Sticks and Stars

Dinner was good and garnered much praise, even from my dad who is king of finding something to bitch about. He went so far as to say that my mashed potatoes were “excellent,” even after he complained repeatedly that there was no gravy. I tried to explain to him that my potatoes are so good that they don’t need to be hidden under gravy, but it wasn’t until he tasted them that he believed me. The key is using more butter and roasted garlic than actual potatoes. And serving them with love, of course.

After dinner my family left and I cleaned up my kitchen so that it would all be taken care of and then I gleefully sat down in front of my semi-finished computer and unwrapped my new video card. Of course, nothing is easy and at first install I noticed that, hmm, it protruded above the outside of the case by a good inch. Greatly annoyed that my video card didn’t fit, I set about researching its replacement only to (eventually) discover mention of a “low profile bracket” to be used with “low profile video cards,” and then further mention that despite no mention of its “low profile status” on the box or in the included materials, my card happens to be “such an animal.” So now I must locate and/or order a low profile bracket. And then maybe this thing will be done…or at least done to the point of installing the operating system.

Tomorrow is my birthday (in case I haven’t mentioned that fact ad nauseum) and it looks like I will be taking the day off from work after all. I wasn’t planning to since I have to take so much time off in February, but when I got word of that childcare subsidy that likely meant I wouldn’t need to take time off in February, I asked my boss if I could take Friday off after all. Of course, the very next day I discovered that it looks like I won’t be able to use the subsidy (more on that later), which means that I really will have to take a bunch of time off in February (when my one year old’s daycare provider is out of town), but I’m pretty sure my boss already thinks bad things about me because I take odd times off and am often late due to my morning bus and have to leave eight minutes before my day should officially be over in order to catch my evening bus, so I decided that I wouldn’t bother making myself look more like some kind of wishy-washy idiot who can’t keep her schedule straight and would just suck it up and have fun on my birthday instead.

What will I do, you ask? Well, my initial thought was that I would go get a massage, go see a movie, take myself out for a nice meal and buy myself this book I’ve been lusting after, but then I realized that would likely total near $200 and that’s just not in the budget this month. Besides, there aren’t really any movies out at the moment that are pulling me toward the theater (I’d be just as content to watch any of them on dvd), and I’m not really in the mood for a massage, and the only meal for which I really want to take myself out is one consisting of a high end steak, and that’s the kind of experience I’d rather share with someone else.

But then on Friday I went to the gallery I visit every month in order to take the last opportunity to check out this month’s exhibit (except now that I think about it the exhibit will probably be there next week too, but whatever) and as I was staring at the pieces and thinking about art and pondering what the pieces looked like and how they were constructed and what I interpreted to be their meaning, I felt such an urge to create. My fingers itched with it and I thought about going on Friday to buy art supplies (because why actually create when you can pretend like you are going to create but just need to buy some stuff first and are then unfortunately too tired to actually create anything after your grand shopping spree so you don’t actually create anything but can offer yourself the excuse that you would if you had only had more time). But then a kind of crazy thought struck me, and I realized that maybe I could just stay home in my clean apartment and spend the whole day working on art.

So I think maybe that’s what I’ll do. I have a couple of pieces in mind, one piece of jewelry and one sculpture and even an essay I want to start (although I might need to spend some more time thinking about that one) and I like the thought of celebrating my life by creating something new. If nothing else, I’ll sure as hell feel better at the end of the day if I’m looking at a new sculpture instead of a hole worn into my debit card.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.