tabula rasa

Lately I've been playing around with trying to turn a few poorly written personal journal pages into a few poorly illustrated personal journal pages with predictably muddled results. In the process, I have learned two things about myself which I will proceed to put down here, as god knows I am currently unable to put them down there, for reasons which will be soon become clear.

A) I have the aesthetic and attention span of a six year old girl.

Despite having recently purchased and perused not one but three gorgeous new books on how to create successful mixed-media collages, I do not not understand these new materials at all. Acrylic paints remain an unfathomable mystery to me, and I cannot seem to grasp how to handle them without brushes drying up and the paper buckling and splotching willy-nilly while I am busily distracted elsewhere, cutting up magazine photos and gluing down pretty plastic pearls. It appears to require more organization and forethought than I am accustomed to. When it comes to the art of collage, I am still a child eating molding paste and dreaming about unicorns, gaily coating everything in sight with glitter and faerie dust, and thinking it magic.

B) I am not that bright.

Actually, this is probably a subset of A, but as I have predetermined that this should be part of an epic 2 Random Things You Don't Know About Me post, it gets its own heading. Although, come to think of it, you may already know this about me, or at least suspect as much. Consider yourself validated.

Inspired by the likes of Judy Wise, Teesha Moore and Amber Gibbs I attempted to
decorate a few journal pages of my own. This seemed to be going remarkably well, and so pleased was I with my cleverness that I even wrote a haiku to grace one of the freshly renovated pages. It was beautiful, that little poem; elegant, self-contained ~ a delicately framed image of the mountains being seduced by enveloping storm clouds. I like writing haiku because it combines two of my favorite things; precise imagery and counting to 7. Plus, they are easy to remember until I can write them down. And because I also like smooth, shiny things, I added to all my pretty pages what I thought was a light coat of glossy gel medium.

You may guess the rest.

I now have a journal full of pretty pages on which nothing may be written. They are sealed; no gel pen, no graphite, no watercolor pencil; no ballpoint, nor Sharpie, nor quill dipped in blood will adhere to the now impermeable surface of my mini masterpieces. Diaries without drama, journals without joy. It is the Never-starting Story.

Of course, I could still paste prose into them, or use acrylics and a very narrow brush to paint entries, calligraphy style, but frankly this is demanding far too much of my limited literary abilities; already there had been a question of what I could write that would be deemed pretty page-worthy. Hauntingly beautiful and long forgotten haiku aside (verily, I swear; a brilliant addition to the art of counted syllables, it was) what was I going to set down in my Japanese garden; the daily calorie count? Miles on the treadmill? My thoughts on the president's stimulus package? Surely, painting one's daily weigh-in is going a step too far.


The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on...