Sixteen Candles: Life Is Open Source

This, my blog, l'astronave, turned sixteen two days ago, on October 7, 2023. I was working at the thrift store that day, setting up displays, and I put off till today doing something I've wanted to do--to go through each October and post a glimpse of that year's birthday time.
(The actual day each year is tagged "blog birthday".)

For this year, working on collages with a circus theme with Em, I came again across photo, German "Circus Workers" by August Sander (c. 1930), below.

I'd always liked it, but now I relate to it--how everyone looks tired and worn, maybe distrustful (of onlookers)... but they are the ones who make magic.
We are in no way coordinated enough to do acrobatics (nowhere near!), but this group reminds me of me and the people I work with (and not just coworkers).

Art Inst of Chicago article "August Sander Takes His Camera to the Circus"
___________________________

And so, review of Blog Birthdays, in descending order...

BELOW: Blog turns 15 one year ago, October 2022.

Re-reading now this 10/9/22 blog post--"Goodness Adequate to Actual Events"--I'm impressed and I stand with my response (in the form of a question) to the huge events of the past couple years: from COVID (2020–), to the police murder of George Floyd in my city (May 2020), to climate breakdown heating up, to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. And that question is:

"How should I, an ordinary person, think and
act well in extraordinary times?"

I am still living deep in that question. A helpful perspective came along this year, the reminder that I am not the savior. It is weirdly invigorating:
"Oh, if I am not expected to FIX this mess, I feel free to try to do what I can do."

And what can I do? Many things. Including recreate famous paintings with toys, which I did this fall.
Play may seem irrelevant, but PLAY IS PRACTICE.
Play knows and shows (like the GTA video, below at 2016) that
you can go into the operating system and change it.

Also, bink & Mo get married! Legal after twenty-three years. :)

BELOW: Blog is 14, October 2021

So much going on, eh? So much that my birthday in March doesn't get much attention, what with everything still masked and locked down for Covid.

One of the things spinning round in the larger world is gender and pronouns. This is one of my favorite photoshops I've ever made. Maybe they have but I've never seen anyone else make this joke, surprisingly.

"Victoria, We/Us/Ours"

And here I am wearing a mask, below, with EVE from WALL-E behind me. (No, that's a mammogram machine.) October 4, 2021.

BELOW: Blog turns 13, October 2020

"With what kind of human beings do we want to surround ourselves for our own flourishing?
If we want to live among equals with strength and candor, among people with, as Euripedes says, 'free and generous eyes,' the understanding of trauma can form a solid basis for a science of human rights."
-- Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Jonathan Shay (1994)

I should post a photo with COVID mask or George Floyd Square, but this, perhaps, is enduringly me--donated stuff I've put on the wall above my work space at the thrift store where I do BOOK's and Toys--posted here October 24, 2020:

BELOW: A dozen years of l'astronave, October 2019
Many people have left the blogosphere for the shiny lights of social media. Not me.

BELOW: "Now we are eleven", Oct 2018
There aren't eleven Orphan Red Dolls yet (there will be), but Penny Cooper has arrived! Here she is greeting my sister through the glass of Penny's Café downtown, where we're going for tea.

(Also, it's my first year as BOOK LADY at the thrift store.)

_________________

BELOW: 10th blog birthday, October 2017
THE MOST IMPORTANT BEST THING:
Red Hair Doll arrives the summer I'm working at Goodwill-- around the same time my father dies,  (important, but not a "best" thing).
 I'd no idea she was originally designed to be a Madeline.
"I AM NOT," she says. "I AM ME!"
Quite right.
Here, she is doing acrobatics with bink in October:

BELOW: 9th blog birthday Oct 2016
I am immersed in FANDOM--writing a book for teens about creative stuff fans do. This fun fanvid by Olanov mashing up (violent) videogame Grand Theft Auto + "Happy"  opened up my brain:

YOU CAN GET INSIDE THE MACHINE
& REMAKE THE STORY.

(In case it's not obvious--the characters in GTA do not dance--the creator manipulated them.)
____________________________

BELOW: 8th blog birthday, Oct 2015
Looking at Starsky & Hutch (Hutch is from Duluth); stuffed animals; Duluth... Stuffed animals in Duluth--here, Black Bear over Chester Creek

BELOW: 7th birthday Oct. 7, 2014
I started working with people w/ dementia on 10/7, but what I'm most pleased to rediscover, looking back, is my mashup of Gilgamesh + "Amok Time" (Star Trek) just beforehand.
I'd totally forgotten it, and it's pretty much genius, if I do say so myself.
Click and judge for yourself: "Gilgamesh/Enkidu meet Kirk/Spock"...

BELOW: 6th birthday, October 2013
I turn in ms for what is wholly my first book for teens (geography books were rewrites of a series)--history of the toilet!
Jump for joy--with Marz at an apple orchard--photo by bink:

BELOW: 5th Blog birthday, 2012
Still barely blogging... Injured my arm's Dequervain's tendon working as a nursing aide...

But made some good photo essays, including, below, my neighborhood's voters in the 2012 election. Minnesota voted for marriage equality, as bink and many others had worked for.

 
BELOW: 4th birthday, October 2011
Barely blogging: Marz (below, left) has moved here after walking Camino, summer 2011--below, in Spain:

BELOW: 3rd birthday, October 2010
This fall, I'm helping bink with her "DVD to Art" project to counteract the Catholic archbishop's opposition to marriage equality (same-sex marriage).
Jumping for joy at the opening--bink on the left:

BELOW: 2nd birthday, October 2009
Write/editing geography books for middle-schoolers on contract. This fall writing about Finland, I bought a Marrimekko shower curtain.

BELOW: 1st birthday, October 7, 2008

Making my 9-min movie Orestes and the Fly this fall:

"As I prepare to shoot the Death of Agamemnon
[below: me trying out bathtub for death scene; bink as Fly, with Erica],
I see that I have been, honestly, a bit overwhelmed with all that moviemaking requires. It's a lot!
I wanted to gobble it all up at once, it's so good. "

BELOW: First Post of Year Zero: Sunday, October 7, 2007

"Sunday Morning"

"One of the things I have missed most about blogging (it's been two years) is having a place to keep found words--things I overhear, for instance, or bits and pieces of writing--like a nest where magpies keep objects that catch their fancy."

Did I not have a camera? Maybe not. Certainly I didn't have a cell/smart phone (and wouldn't for another dozen years)-- did they even have digital cameras in them in 2007?

At any rate, I didn't post any of my own photos until December that year. My first photo was of one of the cards I made to send for the holidays:

Blog Is Shiny Fifteen!

Photo, below, goes with yesterday's post about my thrift haul:
my new (old) curtains and Mikasa dinner plate

Fifteen years ago, on October 7, 2007, I wrote my first blog post here. It began...

"One of the things I have missed most about blogging (it's been two years) is having a place to keep found words––things I overhear, for instance, or bits and pieces of writing––like a nest where magpies keep objects that catch their fancy."

I'm on track. Yesterday on l'astronave's birthday, I blogged something I'd overheard at work. Keeping the bookstore diary is an exercise in paying attention to shiny objects.

[L'astronave is Italian for "starship". I chose the name when I was deep into Star Trek: "These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise", ya know.
(The earlier, first blog I referred to was Flightless Parrots.)
I still like it--the show, and the name. And the blog. It's been so long, it's part of my identity. Heh, My Life Work.]

Mix It Up

New cashier Samantha was accused of racism by a customer last week, as all cashiers are, eventually, and regularly. Standing in one place, they are sitting ducks. Simply asking customers to check their backpacks behind the counter is all it takes to set some off.

"Do I look like a meth head?" an angry customer said to Samantha when she asked him to check his bag.
("That would be the whole store," Samantha said to me.)
And then he called her a racist.

"I'm part Black too," she said.

The customer was Black, but all races sling this accusation, often as a catch-all insult. Not that racism isn't real, but the word is almost meaningless at my workplace, a generic insult, like Shakespeare's "thou art a general offense".

Sometimes at work I swear in frustration the usual predictable words. I'm going to borrow from Capt. Haddock and next time yell JELLIED EEL!

A white guy recently told Ass't Man that he (AM) wouldn't make him check his bag if he (the customer) were Black.
"Dude," AM said, "we're both white."

You can't always tell by looking though--see, Samantha. Though it had crossed my mind that she might be multiracial, which is kinda the new American, right?
Ah--here--a graph from the Washington Post article (Oct. 8, 2021), "‘We’re talking about a big, powerful phenomenon’: Multiracial Americans drive change":

 

The other day, a customer told me his elderly, white parents had been unhappy that his Anglo/Mexican son is dating the daughter of Somali immigrants . . . until they met the young woman.
"She's so nice, not like his last girlfriend. Now they hope he'll marry her."

I try not to assume, but I get caught out all the time.
Leah, for instance, is an older, Jewish woman who I saw at first as unidimensional--nice, but uninteresting. She volunteers straightening clothes on the sales floor once a week. One day a customer was trying to get something across to the cashier in Spanish, and Leah stepped up and interpreted fluently.
Turns out she grew up in Cuba.
(And what I know about that comes entirely from the Wikipedia article "History of the Jews in Cuba".)

Yesterday she asked me if we had any books about Putin.
No? How about any Russian history.
Sorry, I told her, they all sold when I made a War & Peace display for the Russia-Ukraine war.

(Which reminds me--I pulled a new Ukraine flag from textile baling. "We can sell this," I said. "I see Ukraine flags flying around town."

"Oh, is that what that is?")

Later, I unpacked this book, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia. (rev. ed. 2011).

I handed it to Leah, "Just for you!"
She was pleased.
Russia, Jews, Cuba...I must ask her more about all this.

________________
Keep 'er Moving

I'm in motion at work, so I don't get targeted by customers very often.
But last week I did. I'd left my cart in the center of the aisle while I shelved books.

A young man said loudly, "Why would anyone leave their cart right in the way? It's setting me up for failure."

"That's my cart," I said. "Sorry I left it in the way--it's tight for space in here."

"You're too old to tell anything to," he said.
I couldn't tell if he meant I deserved respect as an elder or if I was an old dog who couldn't learn new tricks.

I was annoyed with him from start to finish, but I wondered if he might be schizoaffective or something like that.
Not to assume!
He might've just been pissed off all day long, because LIFE. It can be like jellied eels on your head.

Draperies

I have the weekend off--I'm going to start to put my furnishing in order.
I just now got my new Draperies by Burlington House out of the washing machine (gentle cycle) in the basement. Avocado green with a gold-green sheen. They'd smelled a little rubbery, from their light-blocking lining, but they cleaned up great.

I'm sure they're 1970s. Insulated, like Jimmy Carter said--wear your cardigan! (Did you see Carter turned ninety-eight on October 1? He's outlasted his age-mates I associated him with, my Auntie Vi and Queen Elizabeth.)

I have to mount a curtain rod to hang the drapes. A chance to practice with the electric drill my coworkers gave me as a housewarming present.

My radiators came on this cold morning (39ºF / 3.9ºC), and the apartment is now 72 (22 C). Plenty warm!
(The landlord pays the heat; I pay gas & electric.)

WILL I NEVER STOP WRITING ABOUT FURNISHINGS?
But... It's weird to get so many new things all at once. Usually furnishings collect over the years. I'm wondering if I've got too many things that match... Too much green?
Yeah, no. I don't think so.
Anyway, if I don't like something, I can always take it to the store. It's like a library of stuff.

And now I'm going to walk over to the Fall Festival at the nearby Catholic Church. See what they've got for handmade Christmas tree decorations, if anything. I have none.
Then I'm going to start sewing the felt stars and eye buttons on my tree skirt.

Tootle-oo, blog friends. Thanks for being here!
Let us shine on, like luminous jellyfish, not jellied eels.

Orange October

Blog's birthday is on October 7, but this is the SEASON, so I'm marking it here: Blog is 14!

I don't have enough books specifically on Halloween, so I went with colors and moods: today I turned books at the thrift store with autumn-colored covers face-out for an Overall Mood Board effect.

Here's some of the fiction + the main display:

More to come, but first, an update: The staff meeting this morning was good!
Whew. You just never know.

Big Boss invited everyone to talk about how they felt about the situation with people living/dealing by the store for four months until the cops chased them away a couple weeks ago (the people are literally two blocks away now).

It was good to air feelings about it. Our meetings are so short, there's not time for discussion, and I think that's weirdly helpful.
People have to speak briefly, and there's no time for responses--sort of (accidentally) like 12 Step meetings.

People's responses were varied--everyone's relieved that we don't have to wade through blasted people and traffic, but most people are concerned that nothing changed, there was no real HELP.

Before the meeting, in the breakroom I'd said I wanted to talk about pronouns at the meeting. "Let's put it on the agenda," I said.
I WAS JOKING, (there is no agenda), but the response in the breakroom was interesting.

Big Boss obviously resents having to do the pronoun introduction.
He said that he just says, "My name is ___" and doesn't give his pronouns.

I am with him-- not because I'm opposed to pronoun switcheroos--I think mix-and-match is GREAT---but because I want the Naming of Pronouns to be a choice, not an obligation, not a Test of Political With-it-ness.

If it was a test of with-it-ness, I would say half my coworkers failed. LOL.
But they were honest, not pretending to toe the line.

I wish gender were no big deal. I saw a bathroom signs... now, where...? Oh--yeah, in Burrito Union in Duluth--their bathroom signs say:
WE DON'T CARE.
I don't care either. I will call you whatever you want.

But I sense it wasn't that Big Boss "doesn't care" so much as that he doesn't like something about the gender stuff---not sure what. (I can guess.)
I probably shouldn't probe further--I might well not like what I discover. It felt like a tense subject with him. I was laughing, but he wasn't.

But some other folks had fun with it, though, including Ass't Man, who'd had a great trans coworker at a previous job who was happy to talk to Asst Man all about the whats and whys and wherefores.
COMMUNICATION.
That's the thing.

The other thing Big Boss said was that people should think about setting aside time to do a special project during their shift.
This is SUCH a good idea.
Otherwise there is always too much to do--you have to block out your time and ignore the flood of donations to do anything.
My old friend: Set Your Intentions.

I had already intended to do an October/ Halloween rearrange & display. I have been neglecting displays, feeling overwhelmed with incoming books, and I think it's a mistake.

OK--back to my Halloweenish book display.

BELOW: Georgie's Halloween is from 1958--for only $2.99.
(It's adorable, but it had pencil scribbles on it.)

BELOW: Side-by-side: Look at those compatible profiles!

BELOW: I can't believe that ceramic aardvarky thing (next to the papier-mache giraffe) hasn't sold.
I marked it down from $1.99 to .99.

Some fiction:

BELOW, top shelf, left: The Invention of Hugo Cabret is one of my favorite modern book covers. I don't even know what it's about.
[googles]
Oh! It's about French filmmaker Georges Mélies.
WHAT? AND TOYS??? Per Wikipedia:
"At the end of his life, Méliès was destitute... He sold toys from a booth in a Paris railway station, which provides the setting of the story." Well, now I must read it!

Mysteries often have orange & red covers anyway, so this section was a breeze:

Not visible below--a pile of ten Playboy magazines from 1991, hidden on the bottom shelf of Cool Old Books, priced 99 cents each.
Customers complain if there's anything racy on display, but I didn't want to throw these out. The nudity, such as it is, is stupid and objectifies women, yeah, but it's so mild, it's like what's on billboards now. And the articles truly are interesting--an interview with Spike Lee, for instance.
I'm hoping someone will buy all ten at once---and quickly, and no one will even see them to complain.

Now it's morning

[Blog is thirteen as of today.]

HouseMate's son moved out last month, and the guest room is a sitting room again.

Rose Duquette, Tanya Barry, Golda, and Eeva, looking northeast

 

Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character is instantly gripping, and terrible. "I haven't really slept for twenty years," a US combat vet says.

A main trauma, shared with Achilles: betrayal by a leader (like Agamemnon), who does not do "what's right".
I've read or heard about that over and over, but never put it together as a war trauma.

But of course betrayal is a terrible wound in civilian life too. I felt it with a once-friendly colleague who turned on me when he became a manager. Make that Assistant Manager.
We get along well now. But I don't fully trust him.

3333 Posts, Twelve Years

No significance to this being post #3,333––I  noted the nifty number this morning, then realized yesterday was l'astronave's twelfth birthday! Born October 7, 2007.

I don't think of my blog by its name––"starship" in Italian––I think of it as "my blog". Or even as gugeo--its url name--short for "guerrilla geography", a name that was already taken when I started this blog, a name I wanted because I was tired of writing geography books for middle school libraries at the time, and wanted to go a bit rogue.

I didn't though––go rogue––I still write as if I'm an editor who has to footnote everything I say.
I like that, mostly. It can slow me down, but when I read wrong "facts", I wonder, why didn't someone fact check this? 
I remember when it was hard to look stuff up--you had to go to the library--but now it's the work of seconds to google it.

I'm not too picky about casual writing (like emails), but published?
The other day I started reading a Dean Koontz novel on the rec of a customer, and I stopped after DK describes his hero––a man who supposedly knows spy tactics––as "unavoidably" leaving wet footprints on a carpet.

Unavoidably?
Wouldn't a spy know to take his wet shoes off, if he wanted to avoid leaving footprints?
Cranking this stuff out top speed, are we, Mr. Koontz?

I put genre books like Koontz's out for .49 each at work. People buy them in piles. I get the appeal--it's like eating candy--doesn't have to be great--but I don't enjoy it. 

I cashier from 10 to 2 today. I just took my CBD in preparation. Yesterday I didn't take it, and I felt super annoyed at the store. I was muttering to myself, "Why am I putting up with this for minimum wage?"

Just the usual, relentless mismanagement. 
For instance, someone accepted a load of books that had been stored in a basement. You could see the mildew on them, and you could smell the odor from a couple feet away,
though the worker who is, of course, entirely untrained, said he couldn't smell it.

 I hate to handle books with mold and mildew--even carrying them  as far as the Dumpster--it can infect your lungs...
Oh, well. Other than that, my life is going well. House sitting is nice--far from feeling displaced, I like being in such familiar surroundings after one month in a new and foreign neighborhood. 

My new homeowner messaged me a photo of the three girlettes I left there. "They are waiting for you," she said.

Jayne, Bubblepop, and Opal

Fly Me to the Moon

Today is this blog's 11th birthday! [See all blog birthdays.]
I was going to clean my apartment thoroughly today. 
I made a good start.
But then I had to make this.

Astronaut spread from The New Book of Knowledge Annual, 1970, which I got at a thrift store on the way to Duluth.

Moustronaut from May I Come In? (kids book), 1969

Blog Is Ten!

I've been blogging here on l'astronave for ten years, as of today:
Happy Birthday to blogging me, and love to all blog readers, past, present, and future! 
(I hope to write more later today, but right now I'm off to a garage sale of donated fabrics, etc., inside at the Textile Center.)

Birthday GIF ^ by the artist Maggie Rudy, of MousesHouses,
who makes her amusing mice from felted wool and pipe cleaners. 
Her book City Mouse, Country Mouse is out later this month.

Eight Years, Two Thousand Posts: Doing the Math

I.  I Attempt to Do Math

This is l'astronave's 2,000th post! And its 8th birthday (close enough, anyway). And it recently passed its 500,000th page view.
So... I should crunch those numbers, right?

Let's see... 
8 years x 365 days = 2,920 days ÷ 2,000 posts = 1.46 posts/day.

Donald Glover* in The Martian says, "Your math is wrong."

Ha! Right. My math is crap. It's the other way around: 
2,000 posts ÷ 2,920 days = an average of .68 posts/day.

Yeah, there we go. 

It wasn't like that though---per my archive, I averaged more than one post a day some years, but barely one per month one year.
(Also, like half those views were people looking for "that poem from Lives of Others".)

II. The Martian: "Do Your Science Shit"
 
Speaking of math,
I went to see The Martian (links to trailer; 2015, dir. Ridley Scott) last night--it's about an astronaut (Matt Damon) stranded on Mars, and Earth's efforts to rescue him. 

It's a Robinson Crusoe–like tale, so that's fun; and it's also about "the human instinct to help each other out", so that's uplifting;
but overall the movie felt like one loooooong public service message for STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics):
 
Waking up after an accident to find himself alone on Mars, the astronaut says, 
"I'm left with only one option: 
I'm going to have to science the shit out of this."

Translation:  
Come on, American kids! Do your science homework!
Or, maybe more to the point? Come on, American politicians, fund this science shit! 

It is very cool to watch him do science--there's real shit (toilets in space!), and stuff blows up--  cool for a while, anyway:
at 2 hrs, 21 min, I'd say it was 51 minutes too long.
And I did enjoy the movie. 
But it was all very surfacey–– the astronaut never has anything like a Dark Night of the Soul. 

That may be accurate, of course. NASA chooses scientists who are not prone to despair, but its absence doesn't make for a great human-interest story.

Also, Mars was awfully noisy...  
US movies are too often like radio, disallowing silence for even one second. 
The astronaut talks almost incessantly, mostly in a jokey tone that gets old quickly, like avocado-colored kitchen appliances--
 and when he doesn't, we hear schlocky movie music or he listens to songs from the Seventies. [Watched Guardians of the Galaxy, did you, Ripley?]


The movie met the Director of Inclusivity's** standards, for men anyway––but bafflingly, all the women were white (even mostly blondish), including Kristin Wiig who has absolutely nothing to do but stand around looking concerned. Very odd. 

Of course, if you're a woman who talks in a movie, you're already a minority. * * *
 
III. The Ten-Dollar Woman

Speaking of representations of women, I hear the US is going to replace Alexander Hamilton with a woman on the ten-dollar bill.

I'm fine with replacing some guy, but working on Andrew Jackson lately, I'd definitely choose to replace him over Hamilton. You could say Jackson inherited a no-win situation with white settlers vs. American Indians, but his response was a kind of mismanaged ethnic cleansing [can it be well-managed?].

A-ha! I see the Business Insider agrees with me about Jackson being the better choice to get rid of. They also explain that the woman will appear along with Hamilton, which seems kinda goofy.

Anyway, what woman would you like to see on the $10 bill?

I choose Sally Ride!
First US woman in space, in 1983––twenty years after Soviet Valentina Tereshhkova––and the first LGBT astronaut in space too.

How cool would this look on currency:

____________________
FOOTNOTES

* I thought Donald Glover was new to me, and delightful as a star-dusty-child scientist who comes up with a Star Trekish plan (slingshot around the sun!), but he wrote for 30 Rock, so I do know his work.

**The Director of Inclusivity is a title I got from a much snappier media production---W1A, a BBC TV show sending up working for the BBC---applies equally well to almost any workplace involving humans.

Marketing Evil Genius(?) Siobhan Sharp (Jessica Hynes) tells it like it is to BBC Head of Values, Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville):

 *** Washington Post, Feb. 2015: "Study: There are fewer women in lead roles in top films than there were in 2002"

The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that females comprised 12% of protagonists in the top-grossing films of 2014.

Year Seven, Day One

Today is l'astronave's seventh birthday and my first day of my new job: 
I leave in an hour to go lead activities with seniors ...and toddlers.

TODDLERS?
WTF?

No one told me in the interview that I'd be responsible for activities when the little kids from the on-site daycare visit the "grandfriends" on the memory care floor where I'll be working with people with Alzheimer's and other dementias. 
But I am.

("Memory Care." Ugh. There's no way to name this, I suppose, that doesn't mean to be kind but sound condescending. 
I like instead how Denny Crane, the old lawyer in Boston Legal whose mind is losing its edge, goes around saying he has Mad Cow. 
Maybe it could be the Mad Cow floor? Same initials.) 

The thing is, little kids frighten me: 
tiny sociopaths with high-powered motors and minds like vacuum cleaners that suck up and remember everything.

See > > >
Advertisers know.

The other things is, my new boss e-mailed me yesterday to ask if I had an activity we could do with the kids today.

She had told me she'd handle the first couple toddler meetings, but I guess she's too busy--she doesn't have any assistants until I start.  She didn't say that, but then, she didn't tell me I'd be doing it in the first place either. 

via

Have I mentioned she is very young?

I think I see the lay of the land here.

At first I was annoyed:
I don't even know what supplies we have, how can I plan an activity?
But then I decided to suck it up and ask instead,  
How Can I Help?


I may only be paid to be the lackey, but in truth, I do kind of want and am capable of handing the power and self-direction of a boss. Ridiculous though it is, I'd prefer to plan activities even before my first day than to walk into a tightly planned unit I have to conform to.

And also, I may feel uncomfortable being in charge right away, but I do have a lot of life experience . . . and the Internet!
I can think up Mad Cow activities myself, but I don't know what little kids can do.

I googled "toddler activities with leaves" and a few thousands ideas popped up. 

Today, we'll trace hands onto construction paper (there must be construction paper around, right?), cut them out, and staple their stems together to made a leaf chain we can hang up.

This sort of thing, but you know no child or Mad Cow made such a tidy item. >

I can do this.
I think I'm going through a Mid Life thing: feeling like a beginner but really being the old hand.
Mad Cows or Miniature Sociopaths, Bosses or Minions---we all have more or less the same hand shapes.

So, off I go!

Staggering to the finish line...

[Today is l'astronave's 6th birthday]

I turned it in !!!
The ms of the sanitation history book (for teens).
Whew.
I feel like I ran a marathon.

Why do I judge myself so harshly for having a long hard time writing this?
If a friend ran 26.2 miles in, say, twelve hours, I'd say,
 WOW!!!! you covered 26.2 miles at one time.
Who CARES how long it took?

OK. So that's what I'm saying to me.
WOW! You wrote a book!!!
Who cares how long it took you?
Who cares it's "only" for school libraries?
YOU, Fresca, ARE AN AUTHOR.

Well.... OK, then.
*hangs head in sheepish delight*

Thank you very much.
_________________________
"Simply stunning."

Blog Is Three

LEFT: Me, disheveled at Bob's, where I started this blog three years ago today.

A few random thoughts.

When I started, it'd been almost five years since my mother killed herself, and I was still dragging her death around. It's fallen away somewhat, and I can see her again, the person, unobscured by her death.
I dreamed I saw her recently. She looked at me, smiled, said, "Hello, Francesca."
That's all.
It was stunning. I hadn't heard her voice in almost eight years, and there it was.

Last week, my Frindian ms came back from the editor, who took out much of what I thought was most interesting. (Too gory, too many Indians. WTF?) I lobbied to keep some of it in, but the publisher has the final say, so I don't know.
I'm not really liking writing on assignment. Even though the topics (now, the history of communications) are interesting, it's like writing with blinders and hobbles.

I'm meeting with a couple friends next Sunday with the idea of forming a writing group, especially to encourage one another to send our writing out for publication. Not sure this would ever be lucrative, but maybe I'd rather do nonwriting paid work that leaves my brain free so I can just write here.
I like myself as a blogger.
I like other bloggers.
(Facebook, not so much, though bink's DVD to ART project proves how effective it is as a communication tool.)

I like being middle-aged. A lot.
Despite the usual ups and downs, I am calmer, more sure in myself. I go off (e.g. when the pastor fired bink, a real Sicilian rage blew through) but I come back to center sooner--clear about what I think and feel, not so buffeted by the winds of emotion, and therefore more able to do what I want.
This is great! It's like farming in the Dust Bowl--you want your fertile top soil to stay on the ground so you can use it, not always be up in the air.
It's not a loss of passion, it's a gain of clarity.

Going to donate blood for the second time this Saturday. You may remember, I almost fainted twice the first time. It's a disgusting feeling, nothing like graceful movie fainting. But it's such a good thing to do, I'll do it again.
Captain Kirk would.

Thinking about turning fifty in March... want to write more about that. But not now. I'm writing a couple indexes and later I'm meeting bink at the art college to film her cutting slits into the DVDs on a bandsaw. I hope to create a little documentary of this whole project.

Oh! Jut yesterday, some business-owners gave bink free use of a wonderful empty storefront (in the Uptown) to build and show her project!
A big space with lots of windows, ...perfect for an opening night party.
Will keep you posted.

Happy Birthday to l'astronave. Thank you all for being here.

Post No. 901 (775 Days)

I've been meaning to write something meaningful about the two-year birthday of this blog, like I did at post no. 438 for L'Astronave's one-year birthday. But my brain's been--and is--distracted by herring and Holland, and now the time's slipped past. I'll let these two jokers show how happy I am to be here. (Thanks for sending the photo, Art Sparker.) And, Happy Monday!

365: Marimekko Psycho

I'd forgotten there's a Finn Style store on the second-story skyway downtown. Yesterday I popped in for the first time and saw a Marimekko shower curtain for $5, down from $49 because a worker had cut a tiny slice in it, opening its packing box.
I had to buy it--it's the same classic poppy pattern I compared to the set dressing of "The Trouble with Tribbles."

I'm not doing many 365 self-portraits--I'm getting to see plenty of myself in my "Making Of" film.

{Today is blog's second birthday!}

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365 Days, 438 Posts

My brain is free!

Sometimes you can untangle yourself, unlike Robert Mitchum's character in Out of the Past (left, with Jane Greer, 1947).

Exactly one year ago, I started this blog.
At the same time, I quit writing geography reference books.

Time for a little review.

I. Exiting the Time Knot *

My brain had been molded into the shape of the map of Africa by four years of writing to spec, as if by a Jell-O mold.
My internal-editor gauge was stuck at Seventh-Grade Comprehension Level.

I had no idea what I wanted to do but I knew I wouldn't find out if I didn't shake my brain out of the mold, let it melt like Jell-O in the sun and then re-form itself in its own image.

So that's what I did. I gave myself a sabbatical from thinking along other people's lines.

It was scary to be puddle-shaped. After a couple months, I longed for someone to tell me what to do, even if I didn't want to do it.
It seemed I'd never have a firm shape again.

I just took a deep breath and waited the discomfort out.

That's one of the strengths I appreciate most having at mid-life:
the trust that if I sit with discomfort, it will pass. Lean into it, like into a knotted muscle, and it will ease.
I've done it often enough to know it works.
But it's still uncomfortable and scary, and each time it's new.

II. Never Give Up. Never Surrender.

As I practiced doing nothing, indigenous desires started to arise.
After a month, Glad to Be Alive, I wanted to see Bruce Springsteen in concert.
Rock and roll is a generative force, and I'd been avoiding it for a long time.

[Image: Bruce Springsteen, Rolling Stone no. 1038, November 2007]

Then I wanted to watch all of the original Star Trek again.
Talk about generative! That filled January to March and, according to my blog labels, 97 posts (and counting).
My own energy revved up, Channeling Captain Kirk.

Watching Star Trek also carved out space for imaginative play. The space became a pool, where I could swim with dolphins.
As I first did in my post of January 24, Captain Kirk's Parted Lips, one of my personal bests.

III. That's Not Right

Rereading that post today, I remember that the map of Africa wasn't the only mold I was reforming from. Before I started writing for the school library market, my brain had spent five+ years in the Catholic Church. Such richness! But more of a Procrustean bed than a Jell-O mold, and the parts that got lopped off were mostly sexual.

Worse, I'd learned to cut off pieces myself.
I'd written an article about ten years ago on the Virgin Mary, for instance, and I'd wanted to say that her virginity meant she was unfucked, as in "not screwed/fucked up." I knew the article wouldn't get published with those words so I didn't even write them.
Sex isn't actually high on my list of interests, but it's a canary in a coal mine: If it's suppressed, a whole lot of other stuff is too. Under such censorship, eventually you stop even thinking along certain veins.

Sexuality in Star Trek isn't overt, but it is out of this world.
Its otherlandishness helped me activate my starfish-like ability to regenerate missing limbs. Or even imagine extra ones, like in Galaxy Quest (image here) or some fan videos, which I discovered almost accidentally on youTube.

From there I started recalling and writing in May about Movie Moments--those bits and pieces of stories, images, characters that testify to and fuel the power of imagination.

IV. Plucky Comic Relief

How long can you admire something before you want to try it yourself?

In June I made my first youTube ST fanvid, the little soufflé Don't Touch Jim's Flower. While this dawdles at 367 views (compare to 1,553 views of my Kirk: To His Mistress vid), it's rather my favorite, the way a first-born might be.

Looking backward, these connections line up so neatly, they seem obvious or preordained.
That is an illusion.
Living through the past year, it felt anything but sequential or guided: all jerky starts and stops, swampy slumps followed by quantum leaps.

However, a lot of seemingly disparate threads did come together when I went to the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas in August.
There, it seemed it's Never Too Late for a Happy Childhood, at least in part. Fans and actors alike spoke openly and playfully about sex and space.

Witnessing people being sweet to each other for five whole days, I thought maybe Another World Is Possible, as maintained by the World Social Forum, which I first encountered when I was researching Mali.

After a bumpy re-entry, and a bit of divine intervention, I went and bought a movie camera and, as you know, recently got to work on Orestes and the Fly.

V. The Vox Ultra-Frequency Carrier Guidance System (with Roman Candles)

That brings me up to today and my brain.
Recently, I realized something wasn't right with my movie. I wasn't sure what or why, but I knew part of it was that I was going too fast, like swallowing before chewing.

So I changed my timeframe, from thinking of this movie as something that will be done by November to a semester-long project. Or, actually, as long as it needs.

Giving my brain free rein usually works magic.
Sure enough, last night I saw how I need to reframe the Narrator, who I'd originally imagined being like the Narrator in Rocky Horror. She should fulfill the same function as the chorus in Greek theater, and I saw how to make that happen.

VI. By Grabthar's Hammer, We Live to Tell the Tale

A recent article in the Economist said that scientists were favored in Stalin's Russia because Stalin needed a nuclear bomb, and he knew "scientists' brains don't work unless they are allowed a certain amount of freedom."

It's not just scientists' brains that need freedom.

It took a while, but releasing my brain from the strictures of Other People's Molds has payed off.
Blogging 438 posts was somehow part of that.

Thank you, fellow blog people.

[Image: River Tam (Summer Glau) to the rescue, from Serenity Screencaps ]

Oh--and tonight I am going with L &M to my first Improv Acting class!
As I wrote in Improv Life, it's all about learning to fly with your shields down.

Like Crewman Number Six, I'm just jazzed about being on the show, man.*

[ * Maybe I should say, in case you were confused, this last quote and the post's titles are all quotes from Galaxy Quest.]

Sunday Morning

One of the things I have missed most about blogging (it's been two years) is having a place to keep found words--things I overhear, for instance, or bits and pieces of writing--like a nest where magpies keep objects that catch their fancy.

So, it is fitting that as I locked my bike up here at Bob's coffee shop, where I had come to start a blog but was uncertain what I'd write about, I found a scrap of a grocery list by my feet, in the gutter. And such a morning list, with pleasing spelling variations:

orange ju
Basic 4 ceareal
Milk 2%
bananas
cinnimon rason bagels