Tag Archive | moving

Creativity Goals Check-In October 18, 2020

Oct18

goals12Goals from Last Week – How Did it Go?

Writing

  • work on blog at least five days – two, maybe three?
  • at least five sessions of digitizing old writing – Six.
  • work on disability letter for the school – not at all.

Music

Lifestyle

  • sleep without the phone (a struggle you can read about here) – this will put me at 210 nights (30 weeks) in a row – oh boy, yeah, I broke my streak after 206.
  • write Morning Pages every day – YES.
  • don’t look at phone until after Morning Pages every day – did this a couple days, until I broke the phone streak above.
  • do an Artist Date – yes, went to The Differentialists group, which I love. It’s a group started by some classmates where we work through medical mysteries, and it feeds my imaginary life of being House.
  • finish sorting through clothes – still in progress.
  • finish sorting through books – still in progress.
  • sort through file cabinet – Yes, completely.
  • sort through storage – not started.
  • sort through kitchen cabinets – almost done.

Reflections on the Week

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The Artist’s Way Reflections – Week Six: Recovering a Sense of Abundance

Oct15

neapartment

Week Six: Recovering a Sense of Abundance

The Great Creator

This section strikes me kinda off. I hate to say that but it’s probably the part of the book I have the biggest problem with, and not in a grumpy, skeptical way as I do with other essays in the book.

A lot of the quotes are obnoxious and somewhat contradictory to things she writes. And I think things she writes contradict each other and the lack of internal consistency bothers me. So does the feeling that this chapter drives home, that yeah this is written for middle class people or above, SES-wise, and that bothers me.

But I also think about how AW came out in 1992, and given book publishing timelines and her own telling of how AW came together, she probably wrote a lot of it in the ’80s, which was a different time in terms of cost of living vs. wages, families being okay on just one salary, and so forth.

It just seems like it’s geared towards people who are depriving themselves of joy out of some idea of martyrdom equals goodness, and I get that, but there’s something glib about it that I don’t like. Like yeah, a lot of people would love to dump a drudgy job, or put art first and money second, but for a lot of people that’s just not possible because the money concerns are survival concerns. It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. A lot of us would like to prioritize creativity more, but it’s hard to do if your basic needs at the base of that pyramid aren’t met.

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Creativity Goals Check-In October 11, 2020

Oct11

goals11Goals from Last Week – How Did it Go?

Writing

  • work on blog at least five days – three.
  • at least fourteen sessions of digitizing old writing – oh boy, I did six.
  • finish disability letter for the school – worked on it, didn’t finish.

Music

Lifestyle

  • sleep without the phone (a struggle you can read about here) – this will put me at 203 nights (29 weeks) in a row – yes.
  • write Morning Pages every day – oh no, just two (yesterday and today).
  • don’t look at phone until after Morning Pages – once, just today.
  • do an Artist Date – yes, two actually. As mentioned in this week’s Artist’s Way Reflections column post, I spent an hour listening to music and sorting through my clothes, and I’m counting it. I did one this morning too. I went to “The Differentialists,” a weekly meeting organized by some classmates where we go through and try to figure out medical mysteries, which is aligned with my imaginary life in Week Two of The Artist’s Way of being House. It was the most fun out of any Artist Date I’ve done in a long time.
  • clean my apartment – it’s gotten totally out of control and I have to move in less than a month so yeah – yes, finally. It was really stressing me out.

Reflections on the Week

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She’s a Girl Rising From a Shell: A Memoir Chapter

Aug31

So today, I’m giving you a full chapter from my memoir Moonchild. Now, this is actually up on this site but almost no one has found it, so I’m just pulling it out of hiding. Link is at the bottom of the post.

Another interesting tidbit: Seven years ago, I did a full-length spoken word performance show thingy-dingy and this was the first piece I read at the show. The other day, while on a rampage looking for the earliest version of my manuscript, I came across the recordings from that show. So I am toying with the idea of putting the audio up with the chapter. I don’t know. It has people’s real names. And whenever I hear my recorded voice, I sound like a twelve-year-old with a cold. But I’ll let you decide, should I include audio or no?

All the chapter titles from this book are lyrics from songs. This one comes from the song “Ribbons Undone” by Tori Amos, on her 2005 CD, The Beekeeper. I wrote this piece during that spring, with that album infusing into every corner of my life. At the time, I was about to leave Camp Orkila, where I had lived and worked for more than two years, and my brother was about to graduate college and my sister was about to graduate high school. The theme of graduation kept playing through my mind and it just felt like I was coming to the end of a journey that had started when I first left for college, which is what this chapter is about.

It was one of those things where you look back at the beginning of something and ask yourself, if you had ANY clue where it all would lead, would you do it over again? I was looking back at a time of innocence, of blissfully not knowing what that journey would entail, so this song, where Tori looks at her young daughter starting out on life journeys, just completely resonated with me at the time I was writing and the time I was writing about. It’s a really sweet song and if I’m feeling especially sentimental, it will totally make me cry. I’m a sap like that.

Another cool tidbit: About a year after I wrote the piece, I woke up one morning, way too early, to the sound of my ringing phone. Who the f was calling me at 6 in the morning? It was Tori Amos’ dad, calling from Maryland (where this story mostly takes place) to give me permission to use the lyrics. He also told me I should change the name of my book (which I did, back then it was called Learning to Swim, which is now a tattoo rather than a book title). Anyway, I always thought that was kinda cool.

BUT ENOUGH OF THIS BLATHERING. Here it is:

She’s A Girl Rising From a Shell

I decided to go with the audio addition, so here it is:

Now I’m going to go back to editing this same book manuscript, and listening to Rihanna. For real yo. Cannot even believe I’m fessing up to that but yeah, I kinda can’t get enough of a certain song. Have a good weekend everyone!

~Emilia J

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