Truant from life: The Ann Arbor Art Fair and my day of work. Yep, work.

I am woman. I patch drywall. I disguise inordinate delight when drywall-patching substance changes color to indicate level of dryness. Well, almost.

So today, I spent the morning working. Yes, working. I:

1. cleaned out my old room at my parents' house,
2. patched up some drywall,
3. did some domestic labor with my mother (which I did not succeed in escaping from despite humming "Cinderelly, cinderelly" rather pointedly whenever assigned a new task), and
4. worked on setting up my work study for fall term.

Not truant activities but necessary tasks. Sooo I don't have much to say about today. Although if I'm really bored later, I may post the contents of my closet, which reveal a lot about my tendency to keep limitless loads of crap indiscriminately. Or maybe just a lot about my discriminating abilities.

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Yesterday, however, my father and I went to the Ann Arbor Art Fair.

Ann Arbor, MI, is the city that is home to the school from which I will be one day (hopefully) be receiving a degree, so I'm trying to welcome any opportunity to explore it. Also, my father was very excited to go to this event, to which, as he told me with a debonair air that he acquires at the oddest times, he used to take my mother often. Well, my mother did not want to come yesterday (she explained that she had many tasks to do, but I suspect she wanted to bask in solitary glory. Aloneness has become rare in their house ever since my father, as she said, "retired to travel from kitchen to television to computer for every waking hour") so my father and I went alone.

We got there early to get parking spots and found the tents just opening up.

But it got busy quite quickly. Here's a few hours later:

In the very first tent we stopped at (at right in the first picture, where the purple-draped tushy is protuding) we found a couple from Pennsylvania selling woodworking miscellania. My father exuberantly reminded them of how glad they must be to be here, asking if, as he would guess, this was one of the "top five" art fairs in the country.

The man sitting on the folding chair replied that, yeah, it's probably the biggest, but -here he leaned closer to us with a half-confidential, half-condescending tone- it's a "hodge podge" with some good art but much more crap, because "they let everyone in." My father waved his hand and loudly proclaimed how great it was to be so inclusive and big and then smacked the man on the shoulder and warned him with a chuckle to lower his voice and take pity on the less talented artists. The man was a little obnoxious, but the entire rest of the art fair, I was trying to evaluate everything, bemoaning my utter ignorance about art and tendency to equate good with large and colorful (oooh, an enormous grinning pig!).

A lot of the painting tents had "no photos please!" signs, but this one didn't.