sometimes i think gravity is a pity

When I look back at the event I pulled off last weekend, it's really hard to believe. When I was reaching out to various agencies in November, I was intending to plan for 2024. I certainly didn't expect one agency to respond that the author they represent was already going to be in our state in February, and she was open to tacking an extra day onto her visit to speak at our public garden!!

Our institution really isn't set up for hosting big speakers, so I practically built the process from scratch in less than four months. From convincing the CEO/President, to communicating with agents, to coordinating a room reservation, to working with Marketing on publicity, to finding a sponsor, to testing the AV, to planning a pre-talk luncheon for community leaders, to coordinating scholarship tickets, to working with Retail to get copies of the book, to writing an professional introduction, to coordinating transportation, to assisting the author when she arrived, to making a recording for staff, to invoicing, etc. etc. etc... I don't want to say I did it all, because no one at a non-profit works in a vacuum. (But I kind of did it all.)

In the end, we had 130 people in the room to hear Carolyn Finney, author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. And many of them were first-time attendees of a class/program at our institution!

I'm really proud of myself! I'm also really tired. It's been three days, and I still feel like I haven't fully recovered. On the one hand, it makes perfect sense. You don't run (at times literally) on a single granola bar for an entire day and then feel great the morning after... But I wish I felt energized by the atmosphere and inspired to do more. Sadly, I really wasn't able to absorb any of the intellectual joys of hosting an author I admire because I was too busy running to grab extra chairs and all that. I didn't even get to say hello to my parents, who had driven 3 hours to support my efforts.

Okay, okay, okay... but what matters is the community, and I've only heard good things! We sold over 70 copies of her book, which is amazing and really important (should be required) reading! My old director (the one who laid me off during the pandemic lol) was there, and she got to see me thriving and pulling off miracles. And my new director and all of Leadership Team (our equivalent of C-level management) was mega impressed. So I'd love it if my brain would let me be happy about it! Or relax for a minute! Because it's over! And I did it!

(It is truly too much to ask.)

I realized the other day that part of the reason I've been so antsy and tired is that my Mohs surgery is tomorrow. I hadn't forgotten, but I hadn't had time to dwell on it until the Carolyn Finney event was over. It's not an intensive surgery in the sense that I'll be incapacitated, but I'm still anxious. I think I've done the best I can do. I bought some groceries and care supplies, changed my sheets and washed my purple plush blanket, and spent some time at the ice rink as a treat... I even asked friends to send me letters to give me something to look forward to, and my friend H sent the best thing!!

It's not often someone speaks my love language so directly back at me. I really try not to let myself think of Jiang Cheng as cute or delightful, but these stickers (perhaps because they were so thoughtful and came when I needed them) really pulled at my heartstrings. I mean, look at how little he is!! I'm besotted! I have them next to my bed, and I might even bring them with me in my fanny pack tomorrow to look at while I'm waiting, ahahaha.

Anyway, fingers crossed and here's hoping the surgery goes quickly, and I don't have to go in for too many rounds before they find clear margins. I'm not sure I have it in me for a 4-6 hour experience...

I don't have the patience, precision, or practice for fiber arts, but I love them in theory. When I worked at the living history farm, all my skeins of yarn were so bad I got to keep them rather than having to sell them in the museum store, but I kept spinning yarn anyway. The same goes for natural dyes. I've never been able to get the result I want, but that hasn't stopped me from playing around.

My first attempts at dyeing were at the farm, in a big pot outside over a fire. "You can pick any color you want but pink," my co-worker said when we offered to dye his socks. We tried madder root, but something was off either in our dye bath or the material of his socks, and instead of a rusty red, he ended up with... well... pinky salmon. (In hindsight, I'm not sure we used a mordant...) I got a do-over with madder when I worked at the parks and was in charge of the heritage skills event. I dyed some of my old yarn a beautiful, deep orange, and with that success under my belt, I turned my sights on cochineal.

If you're into nonfiction, I highly recommend A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire by Amy Butler Greenfield. Cochineal was always fun to talk about at the farm because you got to shock people by telling them it was in their modern cosmetics and food (it's a dried beetle), but this book made me want to know it first hand. I ordered some, crushed it with a mortar and pestle, dropped it in the bath... AND DO YOU KNOW WHAT COLOR I GOT? Well. I got pink. Because plants/animals have so many different chemical compounds, the way they react to their environment is highly variable. The type of pot, the type of mordant, whether the water is soft or hard, etc. etc. All of that can change the tones and shades you get out of your dyestuff. I never fully mastered cochineal before I was unceremoniously laid off during the pandemic, but when my friend went to Mexico, she shared a video with me of an artisan working with cochineal that got me closer to red. Fun fact: make the dyebath more acidic and you get a more vibrant red; make it more basic and it veers toward purple. Another fun fact: I think cochineal smells kind of sweet and pleasant when it's simmering.

(There was an interlude around the same time where I also experimented with making my own black walnut ink, but it weirdly didn't coincide with my era of making my own quill pens, so it didn't yield too many exciting results. I'm pretty sure I left the remaining ink in my old office after they...you know, you know...)

Anyway, this is all to preface the main point of this entry, which is to say that my new natural dye adventure has been in indigo. Synthetic aniline dyes are molecularly identical to natural indigo and more widespread, so most of my past experience has either been natural indigo as an overdye (on things like onion skins or goldenrod to brighten/deepen the green) or synthetic dye kits. I used a dye kit with one group of kids in summer camp, and we made a lot of mistakes. I was too ginger with the vat, so afraid of allowing oxygen in that I didn't let the kids massage the dye into their pieces or soak them for long. (And then I dried them in the sun, oops.) I also didn't realize how non-aggressive indigo is as a dye. It doesn't penetrate more than the first layers of a fiber, so when your ties/folds are too tight, only the parts that touch the dye directly will be blue, and the rest will be white. This allows for some cool stuff to happen with block patterns, but it can also lead to major disappointment when you go to unwrap your bundle.

Today, I taught an adult workshop with a vat of natural indigo (from Dyer's Knotweed, which doesn't have as high a concentration of indican in the leaves as True Indigo, but can be grown in our general region), and I've been really stressed about it for weeks. Not only is working with natural indigo a more difficult process than a synthetic kit, I'm still in the learning/experimenting stages, so I don't have the consistency of a master dyer. There's so much that can go wrong, and adult learners tend to have high expectations for themselves, which can be easily disappointed. (Hello, I am an adult learner.) To mitigate some of these expectations but still encourage them to have fun, I set the price of the class low, I was open about being a newbie myself, and I framed the class as an opportunity to (essentially) fuck around and find out. I think some of them still had higher expectations than I would have liked, but I really emphasized that, no matter what happened, this would to prepare them for success if they ever took a class with a master dyer or if they want to try a kit at home.

Even still, I've been nervous ever since they took their pieces home this afternoon. Because the classroom only had two sinks, I gave them instructions to do the final untying and rinsing at home and asked them to send pictures when they were finished. I still had a relatively healthy vat after they left, so I quickly threw together two dye bundles for myself, but neither of them turned out well! I know a few of the class participants used similar techniques, so I've been worried that I accidentally misled them. Immediately, I understood why what I tried hadn't worked, and I wish I'd been clearer about the fact that indigo literally only dyes what it touches. If anything is clumped or scrunched too far inside the outer folds, it will be blocked from the dye. Every time this happens, I think: I should try dipping a gradient pattern with no ties. And every time I forget until the next time. (Alas...)

My friend, Emily, is an artist who often teaches adult workshops, and she saw me panicking on social media and sent me the sweetest message about a time she tried something with an adult class that didn't work perfectly. She reminded me that persisting through disappointment is an important part of learning and improving when you're a beginner, so any experience, whether it's successful or not, is valuable. I've been struggling with negativity and perfectionism a lot (this week has been especially hard), so this was a good call back to what matters.

Okay, well, I've been up since 4:30 a.m. (to prep the dye vat and give it time to mature before the class), so I'm going to bring this to a close. If you want to hear more about the actual process of dyeing with indigo or some cool indigo facts, let me know! It's antimicrobial! It's an insect repellant! Okay, okay, okay... I really will stop now...

(Just kidding! One more... This was one of my favorite sources I stumbled across, and I can't wait to go back and read it more carefully. Alaro: Indigo & the Power of Women in Yorubaland by Stephen Hamilton )

I could go on... :)

In March 2022, I wrote in my journal that "nothing seems worth remembering," and it's true that I didn't do much remembering this year. Between buying a new car after my accident, catching Covid, Oliver's kidney diagnosis, the giant blackhole of summer camps, turning 32, moving offices (again), starting a new job (again), learning I'm laughably vitamin deficient, demoralizing results at work, and the rest of the misery soup I've been floating in, recording anything ~for posterity~ felt pretty pointless. In many ways, it still feels pointless, but I've done a bit of last-minute introspection to help me leave 2022 with a better sense of what the fuck happened, and I was surprised by what I realized.

With the help of The Gentle Tarot deck, I did a seven-card reading on the year past and the year to come. I was a bit skeptical at first, because it was the most positive spread I've ever drawn, and I had no idea how it was going to apply to my life. Turns out, things are A Little Bit Good, Maybe.

( CUE LAST-MINUTE INSTROSPECTION )

One thing that brought me marked levels of joy and frustration this past year (as opposed to general flat malaise) was the reading goal I set for myself. I went in with the idea to try to read 52 books this year, knowing that I almost certainly would not achieve it. I wanted to see how close I could get, and it turns out, I read a lot of books and only liked a few of them. Which is a useful reminder for next year's goal that quality over quantity often holds true.

I'm posting the list, organized by how much I enjoyed the books, but without much commentary. Partly because (see above) I can barely remember anything that happened this year. Partly because it feels unnecessary. If you want to hear more or talk about any of these, feel free to ask!

( 2022 BOOK LIST )

Anyway, thanks for bearing with me! That's a wrap on 2022~

Okay, this is it. I'm (tentatively) committing to Dreamwidth again. There's something comforting about seeing the little icon I pilfered from my old LiveJournal, from a manga series I doubt anyone remembers, although it did have a little resurgence a few years ago because the author finally finished it and they released a couple of movies to wrap it up. I half-heartedly watched the movies in 2020, but there were too many new characters that I didn't care about, and, hey, there were already so many Shinsengumi members to keep track of, anyway! But, about a week ago, I started reading the final manga chapters, and I did start to cry.

There are so many iterations of Okita Souji out there, but this is the one I connected to the most, and you really get to see him die. It's both amazing closure and also something I didn't expect to be so painful... I mean, I'm pretty sure I watched a series where Okita turns into a vampire or some shit. For all the Peacemaker series dabbled in the supernatural, the way they handled his death was so visceral and human.

And all of this was inspired because I was watching Ouran High School Host Club while I was embroidering some gifts for people, and they had a Shinsengumi cosplay that really did not have to call high-school-me out like that! It's true! Apparently, I'm still a real maniac!





Anyway, speaking of embroidery, I think I've only completed three projects this year. I finished Cao Weining in February, and then I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything else until the Eastern helmock and Virginia opossum minis I made last month. I've been working on a new fandom project the past few days, just in time for Twitter to burn and for me to have nowhere to share it...

Well, I suppose I've been fairly spoiled since I started my account. I remember the first Jiang Cheng I embroidered was when I only had one fandom friend, and I kept sending her, like, text updates throughout the day, and she kept encouraging me. I guess it might soon feel more like that again, or maybe I'll exclusively post finished things on Tumblr to avoid spending too much time there but to still get some dopamine out of my hard work... We'll have to see how I feel. (Tumblr was a Bad Era in the History of Jen,)

In any case! What makes me most excited about finishing this new project is that I can finally do that "your skill in 2020 vs. 2022" meme I've seen fiber artists posting online. I could always use Cao Weining...but (as much as it pains me to say it) there are some flaws in the stitching that I find hard to look at. And I just think it would be really cool to be like "Faceless Jiang Cheng 2020" BAM "Yu Ziyuan + Irises 2022".

Look at me, already dreaming big...
 

( Pics behind cut.... )


Today was a nice day off, although I didn't do much! I woke up at 2am and couldn't fall back asleep, so I read a bit of fanfiction, made myself tea, listened to a podcast, and finally started reading MDZS vol. 3. I've been trying to finish A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention by Rebecca Schiller, but the way she imagines history has been driving me up a wall, so I'm glad I decided to put it down for something more entertaining.

This volume, in particular, includes the only chapters I've already read, so I'm excited to see a slightly more edited translation and also to relive Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian's youth/tortured adolescence. And Yu Ziyuan's in this volume, too. Truly, I am eating well tonight! (Metaphorically. I dropped most of the literal food I was cooking this afternoon.)

There were a few times on Twitter when I posted some thoughts about Jiang Cheng, and a wild stranger appeared to tell me I had poor reading comprehension and tried to school me in canon. I think maybe I took what they were saying too seriously, though. I've been telling people all along not to listen to anything I say because I have "poor media comprehension," but I'm beginning to think those strangers were just being mean, because I'm reading the actual novel now, and, your honor, Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian love each other. So much.

And I don't think I'm dumb for saying it!

I've been more socially engaged with fandom over the past couple of days, and that's been exciting for me, but also anxiety-inducing. I'm posting more. I'm commenting more. I almost did a meme...!

I don't know if I can turn all of that energy into a coherent post, but I did want to mark it down somewhere to look back on later when it inevitably becomes hard for me again. I just want to get a few things down before the intense perfectionism brings me down again. So, I'm going to let this post be a bit disorganized, and I'm going to go as far down a random list of things as I can before I get tired.

1. I want to try answering a few questions off the 31 Days of The Untamed meme that jo_lasalle made and littledust has been doing.

( Day 1 )

2. The meme I did and then deleted (Twitter and my brain are pure chaos together) was about posting WIP file names and inviting people to ask about them. I'm always so afraid of posting things like that, because they require outside participation to function. In my heart, I know no responses probably means bad timing/bad luck with the algorithm. But my brain always manages to convince me that it's because I'm dumb or boring. I did legitimately have fun tracking down all my WIPs, so I thought I'd just post them here. Not because I expect anyone to be interested, but because they're eating a hole in my brain, and I have to do something semi-public with them or I'll never get any peace!

( Does this count as a WIP Wednesday??? )

3. Speaking of fanfiction! I finished a ficlet to fill a MDZS rarepairs prompt, but I'm not sure I'm confident to post it in any way that will link back to an account that is me. My AO3 account isn't linked to my Twitter or Dreamwidth, so I think I'd be comfortable posting it as part of the collection there and then linking to it in an anonymous comment on DW. If I do that, though, I definitely need to get started on my goal of doing a bit of maintenance on the one fic I finished/posted back in September. I reread it a few days ago, and I'm still pleased with the overall idea, but I don't like the title, I don't like the description, and there are just a few annoying inconsistencies/repetitions between the chapters I'd like to clean up before bringing any attention to the account. I don't know anyone to help beta, so it ultimately turned out pretty rough, despite my best efforts... ANYway, I've been meaning to give it a little sprucing up for ages, so this is good motivation!

4. I finished my Xiao Xingchen embroidery gift and sent it to my friend. I got the notification that it had been delivered at the same time that she posted on Twitter about driving home from the grocery store, and my breath literally left my body. It was, like, ten minutes of pure agony before she posted on her account about it, and I could finally relax, because she actually liked it!!

5. I started watching Word of Honor, and I absolutely adore it. Once again, no one specifically recommended it to me, but I did see a Twitter thread comparing Wen Kexing to different flavors of KitKats, and I took the dive. It hasn't consumed my brain in the same way as CQL, but I did watch 21 episodes in less than three days, and I did cry actual tears into my morning tea yesterday. I'm genuinely having fun. Favorite character by far is Gu Xiang. I can't help it. I'm a sucker for a spunky kid in purple.

Okay! I think that's all I can squeeze out of myself for today. More thoughtful, organized posts in the future (maybe)!

Today was tough. Overall, I think I'll remember the better things, like daffodils in the sun, wearing my pretty new mask, being on campus again, my first mocha in a year, blooming witch-hazel, a rare leucistic squirrel, a breakthrough in my research project, etc. Objectively, those things were all very nice. But they didn't fill me up enough to make it through four hours of research in a museum basement and then a 1.5 hour long, in-person interview for a part-time temp job at a park. I was flagging by the time I got home, and it all just went downhill from there.

I tried taking a bath, but the water came out disappointingly cold. 

I tried making dinner, but I'm out of cooking oil.

I gave up on everything and decided to work on my embroidery project, and then I ruined it. 

I honestly think I jinxed it by being so pleased with how it was going and assuming I'd already finished the hardest parts. Faces are hard, and so is trying to figure out the right direction of stitches in jet-black hair. All of that had gone so well that I truly thought I could finish all the filler colors tonight and have it in the mail by tomorrow afternoon...

Alas, the fabric had other plans. I can usually forgive a little wrinkle here or there, but I ended up with a huge wrinkle right across his neck. So, I cut out all the stitches and tried again, but it just kept happening. I'd already cut out those same stitches multiple times due to poor color choices, so maybe the fabric was just fed up with me. I was certainly fed up with it. The seventh or eighth time I went to cut the stitches, I cut too much, and I just couldn't keep going. The stabilizer was shifting and everything was a mess.

I should have known not to work on this tonight. I work better in the morning as a general rule, and I was feeling the same buzzing, frenetic energy I felt when I ruined Jiang Cheng. I was just not in a calm or patient headspace, and I ultimately ended up committing a devastating act of violence with a pair of sewing scissors. 

(And then I absent-mindedly brought those same sewing scissors into the bathroom with me and put toothpaste on them instead of my toothbrush?) 

Anyway, I won't commemorate this tragedy by posting a picture of Xiao Xingchen in my trashcan. It's really horrible. I'm obviously upset. So little good has come up this past year that I rely (probably too much) on finishing these projects and the nice attention they get. It's been especially neat using embroidery to create fanart, because there's that extra layer of feeling like you're giving these characters a spa treatment or something. It requires such close, detailed care, and I just think they deserve that.

But the flipside of that very real emotional high is that every failure hits so hard, and I don't have any solid coping mechanisms at my disposal right now. (All my coping mechanisms are busy with, you know, the Big Stuff.)

It's all going to be fine tomorrow. I just need to talk it out somewhere so I can move on and try again. I'm still really excited about this thing. I still really want to surprise my friend, even if it takes a little longer than I'd hoped. The benefit of using a stabilizer is that I still have the original pattern, so it's not a total loss, and my second Jiang Cheng definitely came out better than the first anyway. I'm gonna drink some water. I'm gonna get some sleep. I'm gonna re-up my supply of the proper greys/whites/silvers. And then Xiao Xingchen is coming back to life whether he likes it or not.

(Xue Yang would be proud.)

In the process of deciding to start a Dreamwidth account, I went deep into the archives and unearthed my old LiveJournal account. I've done this before, and it is always a surprise when I fall in love with my teenaged self. The journal is such a beautiful and wild catalog of my adolescence that I can't help it. I was melodramatic and easily excited, bold and unafraid. The things I loved, I loved without shame. I wrote literally everything down, whether it was the flavor of a cookie I was eating or the length of an orchestra audition or my results at a dance competition. I kept trying to convince myself I was "horny." Honey, baby, sweet child, calm down! I regularly posted original writing, and people commented...or they didn't. Either way, it didn't seem to bother me.

Anyway, I've had this DW account for two days now, and I really wasn't sure what to do with it. How do you drop yourself into writing about a life that has already been ticking away for so long? It seems insurmountably complicated, but I found my very first LJ entry, and it really was as simple as just typing "hello."

So, in an effort to channel some of that rogue, carefree teenaged energy: Hello! I'm Jen!

Seventeen years ago, a bunch of friendly online strangers on an anime forum convinced me to get a LiveJournal, and I really had a great time. It's weird, because I truly thought it was friends from high school who had given me the idea, but I suppose they found my account later and brightened the experience. In any case, I like to think of this as history repeating itself, pleasantly. After watching a few people on fandom Twitter talk about Dreamwidth, I grew curious and finally took the plunge. I lifted the default icon and journal title from my old LJ, even though these things mean close to nothing to me now, because I wasn't feeling creative. I'll come up with something more relevant to my adulthood soon, but these are good, comfy placeholders for now.

I'm not sure exactly how I'll use this space, but I'm optimistic I will use it. Some topics I may mess around with: nature facts! women's history facts! classical music! books I'm reading! anime reactions! CQL headcanon thoughts! unemployment and depression yuck!

I'm active on Twitter, but very shy hatpinvigilante. I'm more comfortable on Instagram but almost exclusively nature oriented hatpin_vigilante. Still not ready to link anyone to my AO3 account, because it is so sad. When strangers find it and leave me kudos, I panic, which is both tragic and hilarious.

Okay. That's all for now. I'm excited to see where this goes...