Just Some Art

Q produced this painting yesterday afternoon. Note the zucchini man aquadhered to its surface. Any preserving tips for yellow zucchini's out there?

And he got me good and proper when I carefully framed the question, 'So what is going on here?'.

And he said, 'Nothing, it's just some art.'

That rant I could go on, that one about watching children's loose casual creativity become tighter and tighter under the scholastic, peer, teacher, parent eye ball, I don't really need to go there. 'Nothing, its just some art' says it all I think.

(And it has to be clarified that I am as complicit in the tightening as much as as the next person. Unfortunate, but inevitably so.)

Cut it Out

Further to previous hair/dressing discussion, just overheard news story of a new anti-domestic violence project: based on a successful program in America, hairdressers are being used as information dispensers, giving out domestic violence support information to their clients who are identified as at risk. Training is provided to the hairdressers and, importantly, they are not expected to behave as professional counselors or social workers.

One of the older hairdressers made an interesting point that she thought the opening up of confidence, of revelations, secrets came about because the hair dresser is so occupied with the hair of the client. That this distracted air was like non-direct eye contact and enabled the clients to talk without self-consciousness, she described the head tilted forward, a curtain of hair over the face, the ridiculousness of foils etc.

I found this quite surprising because a) if I am divulging anything I need that eye to eye contact and a fortified wall of privacy around myself and my listener. I can't think of anywhere more exposed than a hair dressing salon to shut my mouth entirely. And b) the bloody mirrors! They are confronting at the best of times, imagine confessing your soul whilst making eye contact with it?

Out of Whack

. . . sounds like I am outing myself as an addict but am thinking 'whack' as in Dolly's.

I was so determined that my next 'post' was not going to be infiltrated by That maudlin tone of late, but fark, if it isn't a day where the gut is just going 'something ain't right in the world'. Focus and motivation are distinctly absent, my eyes are shifty, I can't remember my dreams, I feel edgy and even a walk, buried deep in music, has not put the whack back in place. It's dislodged and gone into the head and so at every tilt my brain emits a bleating, fading 'blaaaaaaah'. (Insert decrescendo sign)

And even this, this attempt to put it in front and away from me, is just making me realise that it is like some weird hay-fever, a brain-fever for which I need a strong anti-histamine that I cannot obtain. Or something, some more apt metaphor for which I don't have the patience to think up. I can't even tell if that is grammatically correct.

Prego prego

I had my first Italian lesson a few days ago.
Something I had signed up for last year and it caught up with me.
It was great.
And at the end I thanked my teacher and she said those words,
'prego prego'
and it was all I could do not to burst into tears.
I knew then that absolutely, sitting in that little room with
her was the right place to be, once a week, for the rest of the year.