twisty trails of monday ponderings

~ still coughing.

~ i love inflated titles - so i gave myself one: director of creative services. next time, i'm going to be an idea consultant. tho' i'm still most partial to storyteller.

~ i watched a documentary last evening about the jewelry of cartier and copenhagen's shamballa jewels. they are both equally pretentious, but in very different ways. it got me thinking about the state of pretention in the world these days. i think it's in flux. whereas it was pretentious to consume the right brand, now it's becoming a pretense not to.

~ i want an herbarium in the garden.  one like cadfael has in ellis peters' crime novels set in the 12th century.

~ nothing brightens one's day quite as much as fresh, new moo cards.

~ a couple of months ago, i bought a .dk domain. if i'd known then what i know now, i'd never have done it. you see, there's a protectionist cartel around the .dk domains that makes it impossible to use them without buying hosting in denmark. no google sites, no blogger, no shop site like someammo. they've got it fixed so that you MUST pay a premium for hosting in denmark. it's a protectionist scam i tell you and i feel it's quite outside what i perceive as the spirit of the internet. i will never again buy a .dk domain.   that said, i have given in and paid their mafia-like extortion fees we'll soon have it up and running and i'm going to be pleased to show it to you!

~ i'm tired of this non-wintery winter. i could really use a good and proper snow before it's all over.

~ that said, the return of the light is already noticeable and these balmy days do make it wonderful to go for a weekend walk.

~ did i tell you that i bought a pinto shetland pony last week? her name is pinky. she's feisty and spunky, but overall a good girl and a good ride (tho' you should NOT use a whip on her, as one of the riding instructors found out to her dismay last week). she's a bit small for sabin, but is her birthday present anyway. every kid needs a horse they can PLAY with and our matilde is not that kind of horse. plus, the riding club had need of a small pony for the leadline classes and doesn't have much money. so, i bought her and have lent her to the club for lessons.

~ i love knitting with variegated yarn - i find the gradual changing of the colors very motivating. and my latest scarf is almost done. i may even try to learn to purl on the next one.

~ remember that local community culture group i mentioned?  well, last thursday, i joined the advisory board. i'm pretty excited about that.

~ it's only halfway into the month and already i'm a little tired of using only instagram photos for my 366.

~ and now it's time to go see how many eggs the chickens have produced today. happy monday one and all!

topography of a life

i'm fascinated by maps. on pinterest, i have a board called topographies, that's full of interesting and inspiring art people have made of maps. but maps are art in and of themselves. they are a representation of a place, not a duplication - a map can never truly capture all that is about a place (borges knew this). they remain but an incomplete illusion. i think it's what makes art featuring maps so fascinating.

just as it's impossible for a map to truly represent a place, it's completely impossible to fully blog a life. for one, no one would want to read it, for another, it's simply impossible to put words to it all. that, of course, doesn't stop people from trying. there are those who blog their breakfast or nightly dinners and then publish books of the photos, in case you missed one of those prosaic shots. there are people who take a photo at the same time every day (or was that just a plot device in a midsomer murder?). or people who simply take a photo every day (i read about a guy who did that for like 30 years).

me, my life and my blog, are all over the place - sometimes it's a craft blog, sometimes a travelogue, sometimes it's about perfume, or raising a child, or living in self-chosen exile, occasionally it's even about politics. but mostly, i blog to think things through, work them out and make sense of the world around me. and it feels pretty real to me. but you can never truly convey what it's all like (especially not the bits inside your head). you can only sketch the outlines. map the topographies of a life, if you will.

i don't share everything, but i do think that because of the immediate kind of person that i am, how i'm feeling is pretty obvious - good and bad. of course there are things i don't blog "out loud" - because they might hurt someone or burn a bridge or get someone (usually me) in trouble (the tales i could tell you of several big corporations would make your toes curl). i also don't blog every worry i have, because to an extent, i want this to be a mostly positive space. but i do blog about those things on my secret blog, because blogging is how i think. or rather, writing is how i think, and blogging is my medium of choice. there's something about that little blogger compose window that just gets the words flowing. and the impossible mapping of a life continues.

flashback art

a friend made this for me for christmas in 1991 or 1992 (i can't quite remember which). she collaged together all kinds of clippings of my favorite (or in some cases least favorite) things from the news magazines of the era, then cut out my name a million times and laminated it all together (she knew me well).  included are the clintons, gorbachev, madonna, marilyn monroe, things russian and for a least favorite - a bit of dan quayle. remember when he was the scariest politician going? i think even to his running mate, bush the elder. he seems so harmless now with his inability to spell potato. maybe it all went downhill from there. he was the beginning of the end of people with a brain on the republican ticket.

i've carried it with me ever since, this very personal piece of art (art-icle?). i spent quite some time looking at it today - it's literally laden with meaning - meaning that's really only truly accessible to me.

could a gift be any better than that?

an encounter with madness

people should come with warning signs

do you think it's possible to tell whether someone is mentally ill just by talking to them on the telephone? i wouldn't have said so before today. but i experienced a telephone call with someone who was completely unbalanced - like in serious need of meds unbalanced. it became readily apparent rather quickly, but was like a big, flashing light of mentalness after she hung up on me when i asked to speak to her boss and then called me back 15 minutes later and calmly (and apparently seriously) accused me of hanging up on her and then proceeded to go mental on me again in all her glory. i mean like the kind of spouting incomprehensible statements in a shouty voice mental.

it's actually a really unnerving experience. i have to admit i was very shaken by it. and am still in a kind of state of shock hours later. i actually think she is dangerously, clinically psychotic. i'm actually grateful the conversation took place on the telephone and not in person. even on the telephone, i think i ended up a little bit scared.  even now, just writing about it, i get a shiver down my spine.

it was the kind of conversation that made me go out and check the bunnies when i got home, just to be sure she hadn't come by and pulled a glenn close. it was that bad. and i am more than a little afraid she knows where i live.

i think that somewhere at the base of us, our very instincts sense and fear someone who is truly off balance. i'm not sure i've experienced it so strongly before. and i can tell you that i hope never to experience it again.

noted.

i had a revelation today.  i was driving along and i saw the sun shining on a little pond and it was absolutely glorious. and i realized there, in the face of that beauty and light and stillness and the silhouettes of the trees, that i cannot take responsibility for fighting against all of the stupidity in the world. or even some of it. i cannot help it if people are petty and power-hungry and purposefully obstinate. i cannot help it if they lack creativity and vision and are unable to appreciate those things in others. i cannot make them open to new ideas if they are closed. i cannot make them other than who they are.

imagine if we took all of the energy we use trying to resist the stupidity of the world and directed it towards something positive. that thought, like this moment of sunlight on a little lake, takes my breath away.

vodka for every occasion

i saw this yesterday in germany and thought it was rather hilarious. and it's fitting for my mood this afternoon. just as i was headed in to teach my first class as part of a big new project, someone from the office called and nattered on about how pissed off these people were at "us" because she had been so incompetent in booking the actual classrooms. excuse me? you're sending me into a hornets' nest? and have made it seem like i'm also incompetent?  as you might imagine, this put me really right there where i needed to be to teach. i'm nervous enough, since it's teachers i'm teaching. i may have to pick up a bottle of this stuff next time i pop down to the border and put a big bow on it and give it to her.

speaking of vodka, there are a whole lot of new flavors of absolut - i'm not sure what i think about that and i didn't buy any. but i sure could use a shot a two before my evening meeting. it's one of those where we're usually on item 3 of a 10 item agenda at around 2.5 hours in. i actually thought about gnawing off my own arm to escape, like a fox caught in a trap, at the last one. i can tell you that i'm likely to go a bit postal (are we still allowed to say that?) if anyone makes fun of my accent this evening.  they're not likely to get out of that alive.

come to think of it, maybe a whole case of that fuck off vodka would be appropriate. gifts for all on my grudge list!

birds of a feather

i sometimes long for the days of intellectual salons, which is a little bit weird, because i don't think they've really happened within my lifetime.  but you know the kind -  where smart people dropped by to discuss the issues of the day and the things that were in the air (and possibly had a side conversation or two about swearing infixes - you know, like un-fucking-believable) . they discussed and possibly caused the movements - in art, in politics. and they smoked and drank cocktails and planned intrigues and probably went home and made paintings featuring stark black squares.

instead, i do daily battle with the well-intentioned but lesser gifted (that sounds so much better in danish - mindrebegavet), the rumor-mongers and those who are decidedly shy of conflict.

i sometimes long for a literary/political salon so much it aches. and i wish we still lived in such times. i wonder if it's possible to make it happen again?

how does one get birds of a feather to flock together?