Another VT sighting!!!

I have NO IDEA what is going on lately, but this is my second Friday in a row where I've randomly reunited with VT female residents from Jan, in Greenpoint. This time, I was waiting on the subway platform, eating my peeled apples, with Terttu's bday mix on my iPod, thinking about the Beastie Boys' lyric, "NYC is a city I feel at home in." I look across the platform, and Susan Peebles is on the other side!! It was EXACTLY like w/Marcie: 1. What the hell are we both doing here? 2. That's her! 3. Wait, is that her? I'm sure it is but maybe I'm just freaking out some random New Yorker by staring and smiling. 4. Oh, look, she's responding to me!

So I yelled across to Susan and we chatted as well as we could with two train tracks between us. Hilarious. Hopefully I'll see her once we get a hold of each other like normal people via email or phone.

This is from my VT sketchbook. Feels like five thousand years ago. Ching-in, the other night, said, "can you believe it's been almost a year since we met, and that soon it will be January and we won't be in Vermont??" I'm feel overwhelmed by everything I have to do, and just want a studio. I need a studio so badly. I feel crazy not being able to do anything while cutting things on the floor and making tiny wisps of papery things b/c there is no space for anything more.

I've been reading Robert Coles' The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination, after finishing Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty. I've been thinking about the ways that I choose to participate in the world, and how being an artist is one of them, but wondering how much responsibility I am taking or not taking, and how do people grow up with a sense of caring about other people? Kids seem kind of concerned about endangered species or littering or other socially responsible things, but adults seem to tune out everything but what they want to care about. How does that shift? Why don't we care anymore about working together to make the world a better place? Why are we so selfish and small minded? Why can't I get myself to write a new artist statement?

Likely, I just feel crazy b/c I trimmed 58 books w/an xacto knife, and then folded and cut 116 endsheets (some by hand, some on the board shears), and then cut down 125 pieces of board. Or b/c I am staring at 80 responses from a performance I did three years ago and wondering what I'm supposed to do with them. Or b/c it is the darkest night of the year.

Who knows! So I'm ending with someone else's words, through Ann Patchett's book. It's about her friendship w/Lucy Grealy, and there are lots of Lucy's letters interspersed throughout. This is part of one of them:

I have been musing some more about what I've said in this letter. My whole concept of art has taken a serious shaking, and I am beginning to see what I can get from this, which has something to do with a better understanding of. . . .christ, I don't know. I did know for a minute there but then I had a coughing fit and now I've forgotten. That is one thing I've learned, that it is possible to really understand things at certain points, and not be able to retain them, to be in utter confusion just a short while later. I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try and call on it, just like a lightbulb cracking off when you throw the switch.