cobaltika

i am excited.

tomorrow morning at 9-ish, i will pick up my betsy at the airport. she has asked me to bring her a plastic camera. we will get into the little fast rental car and drive to texas! we will arrive at margaret’s apartment in austin quite late most likely, and camp at her house. for a day or so we will all hang out. (me and my girls!!!!!!!!!!!!) then i will go to the country and stay with my mother for a day. it has been far far too long since i have been able to just hang out with her at her house. and i can visit my sister at her house (sort of next door, in a hill-countryish way) and see her turkey chicks. then we will go to the estate of my other sister in fredericksburg. the girls will meet us there. and we will hang out for a day or so and i will get to visit little kathy TOO. then we must return home. but i will get to keep betsy for a tiny bit longer.

i will miss mi poeta very much. but i think this trip would scare him! and there is no time to hunt armadillos this time. or poke around in crystal clear creeks. it is hardcore visiting and driving 24/7. but i will love it.

just because i liked the way these looked together…

the weekend ended up being Just Fine, despite the mild crankiness of saturday evening. i think i had that feeling of the time passing too quickly and not having enough of it to do all the things i wanted. typical. i settled down, made the guacamole (with lemon balm and a pepper from the garden! mmmm!) and the fried okra. we watched The Departed, which was intense and escapist, then slept. all as predicted. in the morning, i was slightly cranky again, but realized that i needed to get out. so i worked, chatted with my mother and one sister, showered and made ready to go out. we went to the garden center and i bought a few more pepper plants (some new mexico green chiles! yay!) and some valentino basil and a parsley, to fill in the place where all the bolted lettuce was removed. we took a walk around the garden center neighborhood, which was one i had never walked in, though it is one of my poet’s favorites and he wanted to show. indeed, it was like being in another town. i was reminded of new mexico and austin and anotherworldaltogether, as indicated by the images above.

then home for more work on the magazine, and a break for the artTable, where i was HAPPY. i finished all of the glueing down for the halfyearJournal, using up lots of scraps and started using up paints and stamps and old brushes, oh it was good. then i chatted with another sister and when it was dimmer and cooler went out to finish the garden. it’s done for summer now! and it is growing really nicely. i went to sleep smiling, happy to have felt productive with my own things *and* work.

this morning still happy.

most of last evening and today i have felt an unexplainable euphoria. even though last night was work work work and also this morning. a small break to go to Target and Buy Some Things. every time i am about to go on a road trip i feel a need to do that. i was a traitor to ImageWorks and left a couple of rolls of film at the 1-hour at Target. man. i’m glad i didn’t pay more. my big plan of double exposure with the XA2 did *not* work. no it did not. two of the images were play-withable and came out sort of magicky. i like them. some of the shots from Sunny the CheapCam were pretty good but … well … boring. i don’t even know if i will bother scanning them. oh well! i haven’t had prints made in a long time so now i have many photos to alter! yay?

it was a little sad though, to see such crappy results, because i feel like i have lost something.

i think it might be concentration? i’m not sure. i feel like i can’t think anymore. or something. as if there is just not enough time. always something else needs to be done. i tried to sneak an hour or so at the artTable this afternoon. it was stupid. no time for anything beyond glueing a bit of tissue border. just the mindless stuff. my euphoria dissipated…

oh i don’t want to think about it!

i will have a cold white wine and go back to work. then we will have guacamole soft tacos with lots of salad within and FRIED OKRA and then watch a DVD on iMac theatre. then i will sleep. i sleep like a bear lately. all is well, i’m sure.

who knows. maybe this weekend i can photograph my very own zinnias. god i need to get excited about photographing *something* that is for sure. i have been browsing old images to try to stimulate my enthusiasm. it is SO hard to be enthusiastic about *anything* in the summer - except for central air, ice cold water and sleep. this morning i realized it was my personal hibernation time. i am almost thankful that it is a stay in and work weekend.

thinking of zinnias, my garden is actually growing. the herbs are very large. i don’t really know what to do with them (except for the basil=pesto) but i like them. there *are* zinnias and some are almost blooming! i hope they are big and fat. i planted them too close and it is a juicy clump. we are collecting okra to fry … there are a few mexican midget tomatoes and some bigger ones starting … the squash keeps getting rotty from touching the ground … i can’t figure if that eggplant will grow or not … a couple of peppers. only a couple of hollyhocks appeared and …sniff… no white trumpety things.

it is too bad i forgot to turn off the hose (it has a spray thing with handle attached) and it blew up the other night. i wonder if it can be repaired with that black photo tape?

returning from lalaland. i thought i was having some social anxiety over the weekend, queasy, headachey, a little dizzy, but my monday morning it was fullblown vertigo almost fell into the bathroom sink ugh. now it is going away. much better, but still a stiff spine and a little anxiety wondering if i will fall over somewhere. probably not. i’ve learned to accommodate when it comes. not very often thankgod. i could do nothing but sit still, so i read a whole book in one day! i haven’t done that in forever. it was a new Edna O’Brien that my poet brought from the library. i liked the first one, made it through the second, even though i found the main character rather a big dumb cow. (cruel term, but so true). in this one the character was rather a dummy, too, so i am not sure if i want to read more of her novels, even though i do like her prose. all women need not be heroic, but weak characters bother me. why should i want to read about them? now i am reading A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami. i’ve never read him, but so far am liking this, even though my poet claims his prose is too “pop”, with no vision. i like that kind of prose, though, it reminds me of how i write sometimes here. like a stream, dreamy and somewhat pointless. i like to work like that, too. we don’t agree on everything!

yes, reading, sleeping and eating. it’s summer. making photos of the same old stuff around town, all covered in green plush, sweating like a pig while doing it, and dizzy at that, does not sound fun. i’m sure i will though, eventually. working at the artTable made my head spin, but i did a bit last night. nothing wonderful. i seem to only wish to cut up old book pages and glue them somewhere. and then i don’t know where to go with them…

next week i am going to texas and seeing my girls and my family and TEXAS and i am GLAD about that. i do not look forward to the heat. i do not celebrate the summer solstice. i like sweaters.

a couple of weekends ago, when i was cleaning up, i found boxes of old slides and decided to scan them. i was pretty surprised. they were made with my old Canon Z85 point and shoot. and some of them were pretty good, considering i didn’t really even know what i was doing. maybe it was the slide film? god that stuff is sweet. anyway, the most surprising thing was to see that i looked at things the same way i do now. i was naive then, and am more calculating now, about what i do with the camera, how i want to see and capture, but wow. maybe i *do* have some kind of direction. these are from about 6 years ago. there are more on flickr, but it is not a clicking image, because sometimes when i change the size of the clickable ones from flickr, they degrade and i wanted this clean.

it is fingernail cutting time again already. how come my bangs could not grow out as fast as my fingernails?

this afternoon i have to go to a wedding shower and i am a little uneasy about it. i don’t really do stuff like that, but it is for a nice person at work, so i will. i will have to drive the car slowly on the back road, it is a little town about 7 miles away. that is far for my car to go… gulp. i have made a card and i’m afraid they will laugh at it. and tomorrow we will have guests with BABIES! oh my! i am excited, but social things make me so nervous…oh well.

more timewasting and energy-scattering here: virb

actually, it is a pretty polite site, visually. but lonely. i think i only know one person there. i wonder if it will take off? myspace is so UGLY and irritating.

lately i have felt even more scattered and unfocussed and all over the place. i have been fairly productive (not this week, really) but i feel as if i am flinging my energies all over and avoiding … something. i am piddling. dicking around. being a chickenshit. i don’t know what i want to DO and i am avoiding looking at that question too closely (afraid of the answer?), so i just keep my hands busy and my mind empty and hope it will come to me, my true task. i have been waiting for years and years. i so admire people who have clarity in vision and focus and produce from there, growing and risking, but always in a direction, not just random wandering and frequent regression. i am talking about creative work, not life in general, although of course they mesh and merge.

it really seems that at my age, i should be more than a dilettante by now, and be on my path. sometimes i blame my lack on astrology … it is so hard for libra to DECIDE … sometimes i blame it on not acquiring an MFA … i don’t know how to conceptualize and was not given PERMISSION and legitimacy … sometimes i blame it on my life choices. nah. that is bullshit. even with children, even as a single mother, even as a fulltime drone, i have been exceptionally productive.

i look at my artTable (and the boxes in the basement) piled with finished works of cloth paper paints oh everything, some quite wonderful. i look at my flickr stream (and worse, my hard drive) gobbed with images, some quite wonderful. it is all very schizophrenic and jumbled. such an assortment. i can’t see a pattern, just layers of texture and effort and i wonder what it is all ABOUT. what am i supposed to DO with this stuff? what am i supposed to DO with my talents? i know i have them, i just don’t know how to use and present them. i am so tired of piddling and avoiding. i wish for direction and clarity.

this is just a midday mindstream, induced by 5 days of fluorescent prison. i know there are not answers. just wonderings. same as it ever was. move along!