Friends, I would invite you this morning to press play on this Talking Heads concert from 1980 and then just sit back in awe.
I usually find concert footage to be super boring, but everything about this performance is amazing. Just take an hour of your life to sit here and watch it or, if you can't do that then just listen to it in the background while you eat lunch or whatever. Either way, you will be rewarded.
I'm no luddite with regards to writing. I love technology. I think computers are a gift from the gods and there is no part of me that can pretend we lost something important with the functional extinction of quills and little pots of ink, or lovely smooth fountain pens, or adorable pastel typewriters and their design-y tins of ribbon. And while I feel like it's really great and sweet when people want to scrawl hand-written missives to each other and walk to the post office to deliver them and what have you, I know that if I were forced to do such a thing A) basically no one would ever hear from me because I am extremely lazy, and B) no one would be able to read my letters anyway because I have the most atrocious handwriting in the history of ever. Seriously. I cannot even read it myself.
So, since I tend to do my only good thinking in the dead of night and then forget it all by morning if it is not immediately recorded, I know that the best way to prevent my thoughts from disappearing into the ether is by keeping my (old, weirdly heavy) laptop on the floor next to the bed. Then, cozy as I may be as I am drifting off to dreamland, if I'm hit with an idea, or a sentence, or a scene that must be noted, I'll force myself to switch on the lamp, reach down and lug the laptop up to my bed, pry it open, wait for it to wake up, pull up the giant email to myself called "notes," and jot the thought down as quickly as I possibly can in my sleepy state. Then I'll put it back, roll over, and try to sleep until the next thought comes.
It's a pretty stupid system I know, and the fact that on a good night I have to do it about five separate times makes it even sillier, but I swear it works for me better than actually writing on scraps of paper (my previous system) ever did.
But I will admit this:
Last night, long after midnight, I had some apparently inspired, book-perfecting THOUGHT. So I switched on the lamp, reached down, lugged the thing up to my bed, pried it open, waited for it to wake up... and was met with the endless beach ball spiral of death. I panicked. Frantically I tried force quit things and restart things and press all the keys on the keyboard while keeping the THOUGHT in my flighty mind, but it was no use. The device was frozen.
So I gave up, closed the laptop, put it back on the floor, switched off the lamp, lost the thought forever, and not once did it occur to me to reach over to my bedside table to grab the pen and the little notebook that live there and THAT, my friends, is pretty messed up.
Sure your color-coded bookshelves are neat, but can they do this?
That's right, it's a self-supporting igloo made out of books. Colombian artist Miler Lagos made it and it just about kills me dead. Can you imagine how comforting it must smell in there? I would pile cushions all over the bottom of it and then just curl up reading ALL DAY LONG.
You know those friends you have that just sort of excel at everything and you really want to hate them for it but they also happen to be all sweet and lovely and gracious so you are forced to end up admiring them instead?
I've ended up with enough of these people in my life to leave me in a constant state of either insecurity or inspiration, depending on the weather.
Ugh. She's so cool. A little group of us in Iowa used to have epic feasts together and she was always contributing things like pork belly simmered for two days in duck fat, and homemade pistachio and rose petal ice cream...
She even baked us the most delicious wedding cake which I still dream about eating.
Basically just go look at her website right this moment. There you can check out a bunch of other stuff like the chapbooks she's designed and the illustrations she's done and the postcards she's made etc.
Sadly you won't be able to taste the food she creates, or read her writing (Rawaan, where are your poems, girl?) or like, hang out with her over the internet, but that's probably for the best. You don't want to start feeling, I dunno, inadequate.
Rawaan, you are a Person of Awesome.
Top photos by: Eric Felipe-Barkin. Models: Bettina Huang, Kathryn Egelhofer. Cake Photo by Jagger Photography
I broke out my grandmother's old travel watercolor set this past week to make little portraits of my sister Olivia and her soon-to-be husband Tristan for their wedding invitations.
I'm not really a painter, but I had a lot of fun messing around. I think I hadn't opened the set in something like seven or eight years?
Here's the evolution of Tristan:
And here's the lovely Olivia:
There will be flowers and words and things eventually.
The reason this blog is called Paper Buttons is that a very long time ago I used to make (and sell) tiny little cut-paper collages of animals that I pressed into wearable buttons with my hand-held Badge-A-Minit button maker.
It was a silly little hobby that just happened to coincide with the launching of a brand-new site called Etsy, perhaps you've heard of it? In fact, and now I don't mean to be all I-liked-it before-it-was-cool or anything, but I ended being one of their first members. #HUMBLEBRAG
I think I sold a total of eleven buttons.
(I like to think this may have been because I had to dip out of the burgeoning Handmade Button business and move sort of abruptly to Zurich, Switzerland, but that's a story for another day.)
Anyway, MY POINT is that I happen to think that paper art is basically the highest form of art, and to that end I am going to show you some really cool stuff.
Exhibit A)
Artist Chris Gilmour makes these incredible life-size cardboard sculptures, like this Fiat and this super-detailed bicycle and this set of globes that I would just DIE to have in either my living room or my "study."
Find plenty more of his cardboard brilliance here.
Exhibit B)
Do you know about quilling? It's this crazy and time consuming process of curling hundreds of tiny strips of paper and Lisa Nilsson (unfortunately no relation) makes these slightly creepy yet ultimately badass anatomical cross sections with it, like this:
and this:
Wowie, right? Check out more of her intricate work here.
And how about Exhibit C) my ultimate favorite, basically the godmother of paper cutting: Mary Delany (that's Mrs. Delany to you.)
She was an 18th century paper rockstar who at age 72 began messing around with cut-out flowers, and then went on to create over 1,000 of these exquisitely detailed botanical collages.
I mean take a look at these and tell me they are not paintings...
THE SHADING!
Bananas, right? And this was in the 1770s, when scissors were really big and unwieldy, and Paper Source hadn't even been invented yet. The mind boggles.
My mom bought me this book last year which I highly, highly recommend. Mrs Delany was charming and sassy, and had an incredible life beyond her paper-stardom. Do yourself a favor and check her out.
And, you know, if you ever wanna buy a tiny paper animal collage in wearable button form, you know who to call.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your
knees for a hundred miles through the
desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft
animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I
will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear
pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep
trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in
the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how
lonely, the world offers itself to your
imagination, calls to you like the wild geese,
harsh and exciting– over and over announcing your
place in the family of things.
Artwork above is You Are Not Alone by the incredible April Deacon. Go see more of her work here and be thrilled.
And get yourself a Mary Oliver collection why don't you? She makes me swoon.
Step Two: Avoid a mess by cutting head and arm holes into a trash bag and making a protective tunic.
Step Three: In a shallow ceramic bowl combine one part powder bleach with one part 20 volume creme developer. Mix these with your long tinting brush from Sally Beauty Supply. Are you wearing gloves? Great!
Step Four: Paint the bleach mixture onto the bottom five inches of your hair. There's no turning back now. Open a window and let it sit for 25 minutes, or until your hair starts to feel and look like straw. Rise the bleach out. Dry your hair carefully.
Step Five: Take a picture of your trendy new ombre 'do.
Step Six: Consider just stopping at this point. Isn't this the boost you were after? Doesn't this look cute enough? Spend some time feeling OK about this while you watch the Internet.
Step Seven: Start to meditate on your lost punk youth, specifically the bright colors you wore to match your spritely teenage personality. Think about how happy and how simple it was to sit with your best friend Lauren, watching The Real World London and eating frozen lasagna while she carefully tinted your hair violet or fuchsia. Recall how when you became an adult you made a big show about renouncing your former colorful look, declaring something vague about beauty on the inside. Think of the years you spent being studiously dull looking, buying your clothes from Old Navy and letting your hair become long and brown and forgettable because what did you have to prove? Remember how wrong it felt to look into a mirror a see such a bland reflection, but how silly you thought it would be to have pink hair at your age.
Step Eight: Get over yourself.
Step Nine: Put your trash bag back on. Start painting dye onto the bleached tips of your hair, layering the light pink Manic Panic at the top with the deeper Punky Color toward the bottom, creating an ombre effect similar to what you did for your ikea lampshade. Try not to think too much about how you are carefully matching your hair to a lamp...
Step Ten: Tape the bottom end of the trash bag to your shoulders to trap the mess you've made and avoid it getting onto your nice things (like the white sofa you got from Craigslist that was originally from Pottery Barn, aka Grownup Land.)
Step Eleven: While you are waiting for the dye to set, consider whether or not you think pink hair is actually about youth. Make the argument that it is more about brightness and beauty and living the one life you have in a way that feels honest and fun.
Step Twelve: Realize that no one is arguing with you.
Step Thirteen: Rinse your hair in the sink until the water runs clear.
Step Fourteen: Begin to dry your hair with a dark towel. Get overly excited. Take a laptop picture to send to your sister while everything is still wet. Start to feel like some sort of rock star. Get suddenly embarrassed about being so happy over something silly and superficial like pink hair. Wrestle with your feelings while you put your shoes on to go walk the dog. Realize on your walk that you have a spring in your step. Take the long way, feeling the sun on your shoulders and the soft breeze in your colorful ponytail. Come back home and look in the mirror.
I am writing a book. I have been writing this book for what seems like the entire history of time.
At some point, the wonderful people at Scribner decided they would take a chance and agreed to publish said book, so long as I finished writing it within a respectable framework of time.
And so, when school was done, Jared and I left behind our normal-person teaching jobs and our easy Iowa life and moved back to my homeland of California. Here we started a new life, one comprised of Jared leaving every morning for his normal-person teaching job, and me staying behind for the abnormal-person work of writing a book.
Now, I think that there is a certain type of person who is perfectly suited to the bizarro-world that is having an enormous chunk of completely unstructured time with a deadline planted waaaay down at the end of it, but that person?
She is not me.
BUT! All that really means is that I have had to develop strategies to get my lazy, distractible, procrastination-prone self to do the work that needs to be done. And so, since I think that the best people to take advice from are the people who are naturally bad at something themselves, I present to you my time-tested tips on working from home without turning into a toothless hermit muttering into the darkness and plucking on a one-stringed fiddle.
Tip One: Shower and brush your teeth! This may seem obvious, but let me tell you, when you roll out of bed morning after morning to an empty house where there is no one to see you or be offended by your slovenliness, it can sometimes be hard to remember why such things are even important. Don't fall into the trap! For Heaven's sake clean yourself.
Tip Two is related: Dress yourself in some halfway decent clothing, maybe even dab some makeup on your face. Again, it's tempting to feel like it doesn't matter what you look like when you are all alone, but I'll tell you, working from home is a mind game. Looking like someone who might be seen in public is a trick that will give you a psychological edge. Besides, the UPS man will see you. He sees all.
Do you see where I'm going with this? Working from home is just like having an actual job. It's just that you are the only one around to enforce the actualness of it. It's sort of like how you have to set aside tax money from your advance because there's no one to withhold it from your paycheck and you do that, right?
<cough> moving on...
Tip Three: Designate a fixed portion of your day to the work at hand and then stick to it. Start your work when it is supposed to start, and, perhaps even more importantly, END IT when it is supposed to end. This is actually the most crucial point of this whole lecture besides brushing your teeth. Before I figured this out my entire life was lived in a fog of guilt-induced anxiety. I couldn't take pleasure in anything I did because deep down a voice would be scolding, you could be writing right now! Nothing is worse for your creativity than that stupid voice.
So, figure out what time of day you are best at what you do and then stick to that time. It will probably not be eight hours. It must be manageable and realistic if it is to work. The important part is you are not allowed to watchpuppyvideos during that time. You are not allowed to read blogs during that time. But when the time is up, you are to wrap up what you are doing, and then you are to leave work.
"Leaving work" is such a crucial point that it deserves its own tip. Tip Four: Dedicate a section of your house to your work that is not related to the other things that go on in your house. Best case is you have an office with a door that closes, but I realize that may be a bit of a luxury. So. If you must work on the couch in the living room, try to do your TV and puppy video watching in a chair. If you must work in your bedroom, set up a little desk for yourself,don't work in your bed. Boundaries can be very tricky to manage when you work from home, but they must be maintained if you are to hold on to your sanity and not fall into believing that every minute of your day is about your job.
work-free zone
Tip Five. Keep your house tidy, and spend some time getting it set up to be as pleasing as it can be. You are going to be spending a LOT of time in this space. Do whatever you can do to make it a place of calm and not chaos. The chaos will get you down and the UPS man will judge you.
Then you can walk him. This is a very very good thing to do. Moving your stiff, chair-addled body, feeling the sun on your pale face, looking at things that are three-dimentional and not part of your computer screen, these are the things that will keep you from going off the deep end. You can also talk to your dog, if you feel like it's strange that hours pass every day without the sound of any human voice.
Which brings me to Tip Seven:During the parts of your day that are not your working hours, try to have some form of human interaction. This could mean walking to a coffee shop or going grocery shopping etc, but it could also mean simply opening up your gchat window and making jokes with your sister Olivia, who has a real job in a real office, or with your friend Matt, who is also a crazy home-based writer like yourself. Just don't let these chats bleed into your working hours like I sometimes do. Be vigilant!
Tip Eight.Don't allow your online Scrabble accomplishments to stand in for actual accomplishments.
Am I the only one who does this? Don't do this.
Tip Nine. The weekends are weekends and should be treated as such. Is it Saturday? Get out of your house! Go! What are you doing sitting here looking at a computer screen? You have all week to do that. Go be around the actual people! Go on a hike! See some music! Go to a nerdy party! Whatever. Just don't let me catch you here.
Tip Ten. When the walls are closing in on you and the words you are writing are all meaningless drivel, and your dog looks like he has lost all respect for you, and you feel like throwing it all away, do two things. First, lie on the floor of your living room for ten minutes with your eyes closed and play this song.
Then pick yourself up off the floor and read this.
Then get back to work, you old so and so.
You can do this!
(top photo by Shelby Duncan) P.S. Below are my four favorite books about the writing process. I cannot recommend them highly enough. I've also heard great things about Writing Down the Bones, but have yet to check it out.
How rad is that? A cozy-looking stone cottage all old and snowy and probably filled with tons of glowing hearths etc, and then that big glass box (that's presumably also warm somehow) so you can sit and marvel at all the snow-beauty and never actually have to go out into it! If I were forced someday to take a romantic winter vacation in snowland, I would insist upon this feature. Win win win.
