korafox

I Ate'nt Dead?  I have been lurking a lot and using my longhand journal instead of posting here.  It is hard to accumulate the needed emotional activation energy to get over "but I have nothing interesting to say" and "half the time I stick my foot in my mouth anyways". 

But I want to stop sitting in the corner by myself, too.  So I will try to post a bit more and hopefully more about things I am actually Doing.  So here are a few things I have been doing lately.

• Finished a painting yesterday, probably I have a half-dozen or so that I have completed during the pandemic.
• Continuing noodling around with a stained-glass-inspired crochet design.  It is not there yet but I keep finding additional techniques that might work for it.
• After about four attempts across my lifetime, I think I am finally going to get through the entire brick of Les Misérables.  I am about 300 pages from the end, certainly farther than any previous attempt.  I think now that I am 33 I may be finally old enough for this book.  : / 
• I am making bread right now!  I did not jump on the bread-making bandwagon earlier in the pandemic but I...need to use up this yeast.  It says best by July 2020 and the end result already looks a bit dubious.

Oh and in September I got hired for a new position at my place of work that is a lot less front-desk-customer-service and a lot more fiddling with data and making sure All The Things Are In Order.  I am still not at the top of the learning curve and it is an entirely new position in the organization, too, so there is a lot to figure out still.  But at the end of the work day I feel like I have a lot more spoons left, so I am glad to have made the jump even with all the challenges. 

Today started out fairly productive and now I'm lulling, so here is a post so I can hopefully refocus and get something done with my evening.

I am nearly done with a watercolor, just a few tweaks to adjust value left.  But now I need to find a mat/frame for it, and like a total genius I decided to make it a round composition.  The internet has yet to show me any options for round frames that are not 1) really cheap crap or 2) really damned expensive, so I may end up compromising and getting a round mat that goes in a square frame instead. 

I've chosen Judgment as the next Noema card to work on, and I have a thumbnail design that is a decent starting point.  I'm stalling on that because I ought to take a WIP snapshot of it and post this stage of the design with commentary, but my brain is having executive function difficulties with that whole process.  *sigh* 

A thing I am excited for next week is that I am going to a concert of the St. Olaf Choir!  I expect the music will be amazing and it will be great to hear what a real choir can sound like, ha.  They are doing a piece by Rosephanye Powell which is not the one we did in the fall, but I am looking forward to hearing more of her music and done justice. 

The Battle is the Ikon of direct conflict; its obstacles are not events, but people opposed in such a way that compromise is not immediately possible. Logically the Battle is often associated with wars and physical violence, but any situation where two or more people are working actively against each other can be represented. The Ikon always represents division, separating the combatants on different sides of an issue that must be fought for.
( Image beneath the cut )19/27! 

Sometime last year I decided to do this one because it was cathartic for my feelings about politics.  I don't think it's gotten any less relevant unfortunately.

I need to do something that has more organic elements next.  This one was all grim and needed very precise anatomy that I am still not sure about the results.  The problem is I left off all the Conjunctions for last and those have to have at least two people.  Which means more extra-fiddly composition. 

The Fountain represents our ability to overcome adversity and start anew, either through determination and inspiration or through the simple passage of time. This Ikon washes the past away, allowing us to move on however much our lives and selves may have changed.

This is the seventeenth card of twenty-seven. It is very strange to think that there are only ten left (not counting Virtues, of which I think I will do twelve total if I have the energy).

I should do a Conjunction next, preferably something that does not require extensive amounts of foliage.

The Visionary is the part of us that creates grand designs and tries to execute them-- that wants to change the world and believes that it can be done. Unlike the Stargazer, the Visionary's plans come from within; but both frequently result in lifelong quests and obsessions. Out of all the aspects, the Visionary is the most likely to create something which will stand the test of time; but in exchange it is also an engine of perpetual dissatisfaction with the way things are.

This is number 16 of 27! Progress is being made! I was hoping to have more done by halfway through frickin' April, but this card was understandably complicated. There was a lot of figuring geometric things out as I went along, and there were most definitely things that did not make the final cut.

I think I will leave the next card up to the random number generator. I've had some ideas for the Courtier, but it needs more time to percolate.

I got an email today that said our college library is putting together a display of "transformed" books for National Library Week--books that have been altered by being drawn on, had things pasted on, had the pages cut up to make 3-D effects, etc.  They are asking for loans of any such books people might have.

I just...do not know how to feel about this.  Well, I know how I feel.  It causes an immediate and visceral negative reaction in me.  I cannot imagine taking a knife to a book, even to create art out of it.  I've never been able to even highlight or underline in textbooks, let alone dog ear pages.  I just don't know whether this is a mala prohibita thing that is just my own bibliophilic moralizing, or if it's actually a mala in se offense that goes against the Good and Just order of the universe.

It's not like I have delicate sensibilities when it comes to art.  "Piss Christ" didn't faze me, and I can just shrug at Christo's "let's cover a bridge with tarps" installations (I do worry about the environmental impact, though I think he makes efforts to minimize it).  But I wouldn't break into someone's house to steal their paints, and I wouldn't go into a museum and scribble on paintings someone has already made.  That's what cutting on books feels like to me--these are already works of art, complete, and they belong to everyone in the sense that they are physical records of the human body of knowledge. 

I just think about what would happen if we have a nuclear apocalypse, and how precious that knowledge would be.  Can you imagine being one of the monks from Canticle for Leibowitz, and you come across this treasure trove of "transformed" books?  How devastating it would be to find these texts, chopped to bits and missing half or more of their information. 

So, yes.  I will never be able to bring myself to make art out of books in any way that damages them.  Alas, it is the way of things that there is not a damned thing I can do to keep others from doing so.

...coffee, tea, or chai?

While the answer I would like to give is "Yes, please," ultimately that would not be in any way healthy for me.  So today I think the answer is coffee. 

I'm quite worn out mentally after what is my longest day at work, but at least there was plenty going on to keep my brain alert.  Now the trick is to still have something left in the tank for getting things done tonight.  I would really like to get my scanner software loaded onto this laptop so I can just plug in and quickly scan things, but uugh drivers etc. and what if it doesn't work because my scanner is old.  Like, almost old enough to drive a car old.  My kingdom for a wireless scanner.  : (

But I really should get the scanner up and running tonight, because I feel bad that I have made some progress on arts and just haven't turned them electronic to share.  My executive function, this is one of its weak spots.  This is another reason why I really want a wireless scanner, because every little bit of obstacle I can remove is that much less activation energy it takes to actually get fricking work done.  It is actually not good for me to have all of my art things neatly tidied away, because if it's out of arms' reach that is just another thing I have to overcome to get started.

Brains, can I trade mine in for a better model?

I got a little more done today despite having to stay almost two hours longer at work than I was originally scheduled.  After I came home, I had a quick lunch, a cup of chai, a lying-down-quietly for a few minutes, and then I got my butt up and did some painting. 

It went well, I think, but when Husband got home and I wrapped things up so I could make dinner, I was feeling unreasonably down instead of accomplished.  It's not fair; I just pulled myself up out of a funk by tooth and nail and I do not want to go back into one again.  I am going to hope that this is just exhaustion talking; I have definitely been having extraordinarily bad brain blips today.

Case in point: after Husband got home, he calls out to me from the bedroom asking if there should be a magazine in the clothes hamper.  I had meant to recycle it. *facepalm*

Also I went looking for a tupperware in the hall pantry (there are absolutely no tupperwares there), and tried to put the tupperware of leftover bell peppers in a cabinet instead of the fridge.  Oy. 

Left to do tonight:  I owe an email and should start working on Access chapter two.  In about twenty minutes I'm also going to get a call for Senator Warren's tele-conference which will hopefully be interesting (and better than the say-nothing blah one our local House rep gave last week).  Here's the link if anyone is interested; they will also send you a recording of it in a day or two if you can't join in tonight.

I'm trying a new thing where I keep my netbook in my studio as much as I can.  It's a good incentive to 1) spend more time in here, and 2) not putz around on the internet all night while flopped on the couch.  It's yet to be determined whether this is successful or not, although I did manage to spend almost three hours arting yesterday.

The problem is that I've definitely reached the point where I am just slogging forward with the Visionary without feeling like it's coming together, and I'm afraid I'm going to get ten more hours into it and it's going to become painfully clear that I've screwed it up beyond fixing.  It requires a measure of trust, and trust in myself, and I absolutely do not have that right now. 

...okay, so I've unplugged the netbook and am camping on the couch right now, but it's for a good cause.  I'm being a good citizen and watching the mayoral primary debate for our city.  The good news is that two of the three candidates seem to be highly qualified and it's going to be difficult to choose between them.  I like having good choices.

I do not know why I am so tired today, after sleeping so long last night and the night before.  I suppose it was not really the most restful sleep if you go by the kind of dreams I had--lots of running away, and that weird thing where you actually feel pain in the dream.

Even so, I have been unconscionably lazy and unproductive today.  The Packers game was on, of course, and thank you kayote  and spouse for the jigsaw puzzle--it was quite fun and took the edge off the nail-biter of a game nicely.

I really need to actually spend some time tomorrow working on creative stuff, and not waste all three of my long weekend days.  It has been very difficult to work past the funk I've been in the past couple days, though.  And by "been very difficult" I mean "I haven't managed it yet".  Too many things that can all demand my attention, and too much wibbly wobbly feelings.

*le sigh*  Tomorrow is another day.