chronicled & illustrated

mirror image,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

I have a great new camera. I’ve always dreamed of one day getting a really good camera but put it off and off even when digital made photography immediate and playful and when the internet made it possible to share and get comments from people all over the world. I put it off because I have a superstition about getting good/expensive equipment. It sometimes signals the death of a creative era.

It may be a superstition, but it may also be learning. Years ago, not long after purchasing a huge roll of canvas and being given a fancy wooden easel, I stopped painting.

The problem is: you get the fancy equipment and suddenly there are expectations of producing something excellent. Suddenly it’s changed from: see what nice results I can pull off with my simple digital camera? to: if I can’t get fabulous results with this camera, I’ve wasted the money and let myself down. Suddenly the playfulness leaves and Things Get Serious.

I’m not letting that happen with this camera. It’s just the reason I put off getting one. The only way I could truly let myself down with my new camera is if I fail to use it. If the last week is any indication of future use, it seems I’m likely to be at the opposite end of that extreme. I’ve taken hundreds and hundreds of shots and the word “obsession” has been used several times.

But this all is a reminder of the kind of mental distortion that can happen around creative endeavors.

Anyway, as it happens, I am drawn to visual distortion. The photograph I used today is one taken with the new camera. It’s a view of my office area reflected in an old, cheaply-made mirror—thus the funky distortion. It’s my reminder that even if I’m still getting quite a few out of focus shots (it’s only been a week AND I don’t have a tripod yet!) that my photographs will always reflect my own vision of the world, distorted or otherwise.

After hours and hours of work over the last two and a half weeks, I have only one page left to finish (and—oh well, yeah—thousands of tiny adjustments and corrections)

Three books in the works (Galveston, Causeway and Nova) and none of them are thrilling me.

Just heard about this technique from a friend; I decided to try it on my mysterious leg pain since “western” medicine isn’t offering a cure. whatthehell…

the ins and outs of the Nikon D80 AND a computer drawing tablet and pen!

in through the windows,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

I’m reminded this morning of the Woody Allen quote, “Eighty percent of life is showing up.”
My husband tells a story about when he was in high school and had a job selling shoes. Well, selling shoes is, according to him, an overstatement. He rarely sold any. He hated the job as most of it entailed standing around for several hours doing nothing but trying to look busy. And yet, even though he hated it and rarely sold anything, his boss loved him. When he mentioned this paradox to his father, his dad told him that the boss liked him because he always showed up. He was reliable and there, just in case someone wanted to buy a pair of shoes!

Over the last five days, I’ve been finishing up on The Practically Creative Quarter. This is the second full month of the new format and it’s working out great. The site functions well and—while it’s still a lot of work—it’s doable. Instead of working three solid months to get it ready, I can do a little each week and still have a variety of new things for people to read and see.

So there’s the showing up part.

That’s eighty percent of it, right?

Not really. Because the eighty percent has to include the future as well as the past! Consistency is difficult for me, so I know from experience that two months means nothing. I can fall off this wagon in a heartbeat. That’s why I always need the practical side of me to show up along side the creative side. The first PCQ was creative but not practical. The new version is, I hope, both.

But this morning, I’m being nagged by that other twenty percent. What’s that, Woody? Well we know, don’t we? It’s being good. It’s being unique. It’s offering—showing off—something that people want.

I didn’t start The PCQ to show off. From the beginning, it was about me wanting a place to process creativity. If I still have issues with creativity—need for perfection, trouble finishing things, over-stretching my limitations, and more—I knew that other people do too. So I thought I’d share those challenges with others. What I’ve learned and what I’m learning. But somewhere in all that, I have to deal with the exposure of myself—repeatedly, as it turns out. I often have a bad, let-down day after an email update goes out to my subscribers.

I was writing a piece of fiction last week where a grandmother is watching her granddaughter practice a performance. It’s just the two of them; the granddaughter is talented and very good in the performance. Afterward the little girl gets quiet and comes to sit very close to the grandmother. The grandmother leans down and whispers to her, “Sometimes we can end up feeling that we did something wrong even when everyone tells us we’re good.”

Those words, coming out of my character’s mouth, surprised me. I didn’t know I was going to write that but it sums up my feelings about the showing off part of showing up.

No matter how many people are reading The PCQ (and the numbers are good!)—I feel like the granddaughter in my story, wishing I had a comforting grandmother to snuggle up against. Someone who would know instinctively the down side of showing off.

And yet, those are momentary feelings. The project that is The PCQ is still about process. It’s not perfect because I’m not and because I have sworn off even yearning toward perfection.

My plan is to show up and take the eighty percent odds that it’ll be good enough.

THE ILLUSTRATION: this is a photograph of light hitting a watercolor painting. Speaking of showing off, it was the first painting of mine (done over 20 years ago!) that I felt was good enough to be framed. I loved the way this photograph turned out because the “real” light seems to be coming in through the painted window. Illusions.

READING: Causeway, Linden MacIntyre
EXPECTING: Company! two childhood friends are spontaneously flying up from Texas for a week!
HOPING: We have decent weather (what else?)

it’s slip-sliding thru new b,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

I arrived home from my trip to Maine last night around 12:30am.

The day started off hard and just seemed to—not get worse—but just stay hard to the end. Saying good-bye to my son and granddaughter was emotionally hard. Physically I’m at low ebb with a cold coming on. I had three hours of work to get the rented house back in shape before leaving. This became complicated when I hit my head on a wall lamp causing the thing to crash to the floor and smash into smithereens. And then, an 11 hour drive.

I kept comforting myself with how much worse it not only could be but has been! I was remembering the day I left to drive home from Maine last March. It was bitterly cold with high winds and I had to muscle my luggage down a narrow set of stairs and over slippery ice to get it into the car. Then as I neared home late, late that night, heavy blinding snow made the last 3 hours literally life-threatening. Yesterday was NOT that bad and I made sure I never forgot it!

But it made me wonder what it is that makes me do that. I always compare whatever I’m struggling with with something worse that I’ve been through in the past. When I was young and hadn’t been through much, I used to compare a challenge with the time I had to give an oral report on the Algerian-French War in French! Now it seems silly but then, to give an oral report was bad enough, but to do it in another language seemed like an impossibility. And yet, I did it, (I got a ‘B’ and was grateful) so I used it for years as proof to myself that I could do impossible things!

If I can’t come up with something worse that’s happened to me, I comfort myself with the fact that it’s not anywhere near as bad as what others have been through. I clearly remember being miserable during a 24+ hour car trip with my first husband, two young sons and a mother-in-law in a small car. I was sitting in the back literally on the edge of a too small, non-ergonomically designed seat with everything in my body tired and achy. But I was thinking that it simply wasn’t that bad because imagine the poor pioneer women in covered wagons!

Can’t I just be miserable?

Evidently not. Oh, I do my fair share of moaning and groaning. I can be a real baby when sick or injured. But if it’s something I have to get through, it seems to be in my nature to mentally sustain myself with reasons why it’s not that bad. I can then realize that packing up the car on a muggy day in June is certainly preferrable to a blizzardish one in March. That a late night drive alone in familiar territory with a loving husband waiting at home to give me a warm, hearfelt embrace when I FINALLY pull into to the driveway is really just something to get through and not something to wish away. My life is and has been easy and full of many days without danger or real hardship. I know I should not forget that.

I can still feel buffeted and bruised by my day yesterday. Take a day to recover my bearings. Do blog entries. Open mail. Wash my hair. Be with my husband. And remember things like…

…when I was in Junior High School, I did a dramatic interpretation from a play called All the Way Home by Tad Mosel (the playwright’s name is not from memory but from Google). I remember little about it except that the right to do it at a speech tournament was ‘willed’ to me by one Cheryl Somebody, a tournament-winning actress who had gone on to high school at the end of the previous year. What I do remember is that the excerpt required me to sing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot at the end. This isn’t another story about hard things I’ve been through, as for some reason, doing acting wasn’t nearly as difficult as oral reports in French! My now-husband was in that Speech Class and still talks about being wowed by my sweet soprano tremolo. I tell him it was nerves he heard, but that he believes differently makes me smile, makes me happy. I’m not much of a soprano anymore but he and I still sing together at home—where I am now once again pleasantly ensconced.

old words,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

This list looks old because it is. A vintage list of words compiled and typed on an honest-to-God typewriter because no one had a home computer in 1975.

A year or so earlier, I had asked my sister and a couple of close friends if they would be interested in getting together weekly to *talk.* I made it clear that my idea was to have a group where we could discuss personal life issues in a deep and real way. My sister and friends took me up on the offer, they asked a few people they knew and soon seven of us were meeting weekly, taking turns at each others home.

In our living rooms with husbands, boyfriends and eventually children politely asked to Leave Us Alone, we talked about our lives. This was no ‘koffee-klatch’. We tackled big issues like how to deal with anger and confrontation. How to change ingrained bad habits or alter those traits we were born with but didn’t like, into more adaptive ways of behaving insofar as that is possible.

We called ourselves simply, Group. Membership changed. Some of the original seven didn’t stay long. Others came in and some of those lasted and some didn’t. I moved away and came back and moved away again, as did others. But we met —looking back on it—with astounding regularity. At first we always had wine and cheese and fruit and crackers and later as we matured, decided that the wine was getting in our way and switched to tea. In later years, we find wine is acceptable once again.

The list, though. The list was an exercise that we did. We kept finding ourselves dealing with feelings, emotions. We encouraged each other, in turn, to talk in depth about how we felt about whatever issue was causing us a problem and repeatedly we realized that we didn’t have the vocabulary for expressing exactly what we felt. So we came up with The List. It was fun to think of every emotion we could. There were debates about whether a certain thing was, in fact, an emotion or a behavior. It was instructive.

Later, if someone expressed feeling MAD, we could refer her to the list where she might find that particular MAD was more precisely, alienated, hopeless, ignored and frustrated. This seemed helpful. We realized that the big widely-painted emotions were not just one simple emotion but a unique set of emotions that felt predominantly mad, sad, or glad.

To be able to express the nuances of what we felt led us to know ourselves more fully and to ultimately know others with more insight. In order to deal with complex emotional issues (that affect all the practical issues: jobs, marriages, parenting, family), we found that it helped to first name, then untangle all the emotions involved.

There are four of us who survived several decades together. We no longer get together weekly in each other’s living rooms but we email and get together when we can. We still call ourselves “Group.” The earnest exploration we did all of those weeks, and the wisdom we accumulated still informs our lives in profound ways.

When I forget what was learned, Group is there to remind me.

We don’t have to look at the list anymore. In fact, we never used it that much. Like so many things in life, it was in the process of doing it that the learning took place.