Being politically motivated and standing up for my beliefs had an interesting side effect of making it difficult to choose a straw for my iced tea this morning.

At my favorite locally owned coffeehouse, I purchased organic tea in a recyclable cup. Being the artful sort, I paused as I reached toward the cup of colorful straws, deciding which color would best go with the shade of my peach-tea.

I froze.

The aesthetics of my heart wanted the pink straw. But in my mind, visions of Sleeping Beauty Aurora, helpless in eternal slumber, popped up. My brain stopped me.

The pink straw was the correct straw, aesthetically. But apparently my disdain for the prevailing social meaning of PINK was trying to override what the heart wanted.

For a moment, I became on of those crazy mumblers (fully acceptable at locally owned coffeehouses, natch) and heard myself say:

“Well, I just going to take the pink because none of the girls are here to force me to choose it.”

The little girls will do that. They have been force-fed the Disney pink — and all that it implies — since they were big enough to prop up in front of a DVD/TV combo.

The Princess Bride Price

The cost of princess-ifying our girls is heavy. As writer Kristy Quist notes, “It’s an identity based on image alone…Pint-sized princesses are adorable, and at best, this is fun, imaginative play. At its worst, it distorts a natural appetite for beauty and becomes an exercise in narcissism and materialism.”

Millions upon millions of girls worship the beauty, the gowns, the singing voices of the Disney Princesses. The machine that is Disney have created a factory of Dasmels in Distress – some who read, some who perhaps even carry a sword, but all who are, in the end, just pretty, anorexic and waiting to be rescued.

The psychology of that is real. We might as well be saying: what you say doesn’t matter, but the sheen of your hair and the size of your waist does.

Encouraging them to be “princesses” tells them you believe it too, that GIRLS ARE INVISIBLE TO THE WORLD. Girls don’t matter. Girls are objects. Girls expire at 40.

What I want to say is this: If you even look a little bit, you can’t help but be sick, sad, and terrified for the future of girls.

Sigh. All this, for want of a  pink straw to match my peach tea.

“Maybe if I act like that (do like this), that guy will call me back
Porno Paparazzi girl, I don’t wanna be a stupid girl
Baby if I act like that (Oh, Oh-Oh, Do you think?), flipping my blond hair back (Do you think?)
Push up my bra like that, I don’t wanna be a stupid girl (Yeah, yeah)”

– ‘Stupid Girl’ by PINK

Only once do we have the chance to ACTUALLY be brand new.

We arrive on the earth, sticky and discombobulated, completely unprepared for all this light and noise.

From then on, we are experienced. We’ve seen it all. So we have to do all manner of contortions to reinvent ourselves.

The book I am reading right now is sort of a self-help for writers. It’s called “Juicy Pens, Thirsty Paper,” by an author I really admire. She has many books out that are very successful yet totally unique. You’ll recognize them instantly by their bright colors and hand-written text. She goes by SARK.

In the book, she tells the story of one of her most famous published works. You’ve probably seen it. It’s a poster called “How To Be an Artist.” The story is set in her “magic cottage” where she started out, before she was ever published.

“It (the “How to Be an Artist” poster) was my colorfully written statement that we are all artists of Life. I took this crooked, color full page to a store in San Francisco. They also had a catalog, and agreed to publish a photo of the poster once to see if anybody liked it. The orders flooded in and I ended up making 11,000 by hand. There are now over one million Artist posters in print.” — SARK

Something about this story whispers in my ear, with reverb that travels into the deepest recesses. It’s where I hide my fears. The places I am certain I will fail, so I leave well enough alone. The place where I conjure up another witty or even snarky remark about Someone Else to distract myself and anyone from my calling which has not been satisfied.

Everyday, for any reason, it seems, we are offered the chance to reinvent ourselves. We can suddenly become parents, or pop idols, or in the case of SARK, an artist creating exactly the message she desires, whilst still being able to pay the rent. I am working on something like that, I guess, (though I only now managed to add this sentence, in a second edit).

You know that feeling you get, standing  in line for the tall fast roller coaster? Your legs melting from the core and your stomach rolling?

That’s exactly what I am feeling right now. Telling you.

Shopping at Target for school supplies takes us into the arms of  August, summer’s last great hump.

I smell the Ticonderoga pencil shavings already and summer’s great keening begins.

The season is nowhere over, yet it is aging. Surrounded by the lemon-yellow-forest-green-cornflower-burnt-sienna colors swirling around me in the all-new-all-same-mass Crayola aisle. Even as I buy what is required, I disappear into my own summer place.

In the waning days, we are gathering our harvest buckets, our pickling salts, and inner-tube patches. We are ready for something to die again.

The summers of yesterday– whether we are 20 or 80– wait in our memories like still life. Perfect hard confectionary, twisted inside a cellophane wrapper. A permanent lost anticipation.

They’ve lost the bright heat of concrete noontime. And the sangria reds of the lake sunsets. They are behind us, in the albums of already. They bleach and blanch entirely, monochrome, with twinkles of silver in the edges of our memory.

Now, where the morning light touches the water, the memory flashes in brightest white. Where the canoe glides into the shade of a tree’s arch, it disappears into the blackness.

Summer belongs to the juicy, hand-picked moments of immediacy, and then, to the permanent archive of memory.

Other Summers in Black and White… here.

I’ve fallen in lust with Hipstamatic on my iPhone … All made possible because the iPhone 4 has a decent camera.

Hipstamatic is the app that allows previously young people like me (who refuse to believe that status has changed) to believe that we can still be the great photographer we dreamed of being when we were 16, and toying with instatmatic cameras.

This dream, like many I had suffered the loss of, is fading and lovely in its dusty frame. Only the best qualities are apparent, and for some reason, the skewed composition and disorganized groupings makes the dream seem more human. More like real art.

Which is to say it is like most art: everyday, dime-a-dozen perfection, carved from our leaden souls.

On the road, so that means many hours enclosed in our van as a group.

Somehow I keep thinking that the more time we spend on the road in this Odyssey, the more it becomes a part of us. Sort of like growing roots only with no chance of growing vineyard vegetables any time soon.

This isn’t really a super exciting holiday, but the classic American road-trip, filled with whining and arguments and inappropriate places to stop and pee is just the thing for reminding us just how much we need.

This would include: a few change of clothes, a well stocked snack bag, a few toy distractions and, most of all, the time to slow down, look out at the clouds and do not much with the people we love.

I recently joined a Facebook group that is a group and a game where points are awarded for posts, pics, links and comments, based on their wittiness and hilarity. The group’s moderator however, really prefers somewhat crude jokes, so I have to dip deep down in the barrel of my wit repertoire to get points.One evening, when Colin was traveling on business, and the kids were sleeping, I got quite distracted by the back and forth of the game and didn’t get to bed till pretty late. Result: top score, who cares? and I was exhausted the next day.

<Sigh.>

Meanwhile, I am reading “Wherever You Go, There You Are” by Jon Kabat-Zinn and considering the state of my zen life. I’ve recently rejoined my somewhat dusty yoga practice and have been trying to spread the yoga practice of mindfulness to our family life. Tough to do when we are all constantly running from one activity to the next, constantly chewing on the latest candy necklace and fiddling with a new toy.

The burden of modern life is the mask of consumption we wear. We think we look very nice and fashionable in it, but it only acts to blind us from the ways we are warping real life, real world, time and our own natural selves.

Daughters obsess about princess dresses. Sons obsess about monster trucks. Husbands obsess about electronics upgrades. Wives obsess about body upgrades.

We cannot see ourselves, naked and perfect. We use air conditioners and noise machines to drown out the songbirds.

Our cars’ desires and need to go-go-go (nowhere and anywhere) suffocate the sea life.

Vegetables growing on a vine is a surprise.

How far we have come from the way the world really is.

Roving Band of Idiots, indeed.

Artists are basically fucked in America. They work their asses off, often all day and all night, spend heaps of money and thought on their craft and at the end of the month, they still have nothing with which to pay their water bills.

So can they flush their toilets? NOOOO!

One of the offspring in our house is leaning toward being talented in art– and now of course EVERYONE (teachers, etc) are like: “Oooh You are awesome! What a great drawing! You are so talented! How creative!”

This is such bullshit. Why? Because it’s a lie! They are all leading her on!

Meanwhile, the little boy she goes to pre-school with, who is a socially moronic weirdo with complete brainiac parents, can hardly talk. We all know where this is heading. He is going to be an outcast who comforts himself with video and computer games. And thus end up being the one who is “successful,” rolling in the dough some day.

I’ve been visiting scoutiegirl.com alot lately, and I love her blog. She’s got real chutzhpa, and her blog on creativity, mindful spending, and the handmade really capture the essence of a vibrant creative life. She is achieving the balance of artist and success-nerd.

Tara (the author) exudes a fearlessness in her career that I find both captivating and somewhat inhuman. Well, maybe what I mean is she seems to have those qualities to maintain business that escape so many artists.

Artists battle with not only their own personal esteem issues (everyday, everyhour, everymoment?) but also with the American cultural esteem issue– that $$$ is God. Consumer culture saves us all.

The “Bottom Line” Is Called that For  a Reason

So when artists — any kind of artist — begin to create, the innate cultural conversation always involves  the back-of-the-head whisper:

Who will want to consume this?

What value does my work have?

Can I sell it?

Will I be able to pay my bills?

And, undoubtedly, that cultural whisper changes the shape of their art.

I’ve Got No Adsense, at All

For all the years that I have written this blog, I have kept it ad-free. I signed up for a Google Adsense account a year ago, but never put ads on the pages. I wanted to, but something held me back.

I know about SEO. I’ve understood that the content of my experiential blog doesn’t suit the specified channel of ad sales.

I know that my few “reviews” on this blog are my best-read content. They are also my least favorite pieces to write.

I knew that if I wanted to watch the Adsense ticker go up, I’d have to change what I was doing here.

You can see I have put an ad space on top of the page, but it is empty.

That’s how I feel about tying ad sales to Letters from a Small State. I feel empty. Even though I know I deserve to be paid for my writing.

I rely on friends to keep me in the know on craft-related things and the latest rave has come to me via my cool friend, Jessica — Kumihimo.

Of course, no craft craze is new, and this one is is via Japan and the samurai, so it isn’t exactly modern.

Being a writer, I have a tendency to start hand-crafts, and never finish them. I like the idea of being crafty, but the manifestation of my artwork tends to look just slightly less technical than my four-year-old’s work. I have no talent for any craft, it seems, but writing.

This is a scientifically-proven excuse, of course– I could be successful at just about anything I wanted to, if I worked long and hard enough.

The Art We Don’t Practice

Just ask Serena and Venus (according to “Bounce” by author Matthew Syed).  What artists might cite as their “sixth sense,” or talent for making beauty in their profession is really, Syed says, them “relying on their deep knowledge of perceptual cues” — their mind using the practice they have developed over time and many years working with colors, textures, and techniques.

In some ways, this is comforting. After all, I can look at the lump of yarn I call a “scarf” and say “oh well, it isn’t my fault. I don’t have the time to set aside to really learn.”

Yet in other ways, it also opens the door to a lazy-way-out mentality in general. If I have an excuse (No time to invest! Can’t be bothered!), will I ever take the time to pursue those meandering paths of beauty that open me up to new ideas, and new parts of my identity?

I feel this way about my family, about my art (experiential writing), and about the way I choose to experience the world. In evey endeavour, I begin in the space of imperfection– in a heap of uncertainty and tangled threads. It’s up to me to fight through that and make beauty from it.

We have time, and we use it up. It is the ultimate commodity in a temporary life. In a creative space, it seems to waiver in form: great gaping hours of fearful emptiness, or ultra-thin slivers of panicked release.

Between reading Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Wherever you Go, There You Are” and Scoutie Girl’s latest post on flexibility and balance in our creative lives, I am buggered as to whether my writing would more successful if I were to “do nothing” or “work smarter.”

The creative life and the consumer life constantly fight, like angry siblings.

So many people I know attest that you should “Do what you want and money will follow” and some have even shown it to be true. For them.

What makes a creative day successful? Is the beautiful piece of work completed (or even started)? Or is it having the value of your time/craft validated by the audience/consumer?

Tara and Stephanie look at the concept of “balance” and “flexibility” as being see and saw of a creative “career”. From Tara (Scoutie Girl):

I need boundaries for those around me. My ability to have any sense of balance in my life is tied to my ability to rein in the flexibility I feel around my creative career. If I want to achieve balance, I have to accept a less flexible work arrangement (note: it’s still pretty damn good…). And if I want to maintain ultimate flexibility, I have to accept a less balanced life.

Tara says that flexibility leads to her to “have to accept a less balanced life.”

The language of this reply is like a sigh. For a writer/artist (maybe others too?), a day ahead holds promise. It is waiting to be ready to be filled– with the beauty and deep emotional connections that have our right brain firing constantly.

To “have to” build boundaries and limit “creative time” to 10-4 p.m., Monday thru Thursday (for example), seems to instinctively dive the creative mind into a place of limitations.

Hence, the <sigh> I sense in Tara’s acceptance of “balance” as her creative master.

Man, we DO hate to be reminded that art is work.

The copy of John Berendt’s “The City of Fallen Angels” that Heather gave me is water-logged. It looks as though it made it here by water taxi.

The book, which I am halfway through, wanders through this old city, meeting real Venetians and asking them: “How do you feel about Venice?” It’s a series of snapshots of the real people who live there.

Berendt admits that there’s no point writing another book about Venice– every kind of history, travelogue, commentary has been said and repeated about this melancholy place.

Why do I like this book, then, so much? Something to do with what it is doing to me.

This book didn’t get nearly the attention that Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” did back in 1995. I suppose that might be because critics and readers, alike, feel bored with done subjects in “discovered” places. Sort of the way we feel instantly bored at seeing The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Hours of flights, trains,walking to get to this place and what should we expect to feel?

Venice hides itself away from us, as foreign tourists who scuffle around heads down, in the twisting calle.  Even if you stand on a bridge and stare at its beauty, thinking, “Here I am! In VENICE!” there is no admission ticket to this city, if you don’t belong to it.

Being a tourist so often has made me realize what it means to be home, to belong somewhere, to be a part of the human machinery that makes a place as corrupt as it is beautiful.

Tourists flock to places like London, Venice, Paris, Salzburg, New York. They can pass through and even “experience” these places, but like Berendt (writing from is converted palazzo storage room), it is really only like licking the outside window of a truly fantastic restaurant.