Grilled Cheese and Love

I ate lunch with the kids from my art class today. I do this every Monday after art because I get to spend more time with the kids, because by the time I finish the class I am starving, and because Monday is grilled cheese sandwich day. Real grilled cheese. With butter.

Today I did not sit down to eat right away. Though I was eager to wolf down the grilled cheese that was waiting for me in the kitchen, I still had some cleaning up to do in the art room. As I was picking up bits of string and paper, I heard one of the teachers tell two boys to settle down and keep their hands to themselves. This is not unusual. It is something that we say to the kids at least once during each meal. I kept cleaning.

I heard the teacher tell the same boys not to touch each other’s plates or cups or bodies while at the table. Then I heard another teacher tell them the same thing a minute later. This got my attention. Not because of the amount of times the teachers had to repeat themselves, but because there were no accompanying screams, whines or sobs. I walked over to where the kids were eating, expecting to see the beginning of a fight or some sort of antagonistic behavior. Instead, they were each grinning and bouncing with excitement in their chairs.

I grabbed my sandwich and sat on a stool directly across the room from the boys. They were facing each other and giggling.   One teacher asked the boys if they were finished eating. This calmed them down and they returned their attention to their lunch. I watched them closely. They were eating quietly, smiling, chewing. They were happy. Really quiet, and really happy.  I kept watching. It was weird. Why were they suddenly following directions so well? Then I realized that they were holding hands under the table.

One of the other teachers noticed as well and we just sat there looking at them in awe. She whispered to me that one of the boys had been gone on vacation and this was the first time these guys had seen each other in two weeks. Needless to say, they were overjoyed at having been reunited; so overjoyed that they could not contain themselves. They soon forgot about their grilled cheese and proceeded to touch each other’s arms, pull at each other’s sleeves, and touch their heads together.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

Another Trip

Today I figured out why I’m not a drug addict. It’s because I associate all the best highs of my life with being at the dentist. I went back today for part two of my cleaning. Part one consisted mostly of me laughing uncontrollably due to the Nitrus gas. So naturally when the hygienist asked me if I would be needing the Nitrus again today, I said yes. There was no laughing today- I came prepared. I decided earlier in the day that I would take the opportunity to just relax and let myself fall into it.

Within minutes, my mind was flooded with memories. I remembered playing at my friend Rachel’s house, on the floor next to her bed. I remembered her flowered bedspread with matching pillowcases and the bed skirt that would brush up against my leg as we played with our Barbies. My bed at home didn’t have a bed skirt and I was fascinated by it. I wondered if I put one of Rachel’s Barbies under her bed if she would ever find it.

I remembered swimming in her pool and how the water seemed darker than the water in our pool. Somehow it seemed much deeper and almost like an adventure to swim at her house. I remembered getting out of the water and the feeling of my swimsuit slowly drying on my skin, lightly scratching me as it returned to its original shape. I thought I looked better in my swimsuit than I did in my clothes. I wished I could wear it to school. I felt that the people who weren’t nice to me would be nicer if they saw me in my swimsuit. A voice called me out of my memory and asked me to open my mouth a little wider.

As I drifted away again, I thought about how I ended up at this dentist in the first place. I was eating popcorn and it pulled out my crown. I then remembered being very small and watching movies with my parents. I worried that we would run out of popcorn. I wished there was infinite popcorn. I would watch my parents almost as much as I watched the movie- to make sure I laughed when they laughed. I remembered my dad noticing this and telling me to enjoy the movie and to laugh at what I thought was funny. I said I understood, but I lied. It was so important to me to laugh when he laughed.

This happens to me at the daycare all the time. If I laugh, even if it is at something I have just read on my phone, at least one kid near me will catch my eye and laugh too. I think it’s about feeling like they are part of something with me. Maybe it makes them feel closer to me. Or maybe they just like to laugh.

The chair moved me into a more upright position. She started cleaning my lower teeth. There was more poking and scraping, but not enough to keep me out of my memories. I remembered lying on my bed, drawing with my mom. I wanted her to be there and watch me. I remember needing help drawing the arms of a girl, but not wanting to need help. I remember getting angry with my mom for how she drew the arms. She added the crease of the girl’s elbows, and I didn’t want it there. I erased it furiously and shook off all the eraser bits. My mom asked me if I knew where all those bits went when I blew them. I looked up at her in wonder, and asked “where?”- Anticipating some magical answer. “The floor,” she said, smiling.

Remembering this made me laugh out loud, startling the dental hygienist. I had been so quiet up until that point. She asked how I was doing and told me it was time for my polish. She said I could pick my flavor. I had the choice of mint or a whole bunch of disgusting flavors, so I chose mint. Because of the noise, I couldn’t really escape. When she finished, she went to find out if my insurance covered fluoride treatments and she left me alone with my gas. I started to miss Rodrigo. I wished he were in the chair next to me with a gas mask on as well. I imagined us holding hands and talking about how each of our days had gone. I told Rodrigo I had to pee and asked him if I should even bother getting up and going to the bathroom or if I should just go in the chair. He said he wouldn’t judge me if I went in the chair, but I’d probably be happier if I went to the bathroom. I was smiling when the hygienist came back and told me my insurance did not cover fluoride treatments. She turned off the gas and turned up the oxygen. Within moments I was completely clear and back in the present.

The New Girl

There was a new girl in my art class today. I think she is about three. She is funny and sweet and had no problems with the other kids. She had so much fun in art and participated the whole time. We made temporary sculptures from objects we found around the room. We stacked them up, taped them together, and then took them apart and did it again. This new girl made a particularly successful sculpture of a small boy doll taped between two pieces of plastic bread.

After art class and lunch, most of the kids take naps. A few kids go home early. This girl was one of the kids leaving early. Her mom would be arriving in a few minutes. Seemingly out of the blue, she starts crying out that she misses her mom and she wants her mom to hold her. I tell her that she is in luck because her mom will be coming in a few minutes and she will give her a big hug. Still crying, she looks me in the eye, and very clearly, like she is explaining something to a one or two year old says: “I know but I want her to hold me right now,” and then starts crying even harder. I rubbed her back and told her I knew how hard it was to miss your mom and then I told her that when she saw her mom she could tell her about all the fun things she had done. She looked up at me hopelessly, so clearly thinking: “you just don’t get it.”

She was really suffering. She wasn’t scared that her mom had forgotten her, or that she wouldn’t show up. She was just expressing with absolutely no shame at all, how much it hurt her that she couldn’t have what she wanted most at that moment. It was heartbreaking, but also so beautiful. She hasn’t yet learned to hide her feelings because they don’t make sense to other people.

I picked up a book and started reading it to her. Still whimpering, she climbed in my lap and listened. I had just about finished the book when her mom showed up. At the sound of her mom’s voice, a huge smile broke out across the girls face. She jumped out of my lap, sprinted towards her mother, and leapt up into her arms. Her mom asked her if she had fun and she said “yes, but I was very sad because I needed you to hold me and you weren’t here. Then she sighed and said “I’m better now, but I’m still a little sad.”

Here is the sculpture she made:

The Overflow

It happened just as we were walking into the main room to sit down for lunch. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one of the girls fascinated by something on the floor. She was poking it and squishing it in her fingers. I asked her what it was and she said, “Chicken poop.” I told her it looked a little bit too big to be chicken poop. Then she said “Oh, then it’s kid poop.” It sure was.

I picked her up fast and washed her hands before she could stick her fingers in her mouth. As I was washing her hands for the third time, she told me whose poop she thought it was and then she said “its okay. He’s like me. I poop too.” Inspired by her inclusive and non-judgmental attitude I said, “that’s right, everyone poops. I poop too.” “But do you poop on the floor?” she asked. No. I guess I don’t.

After she was clean, I decided to go check on the possible culprit. I asked him if he had poop in his diaper. He said he did. He seemed pretty indifferent about it. I took this as a good sign. If he didn’t care, then maybe it wasn’t that bad. I was wrong.

There was so much poop in that diaper that for a moment I just stood there staring at it. I finally snapped out of it, and began to change my first diaper ever. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I mean, I get it in theory – take off the dirty diaper, clean the kid off, put on a clean diaper. Its just that there are some in between steps that are not explained in that theory. I had seen regular pee diapers changed on the changing table, but this was a whole different story. I’m not even sure where I went wrong. I think it might have been how I grabbed the diaper. I underestimated its weight and it kind of flopped the other way. Poop fell all over the place. Luckily the kid is awesome, and he was in a really good mood. He was smiling at me and saying poop a lot. I cant imagine what it would have been like if he were crying.

I finally cleaned everything up and we made it to lunch. To my surprise, I had not lost my appetite. In fact, I was starving. Apparently so was the boy. He made his way through three bowls of rice and peas. I looked up at the clock and smiled. I only had five more minutes of work. He could eat as much as he wanted. The next diaper he filled would be for someone else.

That Nasty Brew

We are living in an age where it is possible to clone human beings and regrow hands with magic science powder. We are obviously living in the future. So how is it possible that cough syrup tastes just as awful as it did when I was a kid? It makes me gag. It makes me shiver. It makes one of my eyes close. It tastes like alcohol and sugar and rubber and gasoline. I would rather be sick for a few days than swallow a spoonful of NyQuil.  I would rather have a sore throat and a cough. I would rather suffer in silence and complain out loud than drink that nasty brew.

Rodrigo however, does not agree. He stares at me as I argue and whine and present really well thought out arguments as to why I don’t need the medicine. He stands next to me patiently, cough syrup in one hand, spoon in the other, as I lie right to his face and promise to take it later. He smiles at me and pours the syrup. I threaten him. I look at him through squinty eyes and a wrinkled brow. I tell him the only reason I am taking it is for him. He hands me the spoon. I take the medicine.

I gag and I shiver and my eye closes a little bit. I run to the kitchen and stuff my mouth with blueberries and cheese and I drink Gatorade. Everything tastes like cough syrup. I glare at Rodrigo and tell him he just likes to see me suffer. “How does your throat feel now?” he asks.

Dammit! It feels better.

One For The Kids

I teach art to a group of kids here in Seattle. My students range from about a year and a half to four years old. They are smart, creative, and absolutely willing to destroy anything I put in front of them. I watch them in disbelief as they tear apart projects that took hours of thought and preparation, and then I watch them in awe as they turn them into things I never could have imagined. And then they do it again. For them the project is never over; the creating never stops.

Last week I cut sea animals out of different colored pieces of felt, and with Velcro, attached them to another large blue piece of felt, creating an underwater world. In my mind, the kids would remove and reposition the felt animals where they saw fit, creating their own underwater world. We would talk about underwater animals and admire the starfish and turtles and put them in groups.

This didn’t happen. Within a minute of showing the kids the underwater scene, all of the cut out animals were on the floor or stuck to the kid’s clothes. The Velcro and what it would stick to was the new project. Then, the animals got put back on the large piece of felt and the kids began to swim with them, screaming, as turtles and fish nipped at their feet. One girl asked me for a Band-Aid because she had just been bitten by a shark. A minute later, the underwater world became a giant tortilla and the kids rolled themselves up into burritos.

They are not attached to the ideas they have or to the things they make. They create and destroy with the absolute confidence that anything they have done they can do again. And they’re right. I’m sorry, did I say I was the teacher?

Winky’s Night Out

All Winky wanted was to go to the other side of the room where all the people were. She felt wary of the awkward knee -bending, head bopping line of people admiring the band, Ghost Power, and wanted to be closer to the less awkward drunk people.  She didn’t even want to drink. She had already done shots over a toilet with four other girls in a bathroom stall. She was good on booze.

Seeing as how she would be 21 in two days, I gave her my i.d. to get into the bar area. I mean lets face it, she was going to need the drinking practice and I just wanted to help out. She put my i.d. in her wallet, thinking it would look more natural to pull it out when she was asked for it. Little did Winky know that she had put it directly on top of her own i.d. When asked for her i.d. by the bar guard, she accidentally pulled her own i.d. out first, said “Oh,” and put it back in her wallet, trading it for my i.d. The bar guard, having already seen the first i.d., knew something was up. Winky, strong at heart, didn’t give up. She said “Oh, this i.d. is expired. Let me give you my real one.” Unfortunately, he wanted to see both. He kept my i.d., and as Winky and I were talking to one of our teachers, he told her she really had to leave. He then asked me if it was my i.d. and told me if I wanted it back I had to leave as well.

Rodrigo was extremely relieved, being that we had already been there longer than he wanted. He had suffered an hour of Ghost Power and actually thanked the bar guard for kicking us out. He was even happier when he realized that it was his first time being kicked out of a bar because of the bad ass girls he was with. All in all, it was a pretty great night.

Almost Thirty

(This is the artist statement I wrote for a show I am having in the Closet Gallery at Cornish College of the Arts on Tues. Nov. 22nd)

I remember thinking that I’d never be thirty. Not because I thought I’d die young, but because thirty seemed so old and so far away. It still seems old, but it is definitely not far away. Almost Thirty is a series of prints of me at age twenty-nine, looking in the mirror and recording what I see.

All of the images in this series are observations from life, engraved directly into copper or plexi-glass and then printed. Most of the pieces have blind contour engravings integrated into the images. Using the blind contour technique keeps me honest. I draw what I see and am not tainted by the desire to create a beautiful drawing. It also helps me capture things that I would normally overlook.

For as long as I can remember, I have been an avid people watcher. I always notice a person’s gestures and the way their body moves. When I draw someone, I try to show something specific and unique about them. My ultimate goal is not only to portray who I am looking at, but also how I see the person in front of me.

This series of prints is an attempt at documenting how I see myself in my twenty-ninth year.

November 1st

sneak peek: setting up the show

Clone Steak

Would it be considered cannibalism for a person to eat a human clone? Rodrigo says yes, but I am not sure. I tend to think of clones as steaks waiting to happen. Not in a bad way, I just don’t really consider them to be human. Rodrigo says that people like  me are the reason that human clones don’t exist- they wouldn’t be safe or whatever. Like I am one of the bad guys from that movie The Island. But those guys were really bad. And wasteful. I mean, if you are going to kill a clone for its liver or heart, why not cook up the rest of it for dinner? It is really messed up when they kill sharks for their fins or elephants for their tusks, and then just leave the animals to rot and die. Why should clones be any different? Honestly I do think there should be human clones, but not really for harvesting organs. Just for food. I think famous people who look like they would taste good should be cloned first. Imagine going to the supermarket and finding prepackaged cuts of Brad Pitt steak or a bag of Angelina Jolie wings ( I don’t think I’d go for those). There could be Beyonce brisket and Russel Crowe ribs, I bet you Scarlett Johansson tastes like chicken. I would have no problem at all eating human clones. I would probably stop eating other animals. I would be a vegetarian of sorts. So I ask you, whose clone meat would you eat?

Seriously?

Let me just start off by saying that I am loving art history this semester. We are studying so many of my favorites that it is overwhelming. Monet, Rodin, Degas, Cezanne, Van Gogh to name a few so far. I also like my teacher. She is fair and passionate about art and slightly hard of hearing. It makes things fun. My only problem is that my class is from 5:30-8:20pm. It is my last class of the day, a day full of classes that begin at 8am. By the time I am sitting in my usual front row seat I am so tired that everything is funny. Things that would normally make me smile to myself give me uncontrollable giggles.

Take today for example. We were looking at a painting by Winslow Homer called “The Lifeline.”  It is a painting of a man holding a woman he has just rescued from a sinking ship in treacherous waters. There are crashing waves all around and one very big, very white splash behind them. The guy sitting next to me asked, “what is the light source for that big white area of the painting?” My teacher “what big white area?” The guy points to the painting and says “the big white area.” My teacher, “show me” (handing him the laser pointer). The guy “seriously?” Now this may not seem funny to you, but it almost had me in tears. They were both just so sincere in their desire to communicate and it was just so not happening that I couldn’t control myself. Its interesting, I am always too tired to be there, and I always leave class in a good mood.