pandemic diaries: week 24

Air quality last week improved here and there (although there were still a couple of days we were stuck inside) so that was nice. 

Palos Colorados Trail hike on a moderate AQI kind of day.

As I mentioned in my last update, I realized with the bad air quality that the thing getting me through many (most?) days over the past six months is the ability to go outside for a walk, hike, or run. Whether solely because of that or not, the last couple of weeks have been incredibly challenging on many levels. 

7yo is suddenly obsessed with basketball. Unfortunately, we've noticed a ghost town like trend of first the nets and then the entire baskets being removed, to dissuade groups I assume. Sigh.

In distance learning news, the 7th grader finally got his mini-mester schedule so every weekday he now has three classes, plus advisory and Jazz Lab two days a week. So far, so good. It's nice (for me) for him to have more to do. It was a tough week for the 2nd grader, who had to do an online reading assessment that took her four sessions to complete. Not fun. I'm hoping the customized program it generates will be worth the frustration. Her schedule will receive a little shake-up next week when elementary schools (or, at least, her's) transition from the district-wide "strong start" plan to more curriculum coming specifically from her teacher, the school "specials" (e.g. PE, art, music), etc. Distance learning is good in that it gives them something to do and I don't have to homeschool from scratch, but it makes for a rather choppy morning full of interruptions for me. Not exactly the best work from home environment but for now it'll have to do. For a minute there in the spring I thought I might be able to parlay my part-time contract position into regular, full-time employment but it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime soon and honestly it's probably for the best. (For some comic relief, this is a hilarious take on academic pods.)

I discovered pokeweed growing (or being grown) in our neighbor's back yard, poking through and over the fence into our yard. Every part of the pokeweed plant is poisonous, so this discovery is very on-brand for 2020.

As soon as I went public with my intention to focus exclusively on finishing my screenplay during any free/studio time I might have moving forward (typically a couple of hours on the weekend, at best), I suddenly feel even less capable than usual of writing words (as evidenced by this long, awkward sentence), and somehow more motivated to just, y'know, make stuff. So that's what I did over the weekend. 

The project I've been working on for over a year now, collectively titled 100 Days in the Dollhouse, has started to incorporate remnants of an earlier, mostly failed project called 'Heavenly', and has also, of course, taken on new meaning during this pandemic, 100 days turning into many more.

Speaking of kids and art, this tweet about (female) artists successfully juggling their art careers with family life sent me into a bit of a spiral. In a nutshell, it feels like an oversimplified art world equivalent of the stock photo of a working mom with toddler in tow (you've no doubt seen some variation of this) and I resent it so much, especially seeing that kind of "you can have it all" mythology applied to the pursuit of a creative livelihood, which is very different (though not necessarily harder) than a more linear career path. I'm cheating a bit and skipping ahead to this week, but Buffy Wicks driving from Oakland to Sacramento with her newborn so she could vote is a perfect example of how this country penalizes working parents, in particular mothers of newborns and toddlers.

Finally, RIP Chadwick Boseman. I've seen and enjoyed immensely most of his work, most recently his role in Da 5 Bloods. This is a really lovely art tribute by Senegalese artist Bou Bou Design and this is the moving written tribute from 'Black Panther' director (and Oakland native) Ryan Coogler.  

Fuck cancer. Fuck 2020.

what I did last year

This is a post I intended to write in May, as my second academic year of unemployment-by-choice, as I've been calling it, neared an end, an end that began with ten weeks of summer break. But in May I was furiously wrapping up the first season of the Artists in Offices podcast. Check that off the list! For now, at least.

But first, before I get into my goals for this year, a (brief) look back, as I did last year, at the half-dozen blog posts I wrote in 2018-19:

• A recap of the first time I spent 10 weeks of summer "break" with both kids in tow 24/7. Over that long period, I managed to carve out just one afternoon alone to go to a movie I really didn't want to have to wait until it was streaming on Netflix to see.
• A DIY version of Arby's Jamocha shake for National Chocolate Milkshake Day. I mean, why not?
• As if my crazy cat lady status wasn't already official, I wrote a cat-themed parody, with accompanying music video, of Sophie B. Hawkins' 'Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover'. Blog post here, in case this requires further explanation.
• A late fall podcast status update.
• Once the podcast launched, I wrote a fairly thorough summary of how the project went from idea to podcast, and everything in between.
• And, over the summer, a little more about what the podcast is about.

So, yeah, the big project of the year was the podcast. But let's take a few minutes to review my original to do list after I left my last day job just shy of 2 years ago.

• I’m writing a screenplay. 

I'm truly, honestly still working on this, I swear. In fact, I was so inspired by my surprising ability to actually finish something big and creative that I decided, once I get caught up on all the things I neglected over summer break, that I'll work on only this in any kid-free time I have each week until it's done. Like, 100% done. Okay, maybe just the first, rough draft. But I'm still catching up. My goal is to be caught up on all the miscellaneous domestic stuff by about Labor Day weekend.

• I need more time to make art in my cozy little backyard studio.

I feel pretty good about where I am in my studio practice after this two-year recovery period. At some point last year I declared Heavenly a necessary failure that was successful in transitioning me back into a more consistent creative routine. I've since devoted most non-audio studio time to a newer body of work collectively titled dollhouse/100 days in the dollhouse/I see things that nobody else sees (I should probably pick one title at some point...). It mostly lives on Instagram at the moment, but I'm excited to see how this project evolves over the course of the next 9 months or so. Like a fetus gestating in my studio womb. (Too much?)

• I’m starting a podcast (and/or support network) about(/for) other artists in offices.

Done! The first season is complete, with a trailer, 10 full-length interviews, 2 bonus episodes around formal art training, and 2 bonus episodes catching up with the artists who quit their day jobs after our initial interviews. I'm currently exploring next steps. I'd like to continue the interviews, with a season devoted to parent artists, and for any creative book editors/publishers who might be reading this, I really feel like this could be a book. An authored book with contributing interviews and such, right? So call me, okay?

• I'm going to revive my boutique wedding invitation design business. 

Uh, quite the opposite, actually, since I finally shuttered this business in December 2018, after years of limping along (the last time that income from my micro biz offset the minimal costs of running said biz was in January 2013, before my now 6 1/2 year old daughter was born). I'm still interested in design, just like I'll always be crafty and make stuff, even if I never have another art show. But running a business on Etsy just isn't what it was in the early days.

• I’m working on a kids’ book based on the Cosmos series, starring a cuddly tardigrade as Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Zero progress made on this front. Also, do we still like Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm not sure we do.

• I’m planning to volunteer at the cat cafe until they just give me a job.

I no longer volunteer at Cat Town, spending all of my volunteer hours (about 4 a week, usually on one weekend afternoon) at Oakland Animal Services instead. I spend time in adoption as well as in the back of the shelter as part of both the kitten and cat "crews". If what I do as a volunteer there was a job, I'd apply in a heartbeat.

• I’m compiling a “quit your day job” bibliography that will eventually be turned into a manuscript for a self-help book with the working title: “Little Boxes: How to get out of the office and into the studio...” (or something like that).

This has morphed a bit to focus on the podcast audience in particular, but it's still very much a work in progress. 

• I'm going to figure out how to make hand-stitched felt phone cases for Android, minus the carpal tunnel syndrome.

Nope. Nothing. I got nothin' on this one. Not sure I ever will. When I checked in with Laura Torres, the second artist I interviewed for the podcast, who'd quit her day job for a few months to focus on her creative practice, she wrote this in her email update and it really resonated with me in terms of all the random creative/crafty stuff I think I want to do in my spare time: "When I was working a day job, I always thought I wanted to do all this other stuff. But I am realizing some of that was a sort of escapist fantasy." Same. I can't say I miss making those phone cases, so why devote precious time on that now? (And if you'd like to hear more from my follow-up conversation with Laura, check out the bonus episode here.)

• I’m developing recipes for a cookbook called “Sweet on Oakland: Cookies Inspired by Oakland Neighborhoods".

No cookbook (yet), but I did make a few new cookies over the past year, mainly because I donated a six-month cookie subscription to my kids' school's fundraiser last fall. I still need to post recipes for the last couple I completed. Shelving this project for now to make time for all of the above.

So what's new this year? Well, if my extra debut in Season 2 of The North Pole is not the breakout role I'm fully expecting it to be (I'm kidding, of course), find another day job, basically. In a perfect world, I'd finish my screenplay and find some sort of funding for the podcast while I'm reviewing 7-figure offers on the screenplay and making sure it actually gets made into a movie. But until then, I can't not work forever. So wish me luck, friends, and stay tuned.

book deal dreams

As I near my final week of kid-free time (and by week I mean roughly 16-17 hours) to make stuff and write, before spending the summer with both kids in tow nearly 24/7, I wanted to take a little time to recap this academic year of unemployment-by-choice. First, a round-up of the posts I've written here about that decision and throughout the year (I didn't blog as much as I thought I might, only averaging about one post per month):

• The announcement.
• A lice-themed parody of Hamilton's 'Wait For It'. I include this because I'm a parent, and the reality is this kind of stuff happens more often than you might think, sabotaging hours, sometimes days, of your well-laid creative plans.
• I had planned to elaborate on the articles included in the initial announcement to quit my day job, above, but only wrote about a couple, here and here.
• My first day of unemployment-by-choice included a field trip to The Color Factory. I was not overly impressed, despite the price tag and hype, and, in hindsight, shouldn't have been spending that kind of money on that kind of "experience".
• Now that my most recent office gig was behind me, I could finally write the complete "artists in offices" chapter of the Burning Bridges series, a series of blog posts about my many day jobs over the past 22+ years.
• I made a few things in the fall before I really got to work in my studio, including this Day of the Dead altar for my past cats. I've also spent much of this year volunteering with and advocating on behalf of Oakland's cat population, through my work with Cat Town and Oakland Animal Services. I volunteer with cats and kittens more consistently at the latter, but have done some administrative work and fundraising for the former. I was even interviewed by KQED and NBC Bay Area about the shelter's staffing crisis. So this post is key to taking total stock of how I spent my year. After all, I wanted to be a veterinarian throughout most of my childhood and for the first couple of years of college, before I switched my major to art. I won't say I haven't researched the cost of vet tech certificate programs.
• I also saw a lot of art, mostly with my kids accompanying me. I wrote about the first half of the year here. We got out and about a little less in the second half of the school year but I'll write a recap of those field trips eventually.

Waiting for Daphne.

• A little side project this year has been this Instagram account dedicated to mostly bathroom selfies I take while waiting for my daughter. I spend more time with her than my older son, as she gets ready for kindergarten (because preschool is expensive). I also wrote about these images here.
• Finally, in January this year, I started making progress on my recent collection of mixed media...stuff, collectively titled 'Heavenly'. I wrote about the beginnings of that project and other stuff I did in the fall to "warm up" here.

• In late January/early February I began applying to - and getting rejected from - various, local art residencies and exhibition opportunities. I wrote first about my generalist tendencies - problematic when you have so little time and really need to focus - here. Later I wrote about my frustration in the face of said rejection and my decision to pivot to screenwriting here.
• I've been really into reading memoirs lately, perhaps because so much of my own art and writing are autobiographical in nature. In April, my last post before this one, I singled out 5 reasons why creative folks should read Felicia Day's memoir.

Day writes about her experience with Geek & Sundry, "the more mistakes, the better the story afterwards, especially if there's a happy ending." I feel like my starts and stops make one helluva story, but I'm still working on the happy ending. After all, nobody wants to read a story about a string of mistakes, do they?

Anyway, that sums up much of how I spent the past nine months. But in the spirit of checklists, let's see how much I accomplished from that initial to do list in my announcement last June:

• I’m writing a screenplay. I need to finish it by next March so I can submit it to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. 

Okay, so this is not finished and was not submitted to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. And the story has changed a lot. But! I did manage to write over 40 pages and I feel pretty good about that. The trick will be finishing it, especially if I find myself in another day job situation at the end of summer. Which is likely.

• I need more time to make art in my cozy little backyard studio. Preferably before I turn 65.

Yeah, I did this. Just not as much as I'd like and I haven't been successful in getting any of this new work out into the world anywhere, other than via social media. And maybe it's just crap, I don't know. I have also, if I'm being honest, been challenged by my lack of funds to go toward art supplies and any opportunities that require a fee. I've done a few and I've bought some supplies, but I have no money to put into my art practice. None. Nada. Zilch. Such is the paradox of making art.

• I’m starting a podcast (and/or support network) about(/for) other artists in offices.

I did indeed start a Facebook group and very sporadically post items of interest to it, with minimal but satisfying interaction. I'm also very slowly making my way through the book Artists in Offices. And, most exciting, I took a class, at CCA of all places, with Julia Scott, about podcasting!

Hello old friend.

Unfortunately, it turns out podcasting is a little more expensive to pull off well than I imagined (is it considered bad audio to use Voice Memo on my iPhone?) so my goal is to buy minimal gear I'd need to practice with my kids this summer before scheduling interviews in the fall. I have a handful of willing interviewees so, again, I just need more time to pull this off.

• I'm going to revive my boutique wedding invitation design business. But maybe explore platforms other than Etsy!

I did handle a handful of holiday card orders in November/December and continue to get the occasional ready-to-send card sale in my Etsy shop. But this one's tricky. I'm reluctant to officially call it quits, because if I could make some dough this way it'd be ideal in terms of schedule flexibility and parenting obligations and such, but the truth is, I do very little to promote my business. And there were things I didn't love about it, mostly the fact that, like a full-time job, it took over my life. I'm constantly debating "closing" the business so that, in the very least, I no longer have to pay the fees associated with owning a small business, regardless of income (business license, resale permit, checking account fees, etc.). But I'm hesitant to do so.

• I’m working on a kids’ book based on the Cosmos series, starring a cuddly tardigrade as Neil deGrasse Tyson.

This has officially moved to my summer to do list, in the hopes that I can work on this during the summer months. In the meantime, you can check out past tardigrade tomfoolery here.

• I’m planning to volunteer at the cat cafe until they just give me a job.

See above. No job offer yet, but I have been spending a lot of time with cats. Probably too much, if I'm really being honest. But I dig it. 

(Sweet) Caroline. Current foster kitten for Oakland Animal Services.

• I’m compiling a “quit your day job” bibliography that will eventually be turned into a manuscript for a self-help book with the working title: “Little Boxes: How to get out of the office and into the studio...” (or something like that).

As I wrote above, I only elaborated on two of the articles included in said bibliography. Not exactly a book manuscript. But a girl can dream about a book deal, can't she?

• I'm going to figure out how to make hand-stitched felt phone cases for Android, minus the carpal tunnel syndrome.

No progress made on this point and I'm 100% okay with that. I would, however, love to sell the handful of ready-to-send cases in my product inventory currently stored in my garage so if you know anyone with a really old Android device (and/or a really small smart phone), send them my way!

• I’ll be making videos for my YouTube channel “dances with kids” of me, dancing with my kids.

I've made a few videos, some dance-related, some not. I have a video currently in the works for my cat-themed parody of Sophie B. Hawkins' 'Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover' (Damn, I Wish I Was Your Kitteh. Obvs.) so be sure to subscribe if you want to be one of the first to see that! You won't be disappointed.

• I’m developing recipes for a cookbook called “Sweet on Oakland: Cookies Inspired by Oakland Neighborhoods".

I started a new recipe for the Dimond 'hood of Oakland in the fall but it flopped and I never really got back to it. This, like the tardigrade kids' book above, has been moved to the summer to do list. You can follow that project here. If you know anyone in the cookbook publishing industry, hook me up!

• I’m starting a food truck business that serves only peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. Each PB&J order comes with a free carton of milk!

Again, nothing. But I have made countless PB&J sandwiches over the past 9 months. I'm sure I'll make a lot more for my two kids over the summer. Maybe I'll get creative. 

• I’ve signed a NDA and I can’t tell you where I'm going from here.

This was never true, of course. I've signed nothing and I'm going nowhere. But if you want to offer me a super cool, creatively fulfilling, preferably not full-time but still well-paying day job I can do mostly from home, I'll sign an employment contract on August 13th, when my kids go back to school. Book deals also accepted.

I'm writing a screenplay

It's difficult to ease into this, especially following up on my few posts of 2018 so far, in which I write about the visual art I've made since quitting my day job last summer, and the juggling act between studio time and, well, all the other stuff. But during the month of March I stopped painting, if that's what I was doing, and started devoting all of my kid-free hours (about 20 each week, minus a few for cleaning, errands, appointments, etc.) to finally putting into script format the screenplay idea I've been mulling over for about two years.

Let's back up just a bit. January was the first month of this academic year of unemployment-by-choice during which I felt satisfactorily productive in the studio. I finished three smallish, mixed media works on paper, accompanied by some three-dimensional/sculptural components (one of which is technically a diptych, and this doesn't include the first piece I deemed a total failure, so five works total if we're counting everything, which we are). I used that new work to apply to four different art-related items on my winter/spring 2018 checklist - a local residency, an exhibition proposal, a publication, and some digital exposure. The work was rejected in all four cases. Which is totally par for the course for artists. But I handled the rejection, something I'm fairly used to, not as well as I thought I would. I'm not exactly fresh out of college or grad school, after all, and after a decade of trying my best to keep my practice technically afloat while being genuinely busy with other aspects of, you know, life, I was feeling especially discouraged.

'Suckers' from the ongoing 'Art from Ephemera', 2016. After all, you can't win if you don't play, right??

Additionally, a couple of things happened that helped me focus my screenplay idea into something I felt I could finally translate into a script. First, Lady Bird was released. I've since seen - and absolutely loved - Greta Gerwig's directorial debut film, but I was apprehensive about it since there was so much talk of the universality of the mother-daughter relationship. It dawned on me that while I've been pretty into stories and art that explore that relationship most of my creative life, it's been from the perspective of loss, lacking, absence. What does that "universal" time in a young woman's life look like when the mother is not part of it? That apprehension helped me focus what my movie idea is really about in a huge way.

Secondly, I retrieved several boxes of childhood stuff from my step-Dad's attic in two batches: when we drove there almost exactly one year ago and when he came here last October. I've taken my time going through all the mementos, writing, and of course pictures. One item I came across was my 11th grade English term paper about Jack Kerouac's 'On The Road'. The process of using index cards to articulate and organize ideas came flooding back to me. I started writing out the various plot points and visual ideas - all pretty disparate at the time and mostly contained in a sprawling Google doc - on index cards and suddenly I had a lot of raw material I could quite literally - and visually (that's key) - organize into a story arc.

I should add here that there also seems to be something happening on a zeitgeist-y level around stories for and about girls.

That quote, by Ian Wojcik-Andrews, who studies and writes about the less common bildungsromane (that's bildungsroman, or coming of age story, but from a girl's perspective) was included in Anya Jaremko-Greenwold's 2016 Atlantic article 'Why Hollywood Doesn’t Tell More Stories for—and About—Girls'. The article blew my mind when I read it, right around the time my story - about an 11 year old girl - began percolating in my brain, and I've returned to it many times since, most recently when 'Wrinkle In Time' was released. To boot, Jaremko-Greenwold also wrote about 'Wrinkle In Time', in advance of its release, in FLOOD magazine: 'Hyper-Girlish Sci-Fi and Trump Parallels in Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time”'. For the record, while I really enjoyed Ava DuVernay's take on the book, I felt the script was a bit lacking in convincing us that Earth could be the next Camazotz if we're not careful: "One of the scariest lines in the book is, 'Just relax.' Just give in, we’ll take care of you. Relaxing is much easier than trying to combat IT. That’s what happened to us as a nation..." But I maintain its importance as one of the rare, but growing pool of stories for and about girls. From the 2016 article, Jaremko-Greenwold writes, "Girls...tend to be slotted into a narrower range of character types (princesses chief among them), making it that much more valuable when films present alternatives young female viewers can relate to." I'm optimistic that this is finally starting to change. Exhibit B: movies like 'I Kill Giants' (directed by a dude, but still).

When not writing, I'm slowly rewatching all the movies Jaremko-Greenwold names in the 2016 article, the early to mid-90s being a bit of a golden age in female coming-of-age stories (I mean, it's relative, right?). So far I've really enjoyed Secret of Roan Inish while Harriet the Spy felt a bit light and generally lacking. Some titles have been easier to find (from the library, because it's free) than others. And not to be all, like, mystical and whatnot, but one morning in late February I woke up with The Sundays' 'Here's Where The Story Ends' in my head. I haven't listened to them in ages. Turns out the lyrics to that song sum up pretty well what I think at this point is the general tone of my story. "It's that little souvenir of a terrible year..." Domestic tragedy and grief aside, isn't middle school just the pits?

PS - I'm averaging ten pages per week so I'm hoping to have a first full rough draft (emphasis on rough) by early June. If I don't, it'll haunt me during the ten weeks I'll be spending full-time with two kids this summer. After that, between endless editing and filling in the holes, I do plan to get back to some visual art-making, but I need to get this story out of my head first.