Tuesday, October 16, 2012

little miss crankypants, the language assessor.

i do not know why. i am a bitch. it comes out in many little ways. perhaps it is my uber-sarcastic humor, or maybe it is from being totally self-righteous or maybe it is a result of the nurture vs. nature debate. i do not know... but i am one. i try to  be as nice as i possibly can, but no good deed goes unpunished in my world.

what may have brought this moment of self deprecation forward you may ask? well i spent some time in the glorious early new england autumn sunshine. i was walking with my dog on a running track. he was going all free-willy all over the place. the squirrels out there may have thought they hadn't a chance with him, but they are completely safe with him. he never catches any of them. as a matter of fact, i think it is just some internally hardwired game he has to play. when confronted with an actual stationary grey beastie, he is totally non-plussed. he has nothing to say or do.
i was walking and my dog was leaping and bounding. he was having as nice a time in his own world as i was. we were both enjoying some light hearted yet essential exercise. knowing me even slightly, will suggest this is an event of ginormous proportion and simultaneous with harmonic planetary alignment. i tend to dislike exercise; it's the sweatiness that resultingly happens. i love how i feel after it is done, but then again, that's where that self righteous thing rears its nasty little head.

as i was moving along the oval i saw some oak trees in the mix. i am a relentless re-purposer and try to smother my crankiness by thinking of others. my friend janice makes awe-inspiring things from felted wool and other fibers in unlikely combinations along with vintage silk saris. now that seems easy enough, but first you need to have all kinds of mad textile skills and then you need to be married to an indian fella with a pipeline to old silks ... it is not as easy as it sounds.
one of janice's side sets of products for sale, is a quick and easy little construction made with felted wool and acorn caps. in my mind, i have been waiting for the perfect time to pluck gabillions of acorn caps from the ground in wooded areas nearby to gift her with. it will allow her to move her festive acorn making factory into overdrive. today seemed a good chance to do some harvesting.  i spent a relatively short but fruitful period with my tush in the air, picking up the adorable mini-wooden berets for her assemblages.

between the joy of running around off-leash and during the season where squirrels take more food hoarding chances with their safety, the dog to got a little jiggy with things. he was so happy, he pooped for the third time. i had run out of clean-up bags, since one had just been allocated to being filled with fresh materials for felted acorns. i left the bag of my collection on the side of the track to pinpoint the mess and walked back to my car to get some more bags for its removal.
in the few moments that this took and the time i took to walk back to where my spot was marked, my plan was dismantled.   a man with a chocolate lab in a big harness was taking my bag and his dog over to the trash barrel.

head slap.

he was dumping my former place marker and acorn cache into the oil drum trash can. i asked to be sure and he replied that someone left a bag of "shells"and he was cleaning it up. seriously, i did not lose it... but i mentioned that i had in fact been collecting the acorn tops and had left the bag to mark my dog's mess. he said "oh" and as i went to reclaim the bag, he told me his dog had peed all over it anyways.
i let it go, went back to look for the mess in the dried leaves and pine needles. luckily it was easy to find and so was the pile of "shells" the guy had poured out of the pee bag onto the ground nearby.

since i had fresh bags to recapture the acorns with, i did so. we had a little discussion about what i was doing and why. he offered that there were a lot  more caps available "at the front".  my head works overtime often enough. i was trying to decide if i wanted to ask, but thought better and figured it was easier to look for other oak trees. since the park and track were oval, there was no clear 'front' to the space. just a couple of more open areas that were along side of it all. hard to say what was a 'front' or a proper entrance. so i just kept my mouth shut.
then the fellow offered the info that there were lots more that were double caps still attached and they were really unique.
here is where my inner language bitch said "MEEEEEOOOOOW!!!"
how can lots of the same thing be unique? especially when it is at the front on an oval?

it is hard being so sarcastic by nature. and by nurture too. the same woman that carefully tended that growth in me also was the one to tell me she could not abide by my self righteousness. again, head slapping myself here. if not for her and her own stinking forms of cray-cray, i suspect that i wouldn't be  imbued with sarcasm, sardonic insight, irony or self righteousness. she made me this way to survive her beastliness and ineptitude in parenting. very limited nurturing occurred.  as my my friend janice says,  in deference to her own childhood, "she was raised by wolves".  often enough, i think i was too. it was another pack though. they had a guilt gene inserted into their dna.

so my sweet puppy and i enjoyed the weather, the collecting, the ability to curtail snarly comments and were just about to pop into our car to return to home base. an enormously lovely young mother from a tropical island somewhere stopped me to speak. her accent had a lilting accent with british overtones that identified her island origin and open countenance. she had her 18 month old son, a gorgeous confection with her. she asked if my dog was friendly and if her son could pat him. of course they could. i adore trying to get more people and dogs to enjoy each other. it makes my grinch heart swell a little every time.
so the three of us were communing with the dog. another woman pulled up and my dog sashayed the six feet over to greet her. she freaked out and asked if he was going to bite her. seriously, did the small 18 month old boy look in peril of any kind? did the dog rush her? he mosied to be sure. that was all. no growling or barking either. at worst, i figure he would make his presence known by shedding near her.. but that is pretty much it.

i need regular reminders. it is not me.... it is that it is cranston. cranston, rhode island. and cranston has its own zip code, but needs its own area code as well as country code. there is something that makes people there dumber more often than they need to be. not all people... just more than one might feel is normal.

so this is what makes me a bitch. rolling all the language and attitudes around in my head. i did not say anything; my aging is allowing me to keep things to myself more. an ability to control my mouth more carefully is helpful in getting by in this world. that and making fresh flowery goodies.

on that note.... here are a few new things or elements in progress.
earrings. earrings. earrings. i made 29 prs. last night. only need their rhinestones to glam them up and some earwires to make them dangle.

earrings. earrings. earrings.
in progresso

tonight i am gonna get some posts made. they are overdue. here is a photo of an older pair i made and me when i was a year younger. the contrast amuses me.

old lady ears... pay no attention to the grey hair, wrinkles and age spots around those lobes. 
it is the scale, color and floral form of the post earrings that are noteworthy.




 and then there are some new necklaces that i made with silver chains 
instead of my more usual vintage lucite beaded ones. 

a new pair of GRACELETS...
since way back when my son was small and charming, 
he would call bracelets 'gracelets' instead. 


and for all of you keeping score at home, 
fresh chain bracelets came into being as well. 
they are punctuated with earrings (again in their then, unwired state)



my daily rant is now concluded. i know there are loads of things to do other than take a field trip into my world, but thanks for looking in.

xo.xo.xo.
w.

Monday, October 8, 2012

i hate that i hate some of my neighbors.

hate is a strong word. i am feeling a certain degree of it though... or some degree of incomparable discomfort. my neighbors are described to me as being rachet. yeah, you heard me, i said it. rachet. oh fer heaven's sake, now what is she going on about? i know that is what you are thinking. also you may be saying to yourselves, she is on another stinkin' nonsense filled rant. no good can come of this.

my neighbors moved in to the house across the street from me. it bugs me a lot, since i am in my house a lot. i work in the front, street-side room and do most of my stuff there. i mean eat meals, work on projects, talk on the phone, nap, comb my dog, make proclamations to my brood, and all other parts of my day to day living. so i have the distinct location of hearing a lot of what happens across the street from me. i do not try to eavesdrop, i swear. however it is very seductive. the goings on there are tantalizingly invasive and curiosity inducing.

when they moved in, i thought it was some guy and two pitt bull dogs. the guy was some non-descript amalgamation of racially blended heritage and a full bushy black beard. it was summer and hot out... so the commitment to a full on beard had me totally thrown. and then his friends or relatives started to show up. all of them had the same thing going on... droopy drawers and full black beards. short hair up top went with the beards. they looked very much like they ought to be profiled. the difference between someone being or needing to be profiled and this group is that there is a privacy barrier.

someone forgot to mention this to the new guys. if you are profile-worthy, typically it is due to having secrets. these people do not entertain secrets. not at all.
except on the big things. those are topics that are not publicly expressed. it took me months and months and into the years and years category to find out, there was not just a guy with a bushy black beard and his hairy faced acolytes to deal with. nope. this guy had gone to some kind of technical school degree and was educated in the ways of construction management. he was married. he had a small daughter with the aforementioned wife. since the baby was born with all kinds of early health issues, they decided that the wife was best to go out and earn some money, while he stayed home with his daughter.  wow. this sounded so evolved in theory.

the bushy dudes love to come visit in packs. at all hours. they are just wastrels of all kinds. the women associated with them are the worst ever. the wife snarls when she sees me. i enjoy as i get to know them more, that i rarely see the wife. i have NEVER seen the baby girl. i have of course seen the dogs. often too. they are beaujolais and botox. i kid you not. those are their names. ok, maybe i kid a little, but not much. why? cause you just cannot make this shit up. no matter how hard you try.

one nice summer day, i was on my front porch either painting or taking photos. the posse was out front with a few motorbikes and lots of chatter. every third word was one that became very noticeable in lexicology of a certain socio-age-economical collective. it starts with an "N" and is only used in impolite company, in rap songs blaring out of tinted glass windowed cars or by non-white people.
seriously, i think the word becomes so used by this crowd, it loses context and the horror of the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
i was wincing every time these ill mannered youths said it. there is a peculiar phenomenon on this street. sound carries unbelievably well bouncing down between houses on the street. the particular summer day that this was occuring, was no exception. i kept hearing "nigga" this and "nigga" that. if you say it enough, it has no context. it becomes an article in grammar.
the loss of the horror of this word became bothersome to keep hearing... at least to my sensibilities. i shouted across the street to interject myself into the bushy bearded motorcycle revving crowd. i wanted to let them know, i did not appreciate their intrusiveness into my own world.  minding my own business was becoming harder to do. they ignored me. afterall, they were busy creating a pocket of social tastelessness.
not very surprising, but when a fat, grey-haired woman screams that you gotta stop sayin' NIGGA, it draws some attention. funny how that happens. i have not heard it since i started calling  that word on that day.

i described this scene to my kids. my son and daughter number two, aka "thing one" and "thing two" as named by my eldest. i told them how it played out that i was no longer horrified to say the "N"-word. these two uber-white kids i have raised, told me our neighbors were just being ratchet. or was that rachet?
their definition was, folks that are pretending or genuinely not caring about being with the inner city rats and living messy urban lives. i did not get that at first. of course, being me, i looked it up in the dictionary. the urban dictionary that is. now i see that my kids were right. there is both a thing that is rachet as well as ratchet. in the application of my neighbors being grouped as such, it was an error. they are neither rachet/ratchet . they are in fact "ghetto". so "ghetto" in fact they may also overlap with some "rachet".
either way, i dislike the whole thing.
in a huge way.

it amazes me that these little darlings, set upon the world by their own pod-parents, would likely be hugely self satisfied knowing they were considered "ghetto". as it happens, i cannot believe in any manner that they would be thrilled to be considered consolidated jews in Venice, Italy. of course, if they knew the origins of a ghetto, it would mortify them.
ghetto
1. (n.) A quarantined section of the city where the Jews were forced to live during WWII Germany.

other things that are going up my nose about this collective include the response to their broken doorbell.
friends and relatives pull up and honk their horns to say howdy. or come on down to the sidewalk. i want to snag some drugs, man.
the women are the WORST. i mean THE Everloving WORST! they are ill mannered, cussing, quick tempered crankpots.  what i find amusing is that the males associated with them from the bushyfaced entourage think that they have some control over these nasty gals.
they go off in all kinds of finger wagging, high haired, ill conceived barrages of language and bad mannered entitlement.
i find it utterly intolerable. really, it tweaks my sensibilities fully and completely. what is most inconceivable is that through a myriad of events... the landlord for the house is now the bank. the former owner defaulted on his mortgage. these people are officially squatting and lowering the quality of the neighborhood i used to enjoy.
i resist change at every turn... but having had this group of folks thrust into my world is pretty painful.
so they can make as much unpleasing noise at all hours, drop trash on my front sidewalk, dump car trash and cigarette butts from their cars in front of my home. they pay no rent/mortgage/utilities. my husband worked 3 jobs this week to pay for all  of those god-given(snort) chances fulfilling our mortgage and utility needs.
rodney dangerfields are we. we get NO RESPECT.

 if my umbrage is not heated enough... they put their dogs on the 4'x8' front porch over the front door. the dogs whimper and whine and bark. during one evening last week (concurrent with the first presidential debate), beaujolais dog was whining for 3 1/2 hours. it was raining too. it is all i can do not to call animal services. these two un-neutered pitts are developing some anger issues. i am right there with them too. they get put out in the sun on hot days, rainy days, as well as anytime it is inconvenient to be cared for. i figure their paws are the canine version of overly callused by now to withstand these porch visits. as a dog owner, i object to all of their bad habits. i just can't do much to improve their lives without speaking out to the bush family.

anyways, there is much more to whinge on about... but i wanted to vent some. these folks are ruining my happy hippie flower ju-ju.
to bring things back into my own world and focus... i leave these floral pics as a visual salve to the posting.
OOOOOOMMMMMMM!

*********

earrings & bracelets
Frida style

beady flower necklaces
more Frida style

gracelets 
in pink and brown

 in calico

deep cornflower blue earrings...
sans wires
{they are easier to photograph without the wires}


more things are coming as soon as i get some photos taken.

so i bid you adieu on this crisp autumnal day... as i need to go back to work, teasing a few more pretty blossoms into existence.

bon jour everyone... for now. 

xoxox. 
W.