I can carry a tune in a bucket, as long as I use both hands

Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2004
1:05 PM

I know, I know, I'm getting really bad at updating regularly. I have been either too busy or uninspired to write much. I hate writing the kind of entries that people will read and then forget five seconds later. Worse, I hate writing the kind of entries that I forget five seconds later. Hopefully this one won't fall into that category.

I never wanted to be a singer. My singing voice does not make dogs howl and small children burst into tears. However, I will never win any talent contests with it either. I can do okay in a group, but don't really have the desire to perform at all. When I was in high school I wanted to be an actor, and I did a couple of school and community theatre type things, which involved some singing but no solos, which was fine. (I got to college thinking I'd major in theatre, took one semester of it and promptly gave it up. Theatre people are too weird, and that says a lot coming from a Scadian. No offense to any theatre people out there.) Music just isn't my thing - though I played two instruments in school, I also gave that up when I went to college and don't really miss playing. I think music is too mathematical for me - I do much better with art forms oriented towards language or visual expression.

When I was very young, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write fiction, and I wrote all kinds of silly little short stories, bad poetry (OK, and some not so bad poetry - even got one piece published) and the beginnings of novels. I'm actually a fairly good writer, at least as far as non-fiction goes, but I can't remember why I stopped wanting to write for a living. Maybe that desire got ground out of me by all the really boring papers I had to write for school. If I got hold of an interesting subject, I didn't mind writing papers - but God help me if I didn't care about the subject. I wrote one short story a few years ago, about the myth of Medusa from Medusa's point of view, but have never done anything with it. I had to write it down because it wouldn't get out of my head otherwise.

Obviously these days my work is pretty solidly in the visual arts realm, though if there's such a thing as textural arts, I do that too. Mosaic is far more than just visual, and anyone who overlooks the role that the materials themselves play is missing the point entirely. I don't have any real art training, took one basic art class my senior year in high school and wished I'd taken more in previous years. That was the most fun class of my high school years, even including theatre arts, which was fraught with drama in all senses of the word. Sometimes I think I should have majored in fine art in college, but I'm still happy with my double major in English and Medieval/Renaissance Studies. (The fact that both have so far proved useless in my career thus far is beside the point.) I'm hoping to be able to take some continuing education or community classes at some point, but as always that depends on the bank account. Either way, I'll still keep creating things, whether visual or written or whatever.

OK, so that's my take on various art forms. Here's a few other tidbits of stuff that have more to do with my day-to-day life over the past couple of weeks.

My niece had the chicken pox. Poor kid's not even a year old yet, but thankfully she wasn't that sick, just itchy. I guess at least she won't remember it. She is much better now. I was talking to my mom on the phone the other night and Cailin insisted on saying hi to me. She is obviously beginning to pick up on words now, as her greeting definitely sounded like "Hiiiiiiiiiii!" rather than just babbling. She is adorable.

Bosslady, amazingly enough, continues to be relatively human. I'm beginning to dare to think that she has realized that I actually am competent. I worked a crapload of hours last pay period so that starts to make up for the two weeks I didn't work over Christmas and New Year's. Other than that, work is work. Not much else to say.

The next couple of months look to be crazy busy. Events every weekend for the next five weeks, plus wedding planning. I have a bunch of things to do as far as that goes, and as The Knot.com site cheerfully informed me yesterday, there's only 110 days to go. I broke down and bought a planner so that I can keep all the multitudes of little pieces of paper all in one place. I've got to find some time amidst all the events to go down to central VA to meet with the caterer, flower lady and cake lady. Oh yeah and keep everything within budget.

Everything finally came together with the table commission and I have started with the actual mosaic part. Whee! That's a big load off my shoulders, even though there's still a lot of work to do. My client seems much happier now that there are no more obstacles in the way and I am at least a little less stressed. Once I get the center motif done, the rest will go fairly quickly.

Speaking of which, I should go work on that, since I have the afternoon off.

Ciao!