Not unrelated

I have started drinking coffee again. Oh no.

And during the time I am working instead of sleeping, I have developed an affection for New Zealand films. Especially the ones directed by/starring Taika Waititi. What We Do in Shadows is the very best vampire movie, and Boy relates more to my experience growing up on Molokai than any film I've seen. Go watch these things, you guys.

What We Do in Shadows

Boy

blog note: I have figured out how to re-link all the images I broke in the great Google Plus disaster of 2014, and I have been painstakingly working back through my old entries and reconnecting the pictures. So the archives aren't an obstacle course of blank image boxes anymore. Kind of. It'll take a while.


Everyone please stop

The boys were at my mom's house when news hit the internets about the Italian Dildo Disaster, wherein a shipment of rubber sex toys washed up on a beach and terrorized parents of young children. My mother read this, fell over laughing, and the kids came skidding over to see what was happening. I have already had the privilege of explaining to the kids what these things are, after they hung out with some teenagers who were pretending to be telemarketing dildo salesmen, and Leif thought this disaster was was the greatest thing that has ever happened in the arc of human history. All the marvels of human ingenuity and scientific achievement had led to this - a beach full of dicks. For the next week, he kept interjecting wiener jokes into our conversations, and he was actually managing to be funny so it was really hard to tell him to shut up about dingledongs at the dinner table. And then, a few days later, husbandface started shopping for Christmas presents online, and while perusing Japanese squishy toys he was derailed by the discovery of by-the-dozen boxes of adorable squish "ding dings". He laughed himself stupid and then bought them, so now I have to find where he hid them before he recreates the Italian beach disaster on Christmas morning.

 One more month until my painting retreat, you guys.

Wherein I know better than to make non-specific wishes.

"I'll get on a plane more!" I said. "This will be the year of travel!" I declared. Shut up, self.

And now I am going to Maui in 2 weeks.

For context, our last trip to Maui ended in the Emergency Helivac Incident.

The year before that, I dived behind a rental car to hide from my avowed archenemy at the Nahiku Marketplace.

Before that, I snuck out of town, pregnant and crying with a cat shitting itself in a cardboard box.

Also there is still a giant Brienne of Tarth out to stomp my ass.

I don't have a history of dignity and grace when it comes to Maui, I am saying. Or anywhere, really, but I splatted my face in the cow pie pretty spectacularly over there.

We are going to drive slow, mind our manners, stay on the cabin property with friends, and nobody is going to leave on a stretcher this time. It is going to be fine. Fiiiiine.



Fruit with a bite

One of our library patrons came in on Friday with a big paper bag full of dragonfruit.
"Wow!" we said. "You sure you don't you want any?"
He held up his hand, which was a bit bandaged and mangled. "Nah. I chopped off two of my fingers the last time I harvested them, and my wife hasn't stopped giving me shit for it. I don't want to see another dragonfruit, take them all."
We checked the bag for fingers. That is what happens when you try to take a dragon's fruit, I guess.

So while it's the weekend in New Zealand and I had some free time, I brought home a couple dragonfruits and made one of them sit for a portrait.

6x6, oil on gessobord

Rising to my level of incompetency

I am putting this thing in the basement and giving it a rest before I ruin it.

This week:

* P. is out of the hospital! Which is kind of amazing, considering he had surgery only last week. And evidently nobody remembered to tell the guy who ran over him that he hadn't died, and the man showed up at our big library event this Saturday to corner all the visiting senators and confess himself in the hopes of obtaining safer parking and crosswalks in the area. When I got him aside and told him the kiddo was recovering, he burst into tears. He said, "That boy is my life now, I have to put this right." Poor guy, he's been in the dark and thinking he was a murderer all these weeks.

* The new season of Outlander has been gutting. DIANA GABALDON. When I go blind working myself myopic to stuff down my feelings, I am naming my bifocals after you.

* Driving home last Friday, the light turned green at the intersection, the car ahead of me drove, and suddenly sirens started blaring. We were next to the hospital, so I craned around in my mirrors to see where the sirens were coming from, then looked back ahead just in time to slam the breaks and avoid t-boning a cop car as two of them sped through the intersection against the light. One of them slowed down in a manner that said, "I saw that, and I'll be back for you later, idiot woman," but then it zoomed on, and I hurried home to hide my car in my driveway. Staggered inside with jelly legs, decided against dinner and opted for a beer, instead. I don't really drink anymore, broadly speaking (I didn't swear it off, I just kind of.. don't), and so the pint hit me full in the head just as I received a call from New Zealand.

And I agreed to everything.

And everything is due in a month, and then Netflix people will be looking at it.

But it's going well. I really like the art that's coming out of this project, so it's too bad I can't share any of it. But if the show gets picked up by Netflix, I will crow like a big fat-headed crowing thing, I promise. 

* Treated myself to a Pandora upgrade, and now instead of listening to music I can just endlessly skip skip skip skip skip. And I paid for it with my thumb, from a magic piece of glass, because we are in the strangest timeline.

Progress and past lives

(update on the car accident kiddo: he's out of ICU! PHEW. Long road to recovery, but he's on his way.)

This weekend the kids slept over with grandma, and I painted, painted, painted. Two layers away from being done with the fabric, and then I can work on the background.

Two afternoons of progress

And then out of the blue, my inbox dinged and I had a message from one of my best college friends, the marine who rented a room from my aunt for a few years. We used to ride his motorcycle down to Kailua to drink mocha milkshakes at the hippie coffee shop with his military biker buddies. Once, while collapsing on the comfy old coffee shop couch, I noticed a couple of girls staring and whispering from across the room. They turned out to be the recent-ex-girlfriends of my high school boyfriend, who evidently shared pictures of me because I was the infamous bitch who trampled his heart. It was the most fortuitous moment of my teenage life that I happened to be wearing a cool leather jacket and surrounded by marines when they spotted me, the Harlot of Legend.

As the friend and I chatted and caught up on 15 years of bad decision-making and marriage, I took down the old box of photos from college - not the nice album, or the love box, but the careless pile of blurry classmates and summer breaks and family gatherings. It was studded with landmines: laughing lifeguards; Mike at his most tanned and golden-curled; me at my saddest and fattest. Rough stuff, young adulthood. 

me at 18, in Sarasota, Florida, before most of that

I pulled out the photos of the marines, carefully tucked the happy lifeguard pictures to the front of the pile, and then thumbed to the very end.

From the late-college-era I found a homemade envelope containing a card I never sent. Look at this thing. It is a marvel of youthful angst.

so rusty and artistic

mood lighting over a table that we should be sitting at SOB

Oh, self.
Mail the card, lose the weight, and go be a painter. 

The good thing about knowing what you should have done is that it makes it easier to decide what you will do from here out. I think this is just called a mid-life crisis, but it is a traditional and time-honored way to get this shit done. Go to the places! Learn the skill! Send the email! Take your ibuprofen and do the goddamned push-ups!

I would put "learn to ride the motorcycle" on that list, but I have crashed enough bicycles to know with absolute certainty that I would pitch myself over the handlebars almost immediately.

But I'll paint until my arms fall off, and try to get on a plane more often.

 let's mark the Era of Good Decisions with a selfie in the toilet, that is fine

What's on the wish-fulfillment to-do list, folks?

The "brr" months are here again

8 more paychecks to Christmas, everyone.

Productivity:

- Have still been working on character design with the film company, which is in New Zealand and comes with bonus "what if I picked up and ran away to New Zealand?" daydreams. There are lots of sheep down there. And penguins. I wonder if they have those miniature milk cows. I bet they do, they have a hobbit village. And Jemaine Clement. Yes, this is a thing I would do if they asked me to.

 - When not doing that, I have been working on a painting that I really like. Zenny looked at my thumbnail sketches and decided it needed flowers, so we bought a fake bouquet and some floral tape to make a crown. The crown turned out ENORMOUS, but we rolled with it anyway. It turned out to be a good thing, we agreed.

reenactment 

3 sittings of progress

-  I knitted some fingerless mitts for my trip in November. I asked the man to take a picture and make me look cute, so he moved my hand so it covered my face. And that is why I'm not taking him to New Zealand to live with sheep.

Portlander mitts

- I finished the travel sweater, but the ribbing on the arms look like the flexible ducts on a homemade robot costume.

Who wore it better?

It's fine, I start turning blue and chattering when the temperature drops below 60 degrees, so I'll be too grateful for the warmth to care if my arms look like they're injected into the sleeves like raw sausage.

- No weekend update on the car accident, but no bad texts from my co-workers, either. No news is good news in this situation - he just needs to sleep and heal.

- Labor Day BBQ today, with kebabs and shrimp! Happy end-of-summer, you guys.

a very bad thing

This is not my trauma, I feel strange talking about it, but it happened right in front of us, so here it is. I might pare this down later, but dumping it out is helpful.

- - -

Yesterday, after school, the library was busy with families and children when a little girl came running in, panicked and screaming, "Someone was just hit by a car! A kid! A kid was run over right outside! It went right over him!" My co-worker ran outside, I ran for the phone. People froze, parents with young children picked them up and stayed inside, afraid of what they'd see in the road. I fumbled the buttons, and it was nightmarishly slow to get the phone to work, but it must have only been a few seconds. While talking to the dispatcher, one of the kids yelled, "It was P.*!" Our student worker was standing beside me, sorting books, looking confused. "P. who?" Her 9 year-old brother's name is P., but it was too terrible to connect. I told her to run. She dropped the books and ran.

P. was lying in the road, conscious and making noise, with bloody scrapes all down his arms and legs. The woman who had witnessed the accident had her hand on his arm and was talking on the phone with the police. I looked at his eyes, because head injury is the only thing I know really well. He had that wild, unfocused look of someone only seeing pain, and my memory held him up against my daughter with her pupils blown, blue and rigid and not breathing. He didn't seem to have a life-threatening head injury, at least. His hands were on his stomach, his lips were losing color. His sister was bent over him, murmuring in his ear and shaking.

"The tire went over his middle," the woman who had witnessed the accident said.
"Is the driver still here?"
"I'm here," said the beardy old man standing behind us. He used his shirt to wipe his face, he was crying, too. He had been backing up his vehicle after eating Thai food at the food truck across the street, and didn't see the small boy walk out from between parked cars.

An off-duty paramedic dropped in beside us and took charge. She checked his eyes and hips and stomach while the sirens approached. As the EMTs descended on him, we moved back, called their parents, rounded up the other siblings out of the crowd of crying kids and told them what was happening. The parents arrived just as our student worker was ready to climb into the ambulance, and their mother was able to go with him, instead. One of the siblings was still missing. I spotted the tween near the convenience store as it started to rain, and ran to get her. She took a look at the ambulances, the police cars, her family car, the librarian running toward her in the rain, and she threw her soda down and ran with me. As the ambulance pulled away, their dad was too upset to think or speak or drive. He used to be a police officer, but your own kid is something different. My co-worker took his keys, we piled the kids into the minivan and made dad sit in the back seat, and she drove them to the hospital.

P. is still alive, but he has internal bleeding. He's going in for surgery. We are all really shaken and worried. And, frustratingly, I'm doing paperwork because the news reported that it happened at the library, but it technically did not, and the higher-ups need an account of exactly where the accident took place. The road and parking lot belong to the shopping center, the driver was a food stand customer and not a library patron, and we rendered aid because it was a horrific accident and we know all the kids. My co-worker took vacation leave to assist the family. We didn't poke him or move him or otherwise aggravate his injuries. It's just a terrible, terrible thing.

Teach your kids to be vigilant in parking lots and hold them tight tonight, you guys. I'll post updates and a fundraiser page as they're available.

*Name changed for privacy

back to life as usual

Yeah, I ruined the bigger painting. Glazing over grisaille is not for me. I'm painting more vegetables as consolation.

My month of solo-adulting has come to an end, and I hadn't realized how deeply I had relaxed until my insides started nailing up siding and installing storm windows like they were prepping a cabin for the long winter. I don't know how to go on living in tight insulation now that I've had the windows open. Travel and art books and hippie skirts, I guess.

Also WORK. I've been contracting with a film company to do some character design, so that's pretty great.

And then the police officer who comes by the library for coffee & bathroom breaks asked me to make a logo for his knife-making business, and he paid me in ice cream. "You're making something cool, so I got you something cool." This works for me.

This logo is very subtle and artisanal and does not at all say "I am going to stab you"

Putting my shoulder to the windows until I can reach a crow bar.

Little figure studies

My month as solo adult is coming to a close. I'm cramming all the painting time I can into the nights my mother takes the kids for sleepovers. It's been really great being the designated parent during the school week and spending long rainy summer nights alone in the painting studio on weekends. Except for having to do the dishes. I hate you, dishes.

I've been putting off glazing the self portrait I'm working on, so I took a break and practiced mixing skin tones. I think I'm about ready to ruin the big painting now.

She's holding a knitting needle here, not stabbing herself with a pencil.

3x3, oil on canvas (one of those ridiculous little ones they sell at Walmart for a dollar)

5x7, oil on canvas board

5x7, oil on canvas board

Avocado

I have been mangling my attempts at portraiture, so I painted another piece of produce to reassure myself that I don't totally suck at this thing.

I call this one, "a millennial's mortgage payment". 

So that went well, and then Adam Rex told me I did a nice job, so I'm just going to put "produce portraiture" on my official CV now, because that is maybe the best thing that has happened ever and I think I have maybe peaked as an artist.

I'm going to try to crack this human-face-portraiture thing, though. I have decided to work through the academic techniques and figure out which one works best for me, so I've started a grisaille. This is where you paint the thing monochromatically and then glaze in the color after it has dried, and I am DEEPLY mistrustful of this process. Work through the ugly stage. The whole thing has been the ugly stage so far. Learning is the worst. Also it is a picture of myself, so I might be having a subject matter problem. I've got my Mondays back, though, so I have time to fix it - or stomp on it and throw it into the gulch.

Questions du jour with the human possum

Yesterday

Least favorite reference question: "What kind of fluid is this on the keyboard? It looks like drool."

It was not drool.

Also yesterday

"Where are the nearest fallout shelters? We are visiting from California, and I work with the DOD, so I know where to go over there, but we have a baby so we want to stay safe."

"Weeeeell, we don't actually have any fallout shelters. But don't worry, you'd only have 8-12 minutes lead time, so there wouldn't be time to get to a shelter anyway!"

I did not tell him about the cast iron tub in my garage, because it's already going to be a tight fit under there with all the kids and cats and chickens.

We aren't actually very worried about North Korea over here in Hawaii, but you know what I do not like? Department of Defense employees asking where the fallout shelters are. You should know, dude. Or you should make sure we get some. Yes, you, random contractor who is probably in charge of ordering toilets or something. Take some initiative.


Some time later

The homeless guy who sharpens knives on a whetstone across the street from the library came to visit, bearing gifts. He had a shirt on this time, because he and I have already had a stand-off re: his carpet of curly body hair and the library clothing policy*.

"Here's some beef jerky, I made two kinds. It's awesome. If anything were going to make me rich, it would be this stuff, it's so good. I don't know why I'm not rich yet."

"How do you make it?"

"In my car."

We laid the baggies out in the staff room and stared at them.

hobo jerky

also pictured: the jar of homemade hot sauce someone else gave us

We had a brief discussion about the serial killer who served his victims as roadside bbq, decided that this was far more likely to be cat meat than murdered-people meat, and then passed the bag around to smell. It smelled okay. "You try it," my co-workers said. And so I did. Because of course I did. I will eat any garbage people hand me. It's part of my now-very-nearly-not-hypothetical-post-apocalyptic skill set.

I am pretty much almost sure it was actual beef. I have not died or erupted in chest hair yet. Another successful gamble by the woman who once saw a bowlful of rocks and decided to eat one to see if it was candy.

(It was.)



*library policy: body hair does not count as clothes.