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I have ordered the FAT DADDY. I'm like, "I need the big guns." I've had my eye on this monster. It's an 84oz water bottle with a black-green ombre. THREE FULL BOTTLES OF WINE FIT IN THIS SUCKER. It's 12 inches tall, 5 inches around, and it shall be my magnificent showpiece. I'm gonna put a sick screaming medusa head on it, with tons of cool snakes wrapping around the bottle artistic-like, and the lettering on the side will say "Pure Poison". Fun.

The terrible thing is I bought a second fat daddy for the stupid low price of $13 (70% off). I don't care for the color scheme (pale pastel pink and blue) and apparently nobody else does either because the price was reduced so low. I think I'm going to do a bunch of angry war-unicorns running around it, and perhaps text in a barely legible very angular pointy gothic style behind them. All you can do with pastels is push the edge for the contrast factor. So I will have two expensive showpieces nobody will buy!! But, I mean, $13 for a huge attention-grabber people can see 20' away? Worth it.

I was going to go vend sat but 1) finishing booth stuff sucked up way more time than expected and 2) I wasn't interested in using gas spouse may need for commuting, or paying a table fee to sit at a market where customers are sparse because they are worried about gas too (I was probably too cautious, we were able to top off the tank that evening with no trouble). I'm nearing the end of the booth setup nonsense. My wood tabletop looks fucking amazing. I fixed up and stained the wood scrollwork ornament I bought. As expected it arrived broken, but I glued it and added some epoxy clay to fortify the weak points. Staining and sealing took some significant time because of all the elaborate nooks and crannies. It's just gorgeous, the perfect decorative touch. The shape reminds me of the Romulan bird of prey symbol. I have a bit left to finish it up - I added some copper foil tape around the base edges to match the tabletop panels, so I need to seal over the copper tape, maybe add some black acrylic paint touches to bring out more depth, then seal it again. The panels link together with velcro strips to keep them from sliding around independently, and I'll use velcro to hang the scrollwork ornament at the table front. I also found some small decorative laser cut wood panels I had bought years earlier and never used, and stained and sealed those and fixed them up as classy matching info signs. I'm really proud of how it's coming together. More work than expected but it sends the message I want, which is: "I came here to chew bubblegum and sell cool artsy shit, and I'm all out of bubblegum."

My business coasters are not printing as well as I'd hoped. I have yet more work to do to get the stamps perfected, so they're at least three times more work than I thought. I really should have just ordered custom rubber stamps, gah. I still like the general idea, and once I finish the carvings they will be good to go, but the process has been very labor intensive for what amounts to a freebie piece of paper pulp with a website name on it. Meh. I give the whole project a C+. Maybe customers will like them enough to make it worth it in the end.

I got some little sewing projects to finish up, like the transport bag for the folding table & tabletop, and the awning fabric piece. I need to sort out the attachment points for the folding accordion garden frame thing, which will be used to display the small art coasters. That means modifying the tent walls with some slits to enable fastening access. Boring stuff that will probably suck up a whole day. I'm sure when the booth is assembled nobody will guess how much work it took to make sure everything is just so.

It's really nice to have the luxury of completing a project just like I want. I've never had such a wealth of spare time and autonomy before. I usually end up with some sad half finished thing I'm embarrassed to show in public. Maybe it's okay but it's not what I had in mind. That's because inevitably something else takes priority and the lion's share of my spare energy. Maybe I have to spend extra time at work or spouse wants to go do things and I don't have the heart to put my foot down. That's exactly how my wedding ended up such a disaster. What good is coming up with amazing ideas if you can't prioritize yourself to execute them properly. You just break your own heart and end up with a bunch of unfinished crap in plastic bins in the spare room (ask me how). Because what you're really telling yourself over and over is everyone else's needs/wants are more important than your own. It feels pretty nice, for once, to have the time/energy resources to do something right.

Been doing some thinking about some of the mental ruts I have fallen into since childhood. How my awkward relationship with myself has carried over into adulthood even though I wanted better for myself. Always that keen internal sense of frustration and disappointment with how things play out. The dissonance between the role one plays for others and the internal self. Who invented the role and who perpetuates it? I can't put a finger on when I understood it was expected not to be myself, probably early elementary school, when I got the impression that being a complimentary presence to others was more important than my own internal integrity. If you sit down to create something, do you automatically just create whatever you want, or are you instead chained to, what would other people like to see?

When I first started at the tattoo shop we had an artist showing his work in the gallery. Honestly, his skill was amateurish and he needed some life drawing classes, but he had a lot of enthusiasm and a good sized collection of finished work. He really liked to draw bondage. All his pieces were cartoonish women with large breasts tied up in various scenes making uncomfortable faces. He had them nicely matted/framed. This is not work I would put on my wall. Perhaps a wannabe Dom might like it. However, this guy knew what he liked and he was drawing the hell out of it, and obviously gave zero shits about what other people thought or would speculate about his mental state, and I really admired that. Takes balls. I talked to him for a while and he just had a passion for drawing women in bondage and that was his thing. He wasn't creepy about it at all. He may as well be drawing flower arrangements or cow skulls. He just happen to like tied up cartoonish nude women with large breasts. Okay. He even sold several pieces from his show. Whatever someone might think about his drawings, the dude was totally honest and straightforward in his artistic expression and goals. He wasn't molding his work for lowest common denominator profitability. I envied him for that. It must be very freeing, to be yourself and create exactly what you want.

Meanwhile, my family has no idea who I am or what I'm about. Like there's this whole invisible code of expectations that is just exhausting to navigate, because the core family structure is a lie. I am impersonal with them, and have been since I was 12 or so. I got used to not expressing anything that would rock the boat. Maybe my mom, dad and sister have a cohesive bond, but the narrative is a lie for me. My dad was/is an abuser. The whole good christian family bit is total bullshit. But the price for me to belong has been to pretend and play along, but I can't help but feel and hate the dissonance. So I can't be myself, I'm not allowed to have my true feelings, I'm not allowed honest expression. I have to put everyone else first and consider everyone else's feelings. Oh no, what if I don't sign the card for father's day and dad feels snubbed. Mom and sister get on me for being uncaring. Oh no. Let's forget that my mom witnessed abuse and didn't help or console me. I got the message all right. The message is The Lie matters and you don't. Doesn't matter what they say to my face. Feels like I've been struggling with that internalized rule my whole adult life. Like there's this deep gnawing sense of frustration and disappointment, yet I keep giving myself the short end of the stick and muffling my own voice. I think the wedding was the cherry on the shit sundae for me. And now the pandemic and checking out for a year has given me the opportunity to process it. Maybe slow and painful and clumsy, but still, I don't know how else I would be able to manage it. I've never had a chance like this in my whole life, where I could slow down, put myself first and really think about what I want and like, instead of being rushed to make myself fit someone else's expectations and demands. I've made big choices for myself, sure, I've moved to Alaska, I've changed jobs, I've dumped boyfriends. I'm not helpless. But I've been self-limiting and self-punishing because I've still been obeying the rules I was taught and angry at myself for it.

I put on Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella (1965) as background noise a couple weeks ago, because I had vague positive childhood memories. Spouse is very fond of musicals, so sometimes I just play musicals because it makes him happy. Well, Cinderella is absolute awful mega crap. The characters actions/motivations and the lyrics are just a gallery of jaw dropping human horrors. (The reigning Cinderella movie champion is Everafter, everyone knows.) What I especially despised about the musical is how ludicrously passive the Cinderella character is. She spends the entire movie catering to the prince or her stepmother/stepsisters, and even at the very end, her idea of acting on her own behalf is to desperately serve the prince water (while weeping) as her last chance to get him to notice her and do something on her behalf. Her whole arc is "I'm going to stuff down my feelings and do what everyone else wants and magically, someday, through no direct action on my part, someone will recognize my sacrifice and rescue me." What an awful message. Have no personality aside from living to do what others tell you, and then wait for someone to recognize your value and give you permission to ascend from victimhood. Congrats, you'll be working all the overtime and doing all the nasty chores forever. I think when I need some gumption I'll rewatch the musical just to really piss myself off. Like, if I had to ask the boss for a raise or was contemplating finding a new job, I'd watch R&H Cinderella to put myself in a fine "fuck you, pay me" mood. Do not be like Cinderella. This goes for dudes, too - don't sit there smirking 'cause Cinderella is a dumb story for chicks. Cinderella is beyond gender. Seriously, watch it, put yourself in Cinderella's shoes and your current boss as the stepmother and your dream job/goal as the prince. Bet you'll be absolutely mad furious for/at yourself by the end.

Sometimes I've had a really hard time identifying my own preferences and wants. Like, there's a big difference between what you CAN do, and what you actually WANT to do. I'm sure this would mystify people who are blessed with a strong internal compass and just know exactly what they want and wouldn't think of doing anything else. (They probably had good supportive parents, those assholes!) Sometimes someone else's drive and excitement about a project is enough to rub off and make you think it can be your project, too. Impossible to advocate for yourself when you don't have your own clear vision. I've fallen into the trap of substituting other people's motivations instead of doing the hard work of figuring out my own. I've invested a lot of time and effort into other people's goals, only to discover that I wasn't really included in the payoff of those goals, or steering where it went, and it was my own fault for misleading myself about what I found personally fulfilling. Work really hard for your boss to meet an insane deadline - guess what you get? Just more insane deadlines. Your boss goes on a nice vacation. Then he'll deny your time off requests because there's too much work stacked up to be done, and you're too valuable an employee. Cinderella, Cinderella.

I wish I could go back in time and have a talk with my teenage self about making space for discovering and prioritizing my own interests, and being dead honest about what really mattered to me. I wish I could talk about the reality of employment vs the rose colored fairytale vision most adults prop up so all us wageslave crabs stay in the nice pink bucket. You know, like the one about the kid that made $100k selling lemonade and then donated the profits to charity and the local millionaire heard about it and gave him a full ride college scholarship. How nice! That fairytale, the one where the kid was supplied and supported by his parents instead of being yelled at for wasting expensive lemons, and then somehow further generously rewarded for his good character by a benefactor just waiting to throw money at something. Everybody hears a version of this - the boss that gives a job to the homeless felon nobody else will hire and then he turns out to be the best manager ever, and then the boss gives him a bonus so he can buy a house, etc. Yay. The myth that having integrity and a selfless heart will get you a promotion and a fat bonus. Ha. No employer wants a "master craftsman". They want a "good enough craftsman" who doesn't think enough of themselves to ask for higher wages or start his own business. If you aren't working for yourself in some capacity, taking time to concentrate on your own development, all you are is a profit generator widget for someone else. I wish I could have told myself how important it is to figure out what you want, instead of devoting all your energy to working on someone else's wants. (Not that I really had a choice, I mean I wanted to move out and that means a stable source of rent money, and that means renting oneself out for 40+ hours a week, but I wish I'd been more protective and disciplined about my free time.)

I guess that would be a REAL fairy godmother move. Here's the magic, kid. Figure out what you want and then be assertive about prioritizing yourself. Be a cold realist toward anyone who tries to take the best part of your time and attention and energy for themselves. What you really want, they can never give you - in fact by necessity they will certainly deny you from getting it. Way better gift than a fancy ballgown and some sweaty shoes, right?

But realistically, once you're living on your own, it takes significant time and resources to untangle yourself and figure out what you want. I didn't have the luxury until this past year, and it sure hasn't been a day cruise. This is a windfall and I am very fortunate. I don't think I could justify this otherwise, without the pandemic and stupid chaos and everything on fire. Even now, I'm internally chiding myself for not being more productive or efficient or whatever. But the real point isn't the productivity or efficiency at all. Literally doesn't matter. The journey is the journey. There is no real product, aside from myself.