This weekend was an interesting one. It started generically enough - I felt sick, slept a lot, did my regular babysitting gig on Saturday night. When it got interesting was Sunday when two things happened - I hit the Old Navy 50% off clearance sale and attended a very interesting 'Girl's Night'. The latter involved a hip-hop class and cocktails/dinner at Ra, a sushi restaurant near my house.
I am neither a hip-hop nor sushi enthusiast which made this a particularly out of the ordinary. The evening was organized by a close friend which enticed/guilted me into attending. The class was less than successful on my end considering my utter lack of coordination and very apparent inability to pick up choreography. I also learned that watching myself in the mirror for a couple hours is not a self-confidence booster. My big sister Anna attended with me and she was my saving grace. I shared with her my secret for what to do when lost in the choreography...simply stop and pretend you need to fix your ponytail (this can waste anywhere from 15-45 seconds).
And so we danced to 'Bossy', the opening verse is...
You don't have to love me You don't even have to like me But you do have to respect me You know why? Cause I am a boss!
Yeah....so definitely a tune that Anna and I rock to regularly. I think I represented well...if 'well' means shaking spastically and staying a consistent 5 beats behind. There go my So You Think You Can Dance dreams. Anna suggested we use our knew knowledge for an audition (an offer I quickly declined).
After dancing we went to Ra which is a sushi hot spot less than a mile from my house. Did I know this? Absolutely not because I hate any and every form of seafood. Anna and I subsisted on pomtinis, edimame and pineapple cheese somethings. We fed our souls by remarking on the fools surrounding us which included many the braless, senseless, near pantless, volume controlless.
As I mentioned earlier, something else happened on Sunday - the Old Navy 50% off clearance sale. I purchased (what I would like to call record braking) six shirts and a skirt for $25.05. I got several blank shirts and have been contemplating what I want to to with them. I have one that is a light grey/purple color and I'm thinking of using it to duplicate this....
I'm collecting flower images tonight and hope to print them on iron-on paper tomorrow to apply. I will post how the shirt turns out.
It's been raining for a week now but my sour attitude makes it feel like months. Some of this bitterness may be due to the fact last Friday, while driving in torrential rain I hydroplaned. My car is still in the shop...sad face. Most of my crabbiness is because indoor recess is the curse of kindergarten teachers and I've been coming home exhausted and more than a little pissy. A day or two of rain can be refreshing but I'm much too ADD for this week of rain crap. As I stood this morning working my carpool duty safely covered by an umbrella big enough to shelter me and my bad attitude in my cute silver raincoat (which far outshined my attitude), I thought about some creative things I could do to try and cheer myself up. I planned some screen printing projects and decided I'd make myself quiche lorraine for dinner. And then I worked all day.
I watched out the windows as the rain clouds hovered, wrangling my antsy kids and wishing for sunshine. About half an hour before the bell was going to ring, the downpour began again. I herded the bus kids out through the puddles feeling more than a little bitter. Now that I'm home, curled up on my couch yearning for the sun, I realize that I may have spent tad too much energy hating the rain. A motionless blob I am searching for some inspiration to do something - anything! I'm gonna start small. Like maybe reorganizing the couch pillows. Hmmmm. Maybe I'll work up to it.
I'm one of those dreadful people who loves watching the audition segments of talent for the comic gold of those who are oblivious of their lack of talent. As someone with little to no performance talent I embrace the fact that I can't sing, dance, etc. and I enjoy watching those who are not quite as self aware as me. I'm a massive So You Think You Can Dance fan and I think they really have some of the most fantastically untalented people show up for them. Night one of auditions for season six and this guy did not disappoint!
I've had a long love affair with the color pink but I am currently obsessed with a shade I like to call peony pink. It's that deep, saturated, bright, luxurious and royal shade of pink and I cannot get enough!
The tornado that is school has begun and I’m now over two weeks in. I’ve climbed over the wall of exhaustion that hit me smack in the face week one and have started to find my footing. Learning about the new students has been fun, exhausting and challenging. I’ve had my hair sucked, been punched, bitten, spit on and gotten lots of remorseful hugs.
What I like most about the school year is the routine. I’m so glad that I am beginning to settle a bit into my school-work and creative-work routine and have been able to find time to hang with friends and relax some too. I am most definitely a creature of habit – like in a need some medication kind of way – so I take a lot of comfort in my life having the air of predictability.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot about my job that is completely unpredictable. I just like to ignore that part as much as possible. Like the part where teachers and students get shuffled around unceremoniously leading to a lot of mayhem and stress. There’s also the part where working with special needs kids is never predictable. Moods vary from day to day, activity to activity – really more like moment to moment. Sometimes they decide to scream a high pitched someone-is-killing-me kind of scream during class. And sometimes when they get frustrated with their work they will turn and yell “Bite Wright!” and dive to take a chunk out of my leg.
Something else that is predictably unpredictable is the behavior of co-workers, many of whom seem to have more special needs than the kids. You never know when the next controversy will break out over duty schedules, comp-time, dress code – you name it. It has been my observation that teaching assistant seem to lack some sort of fulfillment in their job that leads them to nitpick at others. It’s hard to out-boss teachers but teaching assistants win hands down. They’re like that obnoxious kid that always reports even the smallest infractions to anyone they can find. I’m somewhat of a misfit in the group based on my age (I’m much younger), style (I have it and they don’t), class (I wait till people are gone to talk about them) and ambition (I don’t plan to be a teaching assistant for the next 30 years.)
It’s during mind numbing meetings, arguments and hooplas that I let my mind wander to a t-shirt I could screen print, a dress I want to make or something I want to paint. As my sanity unravels through the rest of the school year, I am happy that I can find some serenity in the parts of my life that are (almost) pretty.
I promise to recover soon from my first day back to work...for now I can summarize with the following:
- so cold I might soon become an Eskimo by default - so bored I might memorize my word find by default - learned special info...water is good (NEWS BREAK!!) - geez some of these people are less than gifted - who decided an afternoon siesta was a bad idea - quiet is not a suggestion in this room...it's an expectation!
Soon to have more...and hopefully less exhaustion!
I'm definitely not yet ready to say goodbye to summer! Where did all of the time fly! I love the invitation that summer brings for bright and boisterous colors. Something about the warm weather seems to beckon these saturated and silky colors.
As a teaching assistant, I get summers off. I had lots of plans for my summer (planning is something I'm really good at). I was going to move, find a new job, get organized, find a new job, make my dress for my little brother's wedding, find a new job, enjoy my new found health (aka EXERCISE!), find a new job, learn more about gluten free living. Oh, and find a new job.
Let me back up a little. I work as a kindergarten special education teaching assistant. I capital L-O-V-E the kids I work with. I worked as a nanny in college and had been babysitting long before. I knew I loved working with kids but I was actually surprised at how much I loved working with special needs kids even more. There's one small little problem that begins and ends with my paycheck. I was determined to find a job where I could make just a little more. I mean come on, I'm not greedy or anything (well not most of the time) but unfortunately a teaching assistants' pay hovers around the poverty line.
My "plan" was to find a job that could support me just a bit better and allow me to have more freedom to pursue my creative businesses. Jeez, famous last words. Resumes flew fast and furious and I was certain of a new future every five minutes. A line from my favorite book Pride and Prejudice comes to mind,
"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
There were certainly a few futures I married to this summer. Oops. So as it turns out, God had a lesson for me to learn instead. Jeremiah 29 tells the story of God's people who had been exiled in Babylon. He used Jeremiah to send them a message.
"Build homes and plan to stay. Plant gardens, and eat the food you produce. Marry and have children...Pray to the LORD for the city where you are held captive, for Babylon has peace, so will you."
This reallyhit home for me because I know I have been guilty of sitting around (or rather laying around watching trashy/awesome Bravo reality shows) and waiting for things to pass. I have a tendency when confronted with unpleasant circumstances to curl into the fetal position and chant, "This too shall pass." Clearly very proactive of me. Let me pause to pat myself on the back for my courage.The passage continues,
"The truth is that you will be in Babylon for seventy years. But then I will come and do for you all the good things I have promised."
After I recovered from the idea that I would be a teaching assistant until I'm ninety-four, I saw God's promise to me. He has plans for me that are more perfect than anything my misguided imagination could conjure. Hmmmm. Is it bad that my mind immediately skipped to deciding what his plan should look like? Oh well. After I reeled myself back, I wrote in the margin of my Bible "Even in unpleasant circumstances I must rest in his promises."
So for the rest of the summer I changed my course. Each day, I got up and looked for what God had for me that day. I continued looking for jobs and educating myself on the intricacees of gluten free cooking. I worked out and made myself a dress for my baby brother's wedding. But instead of continually grasping for a future, I forced myself to rest in the knowledge that God owns my future. I say forced because it was literally a morning by morning choice I made to turn off my brain google - you know that part of your brain that is continually searching for a way out, a better way, a new way - really any way where the grass seems greener.
This summer I found something much better than a new job. I found my friend Haley who I've actually known since before I was born (our parents were friends even before we were twinkles). My new apartment was within view of her now old apartment and we first started getting together to feed her insatiable need for exercise. It was great encouragement to me as I was pushing myself back into the workout routine of a semi-healthy person. We talked and laughed and both managed to hurt ourselves at various points. She and her husband were in the process of buying their first house and she was not excited about the prospect of moving. I consider organization to be one of my skills/passions/obsessions and we ended up spending much of the summer together sifting through her apartment, packing, peeing our pants laughing, drinking Jamba Juice, comforting each other through panic attacks and dragging our butts up and down the three flights of stairs to her apartment.
It was both exhausting and really awesome. I'm one of those people who can't laze around without feeling guilty. Don't misunderstand that...I definitely laze around. I just always feel guilty when I do. But helping Haley with her move to her first house gave me something do without having to find any sort of motivation within my slothful self. She would call me in the morning when she woke up and I would sluggishly make my way the zero miles over to her apartment and we would spend our days buying organizational things, throwing away piles of her crap, watching bad reality tv, working out (it is after all her obsession), talking through our anxieties, throwing away more crap she should have gotten rid of in high school, and running endless errands to furnish her new abode. It was like my own special(ed) summer camp.
The only person I've met with anxieties more ridiculously erroneous than Haley's is myself so we make a good - if slightly neurotic - pair. We trolled the isles of IKEA, Bed Bath and Beyond, The Container Store and Target usually looking and possibly acting beyond ridiculous. Both my sisters live too far away from me to just pop in and so Haley is definitely my next best thing. I think there's a connection between people when they've known each other their whole lives. I feel ok being the honest me with a precious few people and I was glad to have one of those people as a near constant companion this summer.
My anxiety tends to make me spiral and accomplish absolutely nil. Having constant activity this summer kept me from this unproductive behavior and actually allowed me to provide my (always) sage wisdom to a friend and rediscover a friendship I've missed. I think everyone has a friend or two that they can absolutely geek/dork/creep out with and Haley is definitely one of mine. Having the time to help her with her move was definitely part of God's plan for my summer.
Haley's family is very talented in the performing arts. This is something I absolutely cannot relate to since I can't carry a tune in a bucket and would rather stick sharp things under my nails than be in front of a crowd. I'm very jealous of Haley's natural extroversion since she relates to the world in a much more interactive way than I do. She is however lacking the creative bug that I thank my Grandma Wright for and it's been a lot of fun teaching her all of my creative/DIY tricks for things. A couple of evenings ago we were getting ready to paint some shelves for her new house and I looked over to see her looking at the paint can for directions. Enough said. I'm proud to say that she is now talking about re-purposing and making things for herself.
I go back to school next week for teacher in-service and I will definitely miss her giving me creepy stares, her tortured screams of "I'm feeling overwhelmed!", visiting every rug store in the metroplex, debating the evils and virtues of sugar, all the free wine, and car dancing to the summer's most overplayed songs. I do however look forward to our future friendship, new DIY projects for her home and mine, the Bible study we're beginning and many more arguments over carbs and sugars. This was most unequivocally my summer of Haley.
I've known since I was a little girl that I would grow up to make pretty things. It took me a while to find out what those pretty things might be. And I tried a lot. I went through majors in college like I had gone through sports as a child - rapidly and with increasing conviction. I hopped and skipped from journalism to interior design to exercise physiology to psychology and finally rested on fashion design.
Design is my passion and fingers crossed it will one day be my career. For now I live as a starving artist and pay the bills with my job as a Special Education Teaching Assistant. Thankfully, my job affords me the time to pursue my creative interests. I have an accessories line called Prude and Prudence which is a collaboration between my and my big sister Anna. We currently sell through Etsy and will hopefully be ramping production up again shortly. I've also got my own Etsy shop Kaunis where I sell handbags. I'm also currently working on expanding that line to include some of my graphic art with cards and prints. Lastly, I am working on starting a Creative Parties by Denise, where I go to birthday parties, baby showers, bachelorette parties or girls nights and teach fun creative projects.
So now I expand my horizons just a little more and have this blog that I can learn to make pretty.
I have a BFA in Fashion Design as well as teaching certification. I have a passion for helping other people of all ages explore their creativity. My motivation as a designer and as a teacher is to use my creative talents to bless the people I encounter. As an artist and designer I am very inspired by the 1960's - Andy Warhol, Audrey Hepburn, Mary Quant and the vibrant colors of the age. Other big inspirations for me are Marie Antoinette, Jane Austen, peonies, birds,my Grandma Wright and travel.
