'Cause we all know art is hard When we don't know who we are

I am sharing this today mostly because I like the lyric I used as the title of this post. I concurrently swear that I have never heard this band until recently and I have always known them. They feel familiar, like they soundtracked hazy memories of time passed in ethereal post-Civil War crackerboxes and late model cars. For as much as I can relate to these lyrics, I could go either way as to if it is reflective of a piece of my soul or exactly what I would write to a certain musician in my life.

Musicians. It's the STD they don't tell you about in health class but that's a topic for a different post.

This post...this post is about me randomly sharing that my renewed creativity is a sign to me that I am on the right path. There's volumes I could write and will write someday about all the twists and turns and whatnot that lead me to letting it all go for lack of a better word. I have struggled with a life-long lack of confidence that kept me from fully sharing what I was fully expressing. When I went off to college once upon a time, in a galaxy oh so far away, I didn't appreciate what it meant to be one of 6 chosen to be in the incoming design/tech class nor did I quite fathom what the financial backing behind that meant.

As of late, when I ponder with friends what I should be  when I grow up and everyone points to some sort of path with a creative tinge. Ffs, I had a random encounter with my 10th grade English teacher, whom I adored, who after all these years made the comment that she was surprised that I wasn't writing and getting paid for it.

Art is hard when you don't know who you are. Or perhaps better stated, art is hard when you think your voice doesn't matter. Art is hard when so many voices keep asking you how you are going to take care of your kid. Art is hard when it's the mortar filling the cracks of your day as an office flunky. Art is hard when you have dealt with continual rejection. Art is hard when you feel like you can't be who you really are, can't use your authentic voice. Art is hard when you and your husband have "Voices Carry" moments about your self-expression.

Well, art was hard because I made it that way. I listened to voices that weren't mine and took paths I was never meant to take. I tried to shy away and defer comment but those who know me and even people I meet, they keep seeing the spark. I am funny. I am thoughtful. I am creative. Sorry, I forgot about that. Sorry, I got swallowed by the sea of misguided adulting.

Sorry I have to go to work because I really want to write today. I want to write in a manic, frenetic state of scribble I haven't felt in a long time. God help my co-workers today, I am a artist in need of an audience and I will give six shows an hour today because it mother fucking makes me happy.

...or does it explode...

I am not sure what has me thinking of the Langston Hughes poem "Harlem" this morning. Well, not entirely. I mean here we are December 16, 2014, the year is winding down and we are all like kittens ready to pounce on a new ball of yarn and hopeful that 2015 will bring less tangles and more unabashed fun and fortune. I am no different.

I'd like to put the last roughly 390 days of my life through a sifter and shake out all the ickiness, keeping the loveliness and working toward being a better version of me going forward. Not that the ickiness is entirely bad per se. I have grown this year in ways that I never thought imaginable and regret that God had to get my attention that way that He did.

I still believe. I believe that God has great things in store for me and my family. I believe that he has ever so much more than we could ask for or imagine right around the corner. I believe that he does in fact wish to prosper Ryan, Jordan, Wesley and myself and not to harm us. I believe that the best, the absolute best, is yet to come.

I heard a sermon recently about transition and I really liked what was said about the pain of transition. It's like you are a caterpillar. You know you can't crawl anymore but you are not quite ready to fly. That's a lot how I feel right now. Believing that breakthrough is right around the corner BUT not everything is in alignment so I wait, dragging myself along on my little caterpillar feet dreaming about the wings I am going to have when I finally bust out of this God-tight cocoon. And for anyone who just read that and said to themselves, Um, Jen, if you are in a cocoon, you can't be crawling around if you're in a cocoon...I am going to throw an extra prayer up for you. Stop getting in the way of your own blessing with limited thinking.

I have experienced shades of black in the last 390 days of my life that I didn't know existed...and I have taken college level art classes! But by the grace of God, I woke up this morning in my beautiful house with my two beautiful kids with breakfast to serve and coffee to drink and car to drive the boy to school in and ever so much more than other people have and I am blessed to have been so well provided for by God these past 390 days. Some day, I am going to write it all out to share. All the ways that God has taken these shades of black and filled them with vibrant, living color. Blessed and favored...but not without struggle, not without worry, not without some days of completely spastic angst and a steady stream of F-bombs in my internal (and sometimes external) monologue. I have chosen to believe that God can and will restore everything in my life that needs to be restored. I have chosen to believe that God will fight for me and that he will deliver me and my family. I have chosen to believe that there is nothing that is impossible with Him.

I don't know about you but I intend to spend the next 14 days getting myself into a super spring-loaded position so that I can explode out of the starting block into 2015 that makes every tear, every sorrow, every confusion, all the grief, all the loss, all the stupidity, all the anger, all the everything that seems like every imaginable plague has befallen me all at once, suddenly seem insignificant in the glow of what it all unfolded into.

Explosions are messy but it beats imploding and sinking and living in despair.

So, what ark aren't you building?

I know.  I know. I don't post for a whole month and then when I do post it's got a weird title. What ark aren't you building, yep, it's a reference to Noah...and his ark which he apparently spent 120 years building while everyone looked at him like he was, er, a little crazy.

I am asking this because I am asking myself this.

To be honest, I have been in something of the Port-o-Jon of life lately. My self-esteem. My confidence. "My ability to deal rationally with my disconcerted precarious emotional situation." So many factors and facets and shrug...I don't know. I get discouraged very easily any more. I don't expect life to be easy but this latest round of butt-whoopins has been more than I can take. I know I am not very much fun to be around lately. It's not my intention. It's just how things are working out lately.

So, anyway, while I was working on Friday (it's really still today to me but I don't want to get too confusing) I started thinking about something. It's one of those thoughts that has come up before. A bad penny of a thought you might say, and it's really starting to look like my ark. The specificity of it might as well be in cubits. But it's nothing I know anything about so I don't even know what the hey I am supposed to do with any of it.

Plus, this  whole idea makes me think a little bit of "Lollilove" and it kinda makes me wonder if it isn't just a little idealistic. Oh, but then I just see such a bigger picture. And the what-ifs start rolling in. And just how possibly explosive the appeal of it might be. Oh my gosh.

Sigh.

Maybe I should just start working on the things that come to me...repeatedly. Maybe you should too. Maybe immediate gratification, immediate acknowledgement, immediate glory isn't what you (or I) need to keep persevering. Maybe it is 120 years of hard work and seeming a little off. I don't know. I really don't. If I did, I probably would be doing something more worthwhile with my time.

My dampened spirits are making it hard for me to really live anymore. Maybe I need to start working on this idea and trusting that I will all come to fruition as it is envisioned. It certainly is as monumental of a task as building an ark. I don't have to collect animals, but it would involve a lot of human interaction. I am willing...if I could keep my "pragmatic" mind out of the equation.

So while I wrestle with this...what is YOUR ark? What thing keeps reoccurring to you to do? What is your calling that you keep shrugging off because it seems too hard, too arduous, too long a time frame?

If money were no object, what would you do?

That question in some form or another seems have popped up in my life lately. Partly good friends trying to help me focus, partly because of all that half a billion dollar lottery madness a few weeks back. I hate that question. I feel like Peter in Office Space when people ask me that. I never had an answer that's why I am blogging from my kitchen.

Being the smarty butt that I am though, I am grateful for that movie because I am not afraid to answer that question with "I'll tell you what I'd do, man: two chicks at the same time, man" I can't help it. It's funny and evasive. We, and by we, I mean my husband and I, used to watch that movie all the time it seems like. One of us would have a bad week and next thing you know it's Friday night and we're curled up together laughing at TPS reports and art imitating reality.

I guess when I really start to think about it, there are things other than nothing but they seem so I dunno. I don't have the background or knowledge to run a tourist attraction, specifically a working farm or campground. Actually, maybe both together. Some sort of retreat, yeah, I know crazy. Then there's what I can only really voice as be an oracle. Heck, I've already got the kitchen so I am half way there, right?


I am not really passionate about anything in particular. I think the last time I was super obsessive about something every inch of my wall was covered with Joey McIntyre and Donnie Wahlberg. I enjoy things but I don't really live or breathe anything. Some people think that's a problem. I am starting to see that it's listening to those people that's the problem.

Life's too short to be obsessive, you miss a lot when you obsess.

Like if suddenly, I had a million dollars...I'd pay off everything, sock some away for the kids' college, take a vacation or two, and see where life took me from there. I'd probably give quite a bit to a couple of places too. Oh, yeah, that's another thing that I would do if money were no object be some sort of venture capitalist/philanthropist. 

I don't know. Seems like if you look at things that sound cool to me I keep wanting to give it away which probably explains a lot about my ill spent youth too. Let's see, entertain, educate, inspire, advise, give away money. Wait a second! That sounds an awful lot like being a mom. So, maybe the real reason I have such a hard time with that question is that I am already doing it, so everything is superfluous.

Why I keep setting an income goal of $37,500

I am prone to all sorts of weirdness and craziness and I guess, magical thinking. I wrote out income goals for this year. I have revised the methods but not the number. I have set a goal of $37,500.

It doesn't seem like much, but even adjusted for inflation, it's actually probably more than I have ever made in my life. I say probably because (accounting for inflation) I did have a job at one point that was paying me "mileage" to run meetings. I couldn't tell you the amount but I can tell you that it far exceeded the standard mileage rate at the time, especially considering that the distance being driven every month was negligible.

Anyway, I had read an article that a survey had been conducted and that 75,000 seemed to be the magical happiness number. I can't find the exact article but this one explains it a bit. I realize that some people would have seen that and set 75,000 as their goal.  Like I said, I can't find the original piece that I had read but I didn't take it that way. I took it as 75k total of which my half would be 37,500. God bless my magical thinking!

Like I said though, I don't think that I have ever made that much (accounting for inflation) in my life. Plus, half of 75k is 37.5k but my other half will exceed that easily. It's a point of fact, not a brag. So, when I hit my number, our number won't exactly be 75k.

I don't really want more than I can handle but I do want to be comfortable. I have never been someone who desires great wealth or the finer things or any sort of bragging rights to anything. I just want to be happy. I just want to live my life to the fullest and so that their actually are people that might be inclined to say nice things about me at my funeral.

I know that some of my stumbling blocks to success are geographic. I am working on it. But really, my whole life I never wanted a desk job...even when I had one. Sigh. I just want to go to bed every night without that worry. I think it is hard because for awhile it was there, and I dunno if I didn't express enough gratitude for being financially sound or what but it all got ripped away and there was nothing I could do about it. Well, except for get back on the market which has failed miserably.

So, yeah, I set my income goal to 37,500 because I want to be happy.