SomethingRed

I love my mom, she’s a great mom. You know when you’re a kid and you hear your parents say certain things that just grate on your nerves. And you say to yourself, “I’m never going to say those things when I have kids…” Well I don’t even have kids and I hear myself say those things all the time!

I nanny two great little boys and it’s just too comical to hear my mom come out of my mouth on a daily basis.

Top 5 this week:
-Christopher, let me handle your brother.
-I am running out of patience.
-I know I’m no fun.
-Why do you make me mean?
-You know what I do with loud puppies? I put them outside.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a dog. Because dogs have four legs and webbed feet so they can run faster and swim better than humans, duh. Well, Christopher likes to eat his cereal like he’s a dog and woof at the table. My mom used to say those exact words to me, loud dogs go outside.

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I learned how

December 7, 2009 by somethingred87

to ride one of these this weekend.

Apparently these have been popular on the west coast for years and the east coast is now finally catching up… as we usually do. From what I’ve heard, riding a longboard skateboard is like riding a surfboard on concrete. That rumor is true, and now I am slightly obsessed.

The best part is that G&S makes them too!

Gordon and Smith have been in the business since the dinosaur age of surfing, when boards were made of balsa wood (way heavy) without fins (way tough to ride). Now they are slightly less well known but still keeping up their quality. They also run in my family. My dad learned on one and so did I, got to keep with tradition ya know.

Longboards, get excited!

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Well, Here’s the skinny

November 28, 2009 by somethingred87

on life thus far.

1 Peter 4:10
Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms.

1 Timothy 4:14
Do not neglect your gift…

2 Peter 1:10
Therefore, my brothers, be all the more eager to make your calling and election sure…

Even just typing out those verses makes me feel like I’m walking down Gervais St. butt naked at 5:00. This is a stretch for me. Writing alone makes this all feel permanent and real. But blogging all this, yikes. However, I feel there is no other way to bridge the process and get started than to put it in the open. So here goes nothing.

The story start to finish… It’s long, very long

For almost a year now I’ve been in a creative dry spell. Every artist gets them; times and phases when you’re just not feeling it. It being inspiration, motivation, drive, creativity, and the like. Usually you can push through it, put yourself to busy work, look at other artists’ work, sketch, suck it up. For me, this dry spell has been seemingly never ending and suffocating. There were brief moments when I felt it or thought I felt it. However there were days, weeks, and months when I wanted to feel it, searched to feel it, begged to feel it, and cried and cried to feel it, to feel anything. About a month or so ago I began contemplating the possibility that I’m not supposed to get it back, that it was just a phase in my young life, and maybe I’m supposed to put art away forever, or at least for a long time. I’m still working through it, still searching and crying and struggling, but this is the story of how coming out of the dry spell looks for me.

In August I graduated college. I had my BFA exhibition, sold some work, and gave away a lot of it. I began the process of job hunting, not sure what God wanted me to do but sincerely willing to do anything and go anywhere. I filled out 3 applications to grad schools, an application to Surfing the Nations, countless local job applications, and looked at many other options. I got half way through most of these and stopped cause they just didn’t feel right. That sounds wishy washy but there have been times in my past when God has made it very clear that I am to continue pursuing an avenue in my life, and these were not it at the time. So I continued praying and searching options. I did start cleaning a lady’s house once a week, and began a trial period nannying for 2 bright and wonderful boys.
Through all this limbo time God taught me trust. Trust in its rawest form. Daily trust. Moment by moment trust. Reckless and stomachturning trust. Trust that several times said “Ok God, I have just enough to get me through today and no prospects for tomorrow, so I’m trusting you to provide. However that looks, I’m trusting you with this.” And he did. I would highly reccomend reading Ruthless Trust by Brennan Manning. At some point during all this I’ve come to a place where nothing mattered anymore. Nothing in just saying nothing, but really nothing. It doesn’t matter what job I will have today or tomorrow, or where I will be. And more so it doesn’t matter what I will do with my life because it isn’t my life to begin with. People are quick to say that but what happens when suddenly you don’t even recognize your life. You probably whine and cry and pout like me. And then you read and preach truth to yourself and remember who you are, nothing. Romans 7:18.
Some things that make this pertinent…I have never felt like I was created for a 9-5, full time job. As silly as it sounds, it’s true. Also, throughout all of this, the 2 things I knew I was supposed to do come January were continue cleaning Deb’s house (a once a week, 4 hour job), and get involved with the creativity team at Midtown in whatever ways they needed or wanted me. This, I knew, was most likely going to involve a 1 hour commitment on Tuesday afternoons. So my schedule already looks geared and ready for a 9-5 (insert sarcasm here).

Then this happens…
In the middle of all this dry, uninspiring, mess of a job hunt and trust lesson, I start stumbling upon all these verses about using your gifts. For about 2 weeks or so I’m seeing these every few days.
Nov 18th before everyone started coming over for Early Thanksgiving, my friends Patrick and Callie came over. We were all playing online and cooking, when Callie showed me Promise Tangeman’s blog. Patrick has shown me her work before and I remember liking it but for some reason it didn’t stick with me like it did this time. As Callie is navigating through her blog and work and telling me about her, something sparked. I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to put it into words eloquently but the only way I can think to describe it is God sitting there with me saying “See, her gifts are her reality. Her dream is her reality. And it’s good. I provide the jobs, the commissions, the clients, and I get the glory because I provide and she does what I made her to do. Like the rocks in the Psalms.” I felt inspired. Cheezy, but that’s how it went down. So after the Early Thanksgiving feast I spent several hours sifting through her blog and my thoughts and sudden resurfaced desires to make work. Although I have been inspired by artists before, there were several things about Promise’s work that I think God used specifically. Promise loves Jesus but her work does not suffer from cheezy christian cliche. She works equally in several different mediums, not bound by one. She is a photographer, and not solely a wedding photographer. She is young, only a few years older than me. She is confident in who God has made her to be and lays it out for people to choose or decline, way easier said than done specifically speaking as an artist. Last and most importantly, Promise is solely trusting in God’s provision with her art as work. So now I’m going “Ok God is this why no job seems to fit and stick except the odd ones? Is this what you want me to do? I said I’d do anything and I meant it. Is this it? Is it ok that this is it? Freelance, it’s ok to do freelance? ” …I guess we’ll see what happens

The next morning I woke up bombarded with these very specific and maliciously spoken thoughts “This is too big. You can’t do this. This is just a dream. Dream’s can’t be reality. You’re not good enough for this. You know your style and that the general public doesn’t like it. You don’t do … so you can’t make it.” Satan has a certain way of speaking to me. I’m pretty good at telling the difference between the voices in my head, Satan has a certain tone about him when he talks. That morning it was a mixture of him talking and my wondering if I should agree like I always have in regard to art. So I told him to shut up and continued to ask God about the whole thing.

Friday someone asked me if I still did photography and if I’d be interested in taking some photos for them. Friday afternoon I read another blog by another freelancer that said in regards to going for full time freelance you can’t be afraid of failure.

Saturday my Grandma gave me 2 1930’s medium format cameras, 2 tools of my trade. Saturday evening I got an email from a friend asking if she could commission me to paint something for her. My immediate thought was “Nope, she has something specific in mind, that’s bad. I can’t give her what she wants, expectations don’t work for me. She doesn’t really mean that she likes my work.” Satan, shut up.

Tuesday I got the chance to sit with Mandy, the mom of the boys I nanny, and tell her everything that had been happening. Without my telling her that I may not be able to nanny full time like we had planned, I explained that this may be what God wants me to do. She was very excited for me and then told me that it was funny, last Wednesday they hired a girl to work in the afternoons with the prospect of moving her to full time. She said they were having a hard time with the idea of letting me go and thought about making up jobs for me to do until they knew I had something solid. Funny timing right?

Wednesday I get another email from another friend asking if I could be the subject of a project they’re doing. They want to take photos of me working and get audio of me talking about how I got started and what it’s like trying to make a living at it. I’m not in any way interested in fame, fortune, and glamour, but it was as though God was letting me know that He will provide ways to get jobs.

It is now Friday. I have updated my work blog, and begun organizing everything in order to get this going as a legit business and not just something I do on the side or think about putting away for good. I have no big bill paying jobs lined up, but I’m not worried about that. I’m not worried about whether people will like my work or not. I’m not worried about not doing big paying gigs such as weddings. 2 Corinthians 12:9, His grace is sufficient for me, and that includes his provision in all its forms.

Maybe all this is just a test to see if I’ll jump. Maybe it’s 3 in the morning and I’m just delusional enough to be writing this. Maybe in the end I’ll swim and He’ll let me sink. Maybe I’ll make an analogy and He’ll think it’s stupid. I’m ok with that. I’m ok with writing all of this for all the blog world to see, and failing in the end. I’m ok with answering the curious questions of my inquisitively doubtful peers and family and receiving blank stares in return for my answers.

Roll with it…

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