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.
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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!

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Badger.  He has been named Earl

My mantis!

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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.

MSWho?

I just had dinner with some old social work grad classmates and I could not help but feel left behind.  Every one at the table was working on an advance degree or beyond and all the social workers had moved on from their humble MSWs.  The listed included:
- PhD. candidate in Mechanical Engineering;
- Postdoc in Chemistry;
- MSW to Law;
- MSW to PsyD;
- MSW to PhD. in Education;
- and me.
And they interestingly most were second generation Mexican Americans who were the first generation in their families to attend college.  I suddenly felt a stagnation in myself for sticking with my practical degree in a very practical, government job.  I am not doing anything to advance knowledge or my field and my job does not inherently demand that I learn something new everyday.  Economically, I can see that what I do also stagnates as a working-class of the white-collar jobs too, with little advancement beyond my small agency as a line-worker.  I don't anticipate that I would be happier in academia, and actually know that I could not be happy there.  But to see people my age who still are in dynamic stages in their lives makes me envious and makes me wonder what life I am not pursuing where I can be changing and growing everyday.  What is missing for me?  And, no, that is not more school.  But there is something practical and challenging that I am starving for.

Cute: the new and the old

New Cute.  I brought hamster purse to my library reading for good luck.  Hamster purse, I love you!

New Cute.  My recent apartment improvement project has involved selling my tv and acquiring a reading chair.  It's not the most comfortable thing in the world, but it is quite cute.

Old cute.  This is a gift from a friend in high school.  

Ah, Monkichi, I want to squeeze your pink butt cheeks, and face cheeks.

Old cute.  KiguruMX is a gift from a beloved friend.  He dances when you hit the white button at his feet.  He's still dancing after all these years...  That is some serious cuteness.

The Word

My writing classes with the Oakland Word series have just finished up.  Yesterday I read my piece in front of a mini audience, including three of my friends.  Ah, I was a bit nervous that they were going to cut me off at three minutes, the prescribed time limit, but a few people didn't show up and it wasn't a big deal for me to read my whole piece.  I was pleasantly surprised to hear some laughs at funny parts and a compliment from an audience member who suggested I try writing for feature articles like in a newspaper.  I can see now how much practice and work it is to write, and write well.  I look forward to my next class on short fiction writing, and hopefully producing another little piece.

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Acupuncture Clinic, May I Help You?

My sisters and I spent Saturdays at our parents’ acupuncture clinic.  My parents enlisted us to do minor tasks like refilling dispensers for the cotton balls, which they used with a dab of rubbing alcohol to disinfect patients’ skin before the needles were inserted and after they were removed.  We often rearranged the glass moxibustion cups on the bedside tables after playing with them by stamping each other’s arms with big red circles.  My mother and father never seemed to mind that we were all inveterate snoopers who also peeked in every drawer and into every cabinet at home.  We liked to look under the patient beds that my parents had made themselves with two-by-fours, plywood, foam pads, and yards of synthetic leather.  Under the beds they stored old Chinese acupuncture journals and empty cookie tins, but we always checked to see if my parents had hidden any new or interesting things there.

The clinic was always an exciting place to visit – it was nothing like home or school.  It was a completely adult world, which made it precisely the most excellent place to play.  When the clinic was not too busy, we had a whole small patient room to ourselves.  We liked the room with the two beds because it gave us more space to spread out our toys and papers.  Each of the beds was a continent for our troll dolls and the space between was an enormous canyon.  The Chinese watercolor paintings and woodcut panels on the walls were backdrops for our plastic bear family saga.  We looked out the window of the office building at the freeway below and stuck our bare feet on the glass, daring drivers to look at our toes.

But when we had exhausted all play in the little room, or our parents needed the room for patients, we all piled into the small reception area and sat behind the big desk.  We three sisters tried our best to avoid talking to patients.  We politely answered questions about how old we were and where we went to school, but mostly we played under the desk and on the floor in hopes that they did not notice us.  Unfortunately, staying in the front meant that we had to answer the phones.  Callers were greeted with a little girls’ voice saying, “Acupuncture clinic, may I help you?”  When the caller needed more than to make an appointment, we placed the telephone receiver facedown on the desk and ran to find one of our parents.  We peeked into the rooms and saw patients in various degrees of undress with needles prickling from their waists, knees, or eyebrows.   No one ever appeared too surprised to see us stealing glances at their peachy bellies and waxy legs.

My father loved to tell stories and we always found him deep in conversation with patients.  There was one room in the clinic that was lined with chairs and devoted to people trying to quit smoking.  My father liked to brag about the very particular technique of ear acupuncture he had discovered to take away patients’ tolerance for nicotine.  He told one story about demonstrating the technique in China to a group of acupunturists.  None could find the right spot in one Communist official’s ear, but when my father tapped it, the man had to throw up immediately because his body could not tolerate the cigarettes he had just smoked.  My father said that the room was designed to encourage patients to share their experiences kicking their addictions, but in effect he created a captive audience for his talks on how his patients needed to make changes for healthier living.  He had placed a poster in the room that charted different foods as positive or negative.  Sweet potatoes had huge positive points and my father liked to recount how he had survived as child on sweet potatoes grown by my grandmother during the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, when all food was scarce.  Much to my mother’s chagrin, he thought the few positive points for pizza also justified his love of barbeque pizza.

When we were tired or hungry we sought out our mother.  She still had her mother smell even in her white doctor’s coat.  She maintained order where my father left chaos.  He never kept track of when patients were ready to have their needles removed or who needed to pay for their treatments.  My mother took care of her own patients in addition to his and I don’t know how he managed on the Saturdays he went to the clinic alone.  My mother found us paper to draw on and snacks to eat.  She showed us the little balls and pins that they taped to the earlobes of their quit smoking patients.  Patients were to rub the taped spots on their ears over the course of the following week to reinforce the effectiveness of their treatments.  She taped the little balls into our ears to treat our sinus problems and headaches.  I used to get stomach aches, for which my mother gave me heat treatments with burning moxa sticks that she waved over the skin of my stomach. The sticks looked like smoldering cigars and had a sweet incense smell.  My mother’s heat treatments were some of the few regular times that I had her all to myself; I recall constantly having stomach aches.

When we needed to go to the bathroom, the three of us went together.  We hoped to avoid running across other adults.  Most of the time we never saw the attorneys, dentists, and insurance agents that occupied the neighboring suites to the acupuncture clinic.  We saw them as strangers, who were unknowingly dangerous.  We made our rounds together from the bathroom, to the water fountain, and to the vending machine where we picked out what chips we would buy if we had money.  The building was six-stories high, with the suites arranged around the periphery of open space on every floor, thus allowing a clear view of every door from the floor to the ceiling.  After the security guard called our parents, we couldn’t ride the glass elevators from floor to floor anymore, but we still trampled the cold metal stairs with the dim fire escape lighting.  We found the hallways not visible from the bottom floor and used our hidden passage ways to make our way back the clinic.

At closing time, my mother tried to drop my father subtle hints to wrap up his conversations so we could go to lunch, but he never seemed to notice.  Usually my sisters and I became so squirmy that the patients themselves knew it was time to say their final words and leave.  At last, my father held up the day’s stack of checks and twenty-dollar bills, boasted about how much he’d made, and took us out for dim sum. 

Me first!

These last few weeks the universe has been sending me messages.

I started taking free career development and creative writing classes from the Oakland Library.  The creative writing class has got my writing brain chugging again.and remembering what I missed about putting words together and the career development class has inspired me to really think about what I value about work and what I value about my life.  I deserve to be happy.  What?!  This has been an original thought for me that I have been encountering recently in many areas of life.

I was looking for new apartments recently and a friend commented that when I'm frustrated in my life I tend to start looking for new placed to live, though my living situation is not the thing spleening me.  Woah, that's true.

I also went to a yoga/meditation workshop around Valentines' Day that explored opening yourself to love.  I'm not a fan of hokey eastern things normally but I thought what the hell.  I actually ended up having really meaningful meditation and learning.  Plus an exercise we did at the end connected our relationships with our primary caregivers with what we seek in intimate relationships.  It opened my eyes to what I always look for (stability) and what I really need (affection).  I also had to consider the fact that I deserve good things and good people in my life.

Reading an article in the Atlantic Monthly about the recession and what it is going to do to our generation gave me a whole new appreciation for my job and having a job.  I hope that I'm not at my job forever, but I can use my time now to be thoughtful about what my career will look like.

It could be the universe sending me signs, or that I'm finally ready to see them, but the message is startling new to me.  I need to put me first and take care of myself.  I need to love, nurture, and care for myself the way I've been pouring that unconditional regard out on other people, with diminishing returns.  I deserve to be treated well by others, and that means myself.  I know I've said things like "self care" but I don't think I ever really understood what that meant.  I also never really saw that modeled in my parents, that you have to seek your own happiness before you can really care for others because you teach others to settle for less when you do that to yourself.  I'm still very much in the throes of practicing some self-love and even listening to what I want, but I'm grateful to have found the space to do it.  I am not moving!

The fungus in me greets the fungus in you.

I decided today that I am tired of solitary paralysis.  Just because I'm single and can't always recruit people to do things with me doesn't mean I have to stay at home.  No!  So I decided to give myself the gift of freedom.  First in the form of a GPS.  Besides the fact that I get horribly lost going to places that I've been to several times before, I think having a GPS will also make me bolder about exploring places I have not been to  without fear of not making it home if I haven't mapped the location beforehand.  Well, the GPS comes in the mail on Tuesday so those adventures are yet to come.  But I decided to venture out for my first solitary hike today at Huckleberry Botanical Preserve.  All by myself!  I worried a bit about needing to tell people where I was in case I slipped off a cliff or something, but I needn't have stressed out so much.

The preserve is a quick drive away and very close to the urban bits of Oakland.  The nice thing about the Bay Area is that everything is so concentrated, meaning nature is right next to the big city.  (Or I guess in the case of Oakland, the mid-sized city.)  I picked a short and easy loop that took only an hour in total, but how refreshing it was to be walking on dirt.  Every time I go hiking now I always think about foster kids and wonder if they've ever walked in the woods, every walked on pure forest dirt rather than concrete.  I always start to wonder if maybe my body knows that I'm someplace different and if it responds differently to the unevenness of the ground and the moistness of the air.

The paths were green and shady--my favorite kind.  Today was a rare sunny day in what has been a series of rainy days, so along with a little mud there were colorful mushrooms along the paths.  Reds and yellows.  And I couldn't help feeling like maybe the fungus on my neck felt some kind of affinity with the cute fungus all around us.  My neck.  Moist woods.  We are all of us ecosystems!

I also spotted two huge hawk-like birds in the sky circling higher and higher and kind of swooping near each other, which reminded me of Avatar pterodactyls.  That's funky that for me nature is imitating art.  Hm...

So yes, I feel like I am reclaiming my independence, or rather exercising it.  I'm also taking some free writing classes through the Oakland Library.  If I write anything worthwhile, I'll be sure to post it.  And did I mention, my ringworm is clearing up?  What a splendid Sunday.  I think I'll go take a nap.

Like a burning ring

A while back I got this itchy spot on my neck like a mosquito bite.  I put some insect creams on it but it kept growing.  Finally it got to be about a centimeter in diameter and I got to poking around at pictures of rashes on the internet.  So I self-diagnosed myself as having psoriasis, nummular eczema, or ringworm.  I called an advice nurse who said she couldn't tell what it was over the phone and suggested I try an antifungal cream for a week and see if that worked out.  She asked how that sounded to me.  I was not impressed and asked to see my doctor.  So my doctor takes a peek and says it doesn't really look like ringworm and I should try a topical steroid cream and see if it gets better.  Or worse.  I was like, this is the best plan out there?  So I tried the steroid cream for a few days and yep, my little rash turned into a clear red ring.  Ringworm!  Guh.  So I sent my doctor a picture and she got me an appointment with a dermatologist likety split.  The dermatologist took a skin scrapping, peeked at it under a microscope and confirmed what I had originally thought.  Fungus ring!  The dermatologist was really helpful, though, and reassuring.  Of all the rashes to get, this one is not so bad because it is so easily treatable.  Likely source of contagion: children and animals.  Oh you look so cute, but you are incubators of ringworm spores!  So eww.  I'll be slathering myself with jock itch cream for the next three weeks.  FUN FACT: ringworm (misnomered as it is not a worm at all) is the same fungus that causes jock itch and athlete's foot.  Fancy.

Urgent Need! Must kill computer hackers!

I never thought it could happen to me.  I mean, I didn't even think of myself as a particularly good target for identity theft.  I don't make huge amounts of money.  I don't visit porn sights or do a bunch of illegal downloading.  But i had a gmail account.  And a facebook account.  With the same username and password.  I know!  Stupid.  So here's what a bunch of my contacts in gmail received:

I'm sorry for this odd request because it might get to you too urgent but it's just the situation of things right now, we are presently stuck in Wales,United Kingdom. we came down here on vacation. we were robbed, worse of it is that bags, cash and credit cards was stolen at GUN POINT, it's such a crazy experience for us and we need help with flying back home, the authorities are not being 100% supportive but the good thing is we still have our passports but don't have enough money to get on a plane back home, please we need you to loan us some money till we are back home to refund it back.



And here's what a friend alerted me to at 4am (I've placed where I got online and began typing in brackets):

4:03 AM j: hm
 ?
4:04 AM me: how have you been?
4:05 AM j: i've been good ... what are you dreaming?
4:06 AM me: did you got my msg?
 j: mmm... no.. what message?
4:07 AM me: am not good at the moment  am stuck in Wales
4:09 AM I came here to visit a resort and got robbed at a gun point,my money and stuffs was stolen,am lucky i still have my passport here with me
4:11 AM j: :S ... what a mess
 but are you ok?
 me: yeah
4:12 AM i have been to the embassy and consulate they are just delaying  all i need now is a financial help with getting on plane back home 
 can i ask for a favor?
4:13 AM j: sure, what do you need?
 me: can you pls loan me some cash to complete my ticket fee till am back home to return it to you
 ?
4:14 AM $600 is all i need more
4:16 AM j: no problem, or i can pay the ticket for you
4:17 AM me: you can get it to me here using western union,all you need is just my name as written on my passport and the location here
 Name:Jennifer
 Location:Wales,United Kingdom
4:18 AM am glad you can help
  [eh?]
  [was that you?]
4:19 AM It's me Jennifer
  [did you just send me a text message about my gmail account?]
4:20 AM [?]
4:21 AM How long will you get it done?
4:23 AM you there?
 j: yes i'm here ...
 me: [is someone using my acount]
4:24 AM j: eh?
 me: [something strange is going on]
4:25 AM j: you are confusing me, are you ok?
 me: the network sucks here
4:26 AM [i didn't just type that]
  [i think someone hacked my gmail account]
 j: ?


So, yes, I was online typing while the hacker was typing too!  I can understand someone spamming with my email, as evil as that is, but impresonating me to chat up my friends?!  That is like a whole different level of insidiousness.  I later found my facebook account was closed, probably because someone alerted them about someone using it.  I heard from a friend that the hacker was also impersonating me on facebook, chatting with friends and trying to convince them I was in Wales.  Oi.  I mean, not super sophisticated, but opportunistic I suppose.  My close friends caught on very quickly that this was a scam, but some people I haven't talked to in a while where confused and freaked out for me.  It's nice to know people still care about me after so much time, but not ok that they had to go through with that kind of emotional trauma.  Grr!  I was so mad that someone would do that to my friend.  Thankfully none of my finance had been tampered with, but I did an overhaul of all my passwords to be safe.  I'm done with my old buggy laptop.  Considering getting a Mac.  Taking a break from facebook until I don't feel like a walking victim.  Or so violated.  Ugh.

cork girl #1

She looks a little grotesque so upclose, but she actually doesn't look half bad. I'll just leave her to dry while I'm in Houston and hopefully her face will be dry enought that I can hold it while I finish an outfit for her. Cork Girl!

prime the pump!

Of course this had to be a bigger project than I realized. Of course cork will be too porous to support oil paint and I'll need to prime the corks first. But aren't they cute? By the way, shout out to my friends to start collecting champagne corks for me! In exchange I'll do a mini cork version of you. I'll post samples as I make them. I hope they won't be too grotesque.

all my cork peoples say hey!

So this is my newest art project in the works. I'm planning to paint cork people. The egg concept is photographed in there for scale.