balmofgilead

Tonight I went to a writing workshop, sort of on a whim, mostly because someone I had coffee with yesterday (totally platonically!) was leading it and invited me.

When did I stop being able to make art?

Maybe I was never able to make art.

Most people in the workshop wrote things that felt more surreal. I want concrete. Lovely turns of phrase, sure, but grounded in reality, don't let go, keep at least a foot on the ground, maybe even a hand just to be safe.

When I was five I kneaded little lumps of gluestick into balls and rolled them in talcum powder to make pearlescent stick-on decorations for the trailing pink flowers I drew. What else do you draw when you're a girl who's five? Maybe that just reinforces that I was never able to make art.

I'm afraid of singing in groups. I blame this on childhood, when my voice was lower than everyone else's and I couldn't hit the notes we were supposed to be singing, at least not easily. But this lasts. So not that kind of art.

When I was in third grade I went to ceramics every week. I only wanted to make chunky, uncontoured pottery on the wheel. Butch pottery? I resisted the ceramics teacher's plan to taper the edges in.  Maybe that was my own kind of art.

Tonight on the train I watched some people hassle someone for not taking his bag off of the seat next to him so someone could sit there. Unexpectedly, I ended up feeling that they were in the wrong.

I did not notice what was going on in the first 30 seconds of the exchange, so it is true that I do not know the whole story. But someone asked him to move his bag and whatever he said exactly, he didn't move it, and they did not let the issue drop, even after someone else had just stood up to give the person who'd wanted a seat a place to sit.

Here's the thing. It was 10:30 at night. The guy had been on the train even before I got on, and he was dressed in clothing that very clearly indicated (to me, at least) that he was getting off of work, probably from a late shift as a security guard or something, judging by the cheap blue buttondown shirt. He was on the large side, not incredibly so, but enough that it might legitmately be uncomfortable for him if the seat next to him was occupied.  (And when I got off 20 minutes later, he transferred to a different train, and had a bicycle with him, so clearly his commute was not a short one.)

The people who were hassling him looked very different, or at least did not look like they were heading home from minimum-wage shift work.

Does all this make it OK for him not to move his bag? I don't know, it maybe still wasn't the nicest choice, but hassling him seemed like a really shitty thing to do. While not giving up seats (or not moving a bag from a seat) on public transit is a problem in general, I think it's important to be careful with how one does it and to be conscious of to whom one is speaking.

This is the trajectory of my life:

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I remember popping a cherry tomato into my mouth. We were in my father's hospital room celebrating my 2nd birthday.

I also remember his funeral a week later.

I remember bits and bobs of other standout things that happened in the next few years: the cicada infestation, live lobsters on a kitchen floor before my friend's dad cooked them, finding baby turtles in the grass at a park, pushing toys through that small space under the railing of our balcony and down sixteen stories to the street (whoops), breaking a telephone cord in the store and my mother screaming about it, the first day of nursery school...but I can't put them in chronological order quite so well.

People who have experience with this:

do you have a favorite US road atlas?  I think I'm going to go for comb-bound and not-tiny, because any time I'm using it I'll have a car, so it's not like being light and small is a benefit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi


I wasn't able to appreciate things like this until I'd been an adult for a while.