plug away

i very rarely gaze at the ceiling anymore. this is a major proof that i am no longer 15. i looked at the ceiling a lot when i was 15. but when i was 15, i really had no other place to be or go, so laying in bed, laying in my sadness and anger was the thing to do. music loud and tears and yells (if i was home alone). or laying silently. focused on the small horrors, looking for a way out, making pictures from the ceiling stucco.

yesterday i noticed there were cobwebs up there so i grabbed the broom. and then i cleaned my bedroom. top to bottom. and beautified it.

i would love to become one of those productive people who undertake a massive cleaning rampage when they are feeling upset. i would love that. and i'm thinking that response to Upset has more to do with nurture than nature... but maybe not.

i was a horribly sloppy child and there wasn't much my mom could do to get me to clean my room other than "You're GROUNDED to your bedroom until it's clean!" ha! and of course, i didn't want to be locked inside my room at that age, i wanted to be outside playing, so i'd start cleaning my room and get distracted by a toy and it would take all damn day to get that room clean. i became a bed-shover-under. and i think that is an inborn reaction. no other little child planted that idea of cleaning in my head and i definitely never saw my mother shove the mess under the bed, so imagine my surprise when she poked her head under there and said "what's all this?" i was like how'd she know to look there????? hahahaha!

i didn't shove anything under the bed yesterday. i put everything away and then i re-arranged, hung different paintings on the walls, even washed the walls with windex. i had to lose myself in something and cleaning seemed a much better thing to lose myself to than laying in bed staring at the ceiling. and afterward, i felt so much better. the room is gorgeous again. plus, a friend of mine from back home is coming up on sunday. she'll be here for a week. we've been friends since we were 14, met walking home from junior high. she is my longest friend. we've never even had a fight.

and so of course i want my little home to be as perfect as possible for her. not that she even cares about that sort of thing and, generally, neither do i... but my little cottage is so packed with paintings and big drawings and projects at this point that i must find a way to establish some kind of order. even if it's only a semblance of order.

today i will dust and straighten the bookcase. this is a major undertaking. MAJOR. my bookcase is actually two HUGE bookcases, side by side, taking up an entire wall. and, in some places, the books are two rows deep. sigh. i'll pretend i am 15. or partially 15, and blast some angry music. while the day away in loud guitars and yelling and cleaning. :)



for the 15 year old girl within you:

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?