Category: General

A string bikini made of orange and yellow neon thread embroidered into a black and white photo.

Summertime and the water’s fine

Jackie Mantey
Neon thread embroidery of teddy and string bikini on a historical photo of a woman hanging working laundry on a clothesline.
“Delicate” by Jackie Mantey // Original image info: Dorothea Lange, 1938, “Women in auto camp for migrant citrus workers. Tulare County, California.”
Detail closeup of neon thread embroidery of teddy and string bikini on a historical photo of a woman hanging working laundry on a clothesline.
There’s a time and a place to air your dirty laundry. That time is now. That place is my heart, girlfriend! ☎️

On our recent trip to New Mexico, I made it all the way to the clouds before realizing I’d forgotten my swimsuit. My old bikini remained rolled up somewhere, seducing moths with its neon thread trim and fading pheromones of summer’s past (chlorine, sunscreen, Red Hot French fries).

How does one end up suit-less on a pool-centric vacation? I blame COVID. It’s been a year and a half of never really leaving the apartment. I don’t know how to plan to be out in the world anymore. I’m still getting my sea legs back under me. Pool legs?

We landed in El Paso and saddled up our slick white Mustang to drive to Las Cruces. As I worked from my laptop at the Airbnb we’d rented for a few days, Justin drove with the top down to Target and tried to find a swimsuit in my size that was as close to cute as possible. 

He came back with this neon orange bikini:

Woman poses in a bright orange bikini while standing beside a blue pool.
Emergency pool purchase swimsuit.

It’s too big in the bottom. The drawers are droopy. Any time I climb out of a pool, waterfalls pour from the sides. I look like a soggy toddler bopping around in a dragging, dirty diaper. 

But who cares. It was a sweet pick. He even snuck a size swap so that the top and bottom are two different sizes. Medium on the top, large on the bottom for my back-country backside. 

I guess that’s just what happens when we forget how to do things we used to remember. We improvise. We make do. We jump in feet first. I’m just happy to be here.

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I got a new job, so here are late highlights from my old one

Jackie Mantey

I started a new job in June as a senior content strategist and writer at a Chicago studio (also fully remote!). But between making that transition and traveling for several weeks throughout the month, I haven’t had a chance to post a proper update. Now the point feels moot, so instead I’ll share some of my final work for the college — interviews with recent alum and students. It was such a pleasure writing and editing for California College of the Arts, and I can’t wait to visit campus — and the beach — when I finally get out to the Bay later this year. 🙂

“Writers, poets, playwrights, screenwriters, filmmakers, painters, printmakers, movement practitioners. I’m here to tell you that you’re needed. I was recently having this conversation with one of my friends in the humanities and they said, ‘Well, we’re not curing cancer.’ And I thought, fuck that. I might be inspiring the person who does.“

Alum spotlight: Digital media scholar Dorothy Santos

“We have to honor that the environment already gave us those resources to produce those textiles and we need to honor those materials. They’re still useful and they’re beautiful. We just have to find innovative ways to use them. As a society, we consume so many things, all the time, that it won’t be possible to sustain. I like thinking about the hidden history of materials.“

The hidden journey of Melissa Rodriguez

“Yes, it is hard—and sometimes even terrifying—but it’s also delicious to be in charge of yourself, to not be subject to other people’s expectations of where you should go and what you should be.”

Alum spotlight: Writer Julie Lythcott-Haims

“Sometimes people get so careerist in the artistic sense; they think it is all being in the studio. But some of my best work and connections were more organic. It’s not something you can game. You have to figure out where the heat is and invest your time and energy—and make the work. So many people get caught up in what the secret is that they don’t have any work when they crack it.”

Stars aligned: Diedrick Brackens and Lauren O’Connell discuss their new exhibition

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Best of last month’s macro.baby

Jackie Mantey

My illustration a day project, dubbed macro.baby, continues. Through rain! Through shine! Through crippling sadness and/or shoddy window unit air conditioning!

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The “after times”: Turn, turn, turn

Jackie Mantey

Pandemic is over. A new season has begun. Right? It feels like it. But it also feels as if we don’t know how to come out of something as a whole. For an event that happened to all of us at the same time, it also remains a reminder of how devastatingly singular we all can be.

Maybe it’s because we’re trying to come out whole in the first place. Why do that to ourselves? The past year or so was a massive fracturing of everything we thought we knew and understood. How does one recover from something one survived? That’s a question I’ve been trying to find an answer to my whole life. 

Today I walked a mile to the dentist to get a crown put on to replace a temporary crown currently on one of my molars. Here’s a list of things I saw along the way: a man in biker shorts juggling three balls while running, a car with a giant Puerto Rican flag flying from the left passenger window and a giant Pride flag flying from the right one, and this flamingo bike:

I feel most like the man pointlessly juggling while running when what I really want to feel like is the person in the flag car. I’d settle for at least feeling like the flamingo.

By the time I arrived at the dentist, I checked my phone and saw they’d called several times. My crown hadn’t arrived yet. Someone in some factory somewhere is backed up and still making it, this fake cap for something inside me that rotted away while I sat inside and watched the news do anything but sit still.

Maybe we’ve been whole this whole time. Maybe we were rotten to begin with. 

Either way, it feels nice to hold others in my arms again. To let them see my unmasked smile. Even if part of it is fake. Or at least temporary. For now. 

I’ll walk back to the dentist next week.

~FIVE YEARS SOBER~

Jackie Mantey

Five years is 1,825 days. ⁠
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It’s 12 steps and two weekly meetups.⁠
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It’s one husband, three therapists, and a better best friend.⁠
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It’s a boost on a bad day.⁠
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It’s a confession on a good one.⁠
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It’s a letting go of all that was lost when drowned.⁠
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It’s noticing flowers bloom, leaves change, skin prickle, water bend, sirens howl, clouds melt, squirrels race, backs curl, dumplings steam, cake melt, chest tighten, pink glow, humility work, and truth help—for the first time, over and over.⁠
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It’s the distance it takes to be the same shape, stitching, color, and silhouette of spirit—turned right-side out.⁠
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It’s the whole of all that is countless.⁠

Five years no booze. 🕺✨ One year no haircut. 😷⁠ (Five year sober anniversary candle by Huff Designs, a wonderful gift from a wonderful friend.)

Photo essay: Plants of my pandemic

Jackie Mantey

I’m one shot deep into full inoculation. On my calendar, April 19, two weeks after our second shot, is circled in red, the outline of a wound, the unceremonious ending of a dread-full chugging along. I feel… complicated about it? I’ll be able to go hang out. Visit my masked neighbors. Be out again with people and friends. That makes me so happy but I am also shy about making plans, anxious about over-committing, afraid of under-committing. I feel like I have atrophied to my desk chair and the monotony of quarantine has emptied me, a hollowed tree trunk on its side. I have been growing behind a fence, having a conversation with myself in a gated space. And I feel trepidation about what to do once it is gone.

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