good morning!

new forks in the drawer. forks of my choosing. can you believe this is the very first time its happened? it's true. i've moved away from my hand-me-down flatware and got some that i actually like. form and function. a style of my own choosing. for however small this seems, it actually made me very very happy. ha! silly, i know, but it's the small things, right? and also, new bowls in the cupboard. bright white porcelain. just two. one for me, one for my sweetie. and this ensures there will never be more than two bowls to wash on any given gluttonous day. i'm going to hide the other bowls and only use them if there's company. and only if it's company who request soup or something that needs to be eaten from a bowl. i'll hide them and not tell my sweetie where they are. yep, i hate cleaning this much. and so i'm devising crazy little schemes like these, whittling down so there isn't much to clean. and it isn't so much a choice based in some sort of anti-consumerism (though i'm on board with that too except for when it comes to cool shoes and art supplies and books), it's pretty much an anti-cleaning campaign. the less there is to be responsible for in terms of dust and crap like that, the better. the more time opens up for painting, for play, for laughter. and so i whittle whittle whittle away and make space for better things.

also, i finally got through the huge stack of composition books i bought early in the year. i filled the last page of the last book yesterday. this is a proud moment. and so now i've decided to make my own notebooks for awhile. i have so many loose sheets of paper and scraps i've saved that need to be put to some sort of use. besides, i think notebooks of the hand-made variety generally look cooler... although i've always been partial to the black and white speckled composition book. and for as silly as it may sound, the type of notebook you use definitely influences your practice. at least it's influenced mine. i need a notebook i can be rough on, scribble in, scratch out entire sentences, make mistakes, spill ink and coffee on. those fine leather journals just don't work for me. they force me to be clean and polite in a way that is sabotaging and endlessly boring. i find it hard to be honest, to be brave, when i'm worrying about my penmanship. any other writers notice this?