a moment in the day: half

Writing group night. We're meeting on Zoom again. We met on Zoom starting all the way back in March of 2020 and through until the last of us was fully vaccinated this past June. Then it was a lovely two months of meeting in person, sitting together, talking, hugging, laughing. But now Delta is surging, young kids still cannot be vaccinated, and there's new understanding that even those fully vaxxed can spread it. So I and my friends are back to growing our proverbial victory gardens: masking, zooming. Doing what we can.

As our Zoom squares start to fill up my laptop screen, mine looks wrong. Stretched out like when you try to watch a movie with the wrong aspect radio on your TV. The stretching pulls everything thin like my face and the wall behind me are vertical lines with tiny lines of space in between.

"Do I look weird to you guys?"

They say I don't. But on my screen I'm stretched thin, and I find I have to shift all the way to the right side of my computer in order to see my whole head and shoulders centered in my square.

"Gigi," Doug says, "you're half out of the frame."

I'm stretched so thin that half of what they can see I can't see and half of what I can see... Oh, I don't even know, but I shift back over to where the tiny dot of camera at the top middle of my laptop can catch me full on. Now everyone can see all of me but I can only see half of me, one eye, one shoulder, half a head.

As my friends catch up on the week, I peck around Zoom trying to figure out how to fix it. If I'm stretched so wide am I also stretched some top to bottom? Like, if I see my head are they just seeing my neck or something? I hunker down a bit. I click over to Google and try to look up the problem.

"Gigi," Doug says, "now I can only see the top of your head."

I abandon Google, straighten up. What I look like on here isn't for me. It's for my friends to see me and for me to be engaged with them. So I relax into my half self and join the conversation. 

Are we being stretched thin by covid restrictions? Are we feeling like we live half lives? And in a way: why not? What are we willing to sacrifice? In order to come out of this whole thing someday not only with our health and the health of our loved ones, but knowing that we did our best, our actual best to be the ones who didn't spread this virus around?

Journal On!

Last year, I designed a logo for a program I love: Journal On!, a collaborative project between the Portland Art Museum, Portland Public Schools, and OK You to assemble "one enduring art journal, made up of many, to capture our shared story of this unique moment in history." They offer up a new prompt every week all summer long for kids and adults to use to create their own entries in this living journal. In fact, I took one of last year's prompts (How Would You Capture this Moment in Color and Form?) and made an entry of my own using paper, pens, and paint. I made it during a particularly bad period in my last summer and something about putting my feelings down in art, in a way that didn't call things by name but spoke to my mindset, was a helpful exercise for me.

This year I was invited back to Journal On!, this time to create their web and social media graphics. At first, I was just thinking of the job as an opportunity to work for an organization I love, but it soon became a really fun project. One thing I love doing in design is taking a known quantity and making it different. With these Journal On! graphics, I got to take their existing style in shape and font and color palette and expand on it. 

Whereas last year their prompts contained video blocks at the right side...

...this year there would be simple illustrations instead. I wanted something that would help explain but not overpower the text, something super kid-friendly but also adult-friendly too. I started working with lines. Simple illustrations created out of linework, as well as letting my lines run all over the prompts, maybe circling or underlining important words, adding little touches of illustration here and there.

One element I liked from last year's design was the hatched lines in the background circles for the prompt numbers on the left side. This became a central element in my design and it was fun to see the different ways I could use it.

Journal On!'s first prompt goes up today. I highly recommend following along and even joining in with some art of your own. You can see all the prompts on their website here, or follow on Instagram @journal_on_everyone.

Or, here: I happen to have the very first prompt for you. From the website, and from Instagram. I hope you'll join in.

a moment in the day: jazz

It's night on the third of July and Nicholas and I are camped out in the upstairs bathroom with the door closed and the overhead fan on: his safe place in fireworks weather.

As the fan and closed door aren't quite enough to keep the sound completely out, I'm singing to him. It's our fireworks ritual going back I-don't-know-how-many years. Well, probably as long as we've owned this house.

I generally sing him old jazz standards. Mean to Me. Lush Life. Don't Smoke in Bed. When the firecracker sounds kicked up into high gear a while ago, he got agitated. Started panting, looking distressed, so I grabbed my phone and dialed up YouTube to add backup to my singing.

Now, we've sung our way through the entirety of Peggy Lee's Blues Cross Country, Nicholas curled on his pillow, me on the floor next to him, my hand going down his back. I'm getting tired of jazz. I poke some letters into YouTube's search bar and bring up some Beatles tunes. Start one playing.

It won't be long, yeah

(yeah)

Yeah

(yeah)

Yeah

(yeah)

Nicholas's head comes up. He starts panting again. 

I don't think he likes rock 'n roll.

a moment in the day: enough

Birthdays in the social media era. Stephen is downstairs whipping cream (I can hear that scraping buzz of beaters against bowl) and I'm sitting at the computer going through my newsfeed, thanking people for their sweet greetings. 

There's a lot you can say about the negatives of social media, but on your birthday, it's a lovely parade of people. You scroll and like, scroll and comment, and it's a little like getting birthday cards but moremoremore, and all I can think is, look at all of these people I've been privileged to know. It's kind of like when they say your life flashes in front of your eyes, but it's all your people flashing in front of your eyes. And you don't have to die. 

When I was a kid, when I was a young adult, all I felt like was a loser. I wonder how I would have felt about myself had I had the chance to sit and watch this parade of people each stop by to say hello.

Hello.

I keep thinking about that thing President Biden said in his inauguration speech. It's funny. The pomp and excitement of that day is a blur now, but I always remember three words he said. Enough of us. 

I can't even remember exactly what he was talking about, now, but I remember how that phrase made me stop. And think. And write it down.

Alright, I'm looking it up now. He said, "In each of these moments, enough of us came together to carry all of us forward."

He was talking about the Civil War, the Great Depression, World Wars, 9/11. He was talking about racism and nationalism and maybe the pandemic too. With all the negativity in the country, with all the negativity in all the people in the country, there's always been enough of us who strive to do the right thing. Just those three words made me feel better about the country I was living in. And now, sitting here scrolling through, watching this parade of lovely people, I think, yeah, you all are the enough of us.

a moment in the day: group

Steve and I walk down the hall to Liz' loft just like old times, just like before the pandemic, heading to writing group together. 

Everything in this corridor looks crisp and new. The bright raspberry-painted wall at the end by her door: is that the same color as it used to be? Every step of this familiar walk, that Steve and I have taken once a month for years, seems both beautifully old-hat and utterly new somehow.

I push open Liz' door and we walk through. Voices inside. My breath swells against my ribcage. This is our first non-Zoom meeting and my first unmasked, undistanced gathering since the before times. I hurry my step down the short front hall and then here we are—Steve, Liz, Kathleen, me—all fully-vaxxed, all crowded together at the edge of the kitchen doing something we haven't done in so long. Hugging. 

Liz' black curls tickle my face. Kathleen holds too tight and too long and too wonderful. I don't want to let go. 

When I do, she tells us she and her son hugged so hard once that it started to cut off the circulation in her neck and, still mid-clasp, she told him, "I think I'm going to pass out." And did.

Stories bounce back and forth between us as we move into the living room where Robert is waiting remotely on Zoom from his home out of town. "Robert!" I say. His face so small on the little laptop screen.

I drop my bags and take the plastic container of appetizers back across the room for warming in the kitchen nook where Liz and Kathleen have returned, chatting as they try to work the top off a bottle of pink wine. I come around behind them at the counter. Their backs to me. 

"No, we used to do it all the time when I was a kid," Liz is saying. "For fun. Like all the time."

"And there's that thing," Kathleen says, "where people do it for a sexual high."

I pull the top off my tupperware container just enjoying listening to snippets of their conversation. I realize they're still on the ways in which cutting off the circulation can make someone pass out.

"There's a name for that."

"Autoerotic... asphyxiation."

I dip my head in between them. "So, here I am, my very first unmasked, undistanced get-together, and what are we talking about? Autoerotic asphyxiation."

And this might be—not sure but might be—even better than the hugs. Laughing together in person again.

a moment in the day: crown

Stephen and I are just back from getting our second covid shots. We have a few moments before I need to be off upstairs to get on Zoom for my writing group. He's going to head out into the studio to get to work, but I make him wait and I run from the room, coming back with two Christmas crackers, one gold foil paper, one silver. I hand them both out to him and he laughs. I tell him to take his pick.

It will be two weeks before we're fully vaccinated, but I feel like we should celebrate, just a little. With as precious as these shots are, with as difficult as it has been for many to get appointments—and more so in other places in the world—I've tried to think of the vaccination wait as one, long, rolling Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever big holiday people would wait for, all year, when they were kids. Something to try to anticipate with excitement rather than impatience. I used to think about erecting a tree in the house with lights and putting names underneath it, a new name each time someone I loved got vaccinated.

But who puts up a Christmas tree in the spring? So these will have to do.

We each take the ends of our Christmas crackers in our hands. These ones are the kind that don't make a pop sound when you open them, but still, Nicholas runs from the room. We count one, two, three. Yank our crackers open. The loot falls on the floor. The paper crown, the slip of paper with a joke on it, and for each of us, a little prize like from a Crackerjack box. Wait. Is that why they call them Crackerjacks?

My prize is a weird, little keychain with a bottle opener shaped like a dead fish.

We put the paper crowns on our heads. Shiny gold foil. We ask each other Christmas jokes. 

What do you call Santa Claus when he goes down the chimney and the fire is lit?

Krisp Kringle.

"That's kind of violent," I say when Stephen reads me the answer.

When I turn to go off to writing group, my paper crown falls off my head and floats to the floor. I pick it up. Put it back on. Head upstairs.

a moment in the day: ready

I head to our front door, to go out into the world, to pick up something for work. Stephen follows to say goodbye.

"Got what you need?" he asks.

These weird days, when we go out so seldom. When every simple excursion feels like an event. Something you've got to plan for, dress up for, think about. It's been so long since going out into the world was a regular thing. 

I pat my pocket to make it jingle.

"Got my keys."

Raise the crumpled bit of cloth in my hand.

"Got my mask."

Look down. 

Look at my sock feet.

"Don't got my shoes."