Play by Play

make-up work ::284:: high on life

(if I can, I'm going to make up for every missed day in this 365 project. yikes!)

Does anybody else remember teachers and parents acting concerned and disapproving about children sniffing Mr. Sketch markers? I remember feeling like we had to sneak a sniff during religious ed classes. Were they worried that it would damage our brains? Did it damage us? If it was toxic, why did they smell like fruity flavors? Was it all part of some conspiracy to destroy the brain cells of American children? Or were the grown-ups all so freaked out by Nancy Reagan and the War on Drugs, and convinced that we would get high off of anything we could get our hands on? Did anybody ever actually get high off these things, or did they just get a blue nose?

Ok, those are all rhetorical questions. This one is not: what is/was your favorite smelly marker?

::290:: in soviet russia, marbles lose you

 

::289:: over the edge

Today was a stay-home-and-organize kind of day. Our studio received the most attention - a nearly full overhaul of the shelves, with lots of recycling and resorting and redistributing items to their rightful places. 

288: trinity

Today I attended my dear college roommate's ordination into the Anglican priesthood. This fall, she and I have known each other exactly half of our lives. The historic church where she was ordained actually reinded me somewhat of the colonial Episcopal church near our alma mater. 

I've never attended an ordination before, nor even personally known anybody who became a priest or minister. What struck me first about the service was how like a wedding it was. At about the same time, I considered how unique an experience it is to witness this important life event, and how it gave me insight into the life of religious clergy in general and my friend in particular. 

I also experienced a strange convergence of roles. I was present as a longtime friend of the ordinand, and somebody who came from a similar religious background as she had. I had also volunteered to photograph the service and was engaged in attempting to do justice by that role without causing any disturbance. And I was present as an atheist, a skeptic, a position which I had arrived at both as organically and as thoughtfully, I imagine, as my friend had arrived at her station. 

These three faces of myself swirled together oddly and interestingly, and not always comfortably, as I had to make decisions about such issues as whether to recite the Nicean Creed, to sing along with the hymns, to recite other prayers, to receive communion (no, yes, yes, cross arms for blessing instead). I came out of the service and the afternoon that followed feeling closer to my friend, refreshed and reconnected, and with a head full of thoughts about holiness (and a program with notes scribbled on the back, from the Bishop's sermon) and what it might mean to the godless among us. 

::287:: when he woke

Swiper finds himself in a chrome ward. 

::286:: fractured

::285:: birthday buddies

I have some issues with the fact that my birthday lands on Columbus Day.

First, I loathe "Columbus Day, Observed". If we're going to get a day off for the day, we should either have a) my actual birthday off work/school/whatever, or b) "Jess' Birthday, Observed" as well as my actual birthday. 

Second, and more importantly, I think it's ridiculous that in 2011 we continue to celebrate Columbus. He didn't "discover" America, he ushered in 500+ years of slavery, genocide, and cultural appropration (still going on, by the way). In the Bahamas on 12 October 1492, he wrote in his journal, "They [the Taino people] ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them. I think they can very easily be made Christians, for they seem to have no religion. If it pleases our Lord, I will take six of them to Your Highnesses when I depart, in order that they may learn our language...I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased."

Nice guy, that Columbus. Let's give him a day and teach school children to consider him a hero. 

I was pleasantly surprised to find out today that I have a much better birthday buddy: Art Clokey, creator of Gumby and his fellow claymation characters. I can dig it. 

Happy birthday, Art and Gumby! 

280: who stole the cookie from the cookie jar...

279: the brains

We're in an ongoing Playmobil lovefest here. It started with a pirate set, which then turned into two pirate sets, which then turned into two pirate sets and a zombie-pirate set (yes, the pirates have sub-specialties), which revived an old, unloved knights set. Eventually they were joined by a penuins-at-the-zoo exhibit and a mother and child at the beach. And Lincoln logs, and Fisher Price Little People, and a few other random items. 

One day, the zombie pirates launched an attack on the Little People castle, which was ruled by a Playmobil princess and her attendants. She and the others valiantly fought off the invaders, but were eventually overcome. The next day, when I entered the boys' room, I found hosts of Playmobil people laying on the floor, scalped. The zombies had won. 

I still hope for a cure for the poor toys, dispossessed of their pia mater. Are they doomed to walk the earth as the living dead? Can they ever recover? 

278:: come out, come out, wherever you are...

We (Swiper and I) have been on a long sabbatical. The fun of daily shenanigans had faded, and the whole point of this project was to have fun, so I Iet the camera sit on my dresser for a month after my beach trip, and then only picked it up a couple of times (none of them Swiper-focused) during the next month or so. 

But lately I'm finding myself again, and as so often happens, books are a part of that rediscovery. I have always found myself in books and have many cherished memories that involve library stacks. A public library in a California mountain town, where I found a fifth Borrowers book. A school library in that same town, where I discovered Ellen Raskin and Alfred Hitchcock. Another school library in Albemarle County where I tore through all the Ray Bradbury they had on the shelves and where I first met with Bartlett's quotations. College stacks where I was surprised to find an old edition that had originally been gifted to the woman for whom my dorm was named, and where I also recontructed a poem with the help of a concordium, based on one line seen in a book shop. 

So many of my memories include the books I was reading at those key moments in my life. Right now I have been reading the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, and it includes elements that bring to mind so many of the classic works of science fiction and fantasy that I have read, each of which calls to mind a specific time of my life. I wonder, someday will I look back at this time, and remember these books, and the events in my life that happened at the same time? 

I don't know what it is about these books that has brought me back to Swiper and the feeling he evokes in me, or if it will last. 

What role have books played in your life?