Friday, May 10, 2013

SIX DISPARATE BITS

• I’ve been out out of the design loop for about a year now. Though I sold lotsa prints in 2012, I didn’t design anything new. But today I identified a fairly obscure font at a glance. I impressed myself with a skill I thought I'd lost. Which is excellent news, ‘cause I really need to have It right now. I received an invitation to contribute a couple new works to a show. The exhibit directors gave the artists a quotation to use as muse, and we’re supposed to derive art from there. But I'm not sure I remember how to use my design programs, and my inspiration these days is anorexic. My proposals are due in five days, and it appears my creativity is on strike.

• I can look kinda cute in the right light. Fluorescent is not the right light.

• Since I’m an essentially egocentric person, I don’t get hot and bothered over feminist issues. Being a girl hasn’t been a hindrance to anything I’ve wanted or needed to do. The stuff that might hinder me is inexperience, ignorance, and inertia. Yet recently I’ve butted up against a couple instances that raised my feminist hackles. Last month when I was on the x-ray table getting shots of my problematic hip, the tech asked me what I do for a living. “Pharmaceutical sales,” I told her. “Oh,” she replied, “was that a hard job to get as a woman?” Uh, no, my vagina didn’t prevent me from snaring a job pedaling insulin. And that’s where I’m lucky. Women before me cut that trail. Back in The Day, my industry was all dudes. A drug rep was called a “detail man.” Gradually, however, them girlies snuck in, and now about half of all drug sales people are women. And we can use computers and drive and buy lunch and everything.

• Creating art takes time. Creating useful art takes witchcraft. 

• Next month is my nine-year yoga anniversary. I’m elated that the activity I use to keep me healthy—body and mind—is one that maximizes my body’s particular strengths and has been around for centuries. Chasing fitness trends like CrossFit, P90X, Jazzercise and the like would wear me out.

• After the requisite product discussion, today’s work lunch deteriorated into pregnancy chatter. Generally, I can endure it comfortably. But this afternoon I wanted to put in earbuds and slide under the conference table until the conversation moved on. I’m 31-years-old and I have exactly two friends that don’t have kids. I have spent all of my adult life hearing about discerning between gas and a kicking baby, watching fetus hiccups, and Braxton Hicks.

I know I’m not alone in this—we’ve all been hearing these stories for years—but the difference here is that when I listen I’m not waiting for the woman talking to shut up so that I can go on about my own gestation experience. It’s a different thing listening to these stories over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over without contributing. It dulls the individual sparkle of each tale, because I really have heard it before, and I actually heard it; I didn’t just compute a buzzing sound preventing me from telling my own stories of morning sickness and desperate needs to pee.

Yeah, yeah, I know pregnancy is a mysterious, magical thing. I know that since I’ve never been through it I’m simply incapable of understanding the majesty of it all. But it’s not by chance that I’ve never been with child. I've prevented that with militant vigilance. Go ahead and talk about your pregnancies all day long, but don’t pity me for not having been there. Don’t drone on in a preachy voice about how nothing compares to the immense joy of holding your baby for the first time. I believe you. And I plainly don’t feel compelled to want to want that.

1 comment:

Shar said...

I have one of your prints on my wall and I LOVE it. Thank you!

Fluorescent light sucks balls.

I'm so bored to tears with pregnancy stories and I have kids. So, you aren't alone.