almost a year since I graduated, and here's what i've got

being an adult is about keeping an open mind to the opportunities you get. never settle, but always be willing to take something you think is ordinary at the beginning—chances are, it'll turn into something magical.

to be honest, i never really thought about taking a job at a crafting publisher. i wanted to work on kids' books or Literary Fiction (yeah, i know, i sound like a tool, but i'm gonna be honest here). but i enjoyed working in publishing so much after my internship that i decided to apply to all presses around. i even begrudgingly applied to some on the east coast, despite having NO desire to move there (i hate bipolar weather, but mostly just the heat, and am not a huge fan of everything being flat)(also, NY publishing is totally overrated. west coast is where it's at).

ANYWAY, i was offered a job where i currently work and i took it. don't get me wrong, the entire time i was applying and interviewing and interviewing again i was totally excited. but still, it was more for the publishing prospect than the content of the books i'd be publishing.

it wasn't like i hated fiber arts or anything, but after potentially permanently disabling a sewing machine in my formative years, i wasn't exactly what you'd call a sewist (NOT sewer, thank you very much).

i'm still not, really, but my new job has opened my eyes to SO MUCH of a world i never really knew. i may have thought it was cool to DIY clothing and tried to make a skirt (unsuccessfully) once. i may have dabbled in hand stitching pillows and stuffed toys and weird scrappy things.

now, though, i can say i've made 3 quilt blocks. i've learned the ins and outs of how-to language. i've used a sewing machine that cost several thousand dollars (and it shows—oh my goodness it's a pleasant experience!). i've cashed in some street cred with my company name and gotten a discount at a craft store. i've assisted at a dog photo shoot where the dog was outfitted with several DIY projects from our books. i might be a hand model. my bedroom was almost used in a photo shoot for a book about sexy quilts (not actual name—don't want to accidentally disclose anything sensitive on the world wide web!).

and i've worked on some really, really interesting books—from my baby-clothes-and-toys books to my quilts inspired by art movements to the topographical quilts displaying maps (and using memory to recount maps). there are civil war quilts that tell histories, gallery quilts made by anonymous pioneers, architectural quilts that represent the homes of the U.S.

what's more, my job has made me remember one of my favorite essays ever, written by alice walker. i read this essay and loved it and wrote about it (like in three papers for one class, it was kind of embarrassing) back before i knew much about quilts or had worked with them (obviously, because that was in college).

i went back and re-read it and here's a fantastic excerpt that just makes me say YES

But when, you will ask, did [overworked Black mothers] have time to know or care about feeding the creative spirit?

The answer is so simple that many of us have spent years discovering it. We have constantly looked high, when we should have looked high-and-low. 

For example: in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., there hangs a quilt unlike any other in the world. In fanciful, inspired, and yet simple and identifiable figures, it portrays the story of the Crucifixion. It is considered rare, beyond price. Though it follows no known pattern of quiltmaking, and though it is made of bits and pieces of worthless rags, it is obviously the work of a person of powerful imagination and deep spiritual feeling. Below this quilt I saw a note that says it was made by "an anonymous Black woman in Alabama, a hundred years ago." 

If we could locate this "anonymous" Black woman, she would turn out to be one of our grandmothers - an artist who left her mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only medium her position in society allowed her to use.

BAM.

yeah. take that, Literary Fiction.

i still love you, but it's hard for black words on a white page to compete with beautifully-designed art books. it's hard for the pretentious educated white male tradition of Literature to compete with the improvised tradition of those who couldn't read or write, didn't have the time for art-for-art's-sake—so they made beautiful, functional, creative, scrappy quilts out of what they had. it's a kind of subversion, a trick, a way of getting around cultural norms and socioeconomic barriers.

and i love it.

you do what you can with what you have. if you were born into a tradition of education and privilege, you have the luxury of creating in any way you want. if you weren't, then you have to be even more creative.

More Entries About Copenhagen Needed?

Okay, well, here's a poem I wrote about Copenhagen for my advanced poetry workshop back in forever ago. It's a sonnet! It is also formatted differently.

And I made it blue because I had to print out like 20 copies and my black ink was dead.

But someone said it gave it a cold feeling and affected the reading, so. HERE YOU GO. blue&classy.

lyset i København

No northern lights dance across the ether,

just days that burn from ten o'clock till three;

night cop car light shows paint my walls like fever

in this city where only cold is free.

Around the streets there is a murky blue

reflecting off the harbor's painted row

of wooden Lego structures, every hue,

that even in the winter seem to glow.

But on the coldest days the windows throw

the golden mead of Odin's warmest hall

from Islands Brygge to Bispebjerg S-tog;

from Satan street art to the mermaid small.

In fact, I missed the winter's cheerful numb

when summertime was plagued with midnight sun.

New Year's

TIME FOR MY ANNUAL NEW YEAR'S POST!

No, not really. I have been seeing Facebook post upon post of "Wow, 2013 is almost here. In 2012 I grew as a Person. I will never be the same. There were so many challenges but also so many fun times. Can't wait to see what 2013 has to offer!!"

Facebook friends sure do have hidden depths.

That made me think I should be writing about the upcoming year, but the whole New Year's thing is a litttttlllllleee dumb considering any day of the year is a New Year's Day. Like August 13, 2012? August 13, 2012 is totally New Year's Day if you started counting August 13, 2011. Wooo. Throw a party.

There are so many different New Year's celebrations in different cultures and frankly the December-January jump (I prefer the late March one. Springtime should totally be the beginning of the year for obvious reasons and Symbolism. Also, my birthday is then) is just an example of glorified colonialism.

But I'm really not one to talk, as I happen to be spending New Year's at a country club.

lol.

If it's true that the way you spend your New Year's is indicative of the year to follow, I'm going to spend 2013 hanging out with friends at a golf course and enjoying an elite lifestyle, complete with truffle oil pizza.

Maybe that means I'll finally get a job? (I mean, not really finally, since my internships haven't ended yet, but it feels like forever that I have been mooching off my family. It has essentially been forever to me; it's what I've been doing my entire life. Except for a couple hundred bucks I've made from odd jobs. Like, really odd.)

Yes, that is my New Year's resolution.

Get a job.

CONTRIBUTE TO SOCIETY, DAMN YOU.

Book Review: Naked by David Sedaris

As if David Sedaris needs any more praise by an unknown blogger, right?

WRONG.

Naked is the second book I've read by Mr. Sedaris and I loved it. The first one, Me Talk Pretty One Day, was also amazing.

Here's the thing about me. I don't laugh by myself. It's quite rare. I only laugh at funny things when other people are around because I have the Need to Share Laughter to show them I'm not a robot or something? I actually have no idea, but whatever. It doesn't happen.

Well, okay, it does. But only VERY VERY rarely. I still think things are funny, I just don't physically laugh unless something really catches me off guard or is just hilarious in general.

David Sedaris makes me laugh.

Actually, David Sedaris makes me do that laugh where you're alone but in a public place and something is just so funny that you're kind of laughing into your hand and disturbing the peace and whatnot. Similar to when you get a ridiculous text message from one of your friends. It happens. But when you get a text from a friend, it's almost like you're NOT alone because it's like a conversation from afar. Reading a book is different. Completely.

So anyway, I laugh. And laugh. And it's really embarrassing. But still I keep reading. And laughing.

That is my review of David Sedaris.

Facebook drama

is literally the stupidest thing ever. The whole defriending blocking "waa i don't like you" thing.

In other news, I am making baby dark chocolate cupcakes with panuche frosting tonight! For actual friends, not just Facebook Friends (part of that new vernacular due to technology: calling someone your "Facebook Friend" means they're on the lowest existing rung of acquaintance. Like the kind of person you'd see in a store and avoid).

Is blogging about internet passive aggressiveness any less passive aggressive than the original propagators of internet passive aggressiveness?

GHSF #1

I am friends with a self-promoting DJ on Facebook and he invites me to events all the time. You'd think this would come in handy but for some reason they are always at high school dances or at sports bars in Pleasanton.

I think I'd rather go to the high school dances.

Book review: The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker

My mom had a Barnes and Noble coupon that was going to expire the next day, so she went to buy stuff for us before we went on our annual family vacation. She saw this book in a magazine and got it for me. It was pretty hyped-up, and the blurb was mainly about how it was Walker's first novel and she'd received a $2 million advance and already sold the movie rights, etc.

The cover is awesome and I like it a lot.

The book was an interesting read, to say the least. The book was definitely literary fiction, which is not always a good thing in my opinion. Sometimes literary fiction tends to take itself too seriously. And it usually has a superiority complex when it comes to commercial fiction. That being said, obviously a well-written book is a great thing to see. But I have to wonder: when a work of literary fiction does so well commercially, what really separates it from commercial fiction?

Whatever. Anyway.

SPOILER ALERT!! (Note: spoilery things will be ALMOST INVISIBLE as per my amazing HTML skills.)(Drag your mouse over them to read them if you want.)

The book is told from middle-schooler Julia's point of view. Julia is a rich suburban girl from rich suburban San Diego County (seriously though, there's ONE character with a single mom. It's the same ONE character who lives in, gasp, an apartment. Also the mom is super young. And suffers from bad parent syndrome. And her daughter is obviously a bad seed--drinking and fraternizing a bit too closely with the boys. This was one of the things that irked me right off the bat. A little too perfectly stereotypical. Maybe that was the point, but it didn't exactly endear me to the book). One day, Julia wakes up to hear on TV that the world has begun to slow. Literally. They begin to gain minutes with each passing day--by about the middle of the novel, each daytime period is 24 hours and each night is 24 hours. And it just keeps getting worse. This affects lots of things, of course. Gravity, for one. Birds begin falling from the sky and dying. Humans get sick, too. And then comes the radiation.

Sounds pretty interesting, right?

But... after reading the book, I had the sense that nothing much really happened. Which is ridiculous, right? I mean, essentially the world ended (oh, that's the ending--Julia is in her twenties now and nobody has any hope left; days are 60 hours and nights are 60 hours or some insanely large number). That kind of chaos is pretty big. But somehow it didn't seem big. Julia was more concerned with trying to keep her friends, getting the attention of the boy she liked and figuring out what was going on with her parents. Maybe that makes the book more realistic. But the dreamlike way it was written--the unconcerned voice of Julia, whose world is literally ending--the news-like reporting of each new development and effect of the slowing--made it seem, well, anticlimactic.

I am so typically a product of American films. I need that kind of story structure. It's lame, I know. But I want a book to make me feel (lol). Yes, there was a climax, but it was anticlimactic.

I think that if the book hadn't been so hyped up, I would have liked it better. And, to be honest, I did like it a lot. I read it very quickly and kept doing the whole "oh, the chapter's over? Well... I guess one more won't hurt" thing. But I wonder if this was me just waiting for something to happen. Something BIG. I imagine if the world really slowed, governments would try to do something. Something stupid and irrational, but something that humans do when they are scared and have enough power. Like coming up with some scientific gadget that would turn the earth at a normal rate. Magneticism, anyone? Messing with the gravitational pull? Creating a GIANT FREAKING ARM from the North Pole to the South to spin like a globe?!? Okay, so probably none of these would work (you tell me!)(don't try it or really bad things happen. Read the book for more deets). But at least there would be a Massive Attempt to Fix Things. Instead, everyone just tries to adjust--to the point that they are literally afraid of the sun and can only go out at night. To the point that the world is overrun by annoying bugs, all the birds are gone and kids are dying too.

To go back to my previous point (privileged suburban kids being privileged and suburban), there was hardly any focus on the rest of the world. Two, maybe three times, Julia said something like "things were much better off here than they were in poor countries." I wanted to know more! Famines and droughts were hinted at. Obviously Julia is a middle school student and god knows when I was in middle school I didn't know what was going on in the rest of the world (minus Iraq because we'd just declared war and it was in the news a lot). Still, I wanted more perspective. If the most impoverished character in the book is someone who lives in an apartment in freaking Escondido, CA (or wherever), I'm just not as inclined to feel sorry for these people. Yes, their world might be ending, yes, they are going nuts, but what about people who can't escape radiation death ray (i.e. the sun) or stock up on packaged and canned foods?

THAT WOULD BE MORE INTERESTING, I TELL YOU.

Because it's not like the rich San Diego Countyites suffered more from the slowing. That would also have been more interesting! To me. They suffered much less. Like, come on. Throw the developing world a bone once in awhile! Screw the privileged elite for once. It's fiction. We know it's not really going to happen. It's okay to do impossible things in books. Fun, even!

Sigh. And that is the end of my rant. I don't know why or when it turned into such a rant. I really did like the book. But I have been trained by Academia to be more critical of things than not. Because if everything in a book is really really really good, what point is there in talking about it?

I want to end on a good note, so I will talk about something that I thought was really well-done in the book. And that is the time debates. See, the world is slowing down. Days are 40 hours long or whatever. Each day, a couple minutes are added. What do you do? Keep up with the sun/obey your circadian rhythms? Or stay on a 24 hour clock schedule? It stands to reason that our society could not function without a strict time-keeping system. The last time we did that, trains ran into each other and all kinds of bad things. That's why we changed it. Anyway, the vast majority of people in the novel decided to be on "clock-time." How else could governments, schools, businesses really run? Those who chose to stay on "real-time" woke with the sun and slept at night. These guys were mostly hippies. Wanting natural stuff and everything. They created colonies out in the desert, such as Circadia (LOL). But being on real-time turned out to be nearly impossible after awhile. I mean, sixty hour days? You can't sleep 30 hours and stay awake for 30 hours. Maybe it's possible, but that's not any more natural than being on clock-time. The fact that society was so far divided was very interesting as well. People lost friends and family over this issue. The community turned on those who chose real-time. They were run out of town. People who found out that their loved ones had chosen real-time FREAKED OUT. Anyway, this whole time dichotomy and its driving force throughout the book was one of the things that made it seem very real.

Overall, I truly did enjoy the book. And I am hungry. This is abrupt. I apologize. Hej hej!