Honing A Craft

It is a slow Sunday morning and we don't have any plans for the day. DB, J and I are fighting the remnants of a cold that has knocked us out to varying degrees in the past week. I happened by the NYT as I do on some Sundays and read this essay by Jhumpa Lahiri that was ever so perfect for my mood today.

Her devotion to perfecting her craft is palpable in every sentence. It seems to me, pieces like this one reveal Lahiri's personality so much more than her autobiographical novels. Without having shared anything about her life, she is able to spark curiosity - a reader wants to know more about her and how her mind works. 

She writes "I hear sentences as I’m staring out the window, or chopping vegetables, or waiting on a subway platform alone. They are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, handed to me in no particular order, with no discernible logic. I only sense that they are part of the thing."  

I know for a fact that I will remember these lines when I look out the window of the kitchen watching a couple of raucous cardinals only a few shades apart from my bowl of red bell peppers. I may pay more attention to gathering my thoughts instead of letting them drift away unattended.

Learning To Frame

K and his wife M were in town this past weekend and when they called to say hello, we invited them over for dinner. K and DB went to school together and were meeting after twenty years. The couple has led a very interesting life and I was looking forward to meeting them.We chatted over chai and snacks and then DB did the obligatory tour of the house. He was really looking forward to showing them some of J's artwork that we have framed and hung on the walls of the office. 

He is incredibly proud of the child's artistic abilities and at times acts like an over-indulgent dad of the worst kind. That evening he was having one of his moments. J enjoys the adulation and I am happy for her - I do believe at least one parent must openly demonstrate pride in their child. It is then okay for the other to be a little reticent and keep things in balance. So while DB pulls the stops on occasion, I make it a point never to do so. 

K indulged us and gushed over how nice the pictures were. DB was all smiles and J looked quite pleased with herself. When the three of them left the room to go upstairs, M pulled me aside to let me know that I should never buy new picture frames on the cheap pointing to one example in the hallway. She exhorted me to check out flea markets for better frames I could buy for the same price and definitely mat every picture before framing. It makes all the difference. She had nothing to say about the artwork at all.

I have to admit I was more than a little taken aback.This is the first time I am meeting this person and  had not asked for an opinion on the aesthetics of my picture frames relative to their price point.A child had drawn these pictures between ages seven and nine and we put it up on our walls because we thought she had done a really fine job for her age. It is our way of encouraging her. I did not have the heart to tell M that every picture does not benefit from a mat and when it comes to artistic sensibility our mileage may vary.

Every room she stepped into she had some advice for me on how to improve it without breaking the bank.The conversations with M left me pondering about how we receive advice and information in our lives. She had a lot of both to share and if I could get over feeling hurt by her not noticing J's efforts, I may have learned several things. Maybe because I never allow myself the freedom to indulge J as lavishly as DB does, I am quicker to hurt over perceived slights. If I could reign my emotions in better, I may learn a lot more from the world around me. As a test, I plan to learn the art of matting from M.

Connections

I got a flyer in the mail today that had contained an infomerical about a product called Liquid Granite. The story was too good to be true - the look of granite for a fraction of the cost and you would not even need to gut your existing counter-tops. I was intrigued enough to do some research online and came across IdeaConnection. I  quickly moved on from Liquid Granite to more fascinating things. I must have spent an hour reading about inventions I had no idea existed. 

This is how the internet experience used to be when I first got online in the mid 90s. There were no filters or aggregrators - you started somewhere and ended up in entirely unexpected places - the journey was fun and unpredictable. You could waste an inordinate amount of time looking for information and digress all too easily. These days, most of my reading online is via Google Reader - the reading list is long and diverse but there is still a corralled feel to it. I get what I want in one place and related information is already curated for me  - there is little need to "browse" and therefore fewer opportunities to happen by something outside the walled garden. Jumping from from a printed flyer to a related online source and wandering without direction or constraint felt strangely exhilarating - I have not done this in a long time.