I’ve noticed that depression and creativity have a strong link. When I was depressed, I went to night classes for web development, worked full-time, and wrote and recorded songs during the weekend. The fact that I couldn’t really play any instruments didn’t even faze me, and I borrowed my sister’s synthesizer to make up for my shortcomings. Before my depression ran its course, I’d also used sewing needles to carve strange figures out of chalk and finished sewing a quilt.
Now that I’m not depressed my creative output has dwindled to a mere scarf and hat set I knitted last year, just in time for summer. Last weekend, in an effort to increase my creativity without forcing myself back into depression, I made my first Artist Trading Cards.
ATCs are just what they sound like: trading cards with art on them. I’d been meaning to start these for some time, but I put it off until one day when Chris and his friend Mike went to Michaels to get some spray paint for their terrain. Cardstock was on sale, so I bought 50 sheets for $2.99. All I had to do was cut up the sheets into 2.5 inch by 3.5 inch cards, and then the real work would begin. I was going to create Art.
I borrowed a ruler from Chris and carefully marked off the sections where I wanted to cut. Using my sewing scissors, I cut along my pencilled line slowly. Hmm. I seemed to be going a bit wobbly.
I cut along all the lines and was left with cards of varying sizes and ragged edges. I decided it was time to place a call to an expert.
“Jessica?” I asked. “I know you mentioned using cardstock to cut into ATCs but…how the hell do you get them to be the same size? And with straight edges?”
Jessica, from her home in Texas, thought this over.
“Well, I use a ruler and mark dots where the sections are, and then I connect the dots,” she said finally.
“Yup…yup,” I muttered. “I did that, so okay, I did one part right…”
“Then I use an Exacto knife against the ruler to cut out the sections,” she finished.
“Ahhhhhh….I see. Okay, thank you.”
An Exacto knife! Of course. I should have thought of that. Now all my problems would be solved.
I borrowed Chris’s Exacto knife, and put a cardboard box top between the table and a new piece of cardstock. I measured off the sections, and then slowly, carefully, drew the Exacto knife against the ruler. I lifted the ruler and examined the paper.
“Hey, nothing happened!” I cried out.
“What do you mean?” Chris asked, busy with his own art project that seemed to be going better than mine, based on his contented humming.
“Well, I put the knife against the paper and…oh.” I looked closely at the knife. Evidently the part that looked like it should be the sharp part was actually the dull side, and I’d been holding the thing upside-down.
I’d done the same thing with a kitchen knife a few years ago, and the subsequent cut through my pinky had brought me to the ER where a nervous medical student carefully put one stitch in my finger to stop the bleeding, though only after telling me he couldn’t do anything until I applied pressure to the wound and it stopped bleeding.
I looked at him sadly and said, “I’ve been waiting in the ER for three hours already, applying pressure.” I paused for that to sink in, and then added gently, “I don’t think it’s going to stop bleeding on its own. That’s why I came to the ER.”
Chris, who had accompanied me only because I couldn’t drive while bleeding profusely and was unnerved by blood even on his best days, was not cheered by witnessing this interaction.
The medical student paused to consider this, then said, “Wait a minute,” and walked off to consult with an older man who, as I explained to Chris, was the real doctor.
“I’m gonna punch that kid in a minute if he doesn’t fix your finger,” Chris mumbled.
Normally impatient at waiting, I seemed to have entered into a Zen state. “It’s okay. He’s just a medical student or first-year resident. I used to have to help them find books all the time when I worked at the medical library. They don’t know anything. They can’t help it, poor things.”
The doctor instructed the medical student on using a tourniquet on my pinky to stop the blood flow temporarily (”remember to take it off after!”) and the med student set to work on my one stitch.
He had trouble threading the needle, and then was dissatisfied by his stitch and cut it out to start all over again. I could hear Chris starting to tap his foot impatiently and I wondered if I should offer to stitch it myself. Even with a finger incapacitated, I felt that I’d probably be able to get a good stitch in faster than the student. Hell, at this rate, even Paco the chihuahua could probably do it faster.
Luckily the student was pleased with his second attempt, and sent me home with instructions to return to the ER in one week to have the stitch removed. Upon seeing my primary care physician later that week, he grunted and said, “No, I’m supposed to take it out. The ER doesn’t do that. Humph.”
Back at home, and now holding the Exacto knife the right way down, I cut a nice straight line into the cardstock. Whoops! I must have released some pressure when I got to the end of the line, because the last bits were scraggly. Oh well. I’d just use the other side.
Eventually I cut out enough cards to begin. Art, prepare thyself to be created!
I knew exactly how I wanted the first set. Delicate watercolors depicting the seasonal changes. Winter should be easy–just bare ground, a naked tree, stark black against the white…Hmm…I wonder…maybe…no…how the heck was I supposed to show winter snow when the card was already white? Maybe I should start with a tree.
I drew a black line against the card. Hmm. That didn’t look like a tree trunk. Maybe it needed…branches?
Nope. That didn’t look good either. Maybe if I drew some ground. I dipped my brush into the brown paint, and swabbed it against the bottom of my tree.
“Does this look like winter to you?” I asked Chris.
He stared at the card for some time. “Why is the ground brown? Shouldn’t it be white, like snow?”
“Aw, forget it!”
I studied my card. Maybe if I added a border. I swiped red, bold streaks against the edges. What if I added…a striped border? With the colors fading from red to yellow and back again?
Now my card was covered with paint. It didn’t look like anything, and especially not Art. It looked like a lot of smudges and blurs.
By now the card was sopping wet with the water from the paints. I set it aside. Maybe when it dried, it would look like Modern Art?
I moved on to a fresh card. Maybe watercolors weren’t the way to go. I ran upstairs for a box of crayons. Primitive art! Like cave paintings! Or…not.
I scribbled over my cave painting and tried to hide it with some arty shades of green. Then I tried some gray around the edges, and found that improved the shade not at all.
“Chris, I can’t draw! I don’t have anything yet,” I wailed.
“Oh, you just say that! I’m sure it’s fine.”
I showed Chris my new card.
He stared at it.
“Okay, well maybe you haven’t gotten off to a great start yet, but I’m sure you can do better,” he offered.
Humph. So much for spousal support.
Maybe I just needed a different medium. Like, collage. Or mixed media. Scraps of cloth!
I ran for some cloth. I examined a green and gray piece with squares in it. I could cut out a square, and have the inner squares form a tic tac toe grid.
I brought out my Elmer’s glue, and found that the glue had hardened on the tip. Usually all I needed to do was break off the hardened glue to restore the opening, but it had been years since I’d used this. Only after chiseling the hole into a vast gaping wound and breaking off the tip of Chris’s mini-drill by jamming it into the hole, did I finally accept that the glue was not going to be freely flowing out the tip. Ever.
I uncapped the glue and poured some onto the cardboard box that I was using as a table surface. I swiped my tic tac toe box over the glue and pressed it onto the card. There! Not bad!
I cut out more shapes from a different piece of cloth, and tried to glue it onto the first piece, to form Xs and Os for the tic tac toe. Except the original cloth was too slippery, and nothing would stick to it.
In desperation, I gave up on the tic tac toe, and just glued some other miniature bits of cloth around the edge of the card, forming a border.
“How’s this?” I asked Chris.
“Hey, that’s good!”
I looked at my card again. It did look good–but only in comparison with the others. Sadly, even my best looked like it would lose against a third-grader’s art project. Maybe I could hire some neighborhood kids to make the next set of cards. Maybe they knew all about this Art stuff.
Today I am having a bad case of writer’s block.
It’s a glorious day outside with temperatures in the 60s, and yet other than a short walk with the dogs, I’ve been cooped up at the computer all day. And what do I have to show for my efforts?
Nothing.
I spent some time playing games on Orisinal.com which features very cute animals that jump–my favorite type of game. Sadly, my cute animals, as manipulated by me, died rather quick and violent deaths so the novelty of the games wore off quickly.
Having spent effort on the games, I felt I now deserved a break from the computer. I thought about going outside so the dogs and I could enjoy the sun, but I’d seen a yellowjacket on the trash can on the deck earlier. My neighbor, who had owned the house before selling it to us and moving next door, had mentioned once that her five-year-old son had been bitten by a yellowjacket in the back yard and stung seven times.
Naturally he was terrified to go outside after that, and she hung a jar of yellowjacket bait on the trees, which she’d left when we moved in.
I’ve never been stung by a bee, and I didn’t intend to start now. So I spent some time arranging dog beds and blankets by the sunny patch in front of the door, which I opened. I locked the screen door in case Flacko took it upon himself to push through and attack an unsuspecting hundred-pound dog ambling by, and Mina and Flacko settled themselves to bake in the heat.
Paco, meanwhile, was worn out from his walk that morning, and had been sleeping steadily and quietly, rolled up in a blanket on the papasan chair next to my computer. Evidently he didn’t care for sun as much as he did for food.
I ate a peanut butter sandwich and contemplated my options. There was the mystery I was working on, which was only two pages long. But I still had no plot, which made it a little difficult to continue with the story.
I had some unfinished children’s stories, but when I looked them over, I realized why I had never finished them. They sucked. And the effort involved in pulling them from the depths of suckitude was more than I was capable of.
Unsurprisingly, I got sidetracked at this point and began looking up houses on various Registries of Deeds. I looked up what Chris’s friends had purchased their homes for, and the amounts of mortgage they had taken out. I also checked out a few people from high school who weren’t my friends any longer, but whom I liked to periodically examine online in order to compare my status with theirs.
I spent quite some time on the Middlesex South Registry of Deeds website which covered our current neighborhood and also the house which we were supposed to buy last year, before the sale fell through and we initiated a lawsuit against the owners.
Eventually I ran out of people and houses to look up. The dogs were still sleeping, and I had nothing to write.
While we were growing up, my parents hardly ever took vacations. Their lives appeared to revolve around us, and I worried about what they would do when all of us were finally out of the house. How incredibly lonely they would be, I thought, with my younger sister in her first year of college, me in my senior year at Cornell, and my older sister starting her career in California.
It wasn’t until I moved back to Massachusetts and got married that I realized just how wrong I’d been. Far from being going through the pangs of empty nest syndrome, my parents were having the time of their lives. Apparently five minutes after we’d abandoned the house, they’d declared their home party central.
Read More »
Last night I discovered my technical skills had begun to disappear.
I was playing Zuma online and listening to some music on my computer, when “Love Goes Home to Paris” by The Magnetic Fields came on. I decided to check out their website and found out that they’re touring!
I haven’t seen them for a few years now, but they’re one of my favorite bands to see live. The last time I’d gone, I dragged my younger sister and our friend Dave to the show. The club was tiny, smoky, and packed with people, and Dave and Alice soon escaped to wait outside for me. I left the show a little bit early because I felt bad that I’d made them come with me, and the smoke really was awful.
But now The Magnetic Fields were coming to Boston May 22 and at a real concert hall. With seats and no smoking, and a start time before midnight!
I called up my friend Craig in Seattle. I knew he’d love them in concert, and I knew he’d mentioned possibly visiting the East Coast in May. Chris would come with me, of course, but I knew it would be out of love for me, and not for the band. And I’d probably have to see a few martial arts movies in the near future to make up for dragging him to the concert.
I got Craig on the phone, but found out that he was going to be in the area in early May. I begged and pleaded, but Craig said, “I hate airplanes” and decided that even though his mother would be in NYC at the end of May, he didn’t want to come back again. And he couldn’t change his trip schedule because it involved a work conference in DC.
While I talked, I started getting tickets for myself and Chris online at the Ticketmaster website. The tickets had been on sale since the beginning of this month, but being me, I felt that a delay of a few minutes now while I talked to Craig would make all the difference between getting good seats for the show and it becoming sold out.
I entered “2″ for the number of seats requested, and hit submit.
The Ticketmaster site informed me I had less than a minute to wait. Then it said, “Enter the word you see here to continue.”
I typed in the word, and clicked OK.
The next screen that appeared announced, “YOU HAVE TWO MINUTES TO COMPLETE THIS TRANSACTION OR THE SEATS WILL BE GONE!”
Yipes! Did I want these seats? I clicked on “seating plan” and tried to figure out where my seats were. But first I had to pick the seating plan. I had a choice between “generic” and, well, apparently generic was my only choice, but I still had to choose it. I selected “generic” and waited.
The seating plan opened up. It had no row or seat numbers on it. That wasn’t useful at all. I hurriedly filled out my email address and name information, and clicked okay. “You sure you don’t want to go?” I asked Craig.
“Yes, I’m sure, but check when the Raveonettes are playing, because I know they’re going on tour.”
I opened up another browser window and typed in the website address for the Raveonettes. Meanwhile, back on my original window, Ticketmaster had opened up another screen and was demanding that I fill out my credit card information in LESS THAN THREE MINUTES OR MY SEATS WOULD BE GONE.
The Raveonettes, it turned out, would be hitting Boston 3 days before Craig.
“No!” he said. He was obviously very upset, and as close to swearing as I’d ever seen him. “I’m just–no!”
I searched for a submit button on my screen. Time was ticking, and I didn’t know how much of my 3 minutes were up. There was another link to “seating plan” on this screen, and I pressed it, hoping it would yield a more useful plan than the previous page. Nope, it was the same “generic” plan. Where the hell was the submit button? There were too many buttons on this screen!
I hit submit once I’d found it, and breathed a sigh of relief. Surely I was - “YOU HAVE LESS THAN ONE MINUTE TO FILL OUT THIS PAGE OR YOUR SEATS WILL BE GONE!”
Damn!
Quickly, I tried to figure out my options for having my tickets delivered. It was confusing because there were prices next to each option, and it looked like the prices were for the tickets, not for shipping. Who would pay $19.90 for shipping? Ridiculous.
I scanned the prices until I got to “No standard charge applied–” and immediately I stopped reading. No charge, that was me. Who cared if it took a couple of months to get to me? As long as it was free and got to me before the day of the concert. I clicked the button next to the text, and looked again for the submit button. Click it, click it, and hurry!
“YOUR PURCHASE IS COMPLETE,” the page announced. Whew. I almost expected it to tell me sternly, “YOU HAVE LESS THAN TWO MINUTES TO STEP AWAY FROM THE SCREEN, BEFORE THIS MESSAGE SELF-DESTRUCTS.”
I went out for dinner that night with Chris and his clients. They’d chosen a restaurant called The Salt Lick, which I’d been looking forward to after discussing it with Jessica.
“The meat falls off the bones,” Jessica said. “It’s basically a barbeque place, but the ribs are great.”
Then Chris called. “The Salt Lick’s off,” he reported. “They said it gets really nasty when it rains, because there are picnic tables out there.”
The next day when I mentioned this to Jessica, she said, “Uh, they do have picnic tables inside.”
“Yeah,” I said thoughtfully. “I did think it was kind of weird to have a restaurant where you can only sit outside.”
We moved on to Dan McKlusky’s for dinner, only to find an empty building and a sign on the door stating that the steakhouse had not been paying its rent and now all the locks were changed. And anyone who wanted to take over the place had to pay the $87,235,083.27 in back rent and fees before doing so. Luckily there was a Cheesecake Factory nearby so we headed there instead, since we didn’t have the $87,235,083.27.
Read More »
Chris and I departed from Boston with happy hearts, because finally we were going to have a vacation from the dogs. Usually when we go away, I end up wanting to come home a day or two earlier because I miss the dogs, but this time? I had a glorious time without them.
Don’t get me wrong, I love them–but it’s become increasingly difficult to find dogsitters since we moved, and what with all the housing problems we had last year, it had been a while since we got a break from them. Just walking into my Austin hotel room without having to immediately leash up three dogs and take them for a cold walk around the hotel was wonderful.
This trip we left the dogs with Chris’s parents. They were happy to help us out, but probably less happy by the time we returned. Flacko must have thought we were going to move again, because he wailed and whimpered and escaped about 5 times the first night we stayed at the house with them. Luckily, the next night we were in Austin, and the problem was no longer ours.
Read More »