Okay, attempt #2 at a passable blog post. Get it? Number 2? Damnit, I’m already back to fecal humor (see my first post)! Oh dear. Moving on. This is SO not what Steve had in mind when he made me start a blog, is it?

I guess I should tell you a little bit about my life so you know who the hell you’re dealing with here. That is, if you haven’t already figured that one out from my first post: I am a grade-A, pure chuck silliness junkie. Who is very upscale and posh. Okay, maybe that last part is a lie, and I promised not to lie in my first blog. I suppose, like everyone, I have a public persona and a private persona, but since I am trying to lead a more authentic life, I’ve decided to try to marry the two in this blog. Which is reason #34 that I was hesitant to start a blog. I suspect I may swing wildly between maturity and insanity in this thing, which is pretty much how I am in real life and is the reason my poor husband never knows what’s coming. Clearly, we have not hit upon the maturity part yet. I know that part of marketing art is marketing the artist herself, which means that anyone trying to market me has their hands full, which really means that I have my hands full. Can you believe that we’ve gotten this far into the paragraph and you haven’t learned anything substantial about my real life? Really, it’s appalling. You should write to your congressman about it (not that they’ll do anything about it, they’re too busy fundraising for their next campaign).

By the way, remember how I said my low back starts killing me if I sit too long at the computer? Well, I stood up to stretch and had my leg on a chair behind me and my arms over my head and may have been making ugly faces, and a man walked by my store window with his dry cleaning and looked at me like I was an idiot. Which is probably true, but really, I was just stretching. I was being sensible. Quit judging, bucko.

I promise that I really am going to tell you about myself now. I just got distracted. It happens. I said quit judging! I’m the product of two dirty hippies who liked to travel around the country camping near train tracks (my dad was a major train buff), which meant that I needed to find ways to entertain myself. Enter art supplies (and making up songs that no one would ever want to hear). While my parents learned early on that crayons equal a melted mess in the back of the van if you’re camping anywhere warm, I was allowed all manner of other media to explore with. As years passed and we stopped travelling as much, my parents still encouraged me to pursue art in any way that interested me. Gotta love those dirty hippies. Eventually, I went to Wake Forest University and obtained a bachelor’s degree in visual arts. Mind you, I was not planning on becoming a fine arts major. I was going to be WAY more practical. But the night before I had to declare my major, I literally played eeny meeny miney moe with 3 equally impractical fields of study, and landed on art, so here we are.  I moved to DC for one miserable year, then to FL (more on how I went from DC to FL in another post) where I began selling my artwork in local galleries (and where I met my husband, who shall henceforth be known as “S,” because his name is way too long to type on a regular basis and I’m lazy like that). As the economy tanked in the mid 2000’s, I found my art sales drying up, so I had to get a “real” job. I landed at a law firm as first a receptionist and then a paralegal helping people get their disability benefits, and while I enjoyed the work, I had a pretty awful boss. One day, out of desperation resulting from a particularly hideous work day, I went onto craigslist to look for another job. I stumbled across a sip and paint studio that was opening up a franchise and applied and got the job. It wasn’t enough work to allow me to quit the law firm, but it was a fun outlet and a little extra income. I’ve taught most of my life, beginning with horseback riding, then acting, and of course, art, so teaching at the sip and paint studio came very naturally to me. Plus, there was wine. Dream job, right?

Then my dad was diagnosed with dementia at age 65. Don’t worry, we’ll talk about that a lot more in future posts. There is no end to the pain and entertainment it brings to my life. So the hubs and I moved to VA to live with my parents and help my mom care for my dad. After about a year, it was too hard to keep my dad safe (again, more on that another time), so we placed him in a dementia care facility and moved to NC to start our lives again. We opened a sip and paint studio and now I spend my days answering calls and emails and teaching drunk people how to paint (okay, so they’re not all drunk, but it’s still fun to say) and wishing I had more time to actually paint for real. Foh rillz, ya’ll.* Really, I should be painting right now. I blame Steve. But I suppose if I don’t start marketing the art again, I won’t sell it, which means I’ll continue paying for a damn storage unit and feeling bad about making more art to store. Steve 1, Emily 0.

*So last night I said to S, “Y’allsuns better move out of my way.” He claimed that “ya’llsuns” is not a word that anyone has ever said. Is he right? Did I make that one up?