I enrolled myself in ART 34A, "Applied Design/Crafts". Sounds so up my alley, don't you think. Crafting? That is my craft. I attended the first day of class last night. I dropped it today.
When one thinks of "crafts," one thinks of things handmade, generally smallish, serving a decorative or functional purpose. I make jewelry, I sadly attempt (and fail) at crochet, I paint, I play with clay, I craft sporadically, tinily, and creatively (and well). What I DO NOT DO, and WILL NOT DO, is create a four foot long functional bridge out of 4" pieces of foam-core board and NOTHING ELSE, including and especially prominently NO GLUE. Or string. Or anything else that is not foam-core board. While the boys in my life are all saying "DO IT DO IT DO IT," because it's a cool feat of engineering and critical thinking... I am not a boy. I do not care about foam-core engineering. I don't want to get off 8 hours of work to cut 4" bits of foam with an Xacto knife for another 3 hours. I don't even want foam-core board to be a part of my life.
The next project would have been "Build a chair out of non-standard materials". Which could have been cool, but I don't want to build the chair, I want to craft the seat-cushion. The next project was "Make a 'Chindogu'", which is Japanese for "Useless Object." I do not want to make useless things. I want to make us-ed things. So this class is not for me.
Also, I was too self-consciously well-put-together for that class. I'm not scruffy, overweight, wearing glasses purposefully reminiscent of a bygone era, old, or generally remarkable in any way. I stuck out like a dachsund in a pack of shih-tzus. And I was the only one who had never taken a class with one of the other people, and so felt like quite the object of scrutiny, like the shih-tzu's were thinking "WTF weiner dog?"
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