Well, as the gift bottle of hot sauce from James & Deb says Well slap my ass and call me sally - the link super secret code works and now it's as if a whole new universe opened afore my fingers.
Went to look into ground zero yesterday, and to visit Smithosonian's Museum of the Native American outside Battery Park. I was mistaken, my images on permanent view are in War-shington (as they say in the midwest) and not there. But it turned out that there was a traveling show about Native American beadwork there and I DID have work in that show, a documentary image of Iroquois women doing beadwork.
Before that emo-jaunt I went to my fav jewelry store in SoHo, Me and Ro , and picked up a new addition to the other gold band I wear with the la vérité éternelle (eternal truth) - this one is also gold with a small ruby and it the Tibetan word for compassion dug into it.
After ground zero went to the museum to see not only my work on display but to also see Tibetan monks making their sand mandala in honor of Yamantaka and it was even more intricate and colorful than I could ever have imagined. I watched the monks work on it with their copper tools for hours, long funnels with ridges along the sides and copper sticks to rub against them to make the sand grains come out slowly or quickly, depending on the rub. It's a mesmerizing, musical process.
I talked with one of the monks and asked him to look at my new ring.
He held it in his holy hands and pronounced that it did say compassion, pronounced neen-jay in Tibetan.
I was relieved that it didn't mistakenly or brazenly say dogpoop.
Before all of this I bumped into an MTV crew on the Chinatown streets, daring innocents to do things/thinks for cold hard cash money. $50 was offered to a handsome teen to take a raw fish into his mouth and be filmed taking a cab all the way up to Times Square. He said no and scooted away.
They approached another person, next to me. Suddenly the host saw me How about this girl? They offered me $300 cash and I said I WILL barf in the cab (I was x-tremely hungover) and he said GREAT!!! we'll get it on camera. I said But I'm not going that way. A woman said It's the holiday season. I said Then you do it! I was out for the night, knew I'd stink of fish and had ground zero and holiness waiting for me. I said no, the host was wide-eyed and off I walked. I imagined cheezball writers at the middling city's daily catching that fishy whiff and my name sprawled out in the paper: Local Photog and Her Fishy Mouth!!!! abso-fuckin-lootly not.