A little self-indulgence goes a long way.

There comes a time in every dallying blogger’s life when she must simply write. Time to turn on the spigot and let the muse loose, talking about… whatever.

But the truth is that my mind these days is a little blank. After a long semester and after dodging illness (not an easy feat with two adorable bags of germs swirling about me), I am drained. Well no. Not wholly drained: I am just tired. The semester ended on a high note, thank goodness, with a small documentary a few friends and I produced getting picked up by a whole bunch of different blogs. We may enter it into a couple of film festivals. We worked very hard on it, so it’s a proud and happy moment– a fleeting one that I don’t know quite how to savor, but whose delicate bouquet I am trying to swirl against the roof of my mouth. For those of you interested, here is that video of which I speak:

Yeah. It came out pretty good. It still needs a few tweaks here and there (most notably, the audio), but yeah. This is as good a place as any to insert some outrageously happy .gif.

Right? Let Joseph Gordon-Levitt do my happy dance for me. That’s what I always say.

Okay…. with that bit of bragging out of the way, I come to this: I am okay with being an omphalokeptic, neurotic artist. Super-duper, totally fine. Except that now I need money, dammit. Because being a tortured artist only goes so far, and in my case I have two young mouths to feed. So I need to start making some $. Any ideas, thoughts, suggestions or actual offers of work that does not involve food service are appreciated– one of my recurrent nightmares is of waking up smelling like pico de gallo. But seriously. I need your help or support or whatever it is that I can get from the interwebs, other than .gifs and memes.

Pretty please?

Once upon a time, there was a caterpillar.

And then, it finished what it started.

You know there is something morally and fundamentally wrong when you’re jealous of an insect.

But I am, and there probably is.

Butterflies, man. What is UP with butterflies, right?
They finish what they start –unless they die or get eaten or are utilized as bait, ending their little lives impaled upon a hook and then mauled by a catfish or something like that.
Caterpillars are, in most cases, rather aesthetically unappealing. Some are downright ugly and terrifying and dangerous and SOME STING. But then they just shut off the world and mummify themselves in this little tomb and suddenly they become beautiful and accomplished and free.

There is no epiphany here: there is just a pointless and ridiculous coveting. Because, really, butterflies only live about one month; they have to eat their own egg sac; and when they are thirsty, they have to drink from nasty, mud-filled puddles: I suppose they deserve one break.
Carry on, lepidopterans. If you made it to the butterfly stage, you kind of deserve it.

They are my everything, even if I lose them every once in a while. Don't judge.

Mothers come in all shapes and sizes. And they also come in all levels of judgment.

Some come from faraway lands –like perhaps Mississippi– and they find your child wandering around the American History Museum. They can hear you calling your child frantically, perhaps, or they just see your face of desperation.

They call you “sweetheart” and they assure you they’ve been in your shoes before. Maybe more than once, they say, they’ve felt the sick pounding of their heart lodged in their throat as they flip through the mental Rolodex of Who To Call In Case Of This Emergency, Oh God. They hand you napkins and hankies as you try to compose yourself pretending to enjoy an exhibit titled Cars on Film. You utter “bless you” completely unironically, while Bill Murray drives with the groundhog, aware that you really, really want these people blessed and protected and held up as paragons of what many, including you, thought was a dying society.

Some other mothers also see your child –that same erstwhile lost child, yes, who is three and after whom you are pretty sure the term, “the Fucking Threes” was coined– trying, unattended, to go down the “up” escalator at a thank-everything-that-is-good-in-this-life NOT BUSY Union Station. They see you, clutching the other child’s hand, face dumb with disbelief, jaw nearly unhinged, walking up to him and starting a tirade. Starting another tirade: that is what you seem to be doing all the time.

Your child, glad to see you, feeling a little sheepish and a little lost, starts walking toward you. All eyes follow the path from mother to prodigal child. It happens very fast, but not as fast as the words can come out of her mouth, ringing in your ears and making you see red:

“You’re obviously not doing a good enough job watching your child. You’re not doing a good job as a mother.”

After an entire day that involved walking, hugging, chiding, rescuing, feeding, reassuring, chiding, walking, sweating, crying, yelling and chiding some more, punctuated by a sobbing fit at a museum, I realize mothers come in all shapes and sizes and levels of judgment.

I also realized that, as an incredibly tired mother, of dwindling patience, I would be goddamned if I let her talk to me like that. So after doing my bit of sass, I asked her –rhetorically, as it turns out, because she never replied– if she had many happy children at home.

Later, another woman caught up to me and apologized on behalf of that stranger.

“I guess she cannot be a mother, the way she yelled at you.”

Maybe mothers, at their core, do not come in all shapes and sizes. Maybe it’s all just a matter of some people refusing to be cruel, and having a soul.

PS: If you have no children and are thinking of calling someone a bad mother in front of a whole bunch of strangers, Lord help you if that mother happens to be me.

Because sometimes it feels good to say, "fuck it."

One can get tired of being an apologist for one’s work, especially if one is pursuing some sort of bullshit fine arts masters degree that one’s ex-husband once pointed out was a really stupid thing to do, especially in this economy.

And by “one” I mean me. I totally, definitely, mean me.

I’m tired of justifying it all.

Sometimes, taking a picture is fun.
That’s all there is to it.
It may not be the best and most wonderful picture, or it could be. It could just be adequate– a picture that says little else other than “meh.”
You see it, you get on with your life. In twenty minutes, it’s gone. But it doesn’t need to mean much.
Because if I tell you the deeper layers of meaning — how I tried to line up Venus and Jupiter with the dome of the Capitol in an attempt at lining up hypothetical power with mythical power; how I pushed my camera’s ISO in a futile attempt to show that the machine can be mightier than the night sky and by so doing, reflecting on the true source of the city’s power; that the beam of light is supposed to guide your eye directly toward the celestial bodies; that the overexposure of the dome is supposed to be a mime of the planets– then I would put any future art critics out of business.
What’s the point of explaining anything if there is an entire industry of people out there, raring to explain and defend your work for you?

That is, if your work ever sees the light of day.

Until then, it’s just you, me, the planets and the bots.

For one, March was the month when, seven years ago, I started this humble blog, where I have ranted and raved and written and generally kept myself amused and self-guilted into continuing to do it.

I also found out I was pregnant, that same March.
(Aside: NOTHING ever prepares you for that moment when the second line appears.)

March was the month I met my future husband– the month we had our first date.

It was also the month in which I discovered there was no turning around in his no longer being my husband.

It was also the month, two years ago, in which he went to faraway and violent lands.

And March was also when I moved to this mythical land of beauty and corruption, lo these six years.
And during that March of 2006, I fell irreversibly in love with this strange little swampy hamlet that a friend once described as, “a city in training wheels.” I have sweated and shoveled snow and been windblown seven ways to Sunday; I’ve provided nourishment for 80,000 mosquitoes as well as two sons; I have cursed more helicopters than I’d previously seen in the sum total of my life’s experience; I have touristed up and photographed motorcades and blossoms and statues and congressmen. I have pointed at flags and bawled through Fourth of July fireworks and seen history being made four blocks away from my house.

And I’ve also found myself. I just didn’t know I was hiding somewhere in DC all this time.

I want to thank the month of March for existing in calendars.

Contrails of Mind-Fuckery

Life is an ocean of mixed signals.
One moment, you ride high on the waves of your own chemicals:
You hang ten; you mug around; you are the big Kahuna.
The next, the tide makes you its bitch.
You eat sand; feel the coral reefs rise up and stab you.

I realize this has nothing to do with contrails.
Like, at all.

The mixed metaphor, however, feels appropriate to illustrate the mixed signal. Of all the things that sit gingerly in the Not In Control category, the visual/written confusion may help most of all.

And loss of control should feel jarring and a little odd and not totally intentional, but intentional enough that you’re left feeling frustrated and like you perhaps really meant to say something else and, in retrospect, you really should have proofread this before hitting “publish” because even though confusion and stream-of-consciousness is kind of your bag and apparently that one last entry when you were intentionally confusing and got off on a tangent about Hollywood actors was quite funny and, in fact, hit a few funny bones, there is absolutely no guarantees that it’ll happen again and dammit, you’ve gone on record about how much you hate run-on sentences.

So, you know, it’s either that, or I just managed to confuse myself again.

Success.

Makeup =identity.

Self-perception is a funny thing.

The party line: define yourself.
Be yourself.
Be true to yourself.
Don’t betray your roots (but if you’re a girl, go ahead and touch them up).
Find yourself.
Don’t lose yourself.

We’re pelted with little cheerful and helpful messages by these blowguns spitting little wadded up projectiles from self-help books.

But then we sometimes have these strange opportunities to see ourselves like others see us.

If others see us in a way we don’t wish to see ourselves, does that invalidate our search for self? Or does it just make it that much more pressing?

Do we get to blow spit-and-paper bullets back?

What if the person who stares back at us from the mirror and in photographs and funny stories and family accounts turns out to be a stranger?

Don’t forget yourself: life is made up of separate and unique moments, but they can all be stitched together with Photoshop.

Do I need a reason to share a bit of pretty?
I’m going to go with, “no.” But just in case you need words to accompany your pictures around these here parts, think of the moon: is it possible to be indifferent to it?
I’m sure it is, but physics agrees with me: because of its close proximity to earth, the moon has a small but significant gravitational pull over bodies of water– we call this phenomenon, tides.

We are bodies made of water. The moon affects us even if we believe ourselves immune to that power.

And sometimes, quite inexplicably, we feel that pull. Strongly.

Watch out for that full snow* moon coming up. You might feel a pull.

_________

*Native Americans used to call this upcoming moon the full snow moon. Because, apparently, it used to snow around here in winter.

Hah.

One of the works we saw was by Minor White and titled simply “Sequence 4.”

We stared politely and then the professor urged us to comment.

Staring back at us was a series of images featuring long, narrow crevices; things that looked long, and narrow; hard surfaces; things that looked splattered and smeared.

Holes, holes, holes.

Do you have any guesses as to the nature of his work? I think refrigerator bulbs were being turned on across the auditorium, slowly but steadily. (Click here for a hint.)

But there was nary a peep.

There is a weird politeness that permeates an environment minutes or seconds before somebody blurts something that society perceives as inappropriate.

And then there is a release, and the inappropriateness comes gushing out and we can all explode together in shock and laughter.

I can only imagine there is a similar release when you reveal a small or big truth about yourself.

Thank goodness life tends to happen to us all in spite of ourselves, because otherwise I would spend more time than is dignified in the fetal position, hugging my knees and wondering where I could better hide so as to avoid pain, irritation, and further humiliation.

But my self-doubt –ever-present, unwelcome, and comfy like a hairshirt– keeps me honest, I suppose. And sometimes I can break away from it a little bit.

I can do this.

I can take a picture that speaks (even if it’s just to me), and one that I can go back and look without feeling that pit-of-the-stomach nausea that insincerity can bring about.

I can have moments where things make sense; where the process can be tangible and beautiful; and where, much like with a grand old staircase from long ago, things build upon themselves and my feet feel secure and I can sprint upstairs and simply feel the joy of defying gravity a few inches at a time.

But gravity makes you work for every inch– and how.