Current mood:

ok

Game Day
Yes, I'm writing before I go to CW tonight. There are things to say and I'm logged in anyway. Tonight is UofM's first football game and it's here in A2 which means my normally 15 minute drive downtown will take at least an hour. I remember clearly that last year, I seriously considered cancelling henna on game days. But I promised Deepali I'd be there tonight. And I promised memorysdaughter I'd be there tonight.

Tuesday's appointment went well despite getting lost. First, I missed the Southfield Fwy exit, but I try to allow enough travel time for one episode of getting lost. I don't exactly have a habit of getting lost (ok, maybe I do) it's more like I'm not willing to cut across 4 lanes of traffic to make my exit. I'm the queen of u-turns and have no fear about driving to the next exit and circling back around. Better that than to make sudden moves at fast speeds. To compensate, I allow a little more drive time than I may need to if it's a new location. Also, I'm a lead foot. My policy is "speed while you can because at some point, you won't be able to". I rarely have a problem making up for lost time.

The kicker came when Mapquest had me turn left instead of right on 8 Mile. I would have been right on time. Instead, I was 20 minutes late. Luckily, Vajna was cool people. And so was her aDORable dog Bakti (German shepherd/sharpei), her friend and her husband. Turns out, I've seen these people around at CW (that's where they got my contact info). Also turns out, Vajna rides horses and is infatuated with Friesians. The weekend before, she'd ridden a $500K stallion. *swoon!* And to top it all off, she's thrice disabled (two car accidents and a trip&fall), so you can believe we compared notes about that. Oh, and I did henna, too. ;) And she made me tea for my cough!

I did her hands and feet for Thursday's festival at her Hindu temple (someone's consort?). She was going to have henna done by Anju and was surprised that I knew of her. Anju had to move suddenly to Seattle this summer when her husband's job transferred him (I think?). Hopefully her color turned out nicely and people at temple admired it. I forgot to get pictures because around 12:30 am, I suddenly got the impression that it was time to go. Henna was done and we were just chatting, so it's not like I left mid-job. I just get these feelings sometimes and I listen to them. I never know why - I figure I'm probably narrowly avoiding an accident. Vajna also lives in a semi-rough part of Detroit (8 Mile & Woodward), so my instincts were on heightened alert anyway. (Called D when I got there, after an hour and again when I was on the road home.) I packed up, gave her a hug, bid Bakti adieu and drove home without incident.

Wednesday, I delivered henna to Deepali - or maybe that was Tuesday. Anyway, Deepali is new to the joy of henna. Learning and very excited about the whole process. We've been writing back and forth about paste consistency and bottles and whatnot. She's not scary like the local HP woman who has been messaging me via Frappr and telling me we should get together so I can teach her how to use her henna stuff. That one gives me the creeps, quite frankly, and I stopped replying to her after the first time. But no, Deepali is refreshingly non-scary. ;) Thursday night I hung out with her and Martha at the UofM Union. They did some free henna to draw people to their co-op's table. I brought simple design sheets, alcohol wipes and Garnier Fructis. We chatted about henna, of course.

I've noticed a disturbing trend on the henna forums this summer. First, the number of henna artists in my area (based on forums) has grown drastically. It makes me a little concerned about competition. But worse, it seems like experienced henna artists are.. squashing newbies. There has been considerable discussion about newbies vs. wannabes and most of it I agreed with. But recently, there have been people asking "Am I good enough to go into business?" and the response seems to be "No". A woman who has done henna for 7 years and still doesn't think she's good enough? What's up with that? I agree that as artists, we need to have standards and consistency and we don't want sub-par artists giving henna a bad name, but a big part of me wants to share my starting out story. On Wednesday, I learned how to make henna and applied my first henna design on my sister. On Friday, I was off doing a 3-Day festival and we made over $400 on little $5 designs. I went back a year later to a great response and since we'll still be in MI, I'll be back for a third year.

Good enough? Was I good enough? Maybe I was lucky in that I found a random powder in a random Indian grocery that worked well. Maybe my audience wasn't very picky about my shaky skills. Or maybe I was good enough and I'm glad I never asked strangers for their opinions. I wasn't great right off and I have certainly learned and changed a lot of things in the past year (I still don't know that I'd really have the skills to jump into the bridal henna circuit), but I stuck with it and people seem to like what I'm doing. Yeah, I'm concerned about competition, but I'm not going to decide whether an artist is or isn't good enough to do what millions of mama-jis and aunty-jis have been doing for millenia.

Also, I'm struggilng a little bit with how aggressively one semi-local person is about "advertising" on the forums when I have been told repeatedly that I can't advertise. And I sure hope that Black Cat, Red Cat has been in business for two years like the advertising contract states. I feel dramatic when I focus on these things, like I'm just creating drama that I don't need. But darnit, rules are rules. It's not my job to police someone else's forum though.

Went to LS again last night, but it was too cold and I didn't do any henna. I think now that the concerts are done, I'll cut back to every other Friday evening there. Well, off to CW in a bit. Man, I'm really tempted to cancel henna on game days.