bad metaphor

Motorcyclist: “Oh lah dee dah, I am just so grateful to have a special spot for mopeds and motorcycles that I will not use that spot and instead TAKE UP A PERFECTLY GOOD SPOT NEXT TO THAT ONE.”

Me: I am thankful my boyfriend has one of those fancy phones that can take pictures, so that I can document this injustice.

Happy turkey day! Hope the wheeled denizens of your town are not total assholes!

- Half-written thank you notes
- Birthday cards
- Old homework assignments and notes from college (in case I need justification for an allegorical relationship between obesity and Southern race relations in “Light in August” handy)
- Unopened utility bills (accessed and paid entirely online)
- Stack of New Yorker issues that I will totally get around to reading one of these days
- Corpses of aborted art projects
- Ticket stubs to movies I don’t recall seeing
- Inkless pens
- Leadless pencils
- Mystery objects that someday may prove absolutely vital to the functioning of something else (“if only I hadn’t thrown away that peculiarly shaped doodad!”)
- $23.07 in pennies
- Out-of-tune guitar
- Diploma

Since I just got back from Baltimore, I have to plug my favorite little museum ever, the American Visionary Art Museum. This little folk-art museum features artists who are self-taught and have outsider perspectives; oftentimes the artists are institutionalized or suffer other various societal obstacles (the first time I visited, the ratio of artists to psychiatric disorders seemed to be 80% schizophrenia, 20% PTSD). Every time I go there, they have fantastic collections and new perspectives – I can get fatigued with museums, even contemporary galleries, but I am always impressed with what they have at AVAM.

The art can range from the very rudimentary (rough crayon drawings on butcher paper) to the elaborate (huge triptychs made entirely of matchsticks). They can range from silly (giant poodles and quilts proudly displaying bad puns) to depressing and downright sad. My favorite piece in their permanent collection is this beautifully eloquent sculpture of an emaciated figure, carved from a single boll of applewood. The artist was a nameless British tuberculosis patient who had never previously sculpted anything in his life. He had been inspired by a fallen applewood tree on the institution premises, and created his first and only work shortly before his death.

Right now they have a great exhibit called “The Marriage of Art, Science and Philosophy,” featuring a number of installations with moving parts, lights and sound – what can I say, I am a sucker for multidimensional art. But the most astonishing feature is an artist whose chosen medium is pencils – and by that I do not mean he does pencil drawings. The artist actually sculpts the graphite part of the pencil into various objects, using nothing more than a razor blade. There is a pencil topped with a very tiny and flawlessly sculpted bust of Elvis, a series in which he sculpts the entire alphabet on top of twenty-six pencils, and a pair of pencils connected at the tops through a tiny graphite chain of links. Even though he apparently did not use a magnifying glass to sculpt them (!), you have to use a magnifying glass to appreciate the sheer mind-boggling amount of refinement it takes to do these. These sculptures can take him years to make, and if any mistakes are made in the process they go to the “Cemetary,” which we viewed (I honestly couldn’t spot most of these errorswithout the magnifying glass). No, his bio didn’t list any specified mental disorder, like some of the other artists, but I’m surprised he wasn’t featured in the room labeled “Obsessive Compulsive.”

If you are in the area, go see these – and other marvelous works of folk art – at the AVAM, just off the Inner Harbor!

Back in town from a brief visit to my sister’s house in Baltimore, which, according to the stenciled benches and dumpsters around the Harbor, is “The Greatest City in America.” Aww.

My sister decided to throw a little dinner party this weekend, and since I and two other carnivores were coming (her husband is one of those dreaded vegetarians), thought it would be fun to make egg rolls. I tried to warn her that, though delicious, egg rolls are usually a pain in the ass to make, but she was up to the challenge – or so she thought.

“How did Mom do this shit everyday*?” we wondered, after being on our feet preparing food for eight hours. Granted, in the time that it takes one of us to roll one egg roll, Mom could do ten and also prevent three other dishes from resulting in surefire disaster. Still, we spoiled kids never knew how good we had it, until we had to do it ourselves.

My sister’s friends rolled in around 7:00, shocked that we were apparently cooking for the entire Chinese army. One of her friends, a hilarious and very blunt girl from Ethiopia, asked what I did, and I mentioned that I worked for a university in Kansas.

“Kansas?” she said, wrinkling her nose. “What are you still doing there? Isn’t it time to move on?” This within five minutes of meeting her!

“Oh, I know a guy from Kansas,” said the other friend. “Maybe you know him! I think he said he lived in Manhattan?”

“Manhattan’s actually an hour and a half away from me,” I said. “I live kind of by Kansas City, in the northeastern part of the state.”

“Oh, the northeast – isn’t that where all the people live?”

So true, and yet – grr. Kansas may be flyover country, but it’s my home, dammit. And we’re not as bland as North Dakota, right? At least we have The Wizard of Oz (and endless “Where’s Toto” jokes almost everywhere else I visit).

In fact, we have lots of things going for us in Kansas. For instance, we have the best barbecue (okay, maybe we technically only have half a claim to that barbecue, but still). We have the best little insane small folk-art town, ever. The world’s biggest steam shovel is here! As is the World’s Largest Ball of Twine (suck it, Darwin, MN!).

…Ah, who am I kidding. At least we don’t have the cheek to declare ourselves the Greatest State in America.

* – No, we didn’t have egg rolls everyday (else we’d be dead of heart attacks by this point), but we certainly ate well for dinner almost every night growing up. Except the nights when Dad would cook his patented lima bean crock pot soup, or his Manwich sloppy joes. Gross.