Small Accomplishments Are Enough

In preparing pieces for my fashion-only blog I have been digging up some old sketches and photographs as well as diving through my giant binders of page protected magazine pages of fashions that have caught my eye over the years.  This sketch is from my final project for my "Design and Line Development" class at FIDM that I did in either 1988 or 1989.  I designed an entire line of holiday-wear in one night.  A night of frantic hell- not going to sleep at all but sketching and costing my line through the night hours into the pasty painful morning when the assignment was due. 

I'm sure I had done much of my preliminary work before that horrid all-nighter but I remember berating myself for having left the assignment for the last minute.  What fashion student worth their salt doesn't do well in a class like this?  As it turned out I got an A+ on the assignment as well as getting an A in the class which not everyone got.  In fact, plenty of people didn't do nearly so well. 

This is my passion.  I suppose one could say I have many passions but this is my earliest one.  I always knew I was going to be a fashion designer.  My mother has claimed that there never was a time when I wasn't certain of it.  See how divergent life paths can be?  How far I am from that wild fast paced fiber-centric universe now!  Even so, this passion, like writing, is in my blood.  There is no washing it out of me.  I don't love fashion for any kind of status that clothes might be capable of imbuing a person with, nor do I love it because I think women should be obsessed with their looks.  I love fashion for the color, the texture, the fit, the cut, the way a particular pattern line can cause a fabric to become as fluid as water.  Fashion is sculpture with fiber.  It's taking a very practical necessity and elevating it to art. 


While getting my printer set up to work with my laptop so I can make fashion montages for the new blog, and also working to get Stitch and Boots moved to Movable Type, I have also been rediscovering my Rebel XT camera whose lens Philip fixed for me.  Things getting fixed in our life is good because things have also been breaking at record speed.

The car is now dead.  We have only the car and the scooter.  We don't know what's wrong and because I am buying tickets to New York this week instead of fixing the car we are having to figure out how to do things without a working vehicle.  Most of the time we don't really need the car but going to Kung Fu twice during the week is the exception.

So we've decided to fix the scooter finally which will inevitably be way cheaper than fixing the car.  Everything must be weighed, juggled, and given a priority number.

Here's what's broken: dishwasher, garbage disposal, stereo (blew up the day before the car died), both showers (leaking causing dry rot), scooter, and car.

Normally I would find all of this depressing but I am learning to put things into better perspective.  The dandelions are thriving in my monastery garden and I harvested a bunch of roots because I want to make a spring tonic to help cleanse my body.  Dandelions may seem like a noxious weed to many people but we are all lucky that they grow so easily and are so hard to get rid of.  They offer powerful yet completely safe medicine.  If you need to detox your body don't go buy expensive herbal teas or bottles of capsules.  Really.  Just harvest some dandelions.  You can use the leaves in cooking (don't need a lot and you wouldn't want a lot because they are bitter!) or you can dig up the roots and use those either fresh or dried. 

 Quite a few of the garden pests we people are used to spending either lots of time or lots of chemicals to eradicate from our gardens are strong safe medicines.  Plantain is one.  Chickweed.  Stinging nettles.  This pleases me hugely.  In Kung Fu last night our Sifu was talking about the real life need for self defense.  He was talking about the earthquake in Chile and how he'd heard from a friend that there was such horrible looting down there that people were gathering in gangs to protect their resources and supposedly people are having to kill others to protect themselves.

I'm not sure I believe the killing part but disasters do tend to cause chaos and people who might, during peaceful safe times, be peaceful and law abiding become opportunists.  Looting is an inevitable result of a crumbling city.  It happened in San Francisco after the Loma Prieta quake.  It happens everywhere. 

Our Sifu was merely pointing out that to take self defense, to hone one's ability to protect one's self against the unknown is powerful.  He started talking about preparedness in general.  This is a favorite topic of mine in spite of the fact that I really don't believe in an Armageddon-type scenario.   My Sifu is an extreme man.  I like that about him.  He is 100% genuine and committed to the things he believes.  He could probably kill a small army of men with his bare hands (seriously, you've never been "gently" punched by him when he's holding back.  Cause if you had you would know that if his holding back can feel like iron...him not holding back must  be very very scary) yet he also is very committed to having guns and teaching as many people as he can to respect them and learn to use them.