origami

this town, from certain angles, looks like a punch bowl full of soviet russia. midwinter, the streets fade into an oppressive palette of grays, washed out taupe, and secondhand camel browns. nothing shines -- no hints of red confetti, yellow hibiscus, party sparkles, or swaying palms to halt the insistent rainbow of drab. all surfaces are in need of a spit shine, crumbling walls and disintegrating curbs beg for a dignified burial.

row after row of sensible brick buildings -- jurassic monuments from an era of visual anaesthetics.

i long for a zoning violation in hunter orange, a yarn shop in shocking indigo, or a corrugated, conical structure to disrupt the breadline of tragic stations, warehouses and abandoned popcorn factories. bring on the ghastly neon eyesores -- antidotes to the blah architecture and monochromatic, windowless mordors squatting on neglected sidewalks with accidental foliage.

add winter haze and overcast skies to the background -- silty air, black dots peppering my kleenex, ashy knuckles and the bleakest town in north korea looks like a carnival cruise.

getting out is key. but when i'm inundated with the raggedy quilt of winter qualms week after week, escape seems out of the question. not because it's impossible, but because survival instincts trick me into thinking that i must stay and let the dirge play on -- leaving now would be rude. this is but one pale pocket of the universe. rumors/blind faith suggest that sunnier pastures surely exist, but leaving is always harder than being gone.

a ticket to fiji was not in my cards this december. so finding and forging color on a local, less exotic level became my mission.

reaching back to my high school days, when my half-japanese boyfriend made me a menagerie of origami tulips on a strand of bright, white christmas lights, i decided to try my hand at paper folding. i bought a stack of dazzling origami paper from a craft store and discovered another pasttime that sucks hours into the same black hole that contains lost sock mates, expensive earrings, and passports. indeed, folding paper into three-dimensional tulip bulbs joined the ranks of repetitive motion activity (OCD-fodder) along with knitting pool covers, beating my own personal best at tetris, and playing electronic travel scrabble. i folded incessantly, and filled a victoria's secret gift box with my faux flora for an then-unknown purpose. initially, i planned on placing them on a new string of lights and draping them across my sensible brick mantle (also brown).

a flood in my bedroom forced a "clean cup, move down" affair in my apartment in mid november. room purposes shifted counter-clockwise, and i cleared out my office to make room for my bed, placed my desk in my living room, and shut the door of my beiruted bedroom for a series of russian handymen to inspect and repair at their leisure over the course of a month.

now that i've returned my bed to its rightful place, the office is still empty. having my desk in the middle of the living room created a temporary, anachronistic effect that i found more inspiring than the office. it also created the starving artist illusion of being tight on space -- something that i do not wrestle with in my current abode-- and evokes an urban dwelling with a coveted, seaside zip code.

so the tulips were born. they lived in a hot pink box on my desk, next to my money tree -- the effect was that of a rectangular green glass oasis, adrift in a sea of stain-resistant carpet in need of a dirt devil (artists can't afford vacuums). lacking a string of lights, and the stamina to face the big box stores that sell them, i took a handful of tulips to my parents' house to test their luminosity and lanternability on my mom's christmas tree. her tree lights resembled rose-molded butterballs. they were supposed to be bullet-sized snowballs, but the butter association could not be eradicated.

it was a tight fit, but i managed to shove the tulips over three butterballs and enjoy the flowers of my labor.

upon discovering my homage to the fine art of paper folding, my mother commissioned me to multiply and divide my origami obsession x10 to create tulips for each butterball on her crooked but naturally imperfect evergreen. i accepted. my internal obsessive hobbies bureau (ohb) was ecstatic -- now i could manipulate blossom-dappled paper for hours with a purpose and a deadline.


the origami christmas tree went over quite well with visitors, siblings and such. one aunt coerced me into teaching a fifth grade class how to create tulips, lotuses, and fortune tellers for art class/"decorate the library" day. a string of melancholy blue lights became the host strand for a linear evolution of crumpled attempts, torn edges, and eventually, perfect tulips fashioned by a herd of 9-year-olds.

one boy buried his head in the crook of his elbow in utter despair: "i'll never get the edges to line up" he said. "not in my life. not with my luck". on some level, he was right. these tulips and origami in general, are partial to precision, crisp lines, symmetry, and strong fingernails to iron each fold. sloppy origami is an oxymoron -- in fact, if it is sloppy, it is not origami. i couldn't tell this kid that he had made a mockery of an ancient japanese tradition. instead, i poked a hole in his wrinkled ball of green paper and stuck it on the string of lights with the rest of them. yes, i was an accessory to corner cutting. the kid seemed supremely disappointed in himself, but managed to get his head out his elbow long enough to appreciate the light peering through his mutant tulip.

post-christmas, my sisters and i exorcised all things holiday in my parents' house. we stashed neighbor gifts (popcorn tins, tea pots, cookies in tupperwares, the dancing santa that terrifies the cat) in preparation for a new year. we pulled each tulip off the butterballs and placed them in a tall box. my sister lifted the tree off the square stand while i stood on one corner of it, and laughed. the cat glared -- quietly bidding farewell to his short and inexplicable love affair with an indoor tree.

we dragged it through the front door head first, catching its wide caboose in the door frame and sending a spray of pine needles scattering in remote places. in protest, citing all it had done for us and its stoic tolerance of feline abuse, it clung to the door frame. but what comes in must go out. with a final shove, it was exiled to the curb. the cat wept and waved a starched hanky from the window -- oh, my love.

we decided to give the tulips a final act for new year's eve. popping the tulips on the butterballs once more, we draped the strands over the china hutch and across the white mantle to illuminate our framed baby faces.

back to my empty office space. i envision a moroccan smoking lounge...magenta floor cushions, drum-shaped tables with olives, and a jade tiled fountain in the center of the room, to hold rose petals and live koi -- just a simple upgrade.

i plan to create an entirely new collection of tulips to light the place up -- newspaper clippings, soap or chocolate wrappers, anything that will hold a crease. i've thought to place a wish, a prayer, a curse or a spell in each one -- each guest can pick one to keep -- along with the fortune inside.

while the season insists on conservative tones, and until charm is restored to the streets, i shall adorn butterballs with handcrafted echoes of spring. or perhaps i shall simply go to india.