Lots of Guilt

I have not been a very good "mother" this week.

Now I'm not trying to say that having two cats is like having kids. I'm not so much of a childless crone that I've lost my sense of perspective. I just mean that, like being a mother, having two cats means that little critters rely upon me for their general health and well-being. And sometimes, we are selfless. Othertimes we are selfish. But most of the time, we do what we all need to do to keep the balance in our little ecosystems.

So Fishy-bon drops dead sometime on Sunday, and then Tuesday I wake up to a text message from Andrea that reads:

"Rococo has thrown up about 8 Times this morning. you miggt want to check on her. also the litterbox is pretty full
From: Andrea
7:47am 1/29/08"

Now, this is enough to make anyone feel guilty. Let me first point out that I guarantee that I read this far more accusatorily than Andrea could ever dream of feeling. She's too kind, and I have too much of a guilt complex. Bottom line, she's genuinely concerned. And I am pond scum.

Truth be told, I haven't been around much. Work, travel, and social calendars. But I started feeling bad. I flushed Fishy-bon on Sunday night, and couldn't sleep Monday because I hadn't slept at home in days and felt worried about the cats. Then I wake up to Andrea's message. So I come home, she's puked everywhere, but seems to have coughed up the foreign object. We go to work, no problem. Then home and all evening, no problem. We go to bed and she doesn't puke again until the next morning. It's only once and she seems okay, even though she hid out all night. I go to work.

Now, I had had plans to be away again tonight, to stay at the Folks' and hang out with Dad while Mom is in DC. I have to work again at the lab tomorrow, so it would work out well. But Andrea called me at 6, as I was wrapping up my visit with Grandpa, to say Rococo was still throwing up, and that her energy and behavior indicated that my little Kitten felt worse still. Needless to say, I flew back to Providence, gathered Rococo, and continued on to the Animal Hospital in Swansea.

Bay State Animal Hospital was fantastic. They treated Coco for dehydration and gave her some meds, and a bland diet. She's hiding out in the dark downstairs, curled up in a tight little loaf the same way I found her in my bathroom today. Mojo is being vigilant, and I love her for it. As of right now, I'm planning to go to work tomorrow, but that remains to be seen.

I've been neglectful. I traveled last weekend, had guests this weekend, and just have not been around. I'm trying to nurture my human relationships, and my own needs, but I've not been here for my cats. And they are my responsibility. So if I'm not happy with Rococo's condition in the morning, I will stay home, and she and I will return to the vet.

Andrea just got home from bowling. Time to fill her in on the doctor's visit and the patient's condition. I'm going to go check on Coco too.

RIP Fishy-bon

I regret to report that Fishy-bon, the betta fish Aaron won in the raffle at the Wickenden pub last month, died this weekend. He was looking a little pale and listless on Saturday night when I cleaned his tank. We found him floating amongst the faux column "ruins" at the bottom of the fishtank on Sunday. He was flushed down the toilet with only a modicum of ceremony.

Continental Drift Creative Services

Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

This is the name of my new business. It is the business of me: writing, photography, interior design.

The interior design portion of CDCS is Crafted Spaces, my fledgling business. On the flight back from Chicago this weekend, I decided on the slogan "Custom need not be costly." The whole crux of Crafted Spaces is to help create custom home interiors that are designed specifically around the way in which the client wishes to use the space, and around how much money they wish to spend. My job is to help my clients to articulate and ultimately realize the perfect custom space, crafted around their needs and budgets. I suppose most interior designers would do this, but I also seek inspiration from my fine arts experience.

As for the parent company, Continental Drift has been my "press" name in Book Arts classes for 10 years, and it's always stuck with me. I love the concept of traveling the world, literally drifting from continent to continent. But more importantly, I love the concept in terms of plate tectonics. It's how the face of the earth is always changing, in mostly subtle ways, but sometimes violently and dramatically. It's like the subtitle of this blog, Icon: The only constant is change. It resonates perfectly with me.

So, CDCS is the umbrella for all this wonderful freelance work I'm doing. I need to continue this massive task of getting organized, and articulating my plan for CDCS is a huge part of it. More to come . . . .

River Valley Reporter: Shout Out!

Amity sent me a link today to the River Valley Reporter. Looks like someone found my blog posts about Dixfield and posted a link to them on my blog. Thanks to Kevin at RVR and to Ms Beane. Click here to see the post.

Weekend in Chicago

I'm writing this morning as a light lake-effect snow is falling outside Patsy's apartment in Old Town. I arrived on Friday afternoon and have had a wonderful time with my girlfriends: dining and drinking wine; hitting the January sales at Neiman Marcus, Banana Republic, Filene's Basement, and Anthropologie; watching football, and just catching up overall with Pats, Jennifer, and Zibby.

I also got sick, of course, a head cold primarily with a sore throat. Patsy braved the cold yesterday to get chicken soup and Nyquil, God bless her, and I slept for 12 hours last night. I'm feeling better today, but must not overdo it. I'm slated to do live chats at 9 am, and I'm not sure my voice is up for it. If I get through them I'll certainly not have a voice after 2 hours. I'm probably just going to go for it and get them done though. So what if I sound like gravelly Kathleen Turner at the end of it.

So it's good to be back here for the weekend, to dash in and out of cabs and spend money and freeze my a$$ off in single digit temperatures and -20 degree wind chills. Believe it or not :) I was sorry to see that the Packers lost last night (I fell asleep in the chair halfway through the 3rd quarter, and woke up to put myself to bed as the game went into overtime. Pats stayed up to watch it and I hear the announcer when the game was over.) Quite an upset, but it was a tough night out there. And the Giants gave New England one of their toughest runs for it during their most recent match up, so the Super Bowl should be interesting.

And tonight, I head back to RI. Aaron and I will just miss each other at O'Hare this afternoon. He'll be passing through on his way to Los Angeles for a quick round of meetings before returning on the red eye tomorrow night and arriving home on Wednesday. My flight departs a little after 7, so unless he's delayed at O'Hare I won't see him until we're both back in Providence. His mom arrives on Wednesday about an hour after he does, and I'm so looking forward to meeting her. Another reason to get better: I'd rather not be sick when I meet her for the first time.

Of course, there is the temptation to hit the Museum of Contemporary Photography, out in 10 degree weather and snow. Not a good idea. But then again, it's right here, and who knows when I'll get to come back . . . .

I am entirely too old and too white for the hold music at Delia's

I called to find out what happened to a t-shirt I ordered and never received. While on hold, I got another sign from the Universe that I am approaching 30. And clearly I'm not as funky as I used to be. *sigh*

An Attempt at an Artist's Statement

Photography is how I help myself feel "at home" in strange environments, how I engage with different cultures. It's how I communicate when I cannot speak. One need not speak the same verbal language to communicate visually. I may not be a fisherman, nor do I speak Spanish all that well, but I can participate with my camera. In fact, when I look at my favorite photographs, I hear silence, and I know that these are the strongest ones.

Expired Film

Man, do I wish I had done something with all of this film. The I-Zone has been a complete failure, but then again the film is probably 7 years old and has been saved in God-only-knows-what conditions since then. I'm not holding out much hope for the B&W Polapan either, since the expiration date on it is 01/98. I think 35mm and 120 roll film might hold up a little better --- at least I hope they do. I'm going to pitch the old Polaroid and start over. Fortunately there's not much of it.

Holga takes on Digital?

The backlash is on . . . .

Did you think your eyes were open? I'm afraid to say that until this very moment they have been closed. The unassuming Holga is here to save you from a future of digital pixels and images shared on small screens on cameras or phones. We have all become numbed with photography, there is no denying it, but a chunky camera made almost entirely of plastic has been put on this Earth to save us. It will reawaken your vision, fill you with joy, make you see beauty when you thought it had disappeared forever, and bring out sunshine on a cloudy day.


Of course, this quote is from the Lomography website, and they want you to buy a Holga, but I love the marketing angle. Reject digital! Return to your roots.

Funny, I was thinking the same thing.

However, everything I shoot is going to be scanned and processed in Photoshop anyway. There is no going back from digital, and that's alright with me.

Oscillation

To everything there is a season, and this season, I've dug out some old low-fi cameras and some now-outdated film. This morning, I'm pondering the Holga.

I first discovered the Holga in Maine, in 1999, through my fabulous teacher Leslie Bowman and the Maine Photographic Workshops. It's a plastic medium format camera, and it cost $20 when I bought it. I desperately wanted a medium format camera, and I bought an old Yashica Mat 126-G for $200 soon after. I ended up selling it four years later in Iowa City, and I got $200 for it. I really needed the money at the time, and the camera needed a serious tune-up. Still, I wish I hadn't sold it, as I'd like to be able to use it now.

Neither of these attempts at medium format were very successful, or lasted very long. I took some fun pix with the Holga (and will post some of the old early work soon), and even the Yashica had its moments. I was happiest with lush color on 35 mm slides and Polaroid Transfers though. Then on to Iowa. My first year in graduate school, in 2000, started a brief but tragic affair with 4x5, an even larger format. Some potentially gorgeous results, but entirely too cumbersome for my personality. Lovely large negatives lead to heavy cameras, leggy tripods, and massive prints. No thanks.

But I think the real problem is that I was too green to know how to use them. I feel so much more confident in digital because it's foolproof. I can see the results and keep shooting until I know I have what I want. My love for color is abiding, and the Digital Rebel and I are happy together. I must also confess that I don't know how to use half the functions on that camera, which I bought in late 2004, but I'm now familiar enough with the first half to go boldly into discovering if there's anything else I can do with it.

But I'm also drawn back to the dozen rolls of 120 film and the old Holga I found down in the basement. After starting with 35 mm black and white photography, I was so enamoured with the idea of large squares, and found medium format to be a compatible medium for my personality. I like 12 exposures on a long skinny spool of film, wrapped in paper like a little scroll, the size and shape of the perfect crispy eggroll.

So I'm going to play with the Holga. And it turns out that Mark, the photographer I work with at the Lab, has an old Hasselblad he wants to sell. He just threw out a ton of film, unfortunately, but he's going to bring the camera and all the gear into the Lab for me this week. In 1999 I wanted a Hasselblad so badly I could taste it. Neither the Yashica nor the Holga could do what I wanted to do at the time, I think. Or maybe I just didn't know what I wanted to do. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with the Holga, or the Hasselblad for that matter. But it's time for a change, again, for now.

Crime Lab

As you know, I have a part-time job as a Technical Writer and Quality Assurance Analyst at the Rhode Island State Crime Lab. I really like my job. The people are cool, the work is both fascinating and ghoulish, and I'm learning a lot. I made the mistake today, however, of perusing a book about how to investigate homicides. I would never dream of burdening anyone with some of the horrors of what I saw today in that book. But I can assure you that, being a very visual person, I can't imagine that those images are going to leave me any time soon.

But because I work with cool people, I got to talk about what I saw. This is all new for me. I like science, and was even an Environmental Studies major briefly. But even at its ickiest, biology doesn't have sex crimes.

I was a bit rattled. But because I am, at heart, a media and culture junkie, I transferred my own existential issues about violent deaths onto our culture, which finds ENTERTAINMENT in franchise shows like "Law and Order" and "CSI". We love crime and punishment. And it's kind of weird. People are often so impressed to hear I work at the Crime Lab, and I always respond "It's not sexy like CSI."

And there's that word again. Sex. Ok, so do we find it "sexy" and "entertaining" to watch these shows because we don't have real danger in our society? Yes, there are problems here, but compare the US to a country like, say, Kenya in the past couple weeks. So our biggest random threat is a pervert serial killer, not rioting after a Presidential election that was probably rigged. Not unlike what happened here in the US in 2004, I might add. But I digress.

Here's the difference though, between television's idea of cops and robbers, and what I'm starting to see. On those shows, the fingerprints are always perfect, the bullets always match the gun, and the bad guys are always caught. The truth of the matter is that they just are not. My valiant and intrepid co-workers do top-notch work, so that's not the problem. Truth is, the fingerprints are blurry if they're there at all, and there are a whole lot of guns out there that none of us know about.

But the way it's presented in our "entertainment", good always truimphs over evil. We win. And winning is sexy. So I'm starting to get it. It's the same old story, but these days we're not afraid of Germans or Communists, and it's not politically correct to be afraid of other cultures anymore anyway. So instead, we're afraid of ourselves; of the deepest, darkest, ugliest, and most twisted recesses that might just exist in all of us.

And I'm sorry to report that I'm starting to learn that we really kind of should be.

Inspi(red) in 2008

I'm home doing laundry and getting ready for the week/year today, and I washed my (red) shirt, from the Gap. I love the (red) campaign, and I bought the "inspi(red)" shirt last year. Anyway, it made me think about how I've been wanting to gather up inspiration for the work I want to do in the New Year.

So I went through some papers and some files, put things away and gathered new things near. Here's a list of subjects/projects:

*Polaroid Transfers
*Designing with Light and Paper (a course I took in grad school)
*Bugs
*Sketching. (I'm going to learn, in a sketchbook I've been carrying around since I graduated college in 1999.)
*The Business of being a Visual Artist.
*Some old Black & White Polapan film and a vintage Polaroid Land camera I bought for $1 at Goodwill in Iowa City in 2001

And I think I know what's going to come of it.

I also found the Holga and a whole bunch of B&W 120 film, and some 35mm B&W too. I might bust out the Lomo and use those two cameras for a piece.

And I want to find the Polaroid I-Zone, since there's a little bumper crop of film for it downstairs as well. That thing drains batteries, due to a loose on/off switch that is easily jostled to "on", where it tends to stay. But the I-zone takes fun tiny pix with some sometimes suprising colors and results. I regret not having bought the I-zone SCANNER that taunted me from the clearance rack at Walmart when I was in grad school and trying to be frugal. There's no real need for the scanner, except that the geek in me would find it cool to have it. I'm going to try to avoid the temptation to look for it on eBay.

So that's some of what's around today. I'm going back to Iowa more and more, integrating what I learned there and applying it to new ideas. It's coming together and I truly feel inspi(red). I have ideas, and energy, and work to do.