Hey, Been Tryin’ to Meet You

Two years ago, I started this blog as a supplement to my Etsy store. I had just completed Dressmaking and Design courses and that itch to create something new everyday was more like an infectious disease that overtook my entire being, 28 days later style. Flash forward to the now–where a second job, relationships and the general “I’ve been busy lazy” has become the bane of my existence. Every once in a while I’d post a few random entries, but never really picked up the momentum of my initial attempt. Sad puppy.

I’m a huge advocate of personal blogs. It’s a neat way to stay tuned into what’s been going on with friends and family, especially when there’s so much distance between us and everyone is just so goddamned busy.

Whenever Tina and I go on break and enjoy a plate of pasta together, we always touch on how important it is to live passionately, but how lately what we’ve become is just a couple of couch potatoes. Well, now that I’ve switched from working graveyard to regular day/night shifts, I feel like I’ve regained some sort of homeostasis and I’m ready to hug the world again. And last week, Tina cleared out her old room and started painting again–she just completed two orchid still lifes (one in watercolor and one in acrylic) to get the hang of working with different mediums again. As it turns out, the only mediums we’ve gotten accustomed to working with these days is makeup on other people’s faces.

What I really want to make more than anything is connections, or even making missed connections would be enough. I want to draw and salvage old dresses and read stories before bedtime without feeling the heavy pull like blinds over my eyelids. Talk about accessories and the last pair of shoes I popped a boner for. And do some yoga with my girls under the sun until we’re all NC 42. And sip on some margarita’s along the shoreline while Roni teaches us how to shake our hips the Tahitian way.

I want to write about nothing at all, which is to say, everything. And appreciate terribly mundane incidents. Stuff that we often overlook when at the end of the day, it’s really what makes living that much more bearable. Like when my dude smiles and takes a mental picture with his eyes. Or that one time when I handed her her change, for 3 seconds our fingers touched and it was electric. Or how I wish more people would hug me the way you did before boarding the plane that morning. Like I existed and you knew I was there. I mean, you hug Marcus Aurelius like that and even his cheese would melt.

All that good stuff, if I understand correctly, is what Amy Hempel calls connective tissue. The space that looks empty initially, but adds up to form something complete when seen from afar. In an interview with The Paris Review she says, “If used honestly and not as a gimmick, these spaces can signify the way the mind really works, noting moments and assembling them in such a way that a kind of logic or pattern comes forward, until the accretion of moments forms a whole experience, observation, state of being.”