Achievement Unlocked: It's a Cuthroat World

Most of the decisions I make are designed to make me feel like I'm in an interesting person. That I, were I acquaintances with myself, would want to know me better. It's the secret to my self-confidence: "Hell yeah, I'd want to know me." Why do I ride a motorcycle? Because I feel like a badass on one. Why do I do stage combat, mud shows, pirate festivals, etc? Because it's a lot more interesting to me than getting 100% completion on a video game.

The other driving force in my life is my "I could do that / I could do that better" bad habit, but that's neither here nor there.

So when I read my friends' blog and saw the article they wrote about learning how, as women, to shave with a straight razor, I was intrigued. Shave with a straight razor? That symbol of manliness from the days of yore? Goodness yes. There's little to me that screams "I am a hell of a woman" more than hijacking men's tools and symbols. Apropos of this, I look GREAT in a three piece suit. In addition to all that, I've always been searching for something better than safety razors. I'm cheap only in the "repetitive expense" way. I don't mind investing a hundred dollars or more in the accoutrements for straight razor shaving, but I balk at throwing away a safety razor before I've worn it down to the nub.

Last night, I ran a lovely hot bath, soaked for a bit while sharpening my blade on the whetstone (lovely *shhing* sound), then sat on the edge and commenced. I shaved my legs, arms, and armpits. My knees are VERY patchy, I'm sure, and my armpits were terrifying. Especially on the right side. I'm not ambidextrous. I could get the arms well enough, but it will take a lot more practice to feel confident on the pits. Those, I may have to occasionally bic again to tide me over.

In all, the experience was exactly what I desired. A+, would commit again.

Drawing, Self-Esteem, and Toracon

I've bitched about my atrophied art skills for years, now. I've attempted numerous plans and schedules for rebuilding my lost habits and talents. I've never really done anything about it. Yesterday was Toracon, this little middle school anime convention a friend and her students put on. I always try to have an Artist's Alley table there, to help support them. I don't exactly make my money back, but it's worth it anyway. I'll make a couple of bucks through prints or little sketch commissions, but mostly I'm just there, talking and hanging out for around six hours. 

Yesterday, more than any previous con, I spent the day drawing and talking about drawing. I made over half a dozen little sketches (commissioned and otherwise) of various geek characters in the bubble people style. I spent way too much time on each of them 'cause I was having fun with colored pencils. I looked through a kid's sketchbook and remembered the days when I used to actually fill those books. I had two or three kids come by, take one look at my stuff, and tell me how gorgeous my art was. I had one kid come by and say he wanted to learn how to be good like me. I said to one kid, once, that my neighbor's art was way better than mine, and that neighbor told me flat to stop it. I recognized, throughout the day, how frequently I was talking about the skill I USED to have and how disparaging I was about the bubble people I do now. 

I'm good at these little guys. Paul got me started on them in college, and I do them all the time, now. They're an incredibly fun, subtly versatile style of drawing. I went to my friend's house, last evening, and as soon as I sat down, my first impulse was to start drawing again. I think this is a sign, yes? Stop talking about it and just start bringing my sketchbook places again. 

Rule of Five

My willpower, my self-discipline, my ability to self-start on accomplishment has waxed and waned over the years. I remember poorly-handled attempts at managing my own academics, at various points in my homeschooling career. I remember taking two years for the ninth grade because I simply hadn't gotten much done. My procrastination bloomed during college, and touches on far more than simply studying or doing paperwork chores. Everything from snooze buttons to eating to exercise have been problematic at times. I know I've been good at this, though, because I remember being almost entirely in charge of my academics during my senior year of high school, and I got everything done. I was in the best shape of my life because I was willingly going to Capoeira some seven, eight times a week. In the last half-year, I've been developing strategies to accomplish what I've gotten out of the habit of. Some work, some haven't. I'll better cover lists, food, and my commandments in other posts, but today is for the Rule of Five.

My Rule of Five is that I don't have to do everything at once, but if I start on something, I need to do five bits of it. I put away my bed in the morning (air mattress, so I fold all the blankets and stack them and the mattress against the wall)? I count each blanket as I fold and stack it, count the pillow as I put it away, count the mattress as I lean it against the wall. There are eight things in total, so if I do them all at once, I need to put away two other items in my room to finish out my count. It works during the day, too, because I'll put away the shoes I left on the floor, then do a quick sweep around the room to get four more things. I might keep going after that, or I might be done with it until later. Rule of Five means that I stop being so intimidated by the big tasks I have to accomplish and instead focus on getting them at least a little bit done.

It applies to more than picking up, too. My bookmarks, for example, have been horribly jumbled for... years. I obviously saved these things for a reason, but as they are, I ain't never lookin' at them again. So, today, I took care of ten of them. Some are sorted into new folders, some are deleted outright, and some are saved onto Pinterest instead of my bookmarks folder. It's a start. Music? Oh, God, my music collection is a Stygian horror of corrupted files, duplicates and triplicates, former half-complete organization attempts, and the inclusion of music of Jeremy's that I no longer want. Not to mention that I, morally, don't want to have music that I didn't get legitimately, anymore. I had my downloading phase, made easier by college ethernet, but no more. As I organize my music, I'm making a list of the songs and albums I want to buy. If I'm not willing to spend money on it, I'm deleting it outright.

Five songs at a time.

To Done: January 23rd, 2015

-Got up without hitting snooze (rescheduled my alarm, but did not hit snooze)
-Had first breakfast (oatnut toast topped with egg salad)
-Put away bed
-Dyed old, stained pair of jeans black (TOOK me long enough)
-Had second breakfast (potatoes with onions and peppers, scrambled eggs with cottage cheese)
-Cleaned litter box
-Swept living room and kitchen
-Cleaned some dishes and counters
-Looked up strawberry-orange muffin recipe
-Watched Baccano! and chronicled favorite parts for Alicat  in a non-spolerific way (I hope)
-Rediscovered Pandora
-Ate the last of Anabear's and my dip from last night (rice-with-stuff-in, black beans, cheese, salsa, sour cream, guacamole, and lettuce)
-Cleaned the microwave a little (after exploding some beans in it)
-Read up on Queen Elizabeth II's record of terrorizing foreign heads of state with her army driving skills and her remarkable unflappability
-Checked Facebook too many times
-Closed the laptop, reopened it, and got on Pinterest
-Agreed to start watching Agent Carter
-Closed the laptop again
-Put on shoes
-Left the house
-Went to Big Blue House
-Did chapter 5 of Wheelock's, the workbook, and Groton&May
-Went to Dark Side and bought Fables 20
-Gave a buck to one panhandler and a bottle of water to another
-Went to Goodwill and got a lady's suit
-Tried on a pair of amazingly ridiculous shoes
-Used a coupon to get a decent, super-cheap haircut
-Got a coupon from that to get super-cheat frozen yogurt next door
-Started to suspect that I may already own Fables 20
-Swung by Big Blue House again to say hi, smell their new leather, and get tomatoes
-Came home
-Made pasta
-Watched an Archer episode with J. and Alicat
-Finished dishes and counters
-Determined that I hadn't previously bought Fables 20
-Set up the bed
-Played solitaire on my phone

The First Panel

Those who know me know that I very rarely give a whit about brand names. There are a few that inspire thoughts of quality and/or nostalgia, such as Sons of Sandlar, Sharpie, and Coleman, but they are few and far between. The least explicable? Moleskin. With roughly the same ease that I could staple some scrap paper together, I could spend an average of $16 for a stamped-leather case and an expanding inner pocket that has the history of the brand inevitably inside. There's so little POINT, against what I could do for cheaper, yet I love the damn things. Consistently. I can sidestep the issue by simply not running into them too often; I don't actually go into bookstores that often since Borders closed, and I've never typed "Moleskin" into Amazon. Sidestepping helps. I've gone years without buying one, in fact: a set of three small grid-paper notebooks which I use for finances. Then I went to the new mall. The new fancy-pants mall with a Tesla store and a masculine boutique devoted to quality shaving products. How could I resist? I wandered. I browsed. I ignored the clothing stores, the furniture stores, the jewelry kiosks. I was poor, I was untempted, I was safe. Safe, indeed, until I rounded the corner and saw an entire store devoted to Moleskin products. 

Those devious bastards. 

I have, I'll finally admit, that kind of personality that looks at file folders and weekly planners and thinks "if I get this, I can organize everything and be on top of things! Look how useful this would be! It will ABSOLUTELY work, this time." After years of practice (and wasted weekly planners rendered useless by the passage of time), I can finally recognize that no, I probably WON'T use it. I can make do with what I have. Yes, EVEN if the item in the store has lots of pockets. I finally can resist those temptations that I've weathered so many times. 

The danger lies, instead, on the ingenuity of new products that I hadn't even thought of before. 

Specifically, here, I found one final copy of a new-to-me product. It was the size of a large index card, akin to their average pocket notebook. Black leather bound, with the familiar black elastic band to hold it closed. Inside, two to a page, are simple blank boxes for use as storyboards. Oooooooohh. This was one of those times when I've walked away from an impulse buy but I've come back an hour later to complete the bargain. Two reasons: I'm writing a novel, God help me, and I've long wanted to get back into drawing. I used to draw all the damn time, when I was a kid, but now I spend those creative hours click-surfing youtube and scrolling endlessly on pinterest. Go me. This book provides a little of that structure I always crave, though, because I can use the panels to draw out miniatures of the scenes I write. It helps me visualize my story and it gives me a drawing format to follow. Done deal. 

It's only sat on my shelf for three days, which is a really good turnaround against my artistic track record. Today, after a high-internet-low-accomplishment start to the day, I set out to do that first panel. Most of my book is from Terf's point of view, but the beginning of each chapter comes to us from Love's side of it. I think I'll pull the second panel from Love's opening as well, but here's the first part that I used as my muse:

Love walked the streets in fall. Spring was the season of infatuation, Summer the season of lust. Winter was the time of affection, of family, but Fall was when love settled in. ... Couples walked by Love, their laughter growing and fading as they moved. Love watched lovers tuck hands through arms, lean cheeks against shoulders, flash their teeth in brilliant smiles as they animatedly shared their thoughts, their lives, their joy.

(Picture to be added once I scan it)

New Leaves

When you're trying to restructure your everything, you have to start thinking hard about why your habits were what they were. I recently read an article, from Cracked.com of all places, and it inspired me to turn over a new leaf. Funnily enough, the leaf remains the same leaf it was before, a fact that seems so straightforward that I wonder if the original phrase is conjuring the wrong image in my head.

Regardless.

I wrote down the five things that I want to be my priorities. I listed learning, creativity, purpose, youth, and friends/family. When I say "youth", by the by, I'm not talking about maintaining my own, but influencing kids. Finding programs to be a part of. Hell, STARTING some if I don't find any to my liking. "Purpose" is a kind of short-hand for me; I want my actions, preferably all of them, to be done with meaning and intent behind them. Granted that we all choose all of our actions, but it's so easy to do things by HABIT rather than with intent. Eating well, good hygiene, a clean house: these are all part of what I mean by "purpose".

So, I wrote those down, and the point behind doing so is to structure my days accordingly. Currently, by the pattern of my recent days, my priorities have been YouTube, Facebook, reading, eating, and video games. While getting some other things done, those have been the focus of my time. So, time and past to make my days reflect my priorities.

Easier said than done.

I don't intend to simply say things like "no more Youtube!" because frankly, I do have fun with it. Not when I surf from link to link and spend hours clicking "just one more video," but I do often enjoy what I watch. So this afternoon, I went online while I ate a belated lunch. This led to, at one point, a great deal of time spent on the archives of a favorite webcomic. I looked up, realized it was after four, and realized I wasn't sure when I'd last moved. Time to stop reading. I got up and did other things, but it's still easy to drift into something else. And then into something else. The article I read talked about how no improvements will be made, we will DO NOTHING unless we have motivation. A proverbial gun to our heads. That gun is self-provided, though. It's not immediately there in my forefront brain. I have to train it to be, I guess.

Tell you what I did do, though: I went up to my alma mater and wandered around for a few hours, helping the freshmen move in. I walked, I talked, I advised, I answered questions, I shlepped a great deal of luggage, and I made a few new connections. If I can be, at any point in their time here, a boon, then that is something I will happily be. It's a priority of mine.

Libere: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Chapter 1

Per one of my last conversations with friend TNT, I'm embarking on my first reading of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. I've seen my husband star in Venice Theater's recent performance of it; I've watched the Boris Karloff movie from the 30's, the Kenneth Branagh movie from the 90's, Young Frankenstein, and even the puerilely oriented Monster Squad. I'd bypassed entirely, however, the experience of READING the dang thing.

A fact of which I'm weirdly glad: I think I would've been discouraged by the density of the language, when I was younger. Now, I just have to focus a little to keep my brain from checking out and skimming unseeing over the words. The phrasing is beautiful, actually. It has the same poetry you often get from literature of that time --thankfully, it's reminding me more the writing of Jane Eyre (my favorite book) than of Tale of Two Cities (of which I've read a page and a half).

For the book itself, I've read Walters's opening letter to his sister. Of this, I'm not sure I have much to say. I was caught by the quote: "...nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose --a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye," which I think I want to print and laminate for my classroom wall. Also, I was struck by the expositional quality of the thing. This is a man's letter to his sister, who one would assume knows the man's history of obsession, poetry attempts, and failure. Is it only for my relative inexperience with old writing that makes this remarkable? In modern storytelling, we would rag on the author for stiltedly feeding us this background via an unrealistic situation: the man's sister knows him, so he wouldn't be repeating his story to this extent. We'd call it weak writing. Yet when I think on what Shakespeare plays I know, the dialog is similarly stuffed with backstory. So perhaps it's a modern snobbery of ours to require subtler exposition.

Alright. Those are my initial thoughts on the initial chapter. Looking forward to more.

Only in Dreams

Dream-me is far more Disney than I am, I feel.

A coworker in my hall, A., tracked me down this morning to say that I had featured in her dream, last night. She'd been teaching, everything was going fine, but she had a bird in her hair. "I need to get this bird out of my hair," she mused. "Who in our hall would know what to do? I know!" and fetched me to help. I, all calm and cool, extract the bird easily from her hair. I then proceed to gently scold the bird, saying, "Now, you know you're not supposed to nest in people's hair. It's not nice," and so on.

Let it be known, one and all: I am to be relied upon in a pinch.

Ubuntu Don't Need no Boundaries

Jeremy and I are having small adventures in building our new computer. First, we planned to replace all the guts, but keep the case. After some tomfoolery with getting the motherboard, Big Ben and I put together the computer on Sunday. Mostly. It would have helped if I'd remembered that I kept getting mildly zapped by this case when I'd reach behind it to mess with the back. Some kind of grounding problem. Wouldn't turn on with the new parts.

On Ben's advice, I put the whole thing together SANS case on Monday, to make sure that at least the parts themselves work. The power supply doesn't, but our old one will hold us over until we can get that sorted.

The case should come in today (huzzah, Amazon Prime's two-day shipping), so Jeremy and I went ahead and installed Ubuntu on our caseless, guts-spilled-across-our-breakfast-bar computer last night. Had to install from an old 10th edition CD, but we'll update it to 13.whatever once it's connected to the internet.

All our old libraries are on a borrowed, portable hard drive. We have made the pact that nothing is to be transferred back to our new computer without first evaluating it for relevancy (do we still need it, is it a duplicate file), then sorting it into its proper home. We have bad habits in our file management, but we can sort that.

So! Our computer is a computer. Soon, it will even look like one.

Crossword Puzzle Snobbery

So...

Looking up crossword puzzles for teens, I find many that are gorgeous, educational, and relevant. I see ones on statistics, WWI, mythology, geometry terms, civil rights, the works. Each one gives a brief example of the kind of clues you'll find.

Congress:
a provision not likely to pass on its own merit that is attached to an important measure certain to pass. is the House sitting not as itself but as one large committee of itself. divisions of existing committees formed to address specific issues. are little different from bills, and when passed have the force of law. a procedure to bring a bill to the floor of the legislative body when a committee has refused to report it.

Electromagnetism:
used to located objects on Earth. electromagnetic waves that you can detect with your eyes. has the highest frequency and therefore they carry the most energy. electromagnetic waves with wavelengths longer than about 0.001 . even higher frequncy than ultraviolet rays and has enough energy to go through the skin and the muscle.

And then I see ones on sports. Music.

Sports:
im good at wrestling and holding other players. im very strong . often played by kids with chalk. the ball is oblong shaped. often played by smart people.

Music:
i sing threw this. i add intense bass. i have wee bells and tap on the knee. when on stage in front of a crowd i like to. a hillbilly guitar.

Which is not to say that the subject material isn't RIFE with critical, intellectual possibilities. It's just also the material that is more likely to draw authors who haven't grasped the concept of capitalization and apostrophes.

Props to the Music guy for his use of "wee," though.