weekly retro #52: walking in this cold for a haunted doll head
happy february, a month where we hope to celebrate love as well as my 41st birthday. it will also be the month we hit one full year of reading (and i, writing) these weekly retros! this is my personal "new years" season, and it's opening up with lots of opportunities for change. one of those changes that i know is coming and i'm dreading is my aerial yoga studio permanently closing at the end of the month. i thought the email was about the monday evening class being, predictably, cancelled - not the entire studio and community i've engaged in 2-3 times per week for years going away!
to distract myself from this news which was out of my control, i literally slid on icy sidewalks down to the ceramics studio to practice throwing some clay instead of rotting. accepting what is out of control was something we'd been discussing throughout january in one of my aerial classes and while there's no way for me to financially and geographically be able to continue this practice as i had been for years, i'll surely find a new on-the-ground yoga studio to join and take aerial less often in manhattan when i find myself there. i'll be totally fine, it's not the first, and likely not the last, time losing community because of capitalism. life is a highway!
"No matter how much you love a community or an organization, it cannot love you back." - brett bonfield
it's been hard to get around because of the ice and snow. after finding out the yoga studio was closing, i had to drop out of hosting robot karaoke that night - a bummer for me, but jamie was able to hold it down for the brooklynites willing to brave the cold for some karaoke fun. in place of the things i couldn't do outside because of the weather, i threw myself into cooking casseroles - ziti is a casserole, please don't piss me off by trying to argue that.
on thursday the streets and sidewalks were cleaner and it was back to the routine. i attached handles to my mugs from monday's solo session and caught up with some of my classmates. i registered for the next level of wheel-throwing classes for next semester, where i heard we'll learn how to make lids among other cool stuff. in aerial yoga, we talked about the studio closing and did a LOT of (for me, much-needed) hip work.
this is pumagreg sitting outside of andy's workspace door, waiting to get his after-dinner treats. at the other end of the hall this week was me either photographing him or being on my laptop and working on my first atproto app. the bug that bit me was that i started streaming on stream.place instead of youtube this week to see how well it worked and it's great. i love using social apps where the people building it are there, too, chatting and facilitating a feedback look between me and the product. i think that's what's most exciting to me about building on the "ATmosphere". so i'm going to build something of my own soon and yes, it will be pixel art related. for now, though, my livestreams have been mostly making stuff with air dry clay and building and testing my new candles.
today i trekked further downtown to 14C's art pantry. they had a few rooms full of stuff from various productions (like project runway) and we were able to hold a half-hour slot for ~$7 to weed through tons of supplies that were free to take. we were encouraged to only take what we needed, a very good constraint that's unfortunately necessary to vocalize these days. i went with the intentions of finding some good fabric to make cloth napkins, cool beads, and things for staging product photos. i found just what i needed including a doll head which i've been wanting to make a silicone mold of. i'll keep you posted on how haunted it is. anyway, shouts out to 14c to so generously opening this up to the community. i met college students from fit getting supplies for their thesis, a couple of friends who are putting together the setting for a stage play, and the volunteers at 14c who, again, were so generous.
things i enjoyed this week
- i devoured mary roach's newest book "replaceable you". one of my jobs through my undergrad era was doing data entry and kit building for a medical device company that arnold schwarzenegger is currently a face of and so i was around fake hips, tools for hammering and screwing bones, prosthetics, jars of human vertebrae and more fun stuff, so it was cool to be brought back to that - by one of my favorite authors ever, no less.
- i love watching andy play skate story. it's an extremely cool looking game and i, too, am a demon who wants to eat the moon
- jeopardy posts "the week in final jeopardy" videos every week. a funny side effect of the official channel posting them is that everyone uploading bootleg episodes have to cut out or completely glitch out the final jeopardy portion of their uploads.
- this gluten-free sourdough sliced loaf is the best gluten-free sandwich bread i've tried. it doesn't taste weird and it does't crumble in your hands like the pages of a used copy of gödel, escher, bach.
- i am not a big gourmand scent person, but the vanilla cashmere lotion from eos is musky and very nice. it reminds me of a doll i once got in a church basement holiday party where they'd have a santa come and hand out free toys to kids. the doll had this subtle, sweet scent and it was wearing traditional norwegian clothing by pure coincidence (my maternal side is norwegian). all that aside, i'd like to smell what eos' pistachio scent is like next. this is also a good time to warn any of you looking to get into working with clay that it will dry your hands out a lot, so get moisturizing!
if you read this far, incredible - thank you! and if you, too, write a weekly, monthly or whenever retro and would like to join the live laugh webring (currently just a simple list of links on my sidebar), i wanna know! my contact info is in sidebar, alongside a link to my ko-fi page if you were interested in further supporting my goblin adventures.
xoxo jenn