"Steam"

Did you know steam is hotter than boiling water?  That's how pressure cookers can cook food faster than a regular pan.  I never use a pressure cooker.  A girl I knew got badly burned with one when we were kids and that scared me off of them.  Fear can be a useful self-protection and hot air can be dangerous... which of course brings me to politics.

I promised myself that I wouldn't write about the election until November, mostly because I didn't think my perfectly reasonable statements on the matter would matter enough.  Facts won't sway people who want to elect Trump.  I've decided to talk to those who can be persuaded to put on their shoes and vote for the sane candidate.

Psychiatrists keep saying things about Trump such as "of course I can't diagnose someone I haven't met, so let me talk about sociopaths and narcissists in a general way..." and then they describe crazy, selfish, and dangerous, implying without exactly saying that's what Trump is.  I'm not a psychiatrist, so let me say it for them.  Trump is a sociopathic narcissist.  There's no way he should be trusted with any aspect of our futures.

I started studying cults and narcissism about 1 1/2 years ago.  I'm pretty sure that everyone around me is sick to death hearing about it, but I can't help but share what I've learned in my research.  You can see some of the traits of narcissists here, and there's loads of excellent information on the subject online.

It frightens me that Trump could actually win this election because there's no telling what he'd actually do in that position.  There's no comfort in thinking the people he's surrounded himself with would be any more sane or responsible than he is.  They're insane too.  Chris Christy is supervising aspects of Trump's operations and Christy's people were convicted this week for vengefully shutting down a major bridge and causing massive traffic jams because another politician wouldn't support him.  Multiple people said in the trial that Christy knew about it in advance.  He might end up going to prison too.  One of Trump's party friends was convicted for pedophilia.  A case has been filed against Trump for pedophilia too.  His first wife testified in court that he raped and beat her.

One of the problems (of the many problems) in this election has been the smear campaign against Hillary Clinton.  This is a classic move by narcissists.  I won't say she's a perfect person or candidate, but after decades of investigations, her enemies have never been able to bring her to court -- but the smear campaign has made many people question her actions and motives despite the fact that she has worked for decades for the well-being of others.

If you're a die-hard Republican, well, do what you're going to do, even though Trump doesn't support your Republican goals.  If you're a Republican that can't abide by your candidate, please stay home or vote for a third party candidate.  But, if you are any kind of sane person who wants to make sure we don't have a sociopathic president, pleeease get out on Election Day and vote for Hillary.

I recently did illustrations on bad presidents for the Mensa Bulletin, the monthly magazine for America Mensa.  Just remember, none of them had access to nuclear codes.

"Stripes"

You would think that there's only so many things you can do with stripes, but the options are endless.  Fat, narrow, pink, blue, straight, wavy, patterns in between, patterns in the stripes... on and on and on.  In case you can't tell, I've done a lot stripes.  You'd think I'd get bored with them, but I don't really.  It's like a simple toy that never ceases to please.

I did these boxes two years in a row for Gift Corp (though only kept photos of one year's boxes).  One year, the stripes were simple.  The other year, I changed up the stripes with different widths and dots.  I'd like to say that stripes are so simple it's all easy money -- but it isn't.  There were a lot of variations before everyone was happy and I got paid.

I always notice boxes in stores.  Every box has an artist somewhere in the process, whether it's Tony the Tiger breakfast cereal or generic air fresheners.  I've been known to go through all of the Kleenex boxes on the top shelf to find the prettiest pattern to keep on my desk.  I feel like my purchase rewards the best artist, even though artists aren't paid commission, but maybe the best artists get appreciated a little more by their employers?

I sometimes get annoyed that "commercial" art is less valued than "fine" art.  Okay, maybe stripes aren't going to get people very excited at an art gallery, but illustrators make beautiful art with a lot more restrictions and headaches than someone who paints whatever they want to paint.  Norman Rockwell, N. C. Wyeth, and many more illustrators were remarkable artists, "even though" they were illustrators.

I was visiting friends recently and noticed a Charley Harper book.  I happily looked through his images and was inspired, comforted, intrigued, and more as I thought about how much his art influenced my childhood environment.  How much of his work was commercial, and how much fine, and what difference did it make?  Good art is good for everyone, no matter if it's a zoo poster or a one-of-a-kind painting.  In fact, I'm enough of a populist to think the more people with the poster, the better it is for our whole society.

Another friend came to my house for the first time.  I'll admit, I can be a bit self-conscious about first-time visits because once in a while I notice that my home is eccentric and eclectic (and usually messy).  In other words, different than the ways most people decorate.  I don't own a beige wall or a properly fluffed accent pillow.  It's just easier to meet at a restaurant than to host people.  At the same time, it always fascinates me to see what other people notice when they come over.  Yeah, large painting on the floor will get noticed, but beyond that, where do their eyes land?

This stripe pattern was also
used as a tower of boxes

In this case, my friend commented on a large painting I did of rocks, though that wasn't what she looked at the most.  She looked at my Charley Harper inspired raccoon longer.  I suspect she just didn't know what to say about it.  Maybe she wasn't sure if she liked it.  I didn't ask, but after she left, I studied my raccoon and felt the same kinds of good feelings I felt when I looked through the Charley Harper book.  Maybe in the end that's the best thing we can hope to achieve through our art?  Even if we achieve pleasant feelings through something as simple as stripes?

"Ice"

I looked at my ice cubes yesterday and remembered drawing them not so long ago.  When I saw the word for the week, I looked them up because I thought "This is ridiculous!  I just did 'ice'!"  As it turns out, in March, 2015.  Oh my.  I think I'm getting old when time just starts sliding away really fast and we're decrepit and on a walker in no time.  My aunt warned me about this twisted reality.

Depending on the day I'm thinking about it, I either feel young or old.  Not young like a child or teenager or anything, just young enough that I can still do whatever I want to do.  I feel like there's still plenty of time to achieve things and really live.  On another day, I might feel like too many things ache and I'm inches from the grave and can't do anything spectacular anymore.

Both things are true, neither are true.  Life is what you make it, whatever your age.

I've been thinking of writing something for a while, in a vague kind of way.  I started a novel years ago.  I felt happy about what I had started too, and then it started descending into soppy and sloppy ideas that seemed like too much effort to clean up. I'm thinking of digging it out and looking at it again.

I know one of my self-sabotaging tendencies.  I'll look at it, it won't be great, and I'll think, "Why do it if it isn't earth-shaking?"  Well, why not?  Why stop myself from something just because it isn't the best?  I know lots of you have some variation of this even though we know that we have to put effort into things to gain the skill to do something well.  How much time did we put into learning to read and write in the first place?

I think it just depends on whether or not we enjoy an activity enough to perfect it, and "perfection" is an illusion anyway.  Sometimes I like to write.  Words flow out of me easily, and I enjoy that ease.  Sometimes it feels really, really hard and I have enough hard things to deal with.

When I make ice cubes, I don't worry about "perfect" cubes.  I just want cold tea.  If I'm feeling a bit whimsical, I might put a flower in the water first.  I made an apple cake, and supplemented my apples with over-ripe pears.  I wondered if it would work, but I didn't feel like my self identity hinged on creating the latest, greatest thing.

There's something about putting things out into the world that opens us up to fear of judgment.  I experienced those fears when I started blogging.  Now that I've been doing this a while, it feels like those fears were a million lifetimes ago.  I notice what other people prefer reading, but I'm not afraid anymore.  If you don't like this week's post, come back next week and see if you like that post better.  Hopefully I've gotten better at it with experimentation.

Yes, maybe it's time to dust off that book beginning?  Winter is coming and cold, dark days sound like the perfect time to try.

(And yes Sharon, you have inspired me with your own writing efforts on The Chorus of Crows!)

"Weapon"

I discovered my yardstick collection in my garage this weekend.  Local businesses used to advertise on these handy measuring tools.  I like that the businesses were often selling paint, and as an artist, paint is good.  I'm especially pleased that I have a yardstick from Morse Graphics and one from Fredericksburg where my great grandpa lived.

A giant praying mantis climbed onto my window screen while I was staring out into space thinking about all the other things I'd rather write about than "weapon".  Did you know the females often kill their male partners during sex?  I suppose violence exists in a lot of species, and doesn't even require weapons.

It's a little ironic that I have a yardstick collection because Mom used them as a weapon.  The yardstick broke once when she smacked it on the back of my bare legs.  I laughed.  She went from mad to really mad.  Things went downhill from there, but I had a sudden realization that she couldn't keep hitting me anymore.  Sometimes the lesson learned isn't the lesson intended.  On the other hand, I don't display my yardsticks in the house.  I'll keep them in the garage.

I've spent a lot of effort lately in cleaning out the garage and rewiring it.  In some ways, I think this is a waste of time since I don't spend much time in the garage anyway.  At the same time, it annoys me that I couldn't use the garage because it was crowded with too much stuff, dirt, and cobwebs.  It becomes symbolic for other things in my life, a large, unnecessary, rotting appendage.  Bro3 re-sided it, so at least it isn't rotting anymore.  Mostly, I'm just working off excess energy and getting some exercise.

I took a class in stained glass when I was managing a fine arts program at the local civic center.  Making something intentional creates a lot of unintentional wasted glass.  I used it to pretty up my garage windows.  Reglazing these windows is still on my to do list for the garage.  It was far more important to get rid of every unnecessary nail, screw, and hook that the man who lived at the house before me put in every few inches on every rafter and stud.  I ended up with a heavy pile of rusting iron and bashed my hands and arms pretty badly in the process.  A friend accused me of "domestic violence", pointing out that it doesn't always take 2 people for violence to happen in the home.

I don't regret these scrapes and bruises.  I've had this garage for years, and for years I had to put things where that disorganized man had left me a mismatched shelf or hook.  I ripped out the shelves on one wall and replaced them with orderly shelves that actually make sense and let me store long pieces of lumber.  I'm tired of settling for what is instead of what I want it to be.

The point of all this is that whatever you do, it's better to strive to improve the world than to just rot with the garage or take out your aggression on someone else.  Look for the beauty.  Create it.  Share it.

"Nest"

I'm not going to make excuses, though I do give you my apologies.  I just dropped off the web in August after faithfully posting every week since 2010.  I didn't get a horrible disease or die or anything.  Life just got stressful and I wasn't in a good head place.  I actually wrote posts the last few weeks, but I didn't post them.  Who wants to hear me whine?  I don't.  I'm sick of it.

Yet for all of that, I think people often post only the good stuff in their lives and I sometimes think that maybe we would all grow if we understood that other people have struggles to face even when their lives look perfect and wonderful to us from the outside?

Maybe some of those people actually do have perfect lives.  Good for them.  My life has been more of a challenge -- though the other day I was trying to have a good sulk and kept thinking of people I'm fortunate to have in my life.  I was very cranky that I couldn't even work up a satisfactory pity party for myself.  I decided to take out some of my frustrations by organizing my garage.  It's not going very well organizationally, but I have been burning off some excess anger issues.

There's an irony here too because I recently cleared out a friend's attic, basement, and office/bedroom.  There was a lot of stuff and I happily broke it down into categories and either stored it in better places or eliminated it.  It was so easy and satisfying -- at her house.  It's a lot harder when trying to clear out my own nest.

I'm a secret hoarder.  If you come to my house, you won't see that I have every significant object of my life, countless treasures from ancestors or garage sales, and of course, every art supply that I may need for the next masterpiece.  I'm just really good at stashing things.  I think it comes from having very limited personal space when I was growing up and sharing a room with two sisters.

I think I can be exactly the same way with my mental inventory.  I remember everything.  I've got all those memories stored in compact places in my brain, stacking things on top of each other and hiding them in a pretty box.  There's good things about that.  I've written a lot of posts about happy memories.  There's bad aspects to this kind of recall too.  I remember every awful thing that people have said and done to me.

In my garage, I have a lot of lumber stacked up to maximize the space.  It's mostly stored by size -- which is sort of useful, but not really if I have to unstack it to find wood for a project.  Think about that in terms of memories.  To address a past issue, I have to sort through ALL of my issues to find the thing that I can fix and move beyond.  It's as overwhelming as my friend looking at her basement and not knowing where to start because that was her memories and stuff.  Sometimes I think my brain could be fixed easier by someone else.

Back in May, I told you about a painting I started.  I've worked on it, but not very much.  That too is part of the reality that I don't see on the web very often.  Procrastination, other priorities, laziness, whatever, are a real part of life too.  I'm far from perfect, but I'm working on being better than I was.  I think that's all any of us can do.  I might even get a clean garage out of the process.

"Origami"

Mom used to make a origami swans.  Us little kids gathered around in rapt attention as she folded the paper.  You know, that's when parents still had magic powers that we could only aspire to as we grew.

I should probably write something about Mom now but she hates that, and besides, I had a vivid dream of Dad this morning.  He told me something that I can't remember now, and then he sang.  It was like he hadn't sung in a long time; he was really rusty and his voice cracked.  He was young in the dream, younger than I ever knew him.  I noticed his crooked teeth and he acted self-conscious about my noticing.

I've been wondering things about Dad lately.  What did he feel and think?  What motivated him?  I've only written the pleasant memories of him on this blog, but our relationship was complicated, and I've been trying to put old issues to rest.

I wonder if he really came back to me in this dream, showing me his insecurities, letting me see what I didn't, couldn't see when I was a child fascinated by paper swans.  It didn't matter to me if Dad had crooked teeth.  I loved listening to him sing, and I assumed he could always belt out tunes with operatic quality and volume.

He was 45 when he died in a sudden accident when I was a teenager.  I never had the usual opportunities to know him more fully as I became an adult.  Who would he have become if he had lived to a ripe old age?  What would our relationship have turned out to be?  Would I like, understand, respect him?  Who would he vote for in the presidential election?  (I suspect the Green Party.)

I saw him as a completed picture.  I know he was skinny when he was young, but he was brawny and strong when I knew him.  He could do pushups from a handstand, even with a kid or two hanging on him.  He was charming and got along with everyone.  I saw women batting their eyes at him and never thought there might've been a time when he felt awkward with girls.

All of us carry the skinny (or fat or whatever) kid within our adult selves -- even parents, grandparents, teachers, and whatever other authority figure we meet when we're children.  All of us encounter a time when we look at our parents and think "that's cracked!" when they something that is clearly just plain wrong.  There's a time when we realize Mom and Dad aren't just taking a nap in the next room, and Grandma and Grandpa aren't napping either.

Then, there's the time that we see the crooked teeth and feel some sympathy and understanding that our parents are flawed humans, just like we've got flaws and insecurities.  We see the path they set us on when they controlled our lives is a path that we can choose to follow or not.  Origami swans are just paper, and we can fold them too.

Next time I dream of Dad I'd like him to sing like he did when we took cross-country road trips and when he was working in the garden... but even so, I thank him for letting me hear his voice when it cracked.

The tomatoes were on the counter when I took the swan pic
and I thought I'd share my garden happiness.
Nothing like a fresh, home-grown tomato!

"Tiny"

It’s easy to make a mountain from a mole hill.  Lately, I’ve been thinking about how we make mole hills from mountains.   They’re so much of the landscape we can’t see them anymore.

A boyfriend was cooking dinner once.  "Can I help?" I was given a pile of green beans to prepare.  I did it the way I was trained, snapping each end and pulling the string.  He grabbed a handful of beans, and whacked off the ends with a knife.  I was shocked.  My world changed in an instant.  Really, why painstakingly string beans?  I told Mom about this epiphany and she said, "But that's the way it's always been done!"  A side discussion of sitting on porches with old ladies, but in the end we agreed grocery store beans aren't very stringy, and we won't die from cut ends, though Mom still prefers it the old way.

It never occurred to me to question my green bean training.  Now apply it to something that matters.

I started wondering what other mountains I’ve made tiny.  It’s hard to know because our perspective is so skewed.  You can point at something like women’s role in society through the millennia and wonder how many women actually stopped to wonder if it was a good idea to cripple their daughters by breaking their feet for foot binding or giving them genital mutilation.  It all seems so obviously abusive now, but I bet millions of mothers just thought that’s the way things are.

Are we still crippling ourselves?  Even though the wounds are invisible compared to foot binding, aren't we still keeping people down in countless ways?

America has about 3 more months of political craziness before the election.  During that time we get a chance to see impassioned people spouting off their dearly-held beliefs.  Some of their invisible mountains will be obvious to a lot of us.  The white supremacist yelling about welfare mothers and immigrants had to be taught white is best and everyone of color has to be feared and kept out.  But what of our own beliefs?  How many of our own thoughts are flawed?

And really, I'm not talking politics or racism.  I'm trying to explain that I've been trying to figure out my own faulty thinking on a very personal level.  What do I believe that hurts my own success and happiness?  For instance, I've been taught that my value in the world is measured by what I do.  Whether that's my creative output, giving of my time or money, whatever, whatever.  I bought into this, but it's a skewed view.  I bet I have a lot of them, and I bet you do too.

Sometimes you just have to find someone who cuts the ends of beans with a knife to see things differently, to find people who haven't bought into your belief system, especially people who are positive and uplifting.  It’s like the old saying about what you water in your garden.  If you water weeds, you get weeds.  I prefer tomatoes.  I prefer being around happy people.

As for the mosquito, I doodled while watching a show about viruses and thought about how something so tiny can eliminate life as we know it.  Maybe I should watch happier tv shows too?