mandalay

some kind of wonderful

i have been feeling very creative lately. wanting to create so many things, which is made that much more difficult by not having any spare time to do much besides sleep. which i suppose you can't even classify as spare time. just time. already slotted for a necessary human activity. what little time i've had has gone to painting. to looking for an apartment online. with the remainder spent staring into space imagining a tiny internal miniature self struggling under the weight of MOVING and NOT EXERCISING and PACKING and BEING LONELY and NUMBNESS and CALIFORNIA. i have had many ideas for poems which have gotten shoved to the back of my mind until they fall off the table and get pushed under the sofa, left with only the dust bunnies for company and possibly to never be found again.

anyway, the point of all this is to say that in lieu of having time to create myself i have been doing quite a bit of online reading and surfing looking at other people's creative pursuits. this has brought me to some pretty cool things. first off, i discovered that one of my beloved singer-songwriters, mike doughty, has a *blog*. now i've been a longtime reader of jude's *blog* but hadn't really ever looked to see if anyone else had them. it seems to be the kind of thing that only the singers i heart who have achieved moderate success and then been relegated to the fringe of all things related to fame and money have time to keep up with. anyway, i love mike doughty's blog. he posts about books and his creative process and what music he's listening to at any given moment and random photos he takes and it's really easy for me to just get sucked in for hours. he is basically doing exactly what i want to be doing. at some point in my life, i would *love* to just exist from day to day taking pictures, making music, writing poems. is it a selfish pursuit? sometimes i feel it is, but when your day job doesn't improve anyone else's quality of life, what's the difference? i think it's better to, say, write about a wheel in a unique way that other people can identify with than to just be a cog in the wheel. but i digress...

besides that, i was looking around for miranda july info (the performance artist who is the main character in "me and you and everyone we know," a movie that borders on perfection through quiet weirdness) and came across this web-based project she's doing called "learning to love you more." it's basically a list of creative assignments for people to complete and then post their take on, featuring things such as: make a portrait of your friend's desires; re-read your favorite book from the fifth grade; take a picture of your parents kissing; make an audio recording of a choir; write your life story in less than a day; hang a windchime in a tree in a parking lot. I LOVE THIS. lots of people have done it. there are 63 assignments. and there's even a family of six in seattle who are doing every one and are going to have a showing there in october. and by looking at their site, i came across this awesomeness. all of which just makes me feel like there are people in the world who are good to each other with no ulterior motives. i've had a lot of experiences lately that have made me feel like there are so few people doing anything but looking out for themselves that spending the day imagining families creating art with each other and strangers letting other strangers bunk on their couch just gives me warm fuzzy feelings. who does this? call me naive, but i want to meet these people. like tomorrow.

posted by amanda @ 1:04 PM