The Batty Old Lady I Shall Become

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, With a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me, And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves, And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter”  – Jenny Joseph

I’ve known for some time that I would likely have to deal with getting old.  (You know, once I realized I was a superhero and thus unable to be killed.  *pause to listen for ominous horror movie music indicating imminent flamboyant death scene…*)  Most of the time I am able to achieve complete denial about it, though, through an elaborate combination of avoiding mirrors, heavy drinking and dating men younger than myself.

But the other day, I got sick of looking at my profile picture on Facebook and changed it to the most recent one I had of myself, one that was taken just a month or so ago.  It was a test for myself, a part of an attempt to include my own face in my appreciation of ‘good’ wrinkles on other people.

Don’t get me wrong.  I know I have wrinkles.  I mean, thanks to Olay beauty products (yes, I will plug them, because I just love them that much), I’m better off than many who have spent as much time in the sun.  But they are there.  But most of them are small and easily ignored by one as easily deluded as myself.

But check it out:

Do you see it?  Right there between my eyes?  The ginormous furrow??

So, I am getting older.   Which is a bit of a surprise, because in my teens I always assumed I would die young – probably of something sordid like a drug overdose.  In my twenties, I  figured I would be murdered by a jealous boyfriend or something.  For most of my thirties, I’ve maintained this line of thinking, but figured it would something adrenaline-related, like speeding in a car or a parachute malfunction.

Well, I’ve begun laying down Plan B.

I am not going to age gracefully, I’m telling you right now.  No way.

But it’s a fairly safe bet that if I don’t start thinking about this, I run a high risk of dying alone and having my face eaten by cats.  So my best friend and I came up with a plan.  I have to admit, I was somewhat snotty to my friend about this at first, because she has kids, which I presumed would leave one immune to the cat-face-eating fate.  However, she is pretty sure her particular kids would be more than happy to leave her to this fate as well, so we have come up with a solution that makes us both happy.

However we have to make it happen, we are going to end up in the same nursing home/retirement village/mental institute.  (We can’t really figure out why some old people cause such a stink about this.  We can’t think of anything much better than having someone else cook and clean for us.)  We will proceed to hang out on the patio in the sun all day, every day, drinking what people will assume is coffee (it’s not – it’s Kahlua).  She will knit (what look like afghans and mittens but are actually beer bottle cosies and fingerless gloves).  I will work on ‘crafts’ (custom shadowboxes filled with slightly macabre displays created from items left over from various medical procedures).  We will commandeer the community rooms for weekend mosh parties.  We will feign early dementia in order to get away with telling people exactly what we think of them.

It’s gonna be awesome.

Artistic Self-Examination

I hate it when people who have known me all of five seconds see through all my crap and force me to look myself in the eye.

Have you ever noticed that when you meet someone new, you start to see yourself through their eyes a little bit?  Sometimes it’s good (I am a fearless, creative, entertaining chick), sometimes it’s bad (I am an insane, fat and ugly weirdo with a too-loud laugh).  But it’s usually enlightening either way. 

So my new friend and I were discussing the arts, and I wound up making the big confession… 

(whispered with shame)

“…art isn’t…really…my passion…” 

That’s right.  I said it. 

Yes, people pay me for it.  Yes, people seem to like what I paint and draw.  Yes, I have a stupid website set up to show it off. (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Drea-M-Artwork-of-Andrea-MacMillan/10522416690 - I may be confused, but I’m not above shameless self-promotion.)

But it’s not my passion. 

My passions are ~ Writing.  Reading.  Looking at other people’s art.  Jumping out of airplanes.  Falling in love.  Quantum physics gets me kind of excited. 

But making art?  Well, lately, I’ve been putting off projects.  I’ve been snarling at my paints.  I’ve been acting like a snotty teenager with issues against authority.   Art had become a party trick.  Being passably talented at it began to feel like a burden.  I felt like Frodo Fucking Baggins. 

So what was my new friend’s response to this confession?  What did this new friend say that has been niggling at me for two weeks? 

When I said art wasn’t my passion, he said…(I have to pause here because it still kind of stuns me a little bit, even after this long – and it takes a lot to render me stunned)…

He said, with a burst of derisive laughter, “Why do you DO it, then?”

Hmmmph.

“Why do you do it, then?”

He laughed as he said it.

“Why do you do it, then?”

Boy, did I feel stupid.

“Why do you do it, then?”

Crap.

At the time, I babbled some semblance of an explanation, I suppose.  I have no idea what I said.  All I knew was that this guy – this really cool, smart, talented and kinda hot guy – thought I was a moron and I was starting to agree with him.

Well, I hate a mystery.  So it’s been bugging me.  Really bugging me. 

I went for a few good long walks on the beach – which usually makes everything fall into place, but this time it was gonna take a bit more, it seemed.  I pondered and pondered.  I went back in my head, years and years, and reviewed all of the emotions I could summon up in respect to my art.

I remembered that when I was an angst-ridden teenager, I spent an inordinate amount of time locked in my bedroom listening to The Cure and drawing sketches of James Dean and Montgomery Clift.  And I loved it.  Those sketch pads filled with questionable likenesses of rather similarly angst-ridden rebels were like meditation for me.  There was nothing to be gained from drawing them – it was just for me.  The only challenge was to make the next one better than the last – and since I am really only competitive with myself, this worked rather well for me.

After I graduated and started acting, I forgot about drawing and painting.  I just stopped.  I had other outlets, I guess.  When I finally did start again, it was purely on a whim. 

I’m not even sure what it was that moved me, but I whipped off a painting in a rush on the way to a friend’s house – I took the painting as a gift.  She loved it and has it hanging in her living room to this day.  I was there recently and the sight of it moved me.  I felt a surge of pleasure at seeing it – remembering how happy I was the day I painted it, how much fun it was to slap the paint on the paper.  And you know what?  It was because I didn’t care if it was any good.  I was just having fun.  I hadn’t even intended to ever show it to anyone.

When I began painting for real, it was under duress.  I was fed up with acting.  I was fed up with working for other people.  I was all angst-y again and wanted to run away and live in the woods behind a 20-foot log wall like J.D. Salinger.  (Okay, a part of me still kind of dreams of that…but I digress.)  I decided to learn how to paint properly as a means to that end.  I began getting commissions to do portraits – people, pets, houses, whatever.  And I began worrying that my work wasn’t good enough to justify taking money for it.  In fact, it was weeks before I cashed the first cheque I was given for a piece of artwork, because I was convinced they would take the painting home, hang it on the wall, realize how awful it was and ask for their money back.  I was insecure!

Once the revelations started coming, they were swift and plenty. 

It dawned on me that I hadn’t really painted or drawn anything since shattering my left (dominant) arm last year.  It had been too painful to consider for much of the time since then, and I’d been putting it off and putting it off, even though I’d broken through most of the pain.  I was a wimp!

And frankly, I have to admit that my life has been relatively angst-free (although this whole “Why do you do it, then?” deal has helped a bit in that department).  I was happy!

Well, with renewed spirit, I decided to test myself. 

I unwrapped a clean canvas.  I dug out my paints.  I discovered that most of them had dried out.  I bought new paint.  I bought new brushes, since my old ones were disgustingly hardened and adhered to the bottom of the water pitcher from the last time I’d painted…the day I went to the hospital for arm surgery last year (yeah, I know – I really need to clean my studio more often.  Piss off.)  I put Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong on the stereo.

And then I spent the whole day painting.  Not for clients.  Just for me.  And while I didn’t produce anything that I’m not likely to paint over eventually rather than waste the canvas, I did gain something. 

I remembered why I paint. 

 

Drea M.’s Tips for Procrastination

It is a well-known fact that I, your loyal and endearingly kooky friend, am an adrenaline junkie. What this means is that I do my best work under pressure.

My best painting sessions take place in the wee hours the day before a dead-dead-deadline…by, say, candlelight because the power is out…with one eye closed because I’ve lost a contact lens…painting with tea, grape juice and my very own blood because I’ve run out of pigment…using the tail of the cat to apply said tea/juice/blood because said cat has eaten my only paintbrush. You get the picture.

Unfortunately, in a world with neither the demands of children nor (currently) a significant other, such pressure is not always easy to come by. For the most part, I live by my own rules and my own schedule.

So when I find myself, as now, with a medium-sized stack of art assignments on my drafting table and clients with very flexible time-frames for completion, I tend to also find myself lacking motivation.

The only possible solution is to flamboyantly and decadently fritter and waste the hours that I could be painting until the time remaining is just barely sufficient to complete the projects, thereby imposing an artificially-induced sense of urgency (which will, in due time, become true urgency).

Over the years I have become quite an expert in the art of Procrastination (and its close relative, Time-Suckage).

I have decided to share with you today some of my techniques for tightening the space between Now and Deadline. It is also hoped that by spending this time writing this article when I ‘should’ be painting, I will have helped to make that fire under my ass easier to ignite when the time comes.

Current Fave Time-Suckers

• Creating MP3 playlists made up exclusively of obscure disco songs of the 70s, such as The Singing Nun’s version of The Lord’s Prayer (which leads to my next time-sucker):
• Following the google-trail created by searching for obscure disco songs sung by nuns in the 70s and seeing where it will lead (strangely, it involves Ricardo Montalban.)
• Perfecting my ability to avoid banging my knee on the helmet dangling from the handle-bars of my mountain-bike (carrying the helmet in the unlikely event I should meet a cop on the hiking trail – thus preventing getting a ticket while still feeling the wind in my hair. What a sneak I am). This is connected to the next one:
• Perfecting my ability to swerve and avoid decapitation of insane chipmunk that insists on a game of ‘Chicken’ whenever I ride by on my bike.
• Sitting on various outdoor cafè and bistro patios, people-watching and getting drunk with friends, thus also promoting time-suckage to others (this is indeed one of my favourites – and can lead to a multitude of other useless activities such as drunk-texting, skinny-dipping, befriending complete strangers, and hours of Fooz-ball.)
• Speaking of which, drinking in general tends to be an excellent, cost-effective and readily available solution to most cases of excessive time on one’s hands.
• Sitting outside with an unlit cigarette from the emergency party-pack, pretending I still smoke (smoking is probably THE best waste of time there is…unfortunately, my vanity prevails and prevents me from smoking full-time now – too bad, really).
• Asking my dad to “Sooo,…tell me again what it is you do at work?” (CAUTION: This one can take DAYS away from your life.)
• Clipping cat toenails and feigning deep interest in their grooming patterns.
• Researching the connection between serotonin reuptake and the ingestion of large amounts of LSD (for my thesis…yeah, my thesis.)
• Looking up the meanings of all the new, complicated emoticons that keep showing up on my profile, reminiscing about the good old days when it was just simple smiley-faces, and spending at least 40 minutes trying to design one that actually looks like me.
• Starting to arrange my library according to the Dewey Decimal System, then getting distracted and spending the rest of the afternoon flipping through my favourite books. (WARNING: This double-layer method of procrastinating-about-procrastinating is highly advanced and recommended only for those with superior skills in the field.)
• Mapping out travel itineraries for this fall to visit my peeps in Toronto, England and other logistically impossible places to hit all in one trip – which doesn’t stop me from trying – while understanding in the back of my mind that if I don’t finish these stinkin’ paintings, there shall be no travel at all.
• Plotting for next April Fool’s Day.
• Practicing my psychic abilities.
• Performing new-age improv music on my keyboard – which will then be lost for all time, despite its utter brilliance.
• Taking apart the DVD player just to see how it works.
• Creating little hands out of Fimo to leave lying around on windowsills.
• Returning calls while refusing to consult my address book, insisting on ‘remembering’ people’s phone numbers by dialing various combinations of numbers that I know are in the real number.
• Answering telemarketing calls and insisting that I will answer their survey questions if they answer mine.
• Writing inane posts for Facebook.

That’s all for now – if you have any suggestions, feel free to send them my way. Must go recharge all the batteries in the house now.