This is my perennial Halloween costume, The Giraffe Hat. I free-sewed it the year the boy was 3. He wanted to be a giraffe for Halloween. The hat is impressive. It is also painful. The only way to fasten it to one’s head is to cinch it below the chin (scratchy-felt-awful) and balance it’s substantial heft on the crown of the head. It was a dangerous costume for a 3-year-old child. The boy got a hastily sewed “bear hat” that really was kind of lame. It was more a bear-helmet affair and made the boy appear a bit off-kilter in some way. Fortunately, off-kilter is an often endearing trait in children and he received much candy that evening.

I wore the hat to work on Halloween. I propped it on my desk and there it has remained. Perhaps I’ll bring it home tomorrow, it’s looking a bit worn, a bit slumped and pill-y. Besides, it’s February.

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I am still working on fore-shortening of arms. The arms a bit off. The hands a bit large. Nonetheless.

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show details 5:59 PM (22 hours ago)

This little deer mouse was fun to draw. It was a pretty dull drawing (and, content-wise, it still is) until I realized that I had been looking at bark for my whole dang life and that I could probably draw it. I could detail the drawing more, but that’d just make it look like high-school art. Terrified of negative space.

I like negative space. It is easy on the eye.

show details 7:51 PM (20 hours ago)

And I don’t think I want to blow-up. To be consumable. A product that is subject to our whimsied treatment of products. Can I be known enough to do what I want and supplement the bills and change the world in some relatively significant way? A tall order to fill. And at what cost?

I can’t maintain my vacuum state if I blow up. Simple logic. And if all this is borne in some Skinnerian box in the back of my mind, what happens when I turn the box into a bird.

That’s the cheesy Winona Ryder voice-over in the movie.

Thus, on second thought, I don’t think I’m lacking bravery. I think I sometimes fail to lack fear. If I’m not scared, then why would I need bravery? And really, what is there to be scared of…

People are full of all sorts of mean, that’s what. All sorts of petty, little mean ways.

show details 12:45 PM (3 hours ago)

Noted: the Bradford Pears are about to bloom. However, cold air is coming. Programs are canceled. Snow is again the predicted landscape this weekend.

Dang. Will it ever end?

Last year, on some random early spring day, I walked to the bakery, brought a loaf of bread, sat in an alley, wrote an old friend about how the sun was sunny and the air smelled like sex. It was the pear trees in bloom.

I fear this year they will be frozen.
Frigid fxcking town.

Plan: cut up the Jessica McClintock formal I got at the James Island Goodwill (South Carolina) and fashion it into placental forms.

show details 3:41 PM (55 minutes ago)

PEOPLE WHO HAVE TIME

And in this having of time, we are really wickedly lucky. How we use our time, fxckin’ tragic? Not in activity, but in joylessness.

Why don’t people do more things that make them happy? And why aren’t people just delighted that we live in houses with cats and dogs and switches and wires and water that appears and disappears at our command.

I’m not happy all the time. Nobody is. I sometimes catch myself looking miserable when I drive.
The chickens really bum me out when they crap on the steps. Biology undermines my intentions sometimes – I occasionally get tired or distracted by one physiological factor or another.

I wish their was a different word for hormone. It’s such an ugly word with teenage connotations.

But, really, most of the time I’m fairly happy.

And it’s because I have time.

show details 3:43 PM (54 minutes ago)

Imaginary Interviews:

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(current) Unfortunately, in a clever reply to myself, I lost the email to some odd blip. However, the content of this email was scandalously declarative. So, it might be best that I lost it. I think I might have a problem with impulsive declaration. I ought to remember to editeditedit myself.

I suggested, in the lost email to myself, using twice as many words, that perhaps it is time for me to actually bring some of my larger ideas to at least some partial fruition. Because otherwise, outside of my family and friendly coworkers, I will just be A Lady Who Emails Herself and Draws Everyday. I’m not sure I want to be that. It’s sort of odd.

(Though perhaps not as odd as watching television all the time…or shopping at night, or going out and getting drunk and ending up naked with strangers…all of that seems really peculiar to me.)

And that’s just it – I’m not really that strange. I just don’t know how to be sometimes, and so I’m myself and then people don’t know what to think or how to be. I’m nice, but confusing and “insufferable” – people like me but they don’t want to hang out with me, which is sort of okay because I don’t really want to hang out with them either, most of the time, most of the people.
(Remember, editeditedit. I am so determined to document this process that editing is difficult.)

I know there are at least a few people like me out there, people who are cleverly awkward or awkwardly clever in some way that puts them out of sync in some small way.

Why is there not a League of Invisible Artists? Is there? Can I join? This League would work collaboratively on the bigger ideas of it’s members – it would be a small league, otherwise it would get complicated. All the projects would have some sort of secondary intention – such as raising awareness of blahblahblah or funds for blahblahblah.

Primarily, however, the purpose would be in the making and in the collaboration. And people could never require us to go to hideous openings or style ourselves in ways untrue. However they could expect us to produce works totally remarkable and the work produced, would in fact be remarkable if only because League members declared it to be so and also because it would be the collaboration of friendly and talented agoraphobes, meek creative geniuses.

In the meantime: Launching the Fiber Arts Placenta Party soon. I’ll post a link to something within the week. So, there…

Perhaps I am just a reallyreallyreally small league. See the following links for academic blahblahblah about invisible artists and such: Louis Muinzer in Circa Art and The Nutzle Enigma: A Portrait of the Artist as an Invisible Man

Seriously, “The Nutzle Enigma” –

I’m a nutzle. Ha!