1/19/26 - 1/21/26: Soup, rumination, agateware, & 77 laps.
1/19/26
I wonder exactly how much of the discombobulation I’m feeling in any given moment is influenced by dehydration.
I have plants I forget to water for weeks and they prosper, and yet if I don’t drink water for 3 days I’m dead? Seems just a tad unfair. The human body seems to adore being so dramatic and sensitive. I’d like to see a plant try to juggle the many stresses just in daily life, including grocery shopping and laundry, and the millions of other annoying tasks, plus on top of all this try to find purpose and follow one's dreams, and all the while stay hydrated. I actually really would like to see that. Anthropomorphized plants living human lives? YES. I cannot stop picturing it. Instead of ‘Days of Our Lives’, it’d be ‘Plants of Our Lives’. An overwhelmed ficus stress smoking. Depressed dahlias stress eating a dozen donuts.
I seem to enjoy pondering measuring the immeasurable. It’s probably because of all the poetry I read growing up. (I find it funny to blame anything on poetry). I am fully picturing a lab coat, measuring tapes, official scales, and then writing down official results of exactly how much someone loves you, for example. Exactly the length of your longing. The exact percentage of pain in your body.
Whenever I start thinking about the plastic surgery celebrities get, it always reminds me of the Talking Heads song ‘Seen and Not Seen’. It’s about a person who, by force of thought, is able to slowly make their face change to the most ideal version they have in mind. “Maybe they imagined that their new face would better suit their personality, or maybe they imagined that their personality would be forced to change to fit the new appearance.”
All the art I make is slow going. Mixed-media paintings that take a few days, or even upwards of a month, to finish. Having a large visual world crammed inside my head all the time and not enough time or energy or focus or arms and hands to get it all out feels unnerving. My goal is to just finish one painting by the end of the month. I’m trying to move toward one per week. So we’ll see how it goes.
When I’m feeling disappointed at my lack of artistic output, or any kind of artistic frustration, I like reading about other artist’s lives. I was reading about Marisol Escobar today. She’s been on my mind because the Louisiana Museum, right outside Copenhagen, is having an exhibition of her work right now, and I’ve been quite sad that I can’t go. I’ve never seen her work in person. Anyway, there was a line I stumbled upon in her biography that made me feel better. It said that she spent “at least three years embroidering the corner of a tablecloth.”
1/20/26
I learned about agateware in my nerokomi class tonight. “I’m pretty sure it’s called agateware.” My teacher was showing me videos.
I hand-built a cup out of a blob of the colorful clay that I had cut off the big nerokomi bowl I was making on the hump mold. It reminded my teacher of agateware. I’m going to be taking a sharp blade and cutting into this hand-built nerokomi cup to reveal the unique medley of marbled-up colors underneath. I’m extremely excited about this.
Lately, instead of referring to myself as an adult, or full-grown adult, I’ve just been calling myself a full-grown. As in “I’m not a kid anymore, I’m a full-grown!” As in “don’t worry, I know what I’m doing. I’m a full-grown!” It sounds hilariously ominous. Like a creature to avoid in a horror/sci-fi story. “Lock the gates! The ravenous full-growns come out at night!”
My head was particularly swirled around today in a frustrated disarray of emotions. The feelings of impatience and longing felt like tight knots in my stomach.
1/21/26
My days lately are all about making soup, ruminating, doing things to stop me from ruminating like swimming, and clay of course. Always clay. Even just thinking about clay relaxes me. And I’ve also been pondering a lot about what it’ll actually feel like to start my business up again. I’ve felt pretty nervous about it. The last guy I dated asked me how much I’d make at shows and markets back when I was doing it full time. He asked this on our 3rd date. It felt like a job interview. And it felt like if my business didn’t work this time around and I absolutely failed at it, then I wouldn’t be good enough for him. It was a weird, unpleasant pressure.
I was briefly reading about metacognition tonight which is the observance of your own thoughts. It’s when you’re able to question your reactions and interrupt emotional reflexes. And apparently when you do this it activates a part of your brain that’s specifically for self-observation, and not action or emotion. This means the anterior prefrontal cortex is, in my opinion, one of the sexiest parts of the brain. If the anterior prefrontal cortex were a person, they’d be in a cafe with a beret and reading Camus with a serious look on their face, and writing in their diary.
My new favorite thing is night swimming. It felt pretty ethereal there for a moment. Especially when I got past 50 laps. 77 laps later and I admit my brain is maybe a tiny bit more relaxed. Maybe it’s not as trapped in the aggressive throes of rumination, like it was earlier today. My ruminating abilities have been off the charts lately. While I was swimming tonight I was thinking about how many bones in the hand there are. 27. Someone told me about a friend of theirs that injured their hand and I can’t stop thinking about this and wondering how their hand is doing. My many thoughts about it tend toward the poetic. I was thinking about how others hold us. In high regard? Gently? Clumsily? Brazenly? I, of course, then thought of all the sayings involving hands:
“Can you lend a hand?”
“Hands down the best there is!”
“You have to take matters into your own hands.”
“I know it like the back of my hand.”
“My hands are tied.”
“My hands are full.”
“Things have gotten out of hand.”
“Hand-me-down clothing”.
“I’ve experienced that first-hand.”
Where would one be without their hands? Any joy I experience seems very tied up with my hands: holding someone’s hand, making art, swimming, ceramics, making soup.