There’s an excellent quote from Gandhi: Be The Change you Want to See in the World. Recently I decided to change this up for personal reasons, temporarily, to: Be the Change you want to See in I.
A little less selfless than Gandhi’s original intent, but bear with me. Want to change your life? Become something/someone bigger or better than you feel you are? Pretend that you’re that person already, and do what they would do. Muhammad Ali said: “To Be a great champion you must believe you are the best. If you’re not, pretend you are.” And he did that: he talked like he was the best (“I am the Greatest!”), he trained like he was the best…pretty soon: He was the best! If you BEHAVE as if you are the best at something – you do the actions that the BEST would do – you will become the best. (All right, in all honesty, you might not become the BEST, but you’ll get better.) I want to be a writer, and make my living by creating stories. Right now I don’t. So what did I do? I thought about (and read about) the people who DO make their livings creatively. What’s one thing they all do? Create every single day. (I mean, like it’s their job!) So here’s my experiment: I fired myself from my “real job.” And I gave myself the job of creator. I’ve got about 6 months to live without a paying gig, before I’m in trouble. I’m creating every day – like it’s my job. And I’m selling it every day, hustling, like it’s my job. Because making up stories is one thing, but you’ve got to get those stories into the hands of someone who can do something about it. So that’s what I’m doing: BEING the change I want to see in myself. The hope is that if I do this long and hard enough, I’ll find someone else to pay me for it. And even if I don’t succeed in 6 months, I’ll probably be closer. This blog will chronicle that experiment. Welcome.
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DMS loves some mirrors (and, um, gold). We had this 4’ mirror that I’d brought to the house from several previous places. The frame had busted off and it was cracked; fairly unusable. But I held onto it in the basement, thinking I might try something with it someday. One day I was shopping at Target and found this great frame. It was black and they didn’t have other color options, but I wanted something to make the mirror pop a bit more. So I took it home and did a once-over with the gold spray paint. I took the mirror and wrapped it in an old bedsheet I use as a paint tarp. Then I essentially beat it with a hammer, smashing the mirror into bits. That led to some great shapes, and kept all the small bits of broken glass in the sheet, so it was easy to clean up. From there I tried to find a variety of pieces; mostly the bigger or medium sized bits. Using the frame’s backing (what you normally put back on after you put a picture in a frame; it locks into the frame itself to keep everything in place) as my base, I spread the mirror pieces out till I had a pattern I liked, starting with the three biggest pieces near the corners. Then I filled in the space between with slightly smaller pieces, and moved things till I was happy. Once I had a design I was happy with, I used a hot glue gun to attach the mirror pieces to the backing, flipping and gluing them one at a time.
After the pieces had dried, I went over them one by one with Windex, and did the same with both sides of the frame’s glass. Really happy with the end result. We hung it between two candelabras and it looks great with them lit. As with all mirrors it expands the way the room feels. And with the fractured pieces chopping the reflection up, it’s endlessly interesting, breaking up the reflection of my guitar, or our books, or me! |