Housewife Posse

She looks in the mirror and stares at the wrinkles that weren't there yesterday
And thinks of the young man that she almost married
What would he think if he saw her this way?

She picks up her apron in little girl-fashion as something comes into her mind
Slowly starts dancing rememb'ring her girlhood
And all of the boys she had waiting in line

Oh, such are the dreams of the everyday housewife
You see ev'rywhere any time of the day
An everyday housewife who gave up the good life for me

The photograph album she takes from the closet and slowly turns the page
And carefully picks up the crumbling flower
The first one he gave her now withered with age

She closes her eyes and touches the house dress that suddenly disappears
And just for the moment she's wearing the gown
That broke all their minds back so many years

Oh, such are the dreams of the everyday housewife
You see ev'rywhere any time of the day
An everyday housewife who gave up the good life for me

Oh, such are the dreams of the everyday housewife
You see ev'rywhere any time of the day
An everyday housewife who gave up the good life for me

I know…I know…totally sexist. Totally. The line: “she picks up her apron in little girl-fashion” makes me shutter like Sideshow Bob when he sees Bart Simpson. But I remember hearing this song when I was a little girl and being completely entranced by this secret society of Housewives and I wanted to be a part of it when I was five. It was the ultimate girls club. I’ve more or less been in this girls club for twenty years. There is a sense of ease in this club, setting our own hours and making the household rules. But up until ten years ago it was really hard and really boring. The hardest part was the constant interruptions. I felt much like one of these damsels in distress in the picture above (It's a photo I took in San Francisco a few years ago) The marauders in the background are our children and husbands. I don’t think Ms.A and I had an uninterrupted conversation the first five years of our friendship. Much less a conversation that followed a steady stream of thought because somebody needed their butt wiped, their nose wiped or their hair patted. Oh. My. God. It’s amazing we knew as much about one another as we did. Given most of our conversations went something like:

“So E told me the curriculum is about to be decided and it looks like trees and flow--Billy, NO!!! NO!!! You and Wally may not climb up the stairs like that!” “What were we talking about?”

“Flowers? Oh, did you get the primroses or the hybrid tea roses for the garden?” “Beav, if you want a cookie ask. Ask Ms. A politely with a please and a thank you, don’t just grab”

“Did I tell you theMr. found that Bulgarian tea we like…Where’s my baby [The Prince of Darkness was his nickname at the time]? Where did little Prince of Darkness go? Billy? Have you seen your brother? …

If reading that stream-of-consciousness didn’t make your head hurt, try living it. I lived those disjointed post preschool pre cocktailnap conversations.

But now we have real conversations and speak in complete sentences. Like grown ups. The only time we are interrupted is if Kipper is barking in the background and I have to pause and tell him to simmer down or knock it off or hush. I’ve enjoyed our long conversations and our leisurely walks and coffee dates but alas, another child is on the way and we are naming her The New Career. Ms. A has a sweet new job that’s a cross between Nina in the film Office Space and the chick featured in Cake‘s “Short Skirt and Long Jacket“ song from eons ago. I’m very happy for her and she is just one of several friends who are starting careers again in their 50’s. It’s exciting and amazing to watch. But…but…but…what about me????

sigh sigh sigh


I’ve no one to have coffee with now. My Housewife Posse are all employed outside their homes from 9 to 5 Monday through Friday and will be having cases of the Mondays, looking forward to Hump Day, TGIF and asking themselves if they are working hard or hardly working. And what do ya’ know? Me too! I’m going to be working consistently three weekdays with few weekends like a normal person. What the hell happened here? Posse when poof!

I guess I’m gonna have to get busy and you know…reinvent myself, too. I might as well because there isn’t anyone available for coffee next Wednesday.

When Good-bye Means Hello

ADD girl has three separate pieces started for this week’s blog. Fortunately, the other two will keep because they aren’t going to seem any less current in a week or three from today and y’all will never know next weeks idea didn’t spring forth from my forehead the second I sat at the computer. (Oh don’t I wish!) I’m on day three of three off and I’ve kept myself busy with projects in the drafty, dark basement I ironically refer to--when I’m feeling expansive--”the studio”. We celebrated my birthday in fine style at my favorite drinking hole. Nothing like starting a dreaded birthday in a whimsically decorated room sipping a breakfast martini with two of your very favorite people on the planet.

I finished organizing all the lace, trims, linens and fabrics I have been collecting or inherited over the years this past week, too. I refurbished a few tee shirts, sweaters and made a dress this week, too. I’m not such a great seamstress, very slow and can’t get it perfect enough before frustration sets in but this week, I swear I was channeling my mom; a talented seamstress and designer. I was doing things I didn’t know I had forgotten how to do. It was very cool and Zen.

For about a minute.

So for the last month I've been working on repurposing clothing, using bits and pieces of antique textiles on reclaimed/used clothing. I thought I would love it. I thought I would just love love love designing the clothing, doing the handwork, piecing them together. The Girl thought she would just love love love the grunt work at the sewing machine.

Um no.

And that’s ok.

It felt like a chore except for that minute when I fixed a waistband the majority of the time I was discouraged or bored or both.

But this is the first time I have abandoned a project and didn't feel like a failure or that I was quitting because I was too lazy to finish what I started. Quite to the contrary. I feel liberated in the knowledge that I'm really not meant to design clothing from scratch.

Tis the week for beginning new things or putting to rest old things. A Happiness Project was launched by one of my new Facebook friends (love this woman. Love. Her. Sister of a guy I went to high school with. He was cute and wild and sort of dangerous back then. Apple doesn’t fall too far from that tree or so it seems.) Another friend is meeting with a group of architects and designers to discuss the feasibility of starting a career in design in this economy (I have one word for her: Slim) Finally, I know I have yammered about this to death but my father is getting married! I can’t wait to get to know our new family. Everyone has been so warm and welcoming, it’s grace at work. Besides this I have a great excuse to go to Texas Hill Country as many times as they can stand me.

I'm still putting together an Etsy store (if I'm satisfied with this spring's work, I'll open in July and the few pieces of clothing we did will be there. I have a feeling the store is going to be a mish-mash of all sorts of things I like to do. My biggest fear is I will end up on regretsy.

Today is the first day in a few I’ve been really happy--at the bottom of my soul happy--in about a week. Growing older was weighing on me; my exhaustion with nursing is at a critical point; and my son’s frustration with joblessness and boredom is weighing on me. Apparently, it’s so hard on him he can’t bring himself to clean his room or empty the dishwasher when asked…but that’s another blog, isn’t it? And OH. MY. GOD. his utter lack of sound judgment has me closer to running away than my job! The good news (?) I’m not alone in this and know more mother’s with kids like this than I care to think about with shutter over the future of the planet. His underdeveloped cerebral cortex is making me wish for a lobotomy or running away some place no one think to look for me like Vegas or Pittsburgh.

But isn’t it wonderful I know what makes me happy? Playing with words, ideas, paper, glue, paint, and little bits of stuff makes me happy. Cooking, nagging, and taking care of sick people: not so much.

This made me really happy today:

The Discipline of Joy
3/10/2010
Joy's a choice. Joy's a discipline. Misery's easy. Sometimes, you don't feel like you can handle the burden of joy, so you slouch and frump and sigh and feel exhausted. Joy can be a real pain,like doing elevated push-ups on your TRX system in the basement. Right now, the joy doesn't want to ignite. I'm feeling the pressure of writing against the schedule of outside things. Inside vs. outside. I have to rush back to school today--my writing day--to sit in a PhD oral defense. Tomorrow, I have to teach, though I can get in some writing after. But Friday, I rush away to Tucson
Festival of Books. Love Tucson, love my friends there, love the festival, and I
love fancy hotel weekends with Cinderella. But...Teresita...Tomas...deadlines...work. I can't get it done. So my decision
today is to embrace the discipline of Joy. Capital J. Because I'm feeling a li'l
beat. Luis A. Urrea


It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it this burden of joy.

Find some joy. Like me, you might have to look in the spaces between the words or the space between the beat of your heart but it’s there. I promise.

Faded Photographs

Even though I have a lot of blog worthy ideas swirling around in my head; I promised myself this week, before I launch back into the world of nursing, I will finish Wally’s scrapbook. It’s about time isn’t it? I thought it would take maybe six months of diligent work but it took me eighteen months! I kept hitting creative or emotional walls and then came summer with the advent of my other writing project and gardening. The picture on the blog is the last image in the album. It was a very weird picture of him standing next to my dresser in my messy bedroom when he was two. Why I took his picture at that moment I’ll never remember. What makes this picture strange is it is triple exposed and in the shadows you can see Christmas as well as a fragment from an image on a deserted highway outside of Taos. Even in the 90’s with point and shoot cameras it was hard to double expose film. This film was exposed three times. I remember talking to the guy at the camera store who told me chances are the film didn’t advance in the camera and it was a small miracle any images were visible.. Much less a collage of images which capture our busy life, and at the time, happy life as a family. The Beav came downstairs Tuesday night when I was laying out the last pages and asked me if this was Wally’s Christmas present. I laughed the idea off because, please, would a 19 year old really want a baby book and scrapbook of their school years as a gift? Beav assured me that Wally has changed so much over the last two months that he would probably think it was “cool” I had finished the book. When I finished this afternoon, I was a little choked up like someone who had finished their first marathon. It was a relief to have completed the task but at the same time I was really saying good-bye to the little boy.

One boy album down, one to go.

I think Beav is secretly hoping I start on his book this winter but I’m a tired of looking at little boy pictures so I think the next project will be to put the very old and very fragile family photos Dad recently gave me in an album. Just a simple acid free album, no embellishments and the journaling will be limited to identifying (if I can) people in the photographs. Some of these photos are unspeakable funny and sweet: my cousin and Sister playing with Hula Hoops, baby me pulling Sister’s hair, my mother and her sisters over the years grouped together, the body language apparent which sisters had just fussed with one another. Many of the photos I’ve seen over and over again but one picture was a surprise. It’s a candid snapshot of my father and mother standing together, he is standing behind her and his face is almost shadowed by her hair blowing back. They are bundled up and probably huddled close against a chilly Kansas wind. Their hands are gently intertwined one with the other making this beautiful candid photo sweetly intimate. I love stealing glimpses at the past before I was born. I also have a set of photos from a particularly rowdy party my parents had when I was about two. Who knows where I was that night, probably locked in my room with my eight year old sister supervising me, giving me Kool-aid and animal crackers when she wasn’t trying to convince me to stick my head between the very wide slats. I’m kidding I was probably not in a playpen but playing with a screwdriver and an electrical outlet [wink]*) Anyhow, those crazy kids were having fun, drinking their very strong cocktails and smoking their strong cigarettes. Those were the days, weren’t they when you could put your two year old in a play pen, get drunk and smoke. Damn, I was born too late.



*for the record, I was at my grandmother’s house and was no doubt being indulged by her and teased by my older cousins.

Art for Art's Sake

<

June got her culture and art on last week; between a friend of a friend’s art opening; scavenging tag sales for art and finally an annual open air art market downtown; I can safely say I have seen enough art...…at least until next week when I go to Next Town and make a quick tour of the local modern art museum. Sadly, my taste in art has been referred to as pedestrian and predictable despite my appreciation of the abstract over the representational. I grew up with really bad representational landscapes (sorry mom, your work was too safe) so I bristle a little when I see them. But when representational pieces reach out to me it is usually because the artist tells the truth of the object through color. She sees the glint of light off water as the color gray tipped with yellow and thereby makes it--creates if you will--a glint of light on water. This gift fills me with awe, wonder and envy. To be able to make color and paint hang together in such a way that I see what she saw in the moment she was painting, is genius. Abstract painters amaze me, too. They think and paint outside the lines. No safe vistas and bibulous skies for them! Their leaps of faith make me giddy. A few months ago the local posh university was offering an adult ed class in oil painting and overcoming fear: the colors will be layered and therefore muddy, I will hate it and therefore wasted $$ on a canvas and paint. It was like the instructor called me and asked me: “if you love color, texture and form so much why don’t you paint?“ Hopefully, the class will be offered again.

The theme of the opening last Thursday was so obscure and ridiculous but I am reluctant to blog about it because I feel mean-spirited: as if I am utterly clueless about the often difficult process of creating. The show revolved around a theme and featured four artists each representing a different medium. My limited art background is perhaps why I found the show to be--well frankly--an absurd and pointless exercise in deconstructing space. Because literature wasn’t enough now we must deconstruct space. I can grope my way through the murky waters of Deconstructionism and it’s tenants. In the beginning, I was fascinated with subtext and all the blah-blah theory but after my initial dewy-eyed fascination, I found it to be ludicrous and a waste of time and academic energy. My favorite description of the importance of deconstructing text was: “so we can read the pauses and spaces between the letters.” Oh. What. The. Fuck. Ever.

This is a snippet of the show‘s statement: “. . .an exhibition featuring works of art that non-representationally refer to human bodily figure. Whether a surviving mark or mere evidence of the former existence--blood stains, sweat, hair, footmarks--indexical signs create a narrative.” The statement continues to instruct this collection of work “delves more into semiotics with the dualistic role of artist humanistic vestiges; intact are the clues that link the imagery to its human origin.”

You lost me at “semiotics”. Is “indexical” even a word?

One of the artists spent the last year collecting her hair from the shower drain, lobbed the wad on the scanner bed and made a picture of it. Yes, they did look like dainty line drawings but that it was scanned hair made me snort in an unladylike fashion. Another of the quartet, made paintings as he stomped, jumped or walked across the canvas in different paint covered shoes. The paintings reminded me of Joan Mitchell’s work, the shapes were airy, loose and sometimes off to the sides of the field. These pieces grew on me because the artist freely admitted what a departure this was for him as a representational artist. He lost me with over thinking his work: “Man has no identity without a carbon foot print, a traceable identity that is erased over time. “ The third is a French chemist who photographically explored how a drop of blood devolves over a year. Scientifically, it was interesting to see the breakdown. He also photographed drops of blood moving through water as an exploration of the alchemy of blood. On an intellectual level, the idea of his work intrigues me. But to see the actual work made me physically recoil. In my reality, an intimate acquaintance with someone else's blood can be deadly and is never beautiful. Finally, the piece de resistance, a textile artist who looked like Joyce Carol Oates younger more intense baby sister working hard to outdo her sister in the oversized eye glasses department. She used the bits of worn thrift store garments featuring stitching, snaps, buttons or zippers on each square of a large quilt. I thought my eyes would spin out of my head when she confessed feeling the previous wearer’s essence in each piece of clothing. She confessed being delighted as she ironed how she could smell their bodies. . .well that’s just icky. Ickier than the hair and the blood. She relates in her artist statement: “. . .the traces of human action that remains on linens and clothing--the rips, holes and stains that mark them as used--become markers of domesticities, lives constellated by cycles and patterns.” Oh joy! Feminist Deconstructionism! Let’s dig up the decomposed corpse of scholarship past and revisit how women’s art is demarked by the cycles of “repetitive and tedious processes” of domestic labor. Let’s debate whether or not biology ultimately decides my creative process. Lee Krasner's "Portrait in Green" as case in point! I did stick my hand in the air and asked if she was still artistically exploring this dead mare. (for the record, I was polite and didn’t say dead horse or dead mare but did assert this had been done to death) Many greater than she had beaten the cycle and drudgery of domestic labor to a bloody pulp back in the 80’s. For the love of the Goddess and womyn everywhere, give it a rest Ms. Oates Jr. And please, girl! The 80‘s are done! (now I’m being BitchyJuneCleaver)

I think I shall pitch a show: I can cart around an empty portfolio, and when I open it up I will do a dramatic hand flourish with a staccato “Viola!” I present to you: The Deconstruction of Space!” But there aren’t any pieces. Not even blank canvases. How ironic, how navel staring, how PoMo of me. Excuse me while I light my Gitan; adjust my gigantic and flowing scarf whilst contemplating my art.

Seriously, I thought the images were either absurd or repulsive. I found their intimacy grotesque. (I can hear Ms A’s man--R--with his laconic English accent: “June, art isn’t always about the beautiful, sometimes it’s about the profane”) But the intimacy evoked wasn’t the a sad piquant intimacy of Goldberg’s photos; or the brutish and jarring intimacy of Mapplethorpe’s finger in a penis. Goldberg and Mapplethorpe rivet me but these pieces made me want to turn away and wash my hands. Perhaps my boundaries are too hard and fast but I felt as if I had violated the artist‘s, and in one case, ultimately the subjects’ personal space. Much of my life’s work revolves around strangers most private functions and becoming intrinsically involved with their bodies. My companions at the show were surprised by my disgust and took note: “But you are a nurse!“ After a week of contemplating all of this it boils down to I would rather art not cross that line. I prefer to be entertained by art. But really, what the Hell do I know? The nice girl that lives in about 2% of my soul is appalled by my distain for these artist’ efforts and one’s complete body of work. What I do know and completely understand how difficult creating art can be.

The art market was a mindless pleasure after the intellectual contortions a few days before. Some of it was boring and predictable but other pieces were surprising and inspired smiles. Like this piece at the student show. I must admit to gasping with pleasure when I saw how well he photographed against the stormy sky.


It’s a deconstructed notion of Mr. Stay Puff as interpreted in Ghost Busters, don’t you think? oh my god! Make it stop! Make the Derrida and Smith voices go away! But you gave them the power of the text by typing their names. Their influences are now the subtext of your life. Ahem…sorry little moment with the voices in my head.

Despite my bitching about the show, I had a great time with Ms. A, R and his friends. The garage sale art and the market a few days later was cosmic payback for the head scratching, belly gazing experience last Thursday night. I did see things I would love to own at the market. I returned with cards and websites for the future when I can acquire a canvas and maybe a tea pot. Art makes a splendid gift. A picture of my hair would be just the thing for TG next Christmas! Better yet, I will allow our strands to intermingle as one continuous line. . . The supreme romantic gesture. Do you think she would like a Kleenex from the bottom of my purse? Because, that too contextualizes traces of my existence. My existence is too important to not be contextualized.

I slay myself, truly.

ATC Mania

It warmed up enough the last week or so for me to work in the basement aka "my studio" (say it with a haughty lilt because I am such an Ar-Teest). Anyhow, it wasn't Arctic in the basement and I made a few ATCs. I like to make them because they are fast and easy.

this one has made an appearance on the blog. The anatomically correct heart image was inspired by an ATC Jas Faulkner shared with me.



The background paper is from the back of a Nordstrom catalogue and the dragon fly is a detail in another mail order catalogue.


This ATC combines a fragment of Emerson and a detail from a page in Kahlo's illustrated journal.


More Emerson on an altered Tarot card.


An iris I actually drew and painted myself!


La luna card from my favorite new tool: a vocabulary game I bought at the Cancun flea market. Plus antique buttons and a transparent copy of the background in the first ATC.

Thanks to Jas for creating http://twopointfivebythreepointfive.blogspot.com/

(she might be sorry she told me about it!)

Inspire Me Thursday: "I am"

I'm just under the wire for Inspire Me Thursday's prompt of "I am"






I took this last night in front of our kitchen window. It gives you the feel of our colorful Mexican Fiesta kitchen and the lovely tree I contemplate when I wash dishes.