Go Big or Go Bust: Day 154 (foreign concept I am adopting)

The black and white part of this picture is an ad on a public telephone booth in the Village.   I don't know if it's the way the singer is twisting her body, the way she's packed into the dress, the hand on her hip, that she looks like she's about to belt out a song or that the dress is shimmery. 

Or maybe it's all of that combined with the fantastic line of text at the bottom. 

It generally takes a conscious effort for me to feel bold enough to take up as much space as I would by putting my hands on my hips.  And 'owning a room' is at least one step up from that.  But somehow looking at this picture makes it feel possible, makes it even seem desirable.  

Maybe I'll go power mad. 

HA. 

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 153 (progress report on the highlights reel)

Like the little vegetables in the garden, I'm happy to report that I'm making some progress.  The highlights reel is close.  Even very close.  Mr. Green pronounced it 'a lot better than okay'.  

And this even though I'm spending way too much time googling 'breaking news' about the escaped convicts, all the while hoping that I'm not drawing them psychically to me by this fixation.

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 152 (on persistence ... like the potatoes)

One of our grown kids recently tried to save me from embarrassing myself: 

HIM   "Mom.  The whole 'go big or go home' idea--" 

I jumped in.

ME   "Go big or go bust." 

He nodded, acknowledging the irrelevant fine point. 

HIM   "Whatever.  The 'go big' thing has a certain urgency to it.  There's a finite kind of excitement implicit in it.  What day are you up to, eighty or something?" 

ME   "We're way over a hundred." 

He shook his head, wincing with pity. 

HIM   "No.  Stop it.  It's WRONG.  Just STOP."

Thinking back on the conversation, I don't think I even tried to explain myself or to argue with him.  I've been completely committed to this daily journal/blog and had never imagined an urgency issue.  I let his point of view sink in a little to see if I agreed with it at all.  That's how I generally function - pure gut instinct, which told me:

GUT INSTINCT   "Are you crazy?  Give up?  You've hardly begun."

So it was nice to go down to the basement to look for something else and notice last Fall's potatoes on the bench.  Their life force,  their faith that they're using their finite energy doing what they obviously feel they're supposed to do.   And this reminds me of a quote from Piet Mondrian:  "The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel."

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 151 (on having a family)

Today I spent the entire day preparing for a young house guest - vacuuming up a whole winter of dust, scrubbing, shaking out linens and making lentil soup with kale from the garden. 

Did I long to be working on the Highlights Reel?  You bet I did.  Did I feel pangs of guilt for being so far behind with email, facebook and twitter?  Oh YES.   All day long I had to keep reminding myself that being a part of this family is the rock of my life, that from time to time I have to put my schedule aside and do what needs to be done.   Today was one of those days.

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 150 (on letting go of a will to power)

I'm writing with a heavy heart tonight in the wake of the horrific murders in Charleston. 

I'm not religious,  but feel a kinship with people on a spiritual quest, people who seek to connect with and/or to serve something greater than themselves.  The victims of this crime certainly must have been doing just that. 

It took decades for me to even be interested in anything spiritual.  First I had to be willing to let go of my will to power.  Working as an artist, humbled by artistic blocks and achieving far less than I'd hoped for brought me to my knees.  Eventually humiliation was transmuted into the freedom and joy of being a channel for the work I had tried so hard to accomplish by force.   

Would that everyone could realize the deep and widely applicable truth of my father's firm suggestion.  (The precise circumstances are murky but likely involved me tattling on my sisters in trying to get the upper hand.)  "Taking care of Anne is a full-time job."  That and "Live and Let Live".  

Rest in peace.

 

Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton    
Cynthia Hurd
Susie Jackson
Ethel Lance
Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor
Hon. Rev. Clementa Pinckney
Tywanza Sanders
Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr.
Myra Thompson

 

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 149 (on the little things that fill a day)

Last night I couldn't fall asleep and really really wanted to creep out to the barn for my knock-out drops (thirty or forty-five minutes of pickaxing the dirt floor).  Too scared that the escaped convicts might show up, I read until the wee hours. 

Today I wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer and somehow the precious hours just ran through my fingers. A trip to the two-table farmers market in the nearby town was followed by a stop to see the blackened shell of a neighbor's 18th c. farmhouse (chimney fire).  Other neighbors stopped over to talk about non-chemical bug repellents, I cut a great many weeds with a pair of kitchen scissors and did two loads of laundry. 

OH.  And I showed a rough partial version of the highlights reel to Mr. Green who thinks "it has a nice way about it".  (!!!)  I'm encouraged! 

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 148 (on experiencing a psychic power)

A number of years ago, the boy who sat next to my child in the high school band committed suicide.  I was overwhelmed by his death, even though neither my child nor I knew much about this poor kid.  All I could find out was that he was quiet, white and had brown hair.  I had a mental image of him, but I wanted to know more. 

Obsessed with trying to understand who he was and how this could have happened, every day after school I asked for news or details about his life.  He was smart.  He was quiet.  That was about it.   

I thought about him and wondered what could have driven him to take his life, outdoors, on a bitterly cold night.  I worried that maybe other troubled teenagers at the school might decide to follow suit.  After all, what teen isn't troubled?  My kid seemed fine, but this boy probably did too.  Plans were announced for a Buddhist memorial service in Riverdale in the Bronx and I decided to go.

There was snow and ice on the sidewalks and streets and it took longer to get there than I'd expected.  I arrived late to a packed room filled with the sound of chanting.  There might have been some sort of bells jangling too.  It was obvious who the parents were and I hung back out of respect for their grief and my lack of connection.  

An enlarged photograph of the boy, with a beautiful and delicate rope of flowers draped over it, was in the front of the room.  To my shock, the picture of the boy was identical to the mental image I had of him, with one small difference.  In my mental image, he was present and free.  In the photograph, he seemed to be withdrawn and held in, almost as if he was behind a thick piece of plexiglass. 

I've never experienced anything like this before or since but it gives me hope.  First of all, it's proof to me that death is not the end.  And secondly, we're obviously connected to each other in unimagined ways and have powers which are generally untapped. 

image from YouTube video: Abhidhamma 7 Verse Incantation Thai Buddhist Funeral Chanting

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 147 (outside NYC there are so many distractions)

I grew up on a farm.  And, being a terrible student with possible ADHD (or it could've been all that sugar), the one thing I was good at was sports.  Physical work makes me happy.  And afterwards, I sleep like a rock.  Meanwhile, it even feels like I'm making some progress on the Highlights reel, the Highlights reel being the key to beating the bushes.  Daring to think we're going to go big.

When you get outside of New York City, there are so many distractions. 

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 146 (on how time flies)

So today I managed to hold it down to one hour of weeding, one hour of obsessive searching for old-news-I-might-have-missed about the escaped convicts and finally, finally one hour of work on the old two-minute highlights reel.  How can there only be three hours in a day?  Tell me.  Please.

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 145 (on aiming at a balanced life)

Wild swing of the pendulum.   (Please note newly excavated, almost weed-free areas.)  Standing OR sitting at a computer (for the past seven years) is not the world's most comprehensive exercise.  And so now - well weeding doesn't exactly raise my pulse, but it does involve bending.  So stiff I can barely walk but hey, who needs to walk.  

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 144 (on what strikes fear in the core of my being)

On twitter this afternoon, I clicked over to see if I wanted to follow back someone who'd followed me.  I was hoping she wasn't going to be scantily clad ... and she wasn't! This lead me to her website, to reading a post she'd written and eventually to feeling like I'd stumbled on the answer to my (unworded) prayer.  She's real, she's vulnerable and she's funny.  She talks about her inadequacies, her failures and her dreams.  But then I came to a line which struck fear in the core of my being:: 

"... those women have created long careers by letting the audience get to know them intimately ... "

That phrase both sends me to and drags me (kicking and screaming) from my bunker of isolation.  It's what Mudd Lavoie keeps encouraging me to do with this Go Big or Go Bust 'live journal': "Go all the way, naked in front of the world!"  (naked being a metaphor here...)  And even I can see that it's because this new twitter friend shows herself with all of her perceived inadequacies that I'm attracted to her.

Onward!  Seriously, I want to do this. 

But let's face it.  In the immortal words of my (then) middle school-aged child:  "It's not easy being me."

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 143 (doing the artist dates ... at last)

Taking Julia Cameron's Artist's Way, I went hook line and sinker for one of her two key tools: the  so-called Morning Pages.  And I've stuck with them religiously for the past seven and a half years. 

But a second key tool, the Artist Date (with which you 'fill the well') did not go so well.  You're supposed to do an Artist Date alone and it's supposed to feed your soul.  You can go to the beach or to a junk store.  You can go to the movies or get a massage.  You can't sleep.  And you have to do it alone.  As good as I was and am with the 'Morning Pages', I've been that bad or worse with the Artist Dates.  There just never seems to be enough time!  Yes, because I'm a living person, I've accidentally done things which would qualify as Artist Dates.  But I never did them as a result of planning or deciding to give myself that time.  The Artist's Way assignment is to do at least one a week.  I've done so few that it isn't worth counting.

But the effect that this vacation has had is to make me realize that I actually can not afford to dismiss my need for these. 

And so today, Day 1 of my new life since vacation, I scheduled an Artist Date.  Okay.  Guess what.  I never got around to it.  It was supposed to be watching an episode of The Comeback and spending at least thirty minutes looking through a fashion magazine. But I did feel compelled to do something else which totally qualifies - gardening!  While listening to the birds. You may remember that picture of me 'crawling around in the dirt' as I planted the garden?  Look at that garden now!  Wall to wall green!  Alas, it's mostly weeds but my OCD goes haywire with mad joy weeding and I had the time of my life.  In fact, when my allotted hour of weeding was up, guess who didn't leave the garden.

Garden left unattended while we galavanted =  weeds/crabgrass/the 3rd Thing and a few struggling vegetables.

An interesting twist on the old 'weeds' problem was caused by the fact of our ignorance as first time gardeners last year.  We didn't realize that it's a bad idea to let anything go to seed and let the dill and the mustard greens do just that.  This year, we planted neither dill nor mustard greens but look what I pulled up out of the rows where the basil, garlic, sugar snap peas and zucchin are struggling to reach the sun. 

L to R: Three plastic grocery bags (15 lbs) of dill and two paper bags (15 lbs) of mustard greens

Guess what we'll be having for dinner for the rest of June.  And guess who is going to schedule that Artist Date for tomorrow. 

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 142 (on opportunities falling in your lap)

It's feeling like I'm in some kind of crazy dance with my life, a dance that I normally wouldn't have even been aware of.  Instead of scowling at the person who plopped down in one of the three subway seats I'd sort of figured were 'mine', I smiled at her.  She was pretty in a very unpretentious and open way and she even apologized for 'crowding me'. Before long we were talking and soon after that I sat down beside her so I could hear better and not have to shout. 

Remember when something falls into Louise's lap on the subway?  (ep 23)  Kind of happened to me today.

She'd gone to a 'Conversation' with Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer last night, the creators and stars of Broad City which, in case you don't know, is a hugely fun and funny show on Comedy Central but which started out as an East Village web series with a very small audience.  Ever curious, I popped the question: "Did they have some pearl of wisdom to share?"  According to my new friend, the gist of what they said was : "We kept taking the next logical step."

That's it. 

It sounds sort of like Victoria Trestrail's response to my plea the other day HOW DO YOU DO IT?  "One task at a time."

Combine Victoria's and the Broad City team's wisdom with Dr. Kumar's unforgettable: "It all comes down to luck and destiny" and hey, the pressure just evaporates. BOOM. 

PS Neither my new friend nor I had business cards on us but she told me her very unusual last name.  Funny thing she didn't mention that she's kind of a big deal. Crazy who you can meet on the subway if you don't have a sizable "I'm too busy" chip on your shoulder. 

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 141 (on getting a little sick of myself and ... hope!)

I have an admission to make: though I started off very gung-ho about this Go Big or Go Bust blog, my feelings about it are changing.  One of our kids asked what it's all about and I had to be honest.  "I'm not sure anymore. I'm getting a little sick of myself."   

And then just this afternoon, at the post office, Lynn Singer, whom I've known but have rarely seen for thirty-plus years, was in line two people ahead of me.  Eventually we got to talking and she mentioned the multi-media experience she's about to launch online.  She was practically pounding on the table you're supposed to fill out your forms on: "Thoughts create reality! We're all hugely creative beings! Our job here is to unblock the mind and spirit." How could I not get excited: "When can I buy it??" Lynn was a little vague: "Soon." It's called Breaking Into Brilliance. 

So tonight I'm thinking that my job may be to recognize that The Louise Log is already big, that I don't have to struggle and slave away to get somewhere. My job is to let go of my age-old idea that scrimping and saving and working my fingers to the bone is the path to success. I thought I had let go if it ... with all my great affirmations. Guess there's room for improvement.

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 140 (on the rest of life and BALANCE)

Three hours ago, we touched down at Newark Airport and I'm back at home in a modified state of shock.  For a person who hadn't really left her desk in almost eight years (unless it was for something Louise Log-related) these nineteen days of travel have been a very big deal. 

I'd forgotten that along with the exhilaration and excitement of travel come inconvenience and all sorts of challenges, especially for people with control issues.  And much as I've longed to get back home to my routine and to my uninterrupted access to cellular data and wifi, not having that forced me into a very different way of spending the days - mostly walking, hiking and driving in spectacularly beautiful country and having every meal with people I adore.

The silence and the beauty of British Columbia and New Zealand and almost uninterrupted time with one and then another of our grown children was ... I'm searching for the words and none of them are coming close.   Heartbreaking?  But in a good way. 

All of this is still very much in my head and body and making me think I want to make some changes.  I don't want to plunge back into workaholism.  I do want to figure out how to work in a sane way that leaves time for the rest of life. 

HOW DO YOU DO IT? 

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 137 (Heading out of Calgary on the Crowchild Trail)

Here we go!

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 136 (workaholic in withdrawal in Calgary)

I was not built for vacations. Naturally, I'm trying to be a good sport about it all and repressing my true self.  But Mr. Green is not so constrained and summed it up nicely (speaking for himself): "I look at my keys fondly and think of my other life." 

If this weren't our only chance to see these flown-away 20-something children, wild horses couldn't have dragged me from my desk for this long. Yes, yes, I know 'time off is important". I'll give you one or two days. Going on two weeks is a little much. 

Anyway, it stopped raining today and we got to take a look at Calgary, the biggest city in Alberta where the sky is huge and with incredibly complicated patterns of clouds.

There are some crazy contrasts in this city.

This dirt road (flanked in gorgeous fragrant lilacs I managed to miss in the photograph) is right in the city, not ten minutes from downtown. (Note: Early June is lilac season and they are all over the place in white, lavender and deep purple and perfuming the city.)

After lunch, in Chinatown.

Man hole cover - I guess they're trying to make light of what the North wind feels like here in the winter. 

Smart and very funny friend-of-friends blogger Una Lamarche's book UNABROW (above, blue shirt) was right there on the NEW & HOT table in the bookstore on Stephen Avenue. 

We stumbled on this great place, Bite, in a cool neighborhood called Inglewood.  It's like Dean & Deluca but without the attitude and on a much smaller and friendlier, hand-made scale.

Those orange things are on a moving freight train which goes right into the city.  I was told that sometimes these trains can be several miles long.  (italics not ennabled in comments or there'd be plenty of them in this caption)

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 135 (behind the scenes of episode #20)

It's been raining non-stop here in Calgary so I have no pictures to show yet of the ongoing 'adventure'. 

What better time to fill you in on what was going on behind the scenes when we were shooting episode #20 (How To Be Free of Envy).

Christine Cook (l) and Jennifer Sklias-Gahan (r) in front of the body cast.

Gayle Brown, a friend who had been in the little West Village Artist's Way group I was a part of in the Spring/Summer of 2007, was in the business of fabricating all sorts of extremely complicated props and objects for artists and designers. When I mentioned to her that I needed a full-size body cast for a six-foot tall man, she suggested we knock it off in an afternoon. 

Gayle brought over rolls of chicken wire and a length of thick foam. I supplied a four-by-six foot piece of quarter-inch plywood, bags of white flour, some surgical gauze and piles of old newspapers. Gayle expertly fashioned a form with the chicken wire and we did flour-and-water-paste paper-machée over one and then over a second back-up chicken wire form.  Knowing that the scene where Louise cuts Phineas out of the form was going to be tricky to shoot and that we might not get it on the first try, a second form seemed like a good idea. In the end, we never used the second one and as far as I know, it's still in Gayle's barn.

Even though this shoot was in August of 2010, the difficulty of getting a hospital bed and its rack delivered is burned into my brain. The shoot was within days and I hadn't been able to get any company to commit to delivering it. Without a real hospital bed and rack, our somewhat surreal plot line was not going to fly. 

It wasn't until my dear brother-in-law Stuart Green advised that I stop identifying myself as a filmmaker and start saying that I needed the bed for my very ill mother that I was able to lock in a rental and delivery. He explained the psychology of the people in this line of work, that they're all about helping people in trouble and that my story about an upcoming film shoot would not motivate them. Ever. By the way, no way could I get a doctor to prescribe an actual medicine for the drip.  The 'medicine' in the bottle is olive oil shampoo from 17th century Suds. 

I knew we also needed something that looked authentic for Phineas' life-support system but didn't have the budget to rent or to commission such a prop. One hot July afternoon, while on Canal Street shopping for rubber tubes at Canal Rubber, I spied an object (pictured above). It was right on the curb. In retrospect, I think it was probably waiting to be picked up as garbage. This gorgeous thing weighs more than fifty pounds and has sharp metal edges on the base. At the time, it was full of liquid. 

Thrilled at my discovery and seized with anxiety that someone else would grab it if I left it unattended, I hemmed and hawed for a few minutes trying to get a taxi. Two taxi drivers who crawled by in bumper-to-bumper traffic did not want it in their car.  I finally dashed into a nearby store and bought a luggage carrier and bungee straps and hauled it for several blocks through the crowd of shoppers blocking the sidewalk on Canal Street. 

By the time I made it to the corner of Center Street and Howard, my lower back and thigh muscles were aching.  I pulled over out of the line of foot traffic, shook out my hands, looked to the sky and moaned, "I need a friend with a car!"  "I need a miracle!" 

At that moment, a beautiful man with legs and arms like tree trunks, wearing basketball shorts and a jersey materialized and asked with a French accent: "Do you need help?"  El Hachimi Mohammed El Hachimi graciously hauled this ... boiler(?) up through Soho, through the Village, only stopping to mop his brow with a white handkerchief from time to time.  (I remember the temperature was in the mid-90-'s.) We chatted all the way, and finally he hauled it up the stoop and into the location in the West Village where it sits to this day. 

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 134 (on filling the well with "Going Gypsy")

Reporting live from Calgary, Alberta, I have to interrupt the travelog with a video shot a couple of months ago in NYC.

Centuries ago in internet time, Veronica and David James aka The Gypsynesters and The Louise Log (aka me) met online.  Their story is wonderful.  When their third child left for college, they decided they just didn't want to spend the rest of their lives staring longingly at the empty bedrooms. Instead, they sold their house and hit the road. Emptynesters turned gypsies.  Gypsynesters. 

I had the huge pleasure of meeting Veronica and David at a party for the launch of their book, "Going Gypsy".  But New Yorker that I am, had no cash on me at the party so I ordered it online. Everybody loves to yuck it up reading about other people's pain. Cause pain is funny.

Here's a visual recap of my reaction to "Going Gypsy" (:50).

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 133 (OMG want a do-over on last night???)

So we set off from Auckland, New Zealand this morning on a 9AM flight only to go even further East (THREE AND A HALF HOURS FURTHER EAST) to Sydney, Australia in order to catch a much bigger plane with a lot more people on it willing to take us to San Francisco.  We got on that plane and doubled back over the same route we'd just taken in the opposite direction, only this time headed for the United States.  Yes it was SEVEN HOURS+ since we'd taken off on the first plane and were then just back at our 9AM starting point .. but who's counting.

See our tiny 9AM plane just below the 'midddle' of this photograph leaving New Zealand and heading, actually, the wrong way.  California is to the RIGHT. 

Using Mr. Green's fist as the Earth and my 'pointer' (finger) as the Sun, I think I did a bang-up job explaining the International Date Line, a point I'll thrill you with another time.  Mr. Green showed his finest colors explaining something which you probably grasped decades ago but which seems the height of profound and surreal to me: that on leaving Australia and heading back toward the USA (the US being off the RIGHT hand side of the above photograph) that we were actually heading back into last night, the night we'd just slept through.  It's really down to basics here. 

Here was our last glimpse of New Zealand, looking remarkably like a map:

A tiny bit of New Zealand

And here is a visual explanation why this blog is especially short tonight.  I slept less than an hour in the almost twenty-four hours it took us to get from New Zealand to Calgary, Alberta where I am right now and on the verge of hallucinating from tiredness. 

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