Skip to content

the little potter that could

Eco Ball!

Work continues on my massive To Do list, with more things added whenever I stop to think about it. I’ve had two days where I’ve done nothing of consequence, and several days, like yesterday, where I did things that weren’t on the list. Part of me is irritated by that fact, that either I didn’t have the foresight to note that the sidewalk ice needed scraping and should have added it as an extra, and then the other side of me thinks that I would have needed to do it even if I did have a job, so why should I get credit for it on my To Do list? Sound thinking, but there are plenty of things on my list that needed doing even if I was gainfully employed, so there goes all of that logic out the window.

In other news, the Portillfaux beef was not very Portillos-ish, perhaps because of the cut I used and perhaps because you cannot capture the magic without flying to close to the sun. Actually, I think it’s the fact that it’s not humanly possible to slice cooked beef that thinly without the help of some surgical lasers.

Speaking of surgery, Jincy is finally finally healthy enough to go in and get spayed, and I just got back from the vet. She is now officially too big to fit into that kitten carrier (which I had purchased by mistake the day we brought her home) and quickly figured out how to escape from the pink bag carrier we used for Tilly, so she spent the entire ride happily tucked in my hoodie, right under my boob pit. She now weighs 5.5 pounds, which is amazingly more solid than her 3.0 pounds when we got her from the shelter. She’s up for about another $450 worth of vet bills today, which should bring her total squarely to almost costing as much as the car I was driving through college and for about a year into my job at Ex-Company.

My plans today involve getting back on the track of The List, with brief breaks to deal with the (fucking) laundry situation, which has reached critical mass. You see, our space age washer gets clothes almost-but-not-quite-dry so when our dryer decided to only blow cold air, it was enough to get most of the clothes dry. Our washer has a much larger capacity than our dryer, so I blamed the wet batches on myself, assuming that I was overloading the dryer.  Then I noticed that it wasn’t quite doing the job on heavier loads and towels, which needed two go-rounds, and happened to be down there when the dryer stopped. I felt the clothes and they were ice cold. Ding ding ding ding! Glad to see that only took a month to figure out. So I told Esteban that I thought the dryer was broken, and it was another week before he told Ward, who then came over a week later and figured that he’d try to replace the igniter and see if that worked. It did! And then I fell down the stairs on my first attempt at playing catch up, and Esteban didn’t do any laundry while I was recuperating and then I lost my job and believe it or not, all of this time, we kept wearing clothes. Stupid us. Although it’s impressive that we still have clean clothes to wear, even though it is physically difficult to walk around the pile of clothing in the basement. Anyway, today I was going to drive to Milwaukee to the nearest Apple store and nab a refurb Mac Book, but my guilt regarding the (fucking) laundry has gotten the better of me and it would be a shame to waste an entire day where I could leave the pet gate off the stairs without worrying that the cat would be carted off by basement spiders. But let’s be honest: I may be at this all week. Send snacks.

In other news, I’m kind of in love with my pottery class. I did the wheel this week! The WHEEL! Like in Ghost! It was not as successful as that movie, sadly, in that I got really dirty but never actually got it to go. I went in again on Saturday, during open studio time. Mr. Pottery Dude was making his own wares and there was one other student there so I wedged my clay and nabbed a wheel, which happened to be on the other side of his wheel. And then I basically stayed there for four hours, hunched over the damned wheel, getting pruny fingers and knowing that I wasn’t centering the clay properly and knowing that I was missing some step somewhere, but not really able to figure it out. Finally, another potter came in to use the studio and told me that I was building my walls backwards and should be leading with the right hand, not the left, unless I’m using a wheel that spins the other way. Oh. That worked a little better, in that I actually made a small cup thingy, but then I couldn’t actually get anything else to go. Make it go! I felt like a four-year-old. Finally, when Pottery Dude took a break from making his DOZENS of pieces of art, I asked him to just watch me and tell me what I was doing wrong. Everything, it seems. He grabbed my misbehaving wad of clay, plunked it down and had it centered in less than five seconds. Then he told me to feel it, so that I could feel what it was supposed to be, and then he knocked it off center and told me to fix it. I didn’t, so then he put his hands around mine and showed me how to do it. It was… disturbing and weird and would have been disturbingly sexy if it had been, say, Ghost-era Patrick Swayze and not Pottery Dude, who is a cross between James Cromwell and Ned Flanders, which made me blush for thinking those thoughts when I should have been thinking about art and ceramics and certainly not about naughty bits.

It was a very fulfilling Saturday, however, even with the mental distraction. At the end of the day, I felt achy and good, the way I used to feel after playing volleyball, and what is even better is that I had spent a good six hours not thinking about losing my job or what I was going to do next. It really reinforces my need to have some kind of artistic outlet, or anyone’s need, really. It’s going to sound really egotistical, but it’s been a really long time that I’ve had to work to be good at something. Normally, I can pick things up in a snap, especially if it’s something that I want to be good at (I’m a horrible bowler, but I have no desire to be good at bowling), and while pottery is certainly creative, there’s a definite skill involved as well. The moment of discovering that skill, of learning to turn it on and off, that’s a beautiful thing.

At one point, I asked Pottery Dude how many times I needed to cone the claw before making the well and he went off on an elongated tangent, as is sometimes his way, that turned into his view on art and artists. He feels that the keys are in existing, persisting, and insisting. You need to figure out a way to keep your life going while you pursue your art, you have to keep at it even if you’re having little commercial success and you also have to have the backbone to stick with your vision, even if your patrons and critics are telling you to change something. Of course, he meant it from a potter’s perspective (and a successful one, as he’s made a very good life for himself as a full-time potter) but it really hit home for me about writing. I have persisting in the bag, and I’ve found a way to exist, more or less, but the insisting is something that I have a hard time doing. Even now, this very month, I essentially was looking for a literary hero’s stamp of approval before moving onward. I don’t trust myself enough, I think. And even if I don’t make another thing on that pottery wheel, that’s more value than anything I learned in graduate school.

And that’s going to be my homework for February. Stop worrying about whether or not it’s going to be good enough and just do it.

Insist.

I should embroider that on a fucking tea cozy or something.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...