Things In My Cabinet: Sun and Dark

The Sunshine Blogger award. So...sunshiney.

I woke up this morning to a sky full of fog and two unexpected doses of intense sunshine in my inbox. First of all, the delightful A.F.E. Smith of Reflections of Reality nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger award. I have mixed feelings about these awards - they're sort of like chain emails, in that they kinda guilt-trip you into passing them along with the sense of "Well, at least somebody cares about me enough to pass it on, I'm not alone in the world, better make sure I send it to everyone I know!" And then, too, they don't tend to have much in the way of meaningful content (what's your favorite place to vacation? what's your favorite Christmas movie?) That being said, though, this kind of casual blog award is a sweet, unexpected indicator that hey, whoa, somebody out there is actually reading your blog! And likes it! And wants to share it! Which is lovely. And this one is, well, unusually topical.

See, I've been having a rough few weeks. Moving across the country has been much harder than I expected. I left behind a beautiful house full of art that I'd made, a wonderful partner, and a community of kind, creative people to come back to the Bay Area, because despite everything I'd made for myself in Massachusetts I knew it wasn't the right place for me, and I was homesick for fresh fruit and the smell of the jasmine and blue days full of sunlight that weren't soul-witheringly humid. And I thought that here would be the best place to seriously get to work on the Museum of Joy. I'd volunteer at the Exploratorium and learn a million things about how to make and run an amazing museum. I'd have contacts here, and family, a safety net. It would be a hard change, sure, but the right one! I didn't expect to find myself, a month out, walking around on the brink of weeping all the damn time. I didn't expect to find myself swamped so deeply in self-doubt that I'd actually consider moving back to the East Coast. I didn't expect to miss Kevin so viciously. I thought I'd be doing a splendid, adventurous thing, and it doesn't feel that way.

This Inquiry Into The Nature Of Joy Is Totally Scientific I Swear

This is the four-mile trail from Sky Camp to
the beach, a hike we refer to as The Death
March - it's even more lovely than it looks.

I want you to talk to me about joy.

I'm not much for "please comment!" or "please share!" but this post is a little different. You see, I'm doing research, and I need your help. I need to know:

What brings you joy?

I've just come down from four days in the shocking beauty that is the Point Reyes National Seashore, and while I was up there, wandering around in the glorious sunlight (watching baby quails fluffing themselves in the dust, ospreys diving for fish, hummingbirds in the sticky monkey flower, bunnies hopping, fawns with big ears staring at me through the underbrush...what joy) I did some thinking. (Like you do when you've finished the only book you've backpacked up with you and there are about eleven hours of daylight left to ponder in.) And one of the things I thought about was - okay, so this Museum of mine. You know, it's really time to get started on that. And I know what I think about joy, but really? I don't know what everyone else thinks. But if I want to really start laying the foundation of a museum dedicated to joyousness, I'm going to need to learn a lot more about joy. So, ladies and germs, it's time to do a survey. It's TOTALLY SCIENTIFIC AND STUFF! by which I mean it's not, even a little bit. It is, however, very simple.

Say, What the Heck is This Museum Anyway?

This is basically how I imagine the first thing you see will
look. Via Unusual Life.

It occurred to me at three o'clock or so this morning that although I've got a nice little verbose and flowery blurb about it, and plenty of posts referring to it, I haven't actually sat down and told you just exactly what I imagine this whole Museum thingy as one day actually being. Wonder and beauty and joy and blah blah blah, yeah, okay, but how do you actually put that in a museum?

Today I want to talk about that. I'd like to paint you a picture of the place, by which I mean talk a lot and include many lovely pictures of things I didn't make but like to imagine I could one day vaguely approximate. And, of course, I want ask for your input. Because what fun is building something awesome if nobody comes? And joy, while intrinsically an excellent thing, is magnified and multiplied when it's felt, shared, and experienced by a whole community. So please, at the end of it all, tell me what you think I'm missing, the vital things YOU'd need to have a museum that left you truly feeling joyful in your bones.

S is for Simka

My sister and I having a very important discussion on
the streets of Berkeley. (I'm the short one.) Note
the lampshade's elegant mustache.

Although the 26 entries of the A to Z blog challenge here at the Museum of Joy are all dedicated to inspirations for the Museum, this one might be the single most important. See, it was my amazing, brilliant, and lovely sister Simka who came up with the idea in the first place. Incidentally (or maybe not), Simka's name comes from the Hebrew word for joy, simcha, pronounced sim-hah with an extra-throaty h. (My parents were afraid of condemning her a life of being mispronounced in such senstive locales as elementary school classrooms and dentist offices, hence the alternate spelling. I figure they learned from their mistake with me. If I had a dollar for every time someone mangled my name, why, I'd be halfway to buying a few square feet of land on the Northern California coast by now!) (It's Jericha like the city of Jericho, if you were wondering.) Where was I? (Sometimes I get lost in my own parentheticals.) Oh yeah. Simka, my awesome sister. Simka is an inch taller than me for every year I am older than her (I'm 5'2" and she's 5'8") and the most empathetic person I know. In addition to a really extraordinary and sensitive emotional intelligence, she's also sharp, witty, booksmart like whoa, and loves math and cool nerdy things. I am praising her here in part because she's my sister and I love her, but also because, well, if I have a calling in life now it's all her fault.

A is for Academy of Sciences

Image credit: Cal Academy of Sciences Research Archives

Welcome to the A-Z Challenge Entry for A on the Museum of Joy! This month, I'll be writing about 26 inspirations for the Museum of Joy, one for every letter of the alphabet. To be fair, this entry is actually about the California Academy of Sciences, but I've got something else lined up for letter C, and living in San Francisco there's no need to refer to what state you're in. When I was a kid, it was just The Museum with Dinosaurs.

My family moved to San Francisco just before I turned 2 and just after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. We were pretty poor, apparently, although I had no idea because I was a toddler and we lived at the edge of Golden Gate Park, which is still one of the coolest places in the world that a kid can possibly have at her doorstep. (Although the Inner Sunset, our neighborhood, is a whole bunch ritzier now, there still remains a shop that was for me a magical cave at the age of 2, which we called The Badge Shop because it sold dozens of tiny enameled pins and other treasures. It's really called "Oriental Import Co" or something, and it looks exactly the same. You can still buy a really great pin for five bucks, too.) Back then, a member ship at the Academy of Sciences was affordable. As this article says, a family membership was $25 in 1996, and this is even earlier. Now it's $500. Poor kids like me don't get to go any more, but then there's a lot less to see these days....

Art I Wish I'd Made Myself: Entering the Memory of Michael C. McMillen

In pursuit of the magical museum, I write about other museums that have inspired, amazed, and astonished me. In this case, an exhibit from August 2011 at the wonderful Oakland Museum really pushed the boundaries of what I'd realized a museum installation could do - especially in a smaller collection. It's one thing for the Met to knock your socks off, but to see a local museum do it gave me this moment of "whoa! say, I could do that!" ...not without a hefty chunk of change, perhaps, but all of a sudden the idea of a mystical collection seemed that much more within my reach.