Experience #18 Painting and the Perfectionist



I’ll admit, my list of experiences was put on hold the last month as I attempted to buy a house and to be a good college student (now however, I’m only trying to survive and finish). Painting was on my original list of thirty-three, and a fellow teacher invited me to attend a party at Painting with a Twist. She even made mention of me adding it to my list because of course, no one has seen the completed list. Her invitation served as a reminder that I’m only half through my list, and the year will not wait for me to accomplish my list before it comes to that rapid finale.



Donna "Lucy" and I showing off our finished paintings
 at Painting with a twist.



So Wednesday afternoon I found myself having a painting lesson at Painting with a Twist. Teacher friend had chosen the St. Louis Cathedral with azaleas as her painting.

The display painting was a beautiful painting, but as I stared at it waiting for the class to begin, I thought there was no way that it was going to happen on my partially outlined, colorless canvas.

After thirty minutes of painting, listening to directions, and attempting to make my painting look like the display, I gave up on that lofty ideal and decided to make it look like it wasn’t painted by a kindergartener.

Best friend “Lucy” was no help on that level. She encouraged failure with the tip that I could tell everyone that I was attempting to make it look like my six-year old had painted it. Have to love her.

Somewhere in the middle of it, after I stopped listening to painting directions and began to consider the painting itself as an imperfect representation, painting actually became relaxing. I’m an admitted perfectionist, and I won’t usually try things like this because I know it won’t meet my perfect ideal. But somewhere around attempting to do two-toned azaleas and making a mess of the grass, I stopped caring that it wasn’t perfect.

All in all, I enjoyed painting. I have a feeling I will not want to see a paint brush for a very long time after I finish painting inside the house I mentioned earlier. But the experience was a much needed one at this moment in my life.

I planned to hang the painting in a deep, dark closet, but my daughter loves the painting and has asked to hang it in her new room. What can I say? She’s six and doesn’t understand yet that the lines are supposed to be straight. Of course, she also informed me that I should have taken her to the class because she is the one who wants to learn how to paint. I may be holding a paint brush sooner than I’d like. I believe I need to choose something abstract next time, without any lines that I’m expected to get straight.

My finished painting. If you don't look too closely,
 it will look decent.

The Dreaded Back to School Shopping

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a fan of shopping. I consider it to be a hobby of mine and often joke that I would like to be a professional shopper just so I could spend other people’s money. I never seem to grow tired of it. That’s until it comes to shopping for back to school. There’s something about it that puts a finality to summer that makes me grouchy.

Even with all of this dislike, my children are usually pretty easy to appease. Uniforms make shopping easy, even if they are boring and ugly as my daughter points out. Still, they are quite content with the standard uniforms and never really make specific requests. That is until this year.

Apparently, all of the nine year old boys that my son knows are wearing Reebok Zigs. Hmmm…. Is my nine year old growing up? I’ll leave that to contemplate later.

What was important was finding these shoes. He of course didn’t know the name of the shoes. I brought him to several shoe stores where he passed over every shoe looking for what he could only describe as being blue with a wavy bottom.

We ended up at the mall where we made our way through several more shoe stores with him taking all of five seconds to glance at the available shoes and tell me he didn’t like any of them.

I must say, to my own surprise, I hadn’t lost my patience at this point. I actually encouraged him to keep looking for the shoes he wanted.

We finally located the shoes in Foot Locker. They had the shoe, but not the color he wanted. So I finally got a look at the shoes we’d gone to five shoe stores looking for. All I will say is that I thought they were the ugliest shoes and gulp…. Seventy-five dollars.

Was I really going to pay that much for a shoe that he would outgrow in five months max?

I studied the shoe and then his face for a long time, asking him several times if this was the shoe he really wanted (adding that it was ugly and if I paid that much money for a shoe he’d have to wear it until it fell apart.)

He remained steadfast in his desire for the shoe.

His determination to have those shoes brought me back to the school shopping I’d done at that age. I’d wanted the expensive clothes that everyone else was wearing, but my mom had always said no. My mom still tells the story about a pair of Guess jeans I carried around the store, wanting desperately, but my mom had warned me that it would be the only jeans I’d get if she had to pay that much money for them. I’d ended up putting the jeans back on the rack, but it hadn’t stopped me from wanting them.

Sigh. Yes, you guessed it. I shelled out the eighty- five dollars after tax for the shoes. They should arrive any day, since they are so popular we actually had to order his size.

I know that this was only the beginning of his requests. (I’m mentally blocking out the knowledge that fashionista's dauther’s requests will come fast and hard.) I think I’m in trouble.

My Harry Potter Weekend

This weekend was what I’ll call my fix for my Harry Potter addiction. Considering that I trekked to Florida to the theme park, to New York to the Exhibit, and between my son and I, we own wands, broom, books, movies, candy, oh you get the picture. An addiction is the obvious conclusion.

Harry Potter gift bags.

First, Saturday was my son’s birthday party. He loves Harry Potter nearly as much as I do, so he chose to go with a Harry Potter theme. Normally this would mean that I go into full scale party planning, but this year his party was at Pinocchio’s Pizza Place. Unfortunately, the place only allows you to bring in a cake.

This presented a problem for my itching party planning skills (Not to mention that addiction to everything Harry Potter). I got creative anyway and made cute broomstick gift bags.

Yes, I encourage my son to follow my addiction, and he handed them to his friends, including the chocolate frog inside each bag. (This was technically against Pinocchio’s rules. But I figured I’d be bold, and no one would stop me.)

Sunday, he and I made it to the movie theater to watch the new film. The delay was due only to the required babysitter for my daughter. My son wanted to be camped out Thursday night at the theater with everyone else waiting impatiently. I was with him, but I did have to be the responsible mom as well as feed the Harry Potter addiction.

The movie did not disappoint. I have been a fan of the books since I picked up the first book thirteen years ago at a book fair. Seeing the culmination of all those years of books and movies on screen was quite emotional. (Yes, I cried, but I also laughed.) I’d waited for this movie to come out to end this epic saga since its release date was announced, but it was bittersweet for there would be no more waiting. I had felt the same way at the end of Book 7.

Watching this great story, listening to an audience who claps along with parts or sniffles through emotional scenes makes me want to create a story that I feel the same way as when I read or watch the stories of Harry Potter. I want to create something that brings me to tears and causes a few laughs as J.K. Rowling’s stories have always done for me.

This is what I’ve always wanted to do since I penned that first story in sixth grade that went on for over a hundred pages, and I was so proud of it when I finished. (Though I would never let anyone see it today.)

Though I sometimes lose sight of this dream in my day to day life, it’s stories like Harry Potter that remind me and inspire me to keep that dream working in my head. I think this above all is what draws me to the Harry Potter stories above all others.

I’m already planning to return to the theater to see it again. This time I’m looking for company that doesn’t ask me a million questions throughout like my son. I want to sit quiet and watch it unfold once again as it all comes to an end.

Who gets the Toaster?

It’s no secret that I’m divorced. I’ve joined the other half of the population that didn’t end up in marital bliss. As a perfectionist, this probably should bother me, but I actually found the whole process to be quite liberating.

As a planner, I pretty much planned every detail of the disentanglement, but life is not like that list I wrote down on paper and surprises did pop up along the way. I was talking to a friend who has recently decided to join my side of the population, and the conversation veered toward the effects of divorce on other areas besides living standard. What people don’t talk about is that along with the divorce settlement of who gets the toaster, the community property settlement involves the splitting of friendships.

In the divorce everything gets split in half, and it seems as though friends hurry to choose which side of the great divide they’d like to end up on. I’m not complaining about my settlement of the few friends who I managed to negotiate, but I do question how people who you called your friends for years choose to pick sides.

In elementary school there were these groups of girls that if you were lucky enough to be invited to be one of them, you’d have the whole group as your instant BFF’s. Of course, that only lasted until you did something that the group’s leader didn’t like and then you lost the entire group as your friends. This is how it feels as you walk away from your old life.

The problem I have with this whole system is that my definition of a friend does not include someone who stops being friends with me because I do something they don’t like. In elementary school, those girls weren’t really friends. I’m sure they were quite successful in whatever career they had chosen to train for so young.

Maybe I expect too much, but if I call you my friend, I expect a little more than being dropped because I’m no longer the “her” in the his and her. I’m not saying that it isn’t difficult balancing two people who’ve decided they no longer can stand to be in the same room with each other. But a friend should mean a little more than that toaster.

It’s actually been quite a liberating experience for me to lose all those people who at one time treated me like a friend. The people left around me, the ones who have been there every step of the way, are the people I can truly call friends. All those others who chose so easily to kick me out of the group were only acquaintances. The same acquaintances who now don’t even bother to tell me hello in Wal-Mart as if it is dangerous to talk to the enemy on the other side of the divide. I will have numerous acquaintances that come and go throughout my life, but it’s always nice knowing who your real friends are and who only pretended to be.

Agree or disagree with me? Voice your opinions under comments.

Experience #17 The Beach

My second vacation of the summer consisted of two things that I’ve never really been fond of: the beach and camping. Only one of these items made it onto my list for the year though, and that would be the beach (On a side note, going camping would only make the list of things I do under threat of bodily harm).

The beach is great in theory. The evoked imagery is one of relaxing. However, I don’t like sand. I do not have a developed appreciation for the grittiness between my toes. I don’t like having sand in every crevice of my body and be left wondering how in the world it managed to find its way there.

So why did I put it on my list then? The answer is provided by just recapping previous vacations where one of the main forms of entertainment was waiting in lines and being crowded with all the other crazy people who believe a vacation means fighting the crowds at whatever theme park we have landed ourselves in that summer. (In the last few years, we have been to Disney World three times, Universal Studios, SeaWorld, Six Flags, and a few water parks for good measure.) After two vacations last summer where we forgot our sanity at the entrance gate, I decided that my next vacation would involve sitting and doing absolutely nothing but relaxing. New York ended up coming next on the whole vacation train, but I was determined to gain an appreciation for a relaxing vacation one way or another. And of course, everyone says that a beach is a relaxing vacation.

I don’t know if I’m cut out for it though. In the whole building appreciation theme of this vacation, I walked out into the ocean, cringing when my feet would brush something in the sand below. I built a sand castle with my children and then walked back out into the ocean to rinse all the sand that managed to find its way into every crevice of my body. I will now have to vacuum every inch of my car to get all the sand out that the ocean water did not wash out of those same crevices. I could probably build my own beach with all the sand that found its way inside, but then I’d have to deal with all that sand again. Not an entertaining idea.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my definition of relaxing is probably as unique as I am. Unfortunately, I haven’t found what is relaxing for me yet.

As far as the camping experience, I’ll say that I have never been fond of it in my life. I blame my parents for dragging me through Mississippi campgrounds on my first ever camping experience. (In a Tent!) As a fifteen year old, the idea of public bath houses and sleeping outside in a tent with all nature has to offer is just a bit traumatic. (Did I mention we spent a week in a tent with it raining through the seams of that same tent?!)

My parents loved camping, and proceeded to buy a camper when we returned from that life affirming trip (That would be life-affirming for me. I affirmed that I did not like camping). The purchase of said camper meant I had to be dragged through more campgrounds, but this time in a camper. I will admit that my parents have upgraded their campers every few years, so that going camping with them now involves full size showers, washer and dryer, and flat screen TVs larger than the one I own in my apartment. Even still, I haven’t gone camping in eight years with them. I don’t know how I’ve managed to get away with that in my family, but I suppose I’m still that rebellious teenager who refused to go camping. My children however would have been the bodily harm factor if they had not been able to attend the annual fourth of July camping trip. Andrew had last gone days before his first birthday, and Cara had never been exposed. (I mean, I didn’t want to traumatize them. They of course were jumping up and down excited.)

This camping experience wasn’t a horrible one, but again, I realized that it isn’t my idea of relaxing either.

Everything in my life is at this in-a-hurry, high speed pace, and neither camping nor the beach is conducive to my pace. I suppose I haven’t learned to relax yet. I will have to keep trying to find that place or hobby that finally allows for relaxation.