No Time For Pictures Even (Happy New Year)

It's about 6:30 a.m. now and I'm up because I'm supposed to go with a couple of friends to walk their dog in a little bit. I'm house- and dog-sitting for them next week and I want the dog to get used to me at the end of the leash during walks. It's too early, though, and it's still dark and cold outside. Neither The Brain nor I do dark and cold, so I'm already scheming ways to put off going over there so early, like pleading dark and cold.

Anyway, Dave and I went to the studio again last night to throw mugs. I threw another eighteen mugs and he threw, I think, eight or ten more. (He was working on other things for awhile.) After we came home and had dinner (quesadillas with beans and salsa and sour cream), I watched a few handle making videos on youtube.

Potters are weird.

Let me explain: I watch a handful of types of videos on youtube, makeup how-to videos and pottery videos (and a few happy baby videos from time to time--but we'll come back to that).

The makeup how-to videos are fun; the women and men who make them tend to be very earnest and helpful (despite the fact that they refer to themselves as "makeup gurus" without a trace of irony). They're sure that, at some point in your life, you're going to need to know how to put on false eyelashes, say, or apply a coat of glitter to your freshly lipsticked mouth and they often treat this information the way that someone might explain (or try to explain) how to make ceiling joists. I mean, they're straightforward in the way that some of those guys on those carpentry shows that used to be on PBS were. Remember that show "This Old House"? Like that. Or like that carpentry guy, the young one with the cap and moustache, who used to use no electric tools and who cut himself about six times per show? Remember him? Well, youtube makeup gurus are like that.

Potters, not so much. Despite pottery being closer to woodworking than to eyeshadow application, youtube potters tend to be puffy little prideful things, some of them. For example, lots of them want to talk at you. It may take them three minutes to put a handle on a mug, but their videos are twenty minutes long because they think they're imparting the wisdom of the ages, or the philosophy behind handles or something. Some of them are in it for the show-off factor--though luckily those types tend toward making things quickly. One guy (who seems relatively normal in most of his videos) will often make these show-off-y vids where he throws two mugs in three minutes or throws a giant pot really fast. (Maybe he can't help it; his father is the only one-handed potter--and a successful one, who has made his living all his life as a potter--I've ever seen or heard of, and he's very skilled. I mean, how do you top that?) Another guy speeds up his videos so it looks like he's throwing super fast, then he shows you the two hundred cups he made that day.

Potters are weird.

Anyway, so yes, I watched how to pull handles on mugs. (Pulling handles is part of the process of putting handles on mugs; I'll explain another time if you're at all interested.)

But there's also this thing:

Writing that paragraph about youtube makeup gurus made me think of an email I got this morning from OK Cupid, the online dating site. I registered for OK Cupid about a year ago, when one of the potters at the studio put himself on the site and he wanted to know what I thought about his online profile. Turns out that I had to register for the site in order to see his profile, so I put in some basic, bogus info and looked at his profile (shake head sadly; no wonder he's single) and then I forgot all about OK Cupid. Until this morning when I got an email wishing me a Happy 40th Birthday!

Grrrr. I always enter my birthday as either 1/1/01 (because it amuses me to be over a 100 years old) or as 1/1/71 (the actual year I was born) whenever I register for anything online. So that's not so weird. What's weird is that David, completely out of the blue, reminded me of the fact that I'm turning 40 in 2011 after he wished me a happy new year on new year's eve.

My birthday is in August, by the way, eight months from now. I'm barely getting used to being 39, *FFS.

He tried to play it off, like, oh! Forty's great! You'll love it! But that's like telling me that my favorite jeans make my ass look huge--then trying to play it off like he likes huge asses, so isn't it great that my ass is huge. That is not a thing you should do.

And about those happy baby videos:

Get this: I had a dream last night that I was talking to crows! Three of them had built their nests in a tree outside my kitchen window and two of the nests were blown out of the tree in a storm. They came inside and we had a conversation about the nests and then I went outside to help them look for their eggs, which were mostly smashed and ruined on the brick patio. One of the crows, a female, was walking around, picking up the eggs or just touching them, and discarding the ruined ones. I wanted to apologize to her, but she was so matter-of-fact about the whole endeavor that I said nothing and the discomfort of saying nothing woke me up out of the dream.

That's not Freudian at all, is it?

Yes I'm glad to be hitting forty, but mostly that's because I'm glad--very, very glad--to be at the tail end of my reproductive years. But that doesn't mean that I don't have to cycle through all the shit that goes with being at the tail end of my reproductive years. I think that's what the crows were trying to tell me.

And just a couple of days ago I scoffed my way through a story in the New York Times about a woman in her early 40's who, after six tries at in-vitro fertilization, finally settled on hiring two surrogate mothers and an egg donor to acquire what she calls her "twiblings" (twin siblings, related via the same egg donor and the woman's husband, but carried by different surrogate mothers). This was not a cheap endeavor, by the way. Aside from the doctor's visits, IVF can run about $13,000 per attempt (so there goes $78,000 down the tubes) and surrogate mothers can cost from $10,000 to $40,000 (that's per surrogate and she had two, so there's another $20,000 to $80,000). I think she splashed out another $5,000 to $10,000 on the egg donor, too. Plus the cost of the hospital births? You're looking at at anywhere from $110,00 to $200,000. You have to want it, I guess. (In case you're wondering: She could afford this desperate act because her husband hit it big when he sold his tech business.)

Would I ever spend the money on a thing like that? Well, no. Clearly, I don't want children (and I don't even really understand people who do), but if I had a spare quarter mil laying around, I would spend it traveling the world. Selfish but satisfying--which I guess describes most baby-making. So there's that.

Okay. It's after 7:00. (I texted to say I was running late.) I have to get dressed and go walk a dog.

Happy New Year, by the way.

*FFS = For fuck's sake.