I think I'm actually prepared for school tomorrow.

I didn't push everything off til today, so I'm not going to be up until 9 when I should be in bed for work at 3AM.  I actually DON'T know what I should be doing with myself today, so I've been doing my laundry (which was long overdue) and I cleaned my bathroom, again, long overdue.  I should really just do my homework more often!

Every time I do my laundry, before running the dryer, I count the cats in my house.  2 is the magic number.  I don't know if I'm just paranoid, or if I really think my cats are that dumb (they are), but I couldn't live with the guilt of letting one of them die like that.  I mean, I raised them since they were little gross kitten larvae.  Anyway, here's a great picture of one of them wearing a cone.

OH.  NEVERMIND.  SORRY, BLOGGER.  I GUESS MY PICTURE JUST ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH.

Screw off.

(Edit: I logged in with my gmail account to get the picture, which is not the account this blog is registered under. Apparently google wants me to have a gmail account for everything and abhors me using my school email address.)

Sick

I'm at the point of sickness where it feels like my bones are trying to jump out of my body.  Thankfully I'm done working for the week, with just one more day of class. 

Oops.  I dunno what to write here, my head hurts too much to think a lot.

Exhaustion

I've not slept before, but usually when I don't sleep I just sit on my ass and look at pictures of cats on the information super highway as it is called.  I had to work today with no sleep, which is basically going in at 3 in the morning to move boxes full of glass jars and candles to the outside of the store back and forth like a worker ant.

My boss's daughter is going totally blind.  She's been for some time now, apparently.  Her husband and she got married recently so that she could live on his Military base with him.  I sort of envy her, in a way.  She gets something that we who can see our whole lives never do.  When she can no longer see, the last image she'll have of her husband will be at this very moment they are united.  For the rest of their lives, she'll always picture him the way she did when they were married without a single other image to compare him to ten, twenty or a hundred years from now.  Foolish human vanity has little bearing on her love, and for that she may be blessed.

Perhaps an artist really doesn't need his eyes to create a great statement.  I wonder if sight is a crutch to someone who wishes to express something abstract, because we have to worry what it looks like.

Linocut

I have spent the past 4 hours cutting a block of linoleum up to print onto paper.  My hands hurt.  My knees hurt.  Everything hurts. 

This is why I haven't seen you in awhile, Blogger.  I'm not doing Livejournal behind your back.  Don't get me wrong, Wordpress wanted me to threesome with her and Livejournal, but I held firm that you're the only one for me.

This one's for you, baby.

Fantastic Idea for a Short Story.

I want to make a story that begins in California around 1985 when Back to the Future was released in theaters.  The main character, the proud owner of a Delorean, spends a great deal of his time attempting to get his license plate to read "OUTATIME."  He refuses to drive his car until he can obtain this plate on his car.  With the advent of the internet, years later, he finds that he can constantly check to see if "OUTATIME" was still being used by another car.  The story charts his steady descent into madness as his fanaticism for the great Robert Zemekis film is both his life's meaning and the only thing holding him back.

Wow I don't even know if I am joking.  I really want to write this.

Sundays still my least favorite part of the week.

Why?  Because I need to have been asleep by now to get a proper sleep.  I have work at 4am tomorrow, which is the last week it's gonna be like that.  From now on, the freight truck comes in at 3am, but it has much less stuff in it.  Is that better?  Worse?  I have no idea, but it just means Sundays might as well be "Wake up at 12 because you haven't slept all week and go to bed at 7 so you aren't completely spent tomorrow".  It's a vicious cycle, but somebody's gotta make the magic happen, right?

I like my job, though.  It beats food service, where customers constantly get in your face because you didn't do something they didn't mention.  The entitlement on these people, it's like, because we have to work for minimum wage doing something I can't even imagine liking, it makes it so we can't be given a little patience.  It's always "work faster work faster" because the customer can't wait an extra few minutes for a sandwich.  A chicken sandwich prepared and cooked in a minute is unnatural, and I don't know what reasonable human being would want to eat something like that.

Though in all realities, there are always worse jobs.  What do you think, Blogger?

Finally.

Blogger is letting me upload images today...so here goes...

I wish that 3:20 were in the PM...

 Awesome, I'm surprised that worked.  This is the first page of a 24 hour comic I had to do for another class.  I've mentioned before that I'm really into comics, and this other class has only been making it worse.  I've tried to draw comics for a really long time, but as far as supplemental literature goes, there aren't a whole lot of books on creating comics.  I don't really want to include books like "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" simply because I didn't ever want to draw comics the Marvel way (I think it's Picasso who said "Raphael already paints like Raphael, so why should I?").  Will Eisner and Scott McCloud have, as far as I know, created some of the most comprehensive works on actually understanding the idea of comics, not just creating them.

"Stray," a comic I've been working on for some time now.

In so many ways, comics are a medium based in writing.  For me it takes a lot of the tedium out of immersing myself in a story.  That isn't to say I haven't come across works of fiction that haven't done the same thing, and there are many comics I walk away from saying "who cares?"  But just like some people happen to simply enjoy novels more than poetry, I enjoy reading and writing comics much more than any other creative media.  It might be the untapped creativity that lies hidden in it, it might be when a comic stacks up in literary value to written works or masterpieces of art and design, but it might be because it's a technique a lot of people write off as less valuable than other art.  Beware, though, attributing a subjective value to any work of art based on its media is a dangerous assumption to make.

Do comics mean anything to you?  Why/why not?  I'll keep thinking about why it is I draw comics...and I'll get back to you, Blogger.

Carver.

Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" and "Beginners" are two different versions of the same story.  One gutted by his editor, Gordon Lish, and one, published years later due to his widow's insistence.  "Beginners" is the uncut version that Carver originally wrote without alteration.  When "What We Talk About" was first published, it received critical acclaim.  Of the two, I think Lish's edited version is simply a more interesting and engaging story.  Though they are based on the same work, the story is dramatically changed, as well as being much shorter.  The revelation of the different types of love is present in both stories, though explored a bit deeper in "Beginners."  Though Mel is not portrayed as understanding the form of absolute love illustrated by the old couple, I don't think it matters that he doesn't.  Based on his clearly abusive personality in both versions, I don't see why he would understand how that old man could be so broken up just because he couldn't see his wife.  A lot of Herb's dialogue in "Beginners" starts to sound repetitive only a few pages into the story; it feels almost unnecessary. 

The ending of both stories reveals that when "We" talk about love, we don't really come across a concrete answer.  Pinning and defining what love is as difficult as explaining what an abstract concept should be, and both versions of the story do that message justice.  Whereas "Beginners" feels disjointed at times (I may need another read through to really connect it, but the first couple of times felt really inaccessible), "What We Talk About" does well to contain the overarching theme of Carver's original version, even if Lish's treatment of the story seems excessive and harsh. 

No Facade Today...

So I originally started this blog with the intent to write it as someone else to help me internally develop a character.  It's fun to write as someone else, but at the same time it hasn't been helping me with other ideas.

Truth is: I have to keep 3 journals for my various classes.  I was initially afraid that the overlap would make writing a monotonous process, so I took on this one not as myself (though it was hard to not share certain feelings with her, an unfortunate fallacy.)  As the semester has so far continued, I have been keeping each journal separate according to their subject.  Printmaking information stayed in printmaking, and graphic novel work stayed in the Graphic Novel course.  I started to want to write a few of my own personal thoughts without the veiling I had created on blogger, but I found it difficult to do so without compromising the original intent of the blog.

Then I just decided "Whatever!  Why am I putting so much stock in what--to me-- is basically journaling?"  I want to write more about what really interests me as a writer and as a student.  If I can figure out how, I also would like to put up some of my comic art.  As an avid reader/hopeful writer of comics, I find the medium to be a powerful and not yet fully explored medium.  In writing, adjectives, nouns and verbs are used to set your piece and develop your characters, but in comics, your descriptions and character development come very much from the method you use to craft your piece while choosing appropriate text and subtle choices in voice and dialogue to walk hand in hand with the artwork.

(Blogger is currently not letting me post pictures, for whatever reason.)

I wouldn't say I've even scratched the surface of what a great comic/graphic novel can be, but it's really the only creative outlet I've found where every work for me is invigorating and enjoyable.  Nothing feels forced or unnatural, even when it doesn't work out how I'd want it to.

So, I'll give this a try for a little while.  We'll all see how it goes, right?

Gone for a weekend...

I went home for the weekend, so I didn't really touch my laptop.  I had a relaxing time back home.  Mom always seems to miss me when I return.  Business seems slow for her; I guess no one is buying houses these days.  It's also nice to see my friends from high school who stayed around town. I can't help but feel so weird when I come back and see a new building, or a closed store.  I expected things to stay frozen in time as I remembered it the first time I left for this school.  It still jars me every time I hear the new thing my friends are interested in.  I'm worried that some day, we'll have lived so much of our lives without each other that our lives won't so much as involve one another.  "This is growing up."  That's what I am always told.

-Kat

Ugh.

Why can't I write anything right now.  Why can't I just snap my fingers and know what I want to put on this screen?  I mean I'm getting some black on white here, but it's only because I'm complaining about not being able to write anything!  This Blog is, like, psychologically damaging.  It puts up a big public mirror for me to look at and see just how much I bitch about every little thing.

Honestly!  I can't write about anything but what peeves me.  This is a depressing read!  Maybe it's just bad because I can read it in my own "a little too high" voice.  UGH THIS MAKES ME WANT TO STRANGLE MYSELF.

No- I'm not picking my brain,  I'm not going to do this to myself tonight.  I'm not even signing this.

Role Models

There are a rare few people that I can say I really looked up to as a child.  Besides my mother, I can hardly think of one.  Even treading through a public school in a sleepy suburb, only one person has ever stood out to me as someone I could say I wanted to grow up to be like.  She didn't teach any grade in particular at the time; instead she worked with the kids in an accelerated learning program.  I wasn't one of these gifted children (though I was tested for the program.  I didn't even know anyone ever got rejected for it), but I did see her now and again.  When I was in elementary school, I saw the school counselor a few times.  They seemed to think I harbored some kind of animosity towards my mother evidenced by an assignment where I had to draw my house and family.  Honestly, I don't remember doing anything wrong, but I guess I also don't remember how I drew the picture.

I'm getting off-track.  Dr. May occasionally appeared in the office while I waited to be counseled.  I didn't like the therapy.  I remember the man who would talk to me was very off-putting.  It might have been the way he never smiled.  Every time I looked at him, it just seemed like he was unhappy with me, so I would usually sit outside the office, swinging my legs in trepidation.  Eventually, Dr. May began to recognize me.  She asked why I was around the office so often.  She would even joke to the receptionist that I was always getting in trouble.  All I remember is that one day she just started asking me what was on my mind.  I remember it really shocking me.  I mean, for a faculty member to take an interest in me, whom she didn't teach or work with in any sort of way was jarring, in a way.  She spoke to me like I was an adult, and I liked it.

When it came time to stop seeing the therapist, I must have been around eleven years old.  By this time I didn't even go to the office to see him, I wanted to see Dr. May to tell her about my day.  Even though my issues were "resolved," I would go straight to her room after school to help her straighten her office.  I felt comfortable around her enough to tell her all kinds of stuff about myself I'm not sure I even would mention to a friend.  She's retired now, but I still keep in contact with her, though not as much as I really  feel I should be.  I always felt so ungrateful, because of how much she really did for me.  If she hadn't been around, how much longer would I have been in therapy, or how would I have turned out?

I hope there are still people like her for kids nowadays.

-Kat