A Little Cup of Cyanide

Wow, I haven't posted in a while. I've actually been pretty busy this week. Me? Busy? That has to be a sign of the apocalypse or something. I was helping out with the gallery show quite a bit last week. I got to help make clay birdies. Most of the time I was just packing clay into the mold so it wouldn't leak when they filled it. But she wanted something like 180 birds or something. I forget. I think Melissa said we only got thirty some finished. They all got smashed in the end, anyway. I wanted to break one, but I didn't. I think my mom is sitting inside my brain yelling "Lisa, be careful with that! You don't want to break it!" I was a clumsy kid, much like I'm now a clumsy adult. Only I think I'm worse now. But any time I would pick up something fragile my mom would literally scream at me to be careful. She's one of those people who freaks out over the tiniest things. And I had a reputation for dropping things. To this day if I pick up anything fragile I'm really super careful with it. And I feel weird breaking anything on purpose. So I was standing there in the back just watching people thinking "I'm just going to break one. I have to break one after all the work I did on those things." But I never did.

It made me think about a phone I bought a few years. I was at a yard sale with my mom, and I needed a new phone. Wouldn't you know it, they had one of those old fashioned radial phones for $5. I thought it was one of the coolest things ever, so I bought it. Well, it didn't work. So I decided to do with it what I do with everything electronic that stops working for me, take it apart and see what's inside. Have you ever tried taking one of those things apart? They aren't like today's phones where you drop them hard enough and they fall apart. And there weren't any screws holding it together. It was just a metal plate covered by a really hard plastic casing. I tried pulling it apart and prying it with a screwdriver, but nothing worked. So I finally realised the only way to open it up was to actually break the casing off in pieces. It's different from just removing screws and taking it apart. It's like you're not really destroying it. You can put it back together if you're just taking out the screws and disassembling it. But when completely shatter it, there's no way to put it back together. The whole time I was breaking pieces off the cover I felt weird. Like there's this awesome old phone that's lasted this long, and now I'm destroying it. But it was kind of fun using a screwdriver to fling giant chunks of it across the room.

I have to write a response to the show. I think I'll make this part of it. After I do some major editing, and add some stuff about Nicaragua, which is what the show was actually about. At least as far as I can tell. I still don't completely get it. It's just me, I guess. She had these big biohazard buckets and some other stuff that were held together to look like a boat, and the buckets had water in them. So when someone broke one of the birds, they were thrown into the buckets. It had something to do with the birds representing hope, how they got destroyed, but they were put into the water so they could be made into clay again. The question is if they will ever actually be used again, or will they just end up being sent down a drain somewhere. Always the optimist!