A Game Called Live Forever

So I'm sure you've been waiting to hear how I did on the pathophysiology exam I took last week. I got a very high A, once again the highest grade in the class (three out of three tests). This is by design. That means that I go into the final with a slightly better than 99% average and with enough extra credit under my belt that I can get a 40% on the final exam and still get an A in the class. This is a system that I've honed over many years to keep myself from going crazy during finals. Amortize the crazy, I always say.

So there was that.

I'm hanging out with Crunch this week. We spent the day together not studying. (Why?) Instead we napped, watched old episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and spent some time out in the studio.

In the evening, Dave came and we went out for Indian food for dinner. We had half orders of chana masala and aloo gobi and full order of vegetable chauchau to share and I got chicken tikka masala. We also had rice and nan. It was very tasty and I ate too, too much.

We came back to the studio via the fizzy drink store, of course, and we loaded a kiln. Actually Dave loaded it while I shlepped work because I was so full of Indian food that I probably would have upchucked if I had tried to lean over into the kiln to load the bottom. It's all cone 6 glaze ware, Dave's stuff. We'll fire it off on Sunday and have new work to marvel over on Monday.

After that, I worked for awhile on my new sculpture. She's drying out fast and I have yet to put the arms and head on. I ended up having to cut off part of the leather-hard shoulders to make them wider. I hate cutting into a piece like that, but sometimes it has to be done. I dread making the arms because it means coil-building downward, which makes me feel a bit crazy. And worse, they're capped off with hands, which...I don't even know. I'm planning on making the hands skeletal, which means wiring up the bones, which is about the limit of what The Brain will allow. (I've only made two other pairs of skeletal hands. I like them. I like the way they look and I know that getting good at them is a matter of practicing, so I'll keep making them.)

Anyway, enough about that.

Did you hear about Prince? Of course you did. Everyone has. Dave's company has a huge office in Minneapolis, where Prince is from and where he lived and died, and Dave was telling me that the people in the Minneapolis office are so sad about Prince. Many of them wore purple to mark his passing. Did you?

Here's a poem:

 Makeup

By Dora Malech

My mother does not trust

women without it.

What are they not hiding?

Renders the dead living

and the living more alive.

Everything I say sets

the clouds off blubbering

like they knew the pretty dead.

True, no mascara, no evidence.

Blue sky, blank face. Blank face,

a faithful liar, false bottom.

Sorrow, a rabbit harbored in the head.

The skin, a silly one-act, concurs.

At the carnival, each child's cheek becomes

a rainbow. God, grant me a brighter myself.

Each breath, a game called Live Forever.

I am small. Don't ask me to reconcile

one shadow with another. I admit—

paint the dead pink, it does not make

them sunrise. Paint the living blue,

it does not make them sky, or sea,

a berry, clapboard house, or dead.

God, leave us our costumes,

don't blow in our noses,

strip us to the underside of skin.

Even the earth claims color

once a year, dressed in red leaves

as the trees play Grieving.