You’re the Inspiration

I kind of wish I used song titles or lyrics for every day’s title now, would have made coming up with something a lot easier I’m sure. Maybe that’s the challenge I’ll give myself in May -- an iPod song title shuffle and then I must write a story to accompany the first thirty that come up. Sounds interesting. But as usual not what today’s request is. Sorry about that, but you all know how my brain works by now and this blog isn’t called Random Lunacy for nothing. So today’s really is…

A picture of someone who inspires you.

Oh man, now that’s tough which is probably why I was putting it off up there. Anyone can be inspiring to me, everyone I know personally and even the people I pass on the street or read about in a news article have the opportunity to inspire.

And what is inspiration anyway but a muse right? Your favorite band may inspire you to pick up a guitar and start playing at age eight, an author might inspire someone to write their first book at age seventy two, an incredibly caring staff may inspire a career shift into a new field. There are a million and one ways a person can be inspired.

So I suppose the first question to break down today’s request is -- in what way do I want to talk about being inspired? Financially, physically, career wise, spiritually, in personality, etc?

The first thing that really comes to mind, backing up a little bit, is that when I feel inspired to paint or create art in that manner it generally isn’t a someone but a something that provides inspiration -- warm weather, sunshine, lots of fresh air and blue skies. So you can imagine how lacking I am in the winter here huh? But when I write I need a few different types of inspiration.

And I don’t mean when I just write a blog post (although if its creative non-fiction I do need a modicum of inspiration in order to reign it in story wise, much the complete opposite of this post for example)

First, I really need a female main character (FMC). Because I write sappy-pappy-happy chicky novels my main character is always going to be a woman. I’ve tried to write from a guy’s perspective before and considering I have so many “dude” like qualities you’d think it would be easy for me but it’s not so I stick to gals. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes that FMC is loosely based on someone I know.

What do I mean by that? Are my friends or family going to read the character and say ‘Oh my goodness, I see myself in her!’? Well I sure as hell hope so because if they all see themselves in her then I’ve done my job connecting to the audience considering how different all of those people really are.

Anyway, for example maybe we’re out with Dianna having dinner or something and she says something particularly hilarious that I know I can either build an entire character off of or at least get a really good long scene from, I’m probably writing it down. But not just that line, the total package of the surroundings will be included, from the waitress/waiter to the look and feel of the restaurant, from the color of the napkins to the placement of the bar in the space, from the smells coming from the kitchen to the extraneous people at tables around us rambling on and at what decibel that chatter is permeating the place.

The inspiration came from one sentence but the total package is what will propel my fingers across a keyboard, trying to recreate and capture the magic of that singular moment in about 3000+ words.

After the FMC is decided upon I need a profession, a place for her to live, friends and family, relationship status, motherhood status, financial position, community involvement…you know, all the things that make you, well, you, I need to make her the “real” person she needs to become. That is all inspired by friends, family, people I pass on the street, people I see on television, etc.

People laugh at me when I say I sometimes watch shows like Jerry Springer but I’ll tell ya, tone down the subject matter and that show is teeming with fodder for good Chick-Lit conflict! You just never know where it will strike.

So I will conclude this morning by saying that because I feel inspiration exists anywhere and everywhere, my photo needs to truly reflect that sentiment.  Picture the someone as every single person on the planet.  Thanks earth dwellers!

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The Dynamo of Volition

Today’s picture shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise if you’ve been hanging around here a while. Hell, even if it’s only been a day and you checked out the links I’ve got over there in the left sidebar you’ll know who it is, seeing as though his is the only musician’s blog I follow regularly. The request is for a ‘picture of your favorite band or artist’. Do I even have to say it? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

So a couple days ago I shared the brief story of the first time I ever saw Jason live. It was at Irving Plaza in NYC back on July 21, 2006. I had no camera, don’t ask me why, but I was all ready to experience the fun live show I’d been exposed to online so many times; his ability to laugh and joke with the crowd and make an audience feel like they were part of the show was something he was famous for.

Okay, wait a minute, I should back up for a second. When I say “famous for” I mean among his fans. And when I say “fans” I mean the up to 200 people who would go and see him play every night back then. He wasn’t selling out multiple dates in Boston at the Bank of America Pavilion or headlining an enormous all day festival. Nobody knew him, so to speak.

Not yet anyway.

Matt and I had moved to New York already when he played Irving and it was really the first time he’d come through town close enough to us that we weren’t totally poor and could make it to the show. (As a side note, there had been a show in Boston in 2005 where he actually opened for Alanis Morissette. No I’m not kidding. Yeah I’d never have put those two on a bill together either but it isn’t the strangest pairing I’ve ever seen him in…Sadly, what really bums me out about not getting to see him open for Alanis has little to do with Jason though, Taylor Hawkins, drummer for the Foo Fighters, was still playing with Alanis in 2005 and I would have been able to catch him in his early career. But this is about Jason, so I digress…)

I’d already been listening to him for four years, almost to the day, strangely enough when we saw him at Irving. In fact, I distinctly remember hearing his first release on the radio on the way out to Springfield, late summer of 2002, right before we got married, right after we’d bought, and started renovating, the house. That was “Remedy” and before “Rocket” even hit the shelves. The song was so catchy I instantly fell in love with the lyrics and bought the disc that fall pretty much the day it was released. “Rocket” got me through a lot of lonely days at the house in Springfield, but that’s a story I already wrote so feel free to read that if you’d like to learn more.

By the Irving show he was already touring “Mr. A-Z”, but he was still playing stuff like “Galaxy” and “Childlike, Wildlife”. And not just for novelty sake like he does these days, those were fan favorites. At any rate, the show was not much better than alright, it was plain to see he was exhausted from touring for well over a year and he just didn’t have that spark. Plus the crowd was awful, loud and obnoxious and shoving and pushing for no reason at all. There were really only a little over 100 people in there, anyone could have walked right up to the stage & licked his bare feet if they’d wanted to but rudeness ensued and Matt and I both left, somewhat disappointed in the experience.

We went about life though, and I started reading his blog. Back in those days his blog was hosted right on his website and it was kind of a pain in the ass to read. If I recall (and bear with me this is a lot of years ago damn it!) there wasn’t any way to leave comments or anything. But knowing his lyrics for being so clever I had a feeling his writing wouldn’t let me down either. I wasn’t wrong.

Within a few months he moved the blog over to blogspot, where it lives now. And a few months prior I had started my own blogspot blog so I was excited at the prospect of being able to use the stalking…er, um, rather, the follow features to read his stuff. I personally had no clue how to blog, how to do anything with blogs or how to make bloggy friends so I just started reading the comments on Jason’s blog and anyone who said something intelligent, I checked out their blog and profile. A bunch of people (okay, a LOT) were private profiles but before any of us knew what was happening, we were connecting.

This is how I became friends with Trayce, Ginger, Bridgete and Bree. This information is pretty important because these ladies all rock and I’ve been lucky enough to meet 2 of the gals in the real world, hang out and can safely call them good friends. The other two gals, well I fully intend to meet them when we start that secret Pentavirate. But as for Trayce, well she was fully present for the next time I had the glorious opportunity to catch Jason’s act live.

Things were a little different at that show.

It was Friday April 11, 2008 (aw, T it’s our meeting-a-versary yea!) and we took the day off to drive down to New Jersey. Why Jersey you may ask? Well the show happened to be at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. Yeah, that’s right. Trayce, even though she’d never met us, was kind enough to open her home to us to spend the night after the show, seeing as though it was only a two hour drive from her place and she was a self professed night owl who offered to do all the driving. How awesome of her!

This was the Music, Magic and Makepeace tour. If you want to read all about it, I wrote all about it already. That show was un-freaking-believably good. And then three weeks later he was playing right in our own state! By this time Bridgete and I had already started talking about wanting to get together sometime and it was the perfect time to do it. Not only that but we convinced Trayce to take a ride up (you know, because jersey’s right around the corner…of course it wasn’t too tough convincing her haha!) and we all went to see him at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA on April 29, 2008. It was freaking freezing and we were all forced to wait in line outside, the show was G.A., and poor Bridgete was in a skirt. I don’t know how she made it through!

The show itself was fantastic (the crowd, sadly, was even worse than Irving, and I won’t even begin to discuss the tall assholes who decided that Trayce & I were easy targets to stand in front of. Pffft, like I’d be having any of that!), but remember how I said above that Alanis wouldn’t be the strangest pairing? Yeah, at this particular show Everclear opened for Jason’s band of merry gypsies. Um, huh? Funny too, the four of us (Matt was there too of course) were pretty much the only ones in the crowd who knew every word to their songs too. Everyone else was looking around like ‘who are these rock dudes? I came to see some rowdy adult contemporary damn it!’ But it was great and we tried to force Trayce to not drive home that night but the girl was insane and she took off.

Another year passed and Matt and I had just moved to the place we’re living now when another opportunity to see Jason presented itself on July 24, 2009. Although by this point the man had become flipping huge due to the success of songs like “I’m Yours”, he was only scheduled to be an opening act. Yeah, for Dave Matthews Band. At Hershey Park Stadium. Yes, I said Stadium, the place holds up to 30,000 people, and believe me, it was completely sold out for Dave. It was the largest crowd Jason had played for to date that I’d seen him play. Anyway, this is another show I wrote about already because Matt and I spent an entire weekend in Pennsylvania seeing some truly amazing things from the show to an abandoned town burning underground to a huge wind farm and more. That was written in three parts; Navigator’s Log: Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Good pictures in there, check it out whenever you have time.

Then just eleven days later, he was playing in Boston at the Bank of America Pavilion, in South Boston, right on the water. Matt threw up his hands in the time out position and begged for mercy. So I took my mom. We had phenomenal seats on stage left but the place is pretty huge and it was sold out. (What is it about me & my mom getting to see big acts in the sixth row?) She knew all of about 2 of his songs and they were both from “Rocket” (nice mum, way to be an early fan…high five!) so he certainly didn’t play them on August 4, 2009 but that didn’t stop us both from singing and dancing the night away. Okay I was singing, and when he actually pulled “0%” out, it was only me and about 100 other people who yelled “Foxy” at the appropriate time. Ah, to be an old school fan!

And now everyone knows his name. He’s his own Cheers Bar. He’s been in commercials promoting California tourism, his songs have been used for T-Mobile and the Hilton chain of hotels, he’s had a bunch of songs in movies (50 First Dates, When in Rome, Happy Feet), and TV (Ugly Betty, Everwood, American Idol), covered a few classics (Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Peg, All Night Long) and “I’m Yours” made him famous before it was even released.

I guess one could say ‘Life Is Good’ for Jason these days. Probably why he headlined the festival of the same name, which Matt and I had the pleasure of attending on September 12, 2010.  That was only the fifth show I’ve been to but with all those concert calls over the years it really feels like so much more.

Although I tend to flick him on and off the proverbial pedestal from time to time his strong attention to the awesomeness of life, catchy/witty lyrics, soul-searching writing, fun back up band (s) and overall inspirational spirit have kept him firmly planted at the top of my favorite artist list for nine years now. And I can’t see him tumbling off anytime soon.

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Beautiful Transformation in the Neighborhood?

Insert sarcasm here.

Your landscapers showing up at eight o’clock in the morning with their leaf blower right outside my window is super inspiring.

Ugh. Its times like this that I usually turn on music or the television but at eight in the morning I just refuse to interrupt my own desire for silence. The sound outside is making its way into my house and all the way down to my nerves, this is true, but I’m not the one who was in charge of that noise. Eventually I know it will go away and I can go back to my little Zen space where the only noise I hear is me cutting and pinning a bunch of fabric.

Most days I don’t turn on music. I got out of the habit last year when I did NaNoWriMo because when I listened and wrote simultaneously the emotion in each song started coming through in the narrative and dialog and my characters started sounding completely schizo. Obviously not a desirable outcome in a 230 page book, unless one of my characters happened to be a schizophrenic. But they weren’t. So I turned off the iTunes and opted instead for crime dramas (which now I’m so hopelessly addicted to I should be writing mysteries or cop books…but I digress…)

So most days I revel in the silence of the morning, and sometimes part of the afternoon, until I either start stitching on the machine or clicking the keys to write. Either way, I wouldn’t be doing those things right outside my neighbor’s window at eight o’clock in the morning because, hello, not everyone is on the same schedule as me. Is common courtesy of waiting until a decent hour (say, nine or later when people are typically up and at work) asking for too much in the city? Perhaps, I think with a sigh, but that doesn’t mean I have to be one of those people who are blind to everyone else.

After they turned the blower off all I could think about was the whirring sound of the motor and wondered how much gas/electricity it was burning with every spin of the blade. It made me wonder if they give a crap about the planet at all. Maybe they really do but they have to do that kind of work to survive; no matter what they have to do they will go out there and do it in order to feed their family.

Compromised values in the name of food on the table and mortgages paid? The stark reality of today’s society.

But that is just too deep for such an early start to the day…seriously, shake it off! I know life isn’t light and roses and rainbows shooting out one’s ass at all moments but I can’t bring myself down with thoughts so depressing so early or I’ll end up getting nothing done today while I lament the pains of the world.

Instead…

Let’s talk about the ways I love the planet. I’m using up the last of a whole slew of fabrics to make all kinds of stuff for the craft fair, but you already know that if you’ve spent any time over here in the past couple weeks.

Want to hear something new? Well okay…a few months ago I got turned onto this gal’s blog, New Dress A Day, which is one woman’s journey to spend no more than $1 per day on a dress or similar thrift shop item that she then transforms into something modern and wearable.

Think 2XL muumuu that she ends up wearing with boots and tights out to a bar that night. I know it probably seems impossible but she pulls it off and with only a minimum of instruments -- scissors, seam rippers and a sewing machine. Not to mention her vast imagination to take the ugly and shapeless and turn it into something amazing and one of a kind. Seriously inspiring stuff!

Because I’ve been inspired by her awesomeness I decided to give it a try. Now I didn’t spend any money on the first 2 items I plan to transform, they came from my grandmother’s old stash of stuff but we’ll see what I can do with them.

First is an animal print top in black and white with a thick, black, mock turtleneck collar, long sleeves, shoulder pads and belt loops (but no belt). I might go sleeveless with that one but no matter what, the shoulder pads will be g.o.n.e. by the end of its transformation.

The other is a top and skirt in a taupey tan made out of a T-shirt type knit. The top has a collar and long sleeves (and absolutely no shape at all) and the skirt has an elastic waistband. If worn like a skirt it would fall at just about my mid shin (the worst spot for me because it makes me look even shorter) so I’m planning to add halter straps or something to the neckline to keep it up and then use it as a sleeveless long shirt dress over tights.

That’s the plan right now anyway. But all that will have to wait until craft fair madness is behind me. Just 4 more days and I can stop making these:

And start selling them instead. Hey I’m going to need a bunch of room in the sewing closet for all of those inexpensive thrift shop finds I scour. Maybe extending the lifecycle of some truly awful clothes in my house will make up for the planet stomping that occurs outside of it. One can dare to dream.