birthday coming round again...

today i want to go see this art exhibit
.

i'm hoping Loopy will want to go and will actually enjoy it. she might. it may involve naked people, and who doesn't enjoy that?

well, if not, at least we can have lunch somewhere new and just enjoy each other (the museum is way up in a northern suburb so new territory to explore).

it would be the beginning of my birthday celebration. (i've posted about birthdays and even one of the memories that follow in other years, but i don't care... :) )

next weekend we are going to Madison to spend Saturday with herspiral and her husband. then we're going to have a party two weeks after my birthday. we realized we know and like six people in chicago. that's enough for a party. :) two former coworkers plus one fiancé, one current coworker, and a guy i used to know when we were small children plus his wife whom we met for dinner with my mother and who turned out to be delightful.

i always try to have an extended birthday celebration, at least two weeks and sometimes a month, full of gathered friends and special pleasures. one of these is usually a museum - often an art museum, tho one year it was the . (i didn't consciously create this tradition, but when i ask myself where can i give myself purest joy, that's usually my answer). when i was in college i went to the Museum of Fine Arts at least twice... once I went alone and sketched this piece:


I spent all afternoon, allowed myself to just fall into it, alone in the dimly lit gallery, just become completely absorbed with nothing else to do... it was one of the greatest pleasures of my life. (Of course i had forgotten and missed a meeting with my thesis advisor so guilt and rushing quickly resumed their usual roles...)

(some of you - to the extent that there are any of you! - might know that I am or used to be, or sometimes am an artist, of sorts, maybe. as well as photography i know how to paint and draw, though i haven't for years. after i left art school i was always working on a painting or other piece in my head, but never painted them and the ideas stopped coming. though just this morning i saw a piece in the New Yorker that reminded me of one of these unborn or stillborn ideas... it sounds ludicrously obvious if i describe it but i wanted to make it haunting.... i have a number of pieces in my head related to different phases in my perceptions of our current system of schooling (wouldn't dignify it by calling it 'education') and the harm it does especially to Black children...)

ANYWAY! birthdays.

another year i went to the Museum of Fine Arts with Sylvia and Franklin and we came upon this painting:


(MFA has ridiculously gigantic links - that one was 562 characters!)

It says in the upper right corner - and is titled - "D'ou venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous?"

Sylvia commented with wry amusement (misreading the middle phrase), 'We came from Cambridge. We're in the museum. We're going to lunch.'

It is a beautiful painting...

in recent years I have taken to breezing through museums... the slow pondering way I used to traverse them has come to seem too painfully obsessive to me... i remember feeling very driven to absorb all the information about all the works and slot it into a massive database in my brain... it's a relief to leave that behind... associate it with Harvard and over-achievement. Loopy has taught me this...

at the same time I hurry more than I would without Loopy (she may be surprised to hear that! heh)... she is not the biggest-ever fan of museums and i try to balance our conflicting desires for depth and speed by looking at one or two things in each room in depth, then skipping the rest - it's a good Buddhist practice to just let go. it's a good human practice to remember others and be considerate... had to do the same in Iran. consider the group and don't get sucked into anything...

there is a sort of agreement tho that for my birthday i get to linger and savor... be a lil bit selfish... maybe?

This makes it sound like I don't have fun at museums with Loopy. i do. i have a lot of fun - it's just a different kind of fun. Loopy has definitely added new dimensions to museum going... we have little games that sound silly when i describe them, so i deleted the descriptions, but we have little games we play among the objects, that bring us into our own shared world and give us (or me anyway) a lot of pleasure... and i'm looking forward to today, I'm gonna go wake her up.

It also occurs to me that since this is Valentine's Day, maybe I should offer to do something that SHE wants to do. hmmm. there's a concept. ;) anyway i miss her and will go wake her up. :) even though i didn't make her Valentine's Day project which i still want to :) and will!

lil added bonus: while browsing the MFA site i discovered a section on wallpapers for your phone... i don't get why you'd buy them since you can just download them or screenshot them and then email them to your phone, but maybe if you have a simpler phone you can't do that. Anyway, their suggested wallpapers are fun, including some like this:


i love that lil frog. if i didn't already have a lovely picture of Loopy i might get any one of these....