January 7: Firsts of the New Year

In Japan, the first time you do anything in the new year marks something special, so for this swap I was supposed to pay attention to my new years firsts, write about them, and send them over to my partner. While trying to feel better about spending new year's eve by myself, I thought about about how irrelevant the date is. It's not tied to the solar circumnavigation; there are no crops to harvest or solstices to honor. The reason January 1 begins the year is because that's the day Roman consuls took office. It really doesn't mean anything in the universal scheme of things, which is the only scheme I ascribe to these days. Armed with that attitude, I didn't notice the first time I did anything, except for what I wrote on this postcard of drunken root vegetables.

I flirted with someone I hadn't even met yet, not just for the first time in 2009, but for the first time in ... seven years? I don't usually feel instant connections with anyone, but something about this person made me want to ask questions, find out about him, get him to talk to me, try to seem interesting. I didn't do a very good job of it (my housemates are incredulous that I couldn't think of a reason to ask for his number), but it felt really good just having the experience, and knowing that I'm not an alien who only likes the people she already knows.

After I'd already mailed the postcard, a more momentous first happened that I wish I'd written about instead. As meaningful as it felt to me, flirting is a silly thing to be telling a German guy who is married with two kids, likes to cook, and is involved with civic affairs (all this from his swap-bot profile). I'd rather have told him what happened at the end of a vinyasa yoga class. We were in shivasana, and I'd been imagining a balloon of light expanding in various points of my body as the instructor called them out. When we got back to my brow, I felt tears welling up - not an uncommon occurence lately, but usually I stifle it because I'm on the trolley and I don't know why I'm crying. This time, I let it go. My head started buzzing, then my whole body, and I thought, "this is what joy feels like." I have been either profoundly depressed or emotionally deadened by antidepressants for longer than I know, and this is the first time in my memory when neither is true. Even when I feel bad about things, I feel good. I'm happy even when I'm sad! Hooray!

German man didn't mind the flirting tale, by the way; he wrote in reply, "That was a really impressive story."

January 6: Glucksschwein

Here's the Glucksschwein explanation directly from the swap sign-up page: "When you are lucky, the Germans say "Du hast Schwein gehabt." This means You Have Had Pig. The saying dates back to hard times, when having a pig to eat meant you were fortunate indeed." The pig, not so much.

My partner and her husband spend their summers planting trees in the Canadian Rockies, during which time they live in a van. I thought Pass the Pigs, one of my favorite games, would be perfect for them (that's what's in the present at left, I forgot to take a picture before I wrapped it up). It's small, portable, and can keep you busy for hours. Trust me.

I had a terrible time finding one, though. It seems there is only one independent toy store in Philadelphia that isn't an hour away by transit (Happily Ever After at 1010 Pine), and although it looks like a good one with local owners and workers who know their product and are eager to help you find the perfect toy - a great plus to any locally-owned shop - it's not exhaustive and they didn't have Pigs. Did there used to be locally-owned toy stores around here before ToysRUs and then WalMart took over the market? There are several toy stores in the suburbs, mostly on the main line, and I beg Philly locals to support them next time you're toy shopping. Starting a business is the primary way people lift themselves out of poverty, and the more the big box stores control the market, the more impossible it is for people to help themselves.

The postcard up top is one that moves when you tip it back & forth. It's printed in Germany and even said good luck on the back! Perfect! I ended up mailing my own Pigs game to my partner. Next time I'm in Chestnut Hill I'll replace it at ODoodles.

Incoming: Friendship star quilt block

Some of the swaps on Swap-Bot are serial, like the animal ATCs where you have to make an ATC of an animal for every letter of the alphabet. One swap will be the letter A, the next the letter B, and so on (I joined Animal ATCs - F; that'll be mid-January. Frilled lizard? Flying fox? Firebelly newt? Finnish spitz?).

This is a serial swap that results in a friendship star quilt top at the end, each 12 inches of which is made by a different person. There's a new friendship star quilt block swap every month in which one 12.5-inch block is exchanged. This being my entree into the serial swap, I didn't have any other blocks to match, so I didn't request any specific colors (except I've written on my site profile that pastels are to be avoided at all costs). @Quiltluver, my assigned partner, was so dear as to ask me what I wanted, but I left it up to her. Serendipity has always worked for me, and it didn't fail this time either; she got my colors exactly right. These rich, royal tones are my favorites when it comes to comfort bedclothes. I doubt I'll keep swapping much when January is over, but I do want to keep up with the friendship star swaps until I have enough to make a quilt.

Luna liked the quilt square too. That, or she stopped being the center of attention for one second and had to reassert herself.


@Quiltlover also included a bazillion extra little things, including more triangles cut from the quilt square fabric, some matching fat quarters (a fabric square measuring 18x18 inches; it's a quilting term), and this amazing postcard. I assume it's prompted by the part of my profile that says I love terribly boring postcards. She gets me! Kyoto, you know I've always wanted to visit you, but you're not representing yourself well here:

January 5: Ocean Life ATCs

No matter how much my mom loves them, I've never been inspired to make artist trading cards. But the fascination of jellyfish, sea fans, dolphins, coral, pufferfish, diatoms, skates, and general teeming alien biodiversity of the sea drew me in to this swap of ocean life ATCs. When I signed up I thought I'd just dress up some lobsters (oh no! That was figuratively speaking; I hadn't thought of actually dressing them up like Little Bo Peep or Peter Wimsey - I sense some more collages coming on).

But I can never stick with the most obvious thing. That's why, my mom said, other kids made fun of me when I was growing up, because I was weird and all over the place with my non-linear thinking. I always thought she was just saying that, but now I'll claim it. At least, if a general snapshot of the depth and breadth of the people who do like me as an adult means anything, I think she was right. I mean, my beloved friends are weird, weird people.

So on this one I had to go with honoring ocean life by highlighting its destruction and wrath. Industrial fishing is as heinous and dangerous as big box stores and agribusiness, and as much a result of the prosperous world's senses of entitlement, dominion, and blind faith in technology. Even this Greenpeace video about bottom trawling refers to "our oceans" (at :54); where the possessive indicates that the oceans are ours to do with as we please. Also? Orange Roughy? Used to be called slimeheads, but no one would eat a slimehead. They had to make people eat something other than cod, because the cod were disappearing, so the renamed the slimehead. Now? The slimeheads are disappearing.


The set of ATCs depicting the re-taking of the ocean floor (from tourists anyway) went to one swap partner. The collages are mounted on that kind of picture, which must have a name, that appears to move when you tip it back and forth, cut from an old placemat. The set of ATCs immediately above, with the always/never list (and some runaway paste) on back of both went to another partner. I hope neither recipient feels bad that they didn't get something cute, but, my mom was right.

January 4: Envelopes

These are what I sent for the handmade envelopes swap (see last post for what I got in exchange). My coworkers at Untours have been giving me their old calendars at the end of every year for a few years running, so I had Rail Europe, Carl Larsson, puppies & kitties, English taverns, etc. to work with, plus an atlas of Maine I recently acquired from the Second Mile Center. The calendars had all been used as calendars before they became useful as envelopes (reuse is better than recycling!), so my partner can see what day my coworkers had dinner with friends or gave the dog his heartworm pill:

Here's an aside if there's ever been one: While searching for Carl Larsson the illustrator to get the spelling right, I found this Karl Larsson. Holy crap am I going to see that man when his band tours the USA.

Incoming: Envelopes

I think I got better than I gave with this one (see next post for what I sent). The object was to send my partner 12 handmade envelopes, one for each month. Hannah sent me some supremely colorful envelopes from diverse sources, fun to look at on the inside as well as the outside. She sent more than 12, and two were origami, folded in a manner I had only just learned to do myself at the Philosophical Society. I love the coincidences involved in these otherwise random exchanges.

January 3: Writing prompt notebook

My commitment is to complete a swap for every day in January, not complete a swap every day in January start to finish. That's my own loophole. My friend Mark said that fun-a-day (or any one-thing-a-day project) is really about the discipline of repetitive action - not in a carpal tunnel of the mind kind of way, but in the zen and fulfillment of sticking to a commitment kind of way. Even with my loophole, I agree wholeheartedly. If I did 31 things on January 31, I'd be a cheater. (In any case, that would be impossible because this swapping business is practically a seventh job.)

This project is very much about having some discipline and fulfilling a commitment. Especially in January, when the clockwork-like winter depression nears the witching hour, I need something regular that I can point to as accomplished, so I don't feel like a lump of too-wet clay that just oozes and farts whenever I try to effect something (that's effect, verb, not affect, noun, for you picky grammar people). That's why I was attracted to the idea of swapping as an art form. I'm not responsible to only myself, but to other people who are depending on me to mail them stuff. The nebulous receivers of my envelopes and packages offer an extra carrot, and just maybe the discipline of being accountable to other people will become a habit, and I'll learn to be disciplined all by myself. And then maybe all those ideas that have been on my "to do in 2006, no 2007, no 2008, no 2009" list will get done. Yes! 2009! Year of the ox! Did I mention I'm a ox?

This is all working up to say that I started this writing-prompt notebook in December, in order to have it done by the deadline imposed by the person who designed the swap. I got it in a little early. The assignment was to paste found words and images throughout a notebook of at least 70 pages, and mail it to my partner, whose imagination would hopefully be sparked by them, and she would immediately start free-writing all these feelings and ideas she never knew she had. I had a thoughtful time making it, especially because my partner is a Muslim journalist who lives on a farm, has homeschooled her kids, and does her best to make from scratch everything that her family needs. I really wanted to do a good job for her.


There were at least 70 prompts in the finished notebook; I'm only including three here that made me think as I worked. They all come from children's encyclopedias from the 60s or 70s, and are indicative of how prosperity-centric (if not plain old US-centric) these books that claim to teach kids about the world are. Are sunflowers and dandelions really common weeds that everyone knows? And really, weeds? I don't know about dandelions, but there must be billions of people who have never seen a sunflower. And anyway, sunflowers are crops! Huge crops!

And then there are Building Materials:

It's true, they do throw in "and can afford." But that's a little backhanded: See, we can use any material we want. Can you? This was not, by the way, part of an entry about globalization, colonialism, or the rape of the Earth. It was about houses. The book presented the ability to use any material we want as a measure of progress. Those poor, sorry people who had to use what was at hand! They had it so rough, what with the needing to be creative and feeling the economic and ecological boundaries of the world! We all know what happened to those people:


No wonder so many of these kids grew up to give tax breaks and other incentives to enormous big box stores, so they could deliver unto us all the forests in Siberia.

When I was done with the book, I took a good look at the outside and discovered it was ugly. I wanted to leave it more of a blank slate instead of pasting more stuff on the cover, so I sewed a sleeve for it. Voilà: