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Jul 22

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7/23 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

Wow! Lots of terrific creativity for last week’s prompt, “Chinese restaurant.” Difficult to pick a winner. In the end I had to go with a gorgeous image from Bec Thomas (check out Breakfast with Bec as well as her blog and website if you haven’t already). Congratulations, Bec! Your $10 amazon.com gift certificate is en route.

goldfish

From Cathy Jennings: “The chinese restaurant got me thinking about how i would like to go out to dinner and enjoy a cup of green tea in a beautiful cup.”

From Kelly Warren, a haiku and image pairing: “I collect ACEOs (art card, editions and originals) which are an outcropping of artist trading cards. If you aren’t familiar with them, the basic rule is that they must be the size of a standard playing card, 2 1/2″ x 3 1/2″. I created my first one for this prompt. Also my first Haiku! The Chinese letters are ‘Joy’ and ‘Love,’ top and bottom respectively. I’m not usually attracted to Asian art, but for a first try, I’m pretty happy with this! The stamps were in a very large collection of art supplies given to me by a friend who was moving and need to clear out some supplies. I’m having so much fun going through them all.”

Two Lovers Sitting in a Chinese Restaurant
Joyful hearts take flight
Lit by the lantern of love
Forever soaring.

From Cathy Coley, a poem:

chinese restaurant

my boys away
I thought I’d take my girl
out to our chinese takeout for lunch
four black tables in four white walls
sizzling woks behind the counter
red paper fortunes dangling golden coins
grandfather cooks
smile on his steamed face
heady onions and oil and chicken
and tofu and shrimp and beef
and peapods and mushrooms and bok choy
and sweet and sour and soy sauces
giant fat green jade buddha sits on the counter
ready to trade plastic swipes or paper money
for plastic containers and paper boxes
the best veggie lo mein in town

instead I heat up left over pizza
scarf it down
grab the stroller and the leash
walk my 2 girls around the neighborhood
the shiny black one pauses
to read her pee-mail at everyone’s lawn
the one in pink smiles and drools at me
we pause by the fingerlake
watch the ducklings skate along the surface
between mallard’s green head and mama’s mottled brown
a bullfrog croaks like homer simpson, doh! doh! doh!
dog’s pink tongue droops and waves
in the sweltering air
baby drowses fitfully and
I think of my boys
anchorless swimming motherless
through rowhouses in providence and
how they’ll fare needless of me in a few short years.

From Dana Thomas (welcome to Creative Construction, Dana!):

The Chinese Restaurant

Twenty years later, the words still roll off my brain each and every time that I feel a bit woozy after too many toddies: “You like a Shanghai Moon!”

I’d asked advice from the waiter who too zealously suggested the cool pretty blue drink with an umbrella.

He grinned with that top row of yellow, fanned teeth. “You like a Shanghai Moon. Twust me. You won’t wegwet it.”

What the heck, I thought, we’re celebrating our first date in five years since the boys were born. Bring it on!

It arrived all too quickly. I chugged it down like blueberry Koolaid on a hot afternoon. I ordered another.

The meal came and went, along with a few more Shanghais. I noticed the waiter peeking from behind the thin screen in the kitchen. He was still grinning. So was I. I tried to be romantic with my husband, looking deep into his two sets of eyes.

I should never have ordered rice–but who knew? Tasty going down; rough like metal pellets coming up. I spent the next day in bed, vowing never to drink anything that color again.

Now, when I’ve had a little too much to drink, my husband throws that grin my way and says, “What’s wrong, babe? You like a Shanghai Moon!”

But his teeth are straight and white…so I know I’m safe.

From me (Miranda), a haiku and photo pairing:

Chinese restaurant
I still believe in
the soothsaying truth and hope
of fortune cookies

This week’s prompt: “Beauty”

Use the prompt however you like. All media are welcome. Please e-mail your entries to creativereality@live.com by 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, July 29. The winning entry receives a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com. Writers should include their submission directly in the body text of their e-mail. Visual artists and photographers should attach an image of their work as a jpeg. Enter as often as you like; multiple submissions for a single prompt are welcome. There is no limit to how many times you can win the weekly contest, either. (You do not have to be a contributor to this blog in order to enter. All are invited to participate.) Remember, the point here is to stimulate your output, not to create a masterpiece. Keep the bar low and see what happens. Dusting off work you created previously is OK too. For more info, read the original contest blog post.

Jul 22

8 Comments

Kelly: When Life and Art Meet Frustration

[Editor’s note: The post below was written last Tuesday, but due to an admin error it’s only getting published today. Apologies, Kelly!]

Funny thing just happened. It’s been one of those days. My secretary doesn’t really know it’s been one of those days, yet she just created and sent me this picture. Why has it been one of those days? It’s been one of those days because I yelled at my girls this morning. I rarely even raise my voice at my girls, yet I actually yelled at them this morning, out of sheer frustration I guess. Put me in the Worst Mama Ever category today. So far I’m not doing very well on the “savor the week with my girls” goal I put on the Monday page.

What caused me to lose it? I guess a combination of things really. Since my DH is working 12-16 hour days all week on a major plant project shutdown, I’m essentially a single Mom this week, a single Mom with a very demanding full-time job outside the home, a flourishing part-time business inside the home, and twin girls who will be five in three weeks. How do single Moms do it? And today is Tuesday, Water Play Day. Water Play Day requires that I goop up my girls with sunblock and swimsuit before we even leave the house, plus pack them a towel and extra change of clothes for the day. Oh, and don’t forget the money for shaved ice, Mom! Add to that the rest of the “must gather for the day” things that take place every morning and the long list of tasks awaiting me once I got to the office, and I was truly frazzled. Yet here I am talking to you.

That’s where the frustration must come out. As creative mothers, don’t we all have very lengthy to-do lists? Yet I keep adding things to my list, don’t you? The things that I want to do and the things that I must do sometimes completely crowd out the things that I absolutely must remember. What are those? Those are the reminders to stay sane. Those are the reminders to breathe and count to ten before I snap at my girls. Those are the reminders that my girls did not create my to-do lists. They did not commit me to participating in a Fat Book swap, they did not force me to procrastinate terribly on completing my calendar at work, they did not ask me to take the online Blackboard course, they did not ask for a dog for their birthday so they’d have to help take care of her, they did not even ask to play at Water Play Day. They simply asked me to love them. And I hope that those are also the reminders that it’s okay to screw up every once in a while…no, scratch that…it’s impossible not to screw up every once in a while because I am who I am. First and foremost, a living, breathing, emotional, creative creature who feels smothered when I can’t find that time for myself to create yet feel guilty when I spend time away from my children and family. So maybe Life and Art meet Frustration when we realize we simply can’t do all the things we want to do and be all the things others need us to be. So we must accept. I must accept. Accept things as they are and, just maybe, as they were meant to be.

So I go back to that list and try to remember why there is so much on it. I committed to the Fat Book swap because I want my girls to learn to take chances on new things like I do. I’ve procrastinated on my calendar because I’d rather go through the pictures we took on our family vacation. I’m taking the Blackboard class because I’d love to shift over to faculty full time to have more time with my family. We bought the girls a dog for their birthday last year so they could grow to love animals as much as we do while learning to take care of another creature. And about that Water Play Day? I selected that school for my girls for the growth it would provide them…emotionally, socially, spiritually and mentally. While I suppose there is a little selfishness in all that we do, maybe we all need to learn how to recognize the gifts we give our children by doing everything that we do. I’ll work on that. How about you? I think I’ll go look through those pictures again now….

Jul 22

10 Comments

Online Inspiration: Wordle

OK, I may be the last blogger on the face of the internet to post about Wordle. But I can’t help it; I have to jump on board. I’ve been playing with this toy for weeks now. Just for the benefit of those of you who haven’t read about Wordle elsewhere (there must be two of you!), here’s an intro.

Jonathan Feinberg at IBM created this addictive little toy. Wordle creates graphic word clouds using any text or RSS feed you enter. The size of each word is dependent on how frequently it appears in the text; graphics can be randomized or reset according to orientation, color scheme, and font.  Everything you create with Wordle can be used however you like (even for profit) under a Creative Commons attribution license. Paste in some text and see what happens. Here’s what I came up with when I pasted in my personal life mission statement (it’s seven years old but it still fits):

 

life mission

And here are two different examples of what you get using the Creative Construction feed (click on the images for a closer look):

Creative Construction
Creative Construction

Apparently we use the word “house” a lot! I think this is a result of our recent “My mother’s house” prompt, since the possessive “mother’s” is also showing predominantly in the word cloud.

You could use Wordle images to create all kinds of things. I’m thinking holiday cards…If you play with Wordle and come up with something cool (and I think it’s pretty much ALL cool!) save it to the Wordle gallery and paste a link to your design in a comment below. Ah, the beauty of words….