I do stuff. I am not the greatest stuff-doer in the world, but I work hard at whichever craft I'm engaged in at the moment, whether it's writing or shooting a portrait or building a mosaic backsplash or designing a corporate identity package. I have an MFA in creative nonfiction, an MA in publications design, and a BS in English. I do all these things for two reasons. First, I wanted to be a rock star but didn't have the balls. (I suck at guitar, yet it's one of the stuff I continue to do.) And, second, I don't have a real job. Or maybe I don't have a real job because I do all these things. I just know that doing stuff makes me as happy as I can be.
Which isn't, if you think about it, very happy. But I'm okay with it. I'm not hanging myself from the hall light fixture, except for a photo.
Some people are not composed of beauty and light and glitter and gemstones. Some of us are made with flabby skin and crooked old bones, put together with a collection of adhesives, slathered in plaster, painted with $2.50-a-bottle craft paints. Some of us are cracked and worn. But we can have a good sense of humor about it, tell ourselves we're worthwhile queens of the seconds bin, and get on doing the best we can—hunting down those things made of beauty and light and glitter and gemstones.
So I guess the stuff I do can be summarized as searching for beauty in the cracks. It's everywhere—volunteer petunias squeezing through asphalt, the sun setting behind a broken-down playground, sidewalk shadows cast by a mesh trash can, the skeleton of a frog. Beauty is everywhere you look.
Looking is my full-time job.
I write here when I see.
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