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I stopped tagging my exact materials for a while now and the engagement went up. Not a lot, but noticeable. "Paper and ink" instead of "torn pages from a 1952 Swedish grammar book, conservation-grade paste." I think the specificity was read as fussy. Which is ironic because the fuss is the whole point of what I do. But I'm also aware that I'm measuring my work by a metric I don't actually respect. So I changed the tags back and now I'm just watching it drop again. Fine. I'd rather be understood by the seven people who get it than perform for the ones scrolling past.

Last year a museum in Germany asked me to do a talk and a small intervention in their permanent collection. Three days of work plus prep. They had a budget. I told them not to worry about it. I don't even have a good reason. I respected the institution. I liked the curator. I wanted to seem generous. So I just said don't worry about it and ate the time. My son found out and gave me this look. Not angry. Just disappointed in a way that was worse. He said you always tell me to value my work and then you do this. I sat with that for a while. I'm still sitting with it. The thing is I know exactly why I did it. There's a part of me that still thinks if I'm not being paid it means I'm doing it for the right reasons. Which is a stupid romantic holdover from the 80s when nobody had any money anyway. Now I have a studio to run and materials to buy and a grown son who watches me undermine myself. I charged them eventually. Six months later. Sent an invoice with a note saying I reconsidered. They paid it without a word. But I still feel the embarrassment of that first conversation. Not the embarrassment of asking for money. The embarrassment of being too afraid to ask for it.

Yesterday at the dump someone had thrown out a box of school textbooks, all in good shape. I took a 1962 physics book for the diagrams alone. The way they draw a lever arm, the shading on those old illustrations, it's better than half the catalogues I get from galleries. Some real care went into it. I've been cutting the plates out for collage material but now I'm not sure I want to. It's like dismantling something that was built properly. Thirty years ago I'd have torn it apart without a thought. Getting soft, or getting old, hard to tell which. Anyway the book is on my worktable now and it keeps distracting me. I keep stopping to look at the page about centrifugal force. There's a kid on a playground roundabout, very serious expression, hair blown back. He's been spinning there since 1962. I think he deserves the respect.