thing a day, february 25th

Last night I visited JF (you can read about her adventures here) in her lovely Lower East Side apartment.  JF and I traveled in Israel together a few years ago, and often discuss our mutual wanderlust and desire to maintain autonomy over our own lives, and then we eat things.

After my ink adventure of yore, I had trouble coming up with some thing for yesterday’s thing a day. I wandered around Lincoln Center late last night, and took some pictures, but my current favorite is this, which I took in JF’s apartment mirror.

reflection

The end of Thing a Day Month is hitting me with a mixture of relief and sadness. I’ve had more structure this month around creating than I manage to have with writing fiction really ever. That being said, I’m much more comfortable going to sleep at night when a piece of writing isn’t finished than I was last night, when I decided that my photographs would be my Thing for that day. Then, at some point between being awake and asleep, I thought, but if you think something is lovely, then you should let it be what it is.

Some graffiti from the Williamsburg Bridge:

aw, thanks!

true story

yay!

And finally:

an inkling: thing a day, 2.23.10

J bought me this amazing book, which has given me a touch of the crazy. In it I found  a recipe for how to make brown ink from tea, water and gum arabic.  It took me about fifty seconds to become completely obsessed with idea and run to the art supply store.

Note: You can also do it with an egg yolk, honey, gum arabic and lamp black -what collects on the bottom of a plate if you hold it above a flame- but it was really labor intensive to get even the half teaspoon that I needed.  Next time I’ll try it with store bought lamp black.

steeping tea (then you squeeze the tannin out and add 1 tsp of gum arabic)

ink

weapon of choice

experimenting

victory

While I attempted to make black ink, R took pictures of the fascinating yet slow process of soot making.

making soot

check me out

My new post is up at http://www.makom.haaretz.com/blog.asp?bId=207. It’s also on the front page of Ha’aretz (an Israeli daily), but you have to look for it. It’s on the left hand side, appropriately.

the view

From my window, I can see into the apartment building across the street, and at 4 am, all the neighbours have gone to sleep. Looking out reminds me of the nights and mornings I’ve woken up/been awake with a packed suitcase waiting for it to be time to leave for the airport.

I have insomnia. I am much better at having insomnia than I am at sleeping. The last time this happened, I cleaned my room and showered and read a book. It’s better for me to distract myself than to indulge in the thoughts I have in the middle of the night, which make me feel hectic and jittery.

The other day, D and I were trying to deconstruct my current state of simultaneous malaise and anxiety, and he pointed out that it’s the middle of February, which means on Sunday, my mother will have been dead for 12 years. That’s the English date, the Hebrew one passed a week ago without my noticing, because it doesn’t actually mean anything to me; one anniversary is enough.

Anyway, this might explain why everything has been off lately, even if I’ve stopped noticing the time that has gone by. D says, “Your body knows even if your brain doesn’t.” He also pointed out that someday, the years that I will have been without her will be more than I was with her. I will be old, then, and even though things will be different, they will really be the same.

thing a day: narcissism

I am notoriously unphotogenic, so for yesterday’s Thing a Day, I decided to take things into my own hands.

the best light is at 81st and Columbus.

I am one of those people who thinks that everything about New York City is beautiful. I wandered around the Upper West Side yesterday taking pictures of light and trees and sky and benches and buildings,looking at how  the natural and the human made worlds blend together. It’s a different idea of what’s beautiful. This city is always doing that, developing a new aesthetic, trying what other places wouldn’t even be  able to imagine.

The pictures are my Thing a Day for yesterday. Here are some.

women without men

D is in town this weekend. We have a great love, he and I, and we have since practically the moment we met. We haven’t seen each other since his wedding in August, which is the longest amount of time we’ve spent apart since meeting each other three years ago. On Friday afternoon, I went to visit him in the apartment where he’s staying with his husband while they’re in the city. This apartment is a dream on so many levels, in square footage, decor, bookshelves, etc. It’s also the home of a woman who has lived there for ten years alone. She has never been married, and has no children. This house has always been hers, and only hers, and it’s where she lives a full, beautiful, creative life. I imagined myself in every room, growing into every corner. Because he usually knows what I’m thinking, D said, “You could live here and write and work, and it would be just yours.”

For women, it seems, it is always about someone else. We’re taught to compete for men because we’re expected to find someone to share our lives with, to be caretakers to. We’re taught to believe that this is our nature. In spite of intellect and creativity and the many other things that make us up, our energy is really expected to be channeled into other people, namely, men.

A woman who elects to not share her life with a man, but to keep it for her very own, pays a price. Either she’s a lesbian, which demonizes her in a whole different way, or she must have been abused as a child, or she’s been traumatized by a bad relationship, or she just doesn’t know what she wants. No matter what, her priorities are all messed up (“Yes, dear, those other things are nice, but the point is to find a man.”).

Women who aren’t focused in some capacity or another on this goal are castigated for acting contrary to the nature of women, and not just by men. As women, we can be deeply hurtful to one another. We judge the choices we do and do not make, instead of supporting and affirming each other, corroding our vital female friendships.

A lot of people in my life are interested in my relationship status lately. I won’t elaborate, except to say that I have worked hard to create the life that I have now, and I wish that my personal and professional successes could be considered as interesting, valuable and conversation worthy as my potential relationships with men. My excellent friend V, often my feminist grounding rod, says, “If you want to be with someone, then you deserve someone great, and if you don’t, you should still get to be happy.”

on service

Yesterday I did my laundry from Ecuador (don’t judge me), and I found the pants I have worn at some point during every service trip I’ve been on. They have paint from New Orleans that reminds me of yellow cake batter, and now, dirt from digging into a hill in Ecuador. They remind me that I have been places and had adventures, but they also remind me of the most frustrating moments of staffing service trips, when my students say, “We were just talking to people when we could have been working.”

There’s a lot to unpack in this notion that physical labor is the highest form of service, and the only legitimate one. Service is not just something we do with our hands. In fact, if it is only something that we do only with our hands, and not our brains and mouths, then it’s essentially worthless. There must be a context set initially, and revisited throughout the trip and after, as to why the work needs to be done, what  the circumstances are that necessitate relying on the labor of strangers, and why we as volunteers feel  we are entitled to dictate what work is valid and important. We have to be willing to spend our time listening, playing, singing in order to understand any of these things,in order to open ourselves up to the possibility of a genuine encounter.

Service where you simply build the house/dig the road/weed the garden is an anti-intellectual approach to what can and should actually be an extremely rigorous experience. To base our expectations as volunteers on what we will accomplish in the way of physical work creates a stratification where intellectual and emotional engagement is less valued than brawn and muscles.

There is also a problematic gender component of volunteer based physical labor-namely, the way it can reinforce and reward the male strength/female weakness dichotomy. Women can be helpless bystanders while men do the heavy lifting, because in the worst and most typical of service scenarios, they aren’t being allowed or empowered to think of themselves as having physical ability. The traditional norms of male/female social dynamics don’t make it comfortable for women to take a leadership role in situations that utilize manual labor.

Finally, we as volunteers and people who live in the world have inevitably carried into our volunteer experience certain messages about race and class. We think we know what will best help, and what that help looks like, because we are American, because we are white, because we have been to college, etc. We cease to listen, and worse, we become incapable of hearing. Volunteering is a political act, after all, one that requires us to educate ourselves as well as those in our communities. As long as we continue to prize physical achievement over all else in our service work, we will never challenge our assumptions about who needs help, why, and our role in perpetuating it. We will continue to think of “them” as lazy, weak, stupid; the desperate Third World masses of our bootstrap obsessed American dreams.

habit

One thing I’ve learned so far from this art sprint, besides that I will never throw out an empty pill bottle again, is how much I like the process of making art, even if the outcome is dubious. Last weekend, S and I went to the Brooklyn Museum (it’s free the first Saturday of every month), and there was a piece there by the abstract painter Ad Reinhart. He said, “”The content is not in a subject matter or story but in the actual painting activity.”

It’s good to have someone, living or dead, give voice to thoughts like this. It makes a person feel less crazy. I feel like I’m hobbling along this month which is not how I’d like it to be. There’s nothing specifically wrong, except this sense that things are profoundly off. My routine has been work, home, make art, sleep, which is a rather lovely way to spend time, but still it feels like I’m trying to hang on to a slippery, wriggling toddler.

Inevitably, when I feel like this, I wonder if my order of things are still right and real, if I’m still angry and hungry. The answer is of course yes to both, even if the light seems dimmer, and so I’m trying to power through.

thing a day month!

February, according to my sources, is Thing a Day Month. Basically, you create a piece of art every day for twenty eight days. I wish I’d thought of this myself, but alas, it’s four years old. You can find out more about it here.

The things I love about making art are the same things I love about writing: textures and the way they work together (paint, fabric, words), and being challenged by the potential of creation. I try not to be competitive about it, which is hard, because I am a competitive person, in spite of my best efforts.

This is the first of my pieces for Thing A Day Month.

Materials: super glue, acrylic postcard, beads, tea bag (separated), tiny shoe I found on the street, receipt piece.

Also today, I had jury duty. It was a particularly harrowing experience, what with ornery fellow jurors, tedious waiting, and an insanely racist trial set up (white lawyers, judge and jurors, and an African American man accused of selling drugs). It was what I would refer to as a social justice emergency.

While waiting for my Rendezvous with Justice, I drew this:

Rosehips

I just love her. You can’t see her hands at the top, but her fingers are spread, and she seems incredibly joyful to me. I drew her on a scrap piece of paper with a Micron pen, a beautiful writing implement, introduced to me by my friend Lisa.