Costumes

Happy Halloween! Do what you like.

They are being 'Ghosts in the Window'.
I was going to paint their orbs orange, to be pumpkins, but oh, no, they said, we are ghosts.

I have bought candy for trick-or-treaters.
Did I buy enough?
A neighbor told me people come here from other neighborhoods because a couple blocks away there's a Haunted Alley, decorated by the people on that block.

Maybe I should buy more.
I don't want a lot of leftover candy because I will eat it. Of course I would take it to work, but first I would eat a whole lot of it. You know, for breakfast.

I'm going to sit on my doorstep with the toys this evening and hand out candy. I'm not dressing up, but they are.
I'm going over to my sister's later this morning to carve a little jack-o-lantern. I don't much like carving pumpkins though--I might make make more costumes for dolls and bears instead.

That's the thing, isn't it? If you have a choice, do what you like.
Duh, obviously.
But the things I've talked myself out of, because they didn't seem ... sophisticated enough, or intellectual, or something.
Star Trek and dolls don't cut it.
(Growing up in an academic family didn't help.)

I still wrestle with that. I was fretting, for instance, that inviting people to recreate famous paintings with toys on Instagram was too ... unoriginal. Copying other people's paintings is too easy.
Geez. (Like artists don't borrow all the time?)

The question, I told myself, isn't whether it's nobler to do this or to do that.
The question is will you DO this, or that?

And I will definitely do this, because I like it, I want to, and I already am doing it, in fact, and want to do it more.

It's a sandbox, not an IQ test, for godsake:
So, calm down, Critical Judgey Self!

bink (below) brought over a blue plastic bag yesterday--the kind circulars come in--to be the Girl in the Pearl Earring's headdress.
Its crinkly reflective surface is perfect!
I made a second invitation for IG today, since Sundays, when I posted the first one, can be low-view days:

bink and I talked about what paintings would be good to recreate.

The boats in The Great Wave by Hokusai always intrigued me. The full title refers to them: Under the Wave off Kanagawa (at The Met).
(It's not a painting, it's a woodblock print, but I'm not being pedantic about this.)

bink can't look down too much with her eyes because they're still out of whack (concussion). But she's a great advisor.
She was helping me think about how to recreate the wave in the kitchen.
For the IG ––or here, if anyone wants to join in––there are NO RULES.
But for myself, it's not a rule, but what I like is to utilize mostly only what I have on hand. I'm not going for accuracy, I'm more interested in problem solving with everyday objects.

This re-creation will take some doing...
A different painting would be better for the next IG challenge, I think--something easier.
I'm thinking either Frida Kahlo with Monkey & Cat or Goya's Red Boy, with magpie & cats.

 

Neither are in the Top Twenty iconic paintings, but both'd be fun to re-create. Opinions?

Invitation to Play

I posted this on my IG, and you're all invited too.
No rules! Fulfill this however you want, if you want.

"Wanna play? Post YOUR toy-recreation of Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” on Sunday, November 6, and tag it: #toysrecreatepaintings. This is my preliminary study…"

I'd like to do a series of paintings re-created by toys--mixing some of my favorite but lesser known works in with iconic ones.
The Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer (1665) makes the Top Twenty Famous Paintings list.

Climate activists have been targeting––but not harming––famous paintings, which I think is hilarious.  A man glued his head to this one's frame, just this week [NYT].
The protestors make a good point:

“How do you feel when you see something beautiful and priceless being apparently destroyed before your eyes?” the protester said.
“Do you feel outraged?
Good.
Where is that feeling when you see the planet being destroyed before your very eyes?”

I wouldn't go so far as Nietzsche as to wish for "nothing more than daily to lose some reassuring belief", to seek and find happiness "in this daily greater liberation of the mind."*

But I'd sure say that loss of reassuring belief is forced upon us––or at least it's plenty there for the taking––in these times.
(Maybe in every age, really.)
SO it could be seen as an invitation to greater liberation--though how much can a person take.
A little levity with your liberation?
______________________

*Did Nietzsche say that? It sounds like him, eh? but I can only find it unsourced...

The Lurid Jumble

Tear it up, kids, and I'll record it.
I started snapping photos of the toy mess at work out of angry amazement. But with this photo from yesterday––isn't it fantastic? could be a painting–– I'm eager for the agents of creative destruction to do it again.

I love assembling toy grab bags (below). Two bucks each.

The contents are mostly random, but I have some method.
Every bag gets a dinosaur, if I have them. (None here, I think.)
I mix toys for different ages and sexes. I share the more desirable toys between the bags––and make sure some eyes are looking out, to catch yours.

I don't clean these little toys. (The toy lady before me used to take boxes of toys home and run them through her dishwasher.) If they're filthy, I throw them out.
If one is a little bit broken, but safe (an action figure missing an arm, say), and is a really cool toy, I might put it in anyway. If I do, I make sure that bag has a pristine toy too.

The bags sell well, and occasionally people say they like them. No complaints, anyway.

Put a Sponge on It

An Instagram follower suggested I do more 'Name That Painting' doll recreations, after my Wyeth recreation yesterday. (I just put girlette photos on my IG--mostly I keep my account so I can chat with Fiona about dolls and toys.)

The Top Twenty famous paintings [one of many compilations] would be easy to do--most of them. They're so recognizable, having been turned into phone covers and fridge magnets, shower curtains and umbrellas. (A dress of Guernica? It's on Zippy, via Michael.)
Add one iconic element, and the whole thing snaps into place.
An upright pitch fork in a doll's hand, and you've got American Gothic.
So, it'd be doable and fun.

I immediately thought of Girl with a Pearl Earring--she already even looks like a girlette. The trick there would be the dramatic lighting--it'd be great practice for me. I never studied photography at all, but with our phones, it's not too hard to practice getting better.

The trick to yesterday's recreation of Christina's World was solved by the frightening, months-long drought here:
the blades of grass on the neighbor's doll-sized hill were so bone-dry they looked like Wyeth's crisply articulated ground cover.

I was surprised that several people told me they love this painting.
Why?
AW's painting style is always compelling, but this painting is too disturbing for me:
Christina's arms are skeletal, her fingers curled into the ground, as if trying to pull her heavy, inert bottom-half out of the wild prairie into the mowed lawn.
Reminds me of Walking Dead zombies.*

Richard Meryman wrote, in Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life:

"Wyeth is really a dark painter -- of disturbing subjects, of mordant things, of madness.
And he's a painter of courage and survival and dignity. The survival and dignity of misunderstood people -- hidden-away, misunderstood people."

Yeah, well, I see enough of those brave, misunderstood people (and they are brave!)--I don't need them on my wall.

I'd like to get better at photography, but I'm not interested in exact, technical recreations of artworks.
I love best when people use raw objects to hand. It was a thing during Covid, remember--"People Stuck at Home Recreating Artworks".

The kitchen sponge, here, to be a fuffle ^ on a headpiece--that's my favorite kind of genius.

I wonder if people have been changed by Covid stay-at-home time...
What do you think?

I can't see it myself, but I'm probably not at the right vantage point to see any such thing, if it's there. So many people I know were already stay-at-home makers of things, or retired, or didn't stop working during Covid anyway...
(And, we're not isolating anymore, but Covid is still here and has been incorporated into our normal dangers, like automobiles, etc.)

The bigger eruption in my life, anyway, and in the lives of people around me was the murder of George Floyd, being so immediate and up-close.

And now, off to work... Have a lovely weekend, everyone!

_________

* Oh--this explains it:
In Wyeth's painting, Christina is indeed pulling herself along with her arms--she had polio, probably, as a child.
(How would the viewer know this? Does it matter?)

"Wyeth’s neighbor Anna Christina Olson inspired the composition.... As a young girl, Olson developed a degenerative muscle condition—possibly polio—that left her unable to walk. She refused to use a wheelchair, preferring to crawl, as depicted here, using her arms to drag her lower body along.

“The challenge to me,” Wyeth explained, “was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless.”
--from MOMA

Name That Painting

Can you name the painting this girlette is re-creating?

Linda Sue answered in the comments:
Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth, 1948 (MOMA link).

What I'm Reading; Girlette Round-Up

Fiona, IG doll-friend in Berlin, asked me how many Orphan Red Dolls live here.
I wasn't sure.
I photographed all of the ones here, hanging out. (Penny Cooper is staying with Sophie as she recovers from a stroke, and new girlette, Jennifer Baker, is with Marz). With the ones out visiting, there are fifteen--a manageable number.

This is my favorite photo: Girlette Eeva on my bedside table, listening to Rat read aloud, with Girl Mountie & Duckette.
Eeva is Canadian, of Finnish descent, and she says she lost part of her feet on a desperate winter hike carrying wolf-hybrid puppies to safety.

I don't know what Rat is reading--I think maybe fairy tales?

I'm currently reading the two books on top of the pile:
Slowly I've been reading for a while now In Praise of Good Bookstores, by Jeff Deutsch—the director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores.

Gobbling up Somewhere Toward the End (2009), by English book editor Diana Athill in her ninety-first year, written with the intention ‘to understand, to be aware, to touch the truth’ about aging.
I'm thinking a lot about that myself, here at the entrance gate to old-age.

I like Athill; I relate to how she tends to be "interested rather than engaged"––a biscotti, not a cream bun––something she sometimes regretted, but not much.

I've read it before, and I've just reread her first memoir too, Stet: An Editor's Life (2000)--about books and writers she worked with.

I want to but haven't yet read her last memoir, Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter (2015).
Athill died in 2019, age 101.

 
Here are the rest of the Girlettes in Situ.

On my desk:

On the bookshelves:

In the kitchen, planning the Halloween jack-o-lantern:

Toy Bridge: Tiny Holies

Teeny tiny saint statues are the bouillon cubes of sacramentals,
packing more power per gram than bigger trinkets. (So say I, because I like them the best.)

The littlest here, in the red cape on the Toy Bridge, below, is the Infant of Prague. The full-size IoP changes outfits for liturgical seasons, but it can't do it itself:
"The Carmelite Sisters dress the small Jesus" (more info here). Red is "the colour of blood and fire."

This is a big reason I'm Catholic: for the toys.
(I'm not always sure I'm Catholic, but I'm always sure about toys.)

Hm--I looked up the etymology of toy:
"Of uncertain origin, and there may be more than one word here."

"there may be more than one word here"

A young woman at the store yesterday, with a couple rosaries to buy dangling from her hand, was asking me how to request help furnishing the new apartment she'll be moving into, especially with a bed.
She's the second woman recently to tell me about getting her life together.
A new life needs a place to sleep.

A lot of thrift stores don't carry beds--heavy, awkward, big, they're more trouble than they're worth. And being willing to accept used mattresses puts you in a tricky position:
"donors" (dumpers, really) try to offload their lumpy old pee-stained mattresses on you.

People actually get angry at the guys at the donations bay when they turn away mattresses or other filthy furniture. Some sneakily leave theirs outside after closing time. It costs money to dispose of them.
Trash is one of the store's biggest monthly expenses.

We do carry beds, but the store doesn't give out vouchers for free stuff---customers need to go through other agencies to get those.
As I said to the young woman, finding help is a full-time job.

"I'm trying everywhere," she said, and listed several places she's been.

Most people who badly need help don't have vehicles, of course, so they bus all over town to meet with social service agencies, and back again; and then there's the tangle of getting your furniture delivered.
Sometimes with little kids in tow;
sometimes while not feeling at all well... or feeling exhausted.

Often they're treated as a nuisance... because, honestly, desperation is a nuisance--"a person, thing, or circumstance causing inconvenience or annoyance"--and desperate people are often not at their best.
Confused, angry, frightened.
Thirsty! Sometimes people ask for water--writing this out makes me think I should remember to offer that.

And, if you don't squeak, your wheel doesn't get greased, so a lot of them are pushy, and is that ever effective.
It's not uncommon for one of the furniture guys to say, "I gave it to them for $– just to get them out of here."

This young woman was not pushy. She was tentative, but well spoken and well put together, except her face, which was wary, watchful.

My willingness to give a person time and attention depends on a lot of things, including if I've just had a nice lunch or not. I was not hungry, was in a good mood, and curious, even touched:
I was willing to spend extra time.

She told me some of her story--diagnosed bipolar ten years ago, unwilling to accept it at that time, now she is.

Less common, she asked me questions about the store, how it runs, and, way weirder, about Catholic theology.
I'd referred her to Incarnation Catholic Church for their aid and food shelf, and she asked me what "incarnation" meant, and whether Catholics believed in reincarnation.

No, I said, but they believe in the eventual resurrection of the body, at the End of Time...

Turns out, she was raised Jehovah's Witness. "It's a cult," she said. She told me they believe only 144K people will go to Heaven.
"I've been disfellowshipped though," she said, "and my family isn't allowed to talk to me or help me."

"That's too bad," I said. "Were you going to buy those rosaries?"

"Oh... yeah."

I reached for their price tags and took them off. "They're free," I said.
(I've mentioned here before that donated religious goods are supposed to be given away, but the store sells them anyway.) "I'll let the cashier know."

_____________

Here's my theology:

Life's hard.
Toys help.
There may be more than one Word here.

 

First Faces

(First, though--what? The UK has a new prime minister?
Rishi Sunak. Okay, then--just noting...)

I did quick-sketch some coworkers at the meeting yesterday.
And BB didn't talk about Jesus;
Ass't Man led the meeting, to talk about pricing.
He handed out print-outs of categories, and we spent the 20 minutes complaining, mostly each about their own area.

"Why are toilet seats listed under Furniture?" said Mr Furniture.

At the end, AM said, "Look the list over, and get back to me."

The lists were left lying around.

What I noticed mostly, through sketching, was that almost all the men wear hats. Few of the women wear hats.
Why is that? A lot of the men are balding, or bald, so maybe it's that. Even in summer?
While women don't want to flatten their hair?
I don't know.

BELOW: These are rough, but recognizable as...
Grateful-J; a new woman cashier I haven't mentioned; Jeff Croquette and Mr Furniture.

Stickers and Flags

What does Big Boss look like?

Thomas Jefferson + Darth Vader.

I'm taking a mini-sketchbook to this morning's staff meeting to sketch my coworkers surreptitiously...
Only half--maybe eight?--of us attend, so it might not be possible, but my idea is to look more closely at these people I see every day––I'm not so good at that––so I can fold physical descriptions into my diary.

Not "she was x-feet tall and had y-colored hair", but something that shows who they are.... (The always-dilated pupils of my "medicated" coworkers, for instance.)

BB told me yesterday that he wants to hold weekly meetings again. (Did he ever?) He was at a conference last week, so I'm guessing that's where he got the idea––or perhaps from management books he's been reading lately?

Will we talk about the challenges of the new pricing system, or will we talk about Jesus?
I bet you a quarter it's Jesus.

The pricing system is a pain:
Every department prints stickers for their own categories.
I'm lucky: I only have Books and Toys to price--Clothing has ten categories, each with its own stickers.

The strips of stickers quickly become a mess. I taped toy stickers to an empty cardboard tube and ran a strap through it:

See the ^ mini-LOL dolls, bottom left corner?
They came in one of the bags and boxes of toy donations that blocked the aisle of my workplace yesterday morning. LOL dolls are popular, and most of the donations were unusually good like that.

I've decided to spiff up Toys--now I've made room by adding a slat board to hang grab bags, which is why I was washing toys (yesterday's post).
I usually swipe dirty toys with Windex, rather than bothering to take them to the work sink in Housewares. It's "the" sink, outside the bathrooms--even the kitchen doesn't have one.

I spent all day putting out toys, and they were selling fast--some, right out of my cart.
The day's toy take was double the norm:
a whole fifty bucks.

Flag

Art volunteer found another donated Ukraine flag and asked me where we should hang it---BB shot down Art's request to hang it in the window.

What does Art look like?
A crane. A stalk of wheat... Tall, pale, with thinning blond hair made spiky by swimming in a chlorine pool. (When possible, he swims in the lake. He wears a wet suit in cold but not freezing weather.)

He is outraged about Putin. Trying to convince BB we should display Ukraine's flag in support, Art said, "Putin is like Hitler."

(The thing is, BB barely knows how bad Hitler is.
I've talked to him about the Holocaust, and it's another area where he's told me, "I don't know much about it.")

"Ukraine is an outrage!" he told me.

"I know," I said, "and you should talk to Manageress about Eritrea and Ethiopia. They're just as bad, but no one knows about them." (Manageress is from Eritrea.)
 
Zero interest from Art.

Art likes expressing outrage, but he actually does do useful things, not just rant.
I said we could hang the flag on the wall above the History books. (Very tall ceilings in the back room where BOOK's are.)

"Where are your history books?" Art said.
Another non-book reader--he gets his news from the Internet, where, of course, it is indeed the latest.

He got on a ladder and hung the flag. I'm glad of it.

Monday morning: washing toys

Lipstick stains and general grime

 

Book Chat: Paper, Weight in Harry Potter

I. "Harry Potter used up all our paper."

Here's an eye-opening word-problem that opens Paul Collins's Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books (2003):

     "It's a good thing, my editor says,"that your book isn't being published right now."
     "Oh?"
     "Because"––he leans forward––"Harry Potter used up all our paper."
     "You're joking."
     "Seriously... I'm telling you the truth. There's two major paper producers for New York publishers, and with a five-million print run of an eight-hundred-page book, well... everybody else has to wait in line."

Isn't that wild? I've never thought of that equation.
I was never good at setting up word problems, but let's do the math.

5 million books x 800 pages = 4 billion pages of paper.
That's how many pages were in the print run of the fifth(?*) Harry Potter book.
Four billion. Can that be right?
I double checked. Yes, 5mm x 800 = 4,000,000,000 pages of paper.

So, further, how many trees does it take to make 4 billion pages of paper?

According to Ribble Paper Packaging:
On average, "a standard pine tree, with 45ft of the usable trunk and a diameter of eight inches, will produce around 10,000 sheets of paper."

Let's see...
That's 4 billion pages (in the print run of the Harry Potter novel) divided by 10,000 (pages per tree), right?

The answer is 400,000. Four hundred thousand. Trees. To make 4 billion pages.

Please check my math, but I think that's right.
400,000 trees (at 10,000 pages per tree) produce 4,000,000,000 (4 billion) pages of paper.

And the upshot is . . . BUY USED BOOKS!!!

As Shaun Bythell points out in his Diary of a Bookseller, the huge print runs are why first editions of Harry Potter books (and other massive bestsellers) aren't worth much. (Usually--some of the first run of the first HP book bring in large amounts).

Harry Potter books still sell well, and if we get like-new hardcovers at the thrift store, I can sell them for a quarter of their cover price––say, $7 for the last volume, HP and the Deathly Hallows, which lists at $35.
(You can buy it for half the list price at Nagini... I mean, Amazon.
Nagini is Voldemort's snake.)

II. "taken for granted efforts yet unwavered"

Have you seen the illustrated Harry Potters by artist Jim Kay?
[His website, Creepy Scrawlers, with his partner, the milliner Louise Clark. Also on Instagram.]

Here's Kay's illustration of Hermione Granger in the first book, (from a good selection––worth looking at––in The Guardian).
Sometimes Hermione is portrayed as almost a fuss-budget, and J K Rowling has her crying all the time,
but Kay shows her seriousness of intent and her almost freakish (for a child), focused intelligence.

Kay's illustrations add weight  to the sometimes emotionally . . . slight books. His vision is dark and dignified, not cute-magic.
Emotionally slight? Are J. K. Rowling's books slight?
I've always felt they were a bit, yes.
Did you?
But JKR's intricate world is robust too, and it can  s t r e t c h  like Stretch Armstrong.

I only heard of Kay's illustrated editions last Christmas. Come to think of it, it was his vision that laid the ground for me to read Harry Potter again, when I was laid up this summer with a sore shoulder and had a copy of HP: Deathly Hallows (to take it to the store). I was surprised that I liked the story more this time--looking past the disappointment.

 Kay takes a realistically dark view. To illustrate Hagrid the groundskeeper, for instance, he said:

"While designing Hagrid I looked at the eyes of different alcoholics, both locally and through history.
I was fascinated with Luke Kelly's face, from [Irish band] The Dubliners, but eventually settled on the eyes of Winston Churchill, and the nose of somebody I saw in my local town."

I was sorry to read that with this month's publication of the illustrated HP: Order of the Phoenix (book 5) comes the announcement that Kay has had to give up illustrating the rest of the Harry Potters due to his mental health. He lives with bipolar disorder.

Maybe that's where some of his understanding of darkness comes from? Of the Order of the Phoenix, he wrote,

"It’s great that this is a slightly darker book, and the children are getting older. This is getting more into my comfort zone now. I really struggled with the first two books."

So, yeah, maybe so.
But––and this is a HUGE but––just last week, on October 13–-Kay also wrote on his IG a rejection of the idea that mental illness helps art.**
Here, from the text alongside a scene of grief in Dumbledore’s office.

I was in a terrible place when I did this, and it kind of shows.

I get very frustrated when people try and imply that having mental health problems somehow helps you as an artist.
It doesn’t.
It impacts your work, your life, it estranges you from people you love, and you are left constantly thinking what you could have achieved were it not for your illness.
And therein lies the worst part; it makes you a self pitying, and ultimately selfish horror to be around.

Then you get a blank sheet of paper and think ‘maybe this time, things will be better’. The blank page is hope, the chance that maybe next time, I’ll get it right.

When I was young and romantic and knew nothing about pain, I thought that if pain brought insight,  it was worth it.
Now, making cuckoo clocks without pain sounds good to me.
Not that we get to choose. 

Jim Kay talked further about living with BPD in an interview in 2018 with ArtDependence:

"I am very fond of gardening.
I suffer from bipolar disorder, which makes most of my daily life a living hell, but oddly when I garden it's the only time I can think positively about the future.
You are creating a living visual picture that comes into fruition a year or maybe longer from now.

"Everything else in my life is a battle to just get through the day. It's almost impossible to plan ahead - except when I look at the garden.
I only get a few minutes a day out there, but without it I'd be lost."

I am sorry Kay has had to give up illustrating Harry Potter.
I hope being free of it will bring relief as well as grief–– "crushing", he called it.
He's done extraordinary work on shorter projects--such as the  illustrations for A Monster Calls (...about grief and relief).
Godwilling, he will create many more.

________________

The comment, below, on this illustration on Jim Kay's IG is such a wonderful tribute, it made me cry.

thyme_.kartiki

Good morning Sir, these pure lives which you have rendered our world, it's genius sir, honestly.
For all your extreme and serious efforts, probably even taken for granted efforts yet unwavered. Sir, you created for us something that had and is still helping us grow, be unafraid, be proud of work, be confident, be natural, be ourselves, humble, true, honest, using our efforts where the words shall only help and never ever in the slightest, harm.
You brought it back to life for us.
From the very bottom of our hearts, of the entire wizarding pottermore community. Mr. Jim Kay, thank you, from a fellow Luna.

• 
  

creepy_scrawlers thank you x

_________________________


*The book with the 5-million print run must have been the fifth Harry Potter book, The Order of the Phoenix (2003)--the longest at 870 pages according to "How Many Pages in Harry Potter?".

__________________

**What Jim Kay says about mental illness not aiding art reminds me of what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in "The Crack Up", and David Foster Wallace in "The Depressed Person".
Hilary Mantel, too, said something along the same lines about suffering and art.

Mantel lived with debilitating pain from endometriosis and migraines. Because she couldn't work a regular job, she was trapped at home. Also, surgery left her unable to have children. She had time to write, when she felt "half-well".
I wish I could find the source of something I read somewhere--but where?––Mantel writing that when someone told her that her pain was a gift because it let her be a writer, she replied that she'd rather not have the pain.

Searching, I found this:


"Historians and, I’m afraid, doctors, underestimate what chronic pain can do to sour the temper and wear away both the personality and the intellect."

– From "Hilary Mantel in Her Own Words", a round-up of quotes in The Guardian


Also not the source I was looking for, but a good article about Mantel and the body in pain, from this week's New Yorker:
www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/hilary-mantels-double-vision

Fourteen Magic Penguins

Book donations have slowed at the store (cooler weather?), and yesterday I had time to straighten the shelves and re-alphabetize the Fiction section. A couple Penguin Classics came in this week, and as I went through the shelves I noticed a few more, then a few more, and...
Yay! Fourteen Penguins: enough for a display.

I wonder what it's like to be a reader and to go into a thrift store and see a display of Penguin Classics.
Hell's bells, I'd think. This is fantastic. I might buy every one, and be set back all of fourteen dollars.

When I started being custodian of books at the store, I might have been a little diffident about my belief in the Goodness of books. Not sure of being culturally biased, and all that.

Now, having seen lives deprived of reading,
I trumpet how good books are.

There are other good-to-great ways of being educated, entertained, and enlarged, (or, possibly, etiolated), and of wasting time. Of course there are.
But... there's nothing that has the REACH of books.
They're not dependent on their creators being nearby, or even alive.
You don't need a machine to access them.
Also, you can write one yourself.

We can have a good, full life without books. But without them, our scope is narrower.
Reading gives our neurons extensions, like penguins that can fly.
This is magic. 

Magic is good.

Growing Girlettes

iPhoto labeled a batch of photo "Memories" GROWING UP. Entirely their invention.
How did they know to chose the photo of Racer with her underpants on her head? Along with Minnie Sutherland here, she went of live with Sarah of Circles of Rain in London where they didn't grow up--but they did get more sophisticated (though suitably little-girl) clothes.

BELOW: Here they are with Sarah's girlette pod in the Halloween costumes she made them last year (photo borrowed from her blog--you can see many more terrific Halloween photos there):
Racer in the skull cap, second from left, and Minnie in the red dress and bat/cat ears is second from right.
The most excellently named AMF is the pumpkin. Sarah wrote, "She is called AMF because she arrived in the box of an Adjustable Milk Frother."

 

 It's warm this weekend--I have opened the window to set the smelly batch of dolls in the windowsill. After a vinegar bath and a baking soda spa, they are already smelling much better.
Hopefully the fresh air will blow away the lingering dank odor.

They fly to Fiona in Berlin on Monday! All except Stripe, the Orphan Red Doll (far left), who lives here now.
Good thing they were cheap to buy (even counting the cost of vinegar & baking soda) because they will cost a fortune to mail.

Robust Toy Bridge

Toy Bridge: This has become my favorite part of the store!
Grateful-J put up this metal strip for me to display books,
but it's too narrow, so little goodies go there now.

 

 

Bear ^ is from a hot-plastic mold machine at the zoo.

ABOVE: Macho Baby rattle, made in Hong Kong. Waddya guess? 1970s?
Baby Miss Piggy. (I think she looks a little like Linda Sue's baby friend Flora.)
Puppet is King Friday XIII, from Mister Rogers.

Only problem--people snatch up most of the items, and I don't have enough little tchotchkes to keep it continually filled.
Only cool ones go here--of course we have lots of the usual Precious Moments figurines and stuff.

Revision: Be Robust

I deleted much of what I posted yesterday about Big Boss (BB) and Ass't Man (AM).
I keep having to decide/revise what I want to go on the permanent record.
(I've started labeling it Thriftstore Diary rather than Bookstore Diary, because it's hardly ever about just the books.)

In this case, it's not just that what I wrote was negative and analytical (rather than a story example, which I'd prefer), it was also incomplete, one-sided, and, so, inaccurate.

See, I talked to AM for an hour in the parking lot last night and was reminded of the other side of the story.

AM never "manages" me anymore, so I rarely see this side of him, but it was what we'd had conflict over from the start.
You know how I so appreciate the phrase, "You aren't the savior"?
AM kinda thinks he is.

It's a burden for a person to carry that expectation of their self, and it's an affliction to others! But he thinks they (our coworkers, and BB) should thank him for imposing his "salvation" on them (us)!
Oh, dear.
No.

Here's the thing: AM said he grew up with the teaching that you should always leave things better for the person after you. And that efficiency is the goal.
Well, that's fine.
But efficiency and improvement are simply NOT everyone's main goal, and he judges them harshly, personally, if it's not--like they're stupid and wrong.

I can see that efficiency is not BB's main motivation.
Whether I like that or not isn't the point--it's what I have to work with.

BB does drive me crazy with his inefficient retail management, as I am always saying, but I also give him full credit that he's GREAT at people. And I value that more.
He is unflappable (usually) and sees mad, sad, and bad behavior as ... hm... coming from woundedness, not stupidity.

AM seems to think people are stupid or something if they act badly.
That's just wrong. I mean, incorrect. (Well, usually. But intelligence levels are beside the point.)

The other day, a squirrely woman came in looking for help choosing out furniture--she had a voucher for a free bed and stuff. (Different organizations give these vouchers to people in need.)

She talked indiscriminately, at a mile a minute, but she was friendly and coherent and open.

"I've been clean for a year," she told me. "I've got a place of my own now, so I'm getting furniture."

"That's great," I said. "Congratulations! Mr Furniture can help you."

"Thanks", she said. "Yeah, last year I was one of those people out on the sidewalk here."

"How did you get out?" I asked.

"I guess it was God," she said.

OMG. That reminds me of what BJ, my store-friend who died of lung cancer this spring, said--coming from her own, intimate experience of drugs and prostitution:

"The people on the street acting crazy
hate it as much as you do."

I do wish, wish, wish that BB were as fluent in the nuts-and-bolts of retail as he in people skills--in things like shelving, and displays, and price tags--and all the side of retail he doesn't seem to care about--or gets wrong.
(He bought a new price-tagging system for the store a couple weeks ago, and I could tell immediately that it was way too complex, and too flimsy, for our rough-and-ready store, and that it was going to be a Big Problem. Sure enough, someone already jammed --broke?--the printer part of it.
We need ROBUST, not efficient systems.
We've gone back to hand-writing tags, which is pretty much foolproof.)

HOWEVER...
I am at the store because I LOVE the philosophy of BB, and others.
Which is: efficiency isn't the goal. Saving people isn't the goal.
Lumpy and backward and misguided as it may come out,
Love is.

 _______________
De-Odorizing

I bought a batch of dolls cheap ($11) on Mercari.
When I opened the package, I could tell why they were cheap: the odor of Musty Plastic. I soaked them in vinegar water, then they spent a couple days in a bag with baking soda. This morning they smell slightly better. Next effort: a day in direct sunshine.

Below, short-haired Spike welcomes the new 'Madeline'--her name is Stripe--who'll be staying here. "We're sisters!" (Most of the girlettes are cousins, they tell me, but some few are sisters.)
The other dolls (including the standing Bratz doll, from the store) are all birthday presents for IG friend Fiona.

Stripe, below, drying her dress on a pumpkin.
Her plastic still smells a bit, but the dress is fresh.

"Thank you for existing."

We are the Boxcar Children at the thrift store:
"Look, I found a spoon! We can use it for displays!"

Never Enough Room is the name of the game, nor supplies either:
we are scroungers.

This summer, Grateful-J took apart an old bookshelf for me.
He salvaged its three slat boards--they hold display fixtures––and we just mounted the last of the boards in Toys, to hang my Grab Bags.
The woman below is looking at puzzles––good sellers.
The guy is buying all the toy trucks we had in stock. (The two shoppers were not together.)

BELOW: Aren't I clever? I wrapped that yellow bungee cord around the green pillar last year, to dangle stuffed animals on hangers.
Pre–slat board, grab-bags squeezed onto that white pegboard.
(Shelves are around the corner from the slat board too.)

I'm so pleased to have wrangled more space. (The area was a rare bit of dead space before.) And so proud of me and Grateful-J:
we get no retail guidance, much less encouragement to do any of this.

Ass't Man is a supporter. In his home life, he makes lamps and things from scrap.
Big Boss tends to view innovation with suspicion. I didn't ask him for permission to hang the board, we just did it while he's out of state at a conference.

AM decided not to apply at Meetings-All-the-Time Thrift Store, but... now Salvation Army is hiring managers, he told me.
He's pondering.
I advised him to gather information, at least.
Some conflict will turn up wherever AM goes, because he brings it, but at least SalArmy would pay $6/hour more.

(I do have reservations about the organization--SA is a militaristic religion... But hey, we work for a Catholic organization, and it's not like they're champions of equality/)

 It's a hard call when you're in a rocky place, but you're growing.
 Do you tough it out? How long to stay? When to leave?

BB mostly leaves me alone, and I hope to stay at the store forever.
I'd said when I started that I'd like to work in BOOK's for the rest of my working life.
And now, in Toys.

Toys are a pain, because people often donate them broken and filthy. Broken, as in unfixable, finger-slicing, cracked plastic.
Filthy, as in unremovable marker scribbles and lipstick stains.
Nothing for it but to throw them out.

However, there's also the category of fixable and cleanable.
How much to bother? Given the very real limitations of time and energy and space... (and value).

I did take these two cuties home and threw them in the washing machine. They were both filthy, but endearing. The monkey is a Boyd, the beagle is a modern cloth (not mohair) Steiff, neither very valuable.

A friend sent me the postcard, "Thank you for existing."
It applies to cool old thrift too. And bloggers. Thank yoU!

I am not the savior.

It's 7:15 in the morning, as I write this. Outside my living-room windows, the sky is pale stripes of pink and blue, like the trans flag!
(I've never lived in an apartment primarily facing west, so it's new sky/light for me... )

Now we're in October, I've been going to bed early again, and getting up early.
When it's dark at 6 in the evening, I have a hard time staying up for many hours past that, especially since I rarely watch media (which does keep me awake).
I kind of like getting up in the dark mornings, and seeing the sky gradually lighten.

I never wrote here what helped me with my question I'd taken to the useless therapist:
How can I show up for the suffering of others, especially the people I see at work?

As I did write about, after the therapist suggested Buddhism and therapy books from the 1990s, I went looking again in the bloody mess of the Christian story.

I found the answer I needed in a youTube video by Fr. Mike Schmitz (the Catholic chaplain at--funnily enough--UM-Duluth),
Is Self-Care Selfish? Why Self-Care Is Important for Loving Others.

Most of what he says is solid and familiar:
Take care of yourself so you can help others. If oxygen levels fall, put on your own air mask before helping others put theirs on.
And, You are worth taking care of. In Christian terms, you are a beloved child of God. "Love your neighbor as yourself" presumes you, commands you to, love yourself.

But also––this was it for me––he looks into the camera at min. 8:55 and says,
"You're not the savior."

Wow. That hit me. I watched him say it a dozen or more times.
"You're not the savior. So you get to establish boundaries. You get to actually say, No."

But I knew that. Even if you don't believe in "a Savior," I, you, we know we are not it, right?

Well, yeah.
But, no.
My parents were non-religious, but my mother taught me since babyhood that it was my job was to save her.
I was her little soul mate. I was her savior.
Or, I was supposed to be.

NOT THAT IT WORKED.
I always say, sort of jokingly? that I did all I could, and she killed herself anyway. 

That's the thing: We can help; but no matter how much we knock ourselves out, we can't save. Not because we're a failure, but because we are not supernatural. (Whatever we do, however super, is in our nature.)

After our mother's death, my sister said,
"We can't live without love. But love is not enough."

"You are not the savior":
THAT is what I needed to hear. I need to know and remember that I'm not failing to be the savior of the people dying on the sidewalk---I actually am not the savior.

If I hadn't seen that deficient therapist, I wouldn't have gone looking to that wacky religion for help.
So––ha! therapy worked, via negativa.
(Also, the Not-a-Savior story was free, not $185/hour.)

That phrase, "I am not the savior", which I say to myself, is such a comfort... and a charge. I wasn't looking for help to say No; I wanted help saying Yes.
It makes me MORE able to do whatever tiny, little thing I can (should/ want to) do as a tiny, little human, same as they are––tiny, little humans.

If all I can do is ask some desperate person (or non-desperate one) what their name is, then I want to DO THAT.
It's not enough, but I don't have to put that expectation on myself. It's so freeing to know I am not-enough.
I can be a steward, but I am not a savior.
That's the way it is.

Maybe, with that perspective, I can feel freer to ask for help for myself too.
I always felt I was overburdening people, but asking for help is NOT asking for salvation, it's just asking someone to do a tiny, little human thing. As we do.

The other day, a coworker was telling me about a desperately needy friend, and how she feels bad that she can't show up for this friend at all the times the friend wants (needs?).

"It's okay you can't give your friend everything," I said. Feeling a little presumptuous, I added, "You are not the savior."

It was like administering anti-toxin. Her face literally relaxed at the words, "You are not the savior".

"I needed to hear that," she said.
So did I.
______________

Odo the Bear patiently waiting ^ for me to get an Xmas tree to hang bulbs on.

Portinari Altarpiece (w/ Girlettes)

"Mary and Joseph on the Way to Bethlehem"; detail in the background of the Portinari Altarpiece, c. 1475, by Hugo van der Goes, Flemish, now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

At the lake a mile from me, there's a rocky spot that'd make a good stand-in for the original scene.
I was going to take the toys there, but decided to try to to reproduce the whole scene in my room.
(I don't have a cow though.)