hey, friday night

I have nothing meaningful or deep or funny to say to you tonight. 

This blog post of very little content is to tell you congratulations on making it to Friday night, April 28, 2017. Believe it or not, this is actually an accomplishment, making it is as far as you have.

Go enjoy it.

🌟

how (not) to kill art

This is based on an experience I had yesterday. It is a cautionary tale.

I attended an art lesson with a student I work with. He is six years old. The lesson was a whole class lesson, meaning about 20 six-year-olds were learning how to use oil pastels at the same time. You will not be expected to attempt this, so take a deep breath. This is exposition.

The student I work with, in addition to other things, has difficulty with fine motor skills. It is difficult for him to hold writing and drawing utensils. He has a hard time knowing which direction to move his pencil or pen or oil pastel in order to make a particular shape or mark. Additionally, he has some tactile sensitivity and doesn't particularly enjoy the feel of oil pastels in or on his hand.

He arrived in his class around the same time I did and was being asked to catch up with the lesson: drawing a bunch of flowers in a vase. The rest of the class had begun about 15 minutes earlier. 

We caught up together. His vase looked more like a bowl. His flower outlines looked like circles and were situated far away from the vase shape. 

Meanwhile, the lesson continued.

"When you shade, you want to make sure you shade like this. If you shade like this, that's the wrong way. It won't look right."

The wrong way was the only way the student I was working with could shade. The right way required him to have better dexterity. Naturally, a helpful little girl seated to the left of the student attempted to correct him. 

"You're doing it wrong!" the little girl proclaimed loudly. I told her to work on her own and reassured the student he was doing fine.

"Real artists take the wrappers off their pastels. They break them and hold them like this to do shading."

A helpful little boy to the right had already peeled off a bunch of the wrappers on the oil pastels they were expected to share. The wrappers lay scattered around the desk. The student I was working with looked at the unpeeled oil pastel he was supposed to use (because leaves had to be green, of course) with the revulsion which some people reserve for spiders.

I rewrapped the green. He used it.

"You need to blend the two colors with your fingers or else you'll have a line, and that won't look right."

I asked the student if he wanted to blend his two colors with his fingers, wishing I had a Q-Tip to offer as an alternative. He said no. We left the two colors unblended and, therefore, "wrong".

_____________________

Were there kids in the class who could have learned the secrets of realistic shading? Sure. Looking around the room, some of the students were doing it the way the instructor described. It does give a three-dimensional quality to the drawing. That's great. 

But to say that anything done differently is "wrong"? Maybe, if you're going for realism. If there's only one way to do it. If you want to teach anyone who can't do it your way or chooses to do it a different way that they can't do art.

Art is subjective and is supposed to be about personal expression. And different people have different ability levels. There is room for learning technique, but there should also be a space where the act of making something interesting to look at is open to everyone. Life would be very dull if all of the art looked the same.

There is a saying: "Perfection is the enemy of progress." It's true. Perfection is also the enemy of variety and personality and, ultimately, artistic expression. Enjoy your art. Work on technique, sure, but enjoy your art.

an idea ...

I'm getting political again. Somebody stop me ...

Oops, too late.

First of all, that my idea is at all political strikes me as odd. It is human. It involves politicians, however, so I suppose that is what shifts it from the realm of the human to the realm of the political.

I had this idea a month or so ago, but a tweet I saw on Twitter while I was taking my virtual evening stroll tonight reminded me of it. This evening, Alice Kirby (@Alice_Kirby), a disability activist based in the UK, brought up a similar idea. Maybe it's time to revisit it and put it out into the world, since evidently, I'm not the only person with this idea?

Alice Kirby tweeted (wrote, for those of you who don't speak Twitter) to the current Prime Minister of the UK, Theresa May, "How do you expect disabled people who are unfit for work to survive off £73 per week? Could you live off that?".

I've seen similar sentiments from others, as well. For example, when town halls were happening in the U.S. earlier this year (well, in places where the politicians actually showed up to meet with their constituents, but that's another discussion ...), people were asking the Congress to use the same health insurance as everyone else uses.

It's reasonable to ask our representatives to try to understand what we experience in our lives. How can a legislator legislate wisely without having some understanding of the practical implications of their decisions? And what better way of understanding is there than experience? I've written on this theme before, and it holds true here.

My idea: have legislators try to live on what they ask others to live on. It can be for a limited amount of time, but at least try it, no cheating.

Pick a benefit, any benefit, and try it out.

In my original idea, I was thinking about food stamps (also called SNAP). Here is an explanation of the benefit in an easy to read table, courtesy of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

In case you are wary of doing math, this is roughly $48 a week for a single person for groceries, or just under $7 per day, and this includes everything (including coffee!). 

Legislators should try it, in order to understand the human impact of decisions they make. At the very least, they should probably speak to people who have to use this benefit before voting on related legislation. Just a thought.

Alice Kirby's idea was also a good one. Legislators could try to live off of £73 (roughly US $93) per week --I don't know about unemployment benefits in the US off-hand, so I can't offer the comparable figures. That's a little over $13 a day for lodging, utilities, transportation, etc.

The legislators would only need to do it for a limited period of time, of course. Their constituents don't actually want them to suffer too much. And even if they resume their base salaries of $174,000 a year (for a Member of Congress --it goes up for Senators, Speaker of the House, and such), that small period of time ...say, a month, will have saved the taxpayers enough to fund something like Meals on Wheels from now until the end of eternity.

A slight exaggeration, but it would be interesting to see what could happen if our politicians were to try to see the world through the eyes of the people in their communities.

 

hey doodle doodle

I have been doodling nearly non-stop for the past two days. I did stop to sleep, eat, and go for a walk, but that's how I wanted to spend my last few days of vacation.

Why?

A couple of reasons: 

• I've decided to start querying again for kid writing, and it's a skill that's nice to have in my pocket, if I get better at it;
• Practice makes ...well, not perfect. There's no such thing as perfect. But it makes better. I'm still trying to figure out how to do it on a computer, and I've been able to experiment with a few new things that I figure everyone else in the world already knows about (putting things into photos, anyone?); and
• Most importantly, my brain never stops. Doodles, like writing a lot of the time, are a way for me to process ideas. I've been working with words a lot lately, and I wanted a break to work with images.

If you are a writer, I would encourage you to try doodling. You might think, "Oh, I'm not any good at it." You don't have to be. There's something about the act of drawing and trying to capture what you see that is very similar to describing like you do in writing. There's also something about the act of moving your hand with a pencil or a pen or a stylus in it that loosens up any ideas that may be stuck in your head. It's great for getting a stream-of-consciousness going when the creek's run dry.

And if nothing else, you get to have a good laugh, which is also a worthwhile goal.

Give it a try. And please please PLEASE share any doodles you might come up with. I am not kidding when I say it's one of my favorite art forms!

to do list

Time is a precious commodity. I have been given roughly 24 hours to get stuff done. It feels like that should be embroidered on a pillow ("Get stuff done", perhaps with a skull embroidered alongside as a warning), but it would take too long to do the embroidery.

I mean to take care of writerly things. That is how I would like to spend the time.

I lose focus easily, & so I usually have a couple of things going at the same time. Currently, I have 

• a long-suffering novel; 
• a brand-new middle grade that is becoming more and more epic in scope as time passes;
• research and reading related to the novel and middle grade;
• a couple of picture books; 
• query letters; 
• some poetry for good measure;
• my daily haiku habit; and
• oh yeah, did I mention this is a blog post? 

I cycle through them in case I get stuck on one project so as not to stop entirely, but it is a bit of a scattered approach. A very scattered approach. Okay, it's like trying to round up squirrels. Is this the best way for me to work? I don't know. It's how I've written to date --use time when I can find it, work on what I feel like working on, and don't get stuck.

I'm always curious, though, what other writers do. What do they have on their to do lists? Is it one thing at a time? Do they cycle through? How do they keep it all organized? Because if there is one thing I am not, it is naturally organized. Prolific, sure, but organized? Cut to film of me collapsing on the floor with laughter.

What do other writers do? And what would you do for your writing given 24 hours where you didn't have to do anything else?  

six more doodles

I'm learning more and more every day about how to use this computer for doodling. Here are six more doodles I liked for whatever reason. They're pretty lighthearted, so enjoy not thinking for the roughly 8.52 seconds it takes to look at them!

the faith of lemmings

Everybody knows about the lemming thing. On the off chance you have managed to avoid popular culture for the past 50 years or so, I'll summarize: lemmings jump off of cliffs. It is said that nobody knows why, except that it is some kind of mass hysteria/small rodent cult-like thing. Lemming is used in a similar way as sheep --an animal that is incapable of thinking for itself. Lemmings kick it up a notch by adding in mass suicide, which appears to be counter to their own survival.

Here's the issue: the lemming thing isn't actually true. Not really.

Walt Disney made a wildlife documentary called "White Wilderness", released in 1958. Apparently, the wildlife wasn't wild enough and the filmmakers got creative with their staging. It was filmed in a landlocked area rather than near the sea, which is the lemmings' native habitat; it featured brown lemmings, but claimed they were Norwegian lemmings; and (my favorite detail) they dumped the lemmings out of the back of a truck and allowed them to drown. Not one of Disney's finest moments.

Lemmings --real ones --live happy little rodent lives avoiding predators, snacking on what's available on the tundra, and making little lemmings. They have been known to jump in the water to get from a place with no food to a place with food, but only when they are starving and that is their one chance at survival. When they do this, some of them actually make it to the other place that has food. It is not a blind faith; it is taking chances when chances need to be taken.

Which brings us back to the myth of the lemming and people. People can be like lemmings sometimes, and it's no insult. They have been known to jump in the water to get from a place with no food to a place with food, but only when they are starving and that is their one chance at survival. When they do this, some of them actually make it to the other place that has food. It is not a blind faith; it is taking chances when chances need to be taken.

It is okay to enjoy bounty when you have access to it. It is okay to seek bounty when it is scarce. There is no shame in trying to survive, and so, there is no shame in having the faith of lemmings.

a small moment

A boy, 9 years old, and his mother walk along on a path along a road. He wears his raincoat casually open; she is huddled into hers. Towers grasp high tension wires and loom like giants overhead. The electricity in the wires crackles in the air.

"What's that sound?" she asks the boy, curious to know what he hears.

The boy pauses. "It's the wires. They sound like cicadas."

His mother tries to remember this moment because he is 9 years old. She likes his idea that electricity snaps the air like cicadas. The boy wants to eat lunch --maybe a sandwich. 

They both wonder how long the walk will continue.