Excerpts From My Journal

Library Lights

I can’t stand being in the library more than 2 hours. It truly is my limit. I get annoyed by the soft blanket of incessant chatter. The air is stale. The lighting is unnatural. And sitting in one place that long, I start to feel like a caged cat.

The Future is Inside Us

I just finished Paul Auster’s book, Oracle Night. I’m left with these two statements stinging my mind: “the future is inside us” and “everything human is real”.

Ideas:

I realized early on that built up extravagant events with someone don't make for special moments, rather it's the unexpected moments during the every day that do. 

Time is a way to manage people.

Money exists only when you use it.

Add wire to my paintings.

We should wear what we want like a little girl.

Perhaps creativity aims to reach the sublime-- that place where it's both familiar and completely foreign.

Odysseus is a great name.

What causes an itch?

What if I had a day when I never knew what time it was?

Quote from Invisible by Paul Auster:

“Real love is when you get as much pleasure from giving pleasure as you do from receiving it”

Play on words:

I grated great cheese but dropped some in the grate.

That kind of dog is kind of kind.

Who am I to you?

Who is Olivia to someone meeting me? What do they see? What do I show and give of myself in their eyes? I do not have a clear perception of how I am to other people. 

Deepak Chopra:

"Seeking is really just a way of winning yourself back"

Poem About a Poem

I went home straight away after finishing a poem

Read it to Lora and Kat

Both impressed

That I wrote such a thing

In two hours flat—

So dense and immense they had to

Hear parts back.

After editing I couldn’t resist

I re-copied it down,

Bit by bit.

I read it out loud,

Letter after letter,

Forming words—

      and meanings too!--

Making it better and better

For my ears and yours, I assume.

Together, with voice and hand typing all

I finished the poem growing in me

Nine months strong. 

New "Tidyings"

I've had a collection of miniature things on my desk for the past 2 months, waiting to find the perfect display case for them all. I've collected "miniatures"since I was young but recently I've put more thought into what I choose to hold onto. For example, I drank a mango juice from Bay State Bakery (delicious middle eastern food on Water St, Worcester) that came in a tiny, unusually shaped glass bottle. I knew I wanted to keep this bottle, but had no clue what I would use it for. So I tucked it into my bag, brought it home and on my desk it sat. Until one day, I was working in my studio on a new doll and considered using buttons I've collected from various garments that came with extras on my doll. Thats when it hit me: why not put all these buttons into the mango juice bottle?

This is the type of decision that has gone behind my collection, however my miniatures were consuming my desk. Though I've been looking in antique shops , yard sales and stuff left in front of houses for the perfect case, I hadn't checked my own house. Lo and behold, in my attic, balancing on the arm of an old chair and a filing cabinet was a beautiful display case--no doors-- with a mirror in the back. Perfect.

So today, I finally set up all my miniatures collected over the past year in the case. In the midst of accomplishing a task that's been hanging over my head, I decided it was time to finish another project.

Last winter I began a sculpture to hold incense. The concept was to sculpt a hippie leaning back smoking  but all I completed was the head. For the next few hours I designed the rest of him: his yellow and green tie-dyed T-shirt, blue cut off jeans, funky sneakers, and limbs.

I've posted images of both these new "tidyings", along with two old collage drawings I did around the time I started the smoking hippie.