Last night, Elizabeth Gilbert, the writer of Eat Play Love was in Rochester to give a talk through Writers and Books. It seems like every woman in town was there. I feel a bit shallow for getting so obsessed with the boots she was wearing, but the truth of it is that they were/are big, confident, high healed, Italian leather, made for causing trouble, speaking your mind, and being smart and sexy boots. She owned the stage, worked the corwd and read us a witty little, well writtten story about Rose who drove the bus filled with her old lovers. I took notes and have to share them in hopes you'll read her book, watch her on Oprah tomorrow and go on your own adventures.

Mine, are pretty pedrestian but no less fabulous, for being in flat shoes solidly on upstate new york ground....










alright then, stay out of trouble,
Rachael

So I haven't written much here but I've been writing a lot for the classes I started taking, for work, for my own sanity. I haven't been painting much but I have been doing some drawing. Priya's comment on the last entry is a good push to put some pictures up but we broke our digital camera and I can't find the scanner. Excuses, excuses.

I do at least have (thanks to John Boutet) some pictures of the traffic signal boxes I recently painted.





I have also just begun to get obsessed with an artist, Hugh Pearce Botts , now mostly forgotten but whose work mostly lives in the museum I work at. Botts it seems was a sketch-hunter, a WPA printmaker and a coffee pot patent holder. He's gone now but I'll get a chance to see his sketchbook on Thursday and I suppose, if I'm lucky, someone will someday say that about me.

Life is short, I'm off to live it.
thanks for looking, reading, and sharing car crash stories. I like to think I'm done crashing into the world, hope so at least...

Rachael

Well sometimes the world is easy to bump into. Today I learned an important lesson about distractions. I crashed my car into another car because I was not paying enough attention. Nobody was hurt. My car was totaled and his was mucked up in the front a little. My freedom of travel will be reigned in a bit (it's OK I like the bus) and the following things were shocked back into me:

People are more often kind and forgiving than not. The gentleman I hit didn't scream at me for being such a knucklehead, a total stranger stopped his car in the middle of a busy intersection to help, and all along the process people were nice. Over and over I heard, "that's why they call it an accident".

Accepting responsibility and taking the consequences of your actions is incredibly important, free-ing, and swallowing pride is good sometimes. I'll be paying a ticket for running a red.

We move too fast in this world. Sometimes the world will slow us down.

This happens too often. Would that I looked a little more carefully at the road and thought less about the things I had to do.

The sculptures of John Chamberlain will never look the same.

True friends are the ones who pick you up and dust you off. Thanks Kerry, thanks John.

Drive safely and know that I will too, once I'm ready to buckle in again. Mercifully no one was hurt. No one was hurt. Phew. No one was hurt.

Rachael

Janna Levin talked tonight in Rochester. Though I don't speak theoretical physics and cosmology seems overwhelming, her language, her passion, her knowledge, her ideas were thoroughly accessible and thrilling. I'll try to scan and put up some of my lecture notes but for now, enjoy her interview on the Stephen Colbert Report. Part 1 of Janna Levin on the Colbert Report


Part 2

Part 3

Rachael

The museum I work for has a big fund-raising art fair every year over the weekend after labor day. All staff work all weekend making sure the whole thing happens without a hitch. Today the hitch was non-stop rain and low attendance. I couldn't bring the sun out but I could smile, make coffee, talk to those who came, keep my volunteers smiling, pass around M&M's and compliments and remember that the end of the world will look a lot different than a grey sky, a muddy ground and a fairly empty party. Plus, you know, I wouldn't be smiling if I didn't believe in what I do.
I feel for the exhibitors (soggy tents and hours of standing there waiting for people to come in) and I know we'll be trying to creatively raise some more money this year, but I was pleased to see my colleagues and friends smiling too.

take care,
Rachael