No promises this phlog will be a completely regular thing, but I
really love the sdf universe and the gophersphere, so I would
like to do my part to contribute a little content -- positive
externalities and all that.
Furthermore, it is is nice to have a creative outlets and now
that the school year is starting again (I teach), I am
concentrating personal creative projects to Saturdays.
Writing is the medium I feel most comfortable in -- with the
proviso that I leave out a lot of words, make many mistakes,
and jumble together false starts to my thought, thus *you*
may not feel comfortable in my writing, but I assure it was
only worse in the past -- but my real love is making things
with my hands, so I'll write about that. (Besides, far too
many people write about writing).
After some bursts of creativity including items for cats,
such as toys and frames they can jump on to reach perching
areas, I denied myself shop time. Mainly I realized that if I
kept up the pace I was going, every bit of our house would be
cluttered with, well, at that level of clutter, the objects
would take on the emergent property of being crap.
Yoko Ono had a quote which applies:
| Artists must not create objects.
| The world is full of everything it needs.
And so, writing is how I filled my need to create, mainly out
of concerns for clean-up.
Recently I had a revelation and it has got me back in the shop,
and will probably bring me there most every Saturday through the
school year: I can make gifts, and once they are given away they
do not take up space in my home.
This should have been a fairly obvious thought, but my overriding
cheapness and general misanthropy had prevented me from thinking
strategically in gift space. Year after year I would block from
my mind the need to spend money on dumb shit people should just
buy for themselves. I would delude myself that I could convince
others to not buy me gifts in return for getting myself off the
hook, or get us to donate to charities, or anything other than
the madness of gift giving. Every year I would fail and be left
as angered as Scrooge about my pocket being picked that time of
year.
Well, now I have my solution. With reclaimed materials and some
basic tools I will deconstruct gift giving and allow myself
plenty of shop time through the year.
And this makes it easy to spend gift cards immediately after
I recieve them: just stock up on the next batch of materials for
the perpetutal gift machine.
--
This work is hereby in the public domain.
Do what you want with it.
