Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Birthdays come only once a year, and this is a big one for me, so I’m taking time off to do some crafting, some writing, some sleeping and some celebrating with close friends and family. When the frolic is over I’ll be back, probably around Sunday 11/10 with shared moments from the big day.

I scored Star Wars tickets. It wasn’t the same thrill I got when they were hard to get many years ago, but then opening night was Friday, not Thursday. Now everybody goes to new movies on Thursday night, crowding the auditoriums and causing emotional uproars, sharing the cheers and tears. I easily obtained two good tier reserved seats for the official opening evening on December 20th. Now that millions will see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker on December 19th, the Friday night crowd is an afterthought.

And there will be no afterglow for this one.

Too many movie franchises have seen their last installment, including the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s climactic Avengers: Endgame and the Twilight saga, not to mention series such as Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, which were kept true to their book inspirations movie-wise and were satisfying by themselves.

We have had an adventure spanning nine movies, several spin-offs, immeasurable fan feedback, product tie-ins and all that goes with such a huge endeavor, and now it comes to an end, for good or bad (or good side and dark side), and I don’t know how to feel about that.

Why put myself through such a downer? I would be missing something by not doing it.

No matter how we welcome or say goodbye to something we cherish, no matter how big or trivial it is, it’s part of the adventure of life. Seeing anything through to its conclusion draws a well rounded circle defining your humanity, letting your tenacity shine and your commitment emanate like the Force.

Whichever night a fan will attend, it’s an early holiday present. I plan to take along lots of tissues, and I’ll have a friend along for emotional support. Since I never go looking for spoilers or advance knowledge, I expect to be thoroughly entertained. There will probably be laughter and tears and feelings that something happening onscreen is unfair or improper, but it is, after all, somebody’s idea of how a scenario might play out. It’s not real, nor should it be mistaken for anything other than what it is: entertainment designed to stroke your emotions and dazzle your senses.

Everything after Star Wars seems short of the benchmark, even if deserving of praise. There will never be anything like what started back in 1977 when George Lucas decided to film a “space opera.”

Prepare the curtain: it’s the last aria.

Creating something is more exciting than destroying. I reinforced that knowledge yesterday when I attended a needle felting workshop in Maryland for the day. A project that challenges you to create a 3D sculpture from wool does take about six hours or longer. We had six and fit in lunch, and it was a ball.

So what is needle felting? Crafters and school children are familiar with flat squares of wooly fabric which can be cut into projects, and this technique takes the act of making felt to a fuller and denser level. Commercial artists of collectible felt art such as AnnaLee Thorndike use felt to sculpt flat pieces into dimensional objects, but at our workshop inside Sarafina Fiber Art we used wool from the inside out to create a variety of shapes and bring objects to life.

Our workshop attendees came from western Pennsylvania and North Carolina, so my journey from New Jersey seemed small (about a 90 minute drive). We shared large tables filled with all the materials we would need to create a ram from wool, complete with horns and hooves. It isn’t a beginner project, but some of us were well versed in the video tutorials if not in actual practice, and we were able to keep up with the slightly more challenging parts of the project, such as how to turn a circle of wool similar to a Pac Man ghost into part of a face.

How do we make part of a face out of wool? We stab. The key to needle felting is to use a sharply barbed needle to tangle fibers into a definitive shape, as well as not stabbing too much (making a wooly hard ball with no bounce) or too little (a wool squishy).  I quickly found that I am a too loose stabber and have to poke more to get my shapes. . . .well, in shape. That’s probably the preferred choice of the two, as once you’ve got it too solid, you can’t take it back, but you can always stop stabbing whenever you want, review and then stab some more if necessary.

There is something therapeutic about shop and felt guru Sara’s concept of “stabbing to life” an object. We found ourselves happily poking and angling (and sometimes getting an ouchie on a thumb) as our shapeless blobs of wool began to show signs of looking like something recognizable. Our project involved an added internal feature: an armature, which like in drawing is a base on which to build, using two wires and pipe cleaners. Small, but effective.

By lunchtime we had actual bodies sitting on our tables, and by the end of the day we were looking into the eyes of our rams with adoration. Of course, with all of us learning as fast as we could process the steps, our completion levels were varied, but we each left with a project that looked 99 percent like what we intended to do, and that’s fine with me. The commitment of the people who participated in the workshop with me was such that we learned enough to finish tweaking our sculptures at home. My plan is to build up the horns on my ram, whom I’ve named Bram (yup, Bram the ram), and do a little cosmetic surgery on the face and neck. We had extra wool to take home with us, and I think I’m in love with this new hobby, especially since I now have Bram staring at me from the coffee table at home. I created him, and I’m responsible for him.

I have worked with crocheting for ages and am finishing up my thirtieth afghan, so trying something new is good at this point. I promise to post a photo of the completed Bram the ram when he looks ready for his closeup. Meanwhile hand me some wool and a needle and a bandage for my thumb. I’m into stabbing now.

I was in New York City last weekend and had the opportunity to shop and explore and see a great production at the Met. I also had my first exposure to inclusion which directly affected me, and it took place in a restroom.

My favorite secret public restroom in the city is always clean, never has a queue, and features those incredibly strange but effective Dyson hand dryers on the wall. When I made my routine rest stop there, however, a sign was on the door, saying in so many words that the facility was open to anybody regardless of gender identity.

I stopped for a minute, and then I went in as always.

Nothing happened, but it’s a new grey area in this world, and I wonder how it will play out in the future. I don’t know how I will feel if a man who is obviously a man externally but feels like a woman internally decides to enter that restroom while I am there. Bathroom cubicles are not exactly peek proof, and our method of building out relief stations in public places has not changed much in a century, except to add diaper changing tables and vending machines appropriate to the location (tampons or condoms, usually).  How will we accommodate inclusion?

Non-gender restrooms are probably a step in the right direction, but we probably will continue to need ladies’ and gentlemen’s facilities forever. If one is one hundred percent one gender, one sometimes has to have a place in which to behave as one’s gender must. I’m not sure if I am ready to stand at a sink while a man adjusts his pelvic accoutrements at the next sink (if that is even a thing, which would hopefully be before washing his hands). There is also the issue of nursing mothers and fathers on diaper duty, and though family parameters are being met more at public bathrooms, the rest of us are still dealing with fewer stalls and a longer queue (particularly for women). We have more restaurants than restrooms, and people have to go more than they may eat.

We might want to look to Europe, where restrooms are much more private and seem to be just as user friendly. I have seen videos online in which visitors to the US complain about how open and uninviting our restrooms are. They should be the greatest equalizer in our world, rather than a divisive issue.

So the next time I visit my favorite hidden secret restroom, there may be somebody in there I might not be used to seeing.

I’ll let you know if I still go in as usual.

My work computer has had an issue. Normally I work from one location, but several times a year I pack up my handy laptop and visit our other location for meetings. When I plugged into the handy power strip in the conference room and booted up, to my horror I found that my personal drive was gone.

I suspected it was an abduction. But who would want to waste ransomware on my personal work drive? It’s my job related files, not the Rosetta Stone. Then I figured our system in the mainframe building was to blame, so I shut down and rebooted. Still nothing. No system alerts were posted, so it wasn’t a problem everybody was having. I remapped. I restarted. I even changed servers. Still dead in the water. I had to open a blank document to take meeting notes, and save them in another unrelated folder just in case. Junk mail piled up in my inbox because I had no spam folder to send them to. This was computer primitive living at its finest.

So who do you call? Information Technology. The IT guys. The gurus of all computer mishaps. But you shouldn’t just call. Protocol requires submitting a work ticket, so I did, and I waited.

Fast forward to Wednesday and four IT guys later, then fast forward again to Thursday and another IT guy. Nobody knows why my drive went missing. They do know that I was on an older system to which I should have been saving nothing, but nobody alerted me to that before now. Anyway, they managed to find my files, though I ended up with two of them; one over a year old and the other with the updated files I’d saved since the new system went into effect.

Yesterday when I logged in, it was missing again.

What do you do on a Friday, when you have a whole day ahead of you? You soldier on until Monday. Wish me luck.

(Update: still have a grumpy computer, but a fix is in, and business goes on.)

Vapers, pay attention, especially if you are under 17.

I get it, because I was there. Of course, back when I was a teenager we only had cigarettes and not highly complex and cool-looking vape devices. We were one hundred percent hardcore into inhaling burning leaves straight from a tightly packed tube of rolled up plant castoffs, which have been lovingly dried by a manufacturer and set up for us at a crazy price we were willing to pay.  The truly thrill-seeking types even avoided those specially designed filters, for maximum nicotine effect.

We were hard set on getting a smoking lounge for seniors in the high school, because we would be close enough to adulthood to warrant the right to such a luxury. We wanted to be able to openly rebel in a place designated for that rebellion, rather than have the stupid faculty deny us smoking in the restrooms or out in the common areas. I hear this is happening today again, because you and your peers are vaping in school now, and they’re taking down lavatory doors so you can’t sneak a draw while supposedly taking a pee. Those darned adults.

Gotta tell you, though: they and we know something. But don’t listen to us. Don’t read on. Just go on and suck in some more cherry mentholated mysterious looking swirls into your nice lungs and enjoy. It’s totally cool. Everybody is doing it, except the creepy normal people like me.

Of course I don’t know if you look at certain celebrities who smoke and vape or not and think it looks okay when they do it, but I knew from moment one that I would not look exotic like Bette Davis or Joan Crawford if I smoked. In fact, I looked stupid. I actually held a cig in my fingers and looked at myself in the mirror and thought, oh no, this isn’t happening. So I never took up smoking.

I guess I’m weird, because since I never smoked, I smell like fresh clothes and powder and perfume, and my breath is spotless when it should be carrying the wonderful odor of a trash pile on fire. Nothing makes one stand out like a distinct odor, but then again, everybody who smells the same tend to stick together, so that’s probably okay.

I also have the misfortune of not having yellow teeth, or wrinkles around my lips from sucking fire-induced chemicals into my system. My fingers are a normal skin tone and not yellowed from handling cigarettes.  My clothes smell like the fabrics from which they are made, and maybe a perfume or two. And I can breathe and enjoy fresh air, and when I eat or drink, stuff tastes good.

Gee, how can I stand to be around humanity?

Well, I can, because I look around at the people who took up smoking when we were teenagers, and I know what they have to show for it now. Some of my fellow students have breathing problems, bad bones, cancer, or one of a variety of illnesses which can be attributed to smoking. Some of them I can’t speak for, because they have died.

You can see them, though, in your everyday life, if you look up from your social media screen for a few minutes. Those haggard men and women who seem ancient even though they may be only ten or twenty years older than you: that will be you in ten or twenty years, and teenagers will be seeing you looking like that.

You will find yourself hacking up a lung, if you can breathe at all. Reading my blog may also be one of the last warnings you will ever receive, because vaping is killing people, and it may kill you. If you’re smoking cigarettes, you may get some life of it, but for heaven’s sake, why make life more inconvenient than it already is?

Tobacco and vaping companies make a product, but it doesn’t mean you should blindly use it. The idea of consumable products is to gain a following of constant users. What happens to you once you pick up the habit doesn’t matter, because if vaping kills you, another new vaper will come take your place.

Controlled substances are called that for a reason; they have limits, they pose a danger, and they should be handled with caution.

According to an online article by a breast health group called the Maurer Foundation, tobacco kills a person every six seconds. That’s estimated to mean one billion people will die from tobacco use in the 21st century. 63% of global deaths are attributed to smoking related diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, cancer and chronic respiratory diseases. That means you are trying hard to spend the rest of your life–what little you may have left after lowering your life expectancy smoking or vaping–having trouble breathing!

And what has this to do with breast health? Well, cancer doesn’t just stay put. It may dock itself in your lungs, or move around and relocate to your other organs. It may not come just from smoking, though, as dangerous behavior may trigger cancer anywhere in the body, whether you have a family history or not. But we women want to get lung cancer and lose our breasts? Why not? We’re rebellious.

And vaping hasn’t even been studied long enough to know what effects it may have on people. We do know that as of this moment, eight people have died from vaping, and the number is expected to go up.

But you’re thinking about how to rebel against the unfairness of life at your age, and there’s nothing like helping your future along by sucking up smoke in a stick or vapor from some marvelously designed contraption. Teens have rebelled for ages. Take your place among the gifted vapers and smokers, and cough proudly. And die resignedly.

Excuse me, but I’m going to take a breather, because I can breathe.

Entertainment Weekly  magazine has come to my home for years, along with four other regular magazines and three newspapers. That may not happen for much longer. EW is supposed to be a weekly magazine, but more often than not it has been a bi-weekly because they have been producing many double issues. It’s hard enough when Reader’s Digest combines two months of issues into one twice a year: the content is not twice as big, so I usually end up waiting seven weeks or more for the next issue. Need I tell you I tend to devour articles?

When a magazine covers the entertainment world, a lot can happen in two weeks, and the content may be larger to compensate, but they constantly play catch-up, especially with big events or celebrity deaths. They probably hope that their sister publication, People, can take up the slack, and I’m sure they hope most EW readers get both publications, but that mag is more of a mashup issue with true crime and inspirational stories thrown in with the entertainment, so for me it isn’t the same.

I flipped through the new issue, which is another double covering the new television season. The information was cut short because they are also delving into streaming series on services I can’t access or don’t feel are worth the money to get, so the regular network articles suffered. After reviewing some of the series which captured my interest via their commercials, I don’t feel I know any more about them now.

The magazine recently changed some staff, so it may be undergoing growing pains, but I miss the wealth of knowledge reaching my mailbox every week. Or change the name.