Weekly-ish Flotsam 016

Seven great things for you, from me

1. Lookit this thing.

   

   Yes, I know. It looks like a little earthworm. It is not. It is in fact the mark of a blep. You know, that thing your dog or cat does with their tongue. This is the mark my dog leaves behind when he picks a treat up off the sidewalk. It is super cute and I think it may be ny next tattoo. Yes or no? Does it look too much like an earthworm? Maybe.

2. Recently my cousin bought me box of Tea Forté teas. These things are overpackaged. They are super pretty, though. Each tea “bag” is a plastic pyramid infuser topped with a wire thread and a pretty little adhesive leaf that is scored…just…so! so that it looks like a proper little live leaf. The paper around the infuser is gorrrgeous: four shades of yellow with an attractive font and lined in gold foil.
   It’s completely unrecyclable, so I thought I’d put it to art use, for two reasons. 1., I am falling down on my one tiny gouache painting a day; 2., I find a little constraint does my creative self a world of good.

   So I made myself a rule for December: I will make art using only the materials I can glean from this tea packaging. So far I’m pretty pleased with the results, even though I have to use needle-point tweezers and then have to sully the artwork by covering it over with tape so that the tiny little pieces don’t fall off. Here’s December so far.

   

I know, the glare is horrible. Stupid tape! Anyway, I’m having fun with these and really enjoying them. Time seems to pass so quickly when I’m doing one of these, and I always feel like I did something.

3. After reading a whole pile of new-to-me books, I’m revisiting one of my old favorites, To the Hilt, by Dick Francis. I’ve read most of his books numerous times, and there are a few heroes that I always enjoy re-reading. The star of this one is an artist named Alexander Kinloch who paints golf scenes, and who gets reluctantly dragged into the world of horse-racing. I love this particular character, and after a hard couple of months, it was great to spend time with him again.

   Each time I re-read a character I love, I get to know them a little bit more, and that feels like a deepening of the relationship, rather than a revisiting of. And, of course, each time I read, I’m a different person, so that accounts for something too.
   Nicole Maggi’s Murder in Zion features a heroine named Emmeline Helliwell whom I absolutely loved, and I can’t wait to see if she appears again in Maggi’s next National Parks novel.

4. I think of myself as pretty minimalist. This is true right down to my skincare routine; I’ve used Cetaphil moisturizing cream for years, year-round, and Cetaphil facial wash. Sunscreen throughout the day, and bang, we’re done. But perimenopause is wreaking ugly havoc and I recently shamelessly ogled my 67-year-old cousin’s luminous skin, asking her what her routine was. The next time she visited, she came with her four-step routine—cleanser, toner, serum, and moisturizer—and a set of my very own.
   My skin certainly feels plumper after ten days of her routine, and even though this routine takes me longer than my usual two minutes, I’m finding that the real value in this routine is the sentiment of actually doing something for myself.
   Some might call this a kind of meditation. I think it’s just the sentiment of carving out some time, at a time in my life where I’m not doing much for myself at all.
   This is a good thing.

5. A few weeks ago, Jim and I took my dad out to eat at a local Thai restaurant. We were pretty shocked, when we opened our car doors, to hear extremely loud baaaaaaa’ing. I went investigating, and I found a pretty pissed-off looking sheep hanging out in her crate in the back of a pickup truck.

   

   Meet Penny (short for Penelope). She is a prize-winning show sheep out of Bakersfield, California, and she had just won second place in best-in-show at Cal Poly’s Fall in the Farm event. Lookit her hair!
   Every time someone opened the restaurant door we could hear Penelope wailing. It was great. Seriously! And it was so wonderful to meet Penelope’s owners in the restaurant, too, which is how I found out we’d just met a real live farm star.

6. My friend Brent Love sends out a wonderful newsletter every once in a while, and in one of his more recent ones he gave out a lovely journal prompt: Write down ten images from the last 24 hours. I tried this the other night, and I just loved it. It was a great way to revisit the day, and I could choose to sit with the image and describe it more if I wanted to, or I could just mark it and move on. Highly recommended.

7. I’ve written recently about how I’m kind of in a dark place. I couldn’t see a world in which I ever completed another novel, even as I was putting down words. A friend told me about six weeks ago, “You’re so stressed. Even if you did manage to complete a draft, it’s not likely to be a very useful draft.” Yet another friend encouraged me to keep writing, because progress is progress. The answer is somewhere in between. I have a weekly in-person writing date with a friend, and I’ve taken advantage of another friend’s virtual writing group, and I do sometimes feel like writing on my own, so I’m at least putting down words in that sense.
   Sometimes things feel okay. Sometimes I’m just plodding forward, one word after the other.
   But yesterday, another friend said something else. He listened to me tell the whole miserable story (telling other people about your problems is so hard, as another friend said recently), and then he said, “I think, if you’re trying, then you’re not being.”

   I love this so much. I am a writer, a storyteller, a novelist. But trying can sometimes feel like it’s in the way. I’m not going to stop doing this plodding forward, but remembering that trying isn’t the same as being is really useful.

That’s it for this week. Hope all is well by you all.