Thursday, March 10, 2005FacehuggersOK. Maybe I don't get out enough. Nor does my friend, Cindy, who is an amazing sculptor and spends her life creating magnificent bronzes (for love) and carving out Barbie's toes (for money). But the day we went shopping for jeans for the photo shoot, we found ourselves at the Santa Anita mall gawking at all the people Just Out Shopping."You think this is what people, like, do? Like, a lot?" I whispered to her. Women walked by carrying shopping bags full of stuff. Families had kids with them. Couples were holding hands. They didn't look like they'd just crawled out from beneath an avalanche of words and pixels, or clay and metal, like we did. They looked like the did this mall thing all .. the ... time. "It's weird," she muttered back. "Don't they have this thing in the back of their heads" she put her hand against her skull, with a death-like grip... "Don't they have this voice that is always telling them to go back to work? Telling them that it must be fed?" I knew exactly what she meant. For me it's the constant waterfall of words, always raining through my head, seducing me and taunting me and begging me to write them down. For her, I imagine, it must be shapes, forms, images, ever-shifting, demanding to be made real. I looked at the people's faces that we passed. Honestly, they didn't look like they were walking around with alien life-forms embedded in their craniums. They looked sort of like they were doing exactly what they were doing: shopping, hanging out. Did this mean that there are people like me and Cindy who are graced and cursed with this creative imperative and there are people who aren't? I totally refuse to believe that. That would make it all so totally unfair, for everyone involved. So... if these other people don't carry around alien facehuggers like we do... what are they all thinking about anyway? I considered my friend Steph at work. She's a lively, fabulous, smart little cookie. She turns heads everywhere we go. She is acutely attuned to every aspect of relationships, sexuality, and all things social. And I'm pretty sure she's not kept up at night wondering about whether the second person sounds too preachy or if the first person makes me too vulnerable. I'm pretty sure that's not how her mind works. Her brilliance lies with people. Attraction. Allure. Allegiances. She instinctively knows and can tell you all about the marketing messages implied in a hint of eye shadow or how to blend lipstick for the exact amount of gloss and shading. (I don't know about Cindy, but I'm pretty much still on the lipstick I bought about three years ago.) Steph's art is created on the canvas of her relationships -- with her kids, her boyfriend, her family and her friends. Art comes in different ways for different people. I know people who find their creative nirvana in a perfectly prepared filet of Copper River salmon. I have other friends who find it in a sequence of martial arts moves, fusing mind and body and transcending both. Whatever the nature of your personal facehugger, I've found the only way to deal with mine is to try to cohabit gracefully with it. I listen to the little messages it breathes in my ear. I pay attention to its capricious whims. It's probably around to stay so, as much as possible, I'm trying to make friends with the little bugger and play nice. And maybe, if I'm good, it'll let me go out shopping again sometime. We never even got around to the shoe department... # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 1:51 PM  
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