Finding Bodies

Have you ever wondered how you would react if you found a body? Would you scream? Would you pee your pants? Faint? Today I found out that answer to that question.

I have been volunteering at the Norfolk Botanical Gardens for a couple of weeks now. I have been learning how to trim azaleas and it has been a lot of fun. Today as we were hacking back a particularly dense patch of azaleas, I crouched down to see something round under the shrubs…Mushroom I thought…no…that would be a big mushroom. What is that??!! Is that hair? It is hair!! ….and an ear??? Oh my Freaking God…THAT IS A FREAKING HUMAN HEAD!!!!

Now all of this has been taking place inside my head. I did not scream. I did not even say a word to my fellow gardeners. I am proud to say that logic kicked in during this moment of potential panic. I began to reason that it could not be a real human head. The hair follicles were in neat rows…too neat. If it was a decaying head, the ear would have rotted away…right? It should have smelled too! So I convinced myself that it wasn’t real. I pointed it out to my companions it took them a moment or two to decide that it wasn’t real. Tom told us that they used to host a haunted garden in this area years back and apparently this manikin head (I named him George) was left behind for us to find years later. Despite the fact that it was not real, I still shudder a little about it because it was just that freaky.


























Tom took George under his wing and has made him part of the NBG community. He will go on to play a starring role in pranks around the office.

Even though I did not actually find a body today, I feel as if I am part of this ‘elite’ club. I have experienced this moment from the inside out and now know how I react. Cool, calm and collected…of course, if it had smelled, I might have tossed my cookies.

In the good news category, I got my copy of “To the Point” today and it contained the article I wrote, “The Pepper Imp’s Lesson.” The only compliant I have it that they changed my slangy phrasology of “wicked fast” to “wickedly fast” and it doesn’t quite have the same punch.

I am also selling prints of my art. If you want a print of one of these pictures, send me an email. :) So Excited!!


Through the Seeing Stone
















The Fairy Collector















Off to Work















Mermaid's Embrace


















Perserverance
















Withywindle Lillies

Changing

I haven’t posted any blogs of substance in a while because I have been fantastically busy. As always, I have taken on more than I can chew and therefore have stressed myself out. Just to list them out so that there is a record of the insanity of my life: job hunting, job applications, interviewing artists, writing about artists, writing stories, editing stories, creating new art, trying to sell art, volunteering and a new data entry job. Uggh, I just stressed myself out more by listing all of those things. Why am I doing all of this you ask? Well, the reasons are varied and complicated. Many of them were inspired by the career counselor that I was seeing. If you know me well, you know that I am not the happy, confident, happy-go-lucky, perfect person I seem (ha). I am very shy in certain situations and for about 4 months, I was alone in the house, fostering that shyness into a real problem. There was a point where I didn’t really want to leave the house. My career counselor immediately pounced on this problem and sent me forth with assignments.

I was to volunteer at various places, go into art galleries and museum to talk to people, and generally get past that barrier of starting up a conversation with people. I failed. Without a reason to start a conversation with people, I couldn’t do it. As a solution, I found a reason to talk to them. I became the Norfolk Gallery Examiner so I could interview people. There were other reasons too. I get to visit galleries, talk extensively with artists and gallery directors, and generally gather information. I also get to practice writing skills and add items to my writer’s resume and say nice things about people. An unlooked for advantage is that I have started looking at art in a different way than I did before. Previously, I have only liked art that was pretty, majestic or inspired some feeling in me. This was a very select group of art, particular to my taste. Since it wouldn’t due to write about only the art I like or to give another artist a bad review because it wasn’t to my taste, I started trying to find merit in art by pretending I was looking through other people’s eyes. I have also come to the realization that my art doesn’t really fit with most galleries.

I started looking to the Science Fiction and Fantasy world, deciding to try to sell some prints at conventions. These are the kind of conventions where people dress up as their favorite characters. I thought my art would be a shoe in here. I was right, but I found that I wasn’t the only one who a shoe in. Instead I was lost in all the other fantastic art at the shows. I brought some prints to the show and didn’t sell one. :( However, I don’t think that the lack of art sales was the biggest failure of the weekend. I had gone with the plan of networking with other people there. I had, after all, been practicing talking to people. I talked to 3 people even though I knew no one at the convention. (Ok, I knew one of the people from the last con and another who didn’t know me.) I found that I couldn’t make the transition from interviewing to networking. More work ahead.

So the point of this blog was to let you all know that I am changing and trying to change, but still jobless. Well, I have a couple of things lined up, but they either pay peanuts (like the Examiner gig, where I spent my month’s earning on faxing in my W-9, HA!), are still sketchy (like my data entry job, where I am not sure that I will actually get paid) or temporary (like my ODU Sea Camp Counselor job, which is going to be a blast.) Come August, I will be back in the jobless pool.

Going Live!!!

My examiner page is up and running. YAY!!! I have posted my first article and I hope you will go read it and let me know what you think.

Bubbling pools of color: An international artist in a local venue

To visit my main page in the future, go to:
http://www.examiner.com/x-9748-Norfolk-Galleries-Examiner

If you are interested, you can sing up to recieve emails when ever I post on a link near my bio photo.

Remember, for every click, I get a penny! :)

Still at the Crossroads

I feel like I am going in a thousand directions at once. I have been seeing a career counselor and she has been helpful in many ways, but I think that I was trying to get her to make some decisions for me. I was hoping she would wave a magic wand and I would know what I wanted. The truth is that I have a drive inside me to write stories and to draw. Depending on the day, one or the other is stronger. Pursuing both of these has me scattered and unfocused. I wish somehow that I had more energy or obsession for both. Unfortunately, neither of these will make any money in the immediate future, so I need to get a money job. In this area, I am no nearer than when I began seeing a career counselor but I can see what some of the problems are. Some of those include pessimism: that I am not good enough for a job, that I will waste all the effort because they won’t even look at my application…essentially I am defeated before I begin. I need to change my attitude before I can move forward.

In the mean time though, I have a job as an ODU Sea Camp Counselor. This will be a fun job for about 8 weeks this summer and will take some of the pressure off for a couple weeks. I am looking forward to learning new stuff and hanging out with kids. I like kids! :)

I also got a job at examiner.com as the Norfolk Gallery Examiner. I would have already been posting, but we are having some technical difficulties. Blah! It is supposedly a paying job, but its only 10$ /1000 hits, so I just assume it is volunteer and something to build up my writer’s resume. It has also had me getting out of the house, visiting galleries and breaking out of my shell long enough to talk to people. Once I am up and running, I will post a link here for you all to click and help me make money. Remember, for every click, I get a penny! :D

I have been looking for places to sell the prints of my Art. I have found two stores that will carry them and have reserved space in the Balticon art show. We will see how it goes. I have been working with a printer to get prints of my artwork made and I am pretty happy about that. Those things have definitely been uppers. Today, however, I got a rejection for my Withywindle Lillies from the Color Pencil Society of America’s Art show. There are so many things that run through my head when I get rejected from a show. First, I am always sad that I wasted the money on the entry fee. I feel as if I have paid someone to tell me that I am not good enough. Then the part of me that always tries to learn from my mistakes kicks in. I start thinking about next year and what I could do differently. Then I remember that there is no way to improve for next year. Each show is put together by one person and is completely subjected to their likes, dislikes and idea for the show’s theme. Next year or next show, it will be someone different with different opinions and whims. All I can do is create the best piece of art I can, pay my fee and hope that my lucky number is up. Sigh.

Contemplations

Wes has been home for a week now and it is so nice to have him back. The best part about it is to be able to get hugs and give hugs as much as I want. I know that those of you that know me well, know that I am not a huggy sort of person, but I think that I just save all my hugginess for Wes and I have been deprived for almost 7 months. I am pretty sure he feels the same way since he generally won’t let me go once he gets a hold of me. But I won’t sicken you anymore with mushy details.

I mentioned in my last blog that I was going to see a career counselor. I have had the initial meeting with her and on Monday I am going to have the first working meeting with her. In the mean time, she gave me many pages of questionnaires to fill out and some writing assignments. I thought that these were going to be easy, but that was not the case. It has taken me two weeks to get through them and even then, I am not completely satisfied with my answers. You would think that it would be easy to talk about yourself.

These are some of the questions that stumped me.

List your top ten professional, personal and relationship goals. Sounds easy right? Try it. I was expecting to be confused on the professional goals, since that is why I am seeing her in the first place. Since my personal goals (writing and art) are currently very interconnected with my possible professional goals, it was difficult to sort them out. And relationship goals…eeergh??? I have none, other than not fight with my friends or family. That alone is a tall order when it comes to certain family members.

Ok, another stumper question. What have been some of your favorite jobs? Well…looking back…I don’t know if I have ever really liked any of my jobs. What stand out are moments at a job or working with particular people at a job, but rarely the job itself. It was just the backdrop for the coworker interactions. So does that mean I have been doing the wrong jobs my whole life? I mentioned this to the girls the other night and I think I depressed them a little when they looked back at their past jobs and didn’t find any that they liked either. I think our generation has been raised under the delusion that we will find a job that we like and that work will not really be work. “Work” is a job for some other poor shmuck.

I was also asked to list things that I would have not yet tried, but think I would be good at. Well, as long as it doesn’t involve math or hand/eye coordination, I think I will be capable of doing the task. However, that doesn’t mean that I will like it or that I won’t let the inner critic loose to wreck havoc on my new found skill.

In the end, I think I put more flippant answers that are meant to deflect that I should have. Sometimes, I just didn’t have the answers.

I also had a writing assignment. I was to visualize a day in my dream life 5 years from now, and 10y, 20y, 30y. This was really hard. The biggest difficulty was the idea of children. I still, at almost 30, have no idea if I want kids. Some days I do and some days I don’t. Imagine trying to plot out your dream life not knowing if there are going to be kids. I ended up writing out two possible dream lives, kids and kids not included. What I learned from this is that I want to become a recluse and stay in my little corner of the world most of the time. I guess my introverted nature is asserting itself…hhhhmmm. I also had to name the children in my dream life (since I couldn’t call them child 1 and child 2 and still maintain a realistic quality to the assignment). You should have seen the look of sheer panic on Wes’s face when I told him that we were having two kids named Lilly and Eddie. Ha!!! I also learned that whatever my future life holds, I don’t want stress. I want a peaceful, quiet life. Occasional stress is Ok and even a challenge, but the day to day life should be quiet. Sorry to those of you waiting for the crazy girl to make a comeback and dance on a bar at a nightclub or climb trees while drinking. I think she has retired. All of her escapades will be confined to the literary page…where fact and fiction can be properly blurred.

On the domestic front, we have installed track lighting in the kitchen and lights under the counter. It’s so much nicer than the old fluorescent lights with half the bulbs burned out. See the pictures below. :)

Track lighting


Lights under the cabinets

Updates

I finished the color pencil drawing :) and it is titled, Withywindle Lillies. Go see it at: http://beyond-the-watchtower.blogspot.com/

I am counting down the days until Wes gets back. :D I am cleaning and grocery shopping like crazy this week. Tomorrow, my mother in law arrives and we are going to go shopping and spend all of Wes's money before he gets back. LOL! Then the cooking will commence...cookies, garlic bread, lasagna, potatoe salad, pulled pork BBQ...mmmmmmmm.....

On Monday, I am going to start seeing a career counselor. Hopefully this will help me stop being so indecisive and pick a direction. Or not...we'll see.

Now that spring has arrived, I have started planting flowers in my front flower bed, but there are so few and they are so small right now that it only emphasizes how empty the flower bed is. I think flower shopping will be on the agenda this week too.

Well, back to being a busy bee.

At Last!

Today I am free! It was my last day at work. Yay! Despite the rain it was actually a pretty good day. My cursing buddy was absent and so everyone was happy (no, I am not the only one that hopes he chokes on the pesticides). I got to work with the people I liked all day long. The quotes of the day include: “Is that a corn cob in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?” “I have buttered myself.” “There is butter on my underwear.” Before you ask, yes it was a corn cob in a pocket and no, it was not me. I think the best moment though, was when someone accidentally locked the boss in a greenhouse and she had to radio to be let out. We giggled over that for the last hour. Now I am free to get back to the insanity of my own life.

Wes is coming back in a couple weeks. It seems like he has been gone forever, yet also that he only left yesterday. Weird how time passes like that… I keep making mental grocery lists of the food he likes and what I am going to cook. I might even arrange the silverware drawer as a homecoming present, but that is not very likely. Maybe I will arrange it, take a picture and print a cover for the chaos that I prefer. Viable solution to the Silverware War of the Brown household? Well, amusing anyway.

I have some good writing news. An article I wrote is being published in To the Point art magazine. You can read it here: Library of Babel.

I am still working on the color pencil drawing, but I have to finish it this week if I want to enter it in the CPSA show. It should take about 8-10 hrs of work yet, but now that I am free, I have it penciled in for Monday (no pun intended). :D I will post a picture of the finished piece soon.