Made plans and got too busy for plans, which made them bad plans. And then I lost my credit card and cancelled my credit card and now my typepad account is about to stop me from posting here because I didn't get a new credit card. I'll be going into hiatus for a while, but in the meantime, you can find me on instagram, where I basically blog anyway, and facebook: links over in the side bar.
xx
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I'm practising selfies because I am going to use portraiture in my PhD project, but my supervisor doesn't like how I take them. God spare me other people's strong photographic opinions. He's not wrong, technically. It's just that, blergh to technically.
Blerghy, blerghy, blergh, blergh.
Anyway. I always wondered what I'd look like with a doll face. Now we can all know, and perhaps never sleep again.
I call this one Serious Artist with Melancholic Eye Glint. I'm quite good at names and eye glints.
And being a plant head. Not everyone can pull it off, you know. Don't be jealous, you have your own brand of special specialness. We are all baby unicorn aprkly rainbows in our individual ways.
So anyway. I'm so bored I could fry my own head in garlic butter and eat it for a late second supper.
How are things with you?
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I've been going through my old Flickr account - remember Flickr? Does anyone still use Flickr? What even is Flickr? It used to be the thing bloggers had to join to be like the cool kids, and now blogs aren't even the thing bloggers have to join to be like the cool kids. Blogs are so 2007.
And I am so 1983.
I was 10, going on 11, in 1983. I was still in primary school and we used to dance for assemblies, dances we would make up in our lunch times, me and my squad. Except it wasn't my squad, it was probably Trudy's squad and I was probably the tallest and most un-co member of the squad, but I was not the worst dancer. That was Kirsten. She was (probably still is) 1,004 times nicer as a human being than I will ever be, but also a worse dancer. Kirsten had a sweatshirt she wore a lot that commemorated the 1982 football World Cup, which was in Spain, which I know because her sweatshirt had Espana '82 on it, and which fact I am going to remember for the rest of my whole entire natural life, God alone knows why. The only two songs I can remember that we danced to are Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart and MJ's Thriller. Or something off the Thriller album. Things get hazy on the details. Mr Cross was my teacher and I felt as much of a round peg in a triangle hole then as I do now.
Which has nothing to do with Flickr. Except nostalgia. And nostalgia was a word I had to learn for my spelling list, probably sometime in 1983, only I mistook the definition as meaning something to do with flying, so the sentence I wrote to accompany the definition was a little off. But I do feel people should mistake things for flying more often, I am sure we would all be much happier. And to be fair, nostalgia is a kind of mental flying. So there.
Looking through my Flickr photos, I felt like I am a total dick, because they were way better than I remembered. I used to take fun and funny photos, at least some of the time, before I started taking myself much too seriously. When did that even happen? It needs to unhappen. I need to dance to Bonnie Tyler (but not MJ, I know he remains beloved but his adult behaviour, ew) and perm my hair and wear overalls and bulky shoulder pads and think that Scott Baio should be my boyfriend. No, wait, Scott Baio is an utter douche. Um. Alan Alda. Alan Alda circa *M*A*S*H* can be my boyfriend. I used to drink black coffee and eat stale bread when I watched *M*A*S*H* so I could feel part of the stuck-eternally-in-Korea Army action, and that might be something I should never admit to out loud. Please don't tell me if Alan Alda is also an utter douche. I adored Hawkeye as only a young square peg shoved into a triangle hole can.
I need to go and cook dinner now. Do you know what was also great about 1983? I never had to cook the dinner (well, except for that time when Mum was drunk and/or high and left the dinner boiling and our plates on a hot element while she crashed out in bed , and the plates exploded, which my brother and my father somehow either never noticed or pretended to ignore so I cleaned them up and finished the rest of dinner, which I don't suppose is so much cooking dinner as averting having the house burn down. Other than that though...) We're having savoury mince, which is a treat because my youngest child hates it so much I don't cook it at all, but she's at work now, so booyah.
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It hasn't even been much more than a day, but I sat at my desk this afternoon looking through the ripped and discarded pile of drawings I rescued from the recycling bin, and I had an inspiration. One of those so-obvious-you-want-to-slap-your-stupid-self inspirations.
Short story: collage. Collage is my arting thing. Won't go into long and ramblings explanations about who and what and where and why, because I've promised myself I'd stop Justifying Things (next on list is to quit Capitalisation) and just do things.
So, okay. Cheers, thanks, bye.
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I can't remember the name of the font I was using to label the *cough* 'polaroids' that I have recently posted, so I picked another font to try that I will probably also forget the name of in another few weeks. This is certainly the least interesting and/or useful piece of information you will receive all day.
I don't know why I draw things, 98% of everything that comes off my pencil ends up in the recycling bin within a few hours. There's always that one last stroke of colour I go to add which ruins everything. You'd think I'd learn, but...
And I can never draw what I'm imagining I want to draw either, no matter how hard I try. Everything comes out distinctly Megan-ish. I used to feel that way about my face too, I'd look in the mirror when standing next to a (invariably skinny) friend and feel so embarrassed and weird because I looked so clumsily, irrevocably, potato-nosedly like me. The me I imagined myself to be had far more elegant cheekbones, was almost certainly descended from woodland elves and born in a misty cloud of glowing stardust. Very high probability.
The odd thing, though, is that when I am drawing I also can't imagine doing anything else. Literally. Even drink tea, I know. And I get so behind on everything when I do, even more than usual, which is an ashamedly large amount, let us never mention it again. I Ignore my obligations, my beloved peoples, my basic human need for sleep. I don't mean to, I don't even really want to, I just move into a parallel universe where the stroke of the pencil, the brush, becomes The Only Possible Thing.
It's not important work. It is, let us never forget, mostly just fodder for the recycling bin. Expensive fodder, and I'm all out of paper once again, just a few days after buying my last lot, and I'm debating with myself whether I can justify buying any more if all I am going to do is throw everything away; not forgetting the orthodontist and dentist and occupational therapist and psychologist and university and school and rheumatologist's fees all withdrawing soon from a bank account near you...
I probably will buy it anyway, and here is probably why:
I'm an overprivileged white female hipster. Lol, no, I don't even like beards. Okay, privileged and a bit of a luvvie, true story, but also, as James Salter writes**: how can we imagine what our lives should be without the illustration of the lives of others? The cutlery-chicken-tree-lady might, in one sense, just be a nonsensical waste of time, but she is also an imagination stretcher and a possibility grower and a tacit illustration that there are points of view in this world outside of my own. It's about mistakes and humility and perpetually embracing the beginner's mind. That is what practising any art can give us, but those of fantasy and make-believe in particular (stealing from Tolkien because WHY NOT?) can provide the imagination a place to escape to, where it may live free-range in complete creative and intellectual liberty. Perhaps there can be no possible world in which cutlery-chicken-tree-ladies exist, but also there always is.
She is, after all, wearing the outfit of a woman whose head I just ripped off, so you'd think a bit of self-protective concern on her part would be a wise idea.
Moving on. If you click on the 'about' link in the column on the right, you'll see that I intend to post here once a week, to post something I've created that makes me happy and to tell the story of that creation in a year long (possibly lifetime long) project called Weapons of Mass Creation. The idea came from an artist friend who gets her students to make guns that shoot glitter, or some such thing, as literal weapons of mass creation, but my own more modest goal is just to honour the freedom that making things gives us to alter our world one small act of creation at a time.
I haven't really told the story of the cutlery-chicken-tree-lady illustration, because mostly there isn't one except that she is what my brain served up in the early hours of this morning when I told it to just go for it and make-up whatever kind of crazy shite it felt like. I've been in a deep state of grief over a series of relationship losses and failures which has manifested mostly in a chest-squashing anxiety that I cannot seem to shake, even though I know not to take the feeling too seriously, not to hang on to it too tight. And that stupid picture? She made me smile, albeit ruefully, and remember some of the things that I deeply enjoy about my own company, even if I am, perhaps, the only one who does enjoy them.
And breathe out...
Until next week, then. I'll leave you with one more quote, because it makes me sound a lot smarter than I am and has the handy attribute of being precisely what I would have said if I had known to say it: Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE. - Joss Whedon
xx
*I get so confused and jumbled up at all the myriad creative impulses my brain fires off at me every day that I kind of flit from thing to thing randomly with no plan and less progress, and any efforts to tidy it up and sort it out tend to leave me feeling flat and uninspired. I had the brainwave today of re-wording my Instagram bio to read The Random Imaginary of Mrs. M.C.M. Young, because it sounds kind of like a magician's emporium, a place of discovery and adventure, rather than a desperate and ultimately doomed attempt at explaining why it's such a jumbled untidy account. And you know? It kind helps me to just own and even be proud of my dilettante tendencies in a way nothing has really ever done before. Words? Who knew?
**Quoted from a book called Maps of the Imagination, by Peter Turchi. Reader, I bought it.
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I have an amulet now. It's not a very good amulet, its main superpower seems to be snagging on the threads of the one top I have that I don't feel like a complete ugly duckling frump wearing. So, that's disappointing. It's possible that I don't understand how to work it, I am not well schooled in this defender of the universe business. There's a significant chance that the local chemist is not the most reliable source for the purchase of magical powers, and in any case, don't you have to be born to it/suffer a lab accident/crash land your alien space ship?
Moral of the story, don't lay claim to powers that don't belong to you.
And eat more pizza.
And don't be an arsehole. I'm quite certain you're not one, but I also do strongly feel that this should be a moral to every possible story.
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I spent hours writing an end of year post yesterday, hours. Then after midnight, when I was finally finished, Typepad crashed and everything was erased. Pity, because it was a staggering work of heartbreaking genius.
Never mind.
The collage remains; I made it after trawling through my photo archives looking for some ineffable something. They were all photos that reminded me of something I enjoy most about being in the world, something that the current hamster-wheel busyness of my life has crowded out (again, I know, and there's no idiot to blame but myself). Looking at them helps me get my emotional bearings, helps me understand what kind of things I most need to include in my life to feel less like a hurtling crazy-train of randomness and more like a grown human woman with actual choices and value.
I've been looking at why and how I keep derailing my best creative intentions, and I won't kill you with the boredom of my incessant navel gazing, that would not be kind or healthy, except to say I think I get it now, and I think I get what to do about it. At least I get it better, and have an idea on what to do next.
Desperation is the mother of change...
I bought an office as the first next step. I have no working or creative space of my own, never have had, just a series of ad hoc kitchen tables and couches and counters on which to lug around any current project. No wonder I lose my will to live motivation halfway through a project. I earned a scholarship through the university over this summer, and I had it earmarked for buying my office gear, but most of it had to be spent on emergency crisis number 912,923,399 instead. Then Warren's work gave him a bit of extra cash on his last day of the year as a small thank you for working All the Hours All Year, and I asked him for half of it. Because when he works All the Hours All Year, I have to work much harder too, and no-one ever pays me for that, or even much says thank you. It's just Expected. I wanted recognition too. Didn't want to take anything away from how hard he works, or how much he deserves that thank you, wasn't even really fussed about the money, truth be told. I just wanted recognition too.
I thought about all the things I could spend my half on (expensive children and decaying house, mostly) but decided to spend it on a place to write and study and create instead (even now, I feel a desperate need to justify spending money on my own working tools, oy vey...). There's no real space in my tiny home for an office, other than at the end of my weirdly long Master bedroom, so that is where it is going. I even drew out a floor plan, a list of what I would be doing in said office space, and what tools I would need to make it all work. I still need one more bookcase for art supplies, and I want a rug and artwork to help it look all Pretty and Proper, but that can wait. I have a desk, people. And an ergonomic chair to sit kneel comfortably on and not trigger those painful brachial nerves, and shelves for things. My things! Only my things!
A brand new, planned and bought especially for Megan, working space.
That's how I know things will be different now. Because I'm choosing to mark out and take up actual real demarcated space for the first time in my ever-loving life.
Better late than never.
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The thing about the macro lens, in all its cheap non-focusing glory, is now I see things that I always wanted to see but never knew I wanted to see them. I live inside flowers now. I live inside flowers and I identify as a blue lace-cap hydrangea and I call myself Princess Melissa Rose. It's not a random name, the internet revealed it to me, and who am I to argue with the collective font of all human wisdom?
I also drink flowers. Child number three bought child number one some French Earl Grey for Christmas, but he doesn't love it like I love it, he doesn't appreciate it and care for it and lay his life on the altar of its goodness the way I do. It's mine now. All mine, my precious...
Which is useful because I am going to need a lot of tea to fuel the next 4 days, which is all I have left to sort my life out. You'd think I have years, even decades, to sort it out, or, if you are especially optimistic, perhaps believe that my life is just fine how it is and doesn't need sorting out in the first place, but no. Everyone knows that this is what the days between Christmas and New Year are for, except that I wasted a few in a food-induced coma existential crisis, and watching movies and braving mall-shopping (because I have teens and they have money), and another half a day writing this, so I only have 3.5 days left. That should be enough. Expect reams of unrealistic plans and schemes and ideas to follow.
This approach has never worked for me in the past, it is true. Not even once. However, isn't the definition of sanity to keep persisting at the same thing until it finally works?
And anyway. I now have a weapon of mass creation. What could possibly go wrong?
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Who knew a cheap macro smartphone lens could bring a woman such joy? Probably you. You seem to know a lot of good things.
Whole new worlds. Worlds within sparkles within worlds.
I feel you really should have told me about this much earlier.
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Attractive pictures of my latest 'itis. It's the third one this year, and I was still weak and occasionally sore from May's brachial neuritis, and tired from the October's cellulitis, when I got hit, boom, with December's urticarial vasculitis. It's bloody itchy, a little painful, entirely exasperating. It's like being simultaneously attacked by a dozen mosquitoes every day and whacking yourself a few times hard enough to bruise. The bruises clear exceptionally fast. It's weird.
And here's why I'm telling you: screw that. I've spent months exhausted and sad and barely keeping up with my day and wondering what the point of trying to achieve anything was when the long hours I worked to achieve it ended up making me so sick. And feeling like shit when one of my kids ran into a wall of their own, and I was too tired/passive to help them quickly enough, making the whole experience way worse for them than it needed to be. I've spent a lot of my kids' lives tired and sick and I can't ever quite feel okay about that. They deserved better. They still do.
I can't fix being so prone to the 'itises, it's literally in my DNA (have I mentioned it before? I don't make enough Complement 2, a protein vital to a robust immune system). But I can fix how I feel about it. Even now, after all these years, all these experiences that would show me otherwise, I still believe somewhere deep inside in 'The Fix'. The fix of the right diet, medication, exercise, meditation, supplements, magic fairy dust, after which I live out the rest of my days healthy, wealthy and wise.
It ain't coming. Nothing can make my body produce more C2, nothing can stop the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, nothing can stop time's inevitable descent into decay and decrepitude. (Merry Christmas!). I should be so lucky to reach decay and decrepitude. Plato said it more succinctly: Only the dead have seen the end of war.
There's such liberation in accepting that. I always knew it, we all do, yes? But every year I come to accept it more, and better, and in the acceptance develop an ability to surf those tidal waves better, to put on my lippy and cloak myself in a persona who is braver, wiser, smarter, more motivated than the scared 12 (3?) year old I constantly feel inside. The 12 (3?) year old is allowed her moment, and she deserves her moment (Warren: what can I do to help you? Me: hug me while I have a tired cry...). What she can't be is in charge. I forget this, way too often. So I'm surrounding myself with reminders so I don't forget: bright lipstick, beautiful flowers, happy colours. And a power bracelet, kind of like this one..
I don't have a power bracelet yet, but when I do KAPOW. I will wield it like a fierce and mighty Amazonian warrior.
Or something. Because life is shit and short and glorious, and only the dead have seen the end of war. So best enjoy the peace while it is here, and prepare for the battle which is coming.
I'm almost looking forward to it.
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