My friend Mary Beth tagged “lurkers” for this meme, and since I admittedly lurk on her blog quite frequently, and since I need a break from grading papers, here goes.

What were you doing five years ago?
Living in Evanston, Ill., in a cramped, rented room in a house with a nice, big front porch. Spending plenty of time drinking on said front porch. Working for a healthcare education firm and, I think, still liking it at that point. Making the kind of fun decisions that youth and general post-college restlessness allow, such as, “I should move to San Francisco.” Packing up all the possessions in my cramped, rented room and loading them into my car. Driving to San Francisco.

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order)?
• Grade student papers (check)
• Wash my car (check)
• Read stories for fiction workshop (check)
• Knit
• Work on Pete’s birthday present

What are five snacks you enjoy?
• White-cheddar cheese popcorn
• My goat cheese marinara dip (Mmmm . . . I have some in the fridge right now)
• Chips, though I try not to buy them because I’ll eat the whole bag at once
• Pizza from Naty’s in Chicago
• Cheese and crackers

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?
• Pay off student loans
• Buy a house in Chicago, or better yet, have Pete design one for us and pay someone to build it
• Make sure my friends and family had everything they needed
• Donate to the arts, especially school music and visual art programs
• Give to the English Department scholarship funds at Oregon State and Northwestern

What are five of your bad habits?
• I’m uptight
• I’m a perfectionist
• I’m a backseat driver
• I can’t have just one beer
• I’m really bad about putting my clothes away

What are five places where you have lived?
• Fort Wayne, Ind.
• Evanston, Ill.
• San Francisco, Ca.
• Chicago, Ill.
• Corvallis, Or.

What are five jobs you have had?
• Nursing assistant at my dad’s office
• Newspaper copy editor
• Magazine editorial assistant
• Senior program manager
• College English instructor

What five people do you want to tag?
I don’t really have many Internet friends, so I’ll take Mary Beth’s approach and say, hey, if you want to tag yourself, go right ahead.

I washed my car today—something I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed. Especially on warm, sunny days like this one, I love running the cool stream of hosewater over my hands and wrists, dunking a thick towel into a bucket of soapy water. It felt like good industry, cleaning that layer of dust and crusted bugs off the hood. I felt capable, in a way that driving through the car wash couldn’t have provided.

As I hand-dried the car with rags and hung them on the backyard fence to dry, I remembered doing the same thing with my dad, as a child. He would wash the family’s two cars, using special soaps and waxes and polishes whose distinctions are still a mystery to me. I, meanwhile, would imitate him by pulling my bicycle out of the garage and washing it. Copying my dad’s slow thoroughness, I would clean under the seat and between each of the tires’ spokes. I used Windex and paper towels on the brake handles and the metal wheel rims until they shone in the sunlight. My bike back in the garage, nestled between the lawnmower and a yellow wheelbarrow, I’d join my dad in drying the cars. He kept a bag of rags—mostly old T-shirts, on a pegboard in the garage, and I’d hoist that heavy bag outside. Rags in hand, we dried the cars’ shiny, slick hoods and doors until the rags sopped with water. We hung them out to dry, anyplace we could find: the branches of the pear tree that shaded our driveway, the lamp fixtures on either side of the garage door, until the rags occupied every possible drying spot. So when, today, I hung my one wet rag—or really, it was my bathroom hand towel—on the fence, my own job seemed meager compared to the work my dad and I used to do together. It’s still out there drying, in the shade because the afternoon sun hits the other side of the house, and I might just leave it out there a while, a reminder of the simple task that felt so good.

A couple of Tuesdays ago marked the last time my non-fiction was workshopped in graduate school. Of course, there are still three more weeks of class to attend, three more weeks of workshopping my cohorts’ writing, but this was the last time my own work came under the microscope. It’s saddening, that two years have passed so quickly, and that I’m about to move back to Chicago and leave behind all these magnificent people. But I’m also ready for a change; two years has been as long as it has short, especially given the location. Every day, I miss the city—for its symphonies, museums, skyline views at twilight, and darkened corner bars not filled with college students.

The past weeks have been a whirlwind. It’s been hard to balance my priorities: There’s still schoolwork at hand, and I do enjoy what I’m reading for my Travel Lit class: It’s based on Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist, a sociological look at the mass production of tourism in the modern age (whatever the modern age really is . . . Hasn’t everyone, throughout time, considered his era “modern”?). But it brings up interesting issues of space and how it becomes marked. Particularly, I enjoy MacCannell’s ideas on how spaces become landmarks—usually, it’s via a socially produced movement that elevates a space to something more than its concrete, physical presence. Here, we get into issues of semiotics, into the signifier and the signified: The place no longer represents just a place, but some emotion or ideal.

This has led me to think, in turn, about our ownership of space. Pete and I talked about this a few days ago, about how our having agency in a place—or at least, feeling as if we have agency—leads to a greater sense of ownership. In places where we feel as if our presence can disrupt the status quo, we’re more likely to feel a sense of propriety. What, really, are “our spaces”? Again, it’s a return to semiotics over the concrete, given that we never really own anything, except in our ideals.

Speaking of ideals, I’m trying to plan my near-future—namely, this means to find a job. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say that I’m really going to do it; I’m going to take the risk. I’m going to try to write for a living, whether it be free-lance or full-time. If I don’t try now, I think I’ll always have that slight sense of regret, of the “what if.” Because, after all, what if it works?

Today, I noticed that my dear college friend Ryan Scammell had posted a new radio segment (I guess I’ll call it that?). Scammell, as he’s fondly called by all who knew him at Northwestern, has always been the most adept of storytellers, whether he’s working in film or radio, whether he’s talking about his heartbreak or the time he dressed up in a banana suit. He worked for NPR for a while, and some of the films he made in college were just breathtaking—both visually and dramatically. I can’t say enough about this guy’s skills, from writing to directing, and these “audio polaroids” (his words) that he produces are just another example of how he manages to translate his easygoing demeanor into something that just sings. There is certainly an art to being a storyteller; it involves a sort of choreographed abandon, if you will. There are times that craft comes into play, when sequence matters; but there are others when a voice across the slow, blue airwaves is all we need.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this art of storytelling. It started when I began a non-fiction piece about my father’s side of the family—my grandma, my dad, and my three aunts and uncles—who sit around the dinner table on Thanksgiving or Christmas and regale everyone with silly tales of their past or present. They all have that storytelling instinct, the one I didn’t inherit. Somehow, my dad and his brothers and sister can make anything funny, even to those who weren’t there. The piece I was writing about this, appropriately enough, didn’t really work. It’s about 1000 words deep and resting on my hard drive, likely to not be resurrected.

Strangely enough, in deciding to scrap that essay, I started writing another one about Scammell, about his art, and about how we thrived off each other one summer in our early twenties. It was as if, all the way from Brooklyn, he heard my fingers on the keyboard and produced his piece, which alludes to the same time. Oh, and that music in the background, at the end? It’s Thomas Tallis, a composer I introduced him to. I’m just slightly proud—that I gave him something, that he liked it.

This afternoon, I took a break from doing the reading for my Travel Literature class to focus on sewing. I tend to move back and forth between schoolwork and craftwork, using one as a reprieve for the other. I returned to the jeans that I’d started adding a fabric hem to last week and—nor can I believe it—I finished them. Both legs are now complete. They have their imperfections, but that’s one thing I’m beginning to learn from crafting: that I have to put aside my perfectionism if I ever want to get anything done. And so, in that spirit, one project completed:

I spent the better part of Sunday in the letterpress shop, making notecards that I’ll (fingers crossed) sell at the flea market next month. I wasn’t quite sure where to start, given that I want these to be a bit personal—notecards and envelopes with initials, so that they’ll seem customized. But this is hard to do without actually knowing who will buy these, not to mention what their names will be. So I did what any strategizing, calculated person would do: I guessed. Mostly, I just picked the letters that I liked best.

Progress, so far.

So I’m hoping that Mary, Kim, and Evelyn come to the market. (If not, my friends with M, K, and E names can look forward to a present in the mail . . .) I’ll be making more of the general “hello” cards, as well, and some thank-you notes of sort. But I think this is a pretty good start.

Watching ink dry.

I love how these “K” ones came out: textured, but clear.

]]> http://onecraftywriter.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/letterpress-the-weekend-in-recap/feed/ onecraftywriter http://onecraftywriter.wordpress.com/2008/04/04/friday-afternoon-sewing-patterned-jean-cuffs/ http://onecraftywriter.wordpress.com/2008/04/04/friday-afternoon-sewing-patterned-jean-cuffs/#comments Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:11:48 +0000 onecraftywriter http://onecraftywriter.wordpress.com/?p=22

I suppose the subtitle for this post should be “or . . . what happens when you hem your jeans too short and need to fix them.” A couple of months ago, I bought a pair of Salt Works jeans at a local boutique, and though I loved the fit, they were way too long. I tried wearing them a couple of times, but even with my tallest boots on, the hems dragged on the ground and—an inevitability in the rainy Oregon winter—got soaking wet. In a hurry to wear them one day, I cut off the bottoms and thought I’d give them a quick hem. Well, turns out I was too hasty and didn’t follow my father’s old idiom: “Measure twice, cut once.”

So in an attempt to reconcile the situation, I decided to sew a new, decorative hem around the bottom. I sketched up this pattern on a piece of scrap paper:

My thesis—a collection of narrative non-fiction essays—is done. I think I’m still in disbelief, even after a few hours of battling Word to get it to number the damned pages correctly.

The thesis: Half-Life: Essays

Writing these essays has consumed so much of my time this year—since October, when I decided to switch gears and go with non-fiction instead of fiction. I’m not sure what I’ll do now. Will I remember how I used to spend quiet Corvallis evenings, pre-thesis? Will I know what to do on sunny Sundays when I don’t have to be cooped up inside? I’m sure I’ll find plenty of Sisyphean tasks to occupy me; and once again, I’ll return to my pattern of starting things and not finishing them. So I suppose this is a milestone; not just a story finished, but a whole collection. And though there’s a sense of achievement that accompanies this stack of papers, ready to be photocopied tomorrow and handed out to my defense committee, I almost wish it could stretch on a bit longer. I found myself, today, reading all 80-some pages for what felt like the millionth time, searching for stray commas and rogue apostrophes, even though I knew there couldn’t be any typos left. I think I was just trying to prolong the experience, to prolong what this thesis has provided me: the impetus to write daily.

But this also means that I’ll have room opened up for other projects, like my newfound need to sell my letterpress art at the local flea market. I did log some time making things this weekend, namely, hand-cut, -folded, and -glued envelopes made from vintage National Geographic maps. I bought these a few years ago, at a used bookstore in Chicago, for something like 10 cents each. Now seemed like a good time to make them into these envelopes:

Denmark, circa 1964

I’m not sure about pricing yet, but really, that’s negligible. There’s not much that’s more relaxing to me than a few hours spent cutting, gluing, and listening to the online archives of NPR’s This American Life. So in that regard, even if I sell nothing, I’ll be happier for having made these.

A few weeks ago, I learned from a flier in a local restaurant about the flea market that takes place at the Benton County Fairgrounds one Saturday a month. In anticipation of lots of thrifting finds, I went to the fairgrounds’ website today for a preview. While there wasn’t a list of vendors, I did find out that spots are still open to sell crafts at the May 10 market. With that, the fire was lit. What, I thought, if I could sell my letterpress art? I’ve been spending long hours in OSU’s letterpress studio lately. Although I’ve been working on printing my own wedding invitations, I’ve become quite facile with the equipment and it wouldn’t be hard to turn out some notecards and envelopes.

I love working in the shop. It’s in the basement of the Art Department building, and stacked almost floor-to-ceiling with cabinets of old type in all fonts—Garamond, Futura, Caslon, Century Schoolbook. But my favorite couple of drawers are the ones that house truly old wood type. While not all the letters of the alphabet have made it into the present, there are plenty of initials to choose from. I’m thinking simple at this point: blank notecards and envelopes with single initials printed from these wood type pieces. I made some already for my friend Sarah:

Close-up of wood block printing

Now I’m in planning mode—perhaps my favorite mode, as I’m the type of person who loves ideas in their nascent stages, the way they pervade every minute of the day. I love to-do lists and adding new things to my planner, and, in general, the taste of anticipation. Especially when it involves long hours in the letterpress room.

Driving to the grocery store today, I passed Goodwill and realized it’d been a while since I’d browsed around. I normally frequent other thrift and antiques/junk shops here in Corvallis, but the Goodwill here is one of those “mega-Goodwills” that consists of about half cast-offs and half unsold items from big retailers like Target (tags still attached). In short, there’s little vintage stuff to be had. And while I don’t deny the utility of the store for “practical” items like Tupperware, muffin tins, and garlic presses, it’s not the kind of place I’d go in anticipation of good thrifting. But today I came away with two good finds:

Green stapler. Vintage Swingline “Colt.”

Purple boots. With blue socks, yes.

So these two small things have been the highlight of my afternoon. My intention for the evening is to continue today’s purple theme and work on my knitting project, this pattern from knitty. I’m knitting it in Blue Sky Alpacas‘ sport-weight in the color eggplant. It’s my first go at knitting a lace motif, and I’ve started over twice already, once because I screwed up something I couldn’t even identify, and the second because I dropped a stitch but couldn’t figure out where.