I have decided I’m going to quit my job.  I have a date in mind. It’s not in the immediate future,( in case someone from work is reading this ) but within X (hi co-workers!!! ) years, I intend for people to give me money to write something other than regular expressions and I’m going to give someone else money to clean my house. Weekly. In the meantime, my work day starts at 3am all this week so I can go to geek school all next week.  yay.

xkcd makes geekery appear to be so much more glamorous than it is. seriously

Thank you.

To my grandfathers, to my Dad, to my Flynn, the incorrigible boy, the lasting man.

p.s.  thank you to my aunt for the prophetic depression glass lemonade set pictured above, given to me as a wedding present.     The glass lasted.  The marriage did not, and I’m not saying it was because he was the FIRST NON-VETERAN man in my life but.. yah know..

A few days ago, I posted a video.  Since I never watch videos in blogs, I’m going to assume you didn’t either*. It’s a commencement address that author Neil Gaiman delivered to a group of art school graduates.

In part, he tells these people,

“ A life in the arts is like putting messages in bottles on a desert island and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you. appreciation, recognition, money. love.  And you have to accept that you may have to put out hundreds of things for every bottle that winds up coming back to you.”

Point being, send out bottles: all the time, in every form say, “this is what I am, I am a bottle sender, a book writer, a music composer, a garden planter, a home maker, a capitalist pig ( hey, who are we to judge )” and the universe will see to it that you DO get a bottle in return.   This is a fact I have seen over and over in my life with a frequency that would be astounding except that I have a growing realization that this is how it works.  Of course this is how it works!

Flynn’s been writing music his entire life, solely for his own pleasure, but for the pleasure we might have together, he wanted to do something public with it and he’s asked me to help him with a project, a video.  I have to be honest, when I said yes, I thought it would sort of die on the vine like a lot of other wild fruit in our lives, but it hasn’t.    Two days ago, after miles and miles and hours and hours of location scouting, I thought how wonderful it would be to have someone do this for us, because we do both have day jobs and sort of like hanging around the house drinking wine, none of which is compatible with miles and miles or  hours and hours of much else.

Yesterday, we dashed into LA,  up to the top of a parking garage in an attempt to get some sweeping views of downtown.  We were only moderately successful on that front, but while we’re there,  a genuine, honest to goodness, Cal.i.for.ni.a location scout walked over to us where we’d set up our little cameras to introduced himself.   I know he hoped we were people who could give him work, but I told him,

“We were talking about you yesterday, but you’re too early.  Do you have a card?”

He was a little taken aback ( completely poleaxed ) by my directness, and probably a lot disappointed. I’m sure he thought we were important film makers, because, you know, I LOOK JUST LIKE SOFIA COPPALA! ( I do.  Seriously.  I have brown hair.  Seriously.  And breasts.), but he gave me his card anyway.   One bottle sent, one bottle returned.

If you ever need a location scout in the Los Angeles area, give this guy a call.  Tell him the crazy woman on the roof of the parking garage at the corner of 7th and Grand sent you.

Alasdair Boyd's charming British name comes with an equally charming accent and 14 years of location scouting in Southern California.

*if your heart’s dream is to make art, whether it’s fashion art, words in books art, art with paint, art with metal, art with paper, art with musical notes, art with moving pictures, art with still pictures,  basically, if you want to make things just because you want to make them and they please your soul, the twenty minutes it would take you to watch that video can, if you allow it, change your life and how you see your place on this ball of dirt.

1. you can do anything, but not everything. no, i didn’t make it up, but it’s a universal truth.  you fail, and you continue to move.  it won’t get any easier unless your RNA, your therapist or your tolerance for drugs and alcohol are very good,  but the places you get stuck become fodder for what you’re writing.
2. a well written paragraph becomes more important than sleep,  good sex,  any sex, social media.
3. you will help your {kids, husband, neighbors } to { love themselves, make a music video, put dinner on the table when someone is sick or dead}but not with {whine time, his ego, pretty much anything else }
4. the preparation of food will now be a burnt offering to the arts or fuel for the next twenty steps.
   1. a timer helps, but eventually you reach detente with over and or under cooked food.
   2. you take a multi vitamin because you don’t really believe vegetable juice counts as three servings of vegetables.
   3. you will learn to love megalo mart soups and frozen vegetables, and by” love”, i mean “be grateful for”.
   4. meatloaf is party food.  Eat it or bring a sandwich. ( note: I will give you good wine.  This will mitigate any disappointment your palate might experience )
   5. an orderly well decorated home….
      1. dishes can wait, unless you’re using them to figure out the next chapter
      2. you’re going to get the carpets cleaned this (next?)  week so why vacuum
      3. dust is another place to take notes.
      4. socks, newspapers, junk mail, the paper towels the dog shredded are all now called “life confetti”
      5. tripods, notebooks, musical instruments, more notebooks, excess pvc, washers, nuts, screws and plastic wrapping from said washers and screws used to make a camera stabilizer is decorating.
5. There’s more, but it will have to wait.  My toast is burning.

Ghiradelli Chocolate Chip pancakes from Burnt Toast Restaurant in Elgin, IL. I've never eaten them, and I've never been to the Burnt Toast restaurant or Eglin, IL, but I've been to Elgin, TX and I've eaten burnt toast. In my world, that's honest blogging.

anything, at all, ever, watch this.

Discuss.

Flynn and I may live and love in California, but we’re still from the Capital S-outh, which means, we eat meatloaf,  beans, cornbread and greens with our Bordeaux, though if it makes you feel any better,  call it gâteau de viande, legumes, and polenta bread. I can’t help you with the greens translation, though if you’re turning your nose up at them just because they don’t have an accent , I have no respect for your palette.  At all.

Either way you spell it, it describes the color of the sky today, but the very second it’s five o’clock, I’m going to go to Fashion Island for tea and madeleines anyway.  I want to try out the new camera toy Flynn bought for me.   I’ve asked him to come along at the risk of impending marital doom.  You wouldn’t think such a simple thing could be so fraught with danger, but he tells me I have a lot of male energy, which is code for,

“You’re bossy.”

I tell him,

“You’re bossy”.

We’re both right.  It’s a problem, but he’s coming down with a bug so I may be winging it alone.   I’ll post the results later.

In the meantime, I hope it’s sunny and warm both inside and outside of where you are.  Here, despite the marine layer and the chill, the now is good.  There are limes and flowers.

I’d love to get my head headed in a singular direction, but it ain’t never gonna happen.   My life  doesn’t move that way. It’s all over the place.  Yes, the river moves always towards the sea, but damn if it doesn’t meander on the way and you know for a fact that there’s no military parade of water molecules in the process.  My brain is a delta and you can take that mathematically or estuarially*.

So, I’m over the fairy tale that “I’m a writer” means I sit with my personal research assistant in a perfectly decorated office with excellent light, thick walls and a locked door  until my major domo brings us a light gastro-fabulous lunch, while my housekeepers fold the clothes, polish the silver, wax the hardwood floors and make sure the floral arrangements don’t go south in their vases, you know, the ones I brought back from my research trip to Kyoto.

I have a 9-5, which is more like an “it’s not done”-”it’s done”.  I don’t have staff.  I do have dishes, dirty clothes and hardwood floors that are polished by me if and when they’re polished, which I assure you isn’t very often, and all the fabulous vases in my house were inherited and currently full of air.  It’s Southern California air if that makes it sound any better.

That’s okay. In fact, this morning, I had what Flynn calls a “stupiphany”.   None of the above makes any difference because Agatha Christie did the dishes. In fact, she said the best time to plan a book was doing that very thing.  If it’s good enough for Aggie, it’s good enough for me.

Yours truly,

p.s.  I’m writing here, people…no pictures, please.

*I take a liberal approach to the rules of spelling in general and English in particular. It’s a language that practically begs to be abused.

Flynn, the boy, cannot and will not abide being the recipient of gifts.  He is inversely a buyer of presents.  If he wasn’t so busy being my therapist, he could get the help he needs for these sorts of nonsensical personality flaws that hearken back to some deeply buried aversion to having goodies showered down upon him.  I myself, though suffering from more odd mental tics than I or you care to have related here, do not suffer from that particular aversion.   Public pools. Yes, decidedly averse.  Gifts: In no way averse.

The thing is, when I was younger, by half, I liked shiny things with carats and facets.  I still like those things, but  they were always, always more important because of what I thought other people would think about me.  Now that I’m more me than ever, my idea of swag the new light fixture Flynn put up for me.

It took him about a week of fits and starts, enough curse words to fill an evening at a Hollywood comedy club, a trip to the hardware store for him, and a drink for me, but it’s up and being all shiny with its shiny self.   That’s right.  I’ve got swag.

I may or may not have mentioned that my day job is spent being an Oracle database geek who baby sits an entire farm of linux servers.    I know.  *zzzzzzzzzz

But *zzz or not, sometimes, i wish i had a life time prescription of valium because, truly,  i constantly feel as if i never  know what i’m doing, and i’ve been not knowing for over a decade now.    i am a lesson in why you should never pursue riches for the sake of riches alone.

truth telling time:   when i was poor, and i’m talking about a poor so real that there were possums living in my house with me and i had to fish for food for my child  ( true story ), i bought a newspaper and decided i would do whatever paid the most, with the single caveat that whatever “it” was, it  had to be done within the parameters of a four year degree because, you know, i didn’t feel like i had time ( at 28 with a baby girl) to become a brain surgeon nor did I have the inclination (after single class  in finance) to understand or engage in the convoluted game of stocks, bond and pirating.  End result?  I became a computer scientist.   joy. not.

so here i sit,  on a saturday, reading white papers about data blocks, standby databases and operating system patch schedules as I drink a martini  ( thank you, perfect husband ), and hope all my toiletries fall under the 3 ounce limit inflicted upon those of us who refuse to check  bags,   because, once again,  contrary to all that is my nature  I attempt to prepare myself for dinner meetings  with men I do not know and business continuity planning meetings scheduled for weekdays with accountants who count beans and think it’s a brilliant idea to pull the plug on a computer system in much the same way that a city boy might want to put milk back in a cow  when all i really want to do is….

well, drink a martini

nevermind.  my life is good.

p.s.  my husbands advice “Wear those shoes, your pearls  and Aunt Bee‘s personality.  They won’t know what to do with you. They never do.”

I love that boy.