The Boring Bits

When I get stressed, I love to do jigsaw puzzles. 

The past few weeks have been super stressful, like "maybe you should call a lawyer" stressful. Just plain bad. Literally insult to injury bad. Awful. Sheesh.

So I am doing a a cute cat jigsaw puzzle given to me by my friend's mom. She knows I am a jigsaw fan and was unloading one from her stash so she can make room for more. 

Anyway, it is a cute puzzle and I've been working on it obsessively so I don't have to think about the stressful thing and I'm also avoiding work on my major creative project which I need to get off my ass and do. 

So here is the puzzle. I just have the boring bits left, the sky-like, monochrome parts. 

Novel Gazing

I supposed to be working on my novel today before I leave for Montana tomorrow for a week. My assignment for my writing group is due next Sunday, but as I will be busy with the Boy and his therapy, I won't have time.

What am I doing instead? All writers have their favorite forms of procrastination. Jigsaw puzzles are my weakness, especially these elaborate wooden jigsaw puzzles from Liberty Puzzles. Carla introduced me to these puzzles and now I have my Dad hooked on them. They are mediative, where I allow myself to sit and think and not expect myself to be busy or productive.

Writing a novel (for me, anyway) is somewhat like doing a jigsaw puzzle. I have lots of small parts put together but I don't see how they are going to fit together yet so the whole thing is kind of chaos.

I have written a bunch of scenes about my main character, Betty, but I am not sure what the full picture will look like. Betty is very loosely based on my best friend from college who is wicked smart but then married a venture capitalist and now plays tennis as her vocation. (Perhaps that makes her even more wicked smart, that she found a way to get a luxurious life without needing to work, but the jury is still out on that.) The real Betty immigrated to the US from Taiwan when she was seven and didn't have an athletic bone in her body. Betty the character and Betty my friend both suffer from lack of problems in their lives, which is then actually a problem. In a sense, Betty is the opposite of Job, a biblical character who suffers every sort of indignity and still maintains his faith in God. Everyone has problems, but most of Betty's friend don't see her problems as real: How can someone so beautiful and wealthy with well adjusted sons and a well meaning husband actually suffer? I've known Betty for so long, I know she has struggled and she does have problems, especially with her mother-in-law, who is just plain wicked. I find it fascinating. I want to figure it out so I am plodding through a novel about her.

"Betty seems superficial," my writing group has said at times. I struggle because at times that is the point. How then does Betty grow from that point of perceived vacuity? My writing group has a point, though--readers need to be relate to Betty otherwise they won't bother reading about her.

Considering I am fighting two crises at the same time--one with the Boy and the other with Jack, I am having very little patience with Betty the character whose life floats by. The real life Betty is fine, but she is not the first person I call when I am having a hard time. When she had problems with her husband, she told him she was going to leave him and poof! he went to a therapist, got his head out of his butt, and everything is hunky-dory.

Betty and my lives were very similar until we turned twenty-eight. She had a baby who is now in college, and I had a baby who died. She has kind and supportive brothers (except one, but she has two others who are.) My brother is insane. Betty's kids are stable and productive. I have a kid in treatment for anxiety and depression. Betty's husband is smart, hard-working and attentive. My husband is smart and hard-working. Her husband is finance and money can't love you back so he spends time with his family. My husband is a prominent physician who is adored by everyone he works with who gets most of his meaning from his job.

I still love Betty in spite of her easy life, even though it would be easier to dismiss her instead. I know what she doesn't share with her friends who are wives of Silicon Valley leaders. When she was growing up in Texas, she was a black haired girl in a sea of blondes, that in spite of her traffic-stopping beauty, she could not get a date in high school, that she would love to have a day with with green eyes and an Anglo name like Lauren Jennings.

So I go back to my jigsaw puzzle, trying to find the bigger picture, to see where this is all heading. Unlike life and a half-written novel, a jigsaw puzzle has a tidy solution. I know the puzzle will work. I wish I had such faith about the book I am writing and my personal life.

Condo Weekend, Part 2: The Monday Reckoning

Mondays are the true test of a weekend. Are you tired? Hungover? Relaxed? Happy to be at work? Sad the weekend is done?

This morning, the weekend in the condo felt like a month vacation. It was awesome.

And yet, there were things I did and did not do that I had planned to do, like

• my taxes
• balancing the checkbook
• working on a quilt

Instead, I worked on the hardest jigsaw puzzle in the world. I have a friend who asked me once why do women feel like they always need to accomplish something. Why can't they just sit and have a beer and do nothing and feel good about it? He was well intentioned and has a point but I didn't want to say because women across the globe have been conditioned for generations to be taking care of other people and not ourselves, but I digress. My piano teacher said the jigsaw puzzle is meditative. She is right.

So today, on Monday, I was less eager to be at work than usual. I still like my job, but rather I loved my weekend. Perhaps my six minute walk to work from the condo didn't allow me to get in the proper mindset.

ELMS Puzzles

A few weeks ago, I was reading Architectural Digest in the waiting room of the Sports Medicine clinic and I saw an article about George W. and Laura Bush's home on their ranch in Crawford, Texas. When the author described a table that "usually had an ELMS puzzle" on it, I dropped the magazine and googled ELMS.

ELMS is based in Maine where they hand make wooden jigsaw puzzles. I was smitten. Instead of selling the puzzles, they rent them out for three months. I called up to find out more about it. I talked to one of the women who cuts the puzzles and we talked in the phone for forty-five minutes about their puzzles. I joined and ordered some puzzles for my recovery period. The puzzles come in a green cardboard box with no picture of what the puzzles is supposed to be.

"You are entering advanced puzzling territory," said Jack. "This is serious stuff."

Tower of London

I fell in love with wooden jigsaw puzzles a few years ago when I came across Liberty Puzzles at Card Kingdom in Ballard. Liberty is based out of Boulder, Colorado, and there puzzles are laser cut by a machine.

The joy of all wooden puzzles are the crazy shapes.  Instead of all of the shapes being close to similar like in a cardboard puzzle, each piece in a wooden puzzle is fairly unique. There are dancers and animals and objects that relate to the theme of the puzzle. I often will start one of these puzzles by looking for matching shapes instead of matching colors or themes.

Why do I love these puzzles so much? I am almost addicted. I get in a zen-like flow state, where my subconscious brain will pick a piece before my conscious mind knows what is happening. Jack commented that I am really good at this. I am. I hoping that when I fully recover from my knee injury, I can get a job in the lucrative jigsaw puzzle assemblers market.

Ha. I am not sure what transferable skills match up with solving jigsaw puzzles. Maybe I could become a maker of puzzles myself, or starting my own jigsaw puzzle company.

Today is the third day after my surgery, and my friend Lisa stopped over for lunch. She is a social worker who focuses on abused and neglected children. She reads about mindfulness, and she saw my stash of stuff to keep me busy during the acute phase of recovering from the surgery. I have coloring books, puzzles, quilting projects, Soduko puzzles, books, and the BBC's Pride and Prejudice.

Finding things to keep me busy during my post-surgery days is hard. My leg was too stiff to move comfortably this morning, so I took some oxycodone. After the oxycodone, I was too woozy and dizzy to move. This seems pretty much like lose-lose to me.

But I have my puzzles and quilts to keep me occupied.

Jigsaw Puzzles

I love jigsaw puzzles.  I love the zoned out and relaxed feeling I get while doing a jigsaw puzzle.  After a certain point, some part of my non-conscious spacial brain takes over.  I love it when my hand reaches for a piece and places it in the right slot before I am aware of what I am doing.  I love the intimacy gained with an artwork after studying each of angles and the hues.  It is very different from taking an art history course, where you learn about the time period and the symbolism.  With a jigsaw puzzle, I study the minor details, the shape of a leaf, or reflections on water.

I was downtown at the Washington State Convention Center and saw this caught my eye.  My first thought was "This would make an awesome jigsaw puzzle."  I love the colors and the little faces.  I would want to get to know each of these creatures, understand their shapes and colors.

The Spirits Within by Alfredo Arreguin, 2002

You might not be able to tell from the photo, but this painting is huge.  It takes up most of the wall on the opposite side of an elevator bank.  Here are a few close ups:

I could spend hours looking at each of the little creatures Arreguin created here.  The best thing about a jigsaw puzzle is that you do get to spend hours studying what ever image you are trying to re-create.  I am guessing it took the artist months to create this.  Why shouldn't I spend a decent amount of time looking at very corner, especially for something so richly detailed?

My friend Grace introduced me last year to Card Kingdom, a puzzle and game shop with a cafe, in Ballard.  They have a massive selection of jigsaw puzzles, including the Liberty Puzzles, which are made out of wood.  When you open the box, you can smell the burnt wood from where the laser cut the pieces.

Here are some of the amazing shapes inside the box.