Bite me!

I just got fitted for a mouth guard at the dentist and the dentist let me keep the plaster cast of my teeth.  Isn't that cool and creepy at the same time?  Hopefully having a mouth guard will do something to alleviate my headaches.  I'm also trying an intensive, and expensive, regimen of chiropractic adjustments to see if this whole thing is a "structural" issue.  We'll see...

Ah, I want to leave you with some highlights from San Diego and Comic Con as well.  I'm actually working on a comic about my experience that I'll post once I've got it to where I like it.  In the meantime, enjoy some of these snapshots.

From Old Town San Diego.  Mariachis of the Dead!

A cool pottery shop where I got some cute Mexican tiles.

Little girl getting a wax hand cast made.  Like a velvet glove cast in iron...

Balboa Park!  Complete with its own soundtrack.

Ooo, an esplanade.

 Lust botanical garden jungle cage

A little biosphere in a plant.  Too cute!

Pretty leaf pattern.  It glows.

Alright already, the convention center for Comic Con.

The trolley that took us there.

The interesting characters start on the trolley too.

And continue inside...

And everyone gets into the spirit.

DC and Marvel collide!

R-2!

But not everything was a costume.

And there were some celebrity sightings to be had, like Draco.

And the still-kicking Ray Bradbury.

But mostly there were endless lines that required hours of waiting to see the big celebrities so I mostly avoided those panels.

I did enjoy seeing the profusions of toys.

I got five of these cute little suckers.  So simple.  Yet so cute.

And in our downtime, I put some makeshift action figures in some harrowing situations in my friend Angel's hair.

Words, words, words

Last night was the book release party for the Oakland Word Anthology.  I didn't anticipate the excitment and warmth I would feel holding that bound book.  Wow, I'm published.  The paper, the font, the binding, I just loved touching it.  See something I wrote in a table of contents and typeset is an experience like nothing else I've experienced in my life.  Gratitude and thanksgiving to the Oakland Word program for making this all possible!

I got to read again, my story about my parents' acupunture clinic.  I think I'm getting better each time I read it.  At least I try harder to be theatrical.  If anything, I just hope to keep writing for the joy of it.  I realized that putting too much pressure on myself for some kind of recognition or success was the biggest buzz kill to writing.  Life is stifling to me with those kinds of contraints, as is writing.  Art needs to be an element for living, not a destination, tool, or objective.

Electric sky

picnic in Benicia's city park

spreading out on the waterfront of Benicia

festive spirit

war paint

pow pow

Oh, how pretty.

I had a lovely Independence Day, not celebrating so much unfettered patriotism, but the American past time of picnicking and taking in fireworks.  Maybe another kind of patriotism?  But it was delightful to spend the afternoon with my friend and her mommy, snacking on sausages and apple sauce.  And we took in the spectacular sights of the fireworks show and reveled the magic of it.  It seems like fireworks never fail to inspire wonder and surprise in people.  They are just too dramatic and beautiful, bursting color through a black sky.  And the pop of cannons, with scary shades of weapon fire, keep you looking for what will happen.  Thank you, 4th of July.

Pablo said it better

I found this poem by Neruda that captures the idea of my poem, Secret, but in such a fuller way.  Everything to be said has been said before.  But tell me, so sweetly, again.
-------------------------------

I Like For You To Be Still 

by Pablo Neruda

I like for you to be still
It is as though you are absent
And you hear me from far away
And my voice does not touch you
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
And it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth
As all things are filled with my soul
You emerge from the things
Filled with my soul
You are like my soul
A butterfly of dream
And you are like the word: Melancholy

I like for you to be still
And you seem far away
It sounds as though you are lamenting
A butterfly cooing like a dove
And you hear me from far away
And my voice does not reach you
Let me come to be still in your silence
And let me talk to you with your silence
That is bright as a lamp
Simple, as a ring
You are like the night
With its stillness and constellations
Your silence is that of a star
As remote and candid

I like for you to be still
It is as though you are absent
Distant and full of sorrow
So you would've died
One word then, One smile is enough
And I'm happy;
Happy that it's not true

Something to make the heart sing

Lately, I've taken to retooling how I see my life.  I'm very much used to living off of the cortisol of my anxiety and frustrations.  It is an effective means, certainly, to feel like I'm being productive by worrying about what I'm not doing or what i should be doing or what will happen tomorrow or next year or three years from now, as if it will make the present and the future that much clearer.  But I've been thinking about and practicing the act of living my life for myself, not my future self or the self I think I'm supposed to be.  I think trying to do things creatively has gone a long way with my feeling more like myself than I have...maybe ever.  Harking back to the days when I made art out of construction paper with middle school kids.  Those were the days.

Granted, I still catch myself freaking out about my creative projects.  Like will this turn into anything?  Should I try to market this?  But I think I need a critical mass of things to do anything with, and really a critical mass of time growing into my creative pursuits.  And really more time just being me.

But art must shared, I think.  Art is an act of communication.  So let me know your thoughts!  I'm including two poems and two new pipe cleaner animals.  Enjoy!

--------------------------------

Badger.  He has been named Earl

My mantis!

-----------------------------------

Curry Puff

  

My aunt made curry puffs

For church sales every week;

And when she had enough,

She gave the spare to me.

Short, she was, and body round.

She stood wide-legged with toes splayed.

With bread roll arms she’d pound

The pastry dough fillets.

“Your mommy’s puffs don’t taste

As good as mine.  You know

She works too much to waste

Her time on that, although

It’s not her fault your daddy

Works her like a dog.”

Though what she was true –

They worked most days,

Vacations overdue –

I tell you there’s no way

I’d let her say such slander;

Yet shyness sapped my spunk,

To piety I pandered.

But aunty is a punk!

And justice must be served,

So finger in my nose,

I found what she deserved:

A morsel that I chose

To spice the yellow curry,

Then break for home –

I got out in a hurry.

 ------------------------------

  Secret

  

i feign my sadness to mask my joy

when i see him packing

i fold his socks and count his underwear

for each day that takes him away

because i can’t admit out loud

the selfish relish in which

i will miss him

when he is gone

the empty space cries out his absence

through which he is called into being

all over again

when he returns

Pipe Dreams

I've continued exploring the out-of-shape creative bits of my gray matter.  I'm taking a poetry class now through Oakland Word in a desire to try writing poetry, something I haven't really concentrated on since the fifth grade.  It's still intimidating and sooo hard, but it's been a joy too.  I'll post some poems once I workshop them in my writing group.  Ah!  Another creative exercise I'm thrilled to be part of is a writing group that meets every other week.  A kick in the butt to practice what I've wanted to try, writing more regularly.  Though, my challenge to myself to write everyday slacks in proportion to my feelings and energy level, which is erratic at best.  Fantastic.

Another new creative endeavor has been the creation of pipe cleaner sculptures.  I began making these in my LCSW group supervision, as the supervisor brought then in as fidget toys to occupy our hands.  It has turned into time of excitement for me less for hearing about tragic family situations than for a change to make cute things.  I'm playing with the idea of trying to make things to sell on etsy.com, though I wonder if there is a market for cartoony pipe cleaner sculptures.  They have brought me great joy to make, nevertheless, and my coworkers have started making requests for them.  Ah fuzzies!  Now is only store sold yard-long pipe cleaners rather than just the footlongs, I could really get busy...

The first one.  Must have intestines!

Here I suddenly had access to a variety of different kinds of pipe cleaner.  Oh the possibilities!

This one has a circulatory system and a heart.

I was very excited to try to make a bird.  What kind of bird this is, I don't know...

I was listening to a particularly sad case when I made this one.  Externalized frustration?

It was difficult getting the balance right, but the bananas are soooo cute.

Creative reuse

After the adrenaline stop jamming the neurotransmitter receptors in my brain, I was able to come back to Earth. I'm not going to quit my job.  In truth, a job will inevitably hit a point of drudgery, no matter what it is, but hopefully it feeds still one's core values and purpose.  But I think I ask a lot of my job to somehow fill all pockets of desire in my life, and I have to realize that it is up to me to fill in what my job does not give me.

Where I feel my job doesn't give me outlets for creativity and handicraft, I have to find the outlets that meet those needs for me.  I started attending a writing group.  I've also been tooling with little craft projects and I have felt the creative receptors of my brain spark a bit.

And I still have not exhausted making this social work thing work.  Maybe the greatest challenge with any work is to keep it dynamic and interesting and tolerable.  Maybe it is basic challenge in life to understand your resistance and responses to something, like the pangs of sadness I often feel when I hear stories of adoption from clients, that despite their hopefully happy outcome I cannot shake the tragedy that separates a child from her birth parents.  Or the disconnect of a social worker being a helper by trying to steer clients towards her or society's standard of normal functioning, when everyone in the world has their own paradigm and reality.  Maybe what bothers me about social work isn't really about social work, but about how to navigate a very confusing world.

Grandma As a Young Woman

This is a painting I did of my maternal grandmother as a young woman.  I meant it as a Mother's Day gift but didn't finish it in time for the requisite weeks of drying.  My friends all say it looks like me, but I swear it was not intentionally done that way.  Maybe we just look more like each other than I thought...

If I case managed myself, what would I tell me?

A friend told me something today that made the bottom drop out of me.  She is quitting her job.  She is a social worker in a stable job at an established agency that serves children and she has loathed it from the start.  And it is sentiment I have been hearing from most of my fellow social worker friends and have been feeling myself.  This gig, helping people or whatever, is not what we thought we were getting into.

I think we all went into social work know it was a thankless--and oftentimes impossible--job with unrealistic expectations, but the realities of assessing and holding people's dysfunction with thin tools for treatment are beyond demoralizing.  I get the sense that you have to somehow fully give in to codependent inclinations to really feel that you are helping people, that the sheer act of trying to help actually has value.  Mostly I think social work is predicated on a social standard of "normal" that we as social workers impose upon clients.  Deviance is cause for diagnosis.

Social workers quickly gain a skewed notion of people.  As a child protective services worker without kids, I lost sense of what a normal child looks like, one without attachment issues, behavioral problems, developmental delays, and poor prognoses for success.  I learned to be quick to search for appropriate diagnoses too, because identification was supposed to lead to accurate and appropriate treatment and--presto!--solutions for the poor, messed-up client.

But it is not satisfying to me.  I've been trying to make my round peg fit in this square hole, especially since I landed my adoptions position.  I am coming on my one-year mark with this new job position, where I am removed from grappling with parents who have had their children removed because of abuse.  And while I don't miss the vicarious traumatization of working with impossible cases and difficult clients--what do you do with borderline personality disorder?--I miss the sense that what I did mattered.  And i simply miss being busy.

I've landed the cushy job where I could fall asleep and wake up forty years later with my vested retirement fund.  I don't have to learn a new thing ever again.  And now that I am removed from it, do I need domestic violence, mental health, and substance abuse in my work life to feel like I was accomplishing something everyday?  Or for that matter do I need to be "helping people" to feel satisfied and alive, as it somehow has not worked out that way.

I've carried such guilt, since I was in graduate school, that I do not feel more gratified by my work.  I've chastised  myself for not owning the pride of being a helper.  It could be that it never sat well with me that social work in practice actually translates into being a therapist.  While I've personally come to appreciate the value of psychodynamics in human relationships and in one's own sense of being--did I mention how I love therapy?--I don't want to be a therapist.  I cannot help but feel that I would impose my model of functionality on my client, pushing them towards what I think will help and feeling responsible for my client's successful return to normalcy.  And as much as my colleagues and supervisors remind me that therapy is helping a client to help herself, I can't separate out that unspoken assumption that a therapist guides the client along a certain socially accepted path.

For five years I have dance this dance.  And now, not only do my feet hurt, but I realized I'm not a good dancer.  And I don't like dancing.  Could it be that it is time to take off the ill-fitting shoes and go shopping?

I'm in love...with an ottoman.

This is what I had originally.  For the past three years.

In its place, a new seating area!  With an adorable ottoman.

The view outside my window the other day after a weekend of raining.

Yes, it is true: I am in love.  With a beautiful piece of furniture.  No, not a Turk.  I went to pick it up today from the FedEx office.  Ah.  It's been kind of an adventure to find it and buy it so I'm super psyched to now be able to write this post with my feet firmly propped up by the cutest thing on four legs.  Cuteness!  I feel like my home is complete now too, because I always bemoaned that my apartment did not have room to accommodate guests.  Now that I sold my tv and replaced it with a chair I feel like I have the sitting area I always wanted.  I'm going to host a gathering of friends starting a support group this Sunday so I'll get to try it all out.  Wee!  I feel so grown up.

Go Oakland!

Marimba band!

Si te puedes!

Walking is ok too.

Last weekend was the Oakland Marathon, the first in 25 years.  It's route ran by window, giving me a nice view.  I tried to host a party and only had one friend show up, but it was lovely.  It made me so excited to see the people out and running.  Even though I am not a runner myself, it felt like all of Oakland was doing something together in a way that is kind of rare for Oakland.  It was lovely to look for people I know and cheer on the runners and, even later, walkers.  It was also a neat thing to wake up to the sound of a marimba band outside my window.  Now that is my kind of Sunday.

mostly martha

Before

After

Funky fresh!

These are pics of some lamp shades I made recently.  They don't really capture the hours I spent collecting the bottles for the plastic, or my tracing the patterns and cutting them out, and then the time it took to figure out how to assemble the shapes, and then the constant reassembling to get the right combination of light filtration.  I got a huge bunch of the white jugs from discarded water jugs collected from the water stations for the Oakland Marathon.  The orange is from an orange juice jug and the blue plastic from an easter bin.  At first the white pieces alone were not opaque enough and the bulbs were glaring.  Then the color pieces were too dark.  So it was a bit of experimentation to get the right combination.  Ah, creative reuse is a lot of work, but I like what came out.

monkey me!

Little girl is progressing.  Oi, her neck is a little too yellow, i'll need to fix that.  I'm going to add some daisies to her dress.

 This little guy is going to be a monkey.  He's a work in progress.  And that's an outie belly button, if you were wondering.