July's Post-it Notes from Instagram

Over on our Instagram page, we're posting a weekly installation from Clare Johnson's Post-it Note Project, a long running daily project. Here's her wrap-up and statement from July's posts.

July's Theme: Last July

Every summer I think I’ll get a million things done, catch up on every longterm personal and professional goal... then end up sick for weeks, or totally useless and unfocused because apparently not taking weekends off from work ever suddenly catches up with you, who am I to think I can outrun that. Or I’m frantically applying to the million art things with July deadlines, or I’m languishing in the heat, confused about why I don’t function better in it. I mean... do I have to say more about the last post-it? Housework in hot weather—I’m maybe not the best at it. Really, not even in the “A for effort” category... it’s more like, WHAT ARE YOU DOING CLARE. WHY ARE YOU VACUUMING YOUR FEET IN YOUR UNDERWEAR. All I can say is it seemed logical—inevitable even—at the time. Also fireworks. I know fireworks displays are indefensible, profoundly problematic in countless ways, and yet in my private heart I remain deeply intrigued. Back in the US after years away, I kept grasping for that one viewpoint where they look as crazily big as I remembered. But it might just be the past. Last July, with the larger world falling to pieces the way it’s always doing now, I found myself in a shockingly charmed moment personally. I’d just been awarded a glamorously unrestricted grant, been handed the actual check on Pride Sunday just as June ended, in the quiet, dark, blisteringly hot afternoon rooms of a fancy club called the Ruins. Sharing the news on social media felt like I was someone else. I was looking forward to my first residencies ever, and this beloved literary review (yes, this one) wanted to start publishing my Post-it Note Project each week. This July I’m just my old self, recovering from a bug, floundering in a relentless sea of applications and rejections, still worrying about small things, or the world, or my friend in Turkey, will I make it back there to her, will things get better, when can I just make all the work I dream of making, oh my god I need to vacuum. But I am still grateful for the same things too. The lake is the lake, and one song on the radio will solve everything for that moment. I’d forgotten the name of that song, such a heartbreakingly lovely thought: No Danger.