adventures of chicazul

Deciding to play the cello was a huge step for me. For the first time I allowed myself to embrace being terrible at a hobby, and truly live the advice given by all creative professionals: in order to make good art you have to keep making awful art until your skills catch up to your ideas.

I wasn’t prepared for the fact that it’s not a choice you make once. Every day you have to get up and choose to do something hard, something frightening, to finish projects that suck. And when you’re trying to build a life around your aspirations, everything in that life is hard and terrifying and you are going to be terrible at all of it, all at once.

The short version of where I’m at: I’ve had some personal problems, and relearned that I’m abysmal at coping with personal problems. I’ve been keeping my head down, waiting for everything to get easier—but that’s not how life works. The cards I’ve been dealt are partially of my own choosing, and if I’m not willing to work with them I deserve to lose.

I’m still epically behind on a few commissions. (I have not forgotten. I just haven’t been dealing with anything more complex than staring at walls.) I can’t even remotely afford to go on JoCo Cruise Crazy. I’m not in a position to fundraise until I finish prior commitments. I’ve been investing so little in #dayjob that I’m making huge mistakes. I still need to look for a more permanent home. I am missing great self-employment opportunities because I can’t handle anything new right now.

I told myself I would have everything sorted by the end of May. Instead here we are, and everything is still chaotic and hard and scary, and I’m still terrible at everything. (My cello playing, two years on, is still atrocious.)

It’s beyond time to decide: am I ready to make hard choices every day, or am I giving up?

December 31, 2010: I left Vancouver to go on a cruise. I left in tears, thinking that I’d failed at all my plans and my trip would be a disaster. (Spoiler: It wasn’t.)

I skipped the traditional New Year’s Eve. Instead I had a cramped coach seat hurtling over the Rocky Mountains, the strange stillness of pressurized air, and a plastic cup of wine offered by my seatmate. I like to believe we crossed the time zones just then and bypassed midnight entirely. 

2011 has been a hell of a year. I met and befriended so many amazing people that I can’t begin to name them or I will be here all night. (If you’re reading this, I probably mean you.) I traveled more than ever before, made a bunch of cool things, and took a crash course in pretending to be socially competent.

While it was a remarkable time for interpersonal relationships, this year kind of sucked for my projects. Adding social commitments to my schedule (as well as returning to a full-time day job) did not magically bestow time management skills upon me, so all of my creative goals are in disarray. Worst of all, my disorganization has played havoc with my commitments to other people. I’m making a terrible muck of starting my own business, but I have fingers crossed that if I get my cards in order quickly enough I can still be forgiven.

Despite all of my bungling, I still managed to achieve goals that a year ago seemed impossibly out of reach. Sometimes when I try I can achieve remarkable things, and somehow my friends still like and support me even when I fumble. Thank you for that, so much. That’s why this year stands out—I have never felt more connected to other people.

December 31, 2011: Though many of my friends are hosting delightful gatherings, I am staying home with my cat, my cold, a bottle of wine, and my sewing room. I’ll try to notice when midnight rolls around, but no promises. Lessons I take into the new year include:

• It’s possible for an introvert to be a social butterfly.
• Goals and opportunities should scare you. If they don’t they’re not big enough.
• Trying and failing at something awesome is more interesting and fun than sticking to the safe road.
• Time management is hard, but it’s way better than the self-loathing and feelings of failure.
• Even my most unlikely goals are achievable, if I’m willing to work hard enough.
• Get off the damn internet and go do some work.

Sometimes in order to succeed you need to take big chances—stop playing it safe, do something crazy.

Sometimes you try that, and fail.

I moved to Vancouver full of plans to start my own business, to make things and sell them on the internet. After several years of not quite getting around to it, I quit my dayjob to focus on my dream.

And I failed.

My business venture didn’t fail—it has been astonishingly successful given the circumstances. What I failed to do is focus, and that lack is smothering my lofty ambitions.

It’s a hard subject to talk about. Not due to my pride (though I have that in excess) but because my support networks are so…supportive. Everyone wants to see me succeed and will brook no talk of defeat.

“Look at all the things you’ve made!” they say when I bemoan my lack of output.

“You’re probably afraid of success,” when I protest how I’ve sabotaged my own productivity.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate it. I love you all beyond measure, and it means so much to me that friends and strangers alike are rooting for me. But there is a problem here, and it is past time that I owned it.

I can blame any number of things: my laid-back upbringing, the school system that never challenged me, my insipid nature. Excuses, all. The fact is that I shy away from anything difficult, and that needs to change.

I’m not afraid of success, not by a long shot. What I am afraid of is being wrong, making mistakes, failing. I’m afraid that I will make everything the wrong way, that everything I finish will suck, that I will be unmasked as a fraud if anyone sees what I am actually capable of. The risk I need to take is to work hard even when everything is going wrong. Start even when I’m not ready, even though I don’t know the right way to do it. Keep working even when I’m frustrated and tired of working. Do things badly, then do them again.

Now I have full-time day jobs again, on top of the commitments I’ve made in my own business. I don’t have time for excuses. I don’t have much time for this bullshit about “taking chances” either.

Sometimes in order to succeed, all you need to do is work harder.

If I am left to my own devices and need some Real Food, I usually default to soup. Everything else is too expensive or too complicated or takes too much time.

This recipe comes out of barely-remembered instructions for how to make soup and the stuff I had in my pantry tonight that would cook in less than half an hour. (Also the fact that the potatoes and broccoli were going to go bad soon.)

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 medium onion
• 1/4 C lentils
• 1/4 C black quinoa
• 3-4 smallish potatoes
• 1 crown of broccoli
• 2 C water
• 1 can coconut milk
• 2 tsp garam masala
• salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Chop onion and broccoli. Dice potatoes into 1/2” cubes.
2. Heat oil over medium-high heat in large saucepan. Saute onion, about 5 minutes.
3. Add quinoa, lentils, potatoes, and water. Bring to a boil for 5 minutes.
4. Add broccoli, coconut milk, and garam masala. Reduce heat to medium-high. Let simmer for approximately 15 minutes.
5. Use potato masher to crush larger chunks in soup.

This turned out a little bland, but I don’t know what spices go with coconut milk and didn’t want to ruin it. One day, if I do this enough, I will actually learn how to cook like a grownup.

It is hard for me to talk about the colour pink without segueing into math. Does that seem strange?

I like math. It is a discipline of pattern recognition and problem solving; logical steps and knowledge that builds on itself. I have always excelled in the subject—by no means a prodigy, but absorbing the standard curriculum so easily I could never understand why others struggled. On some level I internalized the dogma that men have more aptitude for math than women, but mostly to justify why I never placed in provincial competitions. (The truth is I was always unambitious, never looking beyond the bare requirements of schoolwork.)

A few years ago, while visiting an amusement park, I passed a young girl wearing one of the most offensive shirts I’ve ever seen. Upon a pink background it proclaimed—possibly with sparkles:

I’m too pretty to do math

I was stunned—so distressed I nearly overcame my aversion to starting conversations with strangers. I wanted to ask this 12-year-old girl if it was some kind of joke, ask her mother what she was thinking to allow it, try to convey to them both why this was such a devastating insult. Years later, having relived that imaginary conversation many times, I still don’t have the right words.

That single sentence, worn proudly by a preteen, encapsulates so many crushing messages. Only ugly people like math. It’s OK for children to give up and accept that they’ll never be good at something. If you are a pretty girl, you don’t have to worry about working hard, because someone else will do the work for you.

If it’s on a pink background, a message is cute instead of terrible.

I like math, and I’m good at it. And yes, in grade school I was beyond a doubt the Ugly Girl, but fuck you if you think that’s inevitable. I won’t wear pink, I won’t believe that there’s anything I can’t do if I try hard enough, and I won’t accept that being pretty means having your brains sucked out your ears.

I’m teaching myself Calculus now, in my slow quest to get around to learning higher-level Physics. Just because I want to.

Go ahead and tell me learning isn’t beautiful. Don’t expect me to listen.

I hate the colour pink.

If pressed I attribute this to the pinks and purples that dominated my childhood wardrobe, but most girls seem to escape the dressed-by-parents stage without a particular antipathy for that section of the visible spectrum. My own sister has an affinity for pink that matches my fixation on blue. While not alone, I am somewhat of an outlier in my ire.

The word “hate” seems strong for a poor defenceless colour, but my reaction to the sight of it is a visceral repulsion. This has become ever more apparent in the era of breast cancer awareness campaigns, which involve painting every imaginable object in bubblegum shades. The marketing works, after a fashion: I think about breast cancer awareness, but I also think about how I will probably not give them money. If I can’t live without that coffeemaker or pair of yoga pants, I will choose to buy the model that is not pink.

My strong feelings are likely rooted in two personality traits: my unfeminine nature and stubborn anti-conformist streak. As a child I didn’t precisely question gender roles but neither did my favourite pastimes include “playing house.” Eventually my nontraditional interests became such a part of my identity that I began to consciously reject things that were too “girly.” Pink? One of the first things to go.

The core of my discomfort is the intense gendering of the colour. Want to ensure everyone knows a toy is for girls? Make it pink! Want girls to use power tools? Better make those pink too! Game controller? Laptop case? How will women know they’re ok to use if they’re not fuchsia?!

It infuriates me every time I see a “for girls” version of an object that is identical to the regular (and by implication, “boys only”) model except for the colour. How about not teaching people that their genitalia dictates their skill set? Sure, some women find this trend aesthetically pleasing—but you’ll have better luck marketing to me if you dye your products Process Blue rather than assuming my preferences are hard coded into my X chromosomes.

The end result is that while I dislike some colours and prefer not to wear them, nothing riles me quite like pink—no matter what you call it.

On that stage I was eternal—
cascading disarray, the overlapping
edges of my senses starred in bokeh
Twisting a moment into fiction

And you, with your uniform shirt
Unexpected gravity, your words
intruding, crystallizing igneous—
batholith to my eroding joy

On a stage I crumbled quietly
Fading eloquence, the unbelieving
echo of my senses soft protesting
the tarnished toy of your perception

And you, your undiscerning smile
observed a spectre, a painted doll
to promise—close—to walk away
Contented, in your uniform shirt

You do not see what you have taken
but I still feel the loss

The other night when I was sick, I decided that if I was going to have vertigo, I might as well pretend to be on a boat. To that end I queued up the entire Friday concert from JoCo Cruise Crazy—the Jonathan Coulton All Request Show.

What I love about AdhesiveMedStrip’s videos is that he was sitting right behind me, so the point of view is close to how I remember it. Throw in a little swaying and it’s just like being there again.

I’d prefer to watch these videos on the projector—life-sized, audio blaring. Instead I watched them on my tiny laptop, curled on the bathroom floor in the dark, with the screen brightness turned down so as not to aggravate my headache.

There are so many wonderful moments in that concert—most involving JoCo screwing up spectacularly to our raucous delight. And then, there’s “The Commander Thinks Aloud”.

I ripped that performance to my iPod the moment I got off the boat. I’ve listened to it hundreds of times. I can always see it: the “chorus of beards”, Roderick in his “late Marlon Brando” casual attire, the late appearance of the star field backdrop, my friends wiping away tears when it ended.

I’m so glad I was there.

For today’s effort at a sketch I drew a picture inspired by that memory, but it is terrible. Maybe I’ll try again someday, after I’ve practiced this sketching thing more.

Yesterday I gave myself food poisoning.

I’m blaming it on the leftover soup, but the precise cause will remain a mystery. Was it the organic broccoli or the black eyed peas? Maybe the organic spinach came garnished with E. coli?

I like to think I kept my sense of humour about being ill, but it drove home the point that when I am feeling bad, the only thing I want to do is talk about it. Incessantly. I barely refrained from live-Tweeting the whole ordeal, and I admire the fortitude of my friends who were patient enough to chat all night. I found it genuinely amusing—me, in my shiny silver minidress, curled up on the bathroom floor with just the cat and the internet to take care of me.

The end result was a loss of a full day of productivity. I probably could have done something today besides curl up on the couch, but every twinge from my tender stomach makes me hesitate, and even such mild discomforts sap my ability to concentrate on anything taxing.

Suddenly everything is taxing.

Yesterday started great: getting up early for a run in the rain, doing errands in the midday sun, baking, cleaning, finishing patterns for a commission. I was finally getting on track to focus and Get Things Done.

Then I had a bowl of soup.

Yesterday I planned to write a post that had some substance to it, but I can’t even recall the topic. Instead, I will contemplate adding yet another item to my To Do list:

Don’t get food poisoning. It’s not good for your schedule.