Comma Dot Comma

It’s time for a weigh-in from our favorite Netflix movie reviewer. This edition reviews a sci-fi flick called Solaris. He’s really outdone himself this time. I wish all movie reviews were this interesting.

I watch this movie with much the intriguing. The spacemans are fighting with evil alien monstors for who can to control the space ship before it crashes into planet of fire lava. I was tenseness with fear of who may be victorious in the ending. Dr. Clonney is hero in the remembering of type much like Raiders of Lost Ark to save his robot woman. Will he able to save her from the lava planet? Or will he fall with smash into burning? That is the intriguing you will have to survive from the wathing for your own!!!

(Just you WAIT until I post his thoughts on Grizzly Man!).

All weekend my thumb, of its own accord, kept reaching over to my ring finger like a dog going to the window waiting for its owner to arrive. Every time, it was disappointed. That’s because my wedding and engagement rings were in the pocket of my giraffe-print apron, stuffed in a cubby at the pottery studio. I can’t wear the rings when I’m throwing things on the wheel because they get hopelessly gobbed up with clay and because they are prone to cause unsightly divots on the pot itself. I tuck the rings into my pocket until it’s time to go, and every day except Friday, I’ve remembered to put them back on. This time I had to spend the weekend bare-fingered.

When I arrived on Monday and plucked them from their pocket, the waves of relief tempted me put them on anyway, divots or no, gobs or no. My wiser head (I keep it inside my main head, no one can see it) prevailed and I put them back in the pocket for the duration.

Today was an important day, because my month of rented time, space, and equipment was about to run out. I had sixteen pounds of clay to get through and not a moment to lose. Mostly I’d spent the month throwing two pound bowls, trying to get sets of bowls that are roughly approximate. The clay I’d used most of the time was some stubborn mix of grit and slick that had a very strong sense of self. That is, it liked where it was and what it was doing, and refused to budge without very strong persuasion. My palms would sometimes bleed as I used the symmetry and pressure of my body to center a lump of clay on the wheel. I’d grit my teeth and force it into submission. The good thing about it was that once you got it to behave, it would stick the way you had put it, with great personal integrity. No leaning, no slouching, no messing around behind your back. It was hard to get a thin wall or a smooth, non-sandy interior, but by golly it wasn’t going to forget it was a bowl.

I really didn’t like that clay at all, and so for the new batch I went with Sonoran white, which felt like cream cheese by comparison. This clay was submissive and amenable to instruction, but I quickly found that I couldn’t give it one direction, and then change my mind halfway through. It just didn’t have the resilience to go with the flow. If I tried to push it too far too fast, it would collapse in a slimy, quivering heap, and I’d have to send it away to a plaster slab to recuperate. But if I was careful, I’d get so much more out of it in much less time. Slim-walled, steep-sided bowls just grew off the wheel. I almost forgot how bored I was of two-pound bowls.

As I lined up one wet bowl after another, I acquired a small audience of homeschoolers aged one to sixteen, who were there to do a project with the resident potter. They mostly kept to themselves, inspecting my rising walls only as they walked back and forth to the sink, but later, a little straw-haired girl with black charcoal all over her elbows and knees (where had she been crawling?) held up her newest prize: “Look! It’s an egg! I found it in that straw over there and my mom says I can eat it for breakfast.” She introduced herself as Madison, and pointed out that her egg wasn’t shaped like other eggs. It was more oval, with some points at the ends. “That’s an ellipse,” I told her. She nodded and then replied that it was a good thing her dad wasn’t here, because he didn’t like eggs, or chickens, or any animal except pteradactyls. By now she was following me around the property as I checked on things, holding the egg out in front of her, perched carefully in her cupped hands. “Your dad only likes animals that no longer exist?” I asked. She guessed so. Oops, it was time to load up the homeschool minivan, and she took her leave. “Enjoy the egg,” I said. All in all, a good day at the studio.

I’ve been reading Ezekiel lately, and every time I sit down with it that old spiritual comes into my head. I learned it in my Brownie troop away back when. “Ezekiel saw two wheels a-rollin’, way in the middle of the air. A wheel within a wheel a-rollin’, away in the middle of the air.” The song neglects to mention the four-headed beastie that used the wheels for feet. It had eyes all over its body. It never needed to turn because for it, every direction was straight. It was like the north pole in that way. This thing was a cherubim, and it is where God hid out when he talked to Ezekiel. Poor Ezekiel. Up until God appeared, he was an up-and-comer who hung with the elders at the city gate. In his writing, he took care to get the details right, but never added flourishes or special effects. He called it like he saw it, the original straight shooter. No ifs, ands, or buts with Ezekiel.
Other prophets get dreams, voices, or angels that resemble really good-looking humans. Ezekiel gets cherubim. And that’s just the beginning! One of his first assignments is to lay on his side, in his underwear, for several months. He must eat food cooked over an excrement fire. And when he finishes? He gets to turn over to the other side and do it all again. He also gets to draw a picture on the back of a pan and prop it against the wall. Once he’s got all that taken care of, God tells him to pack up all his belongings, heave them up on his back, and dig a hole through the city wall. Then he must climb through the hole as if he is departing on a long journey. God points out, perhaps unnecessarily, that people are going to ask him why he is acting so weird, and that’s when he gets to come at them with the gloom and doom: war, famine, exile. Ezekiel is not too happy about all this. God blesses him with a hardheadedness equal to that of the people he must prophesy to. Lucky! The most stubborn man in the city!

I find it funny that good citizen Ezekiel, who likely just wanted a good job and a calm, god-fearing life working his way up the ladder, got one of the most crazy and eye-catching jobs in the bible. His prophetic performance art could put to shame any number of avant-garde artists in, say, New York City. I’ve read this book before, but it’s been awhile. WHAT will he do next?

This particular adventure began six years ago, when I began lugging around a big sack containing leftover scraps of batiks, prints, and tie-dyes that my tailors gave back to me after sewing interesting outfits that were unfortunate compromises between my instructions (a-line dress with pockets) and the tailor’s sense of style (See? I put giant puffy sleeves on it for you!). I lugged it through half a dozen countries and stuffed it in closets in four apartments back in the States. Surely, I thought, one day I would make a quilt out of it.

Once I got the sewing machine, I pulled out the sack o’ rags to realize my dream. As it turns out, quilting requires both an entire set of tools I don’t own, and a strong personal commitment to precision. My commitment to precision is only sporadic. I put the sack away and waited for more feasible inspiration.

It came in the form of Project Runway, a TV show I watch with a dedication bordering on zeal. Uli was whipping up some frothy concotion of a dress and Dr. G, with a perhaps misguided faith in my design sense, said that I should do that! I should make my own cool one-of-a-kind clothes! Maybe I should learn to sew first, I said. We went to Joann’s and wandered around awhile. Eventually I ended up with a pattern and some cheap polka-dotted cloth from Walmart.

Sewing, I discovered, is actually a misnomer. A more accurate term would be Equal-Amounts-of-Sewing-And-Ironing. I wouldn’t exactly call ironing my nemesis, but in the eighties I had a run-in with a can of spray starch that permanently dampened my enthusiasm for the task. If I had known there was so much pressing this and creasing that, I may not have embarked on the dress making adventure.

But once you’ve got four or five pieces of things sewn together that look remarkably like a dress, you can’t just quit, whatever obstacles you may face. The first one I faced was the mysterious vocabulary of the directions. “Facing sides together, stitch in the ditch then cut the curves. You may find it eaiser at this point to dunk the trollop and underscore the dimple with a triple-quick farce. If you don’t want to underscore the dimple, skip number 10 and go straight to 11.” (ok, so maybe I added a few extra words in there for effect) sometimes google helped; other times I just did whatever I felt like doing.

Next, the machine broke. Since the instruction manual is from 1973, it actually assumes that its owner will be able to disassemble, clean, oil, and otherwise maintain its various parts. This I did, though there was one moment of terror when I could not fit the bobbin shuttle cover back on. Sometimes the fifteenth try is just the ticket! And when excess oil beads up and slides down the needle itself? No problem. Just wipe and go.

Then I kept accidentally using a zigzag stitch when a straight stitch was called for, and also the neck facing was just a torment. Note to self: sleevless and V-neck does not equal “easy.” Oops! I accidentally put the heat-activated fusible facing in the dryer! (oh, so that’s what “heat activated fusible” means. It gets all shiny and sticks together).

Finally, I had a dress! If you didn’t look too closely (say, at the mismatched neck trim, the pointy darts on the bodice, or the wobbly stitching on the hem) it looked alright! Time to try on! Rats. Too tight and too short. All I can figure is that the seam allowance was 3/8ths instead of 5/8ths. A quarter inch doesn’t seem like that much until you multiply it by the total number of seams, to be exact, nine gazillion and fourteen. Then you tend to lose a little necessary yardage. Back to the sewing machine to let out the sides a bit.

I was going for a playful take on a fairly structured early-sixties style dress. I put on the finished product and felt a bit more like an adult pretending to be a five-year-old girl. Dr. G suggested I wear it to the Violet Burning concert. I figured, hey, it’ll be dark in there, why not? Standing outside the venue in the full glare of the streetlight, I struck up a conversation with a woman next to me. “So why are so many people still outside?” I asked. “They’re not letting us in yet,” she said. “By the way, I really like your dress.”

Score! I guess some people don’t closely inspect the seams of others’ dresses? Here it is.

If I lived in an underwater society– the kind in which whole cities are built under clear domes suctioned to the seabed– I probably wouldn’t like swimming as much. Going in and out via the pressure chamber would just seem like too much hassle for a few minutes of waving my arms and legs around. Maybe it would be the kind of society that has pools inside the dome. Then I could float on my back and look up at the water above me and think about how ironic it all was. I could make it even more ironic by sipping water from my hydration pack. Wait, I don’t have a hydration pack. I only have a Nalgene bottle that I hook to my waist strap and then it thunks against my leg the whole time. There goes that fantasy.

P.S. here are some great pictures of Dr. G and his sister, in honor of his birthday, which was a factor of two for the mathematically inclined among you.

• Best recent search term leading someone to my blog: “Godhead explained with candycorn”
• Best recent personal mail: A clear box containing a piece of birch bark, with a note written directly on it. My friend had picked up this particular piece of bark many years ago, when I mentioned that it looked like it would be cool to write on.
• Best recent conversation: A late-night, multi-hour walk around the monuments and tidal pool with old friends in DC, with topics ranging from torture to regrets to true love. I had other excellent recent conversations, but the scenery and the mild exercise put this one up top.
• Best recent happy ending/beginning: the wedding of Kate and Matt, whose love story could make a satisfying novel.

p.s. I have a short-short about daisies in the new issue of Salt.

Some D.C. pictures by Dr. G: