recent haps.

a try-force
Everyone needs three cookie cutter people in their life to make success a graspable task.
1) someone to hold on to.
2) someone who never ceases to inspire you.
3) someone to motivate you whether with positive or negative reinforcement.
#2 & #3 don’t have to be your friends.
You can hate them.
actually, some loathing towards the #3 person your life is probably necessary to formulate those goals..and feed your need to always one-up them.
--------------------

growing more and more impressed by this lady as time progresses. i was happily surprised today when i one found a web log she keeps and two made it three 'older entries' back before taking a break.

school has started and i find myself almost in a happy place. one of my courses is only two units when i had figured three and now i must attempt to find a one unit class to keep the total at a dozen credit hours. my dental isn't inexpensive and being a full time student grants me the luxury of -mad rebates- on every procedure.

i'm taking a pair of sculpture classes, they seem more conceptual than the clay room and i hope to glean a lot from the program. the instructor, craig deines, is this minimalist soul. a singlespeed riding, wood carving shaman.

as for the missing unit, i think i will panic more about it during the weekend. what i should be doing is working on my application materials and portfolio for colleges.

adjunct oedipal.

adjunct, oedipal. i love some words. dislike others. i was talking with katie and she mentioned that i reference oedipus a lot. without missing a beat i responded that i love the way it looks. oed. AWESOME. like adjunct, adjective, adjutant. adj, equally as awesome. i have always mean tokeep a lof of words and phrases i enjoy. i tried carrying a moleskine with no luck, as i can barely keep anything organized and tried stickynotes but they got lost on the surfaces or inside the books i would leave them.

job finding is going alright. i have yet to call back the online application i filled out/sent. i want ot ask my buddy sqeak to help me out with a pizza place that's pretty far away, redlands. i heard something promising at toys r us. apparently they are looking for bicycle assembly people. awesome. i have yet to go back to AMOCA and talk to them about that internship. we will see how it goes. i know today is the day they would have started and as time moves on i feel a bit less ashamed about what i had assumed about having that position already. i need gas to drive to pasadena this week to check out the xiam thing and also santa ana to talk to muddy's studio. i will be successful at both my job search and my internship search.
i will get photos taken of my work for my portfolio.
i will find out informaiton about what a great art student portfolio looks like.
i will send an email to cary esser, george timock, and the recruiter lady at KCAI.
ready, break.

A Quick Word on Mentors

A mentor is someone who is good or great at what you want to become good at and who will personally teach and guide you. With the help and guidance from a mentor, the chances are great that you will learn and become better at something at a much faster rate. (Among the reasons are the fact that you don’t need to make all the newbie mistakes or need to discover the right ways through trial and error).

I believe that it is almost always possible to find a mentor or to find someone who is good at what you want to become good at and who would be willing to mentor you.

In fact, most people who are passionate about their art / craft / niche and who have a great love for it are willing to help a student out and mentor them. Sometimes the mentor will want monetary reward, but more often that not, he is willing to mentor you for free, provided that you put in the effort.

Personally, I am more than happy to teach people what I have learnt and I will do it for free. However, what I do not want is people wasting my time by expecting me to do any sort of work for them.

The mentor is there to guide you and it is up to you to keep all your promises, be on time every time and to do what is expected of you and even more. If you do that, you will almost always find someone good who is willing to mentor you. With the help and guidance of that mentor, you can achieve success and become great at what you want to master very quickly.

___________

i had an awesome talk with my mom today. i talked about my clay goals and things i want to accomplish. wi also talked about what kind of budget i would need to accomplish those goals. i have been fortunate enough to have parents who loved my and incubated me until i turned into a pretty flower or what the case may be. i haven't had to work in the last two or three years and have been fortunate enough to be extended the opportunity to take A TON of classes at my jc while i sorted out a future goal for myself. this led me to find examples of the professional life i wish to have as a grown up and ask these friends to help me reach that prestige class eventually.

yesterday was top of the world and the madness associated with staying up an entire night waiting for the sun to come up. thought about klien bottles and being a tiny piece of mercury traveling on it so fast that you become a silver leaf skin on the bottle. travel so fast that it is defiant.

It feels purposeful. 
I spoke with jkevin about jason on sunday. We talked about in lack o motivation as a student and famly member but mostly about his lack of interest in anything produuctive.as far as i know he excells at one thing, tech theater. It's a shame he doesn't see it as a career choice and more a shame the topic he is interested in is unavailable first at his school due to the ever-overhanging budget crisis and second because of his shitty grades. 
Kevin became goal oriented some time in late highschool due to a mentor/confidant relationship that he developed with his english teacher. I decided what my future would be two years into my twenties and five after highschool in my late post-adolescence. I am example of the late-bloomer archetype and painfully watched as people i grew up with moved off, finished undergrad and as some started families or careers after. I would rather he take kevin's UCLA pre-med example than my not yet transferred jc student one. I'm not explicitly implying school is the only way by which to have a successful future but i would think signs for an alternative path wul have shown by now. 

Anyways, this is the studio i love:




finding inspiration.

that is all.

Kelly Savino on sat 2 jan 10

Aw, Lili, leave the girl be. There's plenty of time later in life to worry =

about mortgages, vision and dental coverage, and career building.



When I was twenty-something, I was selling oriental rugs in Harvard Square,=

interviewing axe throwers in Oregon logging towns, sleeping in my truck at=

tractor pulls and rodeos, and camping alone in roadless Oregon wilderness =

areas. I was cooking for elk hunters on a wood stove in a cabin in the Blue=

Mountains and skinning their elk while they hunted. I was partying at Ken =

Kesey's farm, sleeping in his pasture next to the magic bus, making beadwor=

k and batiks, dancing at Grateful Dead shows and the Oregon Country Fair.



I only had a decade after undergrad to be free and independent, between my =

family of origin and my family-to-be. I followed folklore grant jobs from M=

aryland to Virginia to the Carolinas. I was documenting crabbers and oyster=

men, granny midwives and herbalists, coon hunters, moonshiners, boat buider=

s, Amish farmers and pound net fishermen. I never crewed on a Brigantine, b=

ut I spent a little time on a tugboat called Sampit between Southport and B=

eaufort, NC (Elizabeth's town.) They had a diesel cookstove, no lie. I reme=

mber the captain told the crew that I smelled awful pretty for a towboat, a=

nd they ought to roll me in the bilge if I was going to ride along and help=

.



I had a mud spattered 4wd Bronco with tape recorders, cameras and camping g=

ear in the back, surf rods and tiki torches tied to the roof rack, and a bu=

mper sticker that said, "Smith and Wesson: The Ultimate in Feminine Protect=

ion".



Single years with no possessions, no commitments and no long term plans wer=

e some of the most interesting years of my life, and will give me something=

to write about when I am old. Nannying and living on the cheap in Paris, a=

n improbable romance in Italy, street musicians in Amsterdam.



In 1989 I came home to Wilmington from an Independence day party with old O=

hio State buddies in Stone Mountain, Georgia -- (I had ridden through downt=

own Atlanta in the bed of a pickup, with a dead pig and a bottle of Jaegerm=

eister, and after the party found three bullet holes in my tent.) The funni=

est guy I knew in NC had just gotten a job offer in Texas, and on a whim, I=

went with him.



We've been married 20 years, now, in the same house in Toledo, Ohio, and ou=

r kids are 16, 14 and 11. It's a grand adventure and I wouldn't trade it fo=

r all the world. But I'm glad I had those years on my own between school an=

d responsible homeownership/parenthood/running on the employment hamster wh=

eel.



My college friend Leslie worked for months at a time on salmon cannery boat=

s in Alaska, living and eating aboard and wading knee deep in fish guts in =

rubber waders.. then she took her big fat paycheck and went to Europe, rode=

Eurail and traveled the youth hostels until the money ran out. And then ba=

ck to the fish to recharge the bank account.



Youth is for adventure, Lili. My advice: go now, while you can. Do whatever=

calls to you. There will be time enough for caution, diaper washing and co=

upon clipping, lawn mowing and snow shoveling. Get after it. It's a big wor=

ld and you only get a hundred years or so, this time around, if you're luck=

y and take care of the equipment.



Yours

Kelly in Ohio



p.s. Keep us posted on where you're thinking of apprenticing! It's probably=

like choosing a workshop: nobody will give you the dirt up front, in publi=

c, but you'll get some private off list warnings if you're headed for a dic=

ey situation. Take it all with a grain of salt and call your own shots. Go =

get 'em, girl.







http://www.primalpotter.com (website)

http://primalmommy.wordpress.com (blog)

going to make a big breakfast and ride my bike to school.

that is all.

Sunset anxiety.

be a lighter, brighter person; nicer but you've heard it all before

"You are not in love with that girl, you are infatuated with her looks and her currently limitless potential."

like that girl with the pixie cut in one of my other classes such a
pretty face with little else to offer. she's twenty six or something
and almost a total mute, i thought she was slow at first but i got her
to talk a bit and it turns oun she's jus devoid of social skills. a
painter/art major turned fireman/emt. i think her name is heather,
she's an olive shouldered mexi-something in the north part of europe
but more of an elf i think. she'd be at home in a tree, living off of
berries and whistling with woodland creatures, and i mean this in the
nicest way. the sort of elegant albeit shorter elf you may have read of
in greek mythologies. i think they called them druids or nymphs there,
but it's all the same .one of those pristine forms, athletic from the
swim class she teaches and fireman physical training that i guess is
inherent in the school's program. these delicately set eyes, light
brown like my brother's were when he was younger. i've always liked the hazel ones in any case. Hazel, what does that even mean? I always called them Rusty-jade since they look that way. Some sunbleached green stone that had rusted so pretty near the center of the iris.
Here she was, the Hazel eye'd girl walking to class or maybe her car, it had been the third or fourth time i'd seen her walking uphill here. I was on my bicycle riding back to the ceramics studio coming out of a humanities class. Psyc26 or psychology of sexuality, but i just called it a psyc class. people asked about it if you told them the full name of the course, and i am retaking it due to a bad grade due to a, well. i don't really know. my problem i think is that for as loud as i am around friends or other people in the studiom i'm pretty quiet in this class. i don't have many friends, which is something i noticed in french when i took that with my brother. i kind of stick to myself and only talk to people on a neccesity basis. the conversations are filler, conversational lubricant because i'm not really interested in them and they aren't really interested in me. "what classes are you taking? what's your major? how are you?" the same insencire platitiudes you learn early, gradeschool maybe.
in any case she was there walking this way in flip flops and jeans. i had both hands on my bars and was kind of in a hurry since i had left my hoodie in my bag and it was too breezy to be comfortable in an undershirt and cutoffs. i got a smile recipricated the second time i saw her, something like 'oh-hey didn't i see you yesterday,' only with a lot less intention. at least she looked me in the eyes when i rode past. It is intolerable when people can't look you in the eyes. Driving i think is when i note it the most. We are at a light and i'm trying to glean as much as possible for the cars in my immediate proximity by seeing how clean their car is, what sort of vanily plates they may have or trinkets in the windows. i especially like to see people dancing in their little metal boxes. other twenty somethings with showing similar carelessness about the weather having all four windows down makes me feel bright from the chest out. the way the wind whips your hair and you have to keep checking the passanger seat or rear bench seat for paper that maybe important enought to weigh down with something sitting up front. usually a jacket. i guess you can read peaple very much by how or what they drive, the same with women and their brows. it's one of the first things i look at, eyes and brows if she's close enough, waist down if distance is a factor. brows are of supreme importance. a girl with clean brows sculpts her appearance more than often, more than regularly even. shaped brows may complete or destroy a face, the right kind makes her inviting and never severe, or wry. i think those are my favourite. the square or rectangular shapes with the sweeping curve that follows the brow-bone. when they peak just over the most complementary of eyeware, sleek squared lenses always preferred over the ironic pointed tips or bedazzled frames plebians wear. maybe askew a bit because she fell asleep reading the first couple of weeks she got the pair.
anyways,
this is always the way it went. see girl. she smiles back. imagine life together.

i have to return some videotapes.

Waxen Anagnorisis.

i came home friday to find my dad's car in the driveway. 430p strange, he shouldn't be home until after seven. walked in, dropped my art-bag thing and backpack on the couch and walked to his room from which i could hear the tv going. Dad was sitting on the bed with his white headphones plugged into his acer netbook. he looked up just as i dived for his bed.
they let us go at work because of the holiday. what holiday i thought? well, easter and good friday. what makes it good? well, catholics say that they put jesus up on the cross today. "Creciendo en San Fransisco El Alto presentava pocas razones para estrenar ropa nueva. Solamente este dia, Viernes Santo, Carnival el cumpleanos de tu hermano, Navidad y talbes mi cumpleanos" First i should explain that my dad's conversantions and i whenever they venture to times before he spoke English well turn into his Castellano and my Spanglish. Second a transaltion: The Town my dad grew up in in Guatemala offered almost no chances for premiering clothes. When he was given clothes by his family of farmer/tailors, the latter a profession he would excell in once he moved to the capital at the age of thirteen, it was only three maybe four times a year. His birthday was a maybe, having a birthday in march meant easter and the holy week were less than a month away, two important days is such close proximity lowers the chance of double gifts -my smaller brother jason is familiar with this concept having been born on december 29th- October there is a mayan Carnival that celebrates the village, the women offer pagan tributes to catholic saints, surrounding "aldeas" bring their wares for a special market-day on the village square. The people stay up late and out of the house visiting with extended family at the matriarch's house. He mentioned my brother Kevin's birthday because it lands on october 4th, in the week of Festival. Christmas is a given and finally good friday. He remembers this week happily. As a child my dad would be given a few cents to buy beeswax to play with.

"So we would run up to the central plaza to buy our wax. Not like the gold stuff you have here but this black wax like roofing tar, but hard. enough for the size of a large quarter and thick like a poker chip. then we would play a game for keeps. You challenge a friend to a game and set your coin down on the ground. the pavement was pretty uneven but the stones in the road were perfect. set down your coin but not before scoring it with a nail so that the bottom side looked like the sun's rays. as you set the coin down you would thumb it into the ground hopefully adhereing it a bit to the ground. his challenge was to flip your coin and his to keep both sets of wax .you could tell who had been good at it by mid day carrying coins that were three-four times the size of yours, a coin with two or three wins. there were things you could do to help yourself out. i always went home and made two thinner coins first. my brother had taught me to find a wide thin button to add more weight to my coin, as tailors we had boxes of buttons and i would make my own watching them. another thing i saw with them was before you hit someone else you flared your own, thinning out the edges so that the softer wax would adhere to theirs causing them both to flip over as one.
"later when i moved to the capital with your uncles we looked forward to going back home. i was thirteen at the time but well off. your grandma loved it because i would come back with fabrics that you couldn't get in the mountains. in return she would have made me a pair of slacks, but never new. they were scraps that she had puzzle pieced together from cuts of other people's finer textile. the fabrics all matched but a well trained eye could see the new seams from an extra panel, but i loved them both as a kid and teenager.
"The shop we ran in Guatemala City was doing well but we would have given everybody the day off anyways. We all went home on saturday through to sunday to see our parents and it felt like the city would deflate. the busses on the way back home would be packed with men and women going home to eat their mom's food. It felt like half the capitals population migrated out for three days to put their feet up at their own homes and go to church with their dads.

A friend about that growth a family works for to get out of poverty. My family started in an apartment in Korea Town off of vermont. So here was my dad some thirty years later. A house in a pretty suburb, three boys one in junior college and the other away at college in Los Angeles. Three cars and sometimes brother's motorcycle in the driveway. Home with a huge Brazilian Pepper Tree in the front and big German Shepard in the back.

Multimedia message

They were infinite. They were evry color a soup of grey white and blue could offer, a foam that if i held up a stick maybe a couple lengths longer than i was tall i could scratch my name into or maybe the the made up initials of the kids i owe my parents. I did it all the time, made up first and middle names for them. I like michael because of jordan and jackson, and if i wanted to be cheesy i could give him the same initials as my old man. My parents had middle-named me after a baseball pitcher i think. K, the middle brother was kevin kostner and osmond from the family band. J got his middle name from shaq, except none of us knew if there was an apostrophe -niel or niell on the birth certificate and he was born before the age o google so i think he just spelled with the two l's to be safe.
I remember once when J was an infant kevin and i were convinced our parents loved him more. We had heard them after our bedtime in the living room his gurgling and both my parents laughing. He always got to stay up late and at seven i was grown up. I wanted to play a night with my dad. One night i climbed down my bunk to kevin's shaking him awake to help me spy. We could hear them downstairs in the kitchen now and hadto be careful to get a peek from the top of the stairs. The floorboards that lined the hallway between our room and the top flight were groany and to get past them you had to support your weight on the linen closet door or cupboards on the opposite side.
Kevin was my best friend back then and brother-in-arms. He was the only one i could trust to scale trees with me or do things we weren't exactly supposed to. A renegade team of two sidekicks. There was once that we would climb onto the opening garage door to the gated apartment complex and for the three seconds it was completely horizontal clamber across to slide down the in-side of the gate, like indie jones. I had the gate control to get in after school and we were taking turns clicking and climbing. The story ends with his being lodged between the roof and gate because of a neighbor coming or going and my freaking out until dad came and saved him. We both thought he was going to die and a body check later revealed a little scraping but no bruises and K had returned unharmed. I love him and i was destroyed by guilt because i couldn't help him. He was fine. We're all indestructable at that age. This image was taken after i dropped him off at school. He's a psych pre-med at UCLA and i want to be like him when i grow up.

put this on lj a couple days back.

I'd rather take the time to burn every last bridge I've ever crossed beneath the sun
Than live my life knowin' you may one day follow me over one.

it was implied at the get-go. if not by mutual agreement. if not then than by the signs we waved as they waded through their scene. she remembers defending the events with her friends, "no you don't need drugs every time you go," and "of course there's sober people at these parties." that was the thing, convincing people to come. i remember bringing a girlfriend and her girlfriend to a new years bacchanal in los angeles and the friend was terrified of people slipping things in her water. like there were these cats out there with pez dispenser rophynol waiting to catch a teenager slipping and throw her in the back of a van. so no, drugs are not essential to the dance scene but the only way to enlightenment was through pestilence and the dancer had crawled through three or four controlled substances before she sat down near the dance floor than night.

we talked about these weekend escapes. how we had climbed into overstuffed hondas and drove two three hours either into LA, San Diego, or the surrounding desert to get away from what? like we tried to live some dual life where school or work and the weekday were something to grind through in waiting for the weekend. this is what terrified me. we had friends that were a bit older. paycheck to paycheck renters; plans upon plans coupled with zero motivation. mid twenties i was looking forward to finishing grad school and being a grown up. what had happened with these people to get stuck in a late post adolescence? it was this scene, man. it was just like any other. in my punk days there were old fucks in faded black denim and sleeveless band shirts held together but just barely with dental floss. old crust punks either working the venues or hanging out with the proprietors. burn outs. that must have been it. it was undying love for the scene that stagnated them. keeping involved with whatever music drove them.

she made a joke about our drugs sounding like license plates. D-O-4-DMT-7; it wasn't funny but it was clever and i liked it. "that was alright," and "no i took four times the reccommended dose and couldn't sleep," or "that's alright but i wouldn't do it again, man." she was pretty, smart too. hair that alway fell just-so and eyes that searched your face as you talked looking for tells or smirks maybe a casual sideglance that mean you had just made something up. everyone's perfect when you're tripping so hard the night bleeds rainbows.

i let her know my greatest suspicion. i was afraid of being a psychopath. i watched a tv show and had all the earmarks mentioned. i could hardly keep friends, people were interesting but simple. what i mean by that is that nobody else was playing this game of show-hide-tell. was everybody so bland that their actions were never the sum of their intentions? she posed driving as en example. EXACTLY. you're on a moderately crowded highway and you see opening after opening. flash blinker, check shoulder, merge. playing frogger from point a to point b shooting the accord between semi trucks for a second to get past the 1990s soccer mom luxury van. everyone else was an obstacle or opportunity you needed to wait for the right time to exploit she said, reactive automatons convinced you were an ass for skipping lanes so often or worse, not even noticing. what was more i said.:i never cried. it was hard for me to emote. people were emotional beings and when it was socially acceptable i never broke down. not that i never felt choked up, just not at the right times. there were moments, maybe a look from cereal buying dad to cereal wanting daughter at the grocery store, or the scene in a chorus line when the pr girl finishes the number about her acting teacher. we laughed it off citing social ineptitude.

the most important thing we talked those following days was hate. how if love could be an all encompassing obsession that what could hate possibly be? she said something like an active dislike. that same involvement in their wellbeing becomes a damnation and you spend you time cursing every second. no. hate is an absence of emotion just as dark is the absence of light. it's not an active dislike that you let boil inside you, there's already names for than like angst and resentment. hate was something special and hard to achieve for the uninitiated. it was the second a name no longer mattered to you. the mention of her doesn't envoke a defensive i-don't-care remark or a second thought at all. complete disinterest. this hate was exciting we said like a discipline you perfect.

we hardly spoke anymore but i had kept all the postcards we traded from our neighboring towns like i needed trophies. like some couplings work out we had fully explored each other and found less than we had hoped. there is a special place old lovers keep your secrets and fears, the things that can turn you from frozen pond to a lake of fire in an instant. only strangers pull punches and hitting someone like that is still a victory.

Multimedia message

Dear driver,
This is the ocean of steel you nagivate every day before class. When your school day is over you climb back into your oven adjusting the climate inside to taste and turning on your never-loud-enough stereo before heading out of the parking lot onto the backed up arteries that connect your classroom to your bedroom never pausing to appreciate the north east breeze at the top of a hill or sun setting to the west. I implore you to spend some time outside every day while, as a friend said, mighty spring whips it's flower wreathed cock out. Ride a bike, wave to a stranger, dance at a stop light; you're only young for like ten seconds. Enjoy it.

goodnight doggie.

“	It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.	”
—Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind"

suburban breezeways are moaning tonight as dry desert air heads southwest across socal. the wind farms between here and palm desert with their propellers facing the coming sun. tomorrow i have a date with the pasadena/los angeles courthouse. a ticket i got last month is due tomorrow and like a proper twenty something i left it to the last minute. the hollow gastank in my car was also left out of mind until just now. i knew the car needed food but today was sunday, today in a fleece sport jacket playing chrono trigger, the afternoon peppered with snacks and naps. like i said, the tank was empty and there was no way i was going to do it tomorrow morning. i left the house still wearing my jacket, having traded my gym shorts for some denim cursing myself for not having grabbed my gloves and hat. the wind was a tease of what would be in the coming days. the santa anas were called the devil's breath because of the heat they brought in from the desert. it's the angst of the dying upper class in palm valley and an invitation for trashed twenty somethings to invade indio's coachella groaning through my suburban sprawl. i needed gas and i needed gas tonight. whatever fumes had fueled my honda back from school would have to take me to the corner store for gas. across the street, movement. the air likes to play tricks, turning hedges into raking fingers with lonely voices. there it is again, a bear of a dog. white. labrador. i whistled and waited for the glance from a friendly puppy. marking trees and scratching his feet on the grass; probably belongs to a neighbor on a night walk. plus, it's spring and my mom spent the day with the garage open, if he had been out and about all day he would have come up to say hello. into the car and off to the mobil.
the first week of school is always the worst. parking feels like getting teeth pulled and if you have not been fortunate enough to add classes early you will be doing a dance that involves multiple classrooms, professors, and rejections. i was going home from an afternoon/evening class around and traffic back to the freeway was a clusterfuck. these were kids who hadn't gotten classes were more than likely sitting in their cars disappointed and hopeless looking forward to sixteen weeks of entry level jobs in lieu of studying. there was one cawice lately, am i a reactionary person? do i simply respond to input? ther in particular up ahead being a nice guy. a white late model accord letting cars pass in front of him near a lane merging. my lane on the other hand was inching as his was stopped dead and the third merged in front of him. three, four, five cars. what a nice kid. as cars eight and nine i was able to look into his car. asleep! this kid was asleep! i started honking and motioning for someone else to notice. it was only about seven but i was sure this guy had spent the last twelve hours running room to room getting no after no for having a too late registration da- wait. what if he's narcoleptic?! my flailing and honking got the attention of a girl in a sedan. CALL 9-1-1 i gestured. phoneless i had no way to alert anybody and was worried mr sleeps would kill someone if he got on the highway. my lane continued forward and i left him behind. sedan girl puts her hands in the air with face both worried and smirking saying either "no phone," or "i don't know." should i stop? how could i wake him up? what if i park in front of him and when he wakes up his first reaction to a tattooed man standing in the street at his window is to slam on the gas? i can't afford that. minutes of deliberation i am down the street turning onto the highway. oh man, i hope everything is okay with him. the tank is full and it's freezing out. time to go home.
pulling in the dog is still playing cat-at-scratching post on the lawn across the street. unwilling to let an opportunity to be kind/helpful/not lazy i walk across the street and call to the labrador bear. hey puppy, what's your name? what are you doing out? hunched over but gripping him by the collar i walk him around the house and pull the gate shut behind us. no tags, great. i hope you weren't dumped in the area by a "family." it's a terrible night to leave a dog is a strange neighborhood, and how dare you take advantage of someone like that, jerks. well, i'm not looking forward to a night of howling and scratching so i take some lunchmeat and benadryl and prepare some hors d'voers.

their porcelain hands.

walking to the refrigerator through the dark house is an affair. my slippers clip-clop down the hall past the empty living room and all i feel is eyes and arms. something like being watched but only as a footnote. the way you see a runner out of the corner of your eye while you lounge in a park or how you notice someone sit down near you while you read your book on the bus. the arms are the worst part. they are dainty hands with fragile wrists and slender fingers. it happens only at night after i've been at the computer for a few hours past everybody's bedtime. the screen at it's lowest brightness setting burning pink like i've been staring at a square sun. i meet the sentience with controlled breath and over-calculated footsteps. if i let them know that i know it's all over.
this isn't the only place i've felt them either. i remember throwing out the trash when we lived at the apartment in anaheim. i would try to throw the bags from the street over the gate into the *ideally* open dumpster. first you would estimate clearing distance, second you would pick up the bag by the knot and swing it back and forth like a pendulum gaining momentum enough to make a perfect arc over the steel doors that guarded the rolling dumpster. if everything went right you heard a satisfying metal clang, when things didn't there was still a sound, but one of bagged refuse on plastic coming much sooner because of the truncated airtime granted by a closed lid. this meant having to walk around the stucco enclosure whose floors were stained with soup de garbage'. once you had gotten around the fort built to hide the dumpster you had to build something to stand on. the lid was heavy for a nine year old and getting up on a sturdy box or piece of old furniture meant you could lift and flip the top with your arms and legs instead of toes and fingertips, it also meant somebody had decided that that box you were standing on, or discarded desk was too heavy to lift and properly dispose of. this way you could take a quick look in the dumpster too, make sure there weren't any mummy-shaped rolls of carpet. there they were, noticing and reaching. quick with the trash, making sure to avoid the trash juice now dripping from the bag damaged by landing impact and subsequent sliding onto floor. quick out of the trash place, they had gotten out of the dumpster. faster around the building and up the stairs you could see through horizontally, taking them two at a time because you can almost see their tiny white fingernails reaching from the other side of each step. into the house and SAFE.

clay and funny people

lately my education with pottery has been a bit more intensive than in any other semester. Donna, the lab tech at school has taken a different approach to my barrage of questions and i am more than grateful for it. instead of answering she's been directing me towards potters dictionaries or coaxing my train of thought onto the solution. i learned that the difference between black and red iron oxides is reduction and that red iron oxide acts like a flux while black as an anti-flux. my professor for the weekend is also facilitating my learning she let me borrow The Potters Workbook, a manual on wheelthrowing techniques. also i was given a real sketchbook in which i've been drawing up my current project. drawing is to lead to proper execution so i'm glad to be participating in that.
reading the book that genny gave me it started with a page on the CV or Curriculum Vitae and that i need to build a personal portfolio. "at all times ad for all purposes, you need to keep a portfolio ready to send out for professional jobs and other applications, for publicity of all sorts and for your own records. this means keeping an up-to-date, detailed chronology of your personal history with an exhibition record, articles and books you have written or that have been written about you together with photographs of your recent pieces. a weel coordinated pitch will help clients and galleries remember your work." (\excerpt from the craft and art of clay by susie peterson. this whole thing seems incredibly daunting and intimidates me that i have not much inthe way of a show or experience in clay works. i told Donna this and she quickly reminded me that i have been awarded a scholarship to attend a workshop just last fall. i feel like i'm very much being helped out. i'm very interested in applying places for internships and the like and need to take a serious approach to enabling success in clay. the book goes on further to state that small shows at libraries are also great and that airports are great places to exhibit work.
i watched funny people today and really liked it. there are handful of actors that i can say i'm familiar with and enjoy their quirky work. tom hanks with meg ryan movies, tom cruise in vanilla sky, leo decaprio, paul rudd, matthew broderick's election. anyways the movie made me really happy. also, this:

looking for love in Alderaan places,

today was spent wisely.. sort of. i was torn between this and tumblr. the site hosted a couple of my friends but i had seen some potters with blogspots i wanted to follow/read/subscribe too so i had a foot in each door. actually more than a foot. i spent last night debranding someone's template, uncool i know, for tumblr and tonight editing the one i chose for this site. i'm happier here, the somber warm and cool of the background are an image, not taken by me, of an west facing cliff at the grand canyon. i sort of think it looks like tatooine, sans the other stars. i'm pretty pleased with the color pallete (i've already backspaced this word half a dozen times, i'm over it.)
classes started monday at mt sac but i strategically placed my classes so i would have maximum use of the pottery studio at school. i was able to make some great pots last quarter beacuse i was in studio every day, i'm hoping to keep up the trend this time around as well. sixteen weeks is a long time though, maybe i'll tire out my kiln elf and instructors before then. here's my favourite pot of the semester, faux soda firing because of the soda ash i added to the glazed pot before firing.
i had a couple novel ideas today. one was for a sculptural pieces, there is a scene at the end of the reepicheep storyline that haunted me for a while. the adventurers have reached the end of the world and reepicheep, ever in wont for the next gambit makes a break for the end of the world. here the flat land breaks like a waterfall, but it's still and shallow water where the world ends. here coating the placid surface of the water are lillies that blot out the blue of the ocean. reepicheep climbs in a mouse-sized boat and says goodbye to the sons of adam/eve and in a last show of i guess it's enlightenment he throws his rapier behind him as he goes over the precipice. if i remember right the story ens with an image of his his tiny sword piercing a pure white lily lotus.
i think i could do it well in the babu porcelain, or maybe even buy a block of the northern ice stuff that's supposed to be blue when translucent. i wish i had a large sketchbook. i also wish i knew how to sketch. it's supposed to be half the battle when figuring out a form to throw or build. i imagine it's like brainstorming for a paper. something between doing tons of research and making your own opinions.