When it was time for urgency
I did not act accordingly
Now it's time to say goodnight
but still I'm here and still I write

Tomorrow is my next-to-last session with the drawing kids. After Reagan and I came home from our evening out, I didn't start putting together the pamphlet quickly enough (although I knew what my plan was), and now I'm more than an hour late for bed (though hardly tired).

HOT DAMN

Next week we'll do perspective! If I go Wednesday or Thursday, they'll have gingerbread houses to draw. Rock on.

Another good day, though not productive as I'd like it to be. Too much time spent daydreaming about possibilities outside my control.

The poem today's offering is based on was written in high school, and I was so incredibly proud of it. It was one of mine that made it into the school's literary magazine. I remember we had a hard time laying out that page because the poem is a diptych... or whatever poetry word there is for two columns of poem side by side.

Recall

She says, "Broken."
Then after a pause

asks me what
I remember.


She says, "Red,"
and waits

for me to say
if, behind my
veiled eyes,
I see the autumn
forest, or that
violated house
that used to be
a rosy home.


"Yes," I say,
noting the color
inside my eyelids.

... and more drawings. Today I did better at doodling in a bookstore cafe. Probably because I never want to spend money at Borders, but I'm always anxious to browse at B&N.

I wasn't even thinking that positive

Oddly enough, today ends on a note much more familiar than I have hummed in a week or more. (Drawing!)

On the topic of positive thinking (or not doing so intentionally, and still having things to smile about), two opportunities have come my way in the last two days. One is short term and you'll hear about that next week. One is longer term and more tentative. The latter involves trying my hand at screenprinting. Two exciting projects I don't want to jinx.

Here is a brief photo essay about the 30 hours I was gone. A few more in the Flickr set










In the interest of keeping things chronological, in this gap of time I wrote today's poem.

Foraging

Merlot in hand
I stumble
into the rain-soaked grove
guided in circles
by birdsong

I marvel
at fading remnants
of the citrus crop

when high heels
betray me
mud on flannel pants
chilly earth to skin
I abandon
my search for yesterday's
memories

I follow the rooster back
to pick up
where last night left off

Some commentary below




More here at Flickr

The above poem is a high context daydream based on reality. Odd relationship with linebreaks in this one. I wish I could end that one line with "yesterday" and somehow indicate the possessive right before "memories". Or is that trite? What keeps me from shortening it to merely "yesterday" is sentimental attachment to the context that inspired the poem.

Last of all, a good old fashioned scannie:

The internet is forgiven

In 2001 or so I saw a short on Cartoon Network's O Canada and while it impacted me deeply, I managed to not take note of the title. It, along with Kenna's Hellbent video got a shout-out on my "quests" page on the very first website I ever had.

Tonight I started searching again, and after finding this description on the teleportation page of TVtropes

A Canadian cartoon, spotlighted on the extinct Cartoon Network show O Canada investigated the philosophical issue of teleporters. In it, a scientist shows off to a crowd a teleporter that functions by making an exact copy of someone elsewhere then destroying the original. A woman in the crowd, horrified by this, suggests to the scientist that he test the moral ramifications of the process by stepping through himself, and delaying the destruction of the original by five minutes. Thus, the scientist has an exact clone. They find this wonderful and exciting, until it comes time for one of them to be destroyed, whereupon each claims to be the copy. After the issue is resolved and one scientist is zapped into nothingness, the scientist changes his mind about the usefulness of the teleporter. The woman feels guilty for possibly impeding scientific progress, and atones for this by stepping through the machine herself, claiming that her new copied self is free of guilt for what her original had done.

decided to Ask MetaFilter if the hivemind knew the title or director. I get insecure about asking stupid questions, though, so held off and tried once again to see if my google-fu could pull me out of the jam.

Lo and behold! The next search got me a result of "I think it was called 'To Be'" and two searches later I was at an IMDb message board that not only confirmed the title and gave me John Weldon's name, but included a youtube link:





It's a philosophical 10 minutes I happily spend over and over and over again.

And me helping the internet?

I went back and added John Weldon's name and the title of his short to the TVtropes page that mentioned it. :)

Skimming the surface of sleep

I can't tell where I am relative to the beginning or end of my day. Since my last post I...

+ Spent a hectic 30 minutes with about 10 kids from my mom's class. Description and after-thoughts posted here.

+ Thought some about my plan of attack for Thursday's class, crashed around 3pm and got 6 hours of sleep

+ Woke up, spent some time online to catch up with friends I hadn't talked to for a couple days

+ Wrote the first half of the drawing advice I'll be including in the sketchbooks. Devised a drawing-as-your-personal-visual-language metaphor.

+ Tried to sleep more, watched Red Dwarf. o.O

+ Slept about 20 minutes. Woke up and wrote the second half of the drawing advice, including 67 ideas of things to draw.

+ Snuggled with Reagan, dozed more. I feel like I haven't spent time with my husband for ages.

+ Sketched and brushed the dog.

+ Got ready for day 2! (printed things out, gathered more of my sketchbooks for show and tell, etc)

I'm currently remote posting from my dad's computer downstairs to avoid bothering Reagan with my light and noise. He'll be sleeping another 4 hours.

... I just realized that this remote posting means no scans to upload. I'll include some with today's debriefing, as I'm sure I'll want to talk about it and be more alert than I was yesterday.

Busyness and being out of sorts means I haven't gotten time with my poetry. So here's something from high school I really don't understand:

Forgiveness

It doesn't matter the style of your clothes,
Only who designed them, and that they are your own.

It doesn't matter where you got them from,
Only where you wear them and why you go those places.

It doesn't matter how many places you go,
Only that you try not to get stains on yourself.

It doesn't matter that you did mess up those clothes,
Only that you notice and try your hardest to clean them soon.

It doesn't matter where you go to clean you clothes,
Only that you do it yourself and use lots of bleach.

What was I thinking? I think it fits with a quote I found on a sticky note while gathering sketchbooks. If you can't convince them, confuse them. -- Harry Truman I love quotations that encourage absurdity.

To make up for that lameness, I urge you to go listen to Danny Sherrard perform his poem "We Are Prometheus" over at IndieFeed. I caught the podcast of it recently and it blew me away. Incredibly inspiring and incredibly humbling.

I'm off to teach children about drawing! :D

Nervous + tired = bad!

Early last week I talked to my mom about doing a drawing workshop for her class, then spent several hours writing an outline. I didn't hear back, so I reminded her a few days ago and she told me it had slipped her mind and she needed to clear it with her principal. Yesterday around 11pm my mom asks if I can come do my first session today or Thursday.

We start discussing the bigger and smaller questions I have about what to expect, and what schedules look like daily, weekly, and for the rest of the year. As I haven't been around 5th grade kids.... since I was in elementary school... I decide that I should use one session to acclimate myself, like leaving a new fish in the bag when you first put it in the aquarium so the water temperatures can equalize. Except me and 11 year olds.

As there's no school next week (they get a long Thanksgiving holiday!) it means two full weeks between the first session and the second. With each session only being 30 minutes, my expectations of retention are low.

Short story long, I decided to use both Wednesday and Thursday to make my impression. That left me with under 12 hours to prepare and made my classroom debut coincide with my projected bedtime. Hijinx ensue.

In reality it was more like, stress induced mood-swings ensued.

I spent much of the first 8 hours trying to calm down and concoct an elegant plan to both pitch my workshop to the class at large in the 10 minutes before their lunch break and fill the 30 minutes of time we'd have for chatting.

Needless to say, there have been few opportunities in my day to do my own drawing, polish up today's poem, or write tomorrow's hand out. Well, after some yoga and a shower, I will be drawing before going to school.

Despite how neurotic I feel right now, I think this project is going to be good for me over the next few weeks.



With poem posting, I wanted to start with revising the old stuff that had potential or posting stuff that induced painful laughter. But, again, today didn't go as planned, so here's some ars poetica I meant to post when my site was down. It probably needs a little more tweaking. It belongs to a hypothetical chapbook called "A Self-Aware Collection". This all happened before I learned about the term "ars poetica".


Sentience

I start blank
with no dimension
then a dot
and then a line
a paragraph
a rounded thought
then I expand
to take up time

But that is
my last performance
can't turn a phrase
save plane or face
no back up trick
no animation
a fritter of time
a filling of space

No annotations
lines and arrows
strings to make me
dance and sing
I lack allusions
uncolored, unshaded
Do I lose depth
with history?