doodles – MEGHAN FERRIN

When you block print on old cookbook pages and then make crossout poetry from the remaining words, it gets a bit… steamy.

It’s been a long while since I worked in a restaurant — I did for awhile when I was starting my freelance business, but quit in 2010 to go full time — but some of the stereotypes are true. There was quite a bit of intrigue and lack of inhibition that comes from long, fast-paced nights, in and out of a hot kitchen. Especially when the owner is a bit liberal with the Italian wine.

Perhaps some of it is how visceral the process of making food is, so visceral that we’ve taken food words and sexualized them. Steamy. Simmer.

And in English we also use food words as terms of endearment — sugar, pumpkin, cookie, sweetie pie.

Food and Sex and Science

The pleasure from eating and the pleasure from sex are also very intertwined in the brain. They both light up our pleasure centers, engage all of our senses and cause an avalanche of hormonal and chemical responses in our bodies.

I’m sure there’s some scientific research to back up what I’m saying here, but googling it is giving me a bunch of listicles on what to eat for better sex and I’m getting a little depressed.

Last night I posted this to Instagram because I’m making some changes in my format there.

It explains some of my thought process right now, though, so it seems like a good idea to share it here as well.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve doodled several variations of this index card — my little monster robot that reads INDECISION, KILLER OF WORLDS — trying to decide what to do with my Instagram.

Well, my Instagram and several other areas of my life, particularly professionally.

I’m the kind of woman who tends throw herself head first into a creative project, then eventually I move on to focus on something else for awhile.

I never abandon anything completely… I tend to cycle from one creative project to the next and back again, often by season. But I lose interest in doing a lot of one thing for awhile and move on until I get excited about it again.

Something interesting has happened since I switched my Instagram “brand” to be entirely linocut, though…

I’ve stopped doing anything else.

And because it feels like too much of a departure, when I’m not really feeling the block printing process — and it is a process, a messy one! — I end up not doing ANYTHING because I start feeling bad about not doing the thing I’m “supposed” to be doing.

Oh, did I mention I’m a marketing consultant and I help businesses brand themselves and build sales funnels for a living?

So even though I spend my days building authentic brands for my clients, I find myself NOT being authentic here because I’m never quite sure what to do with this account… an account that started entirely personal and has now become a sea of block printed baby clothes.

So here we are.

I made a decision last week that I am going to start showing my work — both creatively and professionally — as a way to build a more conscious, flexible, authentic online presence.

That means some changes are going to be happening on my grid. I’m going to allow myself to post things that aren’t linocut… though I promise, this isn’t the end of the adorable baby clothes.

But I’m going to try to share more organically about my creative process, my work, what I’m reading, listening to and doing on this feed.

It’s cool if you aren’t here for this… feel free to unfollow my lame, oversharing butt. But I look forward to connecting with all of you in a new, awesome way. ?