•might as well•

The phrase "might as well be" is on the block.  What a funny group of words.  To mean nearly.  Not, but almost.  I peer closer.  I prod with my knife's tip.  This might as well be champagne.  There might as well be stars encircling my head.  She might as well be a ghost.  I'm not in an eviscerating mood, but if I do a small dice, I get "might" and "as well."  A further mincing makes ownership-- "my" from "might."  I like to take things for my own.  The size of the cut does matter; tone changes taste.  Well.  Let's pair these words, then, with a thick slice of choice.  Flip!  Sizzle, sizzle.  What might as well be, now, is.  This, first day of 2012, is perfect.  

(Tahoe National Forest, December 30.  Might as well have been January.)

•teeny tiny art•

The one that got away. "Mustard Sally" didn't make it to the teeny-tiny-art exchange on Sunday, on account of some frothy growing glue that got out of hand. But it's nice to have her here, at home. (Note to self: don't test a new glue on an otherwise done project.)

Back in the summer, my friend Julie hatched a plan to get all of her friends to make more art. Inspired by Art-o-Mat, she decided to host a "tiny art" exchange in November, amid cocktails and appetizers and friendship. The art would be palm-ishly sized, and everyone would get to ooh, aah, and bring home treasure at the end of the night. Well, that night was Sunday the 6th. And oh, was there treasure! Gobs upon cookie-swap-gobs of it. Beautiful stuff, all. Fortunately, I only needed to pull one all-nighter to get my tiny pieces ready for the final reveal, because.... everyone in my family, as it turns out, is completely absorbed by art! Penn spent the weekend writing and drawing and stapling and taping, Troy made origami caterpillars out of old maps, and I pasted and cut and pasted and cut. It's not exactly news. We've arted in our house before. Supplies live on the windowsill. Houses and carports and Boba Fetts and snowmen are drawn and finessed and decorated and recreated on a daily basis. But this weekend was different. We couldn't stop making art.

It was fabulous.

It might just be the new house order.

The icing on the teeny, tiny cake: my brother Art was among the participants. Undaunted by the country between us, he sent his box of teeny-tinies in the mail. And I sent his swapped collection back to New York yesterday. Very much looking forward to Skype-ing when he opens it! We would have Skyped on Sunday, but oh, the wicked EST to PST time change. It works much better in the reverse.

More art that came out of the teeny-tiny-splosion:


Penn named this "air heart." It makes a little puff on your cheek, if you squeeze the poof.


An homage to... well, I suppose it doesn't even matter.

Now, for the clean up. I'm not daunted by the task, but I don't exactly want to put the supplies away... xox

•pretty much everything•

Perfect. (Comma, the need to be.) Is it learned? On the way home from Berkeley, we started talking about how hard it is to work against the crushing need to be perfect. Here at Half Assed Mama, we've been struggling with that for most of our adult lives. It's a good fight. Perfection is alluring... and also a complete and utter illusion. (Read: waste of time.) For me, at least, one way out from under the spell is to fully embrace the opposite. Dot com.

My game plan? Celebrate flaws. Half-ass it, as a rule. You would think it'd get old, but honestly-- the more I relax my standards, the more attainable "perfect" becomes. What is perfection, anyway, but a decision we make? I'm looking around at a sea of wholes. A life, with all its ridges and creases. Some friends and I have a corny way of nudging this along. "Choose life," we say, and laugh. It works. xox

Notebook

I bought a new journal yesterday. I have several notebooks sitting around, in various partially-written-in states, but sometimes, when you need to start over, to pick up a practice that's been dormant, you just need a new notebook.

I have a bit of an obsession with notebooks actually, but normally, I go for cheap ones--notebooks I'm not worried about writing in, notebooks that are large enough to really spread out in, write big (though I like the smallest ruled lines I can find), be messy, write fast. This has always been important to me, a way of getting around the need to be perfect in my journal, and I know this is a thing--I'm hardly alone in this little neurosis. So as picky as I am about the feel and weight of the book, the particular weight and silkiness and color of the paper, the narrowness of the spaces between the lines, the need for lines at all--as picky as I am about all those things, I generally manage to find notebooks that work for just a few dollars.

But yesterday, wandering randomly around Borders, I was drawn to the Moleskine notebooks. This is bizarre not only because they're super expensive compared to what I usually choose, but because I've had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction against them in the past. The damn things are all over the place--they're sort of the the "in" notebook, and frankly, I find the trend vaguely irritating. It's my curmudgeonly side, what can I say?

But there I was, picking up various Moleskine notebooks, and putting them down again, resisting the urge mightily even as I was curious about why the heavy little black book with the creamy pages was calling to me. It took me--no lie--half an hour of touching various books, and then putting them down, and then picking up the other options, and then putting those down--before I could decide.

The one I finally chose is not only more expensive than my usual choices, it's also the size I would normally consider out of the question. It's the iconic 240 page, 5-inch by 8 1/4-inch book, with a hard cover. I finally chose it for a few reasons. First--it's a notebook. Not technically a life-changing or bank-breaking decision. If I'm this drawn to it, it's probably for a reason. And second, it's ultimately a lot cheaper (though less fun) than a trip to London to visit my favorite stationery store, where my very favorite notebooks live. (Though I see now that Muji not only has stores in NYC these days, they also sell stuff online. Oh well.)

So my deal with myself is this: I'm just aiming to fill this book up. I'd like to write every day, and to fill it in a reasonable amount of time. If I scratch out four pages a day, that's two months worth of time to fill the book. I never actually *fill* my notebooks, so that'd be an accomplishment. In the process, of course, my hope is to rekindle a regular practice of keeping a journal.

And there are several things I'm noticing so far as I write in the book. First, I have to admit--this thing is a really great object. I love great objects, and I really love the idea of a journal as an object--as a handmade thing, an art project, rather than some repository for deathless prose. This book feels good, and I like the way the green ink I'm currently using sits on the page. I like the slight curl the pages develop as they're written on. I like the way the book will be fatter when I'm done with it, the way the ink will build up an almost imperceptible layer on each page, giving it depth and dimension.

And I realized, as I wrote in it this morning, that my journal writing these days is tinged with a slight air of frustration, of irritation at my inability to get the words down coherently--at the need to slow my hand down for long enough to capture a thought, when my brain is already racing down the page. My handwriting is worse than ever. And this delights me, frankly. It used to be, at some level, a kind of chore to fill the pages each day, even as I needed the journal to ground me and keep me healthy. Still, each morning, facing an empty page was vaguely intimidating.

But now I've apparently come to a point--almost 16 years into my journal keeping life--where I want to write in it. Not because I think it'll keep me sane (though it will) and I should do it, not because I have anything to say, not because I'm desperate to prove to myself that I'm a writer. But just because my hand craves the motion, because my brain has words to dump out whether they're useful or garbage, and because I like seeing the journal itself develop as an object. I no longer worry what I'll find to write about when I sit down at the page. I no longer question whether there's something to write about. There are always words, and, in my journal, the goal is simply to write them down.

And all these words here, and I think I'm still not fully explaining what I mean. It's something though, about a vital ritual action having become more pure over the years, and more automatic than ever before. About no longer needing the action to result in any payoff in order to act; about the action finally, honestly being its very own payoff. And at the same time, knowing that this new phase of action itself is very likely to open some door I can't even imagine.