« July 2008 | Main | September 2008 »

August 31, 2008

confrontation fear

Scene: Tim Hortons late on a Sunday morning, bustling with the after-church crowd. Your intrepid heroine is sitting alone in a corner minding her own business, knitting away on a lovely skirt over a large mug of Tim's so-called "steeped tea" (not actually steeped, but that's a gripe for another day). A man about fifteen years her senior approaches; he's wearing a t-shirt with some motorcycle company logo on the front, and on the back are two targets with crosshairs, roughly over the lower end of the shoulder blades, and this text: Passenger Safety Instructions. 1. Place one boob over each target. 2. Hold on tight. 3. Enjoy the ride.

The man sits down at the table next to our heroine, ten inches or so away, separated by a low divider wall. He asks, "making me a sweater?".

Ahem. Ladies (I'm assuming no men ever get this question whether they knit or not), have you ever been asked this question in public by a total stranger before? I have, several times, so many times that ages ago I started thinking about how I might answer this question next time, only to chicken out once the next "next time" came.

What I said: "nope". Without so much as a glance up or further acknowledgement of his existence.

What I wish I'd said: "No, but maybe I'll knit you one some day when your membership in the patriarchy no longer entitles you to think you can demand intimate domestic tasks from any woman. You'll need one then, since hell will have frozen over".

Posted by jodi at 05:35 PM | Comments (20) | categories:  assholes

August 25, 2008

smell this!

I finally finished these prints I started oh, a way long time ago now, and got them listed up in my etsy store. These last few weeks I've spent too little time in the studio and too much on the front porch, although Peter's vacation time coming to an end coupled with cooler days should take care of that and get me more motivated to work indoors. We did complete much of our list of tasks around the house, including building this new set of record shelves, for which we've had the wood sitting around all summer:

The old record storage was a little shelf with a crate on top which had overflowed into another giant crate that's been sitting in the middle of our living room floor for a couple of months. But not any more! We're pretty excited about all that empty space waiting to be filled with new records. We're going to need to ramp up our record shopping in order to get some of those spaces filled up before we end up putting books and yarn and bags and stuff in all the openings, which you can see we've already started doing, a little. Old, cluttery habits die hard.

Of course, in order to get a good photo of the shelves I had to move an armchair (that doesn't quite fit so well into this corner anymore) and its side table out of the way, and strategically place myself so as to crop out two guitar cases, a xylophone, a heap of wool cloaks and a mandolin. This is how we live, just mentally editing out the clutter when necessary.

We're getting better though: in the last few days we've gone through almost all of the boxes of stuff that have been sitting in the tv room since we moved them out of Claire's bedroom, which used to double as storage since she rarely slept there but had to be converted to a real bedroom now that she lives with us. Also by the end of today we'll have that wonderful, sought-after thing: a clean, empty dining room table. Cue the children's choir. My so-called "home studio" is another matter, with unsorted piles of fabric and paper and giant snarls of thread and little hand tools I don't know what to do with and unfinished dresses and, beneath all that, drawings I really want to work on. I'm so tired of this being my life, this mountain of stuff in the way of what I really want to do with my time. Before we went on vacation we were decluttering like banshees, and donated to charity enough stuff to fill my old apartment, but it only takes a couple of lazy weeks to unravel that hard work. My goal for tomorrow is to clear out my working space again; my goal for the rest of my life is to keep it that way.

Posted by jodi at 02:36 PM | Comments (7) | categories:  projects

August 14, 2008

on assholery

This is really more of a letter to Peter than a blog post, but instead of sending it to him at work I decided to put it here. Lucky for you all.

The neighbours across the street (the annoying ones who yell at the children, not the nice Lebanese grandparents with the immaculate lawn) are listening to the kind of death metal that sounds like the singer is vomiting, or a monster from Ghostbusters. Or vomiting up a bunch of Ghostbusters monsters. Earlier they were listening to Kid Rock singing about how they used to listen to Sweet Home Alabama all summer long. Can't decide which is less tolerable. Probably the latter, since with the former I at least can't make out words. Wait, now they've changed to the kind of guitar-heavy metal I can handle. Wonder how long that will last.

I don't want to cook tonight. Can we eat leftovers? Or get sandwiches from Green Island? It's times like these I curse Dave Nichols or Loblaws or whomever is responsible for discontinuing those Ancient Grains veggie burgers I liked so much. I also blame them for the fact that our barbecue may not work anymore, because the veggie burgers disappeared right around the last time we barbecued anything, and so clearly there's a connection.

Oh, we're back to vomiting monsters. And they turned it up even though they're no longer outside on the porch. Clearly these people are trying to be assholes, but as the Yoda said, there is no try. Only do. Holy crap, I can hear their front window rattling. I'm not even kidding.

While I'm in a ranty mood, here are a few photos I took in the studio this morning while working on my collaboration with Jessica. This one is for my American friends who think I'm down on their country all the time: here is one area in which I'll freely admit it's better to live in the States than in Canada. Notice the difference in cost to send something from Windsor to Omaha versus sending that exact same something from Omaha to Windsor. Of course I get back and then some all the extra money I send on shipping with the private health insurance I don't have to buy, but still. Our dollars are at par. Why aren't our stamps?*

*rhetorical question; please don't explain, I know why not stamps. It just seems sometimes like Canada Post is a total cash grab.

Posted by jodi at 03:17 PM | Comments (2) | categories:  assholes

August 13, 2008

a stupendous lack of focus

Ten or eleven years ago in another town in what seems now like another life, I returned home from Pennsic to find the most splendid wrong number message on my answering machine:

(each work delivered slowly, with theatrical emphasis): "After having his fill of Starbucks coffee, Blair has returned from his vacation."

(sung, slowly and seductively, and with great feeling on the last two syllables): "caaaallll meeee, I emm-eye-ess-ess-eee-dee YOUUUU!"

I sort of wish I still had that message saved so I could play it back to myself every time I come home from being away. And I wish I knew this Blair dude.

It's slowly sinking in that August is half over and here I am at home, on my own front porch which is nowhere near Georgia or school. I keep sniffing the air, looking at late-season flowers whose blooms I haven't seen in four years, grinning and sighing. It might be driving Peter crazy, I'm not sure. All I know is that I missed the end of summer trememdously. Late in October when it's cold and miserable here and I remember how lovely and warm it still is in Georgia, where I'm not, I may change my tune. But for right now it feels awfully good to be here. Tonight I will eat my first Southern Ontario sweet corn in four years, and over the next few weeks I'll put up jars of Leamington tomatoes for winter. Forgive me, but I feel another of those contented sighs coming on.

My professional life is not such a picture of contentment. I have plenty of ideas and little motivation. I want to do a design collaboration with a local business, I want to do another performance similar to Study for a Remnant Factory (only with a knitting machine), and I want to organize a fashion show, and for these I actually have to go out and meet people and ask for things and all that hard stuff. As well, a lot of deadlines are coming up in the fall for exhibitions and residencies, but this is the easy part (asking people for things in writing is always easier). I'd like to pick up where I left off with the knitwear design but I feel like I have too many ideas and can't focus. And then there's this job I'm thinking about applying for. And then there are these ten dresses that need their hems hand sewn before I can print on them and put them up for sale in my shop. And then, and then. . .

I did find the time to update the portfolio section of my website and my curriculum vitae (how good it felt to delete the words "candidate for" in the education part!). And I added to my "works in progress" page this collaborative piece that Jessica and I have started:

We've already sent out a proposal to show this work (which is very much still in progress) abroad, and if that doesn't pan out we'll have plenty of time to find somewhere else to show it since we'll be working on it for almost a year. To see a statement about the work in progress, go here. To offer me a job or a publication or a show or some kind words or a date to walk downtown and drink tea, please do so here: jodi(at)jodigreen(dot)ca.

By the way, as it turns out there was very little bad weather at Pennsic this year, and thus very little in the way of hysterical claims of tornadoes and monsoons and what have you (a Pennsic rarely goes by when people with walkie-talkies aren't going around telling us there's some sort of natural disaster on its way). We rarely left our own camp, preferring to laze away the days in the company of our dear friends. There was knitting, whiskey and a cool breeze off the lake flowing right through our kitchen (wilderness camping this is not: we have a large kitchen tent and sitting room, a heated shower, running warm water for the washing up and portojohns within sight of our front gate). The pirates and belly bunnies were so plentiful it was hard to choose which to shiv first. And yes, I did indeed see a man wearing a loincloth, ugg boots and a banana. Truly the vacation that has it all.

Posted by jodi at 10:30 AM | Comments (1) | categories:  art stuff : jet set