Estrella Circus Girl

This time in papercraft, from the New Zealand Book Council.

Best for last:



Found on Drawn.ca and BoingBoing.

 Some new comics up on Flickr.   ( Lady Longboarder )

I've been thinking about my mental health history lately.  I made a comic about it, like I do about most things I think about.  I really like how it turned out.  Tell me what you think.  ( OCD )

Ta for now.

<3,
ejl

Dear Friends,

I have a quandary.

Life is fabulously good.  This is true.  I work part-time teaching young children circus arts and helping them gain coordination and confidence in their bodies and abilities.  It is a great job.  I make things (new comics are up at my Flickr site, come and see!) almost every day, or anyway I try to.  But I need something more to do with my time.  The circus gig is extremely part-time, and there are just too many hours in the day for me to stay sane.  

Options I have considered and/or pursued:
- getting a second job (also for income reasons)
- starting a shop on Etsy (selling handmade journals and original art, possibly also comics)
- illustration and graphic design work (I am doing this on the side, but the work is far from regular)

Things I want to do, but don't really know how to go about it:
- be an artist

I'm not kidding on this one.  Making stuff isn't enough.  I want to sell it, or show it to someone, or I don't know, advertise my existence as a person who makes things.  I want to meet people, particularly other artists.  I'm thinking of turning this journal and my Flickr site into a more professional artist's blog and collection of my work (respectively).  I made a blog, but it seems silly to switch to a different journal-like site when I already have this one, and when I know people on this one.  When I finish Olo, which I swear on a stack of bibles I will do, I want to know how to get it published. 

So, friends, what shall I do?  Those of you who make things, and the lucky few of you who make things for a living--how do you pull it off?  More importantly, what did you do before you were able to do it?  

 Super late, but here are (some of) my feelings on Seattle's Seafair and the Blue Angels, who shook our building to its roots for two weeks when they were practicing: 

 

I don't know if I agree 100%, but the sentiment resonates with me.  

I ran across this quote on my way through New Mexico and Arizona.  I meant to post it then; here it is now.  

"Well - I made you take the time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.

Then when I paint a red hill, because a red hill has no particular association for you like the flower has, you say it is too bad that I don't always paint flowers. A flower touches almost everyone's heart. A red hill doesn't touch everyone's heart as it touches mine and I supposed there is no reason why it should. The red hill is a piece of the badlands where even the grass is gone. Badlands roll away outside my door - hill after hill - red hills of apparently the same sort of earth that you mix with oil to make paint. All the earth colors of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands. The light Naples yellow through the ochres - orange and red and purple earth - even the soft earth greens.

You have no associations with those hills - our waste land - I think our most beautiful country. You must not have seen it, so you want me to always to paint flowers...."

-- Georgia O'Keeffe in Exhibition Catalogue, An American Place, 1939


Seattle is very beautiful.  There are fruit trees on every block, and rosemary grows like a tree rather than a bush.  I clipped some new growth from the plant at Erica's house and put it in water--four days later it is already sending out little white fingers into the water.  When it gets bigger we'll be able to plant it in a pot.  I miss the red dirt, though.  I'll go back someday.  

Life is pretty okay.  The apartment is really great, more than big enough for the two of us.  We cook and bake and read.  Money is very, very tight and I am looking for a second job (or third, if you count extremely sporadic graphic design 'gigs').  

That's all for now, I guess.  

Wednesday was the hottest in Seattle's recorded history!  Therefore:



We (Erica, Alex, Carey, Ben, Nick and I) went swimming in Lake Washington.  It was incredibly satisfying and exactly what everyone needed, even though we were sweaty again ten minutes later.  

Apartment?

Apartment!  (I will act more responsible than this when I sign the lease tomorrow.)  

What's better than a four-dollar bottle of fermented tea?

I'll tell you what's better: making your own mint limeade sweetened with honey and having people you don't know adore it to bits.  Then, the next morning, taking the last drop of homegrown kombucha (I don't rightly know whether kombucha is grown or brewed, or cultured) and combining it with limeade.  The result was singularly delicious, and according to Alex, tastes exactly like what you can buy in a fancy grocery store for four bucks.  

I also made quinoa salad with yellow and green peppers, cucumber, toasted almonds, olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  I have never made anything with quinoa and it was the perfect, cold complement to Marta's broccoli and cheese quiche.  

(I am alive and life is good.)

So now that I've been here way long enough to merit an update, I'm updating to say I'm leaving again.  Only briefly--I'm taking the train down to Portland to visit Ben and Amanda (!!!!!)

What you need to know: I drove across the country, it was more beautiful and mindblowing than I have words for.  Go look at the pictures, they're all on Facebook.  My job is awesome, exhausting, and ridiculously demanding, and my coworkers are superheros.  I spend every single day on my feet all the time.  I am living in Erica R.'s group house, cooking and eating a lot of vegan food.  My room-until-mid-August is tiny but cozy and adorable, and my stuff fits in it (everything but the books, but that's only because I have no shelves).  I'm so tired from work that I usually don't do much when I get home, but I'd like to start my comics up again.  

Life is good.  

 Holy shit I want these.  Sometimes it's nice for there to be things you want but you know you will never be able to justify buying.

Real update coming soon! (to a computer screen near you)

Charles Bukowski wrote this poem for my grandmother.

FrancEyE was by no means a perfect person - wife, mother, grandmother - and my thoughts on her passing are many and varied.  But she was blood of my blood, and I will miss her.  


One for Old Snaggle-Tooth

I know a woman
who keeps buying puzzles
chinese
puzzles
blocks
wires
pieces that finally fit
into some order.
she works it out
mathematically
she solves all her
puzzles
lives down by the sea
puts sugar out for the ants
and believes
ultimately
in a better world.
her hair is white
she seldom combs it
her teeth are snaggled
and she wears loose shapeless
coveralls over a body most
women would wish they had.
for many years she irritated me
with what I considered her
eccentricities -
like soaking eggshells in water
(to feed the plants so that
they'd get calcium).
but finally when I think of her
life
and compare it to other lives
more dazzling, original
and beautiful
I realize that she has hurt fewer
people than anybody I know
(and by hurt I simply mean hurt).
she has had some terrible times,
times when maybe I should have
helped her more
for she is the mother of my only
child
and we were once great lovers,
but she has come through
like I said
she has hurt fewer people than
anybody I know,
and if you look at it like that,
well,
she has created a better world.
she has won.

Frances, this poem is for
you.

Today I found (and spent the last three hours on) a fantastic blog I have never heard of before, called Sociological Images.  It seems to be an offshoot of Contexts, a publication by the American Sociological Association.  I don't really know how to categorize its subject matter.  It is mostly about the media, and it covers a lot of ground.  One of the most eye-opening articles I found was about the many-faced Unilever, which owns both (pseudofeminist) Dove, (misogynistic) Axe and (racist) Fair and Lovely--and, now, Ben & Jerry's.  (here - and more stuff about it here and here)

Other riveting topics include: 
- Ejaculation imagery in ads
- How labels lie to us
- Rape myth in advertising 
-( women in marketing )
 
Words I have learned:

Astroturf -- "refers to fake grassroots movements that companies invent to try to make their advertising appear like populism."  A great example is Reynolds aluminum foil, which recently re-designed their packaging to be mostly green with a little tree growing on the front, advertising the fact that their foil is made from recylcled aluminum... just like it has been since the seventies.  

polysemy (nsfw but oh so beautiful) - refers to the way one image can be read very differently by different people.  The link leads to an interesting ad series that you may read very differently than the marketers intended you to.  

Also, Sarah Haskins has stolen my heart.

First off, a recipe for ( green soup. )While reading back through this journal, I discovered an interesting effect. I slowly lose my ability to relate to my past self, until around fall semester 2007 I realize that I don't recognize my own voice anymore. So much has happened, I barely know how to write about it. Part of the reason I do so little updating these days is that I'm journaling things for real, in an actual book, and it's ridiculously boring and deeply personal by turns. Doesn't make for good blogging.

The paradox of livejournal is that at the times in my life when the most exciting stuff is happening, I am so busy I rarely have it together enough to report any of it.

Since my last post (not in terms of chronological order of events, but in terms of things that are happening/imminent that I haven't really talked about):

- OCircus! put on yet another fantastic show--the theme was getting a job in a city, and I was cast as the Trickster
- I turned twenty-two and had the sweetest three-part birthday yet (umbrarumcantus  and I are the bread slices of an emo_munchkin sandwich), with more cupcakes courtesy of buglebot and late-night revelries with friends and sweethearts
- I got a job! I'll be working as an instructor at SANCA this summer and beyond.

I am moving to Seattle in exactly one week.  Or more accurately I am leaving for Seattle in a week.  Since the drive will take two weeks I won't really be moving there until the end of it.  Or I suppose I'll be moving for two weeks.  

I panic periodically.  There's an effect called something like approach avoidance; it means that when an even is far away you only focus on the positive aspects of it, then as it approaches you start to focus only on the negative aspects.  When I look at craigslist or wikipedia, in my head all I'm really reading is how Seattle averages fifty-eight clear days a year, or what I'll be earning and what I can or can't afford to spend on rent.  That doesn't even really describe it, this terrible feeling that everything is going to be horrible the way it used to be, in a way I learned to live with, and I never want to again.  But I don't have to!  Everything is going to be wonderful.  Or failing that, fine.  

I am grounded I am humbled I am one with everything...  

Today is a good day apparently for being sick as a dog.  I have a strange feeling that the sense of helplessness I had before I started unpacking and organizing everything is what caused this to happen.  I felt scared and small and I didn't want to do anything, so my body made it so I actually couldn't.  I was going to go see my brother play at a folk festival in Glen Echo today.  I should call him.  

Today is also a good day for unpacking and organizing everything I own, making granola*, catching up on Battlestar, finishing Abhorsen and missing my friends.  

Maybe I'll write more when I feel less like shit.  

*Oats, walnuts, almonds, pumpkin, sunflower and flax seeds, currants, coconut, date molasses, salt, mmmm.  

Being home makes me stay up way too late on the internet.

Tomorrow:
- unpack, organize (continued)
- bike ride
- deep breath

 I did it!  The first chapter of Olo is done and colored and finished!  Meaning I am done with college forever.  

Read Olo on Flickr.  Pay attention to the numbers; they got loaded completely out of order.  

 PS: For anyone keeping track, the next couple pages of Olo are drafted and up on Flickr.  

I think you guys know I would not under normal circumstances burden you with art films, but I found this thing via Boing Boing and it is really beautiful.  It's made from satellite videos of solar wind and coronal mass ejections.  


Black Rain from Semiconductor on Vimeo.