Make Believe

Happy Halloween, my pets. I'm clicking away at my keyboard with shiny red finger nails painted specially for the '60s housewife get up I sported on Friday. Black lace cocktail dress that belonged to my great grandmother and somehow fits me perfectly, with a curved neckline resting just beneath my collar bones, a high waist, and a layer of lace falling at my knee. Paired with a last-minute tailor-made plaid apron courtesy of my mom, black peep toe pumps (pain included), fake cigarette, luxurious feather duster, and of course, pearls. It came together deliciously and cost me a grand total of $13.

Dressing up is fun isn't it? Marching around in something that makes you feel like a million bucks but would never fly on a regular day. I secretly loved holding that cigarette -- so real yet without the poison -- bringing it to my lips and inhaling the make-believe. Filling my lungs with pretend. Meeting people at a Halloween party is sort of unlike any other social dynamic. You don't know what anybody is truly like in real life. They don't know what you're like. 

In a way I feel like I'm currently trying to put my life together the way I put a Halloween costume together. The image I have of myself living in San Francisco is so constructed that it's almost unrecognizable. I have this idea and to make it real I need a number of garments and accessories: a job, an apartment, a bicycle, maybe an iPhone, and Etsy shop, a favorite coffee spot. The costume is me living the life I want to live in the city I want to live in. It's like many Halloween costumes in that the idea is the easy part; you get all excited like "Yeah! It'll be brilliant!" and then realize you don't know how to make, say, a Marge Simpson wig or a Ghostbusters proton pack. The idea dissolves and you go with something you already have.

My friend Anne once told me to start acting and looking like the person I want to become, and eventually I'll just find my way there. Eventually it will no longer be a costume, but real. This is how we build our identity over time, isn't it? Some of it is organic, and some of it, calculated down to every detail. Down to fake cigarettes and red nail polish. At first it feels like you're playing dress-up, and then it becomes so comfortable and familiar you can't remember being any other way.

While I already have one element of my costume -- the job -- after a month I still feel like even that is somehow pretend, like I'm faking it or something. I walk through the Financial District every day and while I love it -- the industriousness of it all, looking up every block or so to where the buildings meet the sky -- I somehow feel like I don't belong, like it's a secret club and people notice me on the streets and think, what is she doing here?

Actually, though, building a new life for yourself is like a Halloween party also in that you really can be whoever the hell you want to be. It might take time, creativity, and 20,000 email responses to Craigslist room-for-rent ads, but in the end the costume is yours to wear. And if you really want, you can be something different every year. The people you meet may not know it, but you'll still just be you, whatever that is.

Sketchy

I'll tell you what, folks. The problem with my current situation is that I get up at 5:30am to commute to work, and by the time I get home in the evenings I have about 2 hours before I want to be in bed! Free time currently goes to (drum roll please): sifting through sales racks to boost my very meager business casual wardrobe, emailing people on Craigslist about rooms for rent, and blogging. Oh, wait.. no. Clearly not blogging, say the only two other posts from October almost over. Woe, guilt, etcetera.

But as it happened last night, some of my free time went to attending a super awesome cooler than I'll ever be monthly art event at the 111 Minna Gallery in downtown San Francisco. A good friend finally managed to get me to a Sketch Tuesday which is basically a bunch of established and emerging local artists sitting in a stylish urban space and making art while the rest of us stand around, drink cheap drinks from the full bar, and listen to the DJ spin tunes. THEN when an artist finishes something they'd been working on, they walk over with the piece and a piece of tape, and slap it up on a big wall with their name and a price (which ranged from one PBR to $45, though the max is supposed to be $30).

Anyway, I bought something that I love but cannot show you because it is waiting here in my lair (lair?) as an intended Christmas gift for one of my (many) readers, to remain unnamed. But when I bought it from the quiet fellow with glasses working away at his spot at the table, he revealed to me that he was this person:

Well, not that actual squid man on the escalator, but Josh Ellingston, the artist who illustrated this and two other fantastic scenes that are currently up in many of the BART stations around the Bay Area as BART's featured artist for 2010. I'd been seeing these for months and then lo and behold! I'm handing the guy $20 for something he'd just made with googly eyes. And he was so nice and you should totally go to his website and admire his work.

Another fave from the night was Mia Christopher. How quirky and charming is her style?! Check out her Etsy shop here. Watching her color in those tiny shapes with such precision was a delight.

 

And we were all ogling the work of Annie Galvin from 3 Fish Studios.

Couldn't you just cry? These postcards are similar to the absolutely lovely little pieces she was making last night. I didn't buy one, but I will be dreaming of them until I do. Especially the bottom left, and bottom right.. well, all of them. OH, oh.

I hope you also get to do something cool with your free time this week. In fact, it's almost over! Nice to see you, Thursday.

Swell Giveaway!

Anyone interested in a little Monday inspiration? Check out this awesome giveaway and interview with DIY star on Living the Swell Life! The artist/designer hails from Paper + Twine, and I don't know about you guys, but I'd love me one of these darling little notebooks.

All Aboard the Pubic Express

OK, I'm going to ask you to do something. Please scroll down and read the first sentence of the post preceding this one. Now, read this short email that I got from my mother today:

Have you ever been sitting on pubic transit...?!

You might want to take a different train!

Love, Mom

Folks, I consider myself a careful writer. Blog posts, emails, essays, tombstone inscriptions, whatever it is, I check it twice. I proofread diligently and yet somehow I managed to let "pubic transit" slip by me. PUBIC TRANSIT! Now, I realize most people probably wouldn't get their panties in a twist over something like this, but I live off catching other people's mistakes. (Well, I don't actually live off it because no one will pay me to be a copy editor, but you get the idea.) I can't very well go around telling everyone how they've erred if I can't get sentence #1 right.

Normally, when a mistake becomes apparent to me after a post has been published, I slyly make the edit, re-publish, and pretend nothing ever happened (kind of like when you accidentally let one go in front of your friends, cough conspicuously, and hope they mistook it for street noise). But this cannot be ignored. I mean, pubic transit. How many of you noticed that?! I am simply mortified, imagining you all throwing your heads back in the wicked cackle of a schoolyard bully. Me, my little baby blog with it's nice wood paneling and regrettably corny title, the laughing stock of the blogging community!

Of course it's a vain and lonely enterprise, writing a blog. People may have noticed my typo and laughed -- or, worse yet, hardly anyone has even read it. I am reminded of something my favorite blogger, Petunia Face, wrote in a post from the beginnings of her blog, which has since become the favorite and delight of many adoring readers.

"Blogging is a bit like going to a cocktail party where you don’t know anyone. You hang up your coat and stand there feeling a bit naked, hoping your dress is the correct attire. Nobody hands you a drink at first, there are no appetizers and you don’t really know what to do with your hands. All around people are laughing at other people’s stories. You feel fringe.

So you just open your mouth and start talking to the air. It feels funny at first, speaking into a void. You tell your stories and maybe someone smiles at you. Hands you a drink. A plate of bite-sized mushroom quiche even though you hate mushrooms so you just nibble around the edges to be polite. You keep talking and suddenly someone laughs. Someone else talks back. Introduces you to her friend. And suddenly you are not alone anymore, your words floating up into nothing. They are heard. You are heard."

Again, you may say the typo is no big deal, but if blogging is like a cocktail party, then such a mistake is like having a booger peeking around the corner of my nostril. Like having spinach in my teeth all night long, or walking out of the bathroom with my skirt tucked into my thong. Like any number of awful things when all you really want is for them to like you. When all you really want is to be heard.  And we all know that no one's gonna keep talking to the girl with a booger hanging out of her nose.

So readers, I hereby invite you to laugh with me (and please, not at me). The pube train is now leaving the station -- on or off?

I wish

Have you ever been sitting on pubic transit, perhaps during commuting hours, listening to a podcast or something on your iPod that incites in you a little irrepressible smiling or giggling? And you become the freak sitting there grinning to yourself while everyone around you looks like a sad robot?

Actual sad robot from Spike Jonze short I'm Here  -  image via

I had one of those moments today. I was listening to an episode of This American Life on BART coming back from San Francisco. Episode #259, "Promised Land" from August 8. Anybody catch that one? He starts off talking about Disney movies, and how so many of them and other musicals start with what they call an "I wish" song. Snow White wishes for the one she loves, Dorothy wishes for somewhere over the rainbow, etc. The examples are too many to count. The same thing happens again and again: the main character appears, sings their anthem spelling out what it is they're after, and this drives the story forward. Ira Glass observes that you start noticing this everywhere, and then? What does he do? He sings. He sings his own "I wish" song for the show, and this is where the smiling ensues. As far as I can remember, I've never heard him sing before, and I was just plum tickled.

But it got me thinking about how everyone has an "I wish" song. See the world, buy a house, graduate, retire, procreate, survive. Maybe you're still trying to place the tune, work out the melody or come up with the lyrics, or maybe you've been singing the same ditty your whole life. Whatever we're after, each of us has a song that drives our story forward. But unlike a Disney movie, our tale doesn't end happily tied ever after up neat with a bow. Our song isn't over when our wish does or does not come true, we just add more verses. 

Ira played the opening number from Stephen Sondheim's broadway musical Into the Woods as the BART train sailed over the sprawl of industry and suburbia of the East Bay Area. The voices of six characters spun together in a medley, all crying out their own respective wishes, and it was as if those voices were floating up out of the windows and chimneys of the tract houses below. Dusty, freeway-adjacent developments awash in grays, taupes and burnt siennas. Rooftops and sidewalks all diagonal lines and one foot in front of the other. Some of those houses are dreams realized, and some hide wishes that may never leave the driveway.

As for me, I've recently had a wish granted (one that took me months to come up with in the first place), and as a result I've got a whole new set of wishes. Today I started a brand new shiny job in San Francisco. It's on the 10th floor of a tall glossy building in the Financial District, and I have a cubicle, a company email address, and benefits. Now, having spent the last two years au pair-ing, traveling, camping, road-tripping, interning, and just generally floating around, this will be a huge change. My peep toe flats clicking on the waxy floor of the lobby as I made my way to the elevator this morning sounded like a foreign language. It's change, but I'm ready for it. I'm ready to find an apartment, buy a bike, and make San Francisco my own. Yes, friends, I'm ready to drive my story forward.

Stay tuned.

Look! I make stuff! (But seriously, please look at it.)

While I haven't been terribly inspired to write lately, I have found inspiration of another color in Craftland (note: not a real place). I spent a lovely Sunday afternoon yesterday learning how to do some embroidery stitches with the expert help of my mom and this handy book. 

I promptly decided that it's a delightful pastime, not to mention the source of abundant potential for style and cuteness. I mean, look how fun!

Just a simple sampler, but I'll definitely be playing with this some more!

Something I've been trying out for a while longer is the irresistible art of making cards. I've combined three of my most favorite things: paper, words, and colorful fabrics... and behold!

Charming, no? So far I've just made one here and there to give to friends and family, but I'm toying with the idea of an Etsy shop. What do you think? Would you give money in exchange for something like this? Handmade, each one unique, perhaps less cutesie and more funky+weird? If no one comments and says yes, I'll never do it! I'll burn all my fabric scraps and flush my rubber stamp alphabet down the toilet! I mean it! I don't care how lowly and pathetic it makes me look, I need your validation! Yes, that's in italics.

Happy Monday, friends! And you know what? I am so glad you looked at this. You made my day. I hope someone made yours.

750 Words

By 8:30 this morning (Saturday, mind you), I had already written 750 words of free text (758, actually). I feel pretty good about this. It's my first day trying out a little site called 750 Words, an online version of the tried and true writing exercise of (go figure) writing. A little bit every day. No editing, censoring, or drafting. Just letting the words flow. I wrote my 758 words (about 3 pages) this morning in 15 minutes, and there's actually some decent material in there. But that's not even the point. The point is to just open up your mind, put whatever's in there on the page (or the screen), maybe for practice, maybe for therapy, maybe as a way to sort through your thoughts, relieve stress, purge.

Whatever it becomes, the cool thing about it is that it's bound to become something. We so often lack motivation or inspiration and as a result do nothing, produce nothing. But by sitting down and just forcing yourself to pull sentences out of the empty space in your brain, things appear. Ideas materialize before your eyes as if by magic. Loose ends connect. Questions are asked. Conclusions are drawn.

The site is the brain child of this guy. It's different from a blog in that the content is totally private and there's no "posting" involved. Different from a journal in that you can type instead of suffer massive hand cramps, it helps you keep track, and it goes into a kind of little bank instead of just into a boring word document. He's made it fun and motivational, with monthly challenges you can sign up for and little badges to reward you for writing, say, 10 days in a row. 

It also provides stats that measure things like how long it took you to write each day, words per minute, and number of distractions. It shows you your frequently used words, which can provide a fascinating (and potentially disturbing) look at your subconscious. Maybe it won't surprise you, but you want to know my most frequently used word today? In 758 words at 8:30 on a Saturday morning? That I am now sharing with you in the assumption that you will even care?

my

My my my my my. Me. My. Mine. I. 

Conclusions, you see, are drawn.