Costuming and kitty litter

The large boy wanted to be Doctor Who, until we said he could make his own sonic screwdriver instead of buying one. The small boy wants to be Michelangelo the ninja turtle, because of nunchucks. He is narrowing his eyes at me when I offer to make them out of toilet paper tubes, but still has enough belief in my magical craft skills that he imagines I'll pull off a real pair of them somehow. "It isn't about getting toys!" I howl. "It's about getting candy. Focus, children." 

So this morning I asked again, "what do you want to be for Halloween?" 

And the boy said, "A ghost! And Zenny is a cherry, and dad is Pacman."

"Oh! Ok. Maybe a banana, because cherries have connotations I don't think are - *cough* - hey, so what am I?"

"A dot."

Great.

So that's where we are with that. Nowhere.

Disaster litter

Our philosophy with allowances is that everyone does normal chores just for being part a household, and kids get paid extra for (competently) doing things we really, really don't want to do. The small boy can't do anything competently yet, and has almost broken all our necks while learning to spray oil on the wood furniture. The large boy gets to do kitty litter for a dollar a day, because it's gross and we don't want to do it. We have litter upstairs for the old arthritic cats, and litter downstairs for the assholes who would rather pee on the stove than walk upstairs. Twice a week, the garbage goes out, and the boy has to add bathroom trash to the litter bag. So on garbage day, I yelled up, "Don't forget the dirty diapers!" and he obligingly dumped them on top of the dirty litter, then he came downstairs swinging the heavy bag. Leif was playing Legos in the livingroom, and looked up just in time for Gavin to turn the corner, the bag sailing out gracefully in an arc to smack him square in the face like - well, a sack full of poop. The boy walked over his stunned brother. While I helped Leif up, my mother praised Gavin for his dutiful garbage collection, and he hoisted the bag and beamed, "It even has Leif's face imprinted on it!" Brothers, I tell you.

On the next garbage day, we asked him to empty the litter pans and refill them with clean stuff. "Dump the litter into a garbage bag," we said. Surprisingly soon, he was finished, and came in with his brow furrowed.

"Wow, done already?"

"Um, yeah."

"Great, do you need help taking the garbage bag outside?" 

"Um, no." 

"Really? That must have been heavy." 

"Well, the pan was heavy."

"But you put the litter in the garbage, right?"

"... Most of it?"

"Wut."

As it turns out, he had decided that a plastic grocery bag was easier to reach than the roll of garbage bags, and took the pan of litter outside, in case some spilled. Which it did. Because he was dumping a big pan of litter into a little plastic grocery bag. So there was a big pile of dirty clay litter on the grass behind the house. And it was raining. It turns out that raking clay sludge out of grass is harder than it sounds. The boy cried in embarrassment while we tried to clean it up, and then we all hid from the yard men when they came to collect the garbage bags from the outdoor bin. There was a WHOOP and someone sailed past the window. We hosed off the evidence afterward and pretended to know nothing. 

It's a learning curve. I consoled the boy by telling about how I had discovered as a child that if it was too cold to take out the cat litter, I could open the door and hurl the turds outside, and feral dogs would come sailing out of nowhere to snap them out of the air and hork them down like bacon treats. The downside of this, besides being revolting, was that when I did go out to put the litter bags in the trash, I had to do it at a sprint, chased by hungry dogs. I did not always make it. 

A learning curve, I say.

fall happenings

Pumpkin Patch 2013: the Sweatening

I get a bit pissy when people assume I'm military, just because I'm white and overrun with kids. So once again, my Molokai High pride cost us a discount when, at Military Appreciation Day at the pumpkin patch, all the minivans ahead of us were waved in without charge and I demanded to throw money at them because RAWR NO, I'M FROM HERE. My integrity looks a lot like my pig-headedness.

It was the first day of the season, and there were so many huge pumpkins. The cousins tried to lift every pumpkin they came across before finally resigning themselves to small ones.

The walk back through the fields was a huffing stream of complaint. Especially when we passed the kiddie field right next to the gates, full of perfect little round pumpkins. The kids stuck with their warty little squashes out of spite.

The man chose as big a pumpkin as he could carry. I am suspicious that he plans to put the baby in it.

And then there was beer

The Märzen has been in the closet for a month, failing to ferment properly. The yeast did something weird, and the man had to syphon as much off the top as he could to save the batch.

There was a lot of grumbling over a beaker about gravity and clarity, but it's in the bottles and carbonating, which is the part of this process I am most attentive to. 

In the meantime

Caramel apples. I added vanilla and sea salt to the melted candies, because I felt fancy.

Gathering good memories like bricks and mortar to wall off the bad year.

nope

It's fall break, and I've already lost track of the days, thrown off by the blur of the passing school year and a seasonal head cold. We don't have falling leaves and snow to mark the seasons, but we like to keep the illnesses.

The tooth came in at 2:00am, riding a fever, and I was woken by hot little hands. Small dose of baby Tylenol, diaper change, tucked back into bed against me, and she murmured off to sleep again while my brain stayed awake, composing long arguments with people who were Wrong on the Internet. 

'Do whatever the fuck you want' is terrible, terrible life advice, my brain clacked.
Pleasure and happiness are not the same thing. 
Babies do not need flowers bigger than their heads strapped to them to show they are female. Let her just be a baby for a while, ffs.

Everyone is wrong at 2am. Nobody more so than yourself. Some words are etched night after night, and burn like the letters of the One Ring in the darkness. When these started up, I drag a pillow over my head and smother the noise.

And then it is day again.

My sense of immobility and failure is starting to make my family restless.

"I have to go to Anaheim for work in a few months, come with me!"
"Thanks, no."
"Let's sell the house and buy a farm in Washington! We can have apple trees and drive to Vancouver!"
"Nope."

I'm a trapped bear wrapped in a wet banket. No quick movements, I have learned. We had to come to Oahu to get Gavin. We had to go to California to retrieve Leif. We had to be on Maui to find Zenny. I'm finished with wandering for a while. The hiring freeze will lift. The new illustration site will be done soon. The next book is blocked out.

I'm not moving a muscle.

Teeth

Up since 3:30am.

3:30 am, I say again.

I had lunch at 8am, because it had been 4 hours since breakfast. My eyelids have started making a clicking noise when I blink. 

Teeth, man.

search for agent, cont.

For anyone interested in how this process works - or does not work. Mostly not working.

So FIRST. I looked up some agencies that represent artists I like, took some shots of my work, and sent emails to two agents.

THEN. One of them was kind enough to reject me with helpful feedback. I worked on honing my style down to something do-able on time constraints and pretty typically "me", and sent in updates to both agencies.

TODAY. I got another rejection from the nice agent, because my color palette isn't great. As it happens, I hate color, and evidently this is PAINFULLY OBVIOUS. I am good at lines, though.

Still an impenetrable silence from the other agent. So that's either 1, 2, or 4 rejections, depending on how you look at it.

So now I have to decide if I am going to get discouraged, or try again and work on something productive in the meantime. This would SEEM like an obvious choice, but I am kind of leaning toward laying under the tap of the beer bucket in the Harry Potter closet. It must be hard being an agent, when you know the artists you reject every day might go off and drown themselves in semi-fermented Irish ale. Although it kind of solves the problem of having too many artists to sift through, in the long run.

So instead of in addition to doing that, I am going to throw a whole lot more mud at the wall and hope some sticks, while dragging out the pile of graphic novel stories I have been hoarding in my knitting cupboard and seeing if I can make a go at making something WITHOUT my nemesis - color.

More on this as it fails to unfold.

6 months

I did a whole video blog thing, then took it down. I grimace while talking, like a pug who's just been turned into a human.

Recap: babby is 6 months old. I made a pie to mark the half-occasion. Did you know you can fold shit into cool whip and freeze it and call it a pie? Yes, you can. Maybe you can scoop it out with a melon baller and put it in your coffee, too. 

So here is the child.

And here is knitting. With superwash wool.

I did an experiment and tried to kill my mother with it, and failed. So, hurray. Not allergic to superwash, just the stuff with sheep body oil on it.

fails and fails

So I ran over a screw. And a nail. Now the bronze class fee is patching together our tires.

And then I got a rejection from one of the agents. It wasn't unexpected, and it was very kind, with good feedback to push me in the right direction. I'm taking the advice, and working on some samples to demonstrate my "signature". 

So that's progress, at least. It's hard to feel like you're going anywhere when your life has shrunk to the dimensions of a play mat, the hours marked by nap times. You become a creature of breasts and lap and fistfuls of hair, stretching to the end of the invisible tether to cook and shower and drink an entire cup of coffee uninterrupted. These months are fleeting, and this baby is easy and funny and loving, so I am not unhappy, but when the time shrinks around you, the wanting starts to press tight to its edges.

I want.

submission

Not too long ago, a friend asked if I was getting anywhere with my search for an agent.


So this week I finally sent my portfolio to a few representatives. Well, I say "portfolio", but our old computer is in the shop and I don't like our scanner, so what I did was take a few pictures of my books with my phone (#nofilter).  And I say "a few representatives", but by that I mean "two". However, most agents will say they would like exclusivity for a month while they kick you through a few deliberation meetings, so I'm actually being a bit of a tart by sending in more than one. But I liked them, and one of them said they weren't actively looking to add anyone, so hey.

What I did not send was a link to a website or blog, because I don't think my knitting and talk about beards is pertinent to illustration. But if any intrepid agent should find their way here...

I promise to make a proper site. 

a bad feeling

My mother is a bird rescuer. She is also a cat owner. She knows that this is problematic, but insists that with vigilance, both can co-exist. The vigilance falls on me most of the time. I am okay with this; I check the old cats to make sure they are breathing, let the young ones in and out, tap the fish tank to startle the goldfish out of its perpetual suicide attempts, and feed the multitude of birds. But then two days ago, just after I got home from dropping off the kids, one of the cats came running into the living room, tossing around the corpse of one of the baby birds.

This was not ok. It upset me a lot. I picked it up and sobbed into the phone. Found the cage door open. I was not the one to open it, but I should have noticed it when I got home, and I apologized over and over while wrapping the tiny thing in paper for burial. I had just sniffled myself calm again over a cup of coffee when there was a mass of chirping outside, and I went to the window to see at least a hundred tiny waxbills covering the lanai, hanging in every branch and stalk of grass. They hopped and sang for a minute, then flew off like a murmuration in miniature. I got very philosophical about it for a couple minutes.

So that was awful.

I started seeing death everywhere. There was a dead lizard in the bathroom. The baby tried to choke herself with my sunglasses. I considered sitting safely in the corner for the rest of the week.

related: I also started listening to Night Vale.

I might have mentioned my "visions" before. This could also be called "imagination", but at least one of them has actually happened*. Or I made it happen. Anyway, the best way to make sure that your predictions never come true is to announce them loudly and publicly, so here it is: while driving downtown, I saw a college girl sitting by the bus stop, and suddenly I had a clear idea that she was Zenny, at age 19 or 20, listening to music and feeling sad about her mother (me) who died a few years earlier of a long illness.
 

Thanks for that, brain.
 

To be safe, I am scheduling all my annual physicals for the next 15 years. Well, thinking about it, anyway.

* When I was 18, I drove to Hana with a friend while visiting from college. As we passed through the town, I saw myself living there, on a hillside, with two children - one running and one crawling. I was very happy. And of course this would never happen, it was impossible, because I was going to school for computer animation, and would be living in a big city some day, paying off my student loans and driving a mustang - HA.

Knitting as silent screams

Last week I had an interview for a job I really wanted. For a few days, I wrapped my heart around the idea of leaving my baby with a stranger (who might keep the babies padlocked into barred play pens), got work clothes in order, and braced for a possible return to the workforce. But I didn't get the job. A man with smart glasses got the job, and I got an evening crying into my knees.

The next day, I knit a doily. I was not sure how to feel about this. What is a doily? Why do I want a lot of them, in bright colors? Could I find a way to knit bad words into them? 

While I was grappling with my vague sense of shame over knitting a doily, another one came off my needles.

So now I have made TWO doilies. I realized that I am trying to fill some hole in myself - with doilies. Maybe it is a doily-shaped hole, eloquent and full of smaller holes. Maybe if I let myself go into the doily as I knit, I will wake up to find I have worked a map or star chart or blueprint to destinations vast and unknowable into the coiling stitches. That is not a fuckup in the second circle from the middle, that is a cypher.

I dunked the doilies in kool aid and pinned them out on foam kiddie mats to dry. 

But in an spooky manner.

And I stared at the doilies, thinking these things, when suddenly I saw it there, amongst the yarn-overs: get an agent, get your pens, and get to work, you idiot. 

So that's what I'm doing. It is wise not to argue with doilies.