Monthly Archives: July 2009

Settle in for many Fridays of Etsy links

I have been A Bad Blogger this week: I was visiting my parents through Tuesday and arrived home to a house full of Wicked Stepchildren.

I’d like to say that I’ve been getting my sleep in at work, but alas! There has been actual work to do. I am looking forward to The Great Ensleepening this weekend.

But first, a link: The Black Spot Books. Hand-bound books and jewelry all in one place! I make little squeaky sounds over her book necklaces. They are entirely beautiful. Her work inspires me.

Send a letter

I love writing letters. Oh, I so love writing letters.

I have more stationery than I do tea. And rubber stamps. And sealing wax. And stickers. And and and.

There are few things that cheer me up, or make me feel close and friendly, like writing a letter.

Receiving a letter is like getting a gift.

Some of my favorite stationery purveyors:

Mother of Hermes Press: Beautiful hand-set letterpress stationery. (And the designer is my own dear friend.)

16 Sparrows: Some very funny cards and stationery, all finely made.

The Small Object: So cute! So cute!

The Bureau of Communication: This never fails to make me laugh.

Happy corresponding.

Around the house

1. Jinx now looks like he walks on stilts. I need to take a picture.

2. My husband (code name: Dingo) has been playing a lot of Guitar Hero World Tour. He likes the drums. I can tell from watching him that I would not be good at the drums. I made the mistake of trying to sing along, but on the “beginner” setting, which wants one to sound like Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady.

I had several years of voice lessons, so … no.

3. Our living room has 4 gigantic windows that all face east.  When we first saw the house, on a lovely March afternoon, that seemed great. We put up white curtains.

Then we woke up in the morning.

Now, 6 years later, we have hung up dark purple curtains. It is so great not to wear sunglasses in the house.

4. I had some spinach that was On the Verge, so I made a frittata. It was disgusting. I don’t often make an inedible dish, which just increases the trauma.

5. Yet another reason I hate summer: all the dang ironing. I like my little cap-sleeve blouses, but when it’s hot enough to wear them, it’s too hot for ironing. Alas! There is only so rumpled even I am willing to look.

Moon, moon, beautiful moon

There used to be a pillow in Innisfree: an old feather pillow with a brown stain on the grey and blue striped ticking.

It was the Moon Landing Pillow.

On the day of the moon landing, a big old gang of us gathered to watch it at Innisfree. Even I was there! (in utero)

Gigi fell over at some point: I don’t remember where or how. Surely one of the attendees will comment with that part of the story. Regardless, she hit her head, and you know how head wounds bleed. Everyone wanted to drive her to the hospital for stitches, but she put her foot down: she wanted to see the moon landing.

So she laid on the sofa and bled onto that pillow until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had jumped around on the moon for a while. Then she went to the doctor.

Dang, that pillow was gross. But funny.

I would really like to jump around on the moon.

Oops, late again

Well, I promised kitten + knitting, so here it is, a few days late.

The kitten is Jinx, obviously, in a brief moment of stillness. I’m working on desensitzing him to knitting so he won’t try to eat all my projects. So far it’s going well. He’d rather attack me, anyway.

The project bag is some fancy thing from England, sent to me by E.

The pattern is Clapotis, which was super easy. I got tired of it by the end, but it turned out really well. I plan to give it to my stupid friend who is stupid moving to stupid Colorado. Because, you know, I hate the idea of her moving, but I don’t want her to freeze to death.

The yarn is Knit Picks Shimmer in a discontinued colorway.

There have been too much knitting and too little writing around here lately.

Juvenalia

I was poking through some old files on my computer the other night and came across a long poem I wrote right after my divorce. It’s based on the first ten kata of eishin ryu iaido, a martial art that I used to study (and miss deeply).

The poem, using each of the kata as a framework, describes ten moments in time.

It’s not a bad poem – it would need work – and at one time it was very important to me.

At one point I had an 88-page manuscript of poetry that I was revising in hope of publication, and “1000 Cuts” was to be the opening piece.

I don’t care about those poems anymore.

That woman, the one who suffered and bled onto the page, is so far in my rear-view mirror. At the time I thought nothing worse could ever happen to me than those six months that capped years of struggle and denial and tears.

I wrote the poems. Some of them are decent poems, but they’re not enough: they’re private things, personal things, and the best poetry (the best art) releases the personal into the universal, which these do not.

I needed to write them. It helped heal my heart to write them. It helped me (eventually) become a better writer to write them.

But they bore me now.

I wonder whether I will look back in ten years on the things I’m writing now and be bored by them too.

If you’re curious about iaido, here’s a clip (that is not me). And, in the comments, you can see a demonstration of why I was sometimes annoyed by my martial arts classes.

A thoroughly unromantic memory

In 1999-2000, Boadie and I lived in a little apartment near Ravenswood and Damen in Chicago. It was the perfect apartment for me at the time. I had many adventures there.

Across the alley was the Oakwood Lounge. At first, all I knew about the Oakwood Lounge was that it had a blue and pink airbrushed sign.

I had not been living in that apartment (I called it Girlhaven) very long: I moved in over Labor Day, and I still had the windows open, when it was closing time on a Friday night (ie, 2 am Saturday morning) and I was awakened by one of the patrons of the Oakwood Lounge.

“Don’t you f*ck my seester! No! Don’t you f*ck my seester! I am going xhome! I am going xhome right now, and my seester is there! Don’t you be there! Don’t you f*ck my seester!”

For a very long time.

And you think that kind of thing is annoying, but after a while it just becomes hilarious. So I listened to that guy go on and on in the alley from 2:00 to about 2:30 about how his friend should not have biblical relations with his seester, and I knew that I would tell this story at every party for the rest of my born days.

A couple of months later, my friend Dan came in town on business, and  we at dinner at Roong Petch for old time’s sake (I recommend the crab rangoon and the red curry with duck), and I told him this story.

“We have to go!” he said.

So we went to the Oakwood Lounge. It had a linoleum floor and a bunch of posters in “gold-tone” frames of ladies wearing sweatshirts straight out of Flashdance. Some of them were draped over tigers.

Mustached men in blue denim shirts were sitting around, staring. Dan and I sat at the gold-tube-and-fake-leather bar chairs.

“Retsina?” asked the bartender.

Life is too short to drink retsina. We had bourbon.

A man approached us: bouffant grey hair, a white band-collar shirt, a navy double-breasted blazer with gold buttons, pressed jeans (with sharp creases), and tassled loafers with no socks.

“Wellllcome to de Oakwoooood Looooounge,” he said.

He kissed my hand.

“We do not often see de beyoooooteeeful ladies xhere at de Oakwood Looooooounge,” he said. “Please enyoy a dreeeenk on de houuuuuse. I khope you will come beck to de Oakwood Louuuunge and brink your beeeeyoooteeful friends!”

It was so creepy. And so GREAT.