(A little tribute to one of my special talents.)
The Tale that Wags the Dog
Once upon a rainy day, A soggy doggy went his way
To find a warmer spot, and dry, When, from the middle of the sky,
All of a sudden, fell a cat Right on the dog and whomped him flat—
The sad conclusion one can draw Is, someone with dyslexia
Was on assignment to make rain, And in the turnings of her brain,
Confused the “and” among her cogs And started Raining Cats on Dogs.
Freedom must be one of the most commonly used words in American English. It’s a constant in the rhetoric of politicians, educators, religious leaders, and—oh, yeah—of marketing professionals. And it means something different to every one of them, often to the same person at different times. Most seem to equate it with what they see as their individual right to do whatever-it-is that they wish to do, and give the word specially loud emphasis when what they wish to do is contrary to others’ rights, real or perceived, or to the law. In some ways, I tend to think of Freedom as a much smaller thing with a much larger personal impact: freedom from my own limitations.
That’s the freedom I seek, and I suppose, the freedom that only I can grant myself, but am persistently too fearful to dare. Afraid to consider, let alone accept. Amazing, when I reflect on it, that I’ve gotten to this ripe old age, let alone had such a full, joyful life, without being quite able to let go of my inborn fragility of spirit. But there it is. I limit myself to solo singing in an empty house, to dancing behind closed doors. It doesn’t really matter that nobody else would pay that much attention if I did this stuff right along with everyone else; it’s that I feel self-conscious and awkward and don’t like my self-image as singer or dancer or anything so near to being extroverted.
Does this make me unhappy? No. It’s more mysterious than upsetting…I love to hear good singers sing, watch uninhibited dancing. I admire people who are extroverted enough to do whatever they jolly well please without regard to how silly it might make them feel. I like to think I don’t care how silly it makes me feel. But I’m holding on to a modicum of insecurity about not wanting to make other people feel a teensy bit uncomfortable with my gross incompetence. Silly me. Really.
Go on, keep dancing, you over there! It makes me happy. No strings attached.
How is it that one can never ‘catch up’—with anything in life? In my case, I’ve no doubt the natural probability of my being behind in all things is undoubtedly exacerbated by my laziness, procrastination, stubbornness, ignorance, and near-inability to operate in the spatial world in a typical fashion. Being virtually unable to distinguish left from right, north from south, up from down, or in from out can be highly entertaining, if nothing of particular value rides on the speed of the outcome, whether I’m en route somewhere or attempting to read or measure something, or just buttoning my shirt, but it’s less amusing when I feel perpetually stuck in first gear despite having a deadline or an emergency.
In any event, it might explain why I find myself distracted (yes, another of my troublesome never-catch-up causes) by all things orbital, this feeling that life is running circles around me. It may be egotistical, come to think of it, to operate as though I were the center of the universe this way, which in turn (there I go again!) seems a teensy bit ironic for someone who feels unable to operate her own life let alone run the world’s machinery. Ah, well, it doesn’t bear further fuss; I’ll get circles under my eyes if I keep this up too long.
No, my friends, I’m no longer feeling so terrible with the flu that the thought of even writing about food repels me; I am, I believe, fully recovered already. No need to bump me off. Whew! But my appetite is still slightly limited and my interest in slaving over a hot stove, nil.
Lest you be too confused by today’s post title, I am not making a personal request either to be executed or made into a photographer’s portrait subject. Not crazy about either idea. I’m also, for the record, not overly fond of getting shots (except for the knowledge that they usually are meant to help me be healthier), and I can’t recall ever drinking shots. All such nonsense aside, my teasing post title only means to tell you that I’m thinking about food photography and meal-time hunger and how incompatible they are.
*SOOC*? Almost. Light-adjusted for clarity and slightly more accuracy, straightened if necessary, and cropped. But the foods were already pretty attractive. Hence, my firing off a shot or two, tossing the camera aside, and getting down to the real business at hand. Eating and drinking. Wouldn’t you do the same?
Left to right, above: Flavored honeys at the farmer’s market in Halifax; a cinnamon apple napoleon with vanilla custard and pomegranate glaze at an unknown restaurant in Seattle; a glass of Pilsner Urquell enjoyed near its ‘birthplace’ at a neighborhood eatery in Prague.
Pros don’t need tons of time or patience to suss out the situation, set their cameras on the ideal settings, frame the shot, take it, and abracadabra!, they’re done. Great art, now let’s get down to eating. So unfair. Of course, that’s arguable, because if I spent the time and effort to learn and train properly in how to use a camera of any sort, I might conceivably get decent enough skills to save myself a few frustrations, not to mention gut rumbles.
Fool that I am, I have always let my natural intimidation around all-things-technical (plus, admittedly, fear of a certain unpleasant would-be teacher in years past) scare me out of getting serious about cameras. I’m generally content to let the camera do all of the work for me, at least until I get photos onto my computer where I can play with them endlessly as artworks or, at the least, adjust them so they better fit my idea of what I saw or am trying to convey. Part of my artist persona has always been to edit, tweak, second-guess, and fiddle with images, so it’s not as onerous to me to figure out how to make a photo into what I want it to be—I’m far less interested in documentary accuracy and straight-out-of-camera [*SOOC*] “honesty” than in getting my story told. All photographs were, and are, still only images of what the photographer chose or was able to show us, despite the popular notion that they are “truthful” in ways that other visual forms of data are not. And while I like a Pretty Picture or a dramatic image, what I’m always in search of is illustration that enhances and furthers my storytelling, whether with words added or not.
As a cook, I am in the same category. I love to eat delicious and, sometimes, complicated foods. I enjoy goofing around in the kitchen and, occasionally, discovering something I can make that’s delicious or, rarely, complex. But the very idea of having good technical skills as a cook—never mind chef—is just as unattainable, between my aforementioned phobias and my laziness, as going pro with a camera.
The results of all of this? I blog about food; as an aficionado but never as an expert, I am limited in what I can tell you about food not only in technical terms but in how I show it to you. I shoot as well as I’m able, and if it’s really imperfect, touch up what I shoot until it’s at least marginally post-able. Then I use it. And I blather about what I do and don’t like, how I make dishes or fail in the attempts, stuff I like to eat when I’m out and about, new treats I’ve learned to adore, and other food-lust topics, just as though I had any business doing so. I happen to like documenting my foodly obsessions.
The other thing I do is try to learn along the way. Food tricks, perhaps. Learn from my mistakes. Photographic ones, mostly. Couple of things I’ve learned: find pretty foods to shoot (see above montage). Better chance of getting a good portrait, if you have a good-looking subject, whether conventionally beautiful or just wonderfully interesting. Use as much natural light as you can get. The food can be moved a little to catch the light better but the sun can’t be so easily moved to better suit the food. Don’t get fancy. The food’s already attractive—okay: or horrible, if that’s what I’m documenting, so it’s at least meant to be an interesting subject. No reason to do a lot of fussy setup and presentation extras, since I have limited supplies of tablewares and glamorous shoot venues, so I tend to pay more attention to details of the ingredients or go for a tight shot of the plate rather than overdo extraneous things.
That’s about it. Because, as I intimated in my opening salvo here, even the littlest bit of time spent on the photographic part of the posts is time taken away from my pursuit of eating. Digital cameras are a boon in this regard, of course. Fast, efficient, no waiting. My little old smartphone is helpful as well. As techno-dull as I am, I know very little indeed of what my phone can or can’t do, let alone how to make it do anything for me. But I know how to take the simplest of snapshots, and my phone camera knows how to send them to my waiting computer, and that speeds up the process just one helpful little bit more. So glad to get to the table faster.
The middle photo was taken with a regular point-and-shoot digital camera, and the flanking shots (a little later) with my cell phone camera. I think I’m getting incrementally better along the way. More importantly, faster to the table. Most importantly, the food tasted rather good. Mission accomplished, I guess.
Left to right, above: Zucchini frittata with salsa, olives, and crispy bacon; roasted chicken breast with guacamole and coleslaw; skillet-cooked steak and mushrooms with pan-fried mashed potatoes, balsamic deglaze, tomatoes, and strawberries. All home cookery.
As a blogger, an artist, and a writer-type person, it almost goes without saying that a I would find it beneficial, if not outright pleasing, to have my work catch on like wildfire for some (or no) reason. Few people, I’d guess, get into blogging in the hope that no one ever notices them.
Nobody who spends any time on the interwebs, of course, has any excuse for not seeing and understanding that what ‘goes viral‘ is often nasty, lowbrow, and destructive stuff. We all still fall for it, but that’s a failure to accept experience, observation, and logic, not one of lacking evidence: tell me there aren’t a dozen topics, from celebrity rumors to fake medical claims and offers of specious Free Fabulousness galore that are patently impossible. And our collective gullibility, willful or not, leads us to pay attention to such lunacy, even to buy—or buy into—it, until the Likes and Shares, the Tweets and Pins reach critical mass. Fans and friends are lost over this stuff, health and fortunes risked, and even governments stand on the edge of oblivion over it. This is not the pretty side of going viral.
Yesterday I was reminded of the sense of the word “virus” I first knew: bugs. Ugh, bugs. Not insect-type bugs, which in the abstract sense I admire greatly. Germ-type bugs. Which I really, really do not.
Apparently, they don’t like me much either. Yesterday when I went grocery shopping around dinnertime, I was not feeling especially perky, but didn’t think much of it. I was a bit hungry, and attributed my discomfort to having let dinner wait too long. I got home, started having a little pain around my midriff, fixed a quick dinner, felt much more awful all of a sudden, left dinner in the kitchen, and curled up on my bed like a snail.
I won’t go into further details, but by 10 last night I was feeling lousy enough that I asked my dear spouse to call the 24-hour nurse line to see what the person on duty would recommend I do. Go to the Emergency Room, she said. And so I did, with a lot of help from my sweet chauffeur, of course. After the examination, a couple of nice refreshing pints of rehydration, a small whack on the head from a dose of morphine, and a long morning’s sleep, I am intensely glad to say that the flu bug that knocked me for a loop appears to have been the classic 24-hour variety. Viral gastroenteritis sounds so much more interesting and magical than Flu. It can, obviously, still knock me for a loop. This was only my second-ever trip to the ER (my first, for stitches over a tiny hockey-acquired slash on the chin when I was in grade school), and I hope it’s my last-ever, but I am grateful that the personnel there diagnosed and helped me so quickly.
And boy, am I glad that I had what looks like a narrow escape from the 3-8 day version that the paperwork tells me is the norm. Going viral sucks. Bugs suck.
That kind, anyhow. I haven’t by any means lost my admiration for insect-sorts of bugs. Real bugs, by definition, are only a smallish portion of the insect population, but since I’m recovering from an illness that I grew up knowing as a Bug when it was really a viral infection, I shall indulge my childhood terminology and leave you with a few pretty pictures of insects that, though they are not bugs, cheer me up whether I’m bug-bedraggled, bugged, or just a bit buggy.
This is yet another of my obvious addictions: the otherworldly or fantastical. I can’t stay away from dragons and faeries, aliens and archetypes, for any great length of time.
Thankfully, I seem to be in good company in this regard. So I doubt I’m either shocking anyone or even likely to bore them with it too terribly, since those not equally smitten will happily ignore or delete my many posts containing such curiosities. I’m also happy that, because of the very unfettered nature of the topic, I will never run out of subject matter for my drawings when I feel it’s time to get back in that gear.
It might be that I am something of a fantastical creature myself, of course, so perhaps that helps to explain my affinity with other denizens of the unknown realms. (Grins to self, scribbling away as usual.)![Drawing: Enter the [Spaniard's] Dragon](https://artcoloredglasses.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2015-07-29-1-back-to-the-drwg-board-conquistadragon-4.jpg?w=584&h=779)
I love the way that superheroes remain unrecognized, even by their nearest and dearest, despite nearly always having camouflaged getups as thin as a politician’s commitment. Glasses on a person who doesn’t usually wear glasses: so much coverage! A little mask with big eyeholes in it…yeah, that’ll fool Mom when she looks me straight in the face! At least in more of the fairytales there’s a serious enough literal transformation that I can believe it would confound a reasonable amount of investigative zeal. I mean, I can imagine that Beauty’s pal the Beast could conceivably be tough for most people to spot as his former princely persona, at least more so than a cape and a staggeringly revealing, body-conforming spandex super-suit would tend to do.
When I become a superhero, and, of course, I will, eventually—it kind of seems like few people on earth don’t at some point fall into a vat of toxic waste and vow revenge on those who allowed it to happen, if you read at all these days—I plan to be so well hidden in my new identity that even you people who have been meeting me here in Bloglandia for four-plus years won’t flinch. Meanwhile, you’ll probably be too distracted by the latest zombie apocalypse or alien invasion (also well documented in current entertaining literature and film) to notice I’ve changed anyhow.
More likely, though, is that the whole hidden-in-plain-sight thing is much closer to reality than I like to think. It’s amazing to consider how many large-looming realities I am capable of missing or simply convincing myself don’t exist because I’m too small-thinking to accept them as present. I don’t like to believe I was wrong, so I convince myself the other person is the one at fault. I don’t want to believe that someone I’ve liked and admired is terribly flawed, so I keep up the idealized image in my mind, pretending that he doesn’t have a detectable alcohol problem or she hasn’t been the obvious only person with access to the accounts that have consistently failed to remain in balance. Might as well be wearing neon signs that say Hey! Lookee here!! Big PROBLEM!!!, and wearing clown costumes.
I still like superhero stories and fabulations and fairytales. I enjoy them immensely. But there is a little part of me that always gets as grouchy as the Beast that they’re so patently improbable, what with all of the costumes that couldn’t fool a baby seeming to deceive the world at large for great lengths of time. Mostly because I know I can’t count myself in the baby’s camp when it comes to such discernment. Fool me twice—a thousand times—shame on me. Grrr!
Brown Recluse to Black Widow
Never fret, my darling;
Never fear, my dear:
If I had meant to murder you
You wouldn’t still be here—
But I prefer the gentler sort
Of crime, soft as a breath—
Embracing you with all eight arms,
While kissing you to death.
Do you dare to think about your own death in reasonable, detached terms? Do you think that’s morbid and grotesque to even consider, or do you find it easy? If you find it easy to contemplate in the abstract, is it because you suffer from depression or are suicidal, or is it simply that you recognize living as an inherently terminal condition?
This is big stuff. Even the clinically depressed are sometimes able to recognize, on those tiny instants of light in the midst of the abysmal dark, that their death, no matter how insignificant and unworthy they may think themselves, will affect others. I know this from experience, and from lots of reading and conversation and observation. I know that even when I was at my lowest—thankfully, not as hideously low as that reached by many, as I know in retrospect—my rational moments told me that no matter how they felt about me, or even if they didn’t notice me at all, when I was alive, everyone who was peripheral to me in any way would have some tidying-up to do after my death. Physical, perhaps, for those to whom body removal and disposal fell, but whatever tiny tasks I was not present to perform anymore would either default to another’s To Do list or leave a gap, incomplete. I realized that I am the butterfly effect, in human form. You are. Every living, breathing being has a space in the universe, a purpose, and however unnoticed in life, has an impact both by living and by dying.
All the same, I feel especially fortunate that in my family, talk about death and dying were far from taboo. It wasn’t all that uncommon to find the dinner table talk veering in that direction, if somebody we knew was unwell or had just died. We didn’t need euphemisms and pussy-footing to protect us from the reality of death. It’s nothing more or less than the inevitable cessation of life, and if we can’t talk about that, we’re stuck dealing with all kinds of petty and logistical nonsense just to get through the process when we’d rather be spending time living and loving each other and getting through the complexities of the occasion with a modicum of grace and humanity.
So my family already knows that I would prefer they donate what they can of my organs or remains to someone who has a better chance of survival and health if I give it to them, or to scientists who can learn how to give future patients that better chance. In fact, the government know this: I’m on the organ-donor registry, should I die unexpectedly or with usable parts intact. My loved ones also know that I’d prefer a minimum of fuss disposing of whatever remains of my physical shell after that, the cheapest and quickest cremation and scattering of my ashes being my top choice. I figure that any Supreme Being capable of inventing the human creature from scratch can easily put me into another, newer shell if and when it’s my turn to exist in any other form, and as for the current body, it’s a good source of recyclable carbon and nutrients to replenish any part of the earth that enjoys a good, tasty meal of ashes, say, my long-loved flowers the irises.
Those close to me also know that I have far less interest in what they do to celebrate or mourn my passing than the still-living will. If the occasion of my death can be used as an excuse for a marvelous concert to raise awareness or funds or mere pleasure for the sake of a musical group, whether my spouse is still alive to conduct or attend such an event or not, that would be lovely. But hey, I’ll still be dead, so y’all can do whatever it is that makes sense to you and I promise I won’t roll in my grave or be a pesky poltergeist or complain in any other way. Still dead, if you didn’t catch my drift.
And that, in fact, is a beautiful thing, and a great comfort to me. I don’t look forward to the actual process of dying or the moment of my death. I’d happily live a long, long life in great health and an approximation of sanity that seems cheery enough to me, before dying for real. But once I do, I feel genuinely confident that none of this worldly stuff will matter to me in the slightest, so as much as I like to “plan” ahead to keep my survivors from any terribly fussy practical matters in the event, I’m not worried. Go ahead and dance on my grave, if there is one. Keep on living. Don’t worry about me; I’ll be fine. Really.
Art-Colored Glasses 