Ingredients

Ingredients that go into a calendar: ink, pencil, eraser shavings, white out, coffee, naps, books on tape, avoidance, wild fantasy life, intenet surfing, hours spent in your pajamas, Cat Stevens, Nick Drake, Tom Waits, freak outs, NPR, updating ipod library, googling, blood, sweat, & tears.

This is the fifth year I have completed the Annual Great Gals Calendar and every year I can't imagine it being done, or I wonder how I am ever going to draw somebody like Eleanor Roosevelt, or Ingrid Bergman, but somehow, day to day it gets done. The great and fantastic thing about making a calendar is that there is a clear and distinct FORMAT. There are 12 months, each month has its own number of days, and a very ritualistic way of proceeding. So it is easy to know exactly what needs to be done and WHEN it needs to get done by. That is the other glorious thing about a calendar--it has a distinctive DUE DATE. No ifs ands or buts--it MUST get done by X date. This is HEAVEN to someone like me who will procrastinate until the cows come home--and then will procrastinate long after! Thanks to deadlines, formats, and lists my yearly project is nearing its date with the copy machine. I just have a few more things to tinker with.

I am sitting at a wi-fi cafe that just opened a couple of blocks away from my apartment. I am using the laptop with the cracked windshield, so forgive if anything looks WONKY. I can only see HALF of the screen. It's kind of exciting--or tricky--or annoying--it depends on how you look at it. What am I REALLY TYPING? Only YOU the reader KNOWS! This wi-fi cafe is a strange addition to my neighborhood. Imagine, if you will, an urban industrial landscape, filled with an array of gated junkyards and werehouses, and no trees, with the occasional apartment buildings that have signs that read NO DRUG SELLING ON PREMISES. Then imagine a small cafe with tile and a sign in CURSIVE in the middle of all that. Then, you go inside and EVERY SINGLE whitey, you didn't even know LIVED in the neighborhood is there, to bask in the glory of steamed milk and and olive green and yellow color scheme. Inside the indie kid with the Cosby sweater, lethargically pours you coffee, and listens to the Cars. Outside, graffitti stretches across every surface imaginable and a a woman yells on her cellphone, every EXPLETIVE in the book, while carrying her toddler, who is drinking a bottle of Pepsi and crying. This is an odd world to exist in, and I am not sure I feel comfortable with my part in it.

But this seems to be the nature of things. It ain't like a calendar, with its clean lines and formulas. It's what it is--a graffiti signature over a beautiful building; a beautiful building displaying a graffitti signature.