self-portrait of a non-catholic inside the cathedral shirine of the virgin of guadalupe

my religious wonderings are so far away from that beginning pre-pubescent, sunday school and sabbath school and prayer circle and then pubescent drum circle, nature circle, buddhist meditation, what-the-hey-ever wonder. i think we lose that "wonder" with age because at some point most of us have to settle on something and move on with our lives. me, now, i realize we/i should/have all trust/ed our/my gut.

though i suppose that's always changing too. might i add: go with the flow, don't worry be happy, 'cause everylittlething is gonna be alright, peace and love and different drummers.

good morning penn. happy birthday.

two years ago, at this time, i was asleep with a brand new baby boy attached to my tit. i had an empty womb and a worn out body and i was beyond tired. none of the latter seemed to matter.

when i found out, at three months, that i was pregnant, i was completely unprepared. in my head the thought of motherhood wiped my life away like the testing of a brand new wipe-off board.

i knew, of course, that there would be love, and unconditional buckets of it. but i thought, "well that's it then. it's me and a kid."

i didn't realize just how fulfilling that kid would be. i mean, i did, but knowledge and experience are so far apart in the child bearing world. i didn't realize that i wouldn't really want anything else. i didn't realize how "life" would not be erased, rather it's meaning multiplied and it's feeling richer.

my baby, he turned two today. and among a small gathering of family we bestowed upon him his first bike and tokens of our fanatical adoration.

at two penn is already a seasoned traveler heading everywhere from new york to canada to memphis. he's gone by planes, trains, buses, subways, and construction equipment.

bragging alert: i know i've already told you this before, but damnit, i'm going to keep telling it until i stop being impressed.

he can count to 10 and he knows his abc's and colors. he knows about hydrolics and how things work and how to put them together. he attempts to mimick my drawings of squares and triangles and circles. he knows some shapes. he knows "please," and "thankyou," and "excuse me, " and "sorry," and "crazy," all said at appropriate times. he can count to ten in spanish pretty well. he's beautifully empathetic. he's sincere. he's silly. he can say silly things like "peace out!" "word to the mutha," "hot mama," and "iii'mmmmmm twooooo!"

he's amazing. he's absolutley fucking amazing and adorable and i can't believe that two years ago i dedicated 13 hours of labor to pushing him into the world and now he tells me every morning, "hi mama. good morning. i love you."

i love you penn. i love you more than everything and i hope you had a good second birthday. i'm sorry i didn't invite all the people over. i'm sorry that store was out of balloons. i'm sorry i don't have one single picture of all of us on the big t-w-o. i''m sorry your feet are one inch too short to really push those bike pedals down. but i promise, as long as you're still sleeping in my bed, i'll always return your morning greeting with, "hi penn. good morning. i love you too." and because you're two right now and you're my cuddly dumpling, that makes us both happy.

note: cat told you happy birthday too!

pressure

it's hard to maintain a proper thoughtful blog when there's so many thoughts roaming the brainmap. two sides to every coin, i s'pose. yay for thinking. yay for thinking beyond babies. yay for finally really putting some artistic ideas into focus and creation in preparation for febuary. and boo that this is a super public blog which sort of stifles alot of opinions "just-in-case" of "who-knows-what."

you never know. you really never do know. and not everyone is as insensitive as i am. meaning some of you might find yourself on the other side of one of my ideas and i'm not here to be misinterpreted on the larger things. also, i don't really, for 100 percent sure, know what i know to be typing it up here for all the world to hold me accountable for.

backtrack. in re-reading what i just wrote, i feel like it sounds defensive. as if i were defending myself against something. which i'm not. intentionally. anyway.

i think what i'm trying to say, is that i have a lot to say, and here is as good a place as any, but i've been sort of biding my time due to business and laziness and just posting pictures here and there and just realized that i've forgotten how to blog without visuals.

the art conspiracy

artconspiracy.org

i'll be there. basking in the glow of amazing artists, music, good will and good causes. you should be too.

baby "a."

i get invited to capture the most intimate and important events in people's lives.

like catholic baptismals.
which i had never seen before.
when i saw baby "a." in her beautiful gown i was sort if transported fifty years back to some faded old picture. the mother thought i had color-corrected the photos to have that browny feel.

nope. they just magically turned out that way. this is yet another family i've fallen in love with.

abstract memphis, 2005

it's a 7 hour drive from dallas to memphis. it's more when you add in babies and rain. which means i had a lot of quality time to spend with my camera, looking at myself in that little mirror on the sun visor thing.

the interior of a 1997 honda civic, black, leaves something to be imagined, literally, and well, we all know how much i love me a real good blur.

sometimes the blur is accidental, sometimes it's purposeful , but this may be the first time where i intentionally put subjects way out of focus.

good way to pass the time, at least.

the drive added another one of these to the window shortly after taking the pic.



thank you, benji's family, for the wonderful visit and food and hospitality. this post would be more interesting if the baby wasn't screaming his ass off right now.

she's never failed to travel all the way to see me at least once a year and for that, among many other reasons, i love her

"i just called to remind you i'm going to be at your house tomorrow through the weekend."

jonelle. she knows me so well. everyone up for things like beer and scrabble and burritos and girls in their pajamas till three in the p.m. and jammin' bagg on saturday, give a holla.

to michigan; in 23 pictures or less

hullabaloo: when you don't get back home often enough and you have to cram in a years worth of personal catch-up and bonding into a week.

meet my family. part of them, anyway. above is my mother's sister and her hubby and chillin's. it's funny, since i see my cousins only once a year, if that because they previously lived in another state, there's always this massive gap in where they actually are in their life and where they are in my head. i may always think of the youngest as "baby mark." i may always remember the boys as hellion toddlers running and screaming. constantly.

it's still sort of the same, only the heated discussions don't revolve around discipline or jumping on the beds. i think they revolve around politics. and you can see how much my cousin who's already visited iraq and new orleans due to his military status, just loves this sort of talk.

i loved it 'cause it's not something i get to experience every day. my family sitting around the kitchen table arguing about whether we went to the moon or not.

because of penn's ability to say it and call it out constantly, even now, my mother is officially "grandma jeanne." magical toaster of waffles and cracker of nuts and long walks through the countryside.
beloved woman who owns a heavy equipment like bobcats!
and john deers!
and big trucks! and flupa's! oh my.

meet my lil' brother who just turned sixteen. (happy birthday, bro!)

because i'm not there all the time i got to do what no other human is allowed to do. (read: i forced him) i got to take his picture.

i didn't really get to hear him play guitar, but i got to play two of his four. his four guitars.

penn enoyed going through his uncle ty's stuff. ty's face remained bewildered as i let his nephew pilfer his belongings. me thinks he doesn't get around babies much. yeah, i used to hate my kind too.
and for the first time i got to have real conversations with my brother and discovered we have a lot in common. we look alike, play guitar, dig photography and are on the same page concerning my sisters ex-boyfriend. ha!

meet my little sister. not so little anymore. gone are the days of us drawing treasure hunts and coloring and yay are the days of her graduating high school, going to college and well, all that other fun stuff she probably doesn't want on the internet.

my sis is the coolest. really really really booksmart, and i used to wonder if her common sense would ever catch up with that. (remember when you thought grandpa put a straw through his ears?) and really really fun. and really really good at singing weezer really loud. and exceptionally good at making you laugh if she has diarreah.

we took penn to the park and there was this thing. this slidey-from-one-end-to-the-other thing. so of course lise had to try it and apparently she needed a push.

next thing you know, there goes my mother.
so yes, of course, i had to go too. and then i'm sure somebody cracked jokes about those crazy asians with the swinging and the cameras.

we had fun. that high priced ticket scare and settling for a cheap ticket from hotwire which took us from dallas to detroit and then to chicago and then on a long "crazy" (penn's actual words) ride from chicago to my mom's, and then the noon bus ride back that stopped at every single hotel from there to chicago and then the wait at o'hare airport and then flying to minneapolis, then getting back to dallas at 9:30-----yes, oh yes that's 9 and a half hours of travel time with a baby---well, it was all worth it.

penn thinks every cute slant-eyed girl he meets is his aunt lise. he thinks that big thing in the motor of eighteen-wheelers is a log-splitter like his grandma jeanne's. he thinks every white cat is flupa. (pronounced, "floo-pa!") and he doesn't give a shit how cold outside it is, he hates coats.
he drove us all up the wall with all that baby stuff.

and cast that baby spell that makes us all fall in love with him even more. 'cause he's silly. he's a silly baby.

i know. i should have just uploaded them to flickr and sent you there 'cause there's a gazillion more pictures that i'll never get around to showing you. but i'll never get around to getting them on flickr either.
this is cliff. cliff is lise's friend. and he has absolutley nothing to do with this story. but i really liked this picture.

stop-the-calendar

surely i'm far too small to have so many deadlines weighing down on me. surely.

relocating from hip-urban-town into urban-neighborhood has increased our social life by leaps and bounds. my since-i-went-and-had-me-a-baby-dream (i-love-dashes) has come to fruition; awesome neighbors with kids who i get to see every day and a house that is almost always clean and spontaneously errupts into movie-pizza-popcorn-toddler parties.

this, compounded with butt loads of work (yes, business is better than i could have ever expected, ever) has kept me away from all that is joyful media, including blogging, both reading and writing.

my tired old computer is so bogged down trying to upload the universe that i get small relaxing breaks to smoke, read "the lovely bones" by alice sebold, or attempt to learn more spanish.

days are filled with sweeping and scouring the sandbox turned litterbox off of the steps because penn apparently didn't mind the stench of the shit he delivered to the door. thank you, catfish.


and then figuring out how to cover the damned sandbox turned litterbox so that i can then clean and return it to it's rightful state. or at least not have to smell piss in that one part of the yard.

i've just gotten back from michigan and we're leaving tomorrow (?) for memphis. i am so not looking foward to 7 hours trapped in the car with a two year old. let it be said here: i warned you, benji. and to benji's family, forwarding apologies for the crabby bitch who will step out of the 7 hour moving two year old cage, otherwise known as my poor old car.

then, of course, will be more company, more meetings, another wedding, penn's birthday, thanksgiving, my birthday, christmas, benji's birthday and then sometime in febuary i'll be able to sleep.

and i'm going to go 'head and jinx this one right now 'cause 13 hours of labor gives good reason to brag. my son? currently a perfect gentleman who can count to 10 in english, and almost, in spanish.

and i'm wondering about it, really, 'cause my son and i are not known for our good timing.

moments of stop

these are random non-people pictures i took in michigan. it's sort of in the vein of something i want to do in a series, though more intentional shots.
because what art is to me are the everyday moments of things i see.
it's not necassarily about huge religious-like epiphany's or demanding philosophies or commercial appeal. it's the moments of stop.
it's how everything is beautiful and meaningful and purposeful and connected . . . .
art is you and me and love and hate and big and small and bugs and dirt and trash and new and old and whatever you want it to be. art is everything i see and everything i don't see and most importantly, how i see it.