The mystery of "Himmmm"

 

Telegram from Dorothy Parker to Robert Benchley, Dec 31, 1929

I don't know if Dorothy Parker actually sent this telegram to Robert Benchley on the 31st of December, 1929. It would be entirely on-brand for her; Black Thursday had just happened in October, and she had a sardonic sense of humor in the best of times. If she didn't send it, she should have, and Dottie would back me up on that. She always vouched for the best apocrypha.

I don't make New Years' Resolutions on January 1st. At that point, I've just lived through about a month of frantic holiday activity followed by a week of enforced nothing as all of my classes and jobs go on hiatus. By the dawn of the new year, I'm probably still tired, definitely bored out of my skull, and potentially hungover. If I tried to plan my life right then, I'd just vow to do all manner of damnfool things, and immediately fail as soon reality reasserted itself. Generally I give myself to the end of the month to think up something less stupid to devote myself to for the foreseeable future.

It's February now, so I probably ought to think some up.

First and foremost, I'm going to do my best to Make An Art. Probably a lot of them. It still breaks my brain sometimes that the only career path where I have seen any sort of success is the one that every parent on Earth is terrified their kid will try to major in. Don't go into the arts! You'll work yourself to the bone and be perpetually broke! Joke's on those motherfuckers, I'm disabled, I get both of those things for free. Whenever I start getting too far down in the "capitalism blows" spiral, I remind myself that I get paid actual, literal, legal American money to do things that a lot of people compete to do on a volunteer basis. While talking to the director of last weekend's gig, I found myself starting a sentence with, "The last time I performed with a live symphony orchestra..." and I was perfectly serious, because there was a first time I did that, and now there is also a second. 

[Don't be too impressed. I was puppeteering a large chicken. It was hilarious and the kids liked it, but we weren't exactly playing Carnegie Hall.]

The second thing follows from that, which is that I'm going to try to share more work in progress. I don't have a whole lot of process documentation when I do stuff; the plans for just about anything I do tend to just live in my head until I start construction. I don't do design sketches, or outlines. I don't use a lot of patterns when I sew. I don't write out full rough drafts of anything. I don't use video of myself when I dance. I have a shopping list, usually, I guess? My craft projects tend to go directly from 'heap of miscellaneous parts' to 'usable item', do not pass GO, do not collect $200.

Externalizing the preliminary steps just isn't very useful for me. It's tedious, and the model of whatever I'm building is so much easier to manipulate in my head. I actually got a lot of grief for this in school -- they liked to teach writing by assigning projects where you turned in not only the final paper, but also an outline, notes, thesis statements, unedited rough drafts, etc. None of that exists when I write things, but they were required for full points, so I had to just bang out the paper and then go back and forge the rest.

But other people do seem to enjoy knowing how these things come about, so I'm going to try to hammer out a process for documenting the stuff that I do. I'm not up for fully-produced YouTube tutorials, and they probably wouldn't be very engaging if I tried -- 90% of my project time is just me staring blankly into space, trying to figure out how to shoehorn blinky lights into something. I am going to try to at least remember to take pictures, and explain what the hell I spend my time on.