Do I repeat myself a lot?

I must... I don't know if I do it in everyday conversation, but I just glanced over some posts from Xmas, and saw that I have 2 posts that are very similar. Hmmm.

Speaking of Christmas, I don't know if I shared this little gem. My Father is a smart man. Give him an broken engine and he'll fix it, get it running and painted in the same day. He also has a certian kind of wisdom that I'll never posses. But, when it comes to worldly knowledge, he's rather naive.

On Christmas Morning, he came out into the living room snacking on some bread from the pot-luck dinner before. it was a sweet bread, with a poppyseed filling in the middle. Pretty yum. He walks out and says to me, "Jen, did you know that if you eat this bread with the poppyseeds, and then took a drug test, they'd think you were smoking marijuana?"

o.O

What?

Then I realized... Poppy seeds! As in opiates, the base of opium, heroin... THey'd think you were doing HEROIN. I cracked the eff up! He told me that one of his uncles had told him that the night before. Oh dearest Dad. So wise, and yet so innocent. I then tried to tell him that heroin was terribly addictive awful substance, and that it should NEVER be confused with such a tame substance as pot.

sigh. It hard to parent my parents. :P

I would like to have...

1.) A few more jobs with flexible schedules, but high hourly rates.

2.) Another room on my apartment. I REALLY need some designated work space! Its a bitch setting up a project on the kitchen table and then having to clean it up every night, or conversely, scrub up the kitchen table and sweep the crumbs up every time I want to spread out some work. gah! Next apartment 2 BEDROOM.

3.) An organizational system for the closet in the front room. Its getting to be a nightmare in there! Its deep, and there's a crappy Ikea shelf in the back but there's three rubbermaid tubs in front of it rendering it almost useless.

4.) One of those diffusing screens for taking better pictures of prints and things I make. Its so difficult to take photos with good lighting ...

5.) A better system of record-stereo-receiver stackage. The stereo is taking up a LOT of floor space, and it looks so untidy over there. The cat is always knocking things or falling into the gap behind it, which unplugs the speakers or some other annoyance.

and I'm sure there's more. These are the things that have been rattling around in the back of my head lately, inflating all the other more immediate stresses. Soon as I have steady income I'll be able to get to work on these.

Action/Abstraction at the St. louis Museum of Art

Sunday, I attended the Action/Abstraction show and the Art Museum with Audra. She had free passes and strangely, couldn't find anybody to go with her! I jumped at that since I love abstract expressionism and free things. Plus, I hadn't been to the art museum yet. The show was pretty good, many pieces I've seen before. The audio tour was awful. It was mainly about the two critics responsible for promoting the abstractions of deKooning, Jasper Johns, and Pollock, and how they feuded, ignored artists of color and women, and were basically asshole who did more harm than good.

The other weird thing about the audio tour I found to be grossly inappropriate was the narrators descriptions of some of the pieces. While listening to the commentary about a Norman Lewis painting, Twilight Sound, the narrator began to lead the listener to "the upper right hand corner, where you'll see an image of a face."

It actually took me aback a little, to hear this on an audiotour. Abstract expressionism is meant to evoke the viewer's imaginative and emotional responses on an individual basis. How dare these narrators think its necessary to guide my mind's eye this way? I was very disappointed and did not listen to the remainder of the audiotour.

The rest of the show was good though. I could have used more factual info about the artists and their lives, and less about the damn critics fighting over the art. A Mark Rothko painting was hung prominently in the third room, which brought me much joy as Mark Rothko is one of my favorite artists. Several of the Ad Reinhardt painting also made me very happy and I enjoyed studying them very much.

I hope to return to the museum soon, because one of their permanent exhibits is a Mummy! YES. I haven't seen a Mummy since King Tut came to the Museum of Natural history in NY. Mummies will always be cool, just like dinosaurs!