Catch Up / Typewriter

I've been gone from blogging for a week because SOMEONE took my iPhone to New York City and traded it for a BAGEL.
But what a beautiful bagel, eh?

Truth: I did lend Marz my iPhone to take to NYC last week because she only has a flip phone. And she did get that bagel.
But it was bought (for a surprising amount of money, like $30+) by a  friend from here whose family lives in Brooklyn. Marz and her friend were staying in the house while the family went to Cape Cod.

Here she is in a park--maybe you recognize it?

Marz had never been to NYC. "It's vertical", she reports. Also, like everybody says, "THE ENERGY." I've only been a few times, and not in twenty years, but I remember that--like an electric shock, but in a good way.
She loved it. She says maybe she'll move there after she gets her degree. (BA in journalism is the current plan.)

Now I have my phone back, and this morning Marz is driving up to Duluth (150 miles/241 km) to look at apartments, last minute, so she doesn't have to share a dorm room at 33 years old.
Classes start in 12 days...

Duluth is horizontal---it runs along the lake, and above the city is a ridge traversed by the Lake Superior Hiking Trail.
The energy is nature and weather. Wolves and wind.
Really wolves--residents are warned to keep their pets safe--wolves will snatch and eat them.

I always thought Duluth was an undiscovered wonder.
No more. Climate refugees are moving (lots from California) to this cool port city on fresh water. It's still plenty wild, for now. Just, yoga studios have moved into broken down sailor bars.

Speaking of urban wildness--Emmler's boyfriend took this photo in the densely populated neighborhood near the thrift store.
You can see the little face looking out of the sewer, can't you?

I've loved having Marz here this summer, and I'll miss her, but I'm super excited for her next new endeavor. I hope it's like the NM goat farm (good) and not the wilderness canoe camp (bad).
It's so funny to me how I never particularly wanted children, but I get all these mommish experiences from knowing Marz since 2009 (... omg, that's fifteen years). Ta-da!
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Typewriters

My last printmaking class was last night. I'm sad about that. I'll continue printing at home, but I'll miss the company.
Continuing on with my plan to make small and/or usable things, I made typewriter cards.

Fifty of them! I don't even know fifty people.

My biggest lesson: take more care, especially with ink. I am fast but messy, and that's not a good mix in printmaking: half the cards have smudges on the empty page from where it brushed against the ink. Still perfectly usable, but not ideal.
Gotta work fast + clean.
Will try harder.

Also, drawing and printing the machine evoked such physical memories-- ink on your fingers from changing the ribbon, the ding of the paper return-- it made me want a typewriter. They get donated sometimes, but they usually don't work, and they aren't cheap to get repaired. I'll keep an eye out, though I don't know how much I'll volunteer at the thrift store once school starts.

OMG, the store!
The efflorescence of deprivation there had worn me down to my last nerve, but I want to stay in touch with the humor and creativity that also flowers there.
My coworkers told me that last week a customer pulled a machete--a machete!--because she was unhappy with the price of clothes.
"But everyone knows you can ask and we'll give you some clothes."

Luckily Mr Furniture was there (he's usually at the warehouse these days). He knows about these things.
"What did he do?" I asked.

"He picked up a chair and told her, 'I will hit you over the head so hard...', and she put it away. And then she only took ONE shirt!"

Of course they gave her a shirt.
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Learn, Deflect

School is going to be wonderful!
So I tell myself.
In fact, I kinda doubt it, but there is no doubt that I will learn a lot, and that's important. A School for Learning, wonderful in its way. And have I mentioned the pay? (Heh, that's a big feature, and we just got a raise.)

I was thinking of jobs I've loved.
I'd loved being a breakfast grill cook in my late teens, early twenties---the speed and heat and dance of it. I was proud that I could take raisin bread out of the toaster with my bare hands, the raisins heated to be little sugar bombs.

I just read Anthony Bourdain's memoir about restaurant work--Kitchen Confidential. I recognized a lot of it, though I worked in gentler social circumstances--not the late night, cocaine-fueled, psycho kitchens he loved. Still, even the collectively run, whole-foods restaurant I worked at when I was nineteen was plenty whacko. 

Bourdain--his book--was a shot in the arm, an antidote to an overexposure of woke green hygge self-care worry.
"Your body is not a temple," he writes, "it's a playground."

What I want to learn most at school: play! And don't give a fuck about the inane systems and their implementers.
Yeah, right: that's an Olympic level task when you're IN the system.

[Above, via someone on FB]

The trick, I think, is not to focus on or fight the system,
but to give love and energy to life/work OUTSIDE the system.
Distract, and move on.
Deflect and redirect.

I will work on printmaking, and a lot of planning that goes into that--more than I realized. "Reduction printmaking", which I haven't done, is all about planning... carving and printing layers of color at each stage. You have to think the whole process through before you start. I can work that out during slow times. (But pleasegod, let us not watch Disney movies three times a week like last year.)
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Cousins

Facebook did something curious--it linked me to a cousin on my mother's side. I only have two cousins on that side--this woman, Kate, and her brother--and I've had no contact with them since the 1970s.
(My mother was mostly estranged from her one sibling, Mary.)

So, HOW DID FB KNOW?
Perhaps both Kate and I searched Ancestry.com or something?
I can't find any other connection.

I friended Kate, and she accepted, saying that that very week she'd been talking to her teenage daughter about family members the daughter had never met---and then I turned up.

She hasn't said much else, but she sent me a couple photos on her family's porch--from 1974, I think.
L to R: My aunt Mary, my sister (15), cousin Tom, me (13), cousin Kate

My aunt had adopted a John-Updike life in Amherst, MA, far from her Missouri roots. I remember her being sour with Kate. They certainly don't look happy here...

Judging from her FB, Kate is thriving now, running a horse-training and boarding farm. We'd both loved horses when we were girls, and I was a little envious to see that. Good for her!

All for now--I have things I should do but don't have to do, so I won't. I'm going to play with my typewriter cards.