Procrastination: putting off what you have to do for what you want to do.

Today I was supposed to write a writing sample to respond to an ad in last Sunday's paper. (I'm privately feeling that the person who put out the ad isn't actually interested in hiring writers, he/she wants to steal stories, but that perhaps is just my way of keeping myself from being disappointed when I never hear anything from this person.) Instead I worked on a quilt design. Which is okay, because I'm supposed to do that too; I wanted to make a lap quilt for my halmoni (Korean grandma) when I meet her next month. Assuming I do. I will unless a very good job offer comes in and my nascent employers do not like the idea of my leaving for a week and a half in the first month or so of my employment. A job offer from Home Depot will not prevent me from going. Dad said as much. Mom, on the other hand, said to Dad, "Is Jenny waiting to get a job because of the Korea trip? Because if she is we won't go." Dad tells me this is only worry out of love and that she asked him and not me because she doesn't want me mad at her, and so I am not telling her that I'm not still jobless because of the trip, I'm still jobless because nobody, not even Borders or B&N, will hire me.

(Bev called yesterday and said that she took four months to find her current job and the economy was better then, and also that Gabe is having surgery today--I assume it went well--and that she's doing fabulously at said job, which makes me happy. Besides, if she pleases her employers they won't mind as much letting her come out and help me with the wedding when I'm about to go insane because of it.)

Anyway, this quilt design is sort of starry and sort of 3-D-y, and I'm dying to convert it to more of a 3-D design but this quilt is for my halmoni, whom I've never met and whose taste I'm completely in the dark about, and I tend to think that stars are safer. I'm supposed to make a wedding Penrose tile quilt for Eric and me; I still plan to sometime in the next year or so; and I think it's highly unlikely that nongeeky people would appreciate it as much as he and I will. I don't suppose geek quilting is a very big niche, any more than geek knitting; but I could enjoy pursuing this sort of thing. Or just quilting in general. I don't think I ever put up a picture of the quilt for Marie:



She took the picture, because I ended up finishing the quilt approximately three minutes before I gave it to her. This is the most harmonious and well-done quilt I've designed yet. (It also taught me that stippled quilting is not as bad as I thought, and also that nobody but another quilter is going to notice how amateurly I did it.) Once I finish that writing sample I want to write up the pattern and see what quilt magazines' submission guidelines are. I hope I actually do this.