Puss N Boots and the Heartbreak of Spatial Orientation

I’m inundated with unfinished projects.

The garden—mostly pitchforked.

The article—partly transcribed to Google docs.

Puss n Boots—still a wisp of my imagination.

I started him for the third time last night, but helas! No go.

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Part of the Puss n Boots problem, it turns out, is that I have the wrong kind of polymer clay for polymer clay sculpting projects.

The best stuff apparently is Super Sculpey or Sculpey Pro.

I have a pound or so of garden variety Fimo in an assortment of rainbow hues. I’m not about to throw it all out. But I think I’m gonna have to start refrigerating it for 10 minutes before I work with it: It’s so sticky, it doesn’t hold its shape.

Also, the right kind of tools for modeling polymer clay sculptures turn out to be…[drumroll]… dental tools. Those are cheap on Amazon. I try very, very hard not to order stuff off Amazon because, you know, soulless, union-busting enterprise helmed by creepy, weird-looking gazillionaire; but sometimes there’s no other place to get the stuff you gotta have.

The main problem with Puss n Boots, though, is that I have no drawing ability whatsoever. In fact, I’m incredibly lopsided when it comes to abilities: Such talents as I have are exclusively verbal; I am very, very, very good with the English language, but I can’t do much of anything else. I can’t play any musical instruments. And I’m kinda physically clumsy. I do sketch and dabble in water colors from time to time—it’s so relaxing—and sometimes the results are even pleasing, but the results are always accidental: I could never reproduce them.

The drawing thing is partly hand/eye coordination. But, also, partly a weird loop in my brain.

I have real issues with spatial orientation.

For years, the only way I could tell right from left was by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

I hold my computer mouse upside down.

I get disoriented looking in a mirror.

I get lost very easily. I can get lost looking for the bathroom inside my own house.

I get that this seems very weird—left from right? how can you not be able to tell left from right?— but I’ve met a few other people over the years with this strange… I guess you’d call it a form of dyslexia… so, I know it’s a thing. It doesn’t bother me particularly since long ago, I figured out ways to compensate for it plus, you know, GPS!!!

But it does hamper my ability to reproduce visual patterns. It’s kind of like I have to fight my brain 'cause my brain wants to flip them.

Anyway, I will try Puss n Boots again this evening.