Sometimes I wish I didn't have a creative bone in my body. Sometimes I wish I had no desire to create beauty. Sometimes I wish I could be happy sitting down with a ledger of numbers at a safe and secure job and not questioning anything or thinking I could make something better. But I'm not like that.

Herein lies the problem. I'm also very practical and grounded. One time I was taking one of those silly online personality tests and you had to pick one trait from a choice of two that best describes you. The two choices were "practical" and "creative." I guess, according to the makers of the test, you couldn't be both practical and creative. I don't know which one I picked in the end.

So many creative types, or at least those who like to think of themselves as creative, are, to put it mildly, batspit loony. A while back, a (non-art studio) professor that Stan had said that Stan and I are not like other visual artists because we are sensible and practical. This professor seemed to have experience with studio artists as being flakes. Unfortunately, we've had the same experience.

It's not just the visual art that gives me this problem. It's the jewelry. And now it's becoming the perfume research. I make art and jewelry because they're beautiful. That's all it is, a need to create beautiful paintings and designs and work with colors and lovely stones. And with the perfumery, it's the same thing, except it's the desire to create beautiful scents.

And in my research, whether it's for sourcing materials or just learning, I'm constantly running into the same thing over and over. The witchy woo woo factor.

Let me start over from a different perspective.

Is it just me, or...

...is it a little off that someone maybe in their 20s or 30s wouldn't like movies? Any movies? I don't just mean mainstream Hollywood blockbusters, or eurocinema, or slasher flicks, or any specific genre of movies, or movies with certain actors or by certain directors...but ALL movies?

I'm trying to wrap my brain around this. I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to be someone who rejects this contemporary art form and way of storytelling. All movies are are a modern technological extension of storytelling which has been with us since humans could communicate. Movies *are* a part of us, and to deny the urge to hear or see a good story being spoken or read or presented in multimedia is to deny our humanity, right? Am I wrong about this?

Let me start over from a different perspective.

When I was a 12-year-old I found out that NOT all 12 or 13-year-old girls liked boys. It freakin' blew me away. We're not talking latent lesbianism here, at least I don't think so. The person I'm remembering is married now. I don't know if there are kids. I mean I remember being interested in boys since I was like 6. I found out they existed, didn't like any in my class, really, but made some up to like. Moved to New York, found cute ones in my class, got crushes, rinse, repeat in various forms for most of my life until now when I'm just too old and tired and married to get crushes anymore. When I was in New York, I had a friend who had a crush on the same guy as I did, and it was sort of cute. No competition or anything, we were just 9 or 10. I always talked about boys with my girlfriends and soon-to-be-girlenemies. But to find someone who didn't like boys? Blew me away. Just like accidentally happening on someone's blog while doing research on something else. (I call it being "blogboozled"...being misled/confused/cheated by having blog content come up instead of either commercial content or informational content. I'm sure this journal blogboozles people all the time. But ferkryinoutloud, the dumb stuff people search on that brings up my blog...they deserve to be blogboozled. Yet, I digress.) So this person whose blog comes up instead of more relevant content I was looking for doesn't like movies. Can't sit through them. Weird. To me, it's weird. Am I weird because I like movies? I don't think so, I think that's pretty normal. Everyone has their favorites and genres they don't like. But to blanket-statement say "I don't like movies"...because "I can't sit through them"...Weird. We must be talking some major ADHD here.

To me it came off totally condescending, like she was too good for movies (like my 13-year-old friend was too good for stinky boys) because she practiced this Pagan Mother Herb Goddess Shawoman (not Shaman...it has the word *man* in it) lifestyle which looked down on anything that was "Man-ufactured" (womanufactured is ok). I looked at some other blogs by people associated with her (all women, of course) and although they weren't as militantly-anti-movie as she was, they all had that veneer of "I'm Belladonna the Good Wytch" and "I like groovin' with our Earth Mother and singin' songs to my wyld gardyn" almost parodic self-descriptions. No, I take that back. Not almost parodic self-descriptions, parodic self-descriptions. Nothing almost about it.

And then it hit me. This woman is a fundamentalist. No, not a FLDS or Pentacostal. Not Christian of any stripe. She's a fundie crunchy pagan herbie. Wildcrafting plants is her Sunday morning service. Organic tinctures is her holy water. One fundamentalist movement is patriarchal, the other is matriarchal.

Look, I love the smell of plants and the smell of natural essential oils, but I also love movies that love the smell of napalm in the morning. And you know what? Putting that citrine stone in your herbal blend isn't going to make you more clairvoyant and blending Patchouli and Ylang Ylang isn't going to bring you love especially if your intended lover doesn't like Patchouli. It's all bunk and hogwash. A stone cannot infuse any mystical power in herbal oil. And as much as I loved buying oils at Isis the other month when I was in Colorado, I loved buying them for their SCENT. I love stones because they are visually beautiful, not because wearing one makes me wiser, or richer, or whatever.

Gaaah. Glad I got that off my chest, it's been bugging me for a while now.

And how could anyone not like movies?

Labels: It Takes All Kinds