Leslie, Libby, Lunch

I felt shitty on Sunday until mid-afternoon.

An uncomfortable aspect of my broken existence is upper body muscular pain. My arms, shoulders, the muscles across the top of my back and those down each side of my upper spine really need a time out. I call is “stranger syndrome.”

It’s strangers who are hard to talk to. When I do, the harder I try to speak the more my upper body muscles go crazy. They tense up and I shake with the stress. My shaking, arm jerking and stuttering makes me indistinguishable from someone with cerebral palsy and I find that embarrassing, to be honest. It doesn’t happen with friends, thank God.

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I am working on my dress project right now in a way that an obsessive dislikes.

I prefer to do the bodice of a dress first and then the skirt, and I like to finish one dress to completion before beginning another. However, right now I have three dresses on the go and I work on dress or bodice, this dress or that, as materials arrive. Once this blitz is done, I’ll have completed ten dresses.

I’ll then have two to go. But sometime this summer I will have a solid first draft of a one-act play and twelve elaborate prop dresses that comprise the exhibition in which the play is set. That will require a celebration.

Sunday I spent making a wire frame for the skirt of the marble dress. I use a thick malleable wire to build the main structure and I weave a thinner wire to form a network in between and the thin wire is always inoculating me.

The day ended deliciously, as does every Sunday of late, with Endeavour and Wallander. Sadly, both series are ending for the season.

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Today Leslie and Libby come for lunch and I am really excited. I haven’t seen Leslie for months and we once were close. Libby and I haven’t seen each other for, probably, over a year.

And perhaps I will hear from Boca this week. This project was undertaken as therapy, with no expectations whatsoever. So their decision will just be part of the story, not the end.

Those lips!