Friday, July 27, 2007

cozy

I've been looking around a lot lately. This new job affords me such luxuries. A work break is going some place else besides Microsoft Outlook, and there's so much to see! Tonight I have a new favorite. She's this Midwestern woman who now lives in Portland with her husband. I read that she had an accident, a serious one where she might have lost her foot, but she didn't, thank goodness. She spent a year or so in recovery at home, all the while in loads of pain. During this year at home, she took up needlework. She wrote that she did this needlework for something like twelve hours a day, and when she would stop in the evening, she noticed the pain much more acutely. It was through these experiences that she came to the conclusion that she would leave her career, her corporate job, her ball and chain, whatever you want to call it. Since then she's been tapped into one thing, her creative inklings.

I am taken by her blog, something I like to think of as a little magazine if I had one. I like to think of me as this school kid who says, if I had a magazine it would be dynomite! I'd have Kung Fu, momma's kick-butt bok choy recipe, and some slasher stories mixed in, something like that. You can make whatever you wanna make. Web master, writer, photographer. Whatever. Be it baby, be it. So this woman's blog, Posie gets cozy, is just simple, really. She writes about her days and her peeps. She is an amazing photographer. She mostly photographs food. She loves cooking, and that makes me love her. It's funny to me how she happens to have her camera with her through every meal-making experience, like it's her intimate photo shoot. You see her camera pop up at cafes too, taking the most elegant and delectable picture of a cappuccino with raw sugar crystals on top that you've ever seen. The most recent pic of sprouting garlic made me want to dive right into it. How does she do that?

Anyway, I like her. Something there you may like too. It's girly, crafty and crochety, but there's something more there I tell you. Here's an excerpt from one of her entries:

Nevertheless, I started thinking about creative blogs in general last night, and what I like about them. What I like about them most of all is how you can ultimately, eventually, "hear" people in them, maybe even hear them in a way you wouldn't necessarily hear them in real life, somehow, and watch their travels near and far. Don't we read novels for the same reason -- to find out how it was for them? To see how it was, might have been, maybe will be for us? I want to know. And my favorite blogs are not the ones that are most pretty, or informative, or most prolific -- they're the ones that have a voice. The ones where the people behind them sort of shine past the photos or the punctuation and grammar (so what about that anyway -- never let that stop you) or the crafts or any of that stuff -- I like voices. I like thinking, "Oh, she's gentle, " or "Bah! She's hilarious!" or "Wow -- how thoughtful," or "Mmm -- I see now," when I hear people -- and then I like it when those impressions grow and layer, like puff pastry, into something thrilling and full. I like watching people discover things, I like how the blog changes and develops by sheer virtue of its happening at all, those magic moments when someone discovers something, understands something.









All photographs by Alicia Paulson.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for recommending this distraction. Getting lost in her simple pleasures, quirks and unbelievable photography is enjoying a sloppy afternoon ice cream cone. yummm! I love pokka dots!