Tag Archives: Attention span

A Couple of Rustics

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photo montageI’ll readily accede to being flighty in my affections. My short attention span and my determination to avoid playing favorites in dangerous or dullard ways may contribute to this seeming fickleness of mine, but I think life short enough and the list of possible pleasures long enough that it’s probably the extensive gap between that most often keeps me from landing in any one spot for great lengths of time.

My husband, too, is fairly catholic in his tastes, so though we are both creatures of habit and preference in many ways, we’re often pleased to discover any new delight to add to our own inventories of happiness. As a pair of artists, we’re often included in or happy to observe all sorts of cultural events and elements, and a rather common denominator of those is urban life. Cities do tend to have concentrations of resources. We both love the inspiring energy and wonders of The City, whatever the city of the moment happens to be.

But exposure does not guarantee infusion, immersion or exclusion. We can love and revel in our big-city adventures and lashings of high art and culture, but we’re not particularly notable for our own impressiveness in those realms. Simplicity, ease, companionability and comfort trump all of the glossy and glamorous stuff of life, in the end.

And the thrills of the city are always best savored in the context of time well spent in the contrasting marvels of the countryside. Salt to enhance the sweet. Earthiness and roughness to offset the shiny and sleek. And I guess I feel these latter things enough inside, thinking honesty and humility preferable and more natural to my way of being, that I’m more often a country mouse in the city than a city mouse when in the country. Neither my spouse nor I is probably all that complicated, despite the sophisticated milieu in which we may find ourselves at times. We are ordinary, visitors in the land of specialness, rather than the reverse.

A little time spent in the countryside tugs us away from all flash and clamor. Couple of bumpkins, maybe not entirely. But a little rusty and dusty around the edges, yes. A couple of rustics, really.

Ironclad Alibis

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photoYou may think I am obsessed with rusty stuff, and you may well be right about that. I like all sorts of things that look like they have stories behind them, and it doesn’t matter entirely whether they are animate or inanimate. Odd creatures are surely just as likely to have their tales (or tails) worthy of the attention, but all the more probably going to get my imagination geared up if they are in the context of marvelously creaky and rustic and grubby, grimy, weather-beaten, broken-down, scabrous places and things that in themselves invite all manner of assumptions and guesses and fancies.

photoIf I haven’t mentioned or shown you pictures of such wonderfully decrepit and strange objects and oddments in a while, you can be assured that it’s not for lack of interest or for my not having a multitude of such images, visual and verbal, on file and in process. I do try to vary my posts at least a smidgen [Hi, Smidge!] so as to not put myself into a blog-induced coma, let alone every one of you out there who stumbles into my cave of wonders. Then again, the urge rises and I must let some of my pet images out to play.

photo montageDo I get repetitive and predictable anyway? Why yes, of course I do. I can’t help but ramble down favorite paths just as much as anyone, and even when I do have a modicum of willpower in that regard, you can be certain that I’ll give in to my sensationally short attention span and return my focus to its standard grooves soon enough. Most of us do operate that way. I’m not even particularly apologetic about such crass and lazy behavior, as long as no one’s paying me to share what I put up in my little window here in the ether.

photo montageSo if you think it borders on the criminal, the way I manipulate you into thinking I’m veering off into sincerely new and exotic territory at times or the fact that I have such small and narrow interests and opinions and loves, I wonder at your fortitude (or stupidity) for not just trotting off toward greener pastures, at least less rusted ones. And I’ve admitted to this and many other of my faults, so I don’t really think I owe you any further apology or explanation. What you see here is unshakably the real me. Except when it’s straight-up fiction, because I do have a propensity to lie, too.photo

Shiny Objects & Flying Illusions

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Beetling Brow

Inside my skull’s a fizzing insectarium

of mystic, magic, merry little things

so wildly pretty that my brain can’t carry ’em

without the power of all their tiny wings,

Abuzz with sparkling brilliance and their fleeting,

so speedy that they’ve utterly forgot

regard for gravity or need for beating,

become instead bright vestiges of thought.

Now, you may think I’m just a bugged-out entity

with not a thought for anything of sense,

but every person has his own bugs, hasn’t he,

and with their glittering gleam, the joy’s immense;

I never really cared that much for images

or what all others thought my problem was,

but just embraced my inner insects’ scrimmages,

and love the shiny ways they make me buzz.digital collage

The Race Well Run

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digital illustration from a graphite drawingAthletic prowess of any sort is a mystery and source of amazement to me. One doesn’t have to be an Olympian, by a long stretch, to appear nearly godlike to my unskilled and uninformed eye. While I have had moments of physical fitness in my life, they never amounted to anything notable beyond getting me from Here to There and back again.

I think my attention span tends to favor short bursts of intense action rather than sustained practice, just as my brain has always rebelled against both study and studio time over lengthy stretches. When I’m doing a renovation project, it reflects my past days of art gallery installation, which more often than not veered away from the sensible approach of using a full week for the job in favor of three 18 hour days in a row. When I’d end up at 2 a.m. leaning off the twelve-foot ladder to aim the last few lights properly at the artworks, it’s likely no wonder I avoided spending longer periods acting sensible and instead ended up doing everything in a crazy cram-course style.

I know perfectly well that this approach may be inappropriate for these pursuits and is definitely wrong for athletic pursuits, just as well as I know that attempting to draw only in 18-hour sessions for three days straight and then take a nice six-week holiday before coming back, literally, to the drawing board would be ridiculous. So, considering that I have such a direly miniscule attention span for anything but what I love the most, it’s no shock that something I’m truly lousy at and ill-equipped with the strength, speed or grace to perfect has rarely been (and is unlikely to become) a long-term pursuit of mine.

This–along with the few paltry attempts at athletic activities that I have made over the years–explains quite readily why I both admire great acts of physical prowess and art and find them completely alien, athlete and action alike. Yes, I have pressed a few weights, swum a lap or ten, leapt hurdles, rowed against the current, placekicked the pigskin, arm-wrestled, done pushups and pullups and situps, and run a fair number of miles in my time, among other things. But unless I have to do any of it again to save my life, I’d ever so much rather watch someone who genuinely loves being an Action Figure do all the work, and do it ever so much better than I ever could. After all, though I’m no athlete I am a very skilled and enthusiastic spectator, and all sorts of artists deserve a good audience. That way we all get a chance to rise to the level of our highest potential.

Et in Arcania Ego: Weird is Good

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I like weirdness. Eccentricity, outsider thinking, silliness and the bizarre–I’m generally repelled by danger and anything remotely aggressive, but I have to ‘fess up and say that my own differences from the so-called norm are not just habits and hints of wilfulness but also deeply ingrained and naturally occurring parts of who and what I am. Yes, I am weird.

But I’ll also say that “weird” is simply, for me, an equally comfortable name for being unique. Every norm is only an average, each with plenty of exceptions to prove and/or flavor the rule. While I’ve grown into embracing [most of] my quirks and distinctions, it isn’t always easy being a quagga in a world of pretty ponies. I woke up again today from a dream I’ve had since my memory began: the details vary, but it’s always about being in a group of people, all earnestly working on some project, and having the leader and my peers try in one way and another to steer me to do it Right and not as I’ve been doing it–even while they all assure me that they approve of and appreciate the excellence of the different thing I’ve been doing. This will sound mighty strange to anyone whose life has gone ‘as planned’.

Wildly convoluted brain-waves

Welcome to my synapses

Those with any little anomaly (physical, mental, or other), however, might sense something familiar.

It was only as an adult that I–having grown up in the Olden Days long before “dyslexia” entered the common parlance, and then as something rather negative or at least problematic–realized that I have a nearly magical variety of dysfunctional characteristics that come under that broad umbrella. My worldview is shaped by all kinds of tweaks that mimic but do not match the ordinary: lexicographically, to be sure, since I have the ability to watch words and letters move around a page in ways that if amusing are not necessarily conducive to fast and accurate reading, so I’ve always had to read rather slowly, and about four times over, through anything to feel I’ve grasped its essence. Despite this sometimes frustrating methodology, I’ve never disliked reading, only been surprised over the years to be classified as reading ‘above my grade level’ if it took so much effort to keep up with expectations.

Along with dyslexia of the most obvious sort I can lay claim to numeric, directional, spatial, and temporal experiences that stray from the ordinary a great deal. Numbers play around on a page just as actively as words and letters. There have been times when I was able to surprise my math teachers with the expected answer to relatively complicated computations, but only after I learned not to admit to the process by which I divined said answer, as it bore little relation to the assigned progression from Q to A but was rather intuited. I have no inner compass, so don’t try to guide me to your cozy home with Left and Right and North and South, let alone Up and Down. I do understand what those concepts mean, but they have no relation to locations in my own being other than perhaps as niggling desires. I can you tell whether I’m located right next to the baseball diamond or up in the cheap seats, but not how to get from one to the other (without flying) nor can I experience the action of the game much more vividly from one point or another. And don’t get me started on trying to discern the details of the play: if it happened quickly enough, I have to mentally freeze the moment of action and stare at the “snapshot” in my head for a while to figure out how, where, or if the ball crossed the plate and what the batter and catcher did about it.

This is all a (perhaps appropriately) convoluted route to informing you that I don’t see the world the way other people see it. But honestly: does anyone? If each of us is genuinely unique, then any norms we’ve posited should only serve as starting points for communication and coexistence, not ends in themselves. I’ve been told countless times by well-meaning Professionals and advisers that if I wish to succeed or gain acceptance in my field (whether as artist, writer, teacher, or any other labeled category of mortal being), I ought to work at fitting in better. It’s always couched in friendly terms but boils down to my being too hard to categorize, define and package because my interests and personality (and therefore my work) wander too far afield and are tangential, at best, to expectations.

My answer at last is Vive la Difference! I’ve spent more than enough of my first half century thinking I ought to redesign myself to please the common demand before realizing that I’m really okay with being uncommon. And I sincerely hope that everybody else not dwelling directly on the dot of Normal finds his-her-or-its contentment and delight wherever and however possible. In that lies endless possibility. Especially if one has the attention span of a gnat, as I do.