A Quick One On Prop. 8

Proposition 8 is plain discrimination.

You know who makes laws based on religious principles? THE TALIBAN. If they're wrong to do it how can it be right for Christians to do it? It's wrong to force your religious views on other adults who are entitled to their own beliefs.

Gay marriage is coming. It's the future, a matter of time.

To all the gay people who want to get married: Massachusetts still respects you.

Interesting Times - We've Got 'Em

OVERLOAD

I don't even know what to write. I don't have organization skills. How can I express myself coherently?

I CAN'T!!!!!!

My favorite: excessive use of exclamation points!

I heard some dude on the radio say that the entire U.S. financial system is breaking down. I wonder if this is sort of what a tsunami looks like? I don't want to belittle the experiences of people who have lived through (or not) a tsunami. I'm just wondering if this is figuratively similar. It starts out kinda weird and you don't really know what's happening. The big wave comes from far away and you can see it but not understand what it is. Then before you know it you're engulfed in calamity and it's faster, stronger and more overwhelming than you could ever have imagined.

I think I may be in the "see the big wave" part. Where the hell is the high ground and how do we get there?

In Sierra Leone a woman's chance of dying in childbirth is 1 in 8.

At the same time the world is full of amazing things.

This article on tracking elephants with text messaging is pretty amazing.

Then there's amigurumi.

And I just found this incredible site full of wonderful things, Print & Pattern.

Then there's cupcakes. I know there's a major cupcake backlash going on but holy cow. How can you argue with this?

And of course the whole bento thing.

As it says above, I make things. How can a person possibly decide what to make? I'm really stymied right now because there are so many things to make and so many things to learn and I can't organize my experience in a way that makes moving forward meaningful.

Maybe there's just no meaning, no forward and it doesn't matter what I do next so I should just do anything. That's what I've always done in the past. No meaning, no path, no destination.

And we should all just do what we do. I'm going to try not to hurt anyone while I'm about it.

All my life I've idly wondered what it was like for people in other times. What was it like to be Roman during the fall of Rome? What was it like to live in the Dark Ages? World War I? What was it like to be German during the rise of Hitler? Times of chaos when the world (or one's country) seemed to be going entirely the wrong way.

Maybe I'm going to find out. How much chaos are we in for exactly?

How about ecology? Are we going to retract in fear and use up all our resources because we're too scared to take the apparent risk of trying new ways? Panicked people behave stupidly sometimes. Use up all your resources and you will die. Do we have the sense to take painful short term hits so that we can survive into the future?

Beats the crap out of me.

So now what do I do? Do I go to the local farm stand and buy some more eggplant so I can make some more Japanese eggplant with miso topping? Do I just go out and put in more lily bulbs and peonies? Make more fuck plates? Design myself an agedashi dofu amigurumi?

What the hell?

Another Puzzler and Fay's Feeling Better

So, John Edwards had an affair. Everybody's having affairs. Maybe they shouldn't be such a big deal if most people can't seem to not do it. Know what I mean?

Uh, how about "If affairs are inevitable for most people then why do we give them so much weight and power in our society?"

Maybe it's the lying? The whole "unfaithful" thing? What if you don't lie about it? People should be able to sleep around if their partner doesn't object (Obviously I'm not a practicing Catholic even though I mentioned confession in my last post)

Who doesn't want to be appreciated by as many people as possible? I can understand that. I can definitely understand many of the appeals of having an affair. But I don't want to hurt Pete and he doesn't want to hurt me. So we're not going to have any. Mainly we're scared to ruin what we have. Also, at least for me, the opportunity has never presented itself.

Maybe everything would be easier if affairs didn't seem like such a big deal. They're no biggie in parts of Europe and in certain New York social circles. No doubt in L.A. and plenty of other cultures and places too. An affair doesn't have to mean the end of a primary relationship. It would probably necessarily complicate the lives of everyone involved but that doesn't have to be bad.

None the less, I'm saving myself the trouble and avoiding that circumstance in my own life. I can't possibly know what I'm talking about since I have no experience with them. I haven't even discussed the effects with people I know who have had affairs touch their lives. Of course I'm curious since I'm on The Quest For All Knowledge. Since I'm way too chicken to find out for myself I probably don't deserve any more information. Besides, that's pretty personal stuff to discuss with the likes of me, the emotional tourist.

Now for a complete change of topic: Fay's health.

I don't want to jinx myself but Fay's been doing really well for the last few days. I was so happy about her latest non-diarrhea that I considered photographing and posting it so I could share Fay's good work with others. I'm not going to do that. Who cares besides me? I will settle with my own sense of pleasure, pride and satisfaction.

Not only is her digestion improved but she's been acting more like her old self than she has in months. She's even been standing up a few times a day. She can't maintain it or walk on her back legs but she is achieving more vertical hight than she has in quite some time. Her neurologist was very pleased. She said that it's not typical to see such improvement when you take a patient off the meds but who would complain? I hope the improvement lasts.

If Fay keeps feeling this well I might actually be able to leave her with a sitter and visit my dad again or go see my friend Alex and her twin two-year-olds like I was supposed to earlier this summer.

Thinking About Vice

The other day I Twittered that I was indulging in vices. (That particular tweet got me a new follower: porn_website10) I've blogged about my vices and how pathetic they are once before. They are listed as speed, bacon and shoes.

The vice I referred to obliquely in my tweet was buying things I don't need. In this case some cheap perfume that I'm crazy about.

I checked the definition of vice on my dictionary widget. It defines vice as "Immoral or wicked behavior, criminal activities involving prostitution, pornography or drugs, a weakness of character or behavior; a bad habit."

But what am I talking about when I use the word? What's really so bad about speeding, bacon, shoes, drinking too much coffee, staying up late entertaining myself, playing video games for too long, reading manga for hours, knitting? Are those really my vices? How does it break down?

Those things look like mere irresponsibility. Except for speeding which can get people killed and wastes fuel. Oh yeah, and is against the law.

The Seven Deadly Sins: pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth or acedia.

If I go by the information in the wikipedia entry I'd say my vices boil down to gluttony (Over-consumption of anything to the point of waste, "excessive desire for food or its witholding from the needy") and sloth (failure to appreciate God and His works/failure to live up to one's full potential). Especially sloth.

Maybe I should go to confession. Except I'm going to do all those things again.

Still, they're not very glamorous. Vice should have some glamour to it, don't you think?

Come to think of it, me dressing up these petty transgressions as "vice" could be construed as pride: "a desire to be more important or attractive than others" (among other things)

I'm not sure why I'm thinking about all this, especially since I don't have any intention of trying to improve myself.

Prison

Last month's Martha Stewart Living magazine featured photos of Martha's vegetable garden in New Jersey. The first thing I thought when I saw the pictures was "it looks like a prison." First there's the enormous fence to keep out the deer and other critters. I imagined it being electrified to really show those rabbit thieves. Then there's the strict order, as if the beds were laid out with laser guides instead of string and stakes or a garden hose like normal people use.

I didn't want to associate her garden with prison, seeing as she's been there recently. It seemed like a cheap shot. But if the shoe fits...

It got me thinking though. Martha's such a control freak. I could see her having very strong opinions on how a prison should be run if she were forced to think about it (which she was, unfortunately) I could see her really admiring a well-run prison and being really annoyed by a poorly run one. I could see her demanding an interview with the warden and proposing efficiency improvements. I bet she has tons of ideas on how to improve the effectiveness of jail-time and how it could potentially instruct and improve the lives of the inmates. Enforce discipline, inculcate good habits, teach useful skills, instill self-respect in the inmates, foster actual reform. Everybody would win.

If the Domestic Doyenne thing ever gets old for her and she needs a new challenge I think she could do a lot of good in the Corrections field. Serious.

The Big Three

If I were a real techie I might be able to tell you why it was such a pain in the butt to post all those plate images. Maybe it's that I'm a Mac user? It was a little problematic at times and it took a while. However I did multi-task and in the mean time I'm well on my way with Pete's second sock and I've made another tarte tatin.

I've got my front door wide open to let the sun in and the ladybugs out. The phoebes started yelling the day before yesterday and today I can hear frogs down at the pond. Fay's snoring. She was out quite a bit in her wheelchair today since enough snow has melted for her to be able to go places. I have to admit that it's pleasant to be warm enough for a change. Pete's working with a band this weekend and at the moment they're taking a break and enjoying the weather on his studio's back deck. Thanks again Jinhee, John and Andy!

Now I'm going to try to put into words what I attempted to express in the objects below.

A good artist will find helpful an appreciation for mayhem, lust and greed. Some artists appreciate them more conventionally than others but in general these impulses are beneficial to the artistic process.

I myself am peace-loving and cowardly so I look at mayhem, lust and greed in a somewhat figurative sense. I don't advocate going after one's neighbors with a machete. My brand of mayhem is more along the lines of putting on a green wig and making tequila-laced cupcakes just for fun. Also working in a studio that looks as though I'd left all the windows open during a tornado, being open to mistakes, sudden new directions, connections between disparate thoughts and objects, being eager to try new things and to look at things with new eyes, being comfortable with being off-kilter. Conceptual mayhem.

I mean lust both specifically and generally. Physical lust is a great inspiration and source of energy. Lust inspires ideas that one might never have in a different mental state. It feels exhilarating, engaging and fertile- qualities I love to encounter when experienceing art myself. It's wonderful to be able to put those energies into something one is working on.

Then there's the more general lust for the good things: a fascinating new idea, a new way of perceiving something, mastery of a new technique, joy in the pleasures of experimentation. Desire that spurs one on to hunt down and claim the object of one's lust.

Now for greed. Naturally I am not talking about money-grubbing (although I am sure that there is an artist somewhere who will find a way to make literal amassing of funds into art) Similar to the general sense of lust, I mean greed for the good things. A healthy desire for MORE MORE MORE. More of whatever it is that moves the artist. More color, more restraint, more freedom, more specificity, more black, more space, hell - more publicity. Whatever - just more. Not more than anybody else or all for me and none for you. I'm working from a perception of abundance.

Am I soft-pedaling the evils of mayhem, lust and greed? I certainly don't claim that they are always good things. I'm saying they aren't always sinful and sometimes they are very useful. A person can't help being lustful or greedy but they can try to control how they act. It is possible to exercise all these feelings, to enjoy them and to use them to enhance one's creative process without doing damage to anybody else. It's a matter of judicious use (Sin in moderation and you'll be okay - ha!)

Artists need to think creatively, to discern which path to take in the pursuit of their ideas and to keep at their work until they get where they're going. Mayhem forces one to confront upset expectations, eases unusual juxtapositions of objects and thoughts and produces a state of flux that necessitates new ideas. Lust is the creative impulse, a good indicator of what is really interesting to the artist and a good source of energy to feed the work. Greed helps the artist to grab what they need to keep them going on their journey and offers incentive to keep reaching.

So those are the ideas behind the words. For my next post I will go into "why plates and why do they look like that?"

Sunday Times

Today is, in my opinion, a good day to pick up a copy of the New York Times. I'm not going to do it myself though. That would involve a ten-minute drive and as usual, I'm feeling stingy about my time.

Here's what I read online today:

Guy Trebay on Carla Bruni.
Caitlin Flanagan on the unfortunate price of sexuality for teenage girls.
Steven Pinker on Moral Instinct. That one's 8 pages long. I guess I wasn't so stingy with my time in reading it. But there is a difference between spending ten minutes driving and ten minutes feeding my head.

I have to say that I admire the way that Carla Bruni isn't afraid to use all her advantages. That said I'm also very relieved that she doesn't want anything I have.

And now I'm going to feed my face with another chocolate cupcake.