  Even when I was at my most poor, I kept filling my water jugs.

The place I go now is a trout club, if you can imagine such a thing.  There’s a restaurant with food that looks really good, but us po’ folk don’t get to eat there.  Members only, though we are allowed on the property to fill our jugs and look out the pretty pond and see the goats eating grass because people at the trout club don’t want to listen to lawnmowers, or maybe people with $3,000 to join a trout club have a thing for exotic goats.  You can see the website here.

Part of my pleasure in going to the spring is the community of non-members filling jugs.  It’s a very mixed crowd.  Some people drive up in expensive SUVs and some people drive up in the rattiest pickups you’ve ever seen.  The SUV people only get a few gallons.  The truck people bring many 5 gallon jugs.  I’m somewhere in the middle with a gas-efficient car and a lot of 1-gallon jugs.

We all do the obligatory head bob at each other and scrupulously keep our bottles away from their bottles, and keep our bottle caps separate from their caps.  Sometimes we comment on the weather, such as “nice day” or “can you believe it’s this cold?”  Only the intrepid and the truck drivers come in the winter.  Then we do the head bob with a commiserating grimace as we get our hands wet with ice water.

Sometimes I think that the people around the spring are probably fascinating people with stories to tell, but nobody tells their stories, and I don’t know how to get them to tell.  The old people have a healthy, kind look – the type of people who probably worked as naturalists who retired to a hobby farm with Amish neighbors.  The truck drivers probably hunt out of season and have a deer hanging in their yard.

It’s a place where very different people collide, but it’s a polite and quiet place, and sometimes I need polite and quiet.  It restores my soul to bob my head at people who value chlorine-free water without having to talk about anything other than the varying degree of overcast skies.

When all my bottles are filled, and my heart rate has dropped 20 or 30 points, I get back in my car and drive home, racing along the back roads, up and down giant hills, and back to society.  Sometimes I sing, and sometimes I find room in my head to think about stuff I never have time to think about at other times.  I drink my water every night and relish my indulgence, looking forward to my next trip to the trout club.

"Future"

I listened to an educational program on public tv and learned the greatest indicator of future success is grit, the determination to see something through, planning and acting on goals set far in the future.  IQ, emotional intelligence, and other obvious choices for success won’t do it.  I got a little bored with the program and slept the afternoon away on the couch.  After all, if we’re talking about goals that are years away, I have lots of future time to work on those kinds of things.

Kidding aside, I suspect the earnest public tv speaker is probably right, even though she didn’t have any suggestions how to drill some grit into people.  I also took a few moments to consider the criticism I’ve received for having too much of it.  “Stop and smell the flowers” and “live in the moment” advice from earnestly happy-seeming people started coming back to me. 

I’m sure most of these people were well-meaning, but I couldn’t change my nature.  I had an absolute need to paint pretty things, and most of my life frustrations centered around a lack of opportunities in my chosen field or the obstacles other people put in my way towards reaching my goals.  The more people told me “No”, the more determined I was to show them wrong.

Sometimes I think back on my past selves and wonder how I had the strength to keep banging away at these things.  Absolute focus takes an awful lot of energy to maintain over years, and I got tired, had meltdowns, and kept getting up and doing it again because I couldn’t/wouldn’t change my direction.  Someday somebody’s going to say that stubborn is an integral part of grit.

“Success” is a word with a lot of meanings, and I figure the lady on tv only meant it as professional success.  All those happy flower smellers probably achieved emotional successes that I didn’t spend my time achieving.  I’m not sure if I regret that or if I feel pleased about it.  I’ve had an interesting life, and I got paid to paint pretty things.  I’ve even smelled a few flowers along the way.

I’ve been thinking about these things because of the unexpected turn my career has taken this year.  I spend a lot of my time planning and number crunching, and that’s a long way from my happy time spent painting flowers.  On the other hand, I have a fatalistic thought that somehow all this number crunching fits into the master plan even if I can’t see what the final goals are anymore.  Or maybe all my past grit makes me good at what I’m doing now because I can think ahead to long term goals?

Anymore, I think my long term goal is to achieve a soft retirement.  That’s a long ways away, but I can envision a time when I collect a pension, have money in the bank, and have unlimited time to paint pretty things.  Pshaw to all those people who’ve criticized me for being too single-minded.  I stop to smell the flowers every time I paint them.

This project is something I did for Mrs. Fields.  If you want to buy it, you can go here, but I don’t get anything from it if you do.  The cookies are always good though.  The detail shows what the colors are supposed to look like.  I’ll spare you my internal rant about Chinese printers interfering with my single-mindedness.

"Tribute"

The Illustration Friday word for the week is “Tribute” in honor of its founder, Penelope Dullaghan.  I’m sure Penelope has turned over the reins of the site to very capable hands, but I’d like to take a moment to say thanks for her efforts in creating a forum for artists to post their work and share their thoughts.

It’s inspiring to see what other people can create, whether it’s a website like IF or the individual posts people make to their blogs.  The Mother Theresas and Ghandis and Jane Goodalls are overlooked too often, and so it’s even easier to overlook more human-level accomplishments.  We all need to do our best at whatever we’re best at, and if we inspire others along the way, even better.

Sometimes I think about the blessings I’ve received in life, and most often I think of those blessings as people.  I have been very fortunate to have known some really admirable people who went out of their way to give me guidance and support when I’ve needed it.  In a week when we’re remembering Penelope’s support of artists, I’m reminded of all the artists I’ve known who told me to stick with it when I felt giving up.

In a way, I find this an odd thing to focus on today because I finally updated my LinkedIn profile with my new job which is more about management and a database than art, but I’m also spending my morning in a very familiar way – waiting for a printer to give me proofs.  Sometimes I have to remind myself that I haven’t really given up the art, and maybe this job will give me the freedom to paint what I want in my own time instead of selling cookies?

My apologies in advance for not answering your comments this weekend.  I’m taking a road trip with a friend and may or may not get to the computer.  It’s been a long time since I’ve gone anywhere just for fun, so I’m looking forward to a break from thinking about data and budgets and things.  I’m also starting to appreciate my new roommate situation because I can leave my Penny Penelope puppy at home in good hands.

I hope everyone has a great weekend and let’s all inspire somebody today!