By the Way, I am Painting

This summer I am taking 2 painting classes at our community arts program connected with our university. I have loved getting back in to oil paint, which I have not touched since the late 60's, oh the smell, a trip down memory lane. I am also taking water color. I take one class right after the other. I am coming to think that oil is it-- of course, there is a storage problem with oil paintings, they have to dry, not quickly like either water color or acrylic. It's an issue.

Today Obesity is Classified as a Disease

 I find that, like all things covered in shame and guilt, trainers I have known are coming out with their prejudices-- fat people are lazy. I am angry. The years of steeling my body shame to get the exercise I needed, to put a suit on that and get in the pool, to overcome the prejudices of the "trained world" to use the equipment I needed to use, getting fitter and fitter but still fat, it all comes rushing back to me today with the careless opinions of people who are hired to help people like me achieve their goals.  I struggled over and over so many years until I chose a medical solution which is another difficult decision. It doesn't really make things easier after a point, but people will call it an easy way out. It isn't. There is no easy way out.  I want to flame and I hate flaming so I will put it here. I won't still be around when the crossfitters lose their knees, shoulders and backs, and I hear, even their kidneys sometimes, but I also won't be going to the local hospital for training where trainers express this ignorant, and maybe just youthful prejudice.

I sat in the waiting room of a psychologists office waiting for my very young son who was getting therapy in advance of losing his very young cousin who was like a sister. I sat across from a woman so thin she looked harsh, and I was having mean judgmental thoughts about her thinness. (I came to the same office to deal with my fatness.) We chatted, a local OBGYN had cut her intestine during a cesarean or a hysterectomy and her thinness was a life threatening illness from that catastrophic event in her life. I learned some of my lesson then. I do not know where she is now, or if she even survived, but I thank  her for the lesson.

We are all one life threatening injury  or illness away from disability and having to live on the meager means of poverty. Sometimes kids who have grown up middle class and have known nothing else, moved from middle class with their parents to middle class themselves and can make the choices of healthful eating and constant exercise have no empathy for those who can't. I have noticed the same thing with health insurance, people who have always had it in their youth and in their adulthood have little or no empathy for those who do not or cannot get it.  Oops, oh well, takes one thing to stir up the shit in my brain!

I feel better now.

I am so Cool I Have a Guest Blogger!

This is a guest post by a classmate of one of my daughters who has written all her life and is now working on novels and has given herself the fascinating assignment of writing on 256 blogs as a guest blogger! My street cred jumps so high on this I will try to not double space after a period! There I did it and I learned to type on a manual typewriter. Nath did tell me she couldn't figure out my blog's focus, hah, neither can I! Rayne DeVivo put me on to this, and much to my surprise, Nath accepted my invitation to my little insignificant blog. I think I just learned that the part of my brain that censors expression IS in overdrive and I am very inhibited here. 

Author bio: Best New American Voices nominee Nath Jones received an MFA in creative writing from Northwestern University. Her publishing credits include PANK Magazine, There Are No Rules, and Sailing World. She lives and writes in Chicago. 


Post:

Q: For good or ill— how has blogging changed or affected family life?

A: Well. It doesn’t much. My social life is what’s different now. But I like your question. It’s definitely worth exploring. 

Let’s do a post about Mom, me, and my writing and then we’ll branch out to other aspects of family. 

I write for a thousand people on Facebook. My Facebook writing is a personal sketchbook for the fiction.  But I do explore conflict and I’ve said some truly horrific things about my mother.

Identity cannot become a hang-up. The part of the brain that censors expression will go into overdrive. That cannot happen if you want to write work that matters. If I’m worried about whether or not everyone thinks I’m crazy, mean, hateful, ungrateful, conniving, two-faced, and hedonistic because of the themes I’m willing to explore, I’ll never explore them. 

Mom doesn’t have a problem with what I do now because she never had a problem with what I wrote. She encouraged me by nurturing my work, by taking it seriously when I was six, seven, and eight years old, and by never flinching at the chosen subject matter—regardless of how dark. 

And. Yes. Those stories were dark. I remember carefully drawing a noose in third grade. Kind of tough to detail the rope with those fat, unwieldy Crayola markers. 

I learned to write before Columbine, before Virginia Tech, before this God-awful incident in Newtown. And I’m so glad. I hate to think how children’s creative expression is now being policed.

I’d write a story, hand the pages to my mom, and she’d hand them back with grammatical corrections and ways to amplify the dramatic effect of the matricidal stabbing, or shooting, or hanging, or slow painful demise in relation to some fatal disease. She never once thought, “Wow. This kid hates me.” 

Why would she? I don’t. There were no doubt many reasons why I wrote what I wrote, and, yes, with the help of Dr. Phil, friends, self-help books, and various sessions with professionals I have unearthed my fair share of childhood trauma. Who cares?

A post about teaching writing in elementary schools says that there are, 

“7 reasons why children should write stories (these reasons, of course, also apply to writing poetry): 1) to entertain; 2) to foster artistic expression; 3) to explore the functions and values of writing; 4) to stimulate imagination; 5) to clarify thinking; 6) tosearch for identity; and 7) to learn to read and write.”

Mom and I didn’t bother much with identity. We both have gargantuan egos, sure. But we have plenty of insecurity too. Mainly we were curious about how to make the stories work.

I don’t consider my plight any different from anyone else’s in any other family. So I have no qualms about exposing intimate facets of daily living that are generally left unarticulated. 

Okay. I’ve had plenty of less than lovely things to say about my mother online—in public, for an audience of her friends and mine. Mainly I wrote my way through the fears of what I felt could not ever be uttered. 

Sometimes readers leap to Mom’s defense. They know her. They love her. They don’t want her threatened in any way. Certainly not by her daughter, in public no less! But as often as people admonished me for what I expressed, I also got quiet personal messages from individuals struggling with their own familial relations.

 For me those connections are reason enough to do the work. The words are liberating. They offer permission for others to open up, to discuss hard truths, to be real about how our freedoms really can be constrained by the people who love us most.

Inauguration Day--MLK jr Day

More history being made today. I am grateful, I have high hopes for the next 4 years. I found the last 12 years from horrifying to disappointing. The determination of the the republicans to completely stop any progress has been stultifying. Maybe, just maybe, they can reach back across the aisle and relearn to compromise.
I am home, my eyes cannot leave the screen. A much older man is taking office today than four years ago. The weight of the world is so heavy, the crowd is fabulous! Maybe at the end of this term I can retire and not be afraid.
I remain stunned by the hatred that rears it's ugly head every day on facebook. I never really thought I'd find my blog a safer place to have an opinion.

4 years later and hate has elected a thug, a sexual predator, possibly a puppet of Putin, my country expressed its hate and prejudice, another MLK Jr. weekend. Facebook is worse than ever.

repeating myself..that's OK.

I simply could not find my way with clay this morning-- my graceless pot I could not make to please me-- I have an idea and I will go back later and try again-- without the crowd. Today I felt like I was not an artist of any type! WOW! that was bad for me. I had to get out of there. I am making some chicken and noodles and having some fresh coffee. I really do see some other bad stuff that people are happy with... boom boom boom. There is a lot of good, too. I do like my very first project. Evidently I forgot to publish this. A week passed. I bought two nicely shaped pieces of glassware to use as slump molds for a plate and a bowl and made them on Saturday, and pleased myself. I stayed every minute and then some. I am now finishing up the rest of the weekend and my fall break with the grand boys of central Illinois. Tomorrow is back to work, refreshed and ready for the last mad dash to the end of the grading period. I wouldn't be sad if Miss Grumpy decided to skip a few days. ;^). The grand boys were confused and H said frustrated, I am here, so he must not need to go to school. He will find a little zentangled heart in his school folder sometime today! I may do one more surprise for them all after lawdaughter leaves for work in a few minutes.

Trying Clay Again

I bought 2 nicely shaped glass containers, one a large plate the other a nice big bowl, and built coil spiral pots using the glass pieces to support them. I think they are going to be really cool and I did not feel the frustration of last week at all. I thought today was out last day but next Saturday is our last session. I have an idea of how I want to glaze the mask-- It is not yet bisque fired so that has to wait. I was leaving in a few minutes to go to LeRoy but they are having a tremendous storm. It does not look like it is going to slam us but north of here is a different story. I think I will wait it out, maybe take a little nap to make up for all the waking up last night! I took no pictures today with my filthy clay hands so, no pics for you!

Arden's Pics

How about these?