This is for you, just in case you want to get to know me better. I keep a file in iTunes that I call "Love Songs." They're not love songs literally, they're just songs that I love. These are the last ten songs from that list:
1. Get Ur Freak On (Missy Elliot)--I just love Missy Elliott.
People sing around
Now people gather round
now people jump around
Go, get your freak on
2. City with No Children (Arcade Fire)--I tend to pick one Arcade Fire at a time and listen to it obsessively until it loses it's power. This one has the wonderful lines: I feel like I've been living in/ A city with no children in it
3. She Moves On (Paul Simon)--
She says, "Maybe these emotions are
As near to love as love will ever be."
So I agree
Then the moon breaks
She takes the corner
that's all she takes
She moves on
4. Born Never Asked (Laurie Anderson)--
You were born
and so you're free
So happy birthday
Ah, making playlists is tiring. The Brain is not in a list making mood today. It's been a strange week, I think. My stepfather, for example, decided fall off a ladder and break eight ribs and crack one of his vertebrae. That happened a couple of days ago. My aunt hurt her back late last week making or moving adobe. And this evening I feel like the hunchback of Notre Dame after co-teaching a pottery class this afternoon. (I spent a lot of time hunching over students' wheels and my back is now killing me.)
Strange, no? All these recent back injuries.
Teaching and Can-Do-Ness
Teaching the class was very interesting. I'm teaching with a woman who throws much, much differently than me and since she does the demos, I bite my tongue while she shows students how to do things that I would never do. Still, we get along really well and I enjoy working with her. Anyway of the five students today, four had never touched clay, and one--the one who had two lessons under her belt from ten years ago--sat down and announced before we started that she definitely couldn't do it. That attitude makes me almost as crazy as when people say that they're not creative. If you walk in with a defeated attitude, then the clay knows it and will not be so inclined to work with you.
It's funny, but I had a fairly fast rise in my throwing skills over the past year simply because I would find someone on youtube who had filmed themselves making something I wanted to make. I would watch them, thinking: I can do that. Then I would go into the studio and sit down at a wheel and do it. There was never any doubt in my mind that I wasn't as good as those other potters, or that I couldn't do what they could do. I just thought, oh, that's how you do it. Then I went and did it and it worked every time.
So when someone walks into the studio and says they can't do it, I'm like, well let me just take this cleaver and hack off one of your hands. Then you'll have a real reason for not being able to do this. (Although now that I say that, one of the most talented potters I've seen on youtube is, in fact, one-handed, after having removed his hand with some fireworks as a young boy. So even one-handed-ness is not an excuse for not being able to do it.)
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