Baby Steps

Got home from work yesterday and holed myself up in my bedroom because I had a ninja headache.  You know.  The kind where you’re fine one moment and then the next WOW! you kind of wish somebody would shoot you just to end the pain.  So.  After a night of acquainting myself very intimately with the white porcelain bowl in my bathroom, it’s finally starting to fade away.  Still a little nagging in my neck and around my jaw, but I’m no longer tempted to take a jackhammer to my brain.  Bryan was wicked sweet, though.  Came and stayed with me for a couple hours.  Wish I could say the same of the rest of my family, who were blasting the television, playing music, and practicing the ukelele.

Okay, the ukelele wasn’t that bad.  It was just the third factor of a noisy triumvirate.  Gah.  Pain.  For no reason, you know?  I’m not on my period, and I wasn’t straining my eyes, I’m not particularly stressed.  It was like the Pain Gods looked at me and said, “By George, dear fellow, this lass is due for a spot of misery.  Shall we indulge?” “Oh yes, dear fellow, quite so, quite so.”

All physical discomfort aside, I have other things to write about!  Ahem.

Oh goose, I feel like Umbridge.  Remind me never to say “ahem” again.

Okay.  So.  My landlord put out a new hummingbird feeder and every time I go to the window, there is a hummingbird.  Only I haven’t managed to snap a photo yet.  Yay hummingbirds!

At work yesterday there was a little  blonde girl who was incredibly upset about something and her mother was ignoring her.  After a while her older brother went up to her and started saying something, and pretty soon, she was laughing.  This is relevant, because it reminded me like Lucy and Timothy Brown in ‘Tweens.  Like… really reminded me of them.  The boy looked like Timmy.  It was uncanny.  And awesome.  This was before my headache, for those of you keeping a timeline.

I just logged into my email and one of the headlines on Yahoo was “Great Atlantic Garbage Heap”.  … I clicked on it thinking What is this madness about Atlantis?!?! and it was just about plastic in the Atlantic Ocean.  I guess that’s a big deal too, n’all… but it’s not Atlantis.  … I’mageek.

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I’m not really sure what the title of this blog entry has to do with the content.  Or the image, actually.  But hey!  It’s penguins!  And I painted that.  All by myself.  And gave it to Bryan’s sister for her birthday a couple years ago.

Thank You (Now Get Out) – 8/17/10

Now, keep in mind, last week, I promised comics, and not art.  Therefore, without any further ado… comics about people… good and bad (mostly good).  Now I know on a couple of these unless you have OMG-I-am-so-jealous-of-your vision, then you won’t be able to read the text.  Y’all know you can click on the pictures, if you’re so inclined, to get the big thing, right?

So.  This one is Strawberry Sorbet in to save the day.  I walked in Saturday morning with a stomach ache, four hours of sleep, in a bad mood because of a fight with my parents over my broken bed, dejected because Bryan and I had a fail!date the day before… and loads of work, including a redo-job that would occupy exactly five and a half hours of my day.  No exaggeration.  We timed it.  So, anyways, my manager took the liberty of calling Strawberry Sorbet to see if she would come in early.  Bless her.

Rawr.  This guy made me wicked mad.  The Blueprint Arch-Nemesis came in twice before the scene above.  He wanted to copy at least 100 blueprints while he waited.  ‘Scuse me.  Shrink and copy.  I told him no the first time.  Kate told him no the second time.  The third time, Kate was on her way out and he said he only needed a couple done.  She said yes and left it for me.  Wanna know how many a couple is?  45.  It took over an hour.  And he was unhappy about it when it was done, because it was less quality than he expected.  Dah’ling.  You either get speed or quality, but you can’t have both.

This one, clearly, was drawn at a different time in a different colour.  I was having an awful day and Happy PC brought me an oreo milkshake thing from Wendy’s.  He didn’t make and pomp and circumstance about it, he just left it on my desk and I noticed it at least twenty minutes later.  And even though it was a little melty, it still tasted good.  And it was the highlight of my day.  I’m telling you, guys.  Random acts of kindness, no matter how small, really do make a difference.

Those are the ones for this week, ladies and gents.  Apologies for the mediocre drawings… they really only took a couple of minutes each to draw, and I’m no cartoonist.  Most the people lately have been in the run-around back-to-school groove and therefore all rude, but only moderately so.  I think August makes people irritable.  It’s like March.  We’re done with this season, NEXT!  What do y’all think?

Admiring Fledglings

I got to do my favourite thing at work tonight, and nothing and nobody could stop me.

Once a year, we get these books to photocopy from a local elementary school.  It’s part of a program called WII (and I don’t remember what it stands for, only that it has nothing to do with wars or video games).  Through this, fifth graders write and illustrate (through paper-making, and cut & paste) their own books.  I was in Advanced English in fifth grade, and I remember doing the project.  I don’t for the life of me know where the book went (I suspect my mother is hiding it) but it was called “Jonathan and the Magical Easter Eggs”.  … Yes.  I’ve always been a sucker for the unreal.

I love photocopying this job, because it’s a slow process, and it gives me time to read the books and admire the illustrations.  Some of the kids touch me – there was one dedication that read “I dedicate this to my Oma, who has been battling cancer for two years”.  So sad, and sweet.  And sad.  And some of the kids make me giggle.  One boy wrote a story about being able to make his parents disappear… and of all the things in the world he could do, he went to the beach.  Oh, and no worries, he was lonely at the end, so he made his parents come back.

Aside from simply being adorable, these books give me hope.  Why?  Because out of every batch of twenty, there will be one child that decides to write another story.  And another.  And another.  And a new generation of writers will be born.

Progress and Projects

Today has been a wonderfully productive day for me!  I am a person of many projects.  I get excited about one thing, and go into it with all my heart… until I discover something that excites me more, and then I go into that full-fledged, and so on and so forth.  The result of this is that I end up with half-finished projects everywhere.  Half-finished stories, drawings, maps, I even have a half-finished cookbook (a compilation- not my own).  Today I woke up, looked around my room, decided that this would not do, and decided to get to it and start finishing things.

So.  What did I finish today?  Well, nothing, of course.  But I made progress, and that is important to me.  My bed-coverings have been washed, I exercised for 45-minutes (still not a bunch, but more than I was doing before), I wrote a piece of flash fiction (click here to read it!), I uploaded eight-days worth of Photo-of-the-Day (I am taking pictures every day, even if I don’t post them) and I nearly finished my In-And-Out-Of-Reality colored pencil drawing… the only thing left to do is Bullseye (yes, the horse, like from Toy Story) which I was going to do, but my mum needed the table for dinner.  I will probably color him tomorrow.  I also cleaned out my mp3 player and am presently reloading songs on to it.  All in all, I got quite a bit accomplished today (for me) and I feel great!  Usually when I push myself to do things, it feels like work, but not today.  And that’s totally awesome.

Tomorrow promises a picnic with Bryan (weather permitting) so this break from work is proving to be a nice respite thusfar.  I’m even excited to exercise more tomorrow!  If I get the opportunity, I may even jump on WiiFit again tonight (if I can get the tele).  I feel great, and it’s totally awesome.

Keep Moving Forward

“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long.  We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things… curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” ~ Walt Disney.

Many of my friends are juniors and seniors in college.  Those who aren’t in college are juniors and seniors in high school.  There are some others who are already out of college and I am finding that we’re all at a loss right now.  Some of us have loose assurances:   I have a job, I’m going to college, I’m getting married.  We lean on the cornerstones in our life and depend on them to hold us through all the rest.  But we don’t have a lot going for us, my generation.  Those cornerstones aren’t going to last forever.

It’s a terrible thing to do, but I purposefully keep myself ignorant of the things going on in the world; especially things going on in the United States.  Okay, I read up on the earthquake in Haiti a few months ago, and I’ve been keeping an eye on the Icelandic volcanoes, but other than that?  I rarely check the news.  I do it on purpose, because I know that the economy is faltering.  It never goes up… it drops, stabilizes a little, and then drops again.  That means I’m going to have a heck of a time making a living.  Getting married.  All of that will be nearly impossible.  If nothing else, it’s going to be really hard.

I’m not supposed to think about those things, though.  It makes me depressed, and then I talk to others about it, and it discourages them, and in the end, nobody is happy.  I’m trying to think more positively.  I keep telling myself that all those things I want?  Guess what?  Want isn’t need.  I don’t need them.  And if I don’t buy them, I will have more money for things that I do, in fact, need.  Lately, that hasn’t kept me from buying them.  I’m absolutely incorrigible like that.  But I think I can do better, and in fact, I have to.  How many pairs of pants does a person need, after all?  That sort of thing.

There really are a million ways to cut corners financially.  But I am one of the lucky ones.  You see, I actually have a job.  It’s got no promises attached, but it’s a job, and that’s more than a lot of people can say.  I have a friend who’s getting married in a year, and he doesn’t have a job.  I don’t want to tell him this, but chances are he’s not going to find one.  And if he does, it won’t be a stable job.  He’s a really nice guy, sweet, a hard-worker… but it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and the only people hiring don’t want nice.  Nice is an accessory.  They’re looking for vicious.  I’m not vicious.  I’m lucky I got a job before they started looking for that as a trait.

As a junior in college, I don’t know where I’m going next.  I’ll keep working my job, I suppose.  Start paying off my college loans (yeah, those will be fun).  Even with college loans, I’m lucky.  I don’t even begin to have loans in the quantities that some people have, so I’ll be struggling a little less.  I’ll almost definitely get a second job.  I’d love to go to grad school and get a Masters, but who could afford that?  Besides, I’m looking at Brown University.  It’s an Ivy League school- talk about expensive!  So I’ll have to deal.  Especially since what I want to get my Masters in is entertainment-related.  Uses for a Masters in Creative Arts and Writing isn’t particularly helpful, and Brown is in Rhode Island, so I’d have to live over there.

But you know what?  Despite the worries of the world, I’m going to keep moving forward.  I am an artist, and nobody can stop that.  Nobody can change that in me.  I take photographs, because I want to remember what that moment looked like, not because I’m trying to sell them.  I paint so I can see what my emotions look like on canvas.  I write because I have so many stories to tell.  I act because I know so many characters, I want to give them all justice.  I smile because I am happy, and I smile because it makes me happy.  And nobody and nothing can take that away from me.