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Drank

Continue reading Drink

(preface: I work Monday through Friday, starting at 8AM, at the same company as my sister, Angela)

I just woke up a few minutes ago. Laying in bed, I looked at my watch and saw that it was 9:40AM. The first thought that crossed my mind was “Oh no, Angela’s overslept again!”

She’s been working two jobs lately, you see, and actually just put in two weeks notice at her second job because its late hours have resulted in her oversleeping several times by several hours. If I arrive at work and see that she’s not there, I call her to try to wake her. Sometimes it works and she makes it in, sometimes she falls back asleep. On the rare occassion I oversleep, Angela does the same for me.

The next thing that I thought, and it kept running through my head, over and over, was “no one called me?” “No one called me?” “No one called me?”

This only lasted a few seconds, but the feeling was intense and lonely. I know my supervisors have my phone number. I thought about the other people I work with who I’ve given my number to. I thought about how it feels that I don’t actually expect any of them (besides my sister) to either notice when I’m there and when I’m gone, let alone to care enough to call. I thought about trying to make up my hours, since we’re so far behind in my department that even though my supervisors don’t have approval to give anyone overtime, we really need all 40 hours every week from everyone just to keep from falling further behind.

And when I tried to figure out what day or days I could make up the two or three hours I’d be missing, my brain worked out what day it is, Saturday, and that I’m not missing work at all, and the rest just melted away. No one called because I wasn’t late for anything. I don’t have any friends at work because, generally, I consider them too shallow/sheltered and/or they consider me crazy. Which is just how things go for me, and have for years.

But at least I wasn’t late for work.

I still miss Sara…

…how silly is that? I haven’t seen her since she left the country five years ago. I haven’t held her in my arms and kissed her in over five years. I tell her I love her every time we talk or chat online, but that’s not very often any more. I still ask her to marry me, though I’m not sure if I really expect her answer to ever change back to yes. I still carry her photo around in my wallet… the only photos I’ve ever had in my wallet besides the ones on my IDs… I know, I swore I would take them out, that I was over her, but I didn’t, I never took them out, I just… I stopped looking at them as much for a while. I haven’t seen her in years, I may not see her again, but still I miss her.

She doesn’t stand in the way of things, exactly. I fell in love with a new person last year … that didn’t work out so hot, but … I know I can love again, love new people, even as I continue to love Sara. I continue to date, to pursue relationships. There are stories that exaggerate the truth, but I was never very good at the whole ‘relationships’ thing, and I’m still not.

And I know, I know, after the years with thousands of miles between us and years with dozens of miles and misunderstandings before that, I couldn’t possibly “know” her. That’s what gets said. That I love the idea of who I want her to be, not who she is. That I missed so much of her life I don’t even know who she is any more. That I knew her so young that I probably never did.

But I do. I know her. I always have, I always will. Better, so much better, than I know most everyone else I meet. And it isn’t about little details, little facts about this or that, what color her shoelaces are and how she eats noodles, but the deep details; her true character is what I’ve always recognized.

Continue reading I still miss her…

Artist’s Statement: How I made ‘screw Moo’:

“‘screw Moo’ is a side effect of the experimental process I passed through on my way to creating this piece, which involved a great many more tiny screws filling a much more complex array of tiny holes than were needed to recreate one of my earlier pieces in this new medium. While working in Photoshop layers above photographs of the original ‘Moo’ I decided that using two slightly more differentiated typefaces would help clarify the uppercase and lowercase versions of the word when translated to this new and relatively low-resolution format. I affixed to a piece of scrap plywood a printout representing the desired configuration of screws and, using a wooden stop to control the depth of the bit, carefully drilled the several hundred holes right through the printout and into the wood. After a couple of passes at the table saw to ensure the wood was square, plus some sanding to smooth the rough cuts and prepare it, I spraypainted the front and edges of the board black. Counting out the exact number of screws required for the lowercase letters and adding a dozen more, I punched them through a couple of sheets of paper so I could get all the heads facing the same way and I spraypainted them red. When everything was dry, I went to the delicate work of hand-driving the red screws into the board without scratching their paint, then filled in the remainder of the holes with unpainted screws. Most of the creative work on this one, as with much of my work, turned out to be in the planning stages; selecting a piece of wood to use, choosing typefaces and then calculating the scale of and generating the map for drilling the holes — the rest was just carrying out the plan.”

(See also my original blog post about making this painting.)