What topics do you like to discuss?

My best friend and I talked several times in a single day. We’d talk in the morning, we’d talk through our workout, we’d talk as we cleaned up our kitchens after getting our kids off to school. We’d talk on our errands, we’d talk while making supper and sometimes, when it was super important, before heading off to bed.

WHAT did we talk about?!

Pretty much everything. Every next step, our kids, friends, baseball, my job, books, life. It seemed like every decision or dilemma either of us faced required both of us to make or solve.

Baseball was a hot topic for us and it was ongoing. Her youngest son, who I‘be known since before he was born, little miracle baby that he was, loved baseball. He played on every kind of team. Travelball, Spring ball, fall ball, pick up, any chance to play, From the earliest age he loved everything baseball. If he wasn’t playing, he was watching his favorite team and memorizing stats. Back then, I had a very limited knowledge about baseball, but that didn’t matter, because what we talked about were the politics, the parents, the coaches. Unfair this and coache’s son that.

As the years went by the discussions became more intense. Thomas went from a cute little guy who loved everything baseball, to a high schooler who needed a college baseball scholarship. Wendi was negotiating with three top schools and finally settled on Pepperdine.

Who would have guessed that all these years later, Thomas would be drafted away from college, move up quickly to triple A and now be a top pick for the cardinals MLB team. Who would guess that I would marry a Red Sox fan and learn baseball as a sport AND culture Who would have believed Wendi would be gone.

I spent years rolling my eyes over yet another conversation about baseball. What I wouldn’t give to have just one more with my friend now.

I miss my best friend. I miss ALL of our topics of discussion. It’s not the topic for me, so much as its the person I’m talking to. G taught me everything I know now about being a real sports fan. He taught me player by player, play by play. He made it interesting. I think I like discussing a lot of things if I enjoy the person I’m talking to.

When is the last time you took a risk? How did it work out?

Again with risks. Am I risking now?

Every time I start planning a new project and then start running through the steps of doing it. Even just setting up to do it. It all feels like I’m risking something.

My own approval maybe?

The approval of others?

I’ve know for a long time that you can’t please everyone. Art is an extension of that. All aesthetics are. Everyone has preferences and no artist should attempt to do art that appeals to the masses. I think I need to keep learning this even though it’s one of the most obvious lessons that I learned in art school. A funny side note about art class in college is that in the lower division classes, the way to get top grades was to appeal to the instructor’s preferences. I’ll never forget painting over a whole section of one assignment because I hadn’t learned yet that this professor didn’t like yellow. He suggested that it should be gray. I didn’t argue, I just did it. When I figured this out about art teachers, I felt like I cracked the code.

I cringe a little over that, but I was bearly 18 at the time. I had little to no art in high school (my school was heavily academic), so I was mostly leaning on my very raw talent and what I’d learned in middle school. I really didn’t know how to be an artist at that point, all I knew was that grades were important. Or thought I knew…

Risks are decisions. Decisions are risks. Any time I embark on a new creative goal, which is usually born from an idea which came from a bit of inspiration, I have a bunch of decisions to make which initially seem exciting. That’s the part that pulls me forward. Being excited will cancel out fear for me.

I suppose I’m always risking, but when I make up my mind to do it confidently, I forget riskiness a little. When I doubt and question myself, anything feels risky. When I move forward calmly, my projects propel me. When I doubt and fear I feel stuck.

This has been an interesting post for me to ponder. When I think of risks, I usually think of rock climbing or hang gliding, as in death defying risks, not the usual day to day kind. Art overlaps so much of my life that I sometimes miss the metaphors. It’s not just with art, it’s with all of my life. Calm confidence is something I keep getting reminded to practice. Practice practice practice…

Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.

I wouldn’t consider myself a risk taker, but sometimes, I can’t help myself.

Once I bought a house in a place I had never lived. I’d visited. The house was hundred years old and adorable, but nothing much had happened to it, besides shag carpeting.

Gs friends and family lived nearby, and had fixed up old houses so…what could go wrong? Oh, a lot.

I don’t regret any of it because I’d always wanted to fix up an old house and we made it look amazing. Unfortunately it had structural issues that were beyond our budget and didn’t increase the home value, so we sold our cute little four square house.

I can’t tell you how much fun I had picking out tile and reconfiguring the kitchen. I loved refinishing the hardwood floors and choosing paint colors. Friends in CA saw it and wanted to use some of my ideas in their homes. It led to helping people with design ideas which led to me staging for a real estate company. Which led to more staging for more companies.

That house helped me feel confident in my design decisions . I learned that I could trust G to pull off all of my nonconforming ideas. He learned that he could trust my eye. I saw how good he was at nailing paint color.

We now work together on many projects. Sometimes he just brings me in to trouble shoot when a client is making complicated decisions. Often we work together to bring homes to new levels of aesthetics.

Even though that project seemed crazy. and WAS challenging, I love that I got to do it. In the end we sold it in three days. It fell through when rain filled the basement on the day of inspection. It sold again in a day, then a third time. We had to disclose all its flaws, of course, but it showed so well that until water was obviously filling the basement, people just wanted it.

Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?

I wish I had gone to grad school. Of course it was art. No one would have thought an advanced degree in art would have served any purpose whatsoever, at least not in my family, (my patents and then husband). They may have been right, but I would have loved it! I loved all my art classes, the more advanced the better. I later took a few fiber arts classes after I had kids, but only because I was friends with the professors, I had no plan to keep going with school, I was busy with three little kids and a baby. I was also in an archaic marriage that didn’t support women doing anything outside of domestic chores and certainly not anything outside the home. My husband rarely ‘babysat’ for our own kids! It wasn’t his thing.

It was really a wonder that I did the things I did. Looking back, I marvel at everything I pulled off with four kids in tow. I stopped doing too much with painting, and one time, clay and a learning-to-walk baby, taught me that I needed a less messy medium. Fiber was the answer. I quickly taught myself to spin and weave and knit. I made inlay felt ‘paintings’. Dyes were my favorite. I had fun, my kids learned all those things as well. All my kids can knit and sew. So can my grand kids even though I’ve long since gone back to paint.

Oh to have taken some graduate school level painting classes! How different would my life be today if I had taken my art more seriously? In a different mindset, I might have gone all the way and gotten a doctorate. In art. I would love telling that story. Who knew I would be pushing at practicality anyway for my whole life.

What makes you nervous?

A lot of things.

Not as many things as there used to be.

When I was a kid everything made me nervous. I worried. I feared. I worried about everyone and everything. My little daredevil brother. Oh man. If it was dangerous, he tried it, if he could get into trouble, he’d do it anyway. Me? I would get nervous.

Grown up people in costumes always made me nervous, especially if there was excessive make up involved. One time, Seseame Street did a thing for my kindergarten class. I was completely freaked out by Big Bird. I think my mom had to come get me. Overly made up people…yikes! (the Big Bird costume had a hole cut for a face which was painted yellow and not fooling anyone. The two faced big yellow bird was unnerving for four year old me.

Getting lost. I was born with no natural sense of direction. GPS changed my life. I still feel grateful for it every day.

Shopping, public speaking, tests, grades, teachers, authority figures, obvious untruths, wierd energy. That one still freaks me out. I can still lose sleep over weird energy…

I had no idea that I was so anxiety ridden as a child, but now I can see plainly why I’m all about breathwork and why. I think kids could benefit from it. I could have for sure!