Pick out a crazy outfit at the thrift store . . . Make body-part sugar cookies . . . These are simple tasks I should be able to follow to the T, don’t you think?
Ha!
It’s only Week 1 of my Art and Soul Reloaded Apprenticeship (ASRA), and yet I found myself RESISTING. I don’t have time for this stuff. Which is true, I’ve got projects and responsibilities and they’re time-consuming, and I usually wake at five and go, go, go until about 7:30 when I get ready for bed, get in bed, go to bed. And why do they have to be body-part cookies? I don’t have body-part shapes. I don’t want to buy body-part shapes just to make these cookies. I’m not even supposed to be eating cookies. Wait, I have a tree shape. Can I make a tree shape? Is the point that I engage in the activity of making cookies or that I think outside the box with respect to their shapes? Can I make weird-shaped home-made chocolate? Or is the point that I follow directions?
I decided that the point is not that I follow directions. This comes as no surprise, since I recently skimmed Gretchen Rubin’s The Four Tendencies (the latest of many variations, going back to at least Ancient Greece, 400 BC, when Hippocrates used the four temperaments [sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic–that’s a 17th century rendition above] in his medical practice; the most famous version, of course, is probably the Hogwarts houses).
Anyway, I confirmed (definitely not “realized,” definitely “confirmed”) that I am what Rubin calls a “Questioner.” I won’t do what you want just because you’re asking (like the Obliger, and to some extent, the Upholder), but I also won’t NOT do what you want just because you’re asking (like the Rebel). I’ll do what you want only if it makes sense. To me.
Making body-part cookies did not make sense to me. Neither did getting a crazy outfit from the thrift store.
I did, however, go to the thrift store. That made sense. The point of this apprenticeship is to let loose the creative juices, which exploring new places does for me. Plus: I like exploring new places. So I went to a fabulous little thrift store that I’d never been to before. I even went in with the intention of, yeah, sure, I’ll pick out a crazy outfit. But when I got there . . .
Holy Overwhelment. They organized by color. They had tons of stuff. I didn’t need anything, and I’m not much of a shopper, and when I do need something, I do research and then buy the best possible fit for my needs. But here, now, in this thrift store, with its color explosion–where do I even start to look for an outfit that’s crazy? It’s all crazy!
So I just browsed. AND! I found this fabulous white tuxedo blazer. BCBGMaxAzria. With the Tags Still On. $12! I would’ve bought it, but it didn’t fit. (So close!)
And I perused the books, where I found the writing craft section, including a copy of the most recent Writer’s Market!
And I scanned the DVDs. Writing craft books always use movies in their examples, and they all tend to use the same movie examples. They’re often from the 80s (a certain kind of heyday for film?), which means that if they were rated R, then I probably had to cover my eyes through most of it and didn’t understand the plot anyway.
Anyway, seeing the same movie titles pop up again and again always makes me want to watch the movie. But they’re inevitably never available on Netflix or Amazon Prime, and they’re too old for Redbox. I try the library, and sometimes I get lucky, but sometimes people never return them, and three months after I placed the hold I go to check its status and the movie’s been pulled from the system. That just happened with Stargate.
Guess what I found at the thrift store: Stargate in great condition (disc looked practically unwatched) for $2! That’s cheaper than renting! I also found the Bourne Identity, Groundhog Day and Lethal Weapon. (That last one had an empty jacket, but still . . . it was there once.)
I’ve never had so much luck at a thrift store. Needless to say, this activity was a success, despite my inability to find a crazy outfit, and I’ll be going back to this particular treasure trove soon.
I’ll also be carrying forward the practice of logging three ideas a day. I thought I did this already, but until now I’ve been jotting notes on whatever random scraps of paper I could find, which isn’t as helpful as making a point to log three ideas in the same spot every day.
My results for Week 1:
I had a busy week and didn’t do much online perusing (about 10 minutes, looking on Vipon for something specific), nor did I watch much TV (about 4.5 hours). The majority of my TV was movies, one I don’t recall at the moment (must not’ve been very good), and Flatliners, the original. The other 40 minutes were two pre-bed veg sessions. I used to watch 30 Rock, but it seems to be gone from Netflix forever, so now I watch Rules of Engagement.
As for three ideas a day, I totally rocked this for the first four days, but then I was dry for the next couple days. Either that, or my ideas just weren’t light-bulby enough to remind me to write them down. (In case you were wondering what those first few days’ of ideas were, most of them were for my projects, not worth repeating here.)
As for the zany activities three:
I learned three little-known known facts about Martin Luther King Junior:
(I notice that I did this zany activity without any balking . . . .)
My trip to the thrift store. See, I was serious about the color:
My local thrift store organizes by color.
And this is just the blue-green-yellow section. There was a purple-pink-red-orange section too, plus a whole rack of black and another of white. And then there were the T-shirts. And the men’s and kid’s sections. Not to mention just a bunch of other stuff.
As for my crazy outfit, I don’t feel bad about not finding one. I often wear outfits one might call crazy, such as elephant patterned harem pants, a teal green T-shirt, an orange and blue plaid scarf, a hoodie, and a purple raincoat. That was yesterday’s outfit. I was at the library.
Cookies. So, I made them. Even made the sugar cookie kind. Hot pink frosting and everything. Okay, so they were store-bought–that’s me heeding the resistant complaint about time.
As for shapes, I considered cutting body parts by hand, but big mess = extra work. No thanks. So I used my big tree-shaped cutter.
But then, after making eight giant trees, I had a bit of left-over dough. Not enough for another tree, so . . .
I ended up making a body part after all:
Body-Part Sugar Cookie(Never mind those toasty edges.)
(Ahem. It’s a liver.)
In sum, this week’s apprenticeship was more revealing than I expected. Interesting thing, how much internal debate I had over whether the zany activities three could be prompts rather than directives. This time around, definitely prompts. Does that make me creative or just illustrate that I’m difficult? (Hmph.) Guess time will tell.
Next week, I’ll reveal my Invocation to the Muses and we’ll see how much sense the new zany activities make. She wants me to paint my nails ten different colors . . .
See you then!
Advertisements Share this:
