You want it darker?

My art has gotten stagnant and I'm unhappy about it, so I'm doing that thing that everyone tells you to do but no self-taught artist ever wants to do and learning my fundamentals. I'm doing Drawabox. I've started it several times before, but this is the first time I've ever stuck to it. The fact that I have a desk now and didn't in the past certainly helps. I actually enjoy it. It doesn't feel like grinding. It's meditative.

I've been slamming paperback thrillers like shots this week, and it's been really good for my health to step away from the philosophy.

I have been terrible about art the past few months. Between moving and having to send my computer in for repeated repairs, I didn't even bother re-installing my tablet driver and drawing programs until yesterday. Outside of occasionally doodling and some practice exercises, I haven't done any art at all since November. Yesterday, I finally re-installed all my programs and started painting one of my Karen Russell illustrations. It's just the base colors so far, but I'm looking forward to detailing it. It's going to be an interesting lighting challenge to do a dark, moonlit scene, so I will need to do some research and step up my coloring game.

My brain has been completely exhausted lately, so despite the long reading list I've set out for myself, it's not really coming along, I've hit pause for now on my attempted cover-to-cover read of Being and Nothingness at page 100 (out of 800) and am instead reading Caitlin Doughty's latest book Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, in which she answers children's questions about rotting corpses. For whatever reason, reading about death and decay always puts a girl's mind at ease.



According to my app, I've done about 3 hours of cumulative plank in the past year, and I'm working on getting my daily plank up to 2 minutes (currently averaging 1 minute and 30 seconds). I went for a hike the other day, which felt really nice for my muscles. I'm upset about how online I have become in the past few years due to COVID and the effects it is having on my mental and physical health. I miss being able to go to my martial arts classes and roller derby and have a job that had a strong physical component. I know I can make my own exercise routine, but I haven't been very good at coming up with one that I can stick to other than doing my daily plank exercise. Otherwise, I am quite sedentary and, given that I have poor eating habits and am staring down 30, I don't like it.

I need to find a new therapist because of the move, and I am going to start working on restricting my internet time. It's hard when all of my work is being done online, but there is also plenty of time I spend online when I'm not working, and I want to work toward reclaiming that time for myself. There are many wonderful things about being online - meeting new people, being exposed to new ideas, especially in a time when I've restricted my in-person interactions so much - but I'd be dishonest with myself if I didn't acknowledge that I use it primarily a source of instant gratification and dopamine hits. I genuinely worry about the effect spending so much time online is having on my brain. I so rarely am truly alone anymore, and I need to get back to being able to just be with myself. I need to renew my focusing on meditating (something I am admittedly shit at with my ADHD but that is still good for me), private journaling, and doing my art without something constantly going on in the background. My self-discipline is truly terrible when it comes to things like that, so I'm going to need to put my foot down with myself and develop a system.

Now that I've settled in after the move, I am going to start seriously considering looking at going back to school (again), although I really don't know 100% what I want to do. I have been considering MFA programs in creative writing, but I don't know if they are worth the time or money. I continue to be interested in law school, particularly going into labor law. Human rights law of some kind as been something I've imagined going into since high school, but the truth is that I don't know if I have the emotional wherewithal for it, which is what has kept me from pursuing it so far. I do believe I have the mind for it, but I struggle with bureaucracy and burnout. I have always suffered from being more thinker than doer. It's still up in the air with COVID because I do not want to be in a classroom environment when things are still as they are, but I also don't want to get ripped off for inferior online classes. I want to go to the best school I can get into and get the best experience I can out of it. But maybe that just another excuse for me not to shit or get off the pot and avoid taking the next step in life. I'm going to be getting in touch with the career office at my alma mater, since their services are available to all alumni, and hopefully talk to somebody who can help me pick a path and start working on it. The fact that I don't want to attend school now doesn't need to stop me from applying. I can always defer an acceptance.

I reached out to a playwright friend of mine recently - an old friend of my mother's who I got close with after I did graphic design for several of her shows back when I was in high school - and asked her if she would be interested in mentoring me. She said that she would love to, so now she is going to guide me through the process of writing my first play. I need to come up with a few pitches before our first meeting next week, so that is what I will be spending this weekend on. I am trying to decide if I should try adapting one of my existing stories or write something completely new. I will probably write up pitches for both and then talk them through with her and see what she thinks. I'm not worrying about the possibility of getting something produced because that would be premature when I haven't written anything yet, but I will admit I have daydreams about it.

My damn laptop is going in for repairs again. Fortunately, I dug up my old HP Stream, and it seems to still work well enough for me to do basic things. But this puts a wrench in my art because the Stream doesn't have enough memory to set up my tablet and usual art programs on. So I will probably have to wait until my main laptop comes back to be able to do much digitally. That's okay though because I haven't worked on my traditional art much recently, and it wouldn't kill me to do some practice there, even if it means I won't be producing anything polished or portfolio-worthy.


I also need to get my ass in gear about submitting poetry to journals. I said I would do 100 submissions this year, but so far I've only done four. I have no excuse but my sheer laziness for that one.