Before I begin with my blithering I think you should treat yourself to a visit to our own Michelewln's personal website in honor of her birthday.
Yeah, uh-huh, that's right, I'm starting right out and making this a call-out diary.
Ban me.
Get over to that site already! It's a personal, moving, funny, amazing collection of digital art, pootie pics (and if you're not in love with Pixie by now I'll just go right ahead and call you a heartless bastard-- yeah, I went there, makin' it personal, equating a dislike of cats to illegitimacy... ), creative crafts, jewelry and-- oh heck, I'll spend the rest of the afternoon linking up sections of that site. There's so much to see and read over there. I can't possibly link to everything. I mean, there's this cookbook over there, it's bigger every time I visit it... it gets under your skin and makes you do things like add cocoa to chili soup.
Yes, yes... I'm making chili soup as I write this and, inspired by Michele's fantastic cooking skills and creativity, I'm changing my chili. Do you understand what that means? I am shaken to my very core! My chili soup, the only soup I made that my father-in-law liked! My chili soup, the only thing I cook that my sister-in-law's husband has requested year after year... My chili is beloved! How can I change it? Why, a man's chili soup is his calling card! Ye shall know the measure of a man by the tastiness of his chili. And by his chili shall he be known.
Ah, but I trust you Michele. Your recipes have inspired me to great deeds in the past and so-- I will bravely face change as a true progressive, and with this determination to overcome my own insecurities and inadequacies I will denounce this cowardly chili conservatism of mine!
And my soup shall be the better for it.
Happy birthday, michelewln!
My fluff beyond the fold.
That's right, down here in the bellybutton of the diary-- my fluff.
The first slice in this diary was a slice of birthday cake. That's a good place to start. I've had various slices of life on my mind this week. Nearly every day I've been getting photos from my brother-in-law who is the proud father of two, fresh and wrinkly little babies. They're ten days old at this point. Today's batch shows the wee ones finally away from all the tubes and sticky tape and plastic bubble beds-- finally able to sleep side by side again as they had been doing before all the fuss of being born happened. Don't tell them, but they're not due to be born for another couple of weeks.
I think they're the first twins in the family.
I've been digging through my own slices this week. Maybe the metaphor works better as a layer cake in this instance although I suppose each definable period of one's life is a slice and all that happens in that slice of time is piled up in layers. Layer cake, my life as a layer cake-- why not?
The digging actually began a week or so ago when an old professor of mine tagged me in some silly internet challenge game. The challenge is to post 5 of your artworks in 5 days-- it's mostly just a way to get your friends to post more of their art on Facebook. I waited a bit to give me time to scrounge and found myself rediscovering all sorts of drawings that I'd saved from over the years. I looked through it all, wondering how much of it would be better off used to stoke my kiln this autumn. I saw things that surprised me-- some of it was better than I'd remembered, some of it was worse than I'd remembered. A couple of things I hadn't remembered doing at all-- but seeing them again triggered the memory of their creation. I can look at many of the drawings I made when I was in grade school and recall the physical act of drawing them.
I guess that makes me sort of a visual memory person. Numbers were a struggle for me in school. I couldn't tell you from memory when George Washington was born or died, but I remember drawing a picture of his portrait on the one dollar bill. I still have that picture, it was even published in a little, underground comix paper that a friend of mine started in college-- and a very professional little rag it was, too.
I dug down through the layers of high school work, college work and the seemingly endless layers of storyboard drawings that I drew for several years as a professional artist, the published copies of my drawings and paintings used as illustrations that I'd saved-- and I wondered about the things I didn't have a copy of, wondered if they exist somewhere, documented in someone's design portfolio or photo album.
A magazine that I'd done some work for is celebrating its 300th issue this month. I dug up a copy of a painting I'd done as it had appeared on one of their covers and shared it on Facebook. Some of my work leads me to new projects, new slices-- that job didn't lead anywhere it seems.
It all gets me thinking about this slice, my productivity at this phase of my life. Which brings up to thoughts of when the next slice is going to begin and what will distinguish it from previous and, hopefully, future slices.
Posting new old stuff, and new new stuff on my Facebook page got me to examine my own profile for the first time in a year or two. I discovered that the college listed on my profile had gained an address and that it was not my school. So I changed that and while I was there I dredged up a photo of myself from 1990 that was sitting, forgotten, in an ignored album on the site and set it up as my new profile picture.
There's a lot going on in my head as I look at that goopy-eyed youth. I know exactly what he's thinking. He's looking at the young woman taking his picture and dreading saying goodbye to her in just a few hours at the airport. The shirt that hairy lad is wearing was a gift from her. A few months after one of their farewells a year earlier, after their first kiss in a small field surrounded by woods, she had taken part in the revolution that made shirts like that one possible. So many things were changing in our lives. A time of hopes and fears. This photo was taken at the Sky Deck of what was then still the Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower) in Chicago, what was then the tallest building in the world.
What was then...
Knowing the location of the photo adds to the unreality of our lives at that point. It is a moment stolen between the slices. We had just had a month together after a year apart with another year apart looming nearer as we stood on top of the world-- well, okay, so it wasn't Mount Everest and the Sky Deck isn't even the top floor...
It's strange, the unexpected directions our lives can take.
I remember my dad telling me how odd it was for him to imagine that his father died without knowing anything about him getting divorced from my mom and the Czech-American woman he met at a ballroom dance class and married a couple of years later. My grandpa didn't have any idea of the direction my father's life would take, a Czech direction that eventually made me so sick of writing letters that I moved to Prague.
So now, I sit here, typing away in the Liver of Europe as my chili simmers away in the kitchen. I've just arrived back from driving over to #1 Son's school to pick him up after his week of intensive French lessons and a bit of skiing in the last of the snow in the mountains to the northeast along the Polish border. I find myself wondering more about his life than my own. I wonder where he'll be ten, twenty, thirty years from now. I might manage to be around for at least that much of it, but I come from a family that is scattering itself slowly across the planet. French is a useful language on a few different continents. I'm missing him already... heh, I missed him quite enough during the week.
Yes, I'm still goopy.
I'm enjoying the daily photos of the twins. I love the beaming, goofy, goopy smile on my brother-in-law's face in the pictures of him holding his babies. I know that feeling.
My #2 Son finally got back to school today after a few days off to play with a cough. He'll be changing schools in the fall, beginning a new slice of his life. He has a choice of direction; he has applied to two different schools. Neither of my kids seem particularly driven toward a single profession at this point in their lives. I wonder which directions they'll choose and which directions they'll follow.
Should I compare their choice of direction to choosing a slice of cake or pie from the dessert cart in a restaurant? Or is that just getting silly-- hmm, yes.
Goopy and silly.
I started this bit of navel gazing with a reference to bellybuttons and the fluff found therein. I don't know if any of my fluff is worth reading today. I feel like it was worth writing and if there is anything of worth to be learned from all of this-- it's probably that cocoa powder is an excellent addition to chili.