Joslyn Hamilton's Open Salon Blog

Young and Free and Well-Organized

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:12:52 -0500

The other day I bought a filing cabinet off Craig’s List.

Not your average janky metal office furniture jobby, this filing cabinet is a deep faux mahogany affair that can easily pass as a classy end table. Up until now, my files have all been stashed in a cheap plastic box under my desk, which has not suited my Virgo sensibilities at all. When I found this sweet new filing cabinet on Craig’s List, I hightailed it three towns north to lay claim. In a cozy suburban neighborhood infested with noxious Christmas light displays, I handed over $60 and batted my eyelashes while a hunky dad hoisted it into my trunk.

“Buy filing cabinet” was just one small item on my ever-expanding domestic To Do List. You’d think I would have been able to check that one off and move on to the next. “Weed garden” has been lingering for months, and “clean closet” is looming large. But getting the file cabinet in my car was just the beginning of the adventure.

This 3,000 pound cabinet, with its incongruous shape and impressive heft, proved too big for the spot I had planned, and so began the creative process of moving every single piece of furniture in my home-office-kitchen-living-room-one-room-cottage to try to make things work. In the process, I was forced to reconsider the permanence of the four moving boxes that for an embarrassing number of years have been languishing inconspicuous in the corner under a handwoven Quechuan tapestry that someone once gave me.

Inside those boxes: 35 years worth of handwritten journals.

I am not by any means a hoarder. I like to throw things out. Neither am I largely sentimental. But I am attached to these journals. I’m a writer, and I always have been since I first learned to write at the age of 5. These cloth and paper-bound books represent a lifetime of emoting, analyzing and diagramming, but also comprise possible future memoir material. At times in my life my journal was not only my confidant and confessor, but my closest friend. I guard these volumes ferociously. No one has ever read them (except perhaps one particularly deviant boyfriend in college) and their contents are the only secret I have in the world.

So I was aghast to discover that most of them were covered with a fine gauze of mold. In Northern California, where I live, things are damp. Once I lost a half a closet full of shoes to the scourge. So I should have known. I should have stuffed silicon packets into these boxes years ago. It never occurred to me.

Panicked, I abandoned my plans for that night and instead spent hours taking the journals out of the boxes and meticulously wiping down the covers, one by one, with a chamois dipped in vinegar water. Obsessively I cleaned the cloth and laid each book down, spine open, on the various surfaces in my house, cranked high the heat, and prayed.

Later, exhausted (and hot), I collapsed on the couch beside a low table teeming with drying journals. In no particular order, I began to pick them up and read.

It had been a long, moldy time since I had revisited these entries.

I was enthralled. I went back inside the mind of that 22-year-old girl, nearly two decades later, and with the more sensible and battered heart of a 40-year-old woman I found regret, and compassion. That girl, who suffered so much and so ardently, over things that really did not matter all that much… I wanted so badly to hug her and look her in the eye and tell her, listen! It’s all going to be okay! This boyfriend… he is not good enough for you. That job… quit it! The cough your kitty has that so worries you? Yes, it’s cancer, and she will die from it. But not for many years, and in the meantime, enjoy her. Give her more attention. Give yourself more attention. And maybe give that stupid boyfriend a little less! And stop reading Sylvia Plath poetry, mmmkay?

I got lost for a while in the tortured mind of young, depressed me. But finally, the journals dry, the covers clean, I packed them away in a new place, a more permanent place, and threw out the old cardboard boxes they had lived in. And then I turned to my screen and I began to type. For in twenty years, I hope I’ll look back on these entries I’m making now and think, oh, to be forty again! So young and so free! And so organized!

Pottery Is Not Precious

Thu, 6 Oct 2011 11:10:03 -0400

I’m really into making pottery. I don’t talk about it all that much, partly because it’s hard to talk in words about something that happens purely from the right side of your brain, and partly because, well, it’s my thing, and I don't always feel like sharing it. Sometimes it’s nice to have just one thing that you don’t share with anyone else. I go to a pottery studio once a week and make things. And usually my favorite part of these evenings is putting in my iPhone earbuds, blasting some Chopin, and tuning everything and everyone else out.

Last night though, was different.

I was feeling sad when I got to class. I have terrible jet lag this week, it’s been rainy and glum in Mill Valley, and then, fuck it all, Steve Jobs died yesterday.

I know it’s a little weird to get emotional when a public figure dies. I did not know Steve Jobs and I really do have bigger problems to worry about. But Steve Jobs was that rare public figure whose existence actually did touch my life, personally, and the lives of those around me. He impacted my own life deeply with his brilliant product innovations at Apple, but also with his creative vision, in which way he was truly a role model. THINK DIFFERENT. He was a legend, and he really did the change the world. He definitely changed my own life. Everything I’ve ever done that matters, I did on a Mac.

So when I got to pottery, I was feeling heavy-hearted. I didn’t really want to be there. And I definitely didn’t want to talk to anyone. I wanted to stay home and worry about what’s going to happen to the world without someone like Steve Jobs in it.

I put my headphones on, and I started throwing pots. But then, a funny thing happened. I somehow ended up talking to the guy next to me — a new face at the studio — and ended up having a really meaningful evening. He was a visiting ceramic artist who gave me a whole bunch of insightful tips about how to throw on the wheel. Some of them were useful practical tips: “Get in, get out.” “Keep your elbows in close.” Others were more philosophical.

I watched him give a demo on how to throw off the hump. This is where you take a huge pile of clay, sloppily center it on the wheel, and then make little objects (bowls, mugs, whatever) from just the very top part of the wedge. In this way, you can pop off a whole bunch of things really fast without having to keep wedging, centering, and cleaning off the wheel. It also gets you away from the rabbit hole of being obsessed with centering the entire lump of clay perfectly, which can be a real time consuming OCD endeavor.

My favorite part of watching him throw off the hump was that he kept spinning these beautiful creative pieces, cutting them off the hump of clay, holding them up for everyone to admire, and then smashing them on the floor.

He said: “pottery is not precious.”

And this is what I love about pottery. You can’t take it too seriously. It’s a transient creative format. You can focus everything you’ve got on the most brilliant piece of artwork you have in you, but there are a million things that can go wrong. Even if you manage to throw it successfully, cut it off the wheel without warping it, carry it to the shelf without tripping, and trim it without fucking it up, you never know what’s going to happen in the bisque fire, or the subsequent glazing fire, or when some silly person picks it up to admire it and then accidently drops it. There might be an earthquake, or you might put a glaze on it that ends up sucking. You might get it home, only to have it break in the dishwasher, or slide off the edge of the table, or maybe the handle just breaks off one day. The thing is broken before it was ever born.

You’ve all probably heard the fable about Achaan Chaa, the Buddhist master, who loved his tea cup. His disciple said, how can you teach us about non-attachment when I see you always use that same mug? In the words of Mark Epstein:

“You see this goblet? For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

Pottery is all about nonattachment and it’s also about getting over yourself.

I left the studio in a great mood last night, grateful for a few lessons learned. And then I came home and watched one of the many Steve Jobs videos circulating around the Internet in memorium, the one in which he said:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

This Is All I Know About Budapest (The Cat)

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:09:14 -0400

Once upon a time I lived in a rent controlled 3-bedroom flat in San Francisco.

My boyfriend-at-the-time was “not a cat guy,” and under no circumstances ever wanted to get one. He was actually a militant vegan (although ethic-less in most other regards) who didn’t believe in the subjugation of animals by forced domesticity. His words.

One Sunday, boyfriend was busy studying for his math final when his dad called, unprompted, to say that he had found us a cat.

“But we don’t want a cat,” boyfriend said in a tone of immediate pre-defeat. The usual series of familial arguments ensued, with the end result being that we agreed to go rescue this arbitrary anonymous kitten from its current owner and hang onto it until the dad could come get it from us—by that evening at the latest.

Since boyfriend was busy studying, I was delegated to go rescue the cat from its squalid circumstances. In one of the more ghetto parts of the Mission I found myself knocking on the door of a welfare housing unit.

A scowling old Chinese woman answered the door.

She didn’t speak a lick of English. She glared at me for as long as it took me to repeat “I’m here for the cat” about four times, with decreasing confidence. Finally, a young girl showed up in the background, with a tiny fuzzball of a kitten that the old woman, I soon gathered, had not even realized was in the house. While they screamed at each other in Chinese, I picked up the naturally curious and not-at-all-shy kitten and tried not to feel any kind of love for it.

While I stood awkwardly on the front step watching the Chinese mother-daughter duo embroiled in a heated argument, a bored posse of dudes next door was making lewd catcalls at me. I was getting more and more nervous, unsure of why I was picking up this random kitten that no one even wanted.

I called boyfriend’s dad.

I said, “Are you sure you want this kitten? Do you even know anything about it? Where it came from? Do you know what it looks like?”

Dad, who had a strangely apathetic attitude toward the animal kingdom despite his son’s militant vegan fervor, said, “What does it matter? It’s a cat. I could use a cat.”

Before I could wind up this pointless phone conversation, a door slammed in my face, a deadbolt locked audibly, and I realized that I had been shut out of the bickering Chinese house. Just me and this tiny little furball, standing there on the curb in the ghetto.

That’s how Budapest came home with me.

No papers, no veterinary information, no certificate from the pound. No background history, no birthday, nada. Just a sweet little animal that smelled like Chinese fish sauce and had a raccoon tail bigger than its body. On the way home, I remember glancing at her and saying, out loud, “Well, it’s just you and me now,” and then immediately wondering, why did I just say that?

As soon as I walked in the door and put the kitten down, she ran over to boyfriend and stuck her head in his hoodie pocket. And there she stayed, for hours, until he fell in love with her. And needless to say, by the time my father in law decided to swing by and pick up his new pet, we were not ready to give her up.

We named her Budapest. We never learned anything about where she was from. But we quickly learned that she was feisty as a motherfuck and, actually, not all that sweet. She could stick up for herself. She was a little bit cross-eyed, but she had uncanny balance and preferred heights, where she could survey the world from a place of dominance. She hated small children, dogs, and people with too much joie de vivre. She had uncanny strength and quickly developed many adept forms of defending herself from perceived threats, including punching, biting, hissing, growling, scratching, and her piece de resistance—the savage bunny kick.

She also proved herself a doting sister when we brought home Luka, another discarded kitten, from the pound. Budapest took it upon herself to carefully groom (read: pin down and lick) Luka’s coat whenever she possibly could. Although Luka was the definite street cat (“probably found under a bush somewhere,” they said) she was the far more docile and well-behaved kitten and never gave us any trouble.

Budapest, though, is a handful and has only gotten more ruthless and willful as she’s gotten older. But despite her “special needs,” her slight lazy eye, and her mysterious and obviously traumatic past, I could not possibly love her more. She’s kind of my favorite. She has an attitude that I find secretly impressive, and in many ways I aspire to be more like her.

And long after boyfriend and I broke up under sorrowful and non-negotiable circumstances, I still often say to Budapest, “Well, it’s just you and me now.”

The Woodstove

Sat, 1 Jan 2011 15:01:00 -0500

Even though it was the 70s and modern technology was well established, my hippie parents did their best to pretend we were living on Little House on the Prairie. To that end, the single heat source in our house was an old-fashioned cast iron woodstove. The thing was my childhood nemesis. But, Elia has a different version of the story. Read on…

The Woodstove, by Joslyn

One of my first memories was of my dad roughhousing with me and accidentally pushing me into the hot iron of the wood stove while trying to tickle me to death. And my mother, subsequently, screaming at him.

Besides being of mortal danger to small children, the stove was utterly high maintenance in the way only 70s-era hippies could appreciate. Every fall, a big truck would dump several messy cords of wood at the base of our driveway, which we would then have to chop, dry out, move in small increments in an archaic wheelbarrow, and stack neatly under the porch. I blame my parents for the fact that I even had to learn a useless vocabulary word like “cord,” which I have never since had occasion to use in conversation.

In the winter, we would take turns making the chilly trek outside to bring in a load of wood. The stove constantly needed to be fed, because if you let it die out, starting it up again was beyond a drag. The loads of wood being dragged through the house made for a lot of dirt and dust and wood chips everywhere, and as a consequence, I grew up thinking that constant respiratory ailments were normal.

And after all the work, the wood stove barely threw out enough heat. Which is why, in our giant house, we often stayed in that one central room and huddled around it to keep warm.

In the morning, I’d grab a pair of jeans off the clothesline on the back porch (my parents’ aversion to modern conveniences extended to their refusal to buy a clothes dryer) and drape them over the stove to thaw and dry while I showered. Then, I’d sneak back into the living room and get dressed, right there in front of the stove, hoping and praying that no one else would come downstairs while I was in a state of undress.

I never learned how to start, stoke, or manage the fire myself. Up through high school, if I was home alone (which was much of the time) I had to be given explicit step-by-step instructions on how and when to feed it wood in order to keep it going.

During my senior year, I almost burned the house down when I forgot to open the flue. Whoops.

In my current house, the solitary heat source is a gas fireplace. Now this is a brilliant invention. With a flick of the wrist, I can simulate a real fire that warms up the entire cottage so fast that I often have to open a window to cool it back down. I have always been a big fan of the heat-up-high/windows-open tactic of controlling temperature.

It’s my way of rebelling.

The Woodstove, by Elia

I am better at stacking wood now than I ever was as a teenager. Now, I do it by choice. This past summer, when we received our six cords of hardwood from Sam “the guy who did too many drugs in high school and now is just kind of weird” Garfield, I began plotting the layout of the stack. This time around, I had a few things to consider:

A 2-cord stack makes an excellent noise barrier for the busy road we live on.
It also makes an excellent barrier for our scumbag neighbor who actually has set up a target on our property to shoot arrows at, without our permission.
Since I am cheap, and buy green wood, it needs the most sun to dry by winter.

So I settled on a 3-sided amphitheatre sort of setup. And yes, it is one of the best wood stacks in town. I cover it when it rains, and uncover it when sunny, with 100 feet of plastic.

But when I was younger, I saw no connection between the warmth I felt by the woodstove on a cold day with the need to do all this work in the fall. All I could ever think of while taking one of several thousand trips with the wheelbarrow full of wood was how freakin’ hot my room was going to be in winter, and how I would sleep with my window open in January because upstairs, my little cave with one sloped ceiling held the heat so well. I mean, it was consistently a hundred degrees. Our current bedroom is freezing by comparison, and I love it.

When the dump truck full of split wood would show up at our Ashfield house, generally my sister would have a boyfriend who would find it necessary to impress my mother by doing a bunch of the work. But what the poor sap didn’t know is that my mother never really put much stock in yard work, so it was only me he was helping.

Yet, contrary to my upbringing, as an adult I have this incredible, almost instinctive need to clean up my property, and hers when I visit. Of course, my property has a picket fence now, and a barn, in true Vermont fashion, so proper appearance is mandatory. The wood stack must also be perfect.

As we slowly dismantle the stack and bring it inside to burn over the course of the winter, hours of exhaustion from overloaded schedules melt away by the hot metal box. Jake (our black cat) lives by the thing, as our cats did growing up, and one can catch that daily pungent smell of burnt hair—either human or feline—from someone getting too close. Roxanne and I lie on the rug in front of the stove (because we have no furniture) and either read, block our eyes from the overhead light, or fall asleep.

Just as I did when I was younger.

This past fall I was taking advantage of my teenage nephews-in-law and trying to get some wood stacking work out of them. They didn’t get it. They are from suburban Connecticut. And finally, when I asked them why they might think it necessary to put all this effort into it, they said: “To be better than the neighbors?”

And I spent the next hour explaining the finer points of heating one’s house with wood. After that, they understood, and might have even grasped a little of the romance. They are very bright, after all. Or maybe it is a little of the hippie in me, hanging on, thinking that everyone should be so connected to how they keep warm.

My Big French (Not Jewish) Nose

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 12:12:22 -0500

Here’s an excerpt from a letter my father recently sent me:

Curt has a way with words. (“Curt,” by the way, is what my brother and I always called our father. Our mother was “Judith.” It was the 70s. Being called “mom” and “dad” was not okay to my anti-establishment teenage hippie parents.) I know that pointing out my indeed big nose and confirmed bad temper are his way of complimenting me.

He’s not the first person to want to talk about the ethnicity of my nose (which I prefer to think of as aquiline, not big).

My last boyfriend’s father, a tactless and confrontational Hungarian refugee with ingrained anti-Semitic sentiments, once cornered me and questioned me about the heritage of my nose. I told him that my background was Scottish, English, and French, and that the latter influence was allegedly responsible for the shape of my nose.

Laszlo was nonplussed. “No,” he said, “I know a Jewish nose when I see one.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of this comment. While I don’t have any Jewish blood in my lineage (Judith having later married a Jew didn’t count, obviously), I wouldn’t have a problem with it if I did. However, I wasn’t. Jewish, that is. So, should I argue with Laszlo, because he’s wrong? Or just let it go, because it doesn’t matter, and he’s obviously just trying to intimidate me?

I must have told my father about this conversation, although I don’t remember doing so. However, I recognize that in his own way, Curt is forming an allegiance with me. We are father and daughter, and we both have big pretty French noses and bad tempers.