Being creative daily

I moved recently to another state.  Again.  I have relocated twice in less than two years.  It's exhausting. It's draining. It's stressful.  It's turning your life and body inside out and surviving it, though you often wish you hadn't.  

Now I'm in my beautiful new home.  It's the nicest house I've ever lived in.  I live in a great town.  I'm near a great city.  So why am I so unmotivated?  If I could hazard a guess it's because I spent weeks shutting my life off to pretend I didn't even live in my own home so it could be shown and sold.  Then I spent more weeks wrapping my belongings and stuffing them into boxes and bags and trucks. 

All of that was vomited up into this new location.  Piles of life were just sitting in each room waiting for me to find their place again.  But like actual piles of vomit, seeing everything around me in cardboard cairns encouraged me to continuously hit snooze on my routine's alarm clock.

As a person whose work is based in creativity, and with an already natural state of procrastination, this relocating malarkey didn't help a bit.  I needed a jolt.  Maybe even an actual can of Jolt had that soda not been discontinued.  

So I gave myself a task.  Daily creativity.  I would make one new thing each work day and put it out there into the world.  Sure, sometimes making that one thing prevented me from doing other, perhaps more important things like showering and brushing my teeth.  But it got my mind clean. Making something new was like taking those cans of air that clean your keyboard, and getting it into the little folds and pockets of my brain. 

Side note, if that were an actual procedure I think I'd have it done. I'm sure I have all sorts of nasty crust and dust caught up in the corners of my brain.  Gross.

Has this daily creativity helped me?  Yes.  For one thing I get to the end of the day knowing I unleashed an idea, and isn't that why I do this dumb job to begin with?  Because I was so tired of "the man" squashing all my ideas with his stupid, stanky boot?  

Also, the pressure is off.  If I do something new each day there is no demand for a masterpiece.  That perhaps sounds like a cop out. What I mean is that if you save up all your time for this one chance at art, you want it be, you know, really good.  But things you do everyday don't have that requirement.  

You don't demand that when you brush your teeth each day it be the bestest, deepest, whitest clean they've ever had. What if you only brushed your teeth once each month? Wouldn't you want to make that brush a damn fricking good one? And wouldn't you also stay away from me you harlot of halitosis?

I'm not going to say that this has revolutionized my life.  I'm still tired from my move, almost six weeks in.  I still have a shit ton of stuff to unpack.  I still wake up sometimes feeling life is a jar of mustard and I just can't breathe in it.  But it has indeed cleared the decks.  And when the decks are clear, there's plenty of room for something big to land.  Or a really great dance party.

Advice for my middle schooler

My daughter started middle school today, in a new state.  Yes, during perhaps the most awkward transition of school life, elementary to middle, I ripped my daughter away from her friends and brought her somewhere entirely new.  "Guilt" would be my middle name were it not already "pinnacle of beauty and brains".  

And this new middle school is massive.  It's humongous.  If it had barbed wire around it, and you saw the kids outside from a distance, you'd have no problem believing it was a prison for midgets- so huge is its brick edifice and hordes of short humans.  It scares the shit out of me.  I can't even imagine what my little 11 year old is feeling.

This is where they imprison, I mean educate, the children.

People might say, oh kids are resilient.  She'll be fine.  Yes, she will be fine one day.  But I don't think that day was yesterday when she was thinking about how tough today was going to be.  And I don't think that day was this morning when she was at her bus stop and the other girls were all wearing dresses (yes I now live in a place where girls still wear dresses to the first day of school... wtf?).  That day may not be tomorrow when homework assignments start rolling in.  And that day may not be six months from now when some little brat makes fun of her clothes or hair or the question she asked in class... because let's be honest, kids are fuckfaces.

At the bus stop today I said, "Honey, trust me, everything's going to be okay." But I realized that was total bullshit. I honestly couldn't even keep a straight face while I said it.  After all, I didn't know if everything was going to be okay.  I haven't been to this school, don't know her teachers, and definitely don't know the evil that could be stewing in the misshapen cranium of the moron sitting next to her in home room. 

Let's face it... everything might not be okay.  My middle school years were no bowl of cherries.  They weren't bowl shaped at all.  More like a boot full of shit topped road kill.  Frankly, everything might be crappy.  Very, very crappy.  

Could it be wonderful?  Could her teacher shit rainbows and the principal be Pikachu? Sure, anything's possible.  But I couldn't promise her that.

Nope, as I stood at the bus stop watching her sweat due to nerves, the 90 degree weather and the very, very late bus, I could only promise her one thing.  

"Well, maybe it won't be okay.  But I can promise you it's eventually going to be over."

Middle school ends.  If you're lucky you live through it and are only mildly traumatized.  And then you get to high school to spend four years with the same idiots who now have mustaches.  Even the boys.

It'll all be over soon...

Crochet hook or Knitting Needle display/storage

Guess what?  Chicken butt!

But really folks, the news which you didn't guess because you were too busy yelling about fowl anatomy, is that I'm moving again.

I know, I can't fricking believe it either.

Alas, moving requires cleaning.  And the worst part is cleaning my home office.  I am so very lucky in my current home to have a fourth bedroom which I can assign full time office rights.  What's not so lucky is that it is completely cut off from the home and even has a door I can close.  That means it usually turns into a pile of yarn, mugs, lotions, potions, high pile carpet and gremlins.  

And then your house needs to be sold and people don't want to see a pile of mugs that say 'balls'.  They want to see a room which can be used for their own purposes.  Sadly funny mugs usually don't play a role in other people's lives like they do mine. 

Invariably I must turn my office into how I'd actually like it to be on a regular basis just so strangers can come and look at it... which I'd never do for myself. It's completely insane.

During this task I figured out something which probably a million people before me have already talked about. But I don't read their crappy blogs or tweets or smoke signals.  So I'm going to talk about it here and reaffirm to my own shattered psyche that I am indeed a super genius.

Have any crochet hooks which don't fit in your normal case?  Or maybe you rarely use but want on hand?  I give you... TACKY HOOKER SUPPORT, HOES!

I know what you're thinking.  Those are just crochet hooks.  On thumbtacks.  On a cork board.  

And you'd be fricking right.

Alas, it's a way to store crochet hooks. And you know, that's my whole purpose so it works.  So there.

*Note- this also works with penny whistles.  Or knitting needles.  Or probably cigars.  Maybe small dildos.

*Note again- no, that's not a prison tower spotlight shining on my wall.  It's just a shitty filter.