Brain Flotsam V2.007

On this Day of Remembrance, two songs by Eric Bogle about the First World War, lest we forget...

And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda (YouTube)

The Green Fields of France (YouTube) (performed by the Dropkick Murphys; video is historic photos)

And now some concerns for the servicemembers and veterans alive today, from Democracy Now! Because a 'thank you' means more when it's backed up by decent support and care:

Study: Over 2,200 US Veterans Died in 2008 Due to Lack of Health Insurance

Sexual Assaults, Inadequate Healthcare Among Spate of Issues Facing Women Servicemembers

And my usual barrage of quotes for the day:

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official...
~Theodore Roosevelt

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
~Dwight D. Eisenhower

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
~John F. Kennedy

It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate.
~George McGovern

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I ran away to the circus.. er, Renaissance Festival today!
It was pirate weekend, so I got into a pseudo-costume (I wore jeans), and met Donna, Jon, Lando and some friends.
It was a long drive, by the way. Geez. It seems so much shorter when there is another person in the car.
This is us in front of the waterwheel by the carousel, which was the designated "let's all meet here" location.

More from the Quilt Show:


( photos )

International Quilt Festival, Day 1:

Totally awesome!
I blew half my festival budget on amber jewelry, but the highlight of the show was still the quilts.

This one is pieced, not painted - I swear.  It's huge, taller than I am, and gorgeous in person. "Medea Escaping". 
My flickr set for the show includes the card for this one, and some detail shots.

This evening Mom and I attended the Progressive Forum again. 
Tonight the speaker was Karen Armstrong, and she was amazing. Brilliant. Incredibly well-spoken, fun to listen to, grounded in her knowledge, and beautifully eloquent. Plus bonus British accent.
But seriously, I was so moved at times during her lecture, and her answer to one of the questions during the Q&A portion had me choked up.
It reminded me with deep, loving nostalgia of the best of my class in Seminary.

Her talk was about god, in a very early sense of the word. She spoke of traditions having a special language and breathing to discuss god, the concept beyond realization. About finding the moment when one's word become too much and one is reduced to silence and awe. (Like the moment, the beat at the end of a symphony, the breath before the applause begins.)  The goal of the practice is to breathe in the silence, in the presence of that awe.
She spoke of creation stories or cosmologies as therapeutic exercises, guides for personal creativity with an emphasis on personal sacrifice. Never does something come from nothing; something always from something.
She spoke of revelation as an ongoing process. Scripture, in the Rabbinic tradition, as something to be re-interpreted for and by each generation.
She spoke of the complementary relationship in pre-16th century society between logos and mythos. Logos as knowledge, science, the physical reality. Myth as a way to deal with inner issues, emotion, pain, despair, psyche. Myth as a program for action. Religion, she said, is like dancing - a skill requiring practice.  A belief is not enough. And belief as a word did not mean then what it did now, but represented a commitment, love, dedication, a doing.
She spoke of dialogue as a spiritual exercise in the Socratic tradition, its goal to realize the profundity of human ignorance, and from there begin to seek wisdom. She said that one difficulty we have now is that instead of proceeding in the dialogue with gentleness, as Socrates said, these days we feel the need not only to win, to prove our knowledge, but also to humiliate our opponents.
And of course, she spoke of compassion. She is developing a Charter for Compassion online. (See the page at the TED prize about her wish.)

One of the most intriguing and resonant things she said, to me, was about the need for silence.  Specifically inner silence as a place of spiritual revelation and knowing. This reminded me so much of one of the books that was formative to my young spirituality, Sati by Christopher Pike. We are all god, and this can be discovered in silence.

When asked to describe her idea of god:
"I try not to have any ideas of god at all." She does not wish to 'domesticate the transcendence', but to keep it in the realm of music, poetry, etc. She feels intimations of awe and wonder during the day: "I do feel touched within, but what that is I don't know - and it's better not to ask."

At the very end she spoke about hope for the future in the face of so much misunderstanding and upheaval.

In short, it was an awesome evening.

Also, happy happy birthday to my awesome Dad. :)

As some folks already know, I spent today being sick. Ugh.  I still have a low-grade fever, and the persistance of that will determine whether or not I go to work tomorrow.
I spent this morning at the emergency clinic with Awesome!Chauffeur!Dad, and then the rest of the day in varying stages of sleep or eating under Mom's eye.
Now I'm taking advantage of brief moments of concentration and hoping that I can sleep through the night. Or at least large chunks of it.

Had a lot of stuff going on this week.  It's just been terribly busy, and I haven't slept well.
Thought about going to the memorial concert tonight, but wasn't up for it.  Spent the whole day reading various bizarre social networking posts about where people were in 2001. There was a hashtag for it, for goodness sakes. Bizarre, and yet I suppose completely human.
I doubt I'll ever forget, but the memory seems to change with each telling. And more than the day itself, the days and weeks immediately after stay in my mind. It was a hard time, but one that has faded with the passing of years so that its immediacy is lessened but certain indelible images and feelings remain, worn into the psyche beside all the rest of a life's traumas.

Hm, I seem to have gone a bit introspective despite my effort to avoid same this year.

I've finished two actual novels this week, though, which was great.  And they were both awesome in totally different ways.  Lavinia by Ursula K LeGuin, and The Shadow Queen by Anne Bishop.

Now I'm really tired and looking forward to a fun weekend, so I'd best get to bed and try to actually sleep.

So begins my quest to blog more frequently...

Last night I visited the ancestral homestead, where I picked up various fun things like my laundry, a box of things Mom wanted to get rid of (mostly my bookends - two of them are carved stone figures that are bloody heavy, even for bookends), and some of Mom's lentil soup, this time the cumin and coriander variation.
I am eating the soup right now and it's awesome, but I do wish I'd had the forethought to add some cheese to it before I left. There are so few foods that cannot be improved by the application of some extra sharp cheddar.

It's a rather nice change to have so much of my floor visible at home, although I still don't have all my flat spaces cleared. I can't sew yet, for one thing. But I'm close, very close.

Yesterday I did actually draw something, too. It may or may not morph into a full-blown illustration, we'll see.

Also, I took a Democratic Party political survey, the mail-in kind, and I mostly wished I had a big red marker to strike through half of it. "Mark the issues most important to you right now" - well, it's hard to do when they aren't even on your stupid list, Democratic Party. I added some write-ins.
"Which party do you trust to look after your interests?" NONE.
I hope they don't just throw my survey away because it has so much writing on it, outside of the "Please tell us anything else you think we should know" box. I have extremely neat handwriting, Democratic Party interns, you can handle it!

• my best friend really really really wants me to read Twilight.  sigh. I probably should read it just so I'll have a point of conversation with my younger cousins, who aren't readers but have apparently all finished the series.
  
• she also spent some time discussing the ways that she thought my characterization of Draco Malfoy in Far Away as Moonshine echoed that of Michael Corleone in The Godfather series.
  
• and we spent our lunch talking racebending and white-washing in film, something she's been aware of and talking about for longer than I.
  
• good times, despite the sparkly vampire complication.

• Friday evening I actually went out. Yes, really. Had dinner and then drinks with friends. I visited a new bar I'd never been to, and had some lovely Scotch.
  
• The lightning on Friday was apocalyptic.  Made me wish I had a camera with instant shutter speed, to capture it.
  
• Saturday morning at the gas station, a lady saw my "I'm blogging this" t-shirt and said, "Hey, can I ask you about blogging?"  So we ended up having a conversation about social media while my tank filled. Bizarre.
  
• Spent Saturday evening at my aunt's house. We had dinner and conversation and played two rounds of Scrabble.  Fun times.
  
• Today Mom and I made a HUGE dent in my cleaning. We moved the sewing cabinet, and put away almost all the books, although actually really they're all thrown willy-nilly onto shelves, not actually organized.  It'll take me weeks to get them organized.
  
• I hung two more pictures on the walls, too.
  
• Baking soda really is a miracle cleaner.
  

• I have two more bigbang arts to do, and then a fest to illustrate before Snupin Santa hits.
  
• I'm working on a concept for a series of fairy tale illustrations in Prismacolor and ink, for my Advanced Visual Arts studio class this semester.
  

So my Mom told me she followed the link from my LJ to sign the petition at racebending.com about the whitewashed casting of the Avatar: the Last Airbender movie.
Is that everybody now?  Go sign it!

Also, the TV and DVD player are both installed and working beautifully, and MY GOD Colin Morgan is adorable when his face is a foot tall in my living room.  ;)

Now all I have to do is actually build my IKEA furniture.
And finish my art before deadline.

Also, I posted a bunch of art here the other day because I'd forgotten to add it to this journal.  Reveals for a couple exchanges and my contribution to LJ's hump_day_smut for the last few months.

I finished the painting from last week, which was an exercise in color.
This is Donna at the Lexington Avenue N train platform, based on a photo I took in 2005, before we both moved to Houston. This has a touch of prismacolor in it from when I was trying to even up the lines and shapes, but it's mostly free brush over light graphite outlines.  Next time I do something like this I may actually block out the letters with a resist first. But it's groovy despite the shaky typography.


And then I did a quick still life, as that was the class for today. I think it still needs something, maybe a bolder hand with the lavender background, or some highlights or somethnig, but on the whole I'm very pleased.


Next week we're supposed to try prints. Fun!

Catching this journal up...

( mid-trip report, April 30 )

and a Readers' Studio report:
( it's a wow sort of weekend, May 2 )

The finish of the Readers' Studio was great, and then yesterday I got to see Michelle and Andy and Milo and Vic and Ali for dinner, then E and I played the first half of a cutthroat game of Super Deluxe Double Scrabble, which has twice the tiles and a bigger board featuring QUADRUPLE letter and word scores. w00t!

Hello, Fandom.
I hope I've gotten all my looming deadlines in because I am miles from my tablet... soon to be 1800 miles!
I'll be in New York City for the next week - Tuesday to Tuesday. 
The Tarot Reader's Studio is Beltane Weekend, plus there shall be much social time with friends far and near, including visiting from Australia. Yay! Glee! Wahoo!

I'll likely not be out of electronic contact, but it all will depend on the ready availability of computers and/or wireless.

Coming in May, I hope: finishing the unfinished fanart in the archives.  Plus of course the next set of deadlines. Fun times, indeed.

This is what I started last week as an exercise in values and shapes.
Portrait of a Man


This one was for our class on scale - in this case man and vast weather.
Afghan Wind Storm

Ok, so I noted that I haven't updated here with anything of substance in over two weeks, which we all know is the internet equivalent of ten million years.
I'm still living in what I like to call cardboard chic, a house full of piles and boxes and no real organization.
True to prediction, though, I am spending a lot less time at home. Dinner and/or coffee with friends, meetings, meet-ups, a con, family events, and evening classes have all conspired to keep me far from home.
And I'm going out of town for a week starting next Tuesday. I'll be in the New York metro area, attending the Tarot Reader's Studio as well as hanging out with my beloved friends in the vicinity (and some coming in to town from afar, including Australia! Wow!).
That said, I expect to be spending more time at home in May. I have quilts to make and paintings to paint, for one thing. Plus a lot of tarot cards and still some fan exchanges to finish.  Plus the three Big Bangs I decided to sign up for. Mmm, fun. I also have books to unpack and an apartment to arrange. I also plan to acquire an actual TV. No, really! I'm going to set it up and watch it and everything. Probably.

That plus the whole Summer of Cons (ApolloCon, Azkatraz, Anticipation - I sense a theme here.)  should keep me busy.

Yes, people, it's the return of the weekly watercolor class reports!  Until I get my household in order, this may be the only art for a while!

Slightly wilted flowers


Still Life on Green Plate

You can see a photo of the actual still life (from a slightly different angle, alas) at my Flickr set.

Well, I've moved!  Egads.

My stuff is all still in boxes and bags and a few piles, as I try to get it organized or at least find the stuff I need for day-to-day.

You know, I figured out after mom snuck some stuff into a bag for my kitchen that I don't have a can opener?  It's things like that that are going to trip me up for the next few weeks.  ;)

So it was pouring rain this morning, but the storm had blown through by the time the movers arrived. 
Adventure the First: in securing the dog, I was sure that I had accidentally let the cat outside, which wasn't a terrible crisis necessarily but it's always worrying in a neighborhood so rife with strays.  We fretted about that while the guys moved the boxes and stuff, and searched the house to no avail.
Well, Peter called me when I was at the new place unloading to tell me that the cat was found, in a busy corner of the garage.

Adventure the Second: arrived at apartment, began unloading process. No problems with any of the boxes or furniture, and the place is well-lit by daylight and relatively cool, so at first I don't realize that the electricity is completely out. Finally somebody tries to turn on the bathroom lights without success, and I flip every switch and realize that while the fridge and AC are apparently on standby, the power is pretty much out.
So I call Gexa who calls Centerpoint who says the power is on from their end, check the breaker box. So I call maintenance and they come by and fiddle and lo, the lights work.
Well, not quite.
I turned the AC on, and the lights flickered, then next time I went to hit the switch, nothing.  The AC is blowing but now the lights AND the fridge have gone off.  Hm.
Call maintenance again (by this time the movers are done and gone) and they come by and promise to have things fixed this afternoon, so I go to lunch with mom.  When I get back, still no power, but there's a maintenance guy out by the boxes. 
Hopefully by the time I get to sleeping at the place, the power will be reliably back on.

Also, the doc has taken me off the meds and says to see how I do in my new situation with acupuncture and tai chi and everything. Mostly it's the diet - continuing to do either the No Sugar/Flour Food Plan or the modified hypoglycemic food plan - that may make a difference. I'm to report back in three months, unless the symptoms get worse or change drastically.

So that's that.

Especially for fandom:

I AM MOVING THIS WEEK. 

This means that I will have questionable access to: the fandom parts of the internet (you know what I mean), my art supplies, and in fact, all my stuff.

I'll try to be back and on point for any pending deadlines by this weekend, but it'll depend on how cooperative the cable modem is.

Hey, I get a bed on Friday! w00t!

Packing, shopping for a bed, figuring out that maybe I'm hypoglycemic in addition to the stomach issues because I almost passed out and was shaking Friday night and had to miss a birthday gathering for a friend because I didn't trust myself to drive.  :(
But Saturday was much better and I watched what I ate and there were birthday people to greet and a party to go to. (Why is almost everybody I know born in March?) Donna and Jon and Lando the Magnificent Walking, Babbling, Playing Boy met me for Donna's birthday lunch, and have now seen my apartment, empty and echoing. Lando christened it with drool and laughter, so yay.

Then I went to my cousin Dave's birthday party, which was a live action role-playing card game called Long Live the King.  It was pretty awesome, although I was still trying to control my headachy symptoms (plus even I get a couple weeks when the pollen wreaks havoc with my sinuses).  I played the Archbishop with a 3-minute Mitre made of construction paper, while there were vast levels of costumery among the other folks.  From simple tunics and capes to full-on Henry VIII style gear, it was a good night for costumes.
I didn't know most of the people there, because this cousin was one of the ones that I used to see only for Christmas each year, if then.  But he's discovered that I'm a geek and a gamer, so now I get invited to these things. :)
It was a fun time, but as with many of these games, I think that the next time it's played, things will go much more smoothly.  Last night we were a bit confused about what we could and could not do, and nobody knew exactly how to win. It always takes at least one round for the players to really grok the strategy.  So, I can only hope we find excuses to play again!

Also, another cousin had a birthday last week (and I should have e-mailed him or something - bad me.) and Peter and Hillary are Tuesday and today, respectively.
March - a popular month for being born.

Today mom and I have made it our mission to buy me a bed, and then I have to get the rest of the assorted misc junk off my floor and shelves and into boxes, because the movers are coming on THURSDAY. Yeep.