cry me a river.

then build me a bridge and get the fuck over it.

sorry for the harsh language, i really do apologize if i've peeled anyone's eyes back and i'm happy to offer eye drops or more soothing language in the rest of this post.

see, for a long time, i didn't know the completion of that phrase. i knew all about the sarcastic tones of "cry me a river" but didn't know the constructive side of that phrase.
i knew all about the world's smallest violin playing the world's saddest song but didn't even realize bridge buildign was part of the expectation. so i sit, with hammer in hand, thinking about blueprints.

two things sat me right back, today. and here they are in no particular order.
first of all, we have hannah. hannah is a normal, healthy and probably bratty and sweet, outgoing and shy, ten year old girl who's been diagnosed with breast cancer. she's probably part of the average american family, penny pinching yet generous, openminded but traditional, grateful and angry, with two parents and two kids. one of whom may very well be the youngest girl in the u.s. to be so awfully diagnosed.

i read this and said to myself, get over yourself. there are worse things in the world than writer's block. there are worse things in the world than a shelf full of unhooked yarn and worse things than empty notebooks. there's worse than this empty headed vacant feeling. but she's better than me too, because she's already over herself. she's moving on past it already. she's dealing with the talk of invaded lymph nodes and being feted at girls' softball closing ceremonies as the recipient of charity. in a world that causes us and helps us to treat each other shitty (oh sorry. i'm a trucker/sailor/mechanic/cook in the mouthparts and let's just leave it at that), she's a rallying point- a reason for little girls not to be mean to one another, but to have someone to help. a cause about which to give a damn. she's a symbol, a statistical unlikelihood and someone's little girl. and even more than that, she's someone's own self. thank you hannah for restoring my sense of perspective.

and in the not quite so dire, but inspiring, i made a trade at an art show at the beginning of the month. after quite some time of frustration, with felted beaded bangle bracelets only slightly appreciated, not valued for their work, materials or worth, a woman was at my table admiring them. her eyes were looking at them the way my eyes do, and when she asked me how the beads got on there, i told her that they went on one by one in an old beadweaving technique. her eyes went wide, and she was the first person i'd told that to whom it seemed to make any impact whatsoever. she then told me she was also there to sell things and that she'd be back after she'd done some business. time passed, and bored (not to mention a tiny bit frustrated), i walked over to her things, where she had a dress, a little orange/coral/clay colored one that was simultaneously really cute and also inordinately sehx-ay. i looked at the tag and was glad to see that she valued her work and time (it was well made and made of a good material) but sad to realize that no way was i going to sell enough at this fair to come even on buying it. plus, although it was good material, it was cotton knit, kind of like a thick jersey, and i'd tried on a dress of the cut a year or two ago, when i was in much more serious shape than i am in now and was disappointed. (it was not made of such good material, and it was a quarter of the price she was asking...in a store, which means that *included* markup and transport costs. which makes me very sad for the people sewing those dresses). i loved it was unsure, but she said "you should try it."
we traded, and my first (and only at this point) front page etsy items went to a home. a happy home, with at least one little girl who looked at her mama's new bracelets with envy. and me? i got a dress that gave me legs, where i've got stumps *and* shows off my waist. without looking trampy. i think it was kismet. anyway, check out karina's etsy shop, and prepare to fall in love with her cute things for behbehs and grownfolks alike. and thank you karina, though you'll probably not read this, for showing me (without telling me) that family and creativity are hardly mutually exclusive, and that putting any of the blame on them for not trucking right across that bridge i built over that river i cried is not fair at all.

nerves...the nerve! (i get critiqued and live to tell)

well, here i am, listening to some classic ragas (nayan ghosh playing a song i think called kafi- i'm a sucker for tabla and sitar, and want to learn more about it) and avoiding that camera of mine sitting next to me.

i'd rather check the email that i never check (it's supposed to be my personal one, it seems everything is in my "official" email); i'd rather read the kitchen gardeners' email newsletter about yes the obama family will have an edible garden on the lawn of the white house. i think that's a good symbolic victory, and the clever quote in the email was michelle obama saying that all members of the family will work in the garden "like it or not." which is good. i hope the chance is also being taken to re-normalize family gardening and re-normalize personally conducted growing and self-feeding. if we can all work one hour less each day for another person and work one hour more on our land, on our families and on ourselves, i think it will be worth that hour of salary/wage we don't get.
better yet, i'd like to see a little class erosion and have office gardens, tended by office gardeners as well as the gardeners of the office building. really, it wouldn't be so difficult. many office buildings have plants, planters, etc. i think of office buildings like space ships, and once upon a time i had an idea for a setting of a story; on a space ship that included plants and gardens as a supplement to the ship's air systems. yesh.
anyway, it's an idea whose time has come, and i'm not trying to get anyone into anything they really don't want to do, but seriously, keep a plant. just one. prove something to everyone because you can keep a plant alive (quoth a woman who's killed damn near everything, or allowed it to die. i may also write a column in a little gardening magazine but that's about food, and yes folks i have killed a cactus. a really cute one.) and better yet, make it one that you can eat, and eat some of it. grow some basil, grow a little arugula in a windowsill. grow some catnip in a windowsill, but make sure your cats can't knock the planter out of the windowsill. grow a little chives, or something on the back of the toilet if that gets any sun at all. or put a plant light under the cabinet over the toilet- something that can deal with the humidity of your showers.

i would actually love to do that last, i'm mentally bookmarking it.
and yes, i would rather preach planting things than dealing with these pictures.
they are not problematic (other than being pictures that i have to edit) in and of themselves. they are representative, part of this hurdle i'm trying to clear in representing my work accurately and flatteringly.
i make beautiful things. i am not trying to boast or be proud, many people have told me this. i am happy that this is their perception- i feel like people deserve as much beauty as they can take in. yet there's something that's failing and i think it's a symbolic undervaluation of my own work. by the time i photograph something, i've usually spent so much time with it, so much time working on it that i've grown familiar, perhaps contemptuous. the "taking it for granted" phase- but it's really not fair. it's every bit as wonderful as it was when i first conceptualized it, as excellent as it was when i took that admiring step back to appreciate the thing in context.

yes. so it's time to work on representing it as such. i visited the critiques version on the forums and got honest talk, but not too rough. i was expecting worse, though i don't know why because i'm one of those that's always complaining that the crit in there is too soft, too bum kissy. i don't think mine was like that at all; however there's also the distinct possibility that i was being sensitive and would have cracked under any blunter criticism. however, it was good and also coincided with a helpful post about quick fast and cheap lightbox. i recycled a flat rate box from stuff my mom sent me (i love boxes from my mom. there's always assorted and random stuff from froberg's - jordan almonds, pine nuts and sour worms! and coffee! and the magazines that we're subscribed to that for some reason get sent to her house.) and put it to the test. once i connect the camera to the computer, i have to see if it passes or fails.
i have a little anxiety about it, to be frank, for some reason. besides just plain not feeling like cropping and shrinking, etc. but maybe i'll just put them on the computer, and look at them and not mess with them. i suppose there's always that.