Sick, So Expect Randomness

"I am very excited to apply for this position, because OMG, it’s AWESOME!" Ugh, kill myself. How does one express enthusiasm in eloquent terms? Enthusiasm is defined as a burst of excitement, of gladness for something that is personally moving, and so should not be reined in, or tamped. The writing in cover letters is generally dry and controlled, so any statement of excitement is taken as unprofessional, and the writer as some ditz who can't express herself "professionally". Looking back, I wonder if I would have taken a cover letter seriously, if I had come across one with such unbridled enthusiasm in it. I honestly don't know. I would write down my bones with every cover letter, if I didn’t feel like my bones were so silly.

Illness did not strike me for the first eight months I was in San Francisco, and now suddenly, I am having two bouts of super-sick within a month. There's really not much I can do, since I can't operate heavy machinery on the meds, so I peruse. I read through all the articles I missed, or dismissed perfunctorily in the past, then I stream some videos, go through my half-finished books, start to knit or draw, get dizzy from that, and then just collapse in a leaky pile on the sofa waiting for energy to come back to me. I have never done this before. All the previous times I have been sick (in adulthood), I've had to attend class, or be at work. I know it's a luxury to be able to spend a few days focusing on just the recovery, but damn, it is boring. How do perfectly healthy people spend their lives not working? Pack the days as densely as a cup of brown sugar: that's how it's done.

A booked jumped out at me at the library: All Over Coffee, by Paul Madonna. It's a collection of line drawings with ink washes of San Francisco, veritable love letters from the way they were drawn. I take it for granted that any artist who has a published collection, or has an exhibition, regardless of how small, "has it made". I mean, I know that before whatever art of theirs I first see, they must have struggled with self-doubt, and painful moments when nothing they create seems meaningful enough, or beautiful enough. But now they have it made! All those previous thoughts were silly, and in vain, and thankfully untrue. Reading the afterword in the book though, reading through all those years of worrying about money, about taking jobs that didn't quite fit, knowing only what you don't want to do, but not knowing how to make a living out of something you do want to do, these struggles are not confined to artists, and the doubts don't just end once you get a little exposure. It was reassuring to read that his drawings improved over time, and that he didn't start at some prodigious level, because that's what I tend to think about artists whose works are available for public viewing. It has always seemed to me that they just pick the best ones, but their body of work is pretty much on the same level. Patently untrue, of course, because no one is automatically great at what they choose to do, except perhaps da Vinci.

The first piece I ever knitted was a lace scarf; the first stroke I learned was the breaststroke, and I swam 1000 meters the same day I learned it; the first poem I wrote, I wrote in iambic pentameter, with rhyming; the first time I used chocolate in cooking, I made a soufflé. I have never been comfortable with baby steps. It is painful for me to go through the first steps of anything, because most of it seems so obvious, and anyone with common sense should be able to figure it out. I find that I give up on things, because I aim too high in the beginning, and when the result isn't as perfect as I want it to be, I take it as an utterly failed endeavor. That has been the case with drawing. I found old sketchbooks from grade school in some old boxes I never unpacked from my childhood home. At 11, 12, 13, I churned out stuff like an ink drawing of a Fire Island sunset, a bunch of lilies from memory, a reproduction of a still life painting by Luis Melendez in graphite, a laughably childish copy of Hokusai's Great Wave Off Kanagawa in pastels (the grace of ukiyo-e, raped by crayons, essentially), and many more. And none of it was good enough. And since drawing was just the basic first step to painting, no way was I going to be a painter. So I gave up, but I went back to it year after year, and then a couple of years after a couple of years, and each time I tried to take it up again, the fear of not perfecting even that first little step made me stop trying. If I could have done all those things when I was just a child, if I had kept up with it, I could have been painting for years now. None of the drawing books I've desperately looked through in the interim have made much sense; of course it starts with perspective and simple shapes and values. How do you go from that to actually drawing something that looks like it came from an artist? I finally found a book that approaches drawing in a different way: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Dr. Betty Edwards. It wasn't a question of how precise I was when I was drawing; I was thinking and going about it in a completely unnatural way. If I had ever thought about drawing in a right-brain sort of way, that ability had long rusted, and I know now that I will need to train myself to see things anew in order to put anything on paper that I am happy with. Perfection is no longer the goal. To be extremely trite, nothing is ever perfect, and it is the imperfections that make for interesting subjects. Being from New York, I generally don't like to look people in the face. I've been looking recently, and (god, this is going to be treacly, and I blame the medicine) faces are beautiful. Every wrinkle, pock, and blemish are just as they should be. Which just made me think about how different Heidi Montag looks with all her alterations, and that is a direction I do not want to take this session of rambling.

"Chi po dir com'egli arde, e 'n picciol foco."

And now, onward!