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The Pool - This movie was a 2007 Sundance film festival winner with a Special Dramatic Jury Prize, so I dvr'd it the other day, and watched last night. It's about Venkatesh and Jhangir, two boys from a small town in India who work in the city of Panjim. Venkatesh is fascinated by a swimming pool in which the owners never swim. The story unfolds sweetly....who are these boys? who are the people that Venkatesh watches? How can boys live and work alone in a big city? Why couldn't they stay in their village? What's with the girl in the story? A wonderful soundtrack gives it another Indian dimension. Somehow living in Panjim doesn't seem like the worst fate for a young boy. These are amazing and resilient children in a story and movie that are timeless.
In the meantime, I'm working on a necklace of Labradorite, a shimmery, quiet blue/gray mineral, which is paired with the Poseidon clasp and sea blue crystal roundels. The Poseidon clasp has a story. When I first saw it, I thought it was St. George slaying the dragon, and wanted to make something for my mother with it, because my dad was named George, and now she is married to a second George. Then one day I showed it to my friend Amalia, yes, she's Greek, too, and she looked at it and said "that's not St. George" very matter of factly. Huh? I had this big plan to please my mom! No, says Amalia, St. George rides a horse, and this guy doesn't. Also, St. George uses more of an arrow, and this is a trident. Furthermore, that's not a dragon. And that's how I knew that I had the mythical sea god, Poseidon clasp rather than the religious Saint George clasp. Stay tuned. I'm going to get this necklace right today and it will be a beauty.
I remember hearing the term Greek Key and asking my grandmother what it was. She replied by drawing it for me, and ever since then I've been hooked. I love this design.... to see it, to doodle it, to sew with it, to wear it, to decorate with it. My favorite every day ring is a greek key cutout ring that I bought on the street on Crete. My favorite Greek key is a simple border pattern. One continuous line shaped and tamed into pattern.This bracelet features a clasp that I had made using a sterling silver Greek key earring. The clasp artist used small sterling silver dots and pebbles to set off the symmetry of the circular Greek key design. Two rows of colorful Freshwater Pearls in earthy tones are like the pebbles or rocks that are the terrain of much of Greece. Greens, grays, purples, golds, blues. In spite of the sunshine and blue sea, Greece is not rainbow colors. It's a subtle blend of earth and mountain and sky and olive tree and farmland and dirt road in the village. These are the things that these pearls evoke. Two Bali Sterling Silver beads, one on each strand of pearls are the civilization of Greece, for although it seems untamed, people have lived and created lives and art there for thousands of years. 
So my facebook profile photo is a great photo of me taken in the summer in Florence - a highlight of 2009. It's black and white and looks like a good photo of me. BUT, when you look at other people's facebook photos, they are often not well composed and have other people in them but cut off, like they are part of a group but the person just edited their own face for the profile. Is that a better thing to do? Does that show that you have real life friends who you are in pictures with? Does it show that you are more popular? I must say that the people with those kinds of photos have the most numbers of friends, and I would have to add that they probably don't obsess about these things the way I do. Also my photo, not being colorful, looks kind of bad in the newsfeed. Maybe the photo where I'm obviously sitting at a table would be better, or a color photo would look better on newsfeeds. Some people would put all the photos in a profile folder, but I don't like that idea. So now I check 2 emails and facebook every day. This is unbelievable. Maybe since I have so much time to goof around with Facebook, I could just change my profile photo every week or so, or whenever I feel like it. That might just be the answer, and sometimes I could just put a picture of something I like on there. I almost made my facebook photo a picture I took of the glow in the dark carpeting at our local bowling alley. It's sort of outer-spacey firework-y and very colorful on a black background.
I've read many many stories and accounts of the events in Asia Minor from 1915, the Armenian Genocide, to 1922, the Greek Catastrophe, when my grandmother and her siblings fled from their home and village to Smyrna where they awaited a savior. Since I'm here, you know that my grandmother survived the catastrophe, but there were many more stories, and this is one of them.
My Grandmother by Fethiye Cetin is written by a Turkish human rights lawyer, who as an adult, learned that her beloved grandmother, a "convert" was Armenian, and a survivor of a death march during the Armenian genocide of 1915. It turned Fethiye's world upside down. She had been taught that the Armenians died fighting against the turks, and that the Armenians then left the country. What, 1.5 million people got up and moved to other places? No, they were systematically murdered and marched out. The turkish state still denies any of the violent events they conducted in order to eliminate the Christian population from their country. Fethiye Cetin handles this story with honesty, and with honor. She believed her grandmother, and dealt with the information the way so many of us do when apprised of secrets and cover ups within our families and past. She sometimes zealously probed for more information, while at other times, years would go by where she did almost nothing to make contact with her Armenian American family in order to face their tangled past.
After the Greek catastrophe in 1922, Greece and the new country, Turkey, conducted a "population exchange" 1.5 million Asia Minor greeks were sent to Greece, and 500,000 muslims were moved from Greece to Turkey. Still, one wonders, were any of our relatives "saved" by a turkish family? Do we have family there? Mostly all the survivors have died, and their children are aging. The story is disappearing for all but those activists who are working to try to get the turkish government to acknowledge their actions in 1915 and 1922. If you want to know more, but don't want to read the book, here is a short interview with the author. I loved this book.
Now I get it. Facebook can take over your life if you let it. So far I've got some measure of control, but once you start searching for people, then looking at their limited page and all their friends, and sometimes the search doesn't show your person, or shows someone that maybe could be your person but you don't even have one friend in common, but that might be normal because you haven't seen or spoken with them in years anyway, then you look at someone else's friends, and see the person you were searching for before, and it's the right person, and not the wrong one with no common friends, and then you click on their name and see all their friends, and the whole time you're asking yourself do I want to be friends with this person, because then their friends some of who I don't want to be friends with will see me when they look at that person's friends and what if they try to friend me? Even if I am sort of or actually their friend or relative in real life. I'm starting to get the difference between the wall and the news feed which is progress because yesterday it wasn't making sense. And it's really weird when on the right side you see pictures of people you've never heard of and Facebook is asking whether you want to friend them, and of course not you've never heard of them and the next day in the same spot is someone you do know who you would love to have as a friend especially if it's someone nice who you don't have time to be real life friends with although you want to everyone is too busy and you friend that person or send them a message but they might or might not friend you even if they respond to your message because they forgot to, but what if they don't want to in the first place. The best of all is the friends who are real life friends from far away places who you lost, but who found you because of Facebook and who you can correspond with and see pictures of and it's really great.
I'm off to a great start to the new year. I just completed two online school district applications. One of them requires me to submit a resume, transcript and letters of reference, which I will do on Monday. For the other one, I'm going to call our principals, and mention that I've completed my online application. If they'll request me to sub, I'll be in. Yea!
I just made a Facebook page I think. Peter was helping me for about 3 minutes until his friend came over, then I was on my own. I will try to not let this turn into a rant, but the little circle is still going around trying to confirm being a friend of my friend Sue in Australia. So I guess that's not happening. Peter left me with the browse so that I could put a picture on my page which I did. But now I can't find the list of friend requests that he showed me. He told me the other day that Facebook only has two pages, and that they scroll forever like my blog page. He said you have "home" and your "wall". With all that I write here, I can't think of one thing to put on the Facebook page. OK, I'm going back to it, but might have to put it off until later. I'll go make a necklace or apply to the school district. Then two of my three tasks for the year and the day will be complete!
Happy New Year! Yesterday was New Year's Day, spent as always in a bit of a fog.....new year, new blank slate and all of that. I wonder what wonders 2010 holds for me? I took down most of the Christmas decorations, but left the tree up, because it's so pretty and cheery on cold winter nights. And I emptied off the dining room table in anticipation of jewelry designing for an upcoming show at the National Hellenic Museum in Greektown on February 5th. And we're off......
Possible Side Effects - Another collection of short stories by Augusten Burroughs. This guy can write and write. These are stories of growing up, stories about people in his life, and stories about working as an advertising copywriter. I loved reading about his grandmothers and great aunt. The sweetest story was the one about his dermatologist. His dad scares me to death, his brother absolutely creeps me out, and his mom is a puzzle I'm afraid to even attempt to solve. I know he's OK now, but sometimes I think about him and worry and hope that he's doing alright. He still seems vulnerable to me.
Speaking of vulnerable characters, last night I watched, or shall we say tried to watch Revolutionary Road with Leonardo Decaprio and Kate Winslet. I'd been avoiding this one for the longest time, refused to rent it just in case, and finally decided to get it over with. It's been sitting on my dvr for weeks. All I've got to say is huh? Who liked this and why? There are three copies of it on the shelf at the library! Revolutionary Road is the street they live on, and all it is is a couple with a mentally unstable wife who doesn't like their life as suburbanites in the 1950s. Well, who does like their life as a suburbanite? I kept fast forwarding to see if it would get better or if there would be a story line. It was like watching a super bad play, or like being on a sled going downhill where you're going to crash into a wall. Oh yeah, they went there, it crashes. I would have known not to see the play, and you can bet all your money that I'm never going to read the book. Of course, this is just my humble opinion. You might like it. Valerie.
I've been blogging for two years now. Who would've thought? It's fridgidly cold outside today, but there are no shortage of indoor things to do. The things I want to successfully do this year are as follows:
1) Substitute teach in our local schools
2) Sell my jewelry on a larger scale
3) Get on Facebook and reconnect with some of my friends from around the world.
I think these might be resolutions, but I'm not sure.
4) Blog more. On some level this is all I want to do. However, life outside beckons.
For today's goal, I want to design and make a gorgeous necklace for the Hellenic Jewelry show. I'll post a photo of it here, and start a new label called Jewelry by Dianne Sophia.
