Tag Archives: short attention span

Blogsistentialism

Posted on by
26
photo

Sighhhhhhh . . .

I’ve got this little problem, see. It’s about my name. No, I am really pleased with the one I was born with–Mom and Dad did a bang-up job with that, as far as I’m concerned. Parents have it easy with the baby-naming stuff; it’s not their fault if the kid doesn’t match up with the moniker, considering that they had no way of knowing the shrimp beforehand to fuss over pairing name and gnome perfectly.

My problem is with my blog title. I’ve winged it with my online place’s birth-name, a version of my own, since I started the gig a little over a year ago, but in truth, it was pretty much a place-holder since I had no inkling then that I’d not only stick with the process but have people beyond the borders of my immediate family visiting with me here. So the problem is, if there’s nothing in the name of my blog to tell anybody outside of the aforementioned familial borders what the heck this blog contains, or why on earth they would have the remotest reason to bother visiting here. If, indeed, they did.

Now, then, I’m having a good old identity crisis. ‘Cause I don’t know what the heck to tell anybody either. On Tuesdays, yeah, you’ll generally find food-related ramblings when you show up. Other days, though, swerve from one topic to another so loosely and with such unpredictable abandon that I don’t know when I sit down at the keyboard what direction I’m bound to take. New drawing? New photograph? Reminiscences about travel, DIY monkeying, garden plotting, commentary on freeway drivers or a freshly minted and wildly ridiculous poem–I just haven’t figured out any sort of way to describe in a couple of words what’s on the non-Tuesday menu around this blog.

I’m open to suggestions. Thanks to my obsessive dilettantism, my spouse suggests that the family nomenclature for me of Short Attention Span Artist might just do the trick, but as accurate as it is in describing me (and probably what I do, too), it still doesn’t seem to me likely to tell a total stranger what to expect on arrival. Tangential adventures like mine could possibly be described as, uh, Tangential Adventures, but of course that’s pretty cryptic too. Art, Poetry, Photography, Essays, and Ingenious Insights combines the pompous and the dully categorical in a way remarkable only for its long-windedness.

I guess I’ll just keep a-sittin’ here in my little corner twirling my ponytail for a while and see if some astounding inspiration happens to alight upon my bedazzled pate. Ooh, Bedazzled Pate! Nahhhh, sounds like some kind of yummy mousse studded with masses of rhinestones. The truly big question remains. Who am I? Doubt that can be answered in this or any other lifetime. But perhaps I’ll figure out my blog’s identity one of these days, at the least. Feel free to help!

 

To Find Balance: Open the Book to a New Page and Begin Again

Posted on by
20

digitally edited photoI’m never quite satisfied that I’m getting as much done as I want to do, doing it as well as I wish, improving at the rate I think I ought to manage. I’m hardly a perfectionist, nor am I particularly obsessive (at least about things that I think truly matter)–I’d guess I’m just a fairly typical person who thinks I’m always running just a bit behind the pace and always crossing things too slowly off the To Do lists. But I don’t think that’s grounds for quitting or even for not trying at all.

It just requires that I take a step back and regroup–reassess my priorities–once in a while. Hence my recurrent list-making and all of those times spent sitting and, to all outward appearances, staring off into space, when what I’m really doing is having a long hard look at what’s in front of me that I’d forgotten how to see, or what’s inside that’s not quite getting its message heard clearly enough anymore.

photoFor one thing, my time-management method, if any, is often the old familiar one of doing what appears right in front of me, often leading to that state I’ve mentioned many a time wherein I set out to do one task, get diverted from it partway through by something else that catches my attention, veer off from that toward another thing that drew my eye, and so on ad infinitum but rarely ad finitum. That’s hardly the end of the world, because of course the short and simple tasks that pop up midway do get taken to completion and crossed off the list, and eventually the original plan will recapture my attention. It’s just wonderfully inefficient and sometimes I prefer to reevaluate whether those bigger tasks aren’t better broken down into groups of manageable smaller ones, ones that might perhaps get finished if stumbled upon tangentially in this habitual way.

All of this is a rather sidelong way itself of saying that I haven’t reestablished my drawing habit as firmly and regularly as I’d like, so I’m revisiting my intention to create a specific schedule or plan that encourages me to focus better on drawing, even a little bit, more often again. I know that I will do this; I can do it and have done so before. But I must choose to do it, and how, and that’s the agenda of the day. Other things (like, oh, blogging, f’rinstance) have stolen my attention and intentions away from drawing, and I would like to rebalance my doings a bit.

Needless to say, this has led to a fairly large overhaul of my household Fix-it lists, because I always prefer that there be at least the possibility of my getting those things done that will keep a solid roof over our heads and a comfortable living environment in which to do things like drawing and blogging surrounding us. That list is as big as always, full of everything from essential repairs to the rearrangement of rooms to better reflect and accommodate how we actually use them, to long-range and perhaps highly fantastical proposals for things I might attempt to build, create or accomplish sometime down my long and wayward path of homemaking.

photo of graphite drawing in progressBut there is also this quick-fix remembrance that what I always advocated to my students had better be usable advice for me: To begin drawing again, make a mark. Waiting around for the Inspiration Fairy to appear and bonk me with a magic wand of fully fledged ideas and a baptism of heartwarming motivation makes for delightful internal pictorials, but not an iota of drawing to show for it. The best cure for a staring, empty piece of paper is A Mark. Directionless and indecipherable as any random thing, it may well be, but it’s amazing how very brief the time usually is between seeing a dark scratch on an otherwise pristine piece of paper and my hyperactive editorial mind kicking into gear and critiquing that mark as something that ought to have purpose and attempting to decipher what that purpose is, steering my hand to further scribbling or erasure, and either way, toward something specific and concrete, even if entirely abstract and nonobjective. That’s what’s going to happen, for starters. Where it goes from there, I’ll have to report back to you when it begins.graphite drawing

Maybe I DID Hear You the First Time

Posted on by
8
mixed media drawing

Pardon my reverie . . . I was just mulling over my latest plans for ruling the world . . .

Oh, yes, in my youth I was very much that kid all of you teachers have found so frustrating in your classes. It wasn’t that I was at all obstreperous (a little chatty at times, but then who isn’t), and I certainly wasn’t intentionally disruptive or uncooperative. But since I mostly hated being noticed, thanks to my shyness and social anxiety, and naturally I didn’t want to get in the way of the kids that weren’t perhaps getting enough of the attention anyway, I often found myself wandering the byzantine byways of my brain with the undoubtedly frequent appearance of not caring about the highly significant stuff being generously shared from the pulpit of the teachers’ desks.

Did it really matter that while the doyenne of the desk was teaching the spelling lesson I was counting the holes in the ceiling tiles to see if one tile matched another or perhaps each was hand-punctured by specially trained elfin craftsmen with sterling silver toothpicks instead of fingers? Actually, as a sometime teacher myself, I can answer that query with a resounding Yessirree, but truthfully only because no matter how stealthy the “inattentive” student thinks she’s being, and no matter if she gets a Hundred on the spelling test every time, the other students are bound to take their cue from the least participatory and cooperative seeming student in the room. It doesn’t matter that she did in fact hear the spelling practice being held in the background of her own mental meanderings (or already knew how to spell whatever exceedingly counterintuitive new words were being practiced), what mattered was that she wasn’t supporting the standard of classroom decorum. I get that. Now. But as a kid, I found it rather trying that I had to do whatever everybody else was doing even when I was certain in my heart that I would get the required job done in my own way. I was the poster child for the triumph of Mind over What Matters.

Did I have Attention Deficit Disorder? (Do I?) Would that make any difference? Not really. Despite my demurrals and admissions of inner sloth and self-indulgence, I have always had the ability to be fairly disciplined when it mattered, I just know I have to make a very serious commitment to exercising that particular skill, because it’s simply not my automatic bent. So along the years I’ve tried to train myself up into a slightly more presentable appearance of compliance and conformity when it seems important or expedient to do so.

Yet my mind still flits hither and yon with equally purposeful purposelessness, all the same. I’m simply learning how to be better at a sort of out-of-body transcendence that allows me to look like I’m fully involved in the present action (and I almost am, really, Boss) while a hunk of my inward self can continue its peregrinations in whatever flights of fancy it requires in the moment.

digital photocollage

Sugar and spice, sure, but don't forget the snails and pails and whatnot . . .

See, there’s just too much loveliness in this universe (and potential in all of the other imaginable ones) not to be exploring it when-and-however I can. The found castoff wing of a dragonfly simply begs to be examined in person and in memory and at great length for its extravagant glassine iridescence. Every minute or magnificent object that comes into my view or my thoughts deserves some serious attention. Shells, shoes, barking madmen and barking dogs, whales and whiskers and whistling trains–if I don’t give them their due, and hopefully in the process also unveil their previously undiscovered secret histories, why then who will? That boy in row six thoughtfully picking his nose with his pencil eraser while staring out the window? Probably, because clearly he (a) has a similarly vagrant brain, the sort from which fabulous inventions and discoveries do spring, and (b) his nose ought to be clear enough by now that his brain will get more oxygen than all of the rest of Row Six put together, so his thoughts will have the added lustre of brilliance that fresh air brings.

In the meantime, I feel it incumbent upon me to keep up my part of cross-pollinating the scientific and romantic approaches toward whatever imaginative ends might finally appear. So please don’t be offended if my attention seems to have drifted just a little off to port or starboard when you’re regaling me with the wit and charm and incomparable genius that I should undoubtedly be diving into with the fullest focus possible. Because I probably only look like I’m off in la-la land when in fact it’s located in me and at one and the same time I’m perfectly awash with what you have shared, O my teachers. I promise I will absorb it, too, subliminally, cutaneously, osmotically and, if necessary, orthotically–right along with all of the goodness I’m already absorbing in my far-off inner world.

mixed media drawing

The waters of mystery and adventure are just waiting there to be swum . . .