Butterfly on the Wall

This is what I've been rambling about

Project #1 - Elemental

This is what I started with.

This is what I’ve added.

These are sketches of what I’m thinking.

Now.  I’ve determined the pattern.  And theoretically I know how to execute it.  But I’ve never really done it before, and in practice runs (which I never have the patience for anyway, kind of like recipes,) I certainly haven’t done it well. But at least the path has become a bit more clear and I feel a bit giddy, a definite improvement over the anxiety I've been having this week.

Lessons that I have yet to truly learn:

• Be patient with the process.  It will evolve if it is not forced.
• The One, True Yardstick—am I satisfied with what I’ve done?
• Be aware of themes, use them as guides and allow them enough room to suggest themselves.

Where to deposit the poo?

This is where the “confrontation” aspect comes in.  Though I know I must accept this or (emotionally) die, the process is certainly not easy for me.  Following patterns was safe, but it felt empty.  Creating my own is fulfilling but feels like facing off with the school bully on the playground every. single. day.  

I am very non-confrontational.  I do not thrive on challenge.  But I am also oh so tired of avoidance, a technique that I have used throughout my life, but which is turning out to feel just as empty as those patterns.  Having arrived at the point in my life where yielding to these artistic urges is, actually, unavoidable, I would like to also feel a sense of liberation.  But this would not be so.  I suppose in the northern corner of some bricked up back room of my soul, I do.  But for now the only evidence of its presence that I have is ghostly tapping.

I tell myself that I must remember to play.  It should be fun, after all, or why do it?  But I do have a tendency to drain the life out of things.  Remember?  Wet blanket girl?

I say: “Take a moment in the morning while walking the dog.  Instead of grumping about her sniffing, and sniffing, and sniffing some more, lean your head back and marvel at the blue sky and wispy white clouds and how fortunate you are to be witnessing them.  Feel deeply how much you love her.  Be grateful that her indecision about the right place to deposit her poo has given you this opportunity.” 

My own thing

Despite the giggly sound of the opening paragraph on my About Me page, I’m serious about what I said.  This time is a gift, received after nearly 8 years of asking, and I don’t want to waste it.   After I stopped hurling myself at brick walls in a jobless panic, I tried to be still and listen. 

I have heard my inner voice before.  At first it spoke up in times of great distress, serving as a lighthouse to point the way through the dense fog of my Self before I truly knew I had a Self of my very own, let alone how to navigate it.  In the last few years as the fog has lifted and I’m becoming a more astute sailor, and now the voice seems more like a bossy big sister, providing clear instructions when I’ve needed them.

Lately though, it hasn’t been a voice so much as a steady insistent pressure from behind and not so much clear directives as jarring shocks when I get it wrong.  Occasionally I receive a giddiness treat when I push the right lever, just enough to keep me plodding through the maze.

At the moment, I am confronting the exploration of my artistic inclinations.  These inclinations have always been present, just in a paint-by-numbers sort of way.  Before anything else there was always writing and I have received compliments (and one award) for that.  But except for a few cursory (and bad!) attempts at fiction in high school and my early 20’s, my writing has only served the purposes of others. 

Also in high school I discovered cross-stitch from the countrified females in my family.  So voracious was I in the craft that I couldn’t sit down or watch TV without a needle in my hand.  The same thing happened when I first discovered quilting.  But here’s the rub—the needle provided cover in uncomfortable situations and busy work to occupy the hive of bees in my head.  It was a means of avoidance and coping rather than expression.  And, more importantly, both cross-stitch and quilting involved following someone else’s established patterns.  Granted, with the quilting I at least had the choice of material color and pattern, but I was not at all adventurous. 

I have known for a while that I desperately want my own thing(s).  I want to reclaim my words and design my own patterns.  But I haven’t had the time—or the courage—to fully own that until now.

What storm?

Yesterday we got hit full force with the remnants of the Ida storm (not that we knew what it was at the time) and it was nas-tay, blowing a gale and pouring rain.  While accompanying the dog on her potty break, I found our nearly empty trashcan in the middle of the yard and naively put it back in its unsecured location by the steps.  It must be floating in the Chesapeake Bay by now because I haven’t seen it in over 24 hours.  Our chickens got absolutely soaked.  Feathers matted together and drooping, they huddled under their overhang because they wanted to come outside, but didn’t want to come outside. And Lucy the duck quietly napped in her pool, beak tucked under her wing even as her feathers were ruthlessly ruffled by the wind.

 

I know it doesn't look like it, but really, there is feather ruffling going on here.

The night before that, the heat went out with the power and I spent a chilly morning bundled up until someone finally came to fix it around noon.  After that I took a shower to thaw out (if only we had a tub big enough for a bath—wistful sigh.)  When I pulled the curtain back to grab my towel, the wind shook our little tin can trailer so hard I thought that maybe I’d had the water on too hot again and was getting a little dizzy. The power went out again last night—after we’d already had one power outage, mind you, and had done nothing in the way of preparation— and we decided that what with all the candlelight it was a great time to mess around.   

He went to brush his teeth (you know, foreplay) and discovered that we had no water.  At all.  Not only did we not have drinking water, a necessity after much gasping and moaning, but—much, much worse—no twat washing water.  Now, I can drink chocolate soy milk to quench my thirst afterwards, but my sweet Papaya can’t.  And I’ve had too many cases of “honeymoon disease” to let that go. 

And this is when it finally hit me what oblivious dumbasses we are.  We never adequately prepare for this stuff or even know that a storm is coming because we don’t have cable or digital television or whatever it is the kids are watching these days, nor do we listen to local radio.  So while everyone else is frantically clearing out the milk and bread aisles at Food Lion, we’re sitting at home chatting over tea and wondering if the nice sunny weather we’re currently having will hold for the weekend so we can get some work done in the garden without actually consulting that newfangled thing the internet to get a clue.  

You’d think my Love would be a little less blasé about this stuff since he lived through a few scary weather events in Cuba.  One of them, a hurricane that blew through when he was a teenager, completely ripped the Spanish tile roof off his house so that he had to run around throwing mattresses over his grandmother and mother to protect them from flying debris.  

You would think.  But just in case the Great Twat Water Catastrophe doesn’t amply illustrate this, here is another example of how you would be wrong.  This summer, prior to hurricane season, our local emergency service conducted a trial run of their supply distribution system.  They asked the public to drive up to the local high school where they would hand over a box of emergency items (including bottled water) that were yours to keep.  Perhaps in case there was a real emergency?  And maybe this would have been a good opportunity to come up with some sort of plan, or at least awareness?  But all that we really took away from the exercise was some mini cans of Pringles and rubbery lemon pudding that should last well beyond the supposed 2012 End Times.      

Cuban that he is, though, he’s been eating his way through those boxes of indestructible foodstuffs like a trouper, because the whole point of the exercise for him?  FREE FOOD.  If Castro had given out extra rations in exchange for political rally attendance, I do believe my Love might actually have marched to the Plaza de la Revolución semi-willingly.   

Clearly, when the apocalypse does come, we will be screwed.   

I am not the fun friend.

I am not the girl you call to party until dawn or to go to the club and dance all night or to take on fashion shopping trips or swanky dinner dates to giggle about penis shape and size and usage. 

No.  I am the friend who gets tagged for semi-intellectual exercises like these recently received from my friend Erich on Facebook:  1) List your favorite movies for every year since you were born, and 2) Name the Greatest Male & Female Rock/Pop/Blues/Jazz Singer Ever with mini-essay of justification.  Because this is what I do.  Essays of justification.  I am the one who abstractly uses phrases like “penis usage” instead of dishing about it.

A friend once called me a wet blanket.  She said it in that semi-serious way that if you called her on it, she could say that she was only kidding, but she wasn't really smiling.

I suppose one could argue that there are simply different types of fun.  But sometimes I get tired of the staid, cerebral wet blanket variety.  I want to be Sex in the City type of fun.  Black Eyed Peas dancing-in-the-disco-club-gettin’-freaky-to-the-song type of fun.  I’m the S to the T, A, C, the I, the A.  Stacialicious! 

See?  See how awkward?  It just doesn't work for me.

I ask my husband if he thinks I’m fun.  “Yes” he says, because of course he senses that this question can only effectively be answered in the affirmative.  But really, he would not know.  Because neither is he Super Woo-Hoo Fun Guy.  Not that he is of a particularly cerebral bent like me, but when he sets out to do something, he plans.  Carefully examines every possible option.  Investigates.  And plans some more.  Then he gets upset when things do not go according to said over planning.  He is the perfectionist neurotic misfit nemesis of Super Woo-Hoo Fun Guy.  And I am his gangster moll.  Or, I’d like to be his gangster’s moll because that has a sexy, naughty implication.  In reality I am just his perfectionist neurotic misfit sidekick.

I am . . . Wet Blanket Girl.

Just start.

I waltzed around with this blog for days looking for the right tone, the right intro, obsessing about the banner (although I do think it turned out pretty good. . . .) and basically just waiting for Perfection to graciously alight her smug little Glenda the Good Witch self on my laptop, tap the screen with her glittery wand and poof!  There would be my blog. 

Hard to believe, I know, but that didn’t happen.

Sadly, much of my life has been spent this way, hoping to burst forth from the womb fully formed with no pain, no birthing goo, no red wrinkled skin or soft-skulled cone head.  On some level I know that this is completely unrealistic, and so I remain eternally pregnant, with all of the attendant discomfort and crankiness you might imagine that state would entail.

I’m not exactly sure where this spontaneous birth scenario originated.  I do know that early on, schoolwork came very easily for me and I never got anything below a B.  This was pretty much a parental expectation since valedictorian and salutatorian siblings had come before me.  But then, in seventh grade, the unthinkable happened. 

I got an “F”.

“F” as in failure.  As in flabbergasted and fear.

Also as in flounder, which I did through four more grades and two years of college, through french and history which I loved, and algebra and chemistry which I loathed.  Honestly, it did not register to my 11-year-old self that from that point on I might actually have to work at what I had sailed through with very little effort previously.  If I had reached the limits of my innate intelligence, then there wasn’t much to be done.  Though I heard plenty of “you can do better than that,” I didn’t believe or understand it and part of me took it as an insult.  I suspect that I interpreted “trying” as a weakness, but there was no such thing as self-awareness for me then.  Unable to articulate my perceptions, neither could I contradict them. 

In the classic documentary Hands on a Hardbody, contest winner Benny Perkins says (convincingly) that there is also great value in losing.  “Because at least they tried, and there's not too many triers in the world today. There's not that many people that are willing to take a risk." 

This is why I decided to start this blog—to document the evolution of my imperative desire to take risks, to become a “trier”.  It is also Step One in my not-so-master plan to do so.  

My water finally broke.  It’s time.

Just start.