All up in your grill

Morning, kids. Summer has arrived, which means we grill almost every night on my front porch and drink cheap wine and tell a lot of jokes. It's not a bad life. 

A few things have happened worth noting: 

I had a little revolution on the job front which came to naught but had me thinking a lot about what I want to do and how I want to do it. The best news of all is that even if I keep doing what I've been doing, I actually stand to make a reasonable living this semester. Progress towards financial solvency, check. 

I'm going to be included in a group show at a very good gallery this fall, which could lead to some exciting developments. I'll keep you posted. 

My good friend Erin is moving to Austin (can't refer to her as Baltimore Erin anymore on my blog, drat) and when people move away, what I like to do is buy their stuff. Last year I bought a bag of acrylic paints from Jarrett and Courtney when they moved to Boston ($75 opened a NEW WORLD of untried colors) and this year, what I bought from Erin, wait for it, wait... I bought......................................

A SEWING MACHINE. (*fanfare*)

Here he is. Isn't he lovely? Already I have satisfied a lifelong desire to make my own curtains. My studio gets a lot of strong, direct light in the morning and I am worried about fading of paintings and paper things and whatnot, so, curtains for you, studio! I also made a second set of curtains that divides the space in half-- Nick uses the front half of the space intermittently as a woodshop-- but the big news is that our own dear Mackenzie is going to be sharing the space with us as of a few weeks from now. I am very excited about this development as I think it will make the place more festive, but I also feel it is important that we have our privacy from each other within the space. Therefore, curtains for you, studio!

I also made flour sack pillows, and I have a lot of ideas about other things I can make with a sewing machine. Just wait. I'm gonna get all crafty on you all. 

I went to NYC on Wednesday to see Chriso in his New York debut. The show was very funny, bawdy and sweet, and he was very good in it. He has clearly learned a lot at Yale and I am super proud of him. We had some delicious enchiladas at Lupe's afterwards and then walked up to Chikalicious for a red velvet cupcake. The best cupcake anywhere, ever. We had a very lovely visit. 

Too much cheap wine last night means brain cloud today so I'm going to sign off there. Taking it easy today with laundry and housecleaning, perhaps some studio later in the afternoon. Hope you all are having a nice weekend, too.

Ta ta for now. 

Foolish mortal

Looking back over blog entries from this semester, I see that since the beginning of it, I have believed on an ongoing basis that I was only about a week to ten days out from cutting the workload down to something that would be manageable. I see now that I was wrong; tomorrow is really and truly the last day of school, and I still spent almost the whole day today grading and dealing with school stuff. But now (I think, I do truly believe) I am very nearly actually (dare I say?) finished. I have a day of crits tomorrow, and then I turn in my grades, and that's it. 

It just cannot come soon enough. 

Had some tremendous fun this weekend at (gasp!) a baseball game. Photos forthcoming, including Super-Amazing Professional Baseball Zoom Trick. 

Ta ta for now. 

Loose ends

Hi, kids. I've been feeling a little sorry that my blogging has been so brief and so infrequent these last few months. Now that we're rolling across the semester's finish line, I'm hoping there will be more time and mental space to update you all about my doings and thinkings, as this thing here functions as a meditative tool for me as well. 

(Sidenote: I have started keeping a studio journal that is just about what I'm thinking in studio-- it's a means of picking up where I left off since I often have several days in a row away from studio nowadays. I tell myself it's not another offshoot of my narcissism but a useful tool. And so far it actually is. Wait till you see the giant head painting. It's coming right along.)

A few things from earlier posts that never got wrapped up: 

1. The professor job search is over for this year. I sent out 30 applications and got one interview, in MICHIGAN. Yuck. I mean, no offense to Michigan, but as far as I can tell, that's a cold and bleak winter landscape, and the economy there is slowly imploding, so, not a great time to move there. Anyway it's a moot point because they hired someone else. 

Word on the street is that everyplace has a hiring freeze, so there's nothing out there and I shouldn't take it personally. I'm not taking it personally. I am well qualified for these jobs and I think my applications were strong. There's a lot of competition right now, and most people seem to take three years after grad school to get out of the adjunct racket and be made into honest women or men by some lucky institution. 

The thing is, though, I am really questioning my commitment to teaching right now. There are things I really like about it, and then there are other things that are demoralizing and suck away from me energy that I would prefer to use in the studio. I didn't set out to be a teacher, I set out to be a painter. 

I find myself in a position now where I like my supplementary job, working for Suzi the Collector Lady, much more than I like teaching. She is pleasant to be around, the work is interesting but not difficult, she pays me well, and the work environment is actually quite lovely. Last week I got to work for a day at their second home on the Chesapeake. Here is a picture of the view: 

I bet that beats the view from your office. 

(I really enjoyed picturing my little grandpa on a sailboat on the Chesapeake all that day. He loved sailing and always wanted to live there. He and my grandma moved to Charlotte to help raise my brother and me when my parents split up, with the idea that they would stay a few years and then move up there. They stayed more than twenty-five years, the rest of their lives.)

Anyway, as an experiment, I am taking a step away from teaching right now. Well, as of next week, when I finish final crits and the semester is really over. I am not teaching during the summer, and I am expanding my hours with Suzi. We'll see in the fall whether I want to go back. 

However, I do plan to keep my class at MICA for as long as they'll have me. That class is much more enjoyable than my CC classes, and also keeps my hand in teaching so that if I want to try again for professor jobs in a little while, it's not out of the question.

Regardless of what I'm doing, my main goal is to make enough money to survive working part time, and to spend the rest of the time in the studio. I feel like this year has been a good year for experimenting and trying different media, and now there is a new body of work about to come through. It's an exciting time, I just need to show up, and show up every day. 

2. That lady I mentioned back in November did finally buy my painting, after stringing me along for four months. She turned out to be very nice, and I'm glad she wasn't just being a sadist.

3. I did have strep, that time the strep test came back negative. Turns out there are lots of kinds of strep, and a strep test only tests for strep A. In case you were wondering.

This has been kind of a rotten semester. I am so glad it's over. 

And now, my favorite time of year, a time when all the trees of Baltimore lose their fucking minds and riot in the streets. A time when my normally not-especially-girly constitution becomes obsessed with flowering trees and the display of breasts and legs. Springtime!

Springtime photo essay GO: 

Nick and I went down to DC to check out the cherry blossom festival, and it was nice but it was COLD that day, and windy, and we were about three days past the peak of the blooms so they were starting to fall apart. So we took these pictures: 

OH YEAH and Alana came to visit with her kids and husband Joey, and we had a nice time but I didn't take any pictures. She took some, though, which are posted over at her blog. 

And that brings us pretty much up to date. Moving into summer, I hope to have more grand adventures and to keep you posted as they unfold. 

Wishing grand adventures to you, as well.

Not so worrisome

Mack says I need a new post because the last one was depressing, and it's been a while. I have to be brief, because there's still a slog of work to get through, and at this moment right now, this very instant I am preparing to walk over to Nick's in the rain. It's my evening constitutional. 

So-- briefly--- I will say that we are in the final week of the semester, which means EVERYTHING'S GOING TO BE OK. 

And I promise a photo update quite soon, which will contain images of my recent travels. Like this, for example:

 

 Till then, campers.

Worrisome.

In a conversation with my brother just now about my professional life and how little adjunct professors are paid, I became short of breath. I think the stress of these last two years of total and complete exploitation is starting to get to me. I went to the doctor on Friday for a checkup and my blood pressure was a little high. Since I quit smoking three months ago and have been exercising fairly regularly, and I eat pretty well, this should not be the case. 

I need a different way to do things. There's no one to complain to about adjunct exploitation because everyone does it. It's a way for educational institutions to keep their faculties small and their costs down while still staffing all the classes they need to run. But it's on the backs of the young professors who are just trying to get some teaching experience and find a way to support themselves. We are very well educated; we know a lot of things; some of us are very good teachers, and all of us are working our asses off. How is it possible that we are teaching a full time load and making less than $20K a year? At the college level? Some of my friends teach more than a full time load-- they teach five or six classes a semester when the standard load for a full-time professor is three-- and meanwhile they are all at different colleges, so they drive all over town, none of us has an office, and there is no sense of institutional support or community involvement. It sucks, you guys. When I was in college, I had no idea that this was going on. It is shameful, in my opinion. 

I am going to have to come up with an alternate plan. 

In good news, I spent the day in the studio yesterday and made some exciting progress on the giant head painting. Pictures to follow when I have some. 

Happy easter, kids. 

In an Amish Paradise

I have just spent the better part of half an hour trying to figure out why in God's name the spacing on the text and the photos in this post is not working out. I am hating Blogger not a little because of it. I am giving up for now, so please forgive the bizarre spacing at the end of this post.  

*****

Firstly, I'd like to say that I took most of these pictures from a moving car. Props, please. 

Secondly, I'd like to say that I am fond of rural Pennsylvania. I went from being fascinated by the Amish to being bored by them in a matter of hours, but there is something about being near a community of people that is utterly batshit crazy that is good for the soul. Plus everything was super cheap, the farm landscape appealed to me aesthetically,  and the food was terrific. (Seriously the best soft pretzel I have ever had in my entire life. And sausages, sauerkraut. Chicken pot pie. None of it kidding around.)

A landscape:

A dude plowing a field with, that's right, a team of mules.

A dude plowing his field with a hoe.

Nick and me making Amish faces. (We are not very good people.)

A very picturesque farm.

We each got coffee tables for $10.

We went to an auction. The Amish parked their buggies all together.

A covered bridge.

Here's what it looked like inside the auction. Those quilts were not kidding around either.
Outside the men were selling each other farm tools and horse tack and the like. It was really very interesting.

And that's all for now. Soon: even more recent events than these!

WHY am I not Japanese???