Froshty Mugs

An occasional forum I use to earn "She was funny" on my gravestone.

Friday, July 27, 2007

Reasons Why I Blog

About a week ago, Ian tagged me with this question. I was never good at tag as a kid because it involved running fast and my legs' notion of fast was a turtle crawl. However, this is a cyber tag, so I think I can do it.

1. I blog to have a central place to record my descriptions of events or share my feelings because so often, people ask me how my latest trip to Peru is or what's going on with me. Before I started blogging, I would have to repeat these things numerous times on the phone and in e-mails to inviduals and invariably, I'd leave something out that I'd have to explain later. With a blog, I'm saved from the "Oh, yeah, I forgot to say...blah, blah, blah" postscript or apology.

2. I blog so that I can comment on my brother's blog. Okay, that's not true any more. But when Ian started his first blog, you had to register and have a blog if you wanted to comment. So, I created one just so I could tell Ian that I was the sister who *didn't* hold his foot down so that he couldn't move until he screamed in frustration.

3. I blog because I love to write anything but fiction, but sometimes I'm not fulfilled after writing (1) a 2500-page whitepaper about data storage for business continuity; (2) a proposal describing each and every training session I'll offer a potential client to help their staff learn how to install use their optical character recognition cameras on gantry cranes and then use a web-application to compare the output from those cameras to the input in their databases; (3) an article stating the case for putting radio frequency tags on every shipping container in the world; (4) a description of the quality control process used by one of my clients to ensure that they hire only certified medical coders with the latest knowledge of the ICD-9; (5) a letter to a state senator asking him to introduce a bill that will designate a building a historic property to prevent a developer from tearing up the sidewalk around it; (6) a report that explains the results of a survey of 40 companies to determine whether they still process orders manually or if they use software and systems. However, the idea of writing a novel makes me break out in a cold sweat. So, instead, with a blog, I get to pretend I'm David Sedaris and write essays that are either about me or parodies of things that bother me.

4. Like Ian, I blog to connect with siblings. Since I haven't gotten around to accumulating friends from the blogosphere, because to do that, I have to read other people's blogs and I've just started doing that, my sisters and Ian are pretty much the only people who read and comment on my blog posts regularly. It's so satisfactory to help them relive funny or happy times in our lives and react to them in their comments.

5. I blog so that my cats have even more reason to walk across the keyboards of my laptops, leap onto the box that serves as a woofer and tweeter for my Dell Dimension desktop, knock my books and papers onto the floor, sleep behind the cable modem, and fight with me for the occupancy of my office chair. Blogging adds more hours to the days when I'm on the computer for 8-12 hour stretches and that means that the cats have even more time to mess with my office area and computers.

6. I blog because people ask me to write more. My only regret is that I don't have as much time to blog as I'd like to. I hope that this will change before long, but because I love to work hard and I love what I work on, I don't know if it will.

7. I blog because sometimes I'm bored. There are times when I have to wait for a 6-meg brochure to wind its way through cyberspace or I don't have any work to do, but I have to be near my computer to take help desk calls. I can only read so many personal emails and play so many games of solitaire. Blogging helps stave off that boredom because if there's one thing I really hate, it's to be bored.

I think that's all the reasons. I don't have anyone to tag because Ian opened the challenge and Emily's already taken Ian up on his tag.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words

Leaving the beach is always sad for us. I'm sad because my two-week period of rest, relaxation, and reading is over and the girls are sad because they always make friends when they're down there that they then have to leave. This year, I decided to cheer us up by driving along the Island's two main beach roads looking for illustrations of what I was talking about in my last post when I described what we as children hoped we'd be staying in at the beach and the stark reality of where we ended up. It's also been three years since I tried to upload a graphic on this blog, so this should be interesting.

First, here's the type of house we hoped we'd be staying in:


Here's a house that is a little more like what we would drive up to:


This one is also a candidate for a Michie beach house:




But, the piece de resistance is this beauty:


This one is for sale with the unique message, "For lease, sale, or trade." Maybe I should buy it for the sake of old times.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Thoughts from the Beach

Mary, Anna, and I have been at the beach since June 30 with Wayne's family and assorted friends and "drop-in" guests. We've been coming here together since 1999, usually at the same time, and we usually stay in the same house, a bright, open place with four bedrooms, a loft, and an observation deck that's level with the house roofline. This hasn't really been a complete vacation for me because I've still had to take Help Desk calls and work on projects, but it's been way more relaxing than being at home. This is because, at about 4:30 or 5:00 p.m. each weekday, I tear myself away from this laptop and walk the short walk to the beach, book in hand, where Wayne has a chair, umbrella, and cold soft drink waiting for me. I stay there, reading with the surf in the background, and after about an hour and a half or two hours, I feel really relaxed and return to the house to make dinner (something that I only seem to enjoy when I'm not at home). On weekends, my time in front of the ocean is much longer, often from before lunch until an hour or so before sunset. I rarely go in the water because that entails reapplying sunscreen on a sandy body (not fun) because no sunscreen is waterproof, no matter what they promise on the bottle. Also, I get knocked down and dragged along seashell beds by the gentlest waves, emerging with ears and nose full of water and scraped skin and bruises on my legs, so that also keeps me from running in the ocean. I don't mind this, because, to me, the ocean is like snow--it's something to love from a distance (like up on the sand or through a window or from an observation deck), but not to have too much direct contact with. After I've been exposed to the sound of the surf and the wind for at least an hour, I feel like I can handle anything stressful that life throws at me and I sleep much better than I ever do at home.

This year, for some reason, I've been reminisicing about past beach trips as I marvel at what I consider a whole separate culture--the family beach trip culture--and ponder two of the 12 books I brought along to read (which have all been read now, to my dismay, but fortunately there are some "beach house books" here that I haven't read), and I felt like sharing some of my thoughts here.

Childhood Beach Trips
One of the things I think about a lot when I'm here are my childhood beach trips. For years, I thought that beaches were similar to desert islands with hardly any people on them. I didn't understand what people meant when they said that beaches got crowded. "Crowded with what?" I'd wonder. "Seagulls? Beach houses?" It wasn't until I was in my teens that I actually saw a crowded beach.

The reason for this is the curse of the fair skin. When I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s, SPF 50 sunscreen was unheard of. Actually, no lotion was even given an SPF rating at all. As a result, anyone with skin as fair as everyone's in my family, was a candidate for the lobster look and future trips to the doctor to discuss melanoma if they were in the sun for any period of time between about 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. during the day. So, when I was young, we'd get up very early and go with my father (and sometimes my mother if she wasn't busy with breakfast or my younger brother) down to the beach sometime around 7:00 a.m. We'd stay there until about 8:30 and then go back to the house for the family's self-imposed sun exile until after 4:30, when we could go back out and stay longer, mindful that we all had to be in bed before 9:00 p.m. Sometimes, if my mother came with us in the morning, we could stay out longer than 8:30 a.m. if she slathered us with Sea 'N Ski because she objected to Coppertone for some reason, but we still had to go in by 9:30. (I miss Sea 'N Ski--I haven't seen it on the shelves in years. The smell always sent me back to the beaches of my childhood.)

We were all very happy with this arrangement. We'd all been sunburnt at some point in our lives and it was horribly painful and then itchy so we didn't want to get sunburnt if we could help it. Because of our early and late hours, the beaches were essentially ours for the taking--we could race along the edge of the water for what seemed like miles and dig huge sandcastles wherever we wanted because there weren't any "beach camp vs. beach camp" wars. My mother always managed to bring along some fun board games or graph paper (for Battleship) and we'd play those games for most of the day, if we weren't reading. I remember fondly a beach house called "The Pink Panther" that had a screened porch that ran along the length of one side of the house (on the sound side, I believe), where we played Monopoly (and possibly Life) for hours, even during a thunderstorm. Nowadays, with SPF 50, big straw hats that tie under my chin tightly, and strong beach umbrellas, I can go to the beach at any time of day I want as long as I sit in the shade, mostly covered. I'm glad that I can be there for longer times, but when I listen to Wayne plot his ideas of how he plans to win the "beach camp wars," which exist even on this fairly sparsely populated beach, I miss the times when that wasn't a concern. Maybe that's why I really still enjoy the hours between 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. on the beach so much--they take me back to a simpler time when my family ruled entire stretches of sand.

The other thing I remember vividly about my childhood beach trips is something that continues to amuse my daughters even now that they're teenagers. My family's decision to go to the beach was usually made after the first of the year and involved my mother's making phone calls and looking through books that advertised beach houses for rent. As children, we never paid much attention to that part of it other than to suggest to my parents that they rent houses with names that we liked (which is how we came to stay at the Pink Panther that year). Therefore, when it came time to drive to the beach, we had no idea what our house would be like. We'd arrive at whatever beach we were going to (my parents took us to a lot of beaches along the North Carolina coast from below Wilmington to the northern Outer Banks) and we'd be told the beach house name and address and given the task of helping my parents find it. We'd drive by brightly painted, tall, two-story wonders with exciting decks and huge windows right on the beach, all of us children hoping that we'd spot the house and it would be one of those. Invariably, however, because my parents were living on the salary of a professor at a small all-women's college and not that of a manager at Western Electric or RJR, my father would turn down the street until we were at least 3 blocks from the ocean, and eventually pull in front of a house that usually looked like it was a candidate for condemnation, complete with faded asphalt shingles and dingy, slightly rusted metal awnings and at least one screen door that wouldn't shut properly so that it banged in the wind and convinced us that the house was haunted. Because this was the 1960s and 1970s, none of these houses had air conditioning or televisions, which we really didn't miss because we didn't have air conditioning or anything but a black and white TV that was mostly for watching the news, but we still felt it would have been nice to stay in a house that offered those amenities just to see what it was like. When I was very young, we stayed at one house around the Ocracoke area that had spiders in a bathtub that was one step away from having claw feet. In fact, it might have had them, but I was so young that I don't remember anything much except how huge and scary the spiders were (as a side note: I love claw-foot bathtubs now that I'm an adult but as a child I was slightly afraid of them). Finally, the year I turned 18 and graduated from high school, we stayed in one of our dream houses, but that's because we shared it with another family and it was a number of blocks from the ocean. Because I was 18 and my sister was 16, however, we wanted to be as far away from our parents as possible, so we didn't spend much time in that house and instead careened around the Atlantic Beach area in the family car, looking for cute boys and clubs where we could go dancing.

When Mary and Anna were younger and we were driving here, I told them about how we wished we were staying in a brand new beach dream house and what we actually ended up staying in. Now it is a favorite game of theirs when we drive along this beach to ask me to point out ramshackle two-bedroom shacks with siding blown off that might have been a Michie beach house once upon a time, especially if we have a guest who has not been here before. This year, it was Anna's boyfriend. After I point out one or two of these houses, they get into the spirit of it shouting, "Look, there's a Michie house right there!" and collapsing into laughter.

The Family Beach Trip Sub-Culture
Before I met Wayne and after I grew up and got married, I didn't go to the beach very often. When I did go, it was usually either a quick weekend jaunt with a one- or two-night stay in a motel with fast food as our meals or a drinking spree with "the girls." Even when I was young, our trips were to different beaches at different times of the year. My mother would pack a few food items, some games, the Sea 'N Ski, a couple of blow-up floats, and plastic buckets and shovels, and off we'd go. As a result, I had no clue that there is an entire Family Beach Trip Sub-Culture that has existed for years. This culture includes owning items like special low-rise beach chairs that are made only for sitting on the beach, skim boards and boogie boards, sand augers that you manually twist deep into the sand to hold beach umbrellas so that they aren't blown over, small coolers for six packs of beer or Cokes, water bocce ball games, and small anchors that you can put in the water and tether floats for small children so that the floats aren't carried out to sea. There are also beach carts and golf carts for carrying all this paraphernalia so that you don't have to make lots of trips to the oceanfront. And now, there are fairly wind-proof canopies that you can set up so that more people can be in the shade. I used to be amazed at all the items for sprucing up your life and your house during the Christmas season, but this beach paraphernalia thing has that completely beat.

This sub-culture does not stop at possessions. It also extends to the houses and schedules as well. Until I started going to the beach with Wayne, I thought that getting a beach house that you wanted when you wanted it was a crap shoot and if you were lucky, the stars and planets would align themselves and the house and schedule would work out for you. I marveled at the amazing luck of people who got the same beach house at the same time year after year, including Wayne's parents. Finally, Wayne let me in on the secret: during your stay at the beach house, you have until the Wednesday of the week you're staying to go to the beach rental people and reserve the house for the same time the next year for a relatively small reservation fee. You then have until January of the next year to confirm that reservation or cancel it. For Wayne, this is perfect, because he is a creature of habit who likes things to be the same as much as possible, and, except for a few lapses that have resulted in our having to move to a second house after one week, we've managed to be in this house since 2000. Every once in a while, I look at the book of available beach houses and think of other houses and other times to come here. Wayne and I discuss the possibility of all of these, but in the end, we decide that this period in the summer works best for us, and so does this house.

The other thing I learned is that, in North Carolina, beach houses that are manged by rental companies or real estate companies are rented from Saturday to Saturday. I used to think that you could rent a house for any day of the week and keep it for a few days. Of course, you can do that if you choose, but it's more expensive that way. For some reason, I find this comforting. Maybe it's because in my internal struggle to fit in with the rest of the world when I really don't feel that I do (and at times wonder why I want this), when I hit I-40 East with hundreds of other families all headed to the beach at the same time I am, I get that belonging feeling I long for much of the time.

Beach Reading
The popular media labor under the misapprehension that the only books you should read at the beach are page-turning thrillers that are long on action and short on philosophy or deep thought. Because those types of books make up about 90% of the normal reading that I do when I'm not on vacation, a number of them end up in my beach book bag; however, I also take along books that I've acquired in the last year but have continued to put aside in favor of lighter reading. I usually have a long list of "I should read this" books that often gather dust on the bedside table while I race through Janet Evanovich's latest. However, when I'm down here, the only books I can read are those that I bring with me, so those dusty books are put in the bag and are read avidly. This year, I brought The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and American Chica by Marie Arana. I am a big Joan Didion fan but had been hesitant to read a book that is devoted to discussing the death of her husband and the illness of her only daughter and that's why I had owned it since January without reading it. My mother sent me American Chica because I love almost all things Peruvian and the author was writing about her childhood in Peru and America and what it was like to have a Peruvian father and an American mother. At the time she sent it, I had just finished a book by Mario Vargas Llosa and one by Isobel Ellena and after reading the first chapter of this one, I decided I needed a break from the harum-scarum wording that threads its way through the heart of Latin American prose and I set it aside.

On the surface, neither book would seem to related to the other. Joan Didion is sharing her grief and her thoughts about her life without her husband who died of heart failure in 2003 and Marie Arana is writing about her childhood. After I finished both, however, I realized that they were actually both tales about the marriages of two couples who were of the same generation--that of my parents. In Didion's case, it was her own marriage and in Arana's, her book focused on her parents' marriage. Both marriages were larger than life with deep abiding love and huge disagreements and both lasted more than 40 years. The interesting thing was that the marriages were so different. Didion wrote several times that she and her husband John were rarely apart. They were both writers who had home offices and the few times they were separated involved their traveling as journalists to cover some event. Didion commented that the time they were separated could be measured in days. Arana's book recounted how her parents tried living together in Peru for 14 years without any measure of success because her mother was unhappy in a culture that believed basically in the subjugation of a wife to her mother-in-law and thought that independent women were only worthy of contempt. The parents then tried living together in Summit, New Jersey, and that was also unsuccessful because her father missed his homeland so much. In the end, they compromised and her father would travel to Peru and other parts of South America for several months at a time and in the end, they were a very happy couple who lived for their reunions.

When I think over the books, I'm amazed that Joan Didion, who appears to be a strong person that pursued personal freedoms throughout her life, had such a dependent marriage and I'm amazed that a Peruvian man found himself happy in a marriage that was completely unlike many of the marriages of those of his Peruvian class and culture--where men might stray to a mistress or a brothel, but not away from home for months. It just goes to show what happens when I create pictures of people in my mind without knowing the whole story. I also wonder if I married someone from Peru or another culture, would I suffer simply because I was an American and fight with my in-laws or would I decide to throw myself into the culture completely, walking away from my life as a woman who runs a household by herself. This might seem like a silly thing to worry about since I have a long future with Wayne, but I look at it as a philosophical exercise. Sometimes it's tiring to be a single mother and an independent, successful career woman making crucial decisions by myself almost every day. The idea of giving my life over to someone else, whether it's a husband or a mother-in-law, is very seductive sometimes. On the other hand, when I think of my almost 30-year battle with the stove and mop, I have to laugh at myself thinking I could either cook or clean for any length of time without doing anything else for years. I'm sure there is no anti-depressant on the market today that could help me handle that kind of future.

Last night, I talked to Wayne a little bit about the two types of marriages I'd read about. We decided that, given our personalities, we had a greater understanding of the happiness derived from having separate lives than one in which the couple lives in each other's pockets. Neither he nor I want to live thousands of miles from each other for months at a time, but we do think that having breaks from each other is a great idea. We have also discussed buying a duplex to live in during our retirement, with me on one side and him on the other or something similar to that. My sisters tell me constantly that the reason we've been so happy for almost 9 years is because we don't live together. He and I both agree that they're right. When either of us is irritated by the other, we can go home. That way we avoid the undesirable result of the irritation festering long enough to become an unhealthy discharge of accusations and emotion. We're able to laugh at each other's foibles instead of actively declaring war on them. Since I envision a retirement with no pet care and little strife or discord, I think that the duplex idea makes sense.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Sucking at Life

Sometimes, when I say that I don't know the answer to a simple question or I'm unable to perform a simple task, my younger daughter (who will be 17 in one month and one day), will say, "Well, you suck at life." I've heard her say it often enough now to realize that it is hyperbolic and is not really a statement about my life in general, but it's a statement about how good I am with the minutiae of living. Recently, she said this to me on a day when I read my sister's and brother's blogs, both of which involved compliments that they have received and what they considered the 10 best. Because of their blogs, I recalled one of the most surprising compliments I've ever received which was from a friend that I greatly admire (and who has just ended a ruthless combined session of chemo and surgery to curb breast cancer). She once told me that she admired me because of how much I accomplish each day and how much I've accomplished in my life. I was thrilled, but very shocked, because I see myself as barely making it through each day by the skin of my teeth while my house continues a downward spiral into disarray, decay, and depreciation; my pets are eaten alive by critters like fleas; bats fly down my chimney because I've never gotten around to putting a screen down it; and my daughters are forced to order pizza or Chinese for the fifth time in one week because I'm pounding on my keyboard late into the night and won't emerge from my exile to my office long enough to cook something and I have not provided them with anything in the cupboard for them to cook other than an old box of jambalaya mix with bugs in it and an ancient broccoli and cheese soup mix.

The merging of the notion of not being good at life's minutiae yet managing to impress a friend came just the other day as I was sitting on the beach with my significant other, Wayne. He noticed a couple walking on the beach with their very young daughter and pointed them out to me as "the next couple for the vacation guide cover." He and I play this game often--we point out people that we see and peg them for different roles in life and the vacation guide cover is one of our favorites. Even though it was extremely windy and a rainstorm had ended a bare 30 minutes before, the little girl's hair was charmingly arrayed in lovely ringlets with a bright bow in it, there was not a speck of sand on any of them, and the woman was wearing one of those cottony-crepe oversized beach wraps in the style of a man's Oxford shirt over her bathing suit. I remarked to Wayne that if that couple had been Alex (my ex), my daughter Mary when she was young, and me, we would have looked like we'd been sandblasted in an attempt to remove the bright pink and red hues of our sunburns, Mary's hair would be a huge mass of tangles that no ribbon could go through, and the shirt would be clinging to my legs so that I could barely walk and blowing open at the top so that the whole world could see that my stomach never recovered totally from childbirth, leaving me to grab at it ineffectually while trying to hold Mary's hand.

The reason that I don't see myself as being successful at life is because I am bogged down by my inability to do many of the small things other people do so effortlessly. For example, I cannot attach a cell phone to my body in anyway that does not result in either a crushed cellphone because a car ran over it after it fell off my belt loop on the way to a hockey game (true story) or a frantic search through my cars and those of others to try and locate a phone that has fallen out of the clip somewhere in the course of a day. I am also completely unable to keep earphones either on my ears or attached to MP3 players, laptop computers, phones with headsets, or diskmen/walkmen. They either become unattached when the device they're attached to falls off my body or out of my pocket or I get my hands or some other body part tangled up in the wires and the wires detach themselves, usually by breaking so that they can't be used again. And forget about bluetooth headsets--they can only stay on my ear for about 30 seconds before sliding onto the floor. Wayne's son Jeff can go on 30-mile bike ride with his iPod strapped to his arm with an arm band and earphones without incident; I shudder to think what might happen to my poor iPod if I tried to use it while riding a bike.

I'm also unable to clean up spills properly and I cannot mop a kitchen floor to any satisfactory state of cleanliness. I can sweep the floor, then vacuum it, then sweep it again, but when I try to mop, there are huge dustbunnies that attach themselves to the mop. Many people think that I have someone clean my house every two weeks because I can afford it, but the real reason is that I cannot perform any house cleaning task successfully. If I try to use those wonderful scrubbing bubbles, after the first spray, the sprayer clogs and the bubbles become tiny spritzes of air or a dribbly bit of liquid. I don't want to go into cleaning toilets other than to say that no toilet bowl cleaner I've used ever flows upward and under the rim like you see on T.V. I'm not bad at getting dishes into the dishwasher, but thanks to the immense pressure put on me by Wayne to buy a dishwasher that was not my first choice so that I have a dishwasher that has a huge spot in the middle of the bottom rack where no dish can be put and an incompetent installer who did not hook it up to my hotwater valve (because that would have required extra work), it barely sanitizes the dishes. If even one little tiny speck of food is on anything, it's sure to be there still after the dishwasher has been run. Also, if there's any slightly difficult spot on my clothing, such as spaghetti sauce or a bit of chocolate, my attempts to remove it will result in its permanent addition to the item of clothing unless I send it to my mother for emergency spot removal.

I have a very difficult time cooking, too. I hate to stir things over a stove and am prone to forgetting to set the timer while something is baking and then either undercooking it or burning it into an unidentifiable mass that looks like something Neil Armstrong brought back after he walked on the moon. When I drain hamburger, there's a 50-50 chance that the grease will land on some part of my body. Combined with this are my wars with packaging. If a package has a "tear here" line, it will steadfastly refuse to tear. Then, I'm on a frantic search for scissors that ends fruitlessly with a butter knife that I try to poke into the package with either no or disastrous results. If it's one of those packages that you're supposed to pull apart, it either refuses to come unglued or it bursts open and half the contents ends up on the floor. This is more likely to happen if the contents include something like coffee, sugar, or cheesy powder that's difficult to wipe up. If I give up and manage to tear or cut the package open in some other way, the contents both rush out in a lump far away from the bowl or pot I want them to fall into or they cling desperately to the package so that only about a third comes out. I'm not even going to describe what happens with one of those salad dressing or mustard packs with a tiny slice on one end that's supposed to help you tear it open.

Then there's my computers. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the laptops I have (the one I'm using right now to type), has lost its R key and the other is the first laptop I've ever seen that has almost all the letters on the keys rubbed off. This is okay when I'm "touch typing," but if I'm hunting and pecking with one hand because I'm holding a phone with the other (remember, I can't use headphones), my keyboard turns into something akin to Chinese water torture. I will never forget the laughter of the customs agent in Lima that saw that laptop. All of my computers have unbelievable amounts of dust under and around their keys, even though I close my laptops every night. My friend Debbie has the same model of Thinkpad that I do that she got a full year earlier than mine and it looks like she just unpacked it. Of course, Deb is also able to edit 60-100 pages a day and still take time to sing in the church choir and do crafts, including baking gingerbread houses with her daughters. She's also a witty and fun person and a superior editor. Now there's someone worth admiring. Also, no one else I know has a cat throw up on their laptop, rendering it both completely ruined and classification as a biohazard.

My hair is a candidate for sucking at life, too. I can never get it to look like my stylist does, no matter how I try. If I try to blowdry it so that it curls under, one side will curl under but the other will flip out. My stylist has no such issues with it. I can't pull it back without it all falling out within an hour, either. And you know those quick updos and topknots that most women with shoulder-length hair can whip their hair into in about 30 seconds complete with a few hair clips? Well, I can forget even trying to do something like that without looking like I got out of bed after sleeping in a pony tail and damaging my scalp with the clips or pins.

Other things I can't do include:
  • Wearing anything with a strap (it'll invariably slide down my arm and tangle up on my wrist until it's almost sprained)
  • Carrying more than two things in my hand at a time (something always ends up on the ground)
  • Keeping a suitcase with wheels upright
  • Standing in the ocean without being knocked down by the first slightly strong wave
  • Exercising in the sun without swallowing half the sunscreen that's sweated off my face into my mouth
  • Sucessfully removing sand from my body and belongings
  • Eating ice cream without dropping some of it on my body or, if I'm wearing a light colored shirt, on my clothes
  • Eating a fast-food sandwich in the car--much like the ice cream, no matter how much I cover myself in napkins, I still get mayonnaise and ketchup on my person somewhere
  • Keeping a car in running condition for more than about a year, no matter what the age of the car or how often I take it in for tune-ups
  • Glowing with good health after exercising--instead, I look like I'm a candidate for the cardiologist's office with my bright red face and body covered in sweat
  • Being the kind of parent who keeps up with each child's life milestones and reminds them to do things like register for the SATs or sign up to get their senior pictures done or study more than one hour for an exam they need to get greater than an 80 on
  • Getting my daughters to pick up after themselves or putting something away as soon as they've finished with it (except at other people's houses, where they do that as easily as breathing)
  • Opening a CD case without cracking it, or worse, cracking the CD
  • Walking down the steps to my family room without missing the step and breaking my ankle

With these kinds of struggles with daily living, it's no wonder that I was shocked at my friend's compliment. The hardest thing is accepting that it's not likely that these struggles will end. In fact, they might get worse. So, my project at this point is to remind myself that my friend complimented me because of the big things I can accomplish and to try to stop sweating this small stuff. Unfortunately, the small stuff is more likely to jump up and remind me that I can't do it in some horrible way such as ankle splint or a stack of cracked CDs, but I have resolve. I'll let you know how it goes.

Monday, July 02, 2007

I Think I Might Be an Artist

I've been fortunate in my life to have been acquainted with a number of painters, including my sister. As a result, instead of scouring the Ballard Designs catalog or Pier One for reprints of real art to hang on my wall, I've been able to acquire, either free or at low cost to me, lots of great original paintings and other artwork done in interesting media. I get a lot of compliments on the artwork in my house and the only downside is when someone asks, "Are you an artist?" At that point, I have to say, "No. I just appreciate original art" or "No, my sister and some of my friends are." Over the years, when I've thought of all the talents that are handed out to individuals, I really wish that I had the gift of creating beautiful visual art, but, until recently, all I've felt I was gifted with were the abilities to hang art in just the right spot or paint a wall just the right color to show it off. Now, I'm starting to rethink my feelings about my abilities.

Now, I'm not a millionaire and much of my life, I've struggled along without much money, so you might be wondering how I ended up with this nice collection of original art. After all, artists need to make a living and can't just stand around handing people their work for nothing. That would be taking the notion of starving artist to the extreme. The answer to this is what I call "Acute Artistic Embarassment Syndrome." Every artist I've known, bar none, seems to have this syndrome, which causes them to loath and feel ashamed of their earlier work. When one of the artists I'm closest to surveys some of the paintings she's given me over the years, her mental cringing when she surveys it is palpable. It's true that she continues to grow as an artist and you can see how she's refined her technique and style over the years, but her early works are still awesome and I'm proud to own them.

Another artist I know had this syndrome to the extreme: When she decided to concentrate her considerable talents on making ceramic jewelry, she told me that she was going to burn all her paintings because she couldn't bear the sight of them. To me, this seemed like a criminal act, so I asked her if we could have some of the paintings she was planning to burn, and she gave us a bunch. My ex got custody of most of them in our divorce, which was a pity because I loved all of them, but I got my two favorites: one is the picture of a gladiola in a vase in front of an open window and the other is a picture of the fields that surround the N.C. Children's home, which is practically in downtown Winston-Salem and includes barns and a cows. That is one of my favorite places in my home-town and I feel intense pleasure when I see it.

Yet another artist I know was not as extreme as Children's-Home-Painter, but she had a tendency to start giving away her earlier works whenever her artistic path led her to a new medium. She said she felt guilty trying to sell work in a medium she would never work with again, so I was the beneficiary of much of her work whenever she changed media. (It also helped that I agreed to model for her in the nude, including when I was pregnant.)

I've also read biographies of artists that suffered from this syndrome. Modrian is the artist I remember suffering the most from this, but I think that Picasso and Monet also had it and so did others. I can't remember this for certain because it's been a long time since I read anything about Monet and Picasso.

I'm not sure what causes this syndrome. It's the complete opposite of what a lot of people do, which is long for times past rather than be ashamed of them. Maybe it's akin to that feeling that you have when you remember something you did as a child that was embarassing and you wish you hadn't done it, even if it helped you become a better person. Or, I feel it sometimes when I look over the few diaries I've kept and cringe at the teenager that wrote such things. On the other hand, when I read poetry that I wrote as a teenager, I rarely fail to be impressed with what once flew out of my so lyrically--I've lost that ability now and cannot write poetry like I used to. Now, I can only write silly birthday poems for friends--the angst and pain I felt as a teenager and poured into my work just isn't there anymore and, apparently, without that, I can't be a poet.

Last week, something happened to me and it made me think that I might have this syndrome. In my previous blog entry, I shamelessly self-promoted a website that I designed for one of my clients. I basked in the comments I got that it was a great website (my clients absolutely love it) and beamed when one person told me I was really talented. Well, since that website went live, I've started working on another one. And in my mind, the one I'm working on now, is so slick and so cool, that it blows the earlier one away. Now, when I show someone the earlier website, I'm ashamed of it. It looks blah and simple to me now. And probably, once this latest one goes live, I'll hate it, too, as I work on the next one.

So, if I have this syndrome, doesn't it follow that there might be an artist deep down inside me? I'd like to think so. Call me self-delusional, if you must, but I still think there's something to this.

(P.S. For those of you who are wondering, about three hours after I wrote my "Shameless Self-Promotion" entry, my company was actually the third result of a Google search for "Flexi-Word." Hmm....maybe Google saw my sycophantic raving about how useful Google is for me and decided to reward me? Okay, okay, now I am being self-delusional.)