Day One Hundred Fifty-Two

I wake up when robins sing. Herbs look happy. I make myself tea and write at the kitchen counter. Four sqirrels are frantically running up and down the trees in the back yard as if running away from something. I bike my old English lady's bike to the pool. A bunch of guys hanging outside Anthony's panini place. I see my pool friends. I buy muesli ingredients from Whole Foods the way back home. Eat breakfast. Walk through the park to the studio. White globes of dandelions are replaced by white clover flowers. I work on ideas on a sketchbook for an hour and make a plan for the day. I work with clay. Friend comes in to fire his piece for his show. I work. I eat lunch, read, work, clean. I write and draw. Walk through the park back to home. Have martini. Wind feels nice. Have dinner. Go to friend's show. Stroll through the old neighborhood in a warm summer night to the apartment. It still smells a bit from the fish dish from the dinner party. Make tea. Read. Go to bed with an icepack on my shoulder. Everything is alright.

Day One Hundred Fifty-One

Time now, time past, time next. Our ability to remember, to measure. Selected memories. Ten minutes now and then. Stories can bend and change. We the humans are the apparatus for bending and projecting time. Memory makers. The vessel forms - things which can contain - are reminiscence of human organs and body forms. Old time machine is a funny idea.

Seeing me trapped in the same chain of thoughts on the Time Vessel project Gareth suggested that I read fictions to see how writers implemented time travel to their stories. So I'm taking a detour from the journey of porcelain with Edmund de Waal and traveling with 72 short stories. I hope this will inspire new thoughts. The story I read the other night takes place in the future where your past could be altered through a ripple effect of the past modified by someone you hardly know. So I could find myself living in other part of the world after an aunt of my friend's cousin's husband goes back to the past and successfully avoids meeting the person she has met the first time. 

This happened to me. More than a decade ago my sister cried at the Port Authority bus terminal when her bus leaving New York arrived.  I felt uncomfortable. This was what happened until a few years ago when she told me it was actually me who cried. Simlarily it used to be my sister who once brought a bag of nickels and dimes to a restaurant to pay our meal but since we spoke it has been me who brought the bag. My mother confirmed this although she was not there at both occasions. While I can still see in my mind's eye what I thought have experienced, having two people in agreement, which means everyone interested in knowing what happened minus me, now that became what happend.

Day One Hundred Fifty

I started working on larger time pieces. I was not happy with the scale I was working in. This must be the comfortable size range for my hands, which I realize has grown the past few years but I still think I work too small. I want to go bigger.  After studying the sketches I decided to go with slabs instead of throwing. It seems like if I work on a wheel for a while it becomes easier to go on a wheel. Mixing up methods and tools should help braking up the monotonous scale and the forms. I am now thinking of including varieties of physical locations in addition to varieties of actives in my day. Going one place to another does not mean having a productive day but I have a suspicion that being different locations relates to my perception of having a fuller day. If this is true, to trick to make me feel satisfied could be to allocate certain tasks to a place. For example I can limit my clay work to the studio. When I draw I would go to the study. When I read I would go to the park and I would write in a coffee shop and so on.

Day One Hundred Forty-Five

I make things because I want to make but what is the importance of owning an object? Why objects matter? I can start by paying attention to my own relationship with things I own. I recognize that my attachment to objects has diminished over the past few years. To me it was for a practical reason. Since I started spending more time in a studio I quit wearing many things. Rings, because they leave imprints on clay. Earrings, bracelets and necklace, because I change from a bathing suite to regular clothes, to studio clothes, and then to regular clothes everyday. Removing them and putting them on became a chore. Make-up, because I am either in water or in clay. So past few years I have become to wear bare minimum and own less - not because that I cherish minimalism but for the convenience: makeup less, jewelry less, belt less, manicure-less, bra-less, any sort of accesrories-less. It is less time consuming and less belongings means less tings to maintain, to look for, to protect, to pick up or to choose from. 

Moving in to a new apartment gave me a good opportunity to look at items I had kept in a storage bin and start using them. Fabric coasters and napkins my mother hand sewed, the glass ware I picked up from my trip to Murano, ceramic cups and bowls made by friends and me. And I can tell you the small flower-printed silk fabric my mother trimmed with crochet is from the lady who taught me English on Wednesday nights in her house. She kept this little trapezoid piece of fabric from her time in England where she studied in collage but was ready to let go of it. She was separating from her husband and clearing out her belongings the night I visited her. One face of the red coaster used to be a dress my sister bought back from her Hawaii trip my uncle's company hosted, which I was not allowed to go because they thought I was too young. On the other side was my pajama from my sawing class in a middle school and I think of the girl who had her mother do her sawing homework. She was a bit spoiled but charming and was one of my best friends. My sister's envied Hawaii trip and my sawing class are trimmed with my father's futon cover with red camellia flower prints. 

Day One Hundred Forty-Three

I feel like eating something sweet, that would be nice, to comfort myself. I went back to the studio after two days as my shoulder got much better. I spent the day making vessels for the time series but ended up with a series of forms entirely different from what I was planning on making. My hand just moved. It is okay to let them be that way but it should not the best way to learn anything new. Coming back home, walking through the park, thinking about the next project - what can I do in the world where there seem to be more writers than readers and more makers than users? And I want to make. Make make make. 

Day One Hundred Forty-One

Have to get things out. My left shoulder is much better than yesterday and now it feels like a bunch of pebbles trapped inside with something heavy is sitting on it - 50 lbs of clay - that would not be so comfortable. This should give me a good reason to take care of non-studio work like paperwork and research, organizing. What happened to the junk-drawer time is not much of a mystery. Looking back I was supposed to spend a few hours a week studying glaze chemistry which I had just a few hours up to today. Mostly I forgot about it and when I remembered I decided there was something else to be done first. Perhaps it's a good time to go back and write up the program for the rest of the year again. I don't want to conclude the year to discover that the year-long was not long enough.

Day One Hundred Forty

I somehow harmed my left shoulder. Towards the end of the day yesterday it was becoming from being just uncomfortable to painful even to walk. Today I decided to take an easy day off at home with an ice pack. I have lots of reading to catch up.