Inspiration

Today I had to be practical. I don't like doing it sometimes.

You know when you really want things to go a certain way, and life or fate or whatever it is that ultimately controls the world, just takes things into its own hands and goes and makes ya trip up a bit. It makes you rethink your decisions. It's funny because that same force took hold today and made me be practical. Ugh.

But I'm so glad it did. Because it kinda set things up with a more stable grounding. So as much as I fought against my attachment to desire, practicality made my head spin a little less than it was yesterday.

I've been super excited about this new job I got at a local restaurant. A restaurant totally devoted to presenting its customers with good, healthy, seasonal food from local vendors. IDEAL. But in the midst of loan payments and rent and heat and electricity, you know, the normal swing of things, I realized that those things can't really wait for the new job to begin. I was ready to just be pretty broke for a while, at least a couple weeks. But then my savings disappeared, and rent was due. And I realized that I had barely enough to get by for the next couple of days, let alone two more weeks than I had planned to wait (because of course, something went wrong with construction and this restaurant decided they couldn't open just quite yet).

So I re-applied to another place across the street. The place that offered me a position on the same day the  ideal place did. And after declining the offer and coming back, hoping for a second chance, I got one.

See, let go of desire and fate just hands you everything you need.

So, in the midst of all this practical thinking, a funny little memory of a project I did once when I was younger popped into my head. Now I'm getting to the real point! I can't remember whether someone gave me the idea or if I was lucky enough to have come up with it on my own, in the end that information doesn't matter I guess, but i remembered it. And that memory opened the door to a smaller world of possibility.

I'll get to the point now, for real. This project. When I was in elementary school I did a project for a math class that created beads out of triangle shaped paper. Those of you that know me know that I like jewelry, more to make, and less to wear myself. Soo my next thought was "what kind of paper can I recycle to make beads?".

A handful of months ago, some awesome friends of mine brought home a few hefty size boxes of old National Geographic magazines. The only thing we've done with them since they made their way into our humble abode is cover our entire ceiling with the maps. Which is cool, really cool. See...


I started cutting up the front cover of NG magazine that fate randomly appointed me, and I couldn't help but feel a little weird about cutting up so much valuable information. Yes, there are probably a million of the same copies floating around the world, but only one in my apartment. And it would seem strange to make necklaces and bracelets out of these little beads that contained so much valuable information about our world. So much information that people have forgotten about. So much information that would be lost into the creation of something new.

So now I guess I'm gonna blog about it. All of it. Well, at least the stuff that interests me. I'm not
trying to transcribe National Geographic, that would be, well, downright ridiculous. But while I spend hours making tiny beads out of each of the pages of what I think, is one of the coolest 
magazines in the world, I might as well share my thoughts about them.

I don't know how long I will keep this going. I'm not very good at completing and/or continuing projects in a timely fashion. I never have. I just feel I've got my whole life to work on hobbies and my whole life to decide for myself when they are complete. So if this is the last post I
ever do for this project, well then darn. 

You might call me a quiter if I do. I call myself a work in progress.

And who knows, maybe my writing skills will improve or something. At the very least, I'll have something to do when I'm bored, which has been happening too much lately.

Plus, the world's gonna end I guess, or at least so I've heard.




Oh and by the way, I don't think I've introduced myself yet. I'm Sweens. Some people call me Jess, because thats what my parents named me, but I'd rather you just call me Sweens. We can be friends.