Create!

…to the mom who knew I’d be “trouble” the moment I was born when my hair was so maroon it looked purple under the hospital lights (surprise! never a dull moment from the get-go!) and later when I learned how to walk at 9 months, before there were shoes tiny enough to fit my feet (Ahead of the curve! I’m ready!)…

…who taught me how to bake from scratch, who made a lot of our clothes…

…who made all of our Halloween costumes…

…even the ones we regretted then (ahem, me) or would regret later (ahem, Lianna)…

…and continues to do more for me than I could ever fit into one blog post or a hundred…

“‘To re-work reality’ I had written somewhere: temeritous, presumptuous words indeed–for it is reality which works and reworks us on its slow wheel.” -Lawrence Durrel, Clea

Um, where did April go? April was a cruel month in some ways, staying true to the T.S. Eliot poem, but let’s focus on the positive. When everything seemed to be going wrong (was going wrong), my parents decided to schedule an Easter vacation. Destination? Carolina Beach, N.C. Sign. Me. Up. During a tear-filled phone call the night before I was supposed to leave, my mom said, “Just make sure you get on the plane and we’ll make everything better.” Sounds good to me!

I leave really early the following day, so that even after a subway malfunction, I still manage to get through security two full hours before take-off. I plop down in a seat, realize to my dismay that LaGuardia doesn’t have wi-fi (doh!) and succumb to the effects of severe sleep deprivation. I wake up 15 minutes before take-off and still see everyone sitting at the gate, no movement. The take-off time has been pushed back 15 minutes. I wander off to go look at the snack and magazine selection, pondering coffee but concluding I’d rather pass out on the plane too because there’s no way I have the energy to work through Proust or book proposals. And then I hear my name–I’m being paged! “Passenger Kachmar, please come to Gate 4,” but my last name was butchered enough so I wasn’t sure if they were really paging me. She repeats it. Oh. I’m at the wrong gate. (It was glarey, for the record). Oh no. I run to the gate and am met with a stern, “Didn’t you hear us paging you all those times?” The plane is ready to take off. “No, I…er…fell asleep and then went to get snacks.” Oh dear…

Leave it to me to arrive at the airport the full two hours ahead and still almost miss my flight. My lack of travel skills continues to amaze me; I really don’t know how I do it! This almost tops when [I thought] I threw away my customs form in Mexico (but later found it when back in NYC) and almost wasn’t allowed back into the States, OR when I went to the airport a day LATE at Thanksgiving and the USAirways guy said, “Um, your flight left yesterday.” Anyway, I did make it, and even though I had to a) do work b) do taxes and c) think about health stuff, it was all very lovely and sunny and enjoyable. More pictures here.

I just got back from another escape, this time to Pittsburgh, where I finally ventured to The Mattress Factory, a contemporary art museum where a HS friend of mine works. But not without a bump in road, of course: I have wanted to go to The Mattress Factory FOREVER, so of course 5 minutes before leaving, I get a terrible migraine. I sleep for 30 minutes and rally, determined to go, despite the blade through my head. What’s particularly funny is that the current exhibit is called, “Nothing is impossible.” The description reads: “If we consider that nothing is impossible and that anything can happen, how would we live differently? What could we envision? Where could we be? What can we hope for?” Yes, nothing is impossible indeed, I felt like I had waited my entire life before paying a visit to this museum and then I get a migraine. Envision? I see flashy lights and holograms. Hope for? Make it stop!!! Somehow I made it through a lot of audio and visual stimulation, including 3-D-glasses-wearing (kill me) and still managed to enjoy the place.

On the same street as The Mattress Factory is a row of writer residency houses, courtesy of City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, each with some kind of work of art on the facade. (It reminded me, not visually but just concept-wise, of one of my favorite children’s books, The Big Orange Splot). “House Poem,” seen above, was the first house, and was the home of Huang Xiang, an exiled Chinese writer who was jailed many times for writing. For someone who occasionally complains about writing and their accompanying deadlines, it really made me think: what if I were not allowed to write? What if my life were threatened just for the act of writing? I can’t imagine…

While at home, my parents and I participated in Art All Night, an 18-hour long open, un-juried art show that took place at Iron City Brewery. And as if that weren’t enough creativity for the weekend, I finally got to do something I’ve wanted to do for about a year now: have a baking/cooking afternoon with my extended family, particularly my little cousin Joey who loves to cook and bake with his super duper cook/baker/crafter/jane-of-all-trades mom. On the menu: bread pudding, bacon pine cone cheese balls, pecan rolls, cinnamon raisin rolls and a baked Alaska. Gulp! My extended family is quite large and everyone cooks and bakes from scratch, but usually we arrive at whatever holiday dinner or party with the dishes in hand–we eat together, but we don’t cook or bake together. I thought it would be fun to do both!

When I awoke from the resulting food coma at home, I went looking through my “work desk” in the basement, where I did lots of art projects as a kid. I found pages and pages of hand-copied notes: recipes for bread dough, craft books to buy, lists of projects I wanted to make, instructions for a papier mache sculpture. You name it…. I came upon this list of projects, which my sister totally DEFACED with the word “dork” written over and over. She even adds a definition entry of dork. “Dork: doork, adj; Alicia, one having the characteristics of Alicia.” I think I’ll send her copies of the craft book coming out (it’s basically done!!!), or my magazine design work (coming soon!!!) with a copy of this and the message: “The dorkiness paid off, now didn’t it?”

Lastly, while I was in Pittsburgh, an event known as Veggie Conquest, a vegan baking/cooking competition was going on a few blocks away from my NYC apartment. I participated at the last one as an amateur chef, where we were instructed to make cranberry desserts. It was intense, but fun! This time around, I had the esteemed privilege of being a “sponsor,” which in my case means I donated some smiling crochet vegetables (arguably, some fruits, a bulb and a tuber also). Our Hen House put together a nice video of the event, and you see all the above crocheted items in attendance.

“‘Do you know, master book-lover,’ he asked me, ‘this line of Paul Desjardins?’

Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue.

‘Is not that a fine rendering of a moment like this? May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, which is coming now for me, when the woods are all black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I am doing, by looking up to the sky.’”

-Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

Bachelard, the French philosopher and Sorbonne professor known for his constructivist epistemology and history of science studies (are you excited yet?) once started a lecture with the following:

“On your way here, did you look only straight ahead of you, or did you look up at the sky, and at the left of you, and at the right, and behind you?”*

In general, do I? I think so. Do you? I hope so. The above quote is like the question version of that “the journey is the destination” saying, even if that destination is a an eye-opening philosophical lecture by Bachelard. I found this leaf on an expansive church lawn, covered with leaves and pine cones, here in North Carolina. Some wear and tear around the edges, brown with age, but in tact and unbroken.

* Read More →

For someone who claims to thrive on spontaneity and throwing caution to the wind, I sure do make a lot of detailed to-do lists and plans of action. Like, really detailed. While I have made hasty travel plans many times, as soon as that plan is made, I fervently research everything I can about the destination, even if I only have a few hours. Which is not to say that I would, for instance, book a hotel room in advance, but instead, I’d read everything I can about every single museum, historical fact, yarn shop, book store and weird restaurant found there. In preparation for a weeklong vacation with my family, my dad scanned a vacation list of mine, hailing from the summer of 1999, when I was 17 and had just finished high school. It’s anal, to say the least, but certain items made me laugh, including “writing utensils,” “coloring books,” “candles” and “coupons.” Really? Was I really still using coloring books at age 17? Oh geez. And candles and coupons seem necessary to a beach vacation?

Not much has changed from what I’d bring today, content-wise, disregarding the obvious staples. Of utmost importance are still books, craft kits, Ernie, journal and”writing utensils.” The second part of the anal list-making is scouting out all the places to visit, which did include and would today include bakeries, craft stores, vintage clothes/thrift shops and bookstores. Always on the “buying” portion are two of my beach souvenir necessities, postcards and taffy.

Somebody recently called me a “responsible quixotic.” I think that about sums it up. Beach or bust…

When I was really little, maybe 5 or 6, I stumbled upon a little hot cross bun beaded charm bracelet at our local Sears department store. I must have known the nursery rhyme about hot cross buns, perhaps from one of my dad’s piano books–maybe it was one of the songs my sister and I danced to in the dining room as he played? That could have been the source of the interest in it, because to this day, I have yet to actually eat a hot cross bun. There was only one hot cross bun bracelet, and for some reason, I fell in love with it instantly, was drawn to it, wanting it like I don’t remember ever wanting something before (well, in my scant number of years on the planet at that point). I don’t know how to articulate it, but I felt like I needed it, as if it was somehow going to make me happy, complete my 5-year old life, but not in some shallow materialistic way. Something more…je ne sais quoi.

I never asked my parents to buy it for me, but I’d “visit” it each time we were at Sears, hunching down in the jewelry section and rolling it between my fingers. And just, well, wanting it. Until one day, it was gone. I would wonder about who bought it, and were they appreciating it, loving it the same way I would have? That Sears was eventually bulldozed, but I would think about that bracelet from time to time, half with regret that I never asked for it and half with optimism that one day, in some flea market or thrift store, I’d stumble upon it once again.

Someone recently asked me to design a crochet hot cross bun for Easter, one of my favorite Etsy customers who gives me what I call “crochet challenges.” The above memories flooded back as I googled for pictures of hot cross buns and started reading the wikipedia page about them: giving half to someone is said to maintain the friendship in the coming year; also giving half to someone who is ill is supposed to encourage better health. (Can someone give me, I don’t know, 6,000 of them then?!) I took my crochet hot cross bun assignment to the last Knit Club meeting and designed it from start to finish while dining on nachos and drinking a dirty martini. (The 5-year old has grown up, transitioning from the blinding fluorescents of department stores to the dim lights of neighborhood bars…). Note to self: this seriously impressed the ladies, commenting that they didn’t even need to make anything at Knit Club because they were happy to live vicariously through my yarn creations. (No, you must make things!!!)

Anyway, click below for the hot cross bun pattern to make your very own, and may good friendship, as well as good health, follow.

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