The Wonderful World of Wendy


Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming - WOW - what a ride!!

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Friday, September 21, 2007

Contemplating navel lint and other important things

Seven years ago tomorrow, on my birthday in Y2K (2000), my husband and I visited Giverny, the former home (and now museum) of the French Impressionist painter Claude Monet. It was the middle of a whirlwind week in Paris, my first overseas trip that required a passport. Monet has been my favorite artist since my early 20s and my first art history class, my first real exposure to art that made me finally appreciate it as a worthwhile contribution to the world we live in. For some reason until then I had been given the impression that art was fluff, something extra, not something vital to our survival. Of course, now I feel very differently. You can learn a people's history thru their art. A people's art is their lives, their history. Hundreds and thousands of years later, all that remains of many cultures is their art. The people are long dead, the buildings in ruins - the art giving us a clue to who these people were, that they mattered, that they had been here at all.

I think about this quite a bit these days. As a child-free person by choice, I won't have offspring who care, someone to pass on my knowledge, memories, memorabilia. I have a baby niece now, which gives me a faint glimmer of hope, but I know how big a part of my life my own aunts are (next to none, that is), so that's just a straw to grasp at. I will long outlive my beautiful dog, and many dogs after her. I am getting older, the natural progression towards death someday. Late 30s is a lot older then mid 20s, and even mid 30s.
Birthdays lend to contemplation of navel lint and other important things by someone who spends time alone driving, walking a dog, or standing in the shower, scrubbing pensively, (it is where I do all of my great thinking).

There also was an article in today's Seattle Times, Legendary landscapes of Monet, van Gogh that reminded me of that special day seven years ago, of sitting on a bench in Monet's garden, after walking across the Japanese bridge, staring out at the pond and eating butter cookies and drinking apple juice, with my loving husband of two and a half years, who helped make it possible to spread my wings beyond the Atlantic.

There also is worrisome financial news today, of the US dollar weakness against foreign currencies, Dollar's new low against euro worries France, which reminded me of that amazing trip and makes me wonder when we will get to go to Europe again (our 2005/2006 winter trip to Italy was even more amazing then Paris). We won't be going anywhere for awhile, probably, since we just bought a new townhouse and have spent a minor fortune in furnishing and decorating it (still in progress - have you any idea how much custom window treatments cost? whooee!) But I also don't want to see our currency value slide even more, making it even longer before we can afford our next trip, probably to Germany. 2008? 2009? Who knows.

So, I am celebrating my 37th birthday tomorrow by going on a tour of King County farms with my husband and his father, and wine tasting at Rockridge Orchards, one of our favorite farmers market vendors. Then we are preparing an Italian-inspired meal to share with old friends and new neighbors. I will spend some time with my Italian greyhound, Sophia, and cuddling with our three cats - all in our new home. It's going to be a perfect day. Even with the worries of international currency woes, travel costs, and lost art.

An apology: I have been remiss in posting to my personal blog since moving. My office still is in complete disarray and the move was a lot of work and we have not yet recovered. I have been posting more regularly to my other blog, about something I am passionate about, green living, Green Spaces Real Estate. Check it out if you get the chance. I have several posts in my mind, still, and I have begun taking pictures around the house and will be posting a visual tour of our new home soon. Sophia and I are walking three times a day, including a late night walk in the dark around 11 pm. It is interesting to see the world in the quiet of the night, only accompanied by the hiss of sprinklers in the distance. So, don't lose faith in me dear reader, check back soon.

posted by Wendy Hughes-Jelen @ 1:46 PM  

5 Comments:

  • At 8:02 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    It is interesting that you report that you grew up thinking that art was unimportant or 'fluff' since your mother is an artist. A non-practicing artist, but a quite talented artist non-the-less. There have been a couple of pictures she did hanging in the home you were raised in. Your grandma Marian was artistic and your Aunt Bobbie is a practicing artist.

    If I could do art I would. You have seen a few primitive things around here of mine.

    An observation: Your mother, like some other artists, I have known, seem to lose interest with formal (college) training. After about the sixteenth assignment of "Design for me something with four rectangles, three triangles, two circles and a partridge in a pear tree. Oh, and be creative." something seems to die. I could never get her to draw the simplest things for you kids. That's why I would try to draw you a dog and would end up with a donkey or a rabbit or what ever. (I define as fine art as something that I couldn't do. If it looks like I could have done it, simply isn't art. Aside: though I could dribble paint on a piece of canvas on the floor, there is something about Jackson Pollock's work ...)

    IMHO, fine art reflects more about how the minority well-to-do want to see themselves and how they want to live.

    Depending on how you define art, it can tell us more or less about how real average people spent their lives. There is another level of art. This is the art that is done by everyone in their every day lives. There can be art in how someone builds a house or cabinet or makes a clay pot for common use. There is art in the everyday artifacts of any historical period. There is daily art in a roof line, in the arrangement of plants in a flower bed and in the well plowed field.

    To learn about how most people really lived, visit a cultures garbage sites. Your grandpa Olson used to wander around in the garbage heaps of the, then long gone, native-American villages in the Alaskan outback or here in long forgotten white-American Washington State towns. He was always bringing back interesting things that, at least to him, told him about the people who lived there long ago. And, I believe he saw the simple and sometimes not-so-simple beauty in his finds. At one point he sent a bunch of Alaskan artifacts to the Smithsonian to see if it would be of any value to them. To your mom's best recollection it is now in some museum in Alaska.

    Two thousand or twenty thousand years from now, after virtually all of our fine art has turned to dust, archeologists will, very carefully, layer by layer, dig down through our land fills and marvel at our primitive but interesting culture (and probably, along with studying the foundations of our long gone buildings, conclude we worshipped automobiles and Coke).

    Dad

     

  • At 9:33 AM, Blogger Wendy Hughes-Jelen said…

    Dad - Art was not an income-producing field so not something I ever took seriously or saw value in. The crowd of people I hung out with in school - brainiacs, honor roll and advanced placement students - we were going to make something of our lives, including a lot of money (it was the 80s after all). Your own stress that college and a degree was a necessity - and becoming a computer programmer or something that had a future at the time the best course to follow - sort of reinforced that message. Of course I would never have been happy being a computer geek, but I do know how to make one bend to my will better than most people I know, which is a pretty good talent to have.

    The art students were weird, misunderstood, mostly on drugs, creative of course, but not necessarily in the good sense. Of course these are all generalities, as teenagers tend to label and compartmentalize everything they don't understand or care about.

    My belief that art was fluff was my own and my family's history or talent in that area was largely unknown or not understood (obviously) - but none if it had any bearing on how I came to my own opinion. I am just glad I had the opportunity to learn otherwise. And you're right - the art of the every day man or woman is how we see the past. Of course there are pieces of "fine art" revered to this day - but in a way that was also created by the common man, a struggling painter or sculpturist trying to make a living. I like that we can see how peole honored and cared for their pets, what kind of clothes they wore with pride, and the type of surroundings people valued most, the background of a work of art often tells us the most information.

     

  • At 7:52 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Ah, how soon we forget. I did raise you kids around computers as users. I could see by the mid-70s that being able to use computers was going to be as important as being able to use a ... typewriter? ... maybe not. Almost no men typed. Can opener? Poor analogy. Oh well, very important. I wanted you both to grow up with the future in your hands. Neither of you showed any interest in how computers work though. Maybe you forget that your goal was to go into space.

    So, I tried to help you look around and decide what might fit you and, what seemed at the time, your deep interest in space travel. I thought that with you intelligence and interest in science that the best path was through engineering. After it became apparent that you didn't show strength in math but was still interested in space we thought that you might be able to get into space via psychology. (I honestly thought that we would be much further along then we are now.) The psychology of space travel will be, for the next generation, or maybe the one after that, very important and interesting. In hind sight, your failure to pursue study of space psychology was very wise.

    Now oceanography. That should be interesting. But that's another story.

    Dad

    p.s. I did think, and still do, that you would be a good systems analyst. It is related to computers only in that computers are systems. It is logic, organization and opinion applied to how almost any group of thing relates to each other. Well maybe in my next life I will give it a look.

     

  • At 8:17 AM, Blogger Wendy Hughes-Jelen said…

    Let's see -

    1) In 1986 the Challenger blew up one morning while I was at high school. It was very traumatic for me. I didn't want to die.

    So I thought maybe I should explore our oceans, the final frontier in earth, before learning about far off planets.

    2) When I tried scuba diving, I couldn't even stay down for more than 5 seconds. Their advice was private lessons and a lot of therapy to overcome my fear of the water. What good is an oceanographer who can't go in the ocean? If I couldn't see it and touch it in person, it probably wasn't the right career path for me.

    Getting started in office work during the summers at your office at the age of 15 is what put me on my current career path. Fortunately I have been able to partner my many years of admin experience with my innate talents and forge a career where I can make a better-than-average living wage. You always said find what you like to do and then a way to make money with it. And housing/real estate is obviously where I belong since every job I have had in the last 17 years has been related to housing or real estate in one form or another. I am very passionate about housing and real estate, especially green. My greenspacesrealestate.com is where I take what I love and put it with what I know and I AM going to have a fantastic career for the next 20 years with this endeavor. And I love being self-employed.

    I refuse to look at any part of my life as a failure to do any one particular thing. We all follow our own path. I am very proud of my broad span of knowledge and experience and how it has translated into such a great lifestyle for me! I am a valuable member of every team I have worked with, a great teacher of technology applications to others who just don't have the ability to "get it" like I do. I can run circles around anyone with use of the computer applications I know and people literally revere me and the ground I walk on for being able to teach them a few tricks.

    I don't ever remember "space psychology", 20 years ago. I didn't know there was such a thing. Maybe I better google it!

     

  • At 5:41 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    When you and your sister decided to go in the business direction I had no objections. Virtually every non-business job I have had, except the chemistry QC position and maybe even that now, could be outsourced to another country.

    There are people more qualified than me and willing to work for a lot less than I can afford to work just waiting to take the kinds of jobs I have always found interesting and paid the bills with. Thanks to the Internet most software can be developed cheaper in India and China. There are very able chemists in Russia more than willing to do most chemical analysis jobs, thanks to FedEx being able to get samples taken today to them by tomorrow morning and the Internet to get the results back instantly. Electronic service work? Almost nothing is repaired these days. And if it can be repaired, it can be done more cheaply in Mexico or Asia.

    No, when you and Allison decided to go in the business direction, I didn't try to dissuade you. That kind of work is quite hard to outsource.

    I have never felt that there was anything to apologize for in working in business. I virtually heard my mother turning over in her grave when I took the full commission sales position at Spectron. Boy, would I have heard from her had she been alive when I made that move. She hated salesmen. Particularly full commission sales people. And, coming from a full science background, I sure was ignorant of how businesses worked. But, that kind of work is hard to outsource. I guess if push came to shove I could always go back into sales when I grow up.

    Dad

     

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