Some Assembly Required

I really love productive days off. Yesterday, Mike and I went to IKEA to get a work table that we saw last week when we went to see what all the fuss was about. Last week I left IKEA scared out of my wits... ok, fine. Maybe not scared but on sensory overload. I was overwhelmed by all of the everything that was there to be seen, and all of the people that were there seeing it, and by fighting our way through the maze of stuff, and by the life size floor plans of tiny places to live. The small floor plans probably got to me the most- while I could appreciate the utilitarianism of making the most of a small space, and not needed a bigger space, I felt too confined and boxed in- and I don't even live there! Then I was overwhelmed with guilt that my apartment was something like twice the size of the biggest house model there ( model- 520, our apartment- 1020), and I feel like I need every square inch of it. I'm sorry, I like my space. I have more stuff that I am proud to admit, but I do use it, and at least a third of it is books. So IKEA filled me with wonder and left me feeling like an eco-jerk. Oh well. My favorite thing about IKEA is the pro-organization ethic, and making the most of whatever type of space you have. While I don't think I'm so into the furniture like the beds and chairs and couches, I am way into the shelving, lighting, boxes and workspaces. And, If I had a baby, they have amazing baby furniture =). So I got a work table that does exactly what I need. The height of the table top is adjustable and can tilt if I need it to, the trestles have shelves that I can keep things such as my sewing machine on, and the table top itself is beautifully spacious enough for my paper cutting, and quilt making, and everything. Yes.

Also, Mike went by Garden Ridge and got us chairs for the porch- Adirondack styled rocking chairs. We had to put those together, too, and it wasn't as easy as the IKEA assembly. By the way, the assembly instructions for our table had no words in it! The diagram was beautiful and accurate and easy to follow- wow! The Garden Ridge instructions were a little less readable and not nearly as clean to look at. Nevertheless, we prevailed and now have lovely rockers to enjoy our porch with. Now if I can just figure out what to do with our bicycles- we want to try to keep them under the stairs leading up to our apartment without feeling like the management will kill us or the bikes will be stolen. Ahh, challenges!

You really should come by and visit us, and enjoy this all with us =)

So in reading over previous posts, of which there are few, I realized that I wrote "more better" as part of a sentence. Here's the excerpt;

     "creating a more better creativity space for myself"

Ok, problem. Apparently I am fallible. Blast. I could try to be clever and argue that I meant I had a great space already, that I wanted one that was even better than the space I had already made better, but it won't matter. More better is always wrong. Even if it really might be more better. The saddest part is, I could see myself saying more better as a joke, but I can't remember my intentions and in context it really didn't seem amusing. Oh well.

I went to IKEA the other day. It scared me. I did see something that would make a stellar work table, however, and could resolve myself to go back if I thought it would help me in the long run.

I feel like I'm always waiting for things to settle down into some kind of a routine, or thinking that at some point in the near future money will resolve itself into always being available, or that I will suddenly become more responsible or motivated or capable than I already am- all of this as if by magic. 

I think there's a phrase for this... pipe dream, maybe?

So my latest efforts have been directed toward a reading event at my store celebrating Dr. Seuss' birthday. While I am excellent at this sort of thing, I found it ironic that we were promoting literacy through Dr. Seuss; though his goal in writing was to create interesting stories that children would want to read. Everyone seems to remember Dr. Seuss stories fondly from their own childhoods, certainly most American children know who the Cat in the Hat is. What I find so strange is that often we regard these horrifically complicated and beautifully tongue tying stories as stories to read aloud to kids. On Sunday I read "Happy Birthday to You", which I had never read before. It was thousands of pages long, including millions of words, and about a third of the way through it I was not certain that I would still be capable of using my voice by the time the story was over. Thank god I have a working knowledge of rhythm and could kind of rap the story, otherwise I think my brain wouldn't have allowed my mouth to form the bizarre syllables that Dr. Seuss demands from his patients. 

Also, Dr. Seuss made up so many words, how on earth could this have been acceptable for children learning to read to attempt to understand? I doubt many parents knew what the hell was going on in the supposedly wonderful book they had just given to their child! Don't get me wrong, I love Dr. Seuss. In fifth grade I dressed up as the gentleman to give a biographical presentation of one of my favorite authors. 

That brings me to a second observation- Dr. Seuss was a man, not a cat, or an elephant, or anything else. If someone dresses up as Dr. Seuss they are dressing up as a man from the middle of the previous century with a beard. I heard lots of people tell their kids we were dressed up as Dr. Seuss because we had tall red and white striped hats on. The Cat wore the Hat, not the man. Ok, fine. I'm a snob.

Here's a picture...

Things 1 and 2 are some of the best characters ever created in a children's story. Their proper names are probably something like Trouble and Mischief, and after reading about the ways they wreck those poor kids house, it's a wonder that parents let their kids be exposed to that lunacy. Also, doesn't the cat constitute a stranger, yet don't we hate the fish who demands that the cat leave from their house? I'm confused at what I'm supposed to take away from this tale...

OK, fine. So I haven't updated in a while. Rather, I have been working on volunteer stuff for Target (which I'm conflicted about because I love volunteering, but it's making "big business" look good off of my beneficience), working on a website for my dad (Kudos to Jason for his endless patience and for not acting like I'm a total moron), creating a more better creativity space for myself (creating a space to create sounds like there are some conflicting interests going on), and stretching the limits of parenthetical asides (bringing it up to four for a single sentence). 

Volunteer stuff for Target consists of me currently planning to facilitate our Dr. Seuss birthday reading party, which really means I'm making Thing 1 and Thing 2 "lite" costumes. I say lite because they consist of red tee shirts and blue wigs. The blue wigs I am rather proud of- made form yarn and baseball caps. I will post pictures from both the event and of me as either Thing 1 or 2, depending on what I feel like on the day the pictures are to be made. 

Ok, fine. Here's a teaser of the wig. 

And here's what the Things actually look like.

I couldn't get the hair style quite right, but the color is pretty accurate.

Real update tonight, maybe? I've been attempting to understand the mechanics of websites and it doesn't penetrate my thick skull easily.

Sob Story

Yesterday was Valentine's Day. I am the daughter of a florist. Yesterday was Valentine's Day and I was the daughter of a florist who was not busy. Yesterday I delivered flowers to people who had ordered them from my father for Valentine's Day, which turned out to be a tragically slow day for us. Yesterday was Valentine's Day and my father was a florist who was not busy. 

On Valentine's Day, florists are supposed to be busy, they expect it. Successful florists also usually have a shop where people can just walk in and pick things out, or they advertise themselves a little bit, or something happens (I'm not in small business or marketing, how am I to know?). For Valentine's Day, florists stock their coolers with lovely things to make arrangements with- which, in the nature of flowers, do not last for weeks and weeks. To be hopeful, florists may stock a full cooler. Yesterday was Valentine's Day, and my father's cooler is still half full. At first the problem was the phone wasn't working. Much like Strongbad's email reply to Silent J about his favorite techno song, the system was down. To make a bad situation worse, my mother started freaking out and embraced negativity. I was surrounded by it thinking, businesses do not run themselves, people don't magically find out about you.

Here's the history. My dad's been a florist for years, it's safe to say decades. He has worked for other people all of that time, and most recently was the manager of the flower shop that was part of McEwen funeral home downtown. Well, those kind Funeral home people decided that the flower shop was not something that was all that profitable for them, and packed up and moved about a year and a half ago without taking the flower shop with them. All of a sudden, my father was no longer employed. Flowers are all he knows. My daddy is a wonderful man, but he cannot go very far from his box. He is an innocent, and it seems as the years go by he becomes more of an innocent. He has no clue how to run a business. He lacks the killer instinct. My mother pretends to know about it, but she is just as clueless and infinitely more of a worrier. I felt so much frustration at their pain yesterday, the dread that set in, and the quick drain of hope as the phone continued to be silent, even though they knew it had been fixed.

The tragic thing is, my father is a very good florist. I think people probably expect me to be partial, but I am infinitely picky about the way things look and must be presented, and my father has a gift and a true eye for balance and colors and display. In a room full of other florist's work, it's easy for most people to spot what my father has created because they're well put together. When money is tight, though, these silly luxuries such as flowers are some of the first things to be removed from people's things to get themselves. Flowers are impractical. They are fragile and expensive. I wish I could be more into the idea that people should give him business, but I understand that few can afford it. I need to make a website for his business, which means first of all I need to learn how to do it. If I could just give up my job and work for my dad until the business was on it's feet, I would. I just can't afford to be a dreamer.

Le sigh.

The flowers that did go out yesterday and Friday were beautiful, and people loved them.

I baked over 700 cookies today. No, I did not make them from scratch as I do when I personally bake cookies, rather I placed 700 frozen rounds of cookie dough on about fifty industrial sized cookie sheets and placed them in the walk-in oven at work... the very same oven in which I stand when I am too cold from going in the ten-below-zero freezer.

I also decorated Valentine cupcakes. I like decorating the cakes at work, but I'm not the actual cake decorator so I'm technically not supposed to- but don't think that stops me! Tomorrow I'm baking a cake mix cake for my one and only Valentine... it will be fabulous.

Also tomorrow I will be working for my dear father, delivering flowers that people are sending for Valentine's day, but sending early so they can be delivered and shown off to offices and other people and such. I mean, I guess no one ever sends flowers to one person, they send them to a person so others can see them and be jealous, or empathetic, or something. Flowers are not humble, but they are beautiful.

I should go to bed.

I have not updated in a while. I started to write an update about a terrible, horrible, no good experience I had at the Books A Million at Concord Mills, but I was too agitated to finish it. It may be added at some point in the near future. It made me realize a business I could start though. Well, perhaps not so much of a business as a personal venture I could take to earn some money (those don't ever seem to work out...). My title would be "Consumer Aspect Analyst" and I would go into stores as a secret shopper, but independently so that the stores wouldn't even be looking for me and report to various news agencies with my findings. I see this as a journalistic type of job in which I could be contracted by retailers to help them improve their customer service, to save themselves from my scathing and potentially detrimental reports on their terrible shopping experience. This is the next big thing, and it's alllll mine. I mean, retailers just like everyone else are suffering from the general lack of money in people's pockets, so it would make sense that they would be trying as hard as they possibly could to get people into their stores and for those people to be happy about it, right? I could help. I could make things wonderful. I could rule the universe as well, but no one seems to ever go for that idea, therefore my CAA job seems much more reasonable and slightly less ambitious. 

In other news Mike and I are revolutionizing my dad's business through design. By Mike and I I mean that Mike is doing the grunt work like designing and creating and I'm doing the fluff work like jumping around spouting out ideas and saying "Yes, I like that", and "Oooh, I like that even better". Currently we are revolutionizing the business card, but I am desperate for a website for him because I think that would open the door to more potential customers who don't know anything about florists but could look at how great his stuff is before they plunk down their money for product unseen. I want to learn the art of websitery.

Also, I am studying for the GRE again, because although I did fine the first time (and nailed the essays with a 5.5 out of a possible 6), I believe I can do better and actually enjoy using a workbook to study fun things like basic algebra and vocabulary. Go, me!

Also, also... today I went to a fabulous store in Charlotte called City Art Works and drooled over art by one of my favorite people. Here's a picture since I learned how to put them in the bottom of a post now (Thanks, Daniel!!)

Resourceful Revelationary Artistry

I don't really consider myself an artistic person, sometimes I am hesitant to call myself creative. I am resourceful. I can take things such as paper, cloth, coloring books, toys, et cetera and find ways to make them interesting, but inspiration doesn't usually strike until I have these things not knowing what I can do with them. My Wizard of Oz quilt project was spawned when I found Wizard of Oz fabric and realized it could be thrown together to make a great quilt. The bags I made for my nieces were a simple accident. Card making last night with Kim was productive only because I had textured paper to play with and cut up- I had no plans or designs, and created a hodge podge of random shapes and colors. All of my more successful projects have originated and been executed by pure coincidence of material and effort. I think I find my greatest productivity under pressure, or when people around me are making good on their intended and planned projects. Give me a challenge and I can produce, but rare is the time when I am aware of coming up with an idea from nothing.

My rambling leads to this question; Art is a very broad range of perception of things, ideas, entities. Is my lack of original planning an art unto itself, or is it mimicry of art? I know that's a vague question. 

Ultimately I'm feeling somewhat disgruntled about my lack of effort to produce things that don't just come together in some cosmic ease of artistry that was intentional on my part. 

Wah, wah, wah...

ALSO- is there a way to drop pictures in the text so they don't always show up at the top? The picture is of a card I made last night with Kim after she drew a dog made out of hearts. I copied it by cutting out paper. It was cute-ish.

Valentine, I lose my head over you! (cheap laughs)

Kim and I made cards tonight. And then it snowed. And now it's time for me to go to bed. Goal for tomorrow? Real Blog entry. Ambitious? No. Attainable? I really hope so.