I Look At Pictures

posted in: Work 9
Teenager in Italy, playing with light display. Image: Wikipedia.
Teenager in Italy, playing with light display. Image: Wikipedia.

 

I’m a busy gal. A few of the things on my list:

  • Complete my master’s degree.
  • Research and write and edit for Quiltfolk.
  • Write two (2) new lectures for QuiltCon 2018.
  • Continue to develop Super-Secret Project No. 1.
  • Poke X about Super-Secret Project No. 2 with Y.

So that’s a lot — and we both know I could keep going. But instead of listing all the rest of the stuff I get to do/want to do/have to do, I’d really like to list a few projects that I really, really want to do but can’t, for lack of bandwidth. After all, actually doing things is hard and taxing, while dreaming about doing other things is fun; everybody knows that.

So, here’s a list of projects that I want to do but just totally cannot prioritize just this second:

  • Develop Taco Tape. (*remind me to explain at some point)
  • Make a PaperGirl one-off glossy magazine for sale at gigs and/or as a gift for a donation of any size to the maintenance of this blog and the girl who writes it. (!)
  • Make a big coffee table book with a carefully-curated selection of exceptional (and exceptionally strange) public domain photos and images I have collected over the years of sifting through WikiCommons.

This last one, man … I’m telling you. That book will be so cool when I finally am able to do it — and I really want to do it. Because I have a big file of awesome pictures and illos from years of writing this blog. When I go looking for a picture of gooey butter cake or a man crossing the street with an enormous bouquet of roses, you won’t believe what I come across.

Sometimes, I’ll just click through the images in a folder I have marked “Everything Has To Be Moved”, the working title for this photo book. I don’t know that I’d make up a fictional narrative for each photo; I like the idea of these disparate photographs and illustrations simply living together, selected by me, for their beauty or uniqueness, or their quality, or their subject(s), or all of that.

I traffic in words more than images, of course, but visual language is real and I reckon I’m semi-bilingual.