to always question the default

is my default mode

Finally saw Inside Out 2 earlier this week with my daughter and one of her friends and I thought, wow, my middle-aged brain has been totally taken over by fear and anxiety (does anxiety make a good project/program manager? ha ha, I’d like to think so!). Here are a few other things that have brought me joy, sadness, anger, and yes, for my fellow olds, nostalgia, over the past couple of weeks:

1. Clark Whittington, the artist who founded Art-o-mat, has a show open right now at Delurk Gallery in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I first learned about Art-o-mat via Slop Art as a graduate teaching assistant for a course in the text & image arts area called Publish!, about activist artists, publication design (we taught Quark!), and the publishing industry. Incidentally, you can still see this set of war postcards, of which my Art For a Future postcard is part, here. I got rid of my stash of these cards (500 6x8 inch cards via offset lithography) some time ago but still have a few that I used (the backs of) for drawings which can be seen here. I’ve only seen one Art-o-mat machine in person, at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, where I purchased some fiber art by Shirley Ruggiero (if you can’t get to an Art-o-mat machine, you can purchase a Ruggiero fiber art piece on eBay). As I’ve mentioned before, my dream job is to one day own and operate a cafe/gallery/reading room and as an extension of that I’d like to have an Art-o-mat machine as well.

   

2. We escaped Oakland’s annual 4th of July madness to visit family in Bend, Oregon. Highlights included hiking to the Tamolitch Blue Pool, returning to Petersen Rock Garden (used to go as a kid visiting my grandparents during the summer), a sunrise walk to Pilot Butte one morning after I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t get back to sleep, and mountain biking! We’ve been to Bend loads of times but this was the first visit with bikes in tow and the now 16yo and I snuck in three rides while there (to and up Pilot Butte, Phil’s Trail, and Peterson Ridge Trail in nearby Sisters). The flowy, beginner-friendly trails in the area were dreamy for a n00b like me. GoPro video of our Phil’s Trail ride coming soon!

3. While traveling I finished

   Alicia Kennedy
   ’s No Meat Required. It’s a relatively short and excellent read, no matter your level of meat-eating, from vegan to omnivore (humans are not carnivores, sorry).

   “Eating meat is the default in Western cultures. What is compelling about making the default decision? Nothing, at least not to me.”

   I took a lot of notes while reading this book so I may write more on the blog later…

4. I then started reading Mary Roach’s Gulp and find what she writes about the U.S. government trying to get folks to eat more organ meat during WWII fascinating and oddly applicable, perhaps, to trying to get people to eat less meat now. “To open people’s minds to a new food, you sometimes just have to get them to open their mouths. Research has shown that if people try something enough times, they’ll probably grow to like it.”

   

5. While driving on I-5 and I-97 through California and Oregon I wondered, why don’t gas station bathrooms have mirrors? I didn’t find any good answers, other than the speculation that it’s to prevent folks from loitering (same reason McDonalds bathrooms lack mirrors, presumably) and this interesting history of the general cleanliness of gas station bathrooms.

   

6. Back home, Neal helped me convert the second of two leftover downstairs doors post-renovations into a table/work surface for my studio (the first one is already in the room we use for guests, crafts, and foster kittens).

   

   I had to remove the easel to fit this in my 120 square foot backyard studio, but I’m planning to try out a painting area in the garage, if I can squeeze it in. I have some extra time this weekend, so I plan to start on a new body of work that’s been percolating in my brain, finally! It’s collectively titled Wrong Answers Only.

   

7. Planet Money’s The Indicator podcast has a recent episode about military brats (if I haven’t mentioned it here before, I was a military/government brat, born on Guam and raised in a handful of states and three countries, spending 4th through 12th grades overseas). I’ve always thought this is a group of folks who live/grow up in a really unique way that, active duty members aside, you don’t really hear much about (the so-called dependents—spouses, partners, children—of active duty and government contractors). The 9-minute episode only includes anecdotes from one “brat”—the daughter of an Army doctor—and seems she moved around mostly stateside, so I’m not sure how representative that one example is, but the recent research the episode touches on is super interesting, about “how changes in one’s environment during childhood shapes their future economic opportunities.”

I hope this week’s update didn’t leave you with “the boredom.” ‘Til next time, my fellow hot messes!