3 New Blogs You Have To Read

The unifying theme of these blogs is that they are things created by fascinating, smart and talented women.

Asskicking Ladyblog #1:
The Second Awakening, by Cat Minou. Cat is a funny, thoughtful writer who is looking at the way power and power-grubbing works in our society. In particular, she looks at feminism and what it's like to be a lady here and now.

Her perspective is unique because Cat is a self-made woman, has lived in more than one world and/or skin, and can teach you truckloads about being true to yourself. Put on your thinking cap and head on over there.

Asskicking Ladyblog #2:
Pigments Of My Imagination by June Malone, also known around these parts as Splodge. June has recently come out of hibernation as an illustrator. She is busy mastering new techniques, drawing hilarious things and sharing her journey as a blossoming artist in in that briskly irreverent way that Brits pull off so well. Put on your laughing pants and head on over there.

Asskicking Ladyblog #3:
Women Painting Women, by Sadie Jernigan Valeri. Sadie is an artist working with the grand Old-Master traditions of Western art, and wrestles not only with its challenging and exalted techniques, but also with its deeply sexist heritage in which men did the looking and the art-making, and all women got to do was sit around with no clothes on. Sadie is trying to find her own point of view and express it in terms that create a living continuation of tradition, but are also truly hers.

Sadie created an incredible celebration of womanhood in art, created by women themselves. The Women Painting Women blog has hundreds of images by living female artists portraying other women, and the best part? You can contribute to it yourself! Get out your soul food plate and cutlery, and head on over there.

A Cynical Evening

I just got 4 parcels of Internet purchases delivered. The one I tore into first, with the raw hunger of a starving hyena, contained two wonderful books. They are textbooks on academic drawing, of the figure and the head, written by Nikolai Li, Professor of Drawing at the Penza Institute of Architecture and Engineering.

Li is a fantastic teacher, working within the ridiculously rigorous Russian school of analytical drawing, and I would rather part with a kidney than these books.

But this bit is making me laugh, also like a hyena:
"It is a given that visual art and architecture are based on the immutable principles of beauty, compatibility and harmony."

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Hoo boy. Excuse me. I'm alright now.

...No, I'm not.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

OMG, has this person left the house in the past 80 years? "Beauty" is a dirty word in contemporary art and architecture. But don't ask me to provide examples or I will have to go drink myself to death.

Only In LA: Jogging Is A Way To Acquire A Heart Attack

Seriously, when will I learn? Running errands on foot at lunch time results in two things:
1. Dehydration.
2. Acute crankiness.

You have to time your activities to the heat here. And I could not love it more, both as a Recovering Canadian, and an Unrepentant Procrastinator.

"How Often Does This Happen, Ma'am?"

Today, I made a call to Child Protection Services, to report the fact that my neighbour abuses her children. What sickens me is two things: one, this is the second time I am having to report a child-abusing neighbour.

The first occasion was back in Toronto, 3 years ago, when I got sick of the sounds of bodies being thrown into walls and furniture, and inhuman howling cries following those sounds. I had called the police more than once, and apparently so did several of the other neighbours.

The other sickening thing is how afraid I was to make this call. The little building I live in is a very tightly knit Armenian community. Everyone is in everyone's business. The neighbours are retired couples, a lady I am pretty sure is on welfare and the family with the kids, and they spend most of their time hanging out together in the little courtyard. This community is one of the big reasons I chose the apartment - they are a human alarm system, and I am damn near impossible to rape, rob or pillage. A person making the attempt would have to get through a gauntlet of nosy hang-abouts first.

The problem is, I also have to face the gauntlet too, daily. The people in the building regard me as a curiosity and a stranger. They are nice enough - they say hi, and take parcel deliveries for me if I am not home. But if they were to band together to make my life miserable, it would be a fearsome thing. Or at least, it would be a thing I fear.

So I spent about a month thinking about whether I can make this call. I hear the crying kid - the mother abuses mainly the boy; her girl is a developmentally delayed, silent shadow - and I think, can I afford to compromise my own safety in a foreign city? I can't afford to become a target. I can't afford what it would do to my mental health, I can't afford to move again, I can't, I can't, I can't.

I couldn't.

I felt terrible. There was a child I was betraying by keeping silent, a child I could help, a child who can't help himself.

Until I couldn't listen to this crap anymore. I made the call, and I am honestly not sure whether I made it for his sake, or for my own.

If they try to mess with me, it'll be a party for everyone, with LAPD invited.

How often does this happen? It's fucking everywhere. How often does it NOT happen?

I hate humanity.

Like Having A Baby, Only Without An Actual Baby

Dear Internet,
I have been Away. I have been Away for most of the past three months, as I undertook the blessed madness of moving across the continent, to the interesting yet terrifying country of America, as personified by the interesting yet terrifying metropolis of LA, and then audaciously went to full time school after swearing never to do such a thing again, ten years ago.

This project has demanded all of my time, stress-management resources, energy and mental focus. In fact, I will now make every mother in the land laugh uproariously, and compare the past three months to something like having a baby. I know, I know, but hear me out - you run as fast as you can just to remain in the same place, you think you can't redefine your definition of tired any further, and then you have immediate cause to redefine it again, and your lifestyle is such that you count it as a major holiday to carve out enough time and energy to get a haircut.

Except I don't have a baby. Just me and some new knowledge, which will take some time to manifest in the artwork I haven't done yet.

I am going to write a nice, long tale of how it all went, and where I am now that I have made some changes to the changes I made, and the really, really insane part is wrapping up.

Only it's almost two, I haven't had breakfast yet, and I have a full day of work and homework ahead of me, and then I have to leave the house at 7 am tomorrow to make it to my last anatomy class of the spring term. The teacher is a lovable Nazi, I have been late twice, and if I am late again, he is totally going to kill me and use my skin as a lampshade.

So, talk soon!

Cool It, People

Remember a while back I complained about being harrassed by men everywhere, all the time, in a truly maddening fashion, since moving to LA?

Oddly, that went away as abruptly as it started. I wracked my brains trying to understand if there was some kind of correlation, some factor I could identify and troubleshoot in order to make harassment less likely.

I had nuthin', until a few days ago. The past 6 weeks or so have been uncharacteristically cool and cloudy, for LA. I am pretty sure we had actual rain something like 3 or 4 times, which, in the words of every local I know, is like totally fucked up.

Then a week ago, there was a genuine hot day. Hot day with sliced fruit vendors coming out with their adorable little wagons of iced watermelons, hot day with me inexplicably deciding that this was the day to run all my shopping errands at once, and me also getting on the wrong bus, then getting off at the wrong stop and having to walk and walk and walk in the shimmering heat until I got where I was going.

This whole trip was some kind of a journey into hell, because I was stared at creepily, greeted contemptuously, wolf-whistled at and accused of being totally random people's baby.

And then it went away just as abruptly!

Working hypothesis: it was the heat. Somehow, heat makes men cranky and weird in this city in a way that they are not when its cooler.

Stay tuned. It would be really helpful if I had a lab in a bunker, because then I could abduct a few of these characters, and perform experiments until I get all the variables in their behaviour lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery.

Yes.

Bunker and maybe a tank.

School Dreams

It was one of those again.

Not the one where all my teeth fall out, and I have to collect them in order to take them to a dentist, and they won't fit in my palm and keep falling to the ground, and that, somehow, is the worst part.

Not the one where I work as a waitress, and this one table keeps asking for their order, and I keep promising to bring it to them, and somehow the restaurant gets extra-dimensionally large, and entire sagas take place as I try to cross it, and it's the end of my shift and I STILL haven't brought that poor table their poor order.

Not the one where I am unexpectedly a nudist even though no one else is.

No. It was the other one. The one where it was the end of the term, and I had to take an exam in algebra, and I haven't been to most of the classes, haven't done any of the homework, and in fact haven't actually studied algebra in what is now over two decades, and now I have a week to cover all the course material and I don't even know where the classroom is.

I sweated. I tossed. I ground my (still present) teeth and annoyed the cat.

Then I woke up.

Then I breathed with relief as it turned out it was all a dream.

Then I realized that the exact same thing was happening in real life, except with Perspective II instead of algebra.

This is what I get for trying to do freelance work while studying full-time. Thank God this is my second education, voluntarily self-inflicted instead of me acting rationally and spending the money on a nice long vacation.

I still get to go to Artist Valhalla, right?

Right?

RIGHT?!

...I'm just going to go stare at the total on my client invoice and count backwards from 100 in increments of 2. Be right back.

This IS My Happy Face

Life is full of important questions. One of them is, "Are women happy?" Not one, but two of my fellow bloggistas, Pretty Lady and Sady of the Tiger Beatdown, have come across media assertions that indeed, women are not.

Is it true, people? And is it feminism's fault? (It usually is).

I would like to go on record as a happy woman. World media, please take note: I am female, and I am experiencing a state of happiness.

It is probably feminism's fault. Because the reason I am happy is due to my making choices. Two choices, to be specific.

Choice number one has to do with making decisions about how to run my life. I am probably not unique in having no shortage of people, media outlets and corporations telling me how I should live, what my priorities should be, and what is good for me and bad for me. Dress like this; eat these foods; behave like so; if you don't, bad things will befall you! You might get wrinkles/go crazy/die/go to hell/develop osteoporosis!

Most of these creatures profess to have my best interests at heart, and patently do not. But even if they did? It's still none of their business and all of mine, what I do on this here planet.

Until recently, I was scared to think for myself, and I was invested in being thought of well by certain others. I was really into listening to all those folks because I didn't trust my own judgement. And then I reached a point where I KNOW that nobody knows what's good for me better than ME. Where I want no one's advice on how to live. Where I want what I want, and where some things are important to me, and others not so much, and absolutely, categorically no one has the will to make these things not so, or the right to even attempt to.

That was choice number one: to decide for myself what I want in my life and how I want to live it.

Choice number two was a logical extension of choice number one. Once you know, unequivocally, that - to take a random and trivial example - you really want some ice cream, it's a skip and a hop to going out and getting some.

Beware, ladies who want to please other people: thinking for yourself is a gateway drug to acting on your own behalf! You'll be getting the stuff you want and rejecting the stuff you don't want, all the time, all over the place, as a matter of almost automatic habit, and if people get up in your face with objections, before you even catch yourself, you'll be telling them to stuff it where the sun don't shine!

That's what happened to me. Once I knew what I wanted, I went after it and got it, and now I am hooked! There is no going back! Why, just today somebody tried to tell me how to run my freelance practice, and that I should prioritize school over paid work, and that I should ditch the client I am presently happily working for even though my homework is late, and instead of getting scared and changing my course, I got angry and told them they were going to have to SUCK IT! And then I went home and took a fucking nap, even though I can count at least a half-dozen people who would much rather I work myself sick and ignore my body's needs in the name of economic and academic progress, even then I took a 3-hour nap and have no regrets whatsoever! In fact, I would do it all over again and probably will!

And that is why I am a cautionary and apparently rare statistic now, a happy woman. I am living alone in a strange country and a strange, in every available sense, metropolis. I turned my back on a full-time corporate career; I am spending a huge amount of money on studying art; I am not bothering dating anymore because it is no longer a priority and I no longer feel crappy about being single and child-free. I am doing what I want. I am living where I want to live. I share my life and my home strictly with people and creatures I choose to welcome there.

I am very, very happy, and happier than I have been in over a decade.

Thinking for yourself and acting on your own behalf: best therapy ever. Aside from Crate and Barrel.

Quote Of The Day

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -- Douglas Adams

Only In LA: Film Stuff Everywhere

People like me are probably in the minority in LA, by which I mean that I want very little to do with the entertainment industry.

Few professions seem as horrible as that of an actor. Being stared at and performing the same thing over and over and over, like a trained dolphin, strike me as punishments from one of the lesser circles of hell. Besides, as a fine artist, I am used to doing creative work in my field whenever I damn please. The thought that you don't get to do anything until someone else hires you or gives you funding to do it makes my blood run cold, and most creative film professionals live in exactly this scenario.

Celebrities don't really interest me either, because they are just people - people who get photographed a lot, so if I want to look at one, all I have to do is look up some blogs.

Clever parties with important-to-know people are also low on my list of desirable things, not so much because I don't like important-to-know people as a group, as because I find parties kind of excruciating, and would much rather sketch on the beach or go hiking with a small group of friends.

So basically, all things filmy and Hollywoody are things I either don't care about or actively avoid, except that this is a company town, so avoiding them is kind of like trying to avoid Christian imagery in Florence, Italy. THEY ARE EVERYWHERE!!!

Even the Los Angeles subway ceiling looks like this:

Only In LA: Your License Plate Is Your Resume

Saw a license plate the other day that said simply "SCRIPT". I wonder what that person does?

LA Haiku, While We Are At It

Evening in LA
Helicopters roar
Crickets keep singing

Tired: A Poem About Being Tired

Tired tired tired tired tired
tiredly tired with tired

despite tired
and tired
and tired
and tired

still, tiredly tired and tired
while tired

with tired
so tiredly
tiring tireness tired
but yet
tired.

Trench Saturday

So my day started at 6 yesterday, when I leapt out of bed like a gazelle, and said to the world, "Hooray! I have time to clean my skeleton!" Not the one I have inside me - I have extra. I spotted a life-size skeleton in a thrift shop where I was buying some paintin' pants, and it was clear to me that it was Fate: the universe wanted me to learn anatomy.

That's right. I have a life-size skeleton of my own. How hardcore is that? I don't have chairs, but I have a skeleton, that's how.

The skeleton was so dirty, it took me 5 hours to clean it. It was covered with dust on top of, somehow, a lot of grease, so I think it used to work in a fast food kitchen.

And then I did homework all day, and my Saturday night culminated in boiling a fibula. A little tiny fibula made out of SuperSculpey. If I get any more hardcore, I'll be Rambo.

Hot Day Coming

Dawn is rolling over LA in the manner of a boulder.

San Fernando Valley spreads out heplessly, like pancake batter on a dusty griddle.

"Dammit," thought Jack Bauer. "I really need flipflops."