Elephants

There are two in particular I want to bring into the room. Because if I’ve learned anything from my life as an-experiment-in-trying-to-repress-my-most-neurotic-fears-in-public, it’s that the resulting eczema of the soul is not worth a nanosecond of social acceptability.

[This is from http://www.wandelmaier.com/]

No need to fear that I am about to now reveal something so humiliating that you will feel obliged to be humiliated on my behalf. Nay, the elephants I want to invite into my blog’s game park are not the kind to charge a crowd (although I wish they would, because I could really use the ticket sales right now). The kind of wildlife I’m talkin’ ‘bout are more like freak-show midget pachyderms sourced straight from Lilliput and put on stage at Liz’s Internal Circus of the Neurotic and Insane. To you, this tiny elephant can do as much harm as a fairy pinned to the back of a glass display case.

To me, however, this captive little beast, when hidden behind my curtains, can cause untold damage to the whole backstage area of my psyche.

Elephant #1. Let’s call her Anxiety of Influence, or Annie for short.

Here’s her story: When I was at grad school making my Chuck Close painting adaptations, I had this vision of Chuck’s head encircled in daisies. To say I obsessively thought about painting daisies on my Chuck Close paintings 24/7 is an understatement. If I could have invented more hours in a day in which to think about this, I would have. But I didn’t put the daisies on him because I couldn’t justify it to my peers or committee. And at grad school, you have to justify everything if you want to be taken seriously as an artist. If you can’t theorize it, you’d better not go ahead and just do it, because then something really terrible might happen, but I can’t tell you what because I never found out. I didn’t put flowers on a pair of Chuck Close portraits until the summer before my fall graduation when it seemed safe. They surely couldn’t kick me out at that point.

The only person to see the Daisy Chucks immediately asked to borrow them for his office. He was a prof, and also one of my closest friends at school, a guy my age, but with an art career and a wife and a kid. (That should be beside the point really. But this tiny detail might explain my ensuing bitterness.)

When I finally painted the daisies on the Chucks, instead of making a crown of daisies, as was my original plan, I painted them growing out of his flesh, like a disease, obscuring his face in quite an original way since you’re not really supposed to obscure faces in portraits.


Cut to a year later and this prof/friend, who had been developing a career out of making drawings of brushstrokes from old famous paintings, was suddenly not only now making portraits, but was painting faces obscured by what looked like flowers or snow flakes!

I was outraged. Sickened. Hysterical. But mostly, I was pissed at myself for not putting my own project out there first.

[This is from a wonderful illustrator, Bill Peet, at www.billpeet.net]

The anxiety of influence is no joke, my friends – people really do take your ideas and run with them. And this possibility is so frightening, it’s enough to choke out even the hardiest bud of an idea. But anxiety of influence is also silly because ideas cannot really be owned. (Although I’m guessing a few Americans might argue this point.)

But more to the point, there is no real way to police idea theft anyway (although some Americans think there is). But even if there was, I am far, far, far too lazy to be chasing down idea thieves, and far too vain to wear one of those polyester police uniforms. I have better things to do (and wear). Like wallow in self pity in my coffee-and-egg-stained pajamas while one of my great ideas is made even better by a painter who is far more accomplished. Mostly because he actually bothers to paint. And because he bothers to have shows.

I’ve been turning this story over in my head for a few years now, wondering what to make of it, because the truth is, beyond its value as a self torture device, it actually holds little power. I don’t believe this prof/friend meant to be an asshole. I honestly don’t think he tried to scoop me. I think my paintings, staring at him in all their Liz-infused daisy glory from the wall opposite his desk, simply influenced him. And isn’t influence, if not outright plagiarism, one of the highest forms of flattery?



Why am I dredging all this up? Because I’m back at it. I’m making paintings of men with flowers. And I’m scared. I’m scared that if I don’t do it quick, someone else will do it before me. It seems patently obvious to me that now that I want to make these spectacularly original portraits again, every other painter on the planet is going to want to make portraits of men with flowers, too. And they will likely do it faster, better, and for more money. I just know it.

At art school, no one seemed to express a shred of anxiety when we all sat in one room painting from the same model, even the people on either side of me who had more or less the same view as I did. All the resulting paintings were different because no two people had the same interpretation. Duh! This is one of the biggest clichés of art school, and yet its lesson rarely gets absorbed. Or, maybe every other student did absorb this lesson, just not me. That’s entirely possible. In my better moments, I like to think of myself as a late bloomer. In my worst moments, a complete moron who would rather contemplate fearful thoughts than put some colourful goo on canvas.

[This is from http://floridausaimages.com]

So, I’ve decided to drag Annie, my tiny fear freak, out from behind the curtains and off the stage into the audience where everyone can see her – for free! I can’t keep Annie hidden away in the hopes that no one else breeds a tiny freaky elephant named Fanny or Tammy for their own personal Circuses of the Insane. Because they just might. And I can’t stop them. I invite those people to make their own men-with-flowers paintings and then show them and then sell them. I double dare you. It won't stop me from making mine (today). Because I know that Annie is still my Annie, even if she gets cloned and the clone is named My Annie. My Annie will always be my Annie, my furless fearful friend, until the day I finally kill her.

So, with you all as my witnesses, I’m officially putting a stop to Annie’s tiny marauding parties into the painting retreats of my soul. I am going to do what the Thais did when the Japanese were poised to invade during World War II. They simply let the Japanese in. They called this strategy something like “bending with the wind” (which sounds a lot like a Kama Sutra position I’d like to try, which bring us to our next elephant . . . )




Elephant #2: Anxiety of Spinsterism, or Spinny for short.

Oh, I’m Spinny alright. Or, at least I have been for the last few months, dragging my heart around like an extra limb that requires its own wagon. Remember my insane crush from the last post? Well, let me tell you, insane does not begin to describe the complete annexing of my brain that took place (less like a Thai bending with the wind, and more like a PMSing woman banging on the door of chocolate factory at 3 am. I was helpless.)


Spinny is an elephant on amphetamines on her way to a rave to score some ecstasy. She is so filled with delusions of love that she will do an all-night interpretive dance to prove it. Fear of rejection does not slow Spinny down. Just the opposite. It amps up her drive to locate the right drug that will bring on a two-month-long hallucination of requited love.


In my short-but-heartbreaking time on this planet, I’ve learned a thing or two about myself as Spinny. Such as, delusions are a great pain reliever. So are popcorn, cake and a rom-com movie marathon. But delusions are better because they cost nothing, they won’t make you fat, and you can invent stories ad nauseam without having to worry about what people think of you. And that’s because they all happen behind closed doors, with the eye shades pulled, inside your very own home entertainment system in your head, where you can access every delusional channel imaginable.



My delusions enable me to make up excuses for why a once-but-briefly-interested-in-me man has withdrawn, for instance. Here’s a classic: he’s intimidated by my searing intelligence. Or, he can tell that I will scale his emotional walls faster than the last record-breaking climber of Mount Kilimanjaro. Or, he thinks I’m funnier than he is. Or, he can’t compete with my dog, which is just silly. Because no one should even try to do that. Shy trumps everything.



But I’m tired of these delusions because all they do is stall the inevitable truth: He’s just not into me. And although I really am a whirling dervish of fear of rejection most of the time, the one thing I actually don’t fear is the truth. I only invent stories when I don’t know what’s going on. But I really shouldn’t count on others to just be honest because experience has shown me that people think honesty will hurt your feelings. I don’t know why. It would cause so much less damage if a man could just say, “You know, I like you. You’re OK. But I’m not feeling more than that.” That would be more than fine with me (after I shed a few tears, of course, but I would do that privately so as not to burden the truth teller with my self pity because, at that point, the truth teller would deserve a fucking medal.)

But I can’t control other people. So, I’m going to take matters into my own hands. Spinny, your days are numbered. And I mean that kindly. I know that you wonder why you keep dating men who explain irony to you during movies because they only just got it themselves, or who use the dog-ate-my-essay excuse, even if it does not apply to why he’s rejecting you (any excuse being good enough for you, Spinny), but I honestly believe that these men are wonderful because they keep showing you what you don’t want. And that’s just as important as what you do want.


In the last episode of the last season of 30 Rock, Liz Lemon has a moment of clarity during a YMCA singles dodge ball game she attends in the hopes of finding Mr. Good Enough. Finishing a conversation she started with Jenna the day before, she stops playing dodge ball to inform her hottie opponent (who was not privy to the conversation the day before, but no matter),

“I’ll tell you what I do want. I want someone who will be monogamous, and nice to his mother. And I want someone who likes musicals but knows to just shut his mouth when I’m watching Lost. And I want someone who thinks being really into cars is lame and strip clubs are gross. I want someone who will actually empty the dishwasher instead of just taking forks out as needed, like I do. I want someone with clean hands and feet and beefy forearms like a damn Disney prince. And I want him to genuinely like me, even when I’m old. And that’s what I want.”

Her opponent listens with rapt attention, but that’s because he doesn’t speak a lick of English.

Apart of from Lost and the beefy forearms, neither of which are on my wish list, I’m with Liz. Especially re strip clubs. SUPER GROSS. I'd like to add to her list: I also want a man who is as obsessed with Battlestar Gallactica as I am, and who does not explain irony to me as if it’s as opaque as a brick box sealed in a lead coffin. And I wouldn't mind a man who I think is the dog's ruff, who also likes me back. That would be nice. A tall order, perhaps, but I like to dream big.

[http://www.elephantjokes.co.uk/]

So, there you have it. Two neurotic elephants I am not so much bringing into the room as I am putting out to pasture. Sayonara, my wee fear-filled friends. May you find your tall, green grasses elsewhere.

Having said all that, I know that next month around this time, I will be banging at the door of the nearest chocolate factory at three in the morning, weeping loudly enough for the neighbours to hear – in Buffalo. But I forgive myself already. Because god knows one of the other things I’ve learned about myself in this crazy Sunday Night Movie I call my life: I never kick a girl when she’s down.