I was sick for a few days with a plain old cold which made the normal ol’ progression from throat and clogged head to rattly chest and gave me a few days without much oomph to do much. I was in no shape to deal with the public.
So I did wildly exciting stuff like taking little pieces of fabric off the wall (carefully and slowly). I re-watched the Harry Potter films and let the last ones give my tear ducts quite the work out. (much weeping)
I tried not to fret about my first-ever vegetable delivery from Field-Goods. I did manage to eat:
blueberries (with some fine yogurt I had on hand)
a chopped salad mix of stuff that included turnips and kale and bok choy. They recommended a mustardy dressing which I tried and agreed it was tasty but then, being sick, I threw the rest in with a soup I made and it was quite excellent.
a turnip got chopped up and thrown into that soup too.
I put the frozen cherry tomatoes back into the freezer for another day’s stir fry or something.
I managed to do a little sewing once the dayquil actually did something which was Tuesday afternoon. Last night I was WIDE awake so as you saw I rummaged around on the Robert Genn website and read all kinds of things which made my head turn into a sort of art mush. Worse things have happened.
I had to rummage again because I wanted to find one thing I’d read last night about “recovery mode” – not just the idea that you can, using your skills and mastery, recover from mistakes but you can put yourself into a risk taking mode to take advantage of those skills in recovery. Emphasis in quote below is mine:
The more I’m in this game, the more I realize that it’s a matter of knowing what you’re doing — being able to do it — and being able to recover when you don’t. Accepting that the latter condition is commonplace is part of the game. Furthermore, just knowing that you can get into recovery mode frees you to take chances — particularly at the early stages. As a matter of fact, the recovery mode is where the most inventive and creative moves are discovered and made. A lot of recovery is instinctive. A player needs to act instinctively to bring his will back into play.
Robert suggested purposely introducing “mean characters” like bad brushes or colors to force yourself into this recovery mode state of mind and then ended his letter with this great quote:
I think I’m painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape. — Willem de Kooning
