balance

yesterday morning, sarah sent me this omen:






































in the evening, on my way home, talking with ruthie, noticed many cones and a truck and open manhole covers outside my building. thought "oh no hope the electricity is on" because we lost it one day not so many weeks ago. when i got up to my apartment, no power. worse than that, though, a micro-disaster. i don't like using the camera flash, but there was no power = no light = here's the picture i took:






































stepped out into the hall, asked if everyone's power was out, a chorus of yesses; someone said the building shook earlier. maybe a gas explosion underground? but no news report. anyway, that bookcase was on the mantel you can just see on the upper-right. i seems to have landed on one of my video cameras. luckily no one's head, no hard drives. my projector may have been on it, two dvd players were definitely on it - since it was dark, it didn't seem to make sense sorting through it all and trying to figure out what might be broken and what is working (something to look forward to). when i lived in japan, there were earthquakes, i was a bit more careful about nailing things down. this afternoon, stumbled upon this admonishment:





























































now, to be honest, if i had taken a picture before the bookcase tipped over, it wouldn't have looked all that different. a big mess. sometimes i'm obsessively neat and organized, otherwise if it's project-after-project-after-project (for example, last few months, 1/09 traffic cone orange, 2/09 here today, 3/09 spring planting) then i start to let "little things" (like filing papers, putting away equipment) go and just focus on artmaking, also i keep eating, sleeping, working, going to crit group, etc. etc. etc. i don't always make time to clean but there are weeks when it feels like all i do is edit-and-render, edit-and-render, edit-and-render. i'd still have sorting-and-cleaning, sorting-and-cleaning ahead of me right now.

anyway, balance. so the next few weeks will be the opposite of project-after-project-after-project. i'm going to sort through what i own and get rid of some it, make the things i do need accessible. then, i'll focus on how to raise awareness of the aesthetic pleasures inherent in traffic cone appreciation. and hopefully get to a place where i can both work on several projects at once while getting the dishes washed, filing receipts - keeping the minutae of the mundane in order, within reach.