rumours

yeah

lots of little notes for posts jotted down, but none that i really feel the need to write right now. and i usually write when i want to.
or, more correctly, have to.
i miss that passion.
but you can't really force it, sadly.

it comes and goes in waves, as they say.

talking through cans and string

'k, i'll stop posting articles and stories from other people here soon. it's just that i've been busy with school and work and... well, that's mostly it. and while i had a growing list of things i want to write about, i like sharing the good stuff that i find, especially when i don't have time to write myself.

the great laurie jayne posted this on the facebook a few days ago and i dug it. there's a calvin and hobbes comic where calvin says to himself that he's happy. then he admits that he's happy, but not euphoric. then he gets depressed because he's not as happy as he could be.
same kind of idea.

the original article can be found here. i'm only posting it here as well because it makes it more likely to be read.

By AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS

"I just want to be happy."

I can't think of another phrase capable of causing more misery and permanent unhappiness. With the possible exception of, "Honey, I'm in love with your youngest sister."

Yet at first glance, it seems so guileless. Children just want to be happy. So do puppies. Happy seems like a healthy, normal desire. Like wanting to breathe fresh air or shop only at Whole Foods.

But "I just want to be happy" is a hole cut out of the floor and covered with a rug. Because once you say it, the implication is that you're not. The "I just want to be happy" bear trap is that until you define precisely, just exactly what "happy" is, you will never feel it. Whatever being happy means to you, it needs to be specific and also possible. When you have a blueprint for what happiness is, lay it over your life and see what you need to change so the images are more aligned.

Still, this recipe of defining happiness and fiddling with your life to get it will work for some people—but not for others. I am one of the others. I am not a happy person. There are things that do make me experience joy. But joy is a fleeting emotion, like a very long sneeze. A lot of the time what I feel is, interested. Or I feel melancholy. And I also frequently feel tenderness, annoyance, confusion, fear, hopelessness. It doesn't all add up to anything I would call happiness. But what I'm thinking is, is that so terrible?

I know a physicist who loves his work. People mistake his constant focus and thought with unhappiness. But he's not unhappy. He's busy. I bet when he dies, there will be a book on his chest. Happiness is a treadmill of a goal for people who are not happy by nature. Being an unhappy person does not mean you must be sad or dark. You can be interested, instead of happy. You can be fascinated instead of happy.

The barrier to this, of course, is that in our super-positive society, we have an unspoken zero-tolerance policy for negativity. Beneath the catchall umbrella of negativity is basically everything that isn't super-positive. Seriously, who among us is having a "Great!" day every day? Who feels "Terrific, thanks!" all the time?

Anger and negativity have their uses, too. Instead of trying to alleviate some of the uncomfortable and unpleasant emotions you feel by "trying to be positive," try being negative instead. Seriously, try it sometime. This will help you get in touch with how you actually feel: "I feel hopeless and fat and stupid. And like a failure for feeling this way. And trying to be positive and upbeat makes me feel angry and feeling angry makes me feel like I am broken."

If that's how you feel—however you feel—then you have a base line, you have established a real solid floor of reference. Sometimes just giving yourself permission to feel any emotion without judgment or censorship can lessen the intensity of those negative emotions. Almost like you're letting them out into the backyard to run around and get rid of some of that energy.

A corollary to the idea that we must all be happy and positive all the time is that we must all be "healed." When I was 32, somebody I loved died on a plastic-covered twin mattress at a Manhattan hospital. His death was not unexpected and I had prepared myself years in advance, as though studying for a degree. When he died, I was as stunned as if he had been killed by a grand piano falling from the top of a building. I was fully unprepared.

I did not know what to do with my physical self. It took me about a year to stop thinking, madly, I might somehow meet him in my sleep. Once I finally believed he was gone, I began the next stage: waiting. Waiting to heal. This lasted several years.

The truth about healing is that heal is a television word. Someone close to you dies? You will never heal. What will happen is, for the first few days, the people around you will touch your shoulder and this will startle you and remind you to breathe. You will feel as though you will soon be dead from natural causes; the weight of the grief will be physical and very nearly unbearable.

Eventually, you will shower and leave the house. Maybe in a year you will see a movie. And one day somebody will say something and it will cause you to laugh. And you will clamp your hand over your mouth because you laughed and that laugh will break your heart, it will feel like a betrayal. How can you laugh?

In time, to your friends, you will appear to have recovered from your loss. All that really happened, you'll think, is that the hole in the center of your life has narrowed just enough to be concealed by a laugh. And yet, you might feel a pressure for it to be true. You might feel that "enough" time has passed now, that the hole at the center of you should not be there at all.

But holes are interesting things. As it happens, we human beings are able to live just fine with many holes of many sizes and shapes. Pleasure, love, compassion, fulfillment; these things do not leak out of holes of any size. So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography—and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.

This is among the oldest, deepest, most primal truths: The facts of life may be, at times, unbearably painful. But the core, the bones of life are generous beyond all reason or belief. Those things which ought to kill us do not. This should be taken as encouragement to continue.

The truth about healing is that you don't need to heal to be whole. And by whole, I mean damaged, missing pieces of who you were, your heart—missing what feels like some of your most important parts. And yet, not missing any part of you at all. Being, in truth, larger than you were before.

Human experience weighs more than human tissue.

—Adapted from "This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike," by Augusten Burroughs. To be published Tuesday by St. Martin's.

small notes

I. i forgot what my first note was going to be.

II. i made it to the vizagogo showing in downtown bryan tonight. i was fun to see my work in a gallery and to stand back and watch people taking time to look at what i'd done.

III. watching the exhibition show of my and my peers' work in the theater, i decided i want to work harder.

IV. i've been in austin for two days on a commercial. being with my utah crew friends and staying in a hotel, i'd think that i was on location in some big city. then i'd think about it and remember that i was on location in austin, which is some big city. then i'd think about it some more and realize that i now live barely a two hours' drive from there. it kind of messed with my mind a bit.

V. happy euclid day!

like a rolling stone

i spent the evening in the studio at school with a canvas, my ipod, and some markers.

i've stayed focused this week and it's paid off. my roommates today noted that they haven't seen me since tuesday and i didn't come home until 6 a.m. this morning, but i finished all of my video projects and my shading assignment was selected as part of the class demo reel for next week's show. there's still more to do for the show and i'm not letting myself slow down yet. i shopped for materials before stake conference. after conference, i was in the studio.

today was one of those days where no one texted me back.
the only proof i had that i had my service was even working was a brief exchange between brandon and myself, excited about a few of our videos getting selected for the show's main exhibition.
and while it's not the end of the world by any account, it's hard not to imagine your friends checking their phones and going, "meh."

so i used that feeling of isolation to propel my work and decided that i may as well enjoy the feeling of being a lonely artist on a saturday night. and with a good playlist and a can of code red mountain dew, i did.

as i was prepping my canvas, i thought it was starting to look pretty cool and began wondering if i should make it my project as it was.

i finished it a few hours later and feared that i might have been right about that. the end result was... lackluster. a few weeks ago, to the delight of my professor, i refuted the incorrect interpretations of my "power of vulnerability" piece (which was also accepted into the show, thank you.) he and i also talked a bit about my work and where i am and he noted that my ideas are strong, but that i'm not fully committed to being an artist and that it shows in my work.

and that's a fair statement. i'm not. i'm working to be a layout artist at an animation studio, not a fine artist in a gallery. but it did raise the question of what could i accomplish if i focused more? i'm often actually rather pleased with my ideas in the conception, but i don't think i follow and develop them as extensively as they deserve.
staring at the finished product from tonight's work, i think that's probably true.

perusing facebook before writing here, i saw an essay by ben folds about advice to aspiring musicians. one of his first points felt applicable to me tonight:

Finding your Voice takes a lot of frustrating time. That's a painful period that all artists go through, sometimes more than once. I think that most artists don't want to admit that period ever existed. We all like to pretend we came out special and it all just magically happened. You will eventually find that it takes no effort to just be yourself, but the road to that place can be long and rough. The truth is that most artists would not want you to see the evolution of their Voice. It would be very embarrassing. Imitating your heroes, trying on ill advised affectations. It's all part of the trip. It's why all those Before They Were Stars footage is so cringe worthy. Nobody wants to be seen in that light and so successful musicians do the new generation a disservice by denying their shady artistic past. I for one, will do my best to cover my tracks because I don't want anyone seeing that sh*t!

a few more lines i liked:

Be schooled in form and technique as much as you can swallow and abandon it when you feel it's nearly killed you.

How many times do we say or hear "they're trying tooooo hard!" I say, try try and try again but just put the effort into the right things.


in fact, i liked the whole essay enough that i'm going to put it up as a separate post here, just so i have it.
but your obligation as a faithful sheep go to heaven reader ends now.

short oscar thoughts

why we fall in love

 

somehow, the oscars are tomorrow and i haven't had the time to finish my post on that.

but my dear little mac mini seems to have had some sort of computer stroke, in that seemingly minor issues it's having may be signs of more serious trouble. it's ability to load web pages seems to have recently eroded away. thankfully my apple care is still valid. hopefully that'll cover whatever's going on here.

so i'll finish things up briefly here while i'm in the lab, avoiding writing shaders in slim.

i'm hoping terrence mallick will win for best director tomorrow. that's a long shot and i'm really not sure what the general pulse is on that one.

and while we all know that i think the tree of life is the best movie of the year decade, we also all know that it's too esoteric to have a chance at winning. thankfully, not only is the artist an acceptable substitute, it seems to have been building up momentum throughout the awards season.

the only other contender seems to be hugo and ima be quite upset if that wins (still baffled at the amount of praise that one's garnered). but i think people like the artist because it's black and white and silent, so they can feel like they're choosing something "different" or "artistic" yet it's also delightfully accessible to a wide audience (once they give it a chance.)

my wants:
best director: mallick
best picture: the tree of life or the artist

my predictions:
best director: either michel hazanavicius (for the artist) or woody allen
best picture: the artist

red

first off, happy tabernash.

second, red.


red has been on my mind lately. not anger or rage, nor the camera nor the charity nor the kieslowski movie.


but red.


red.


it was in the book on color and film psychology that i was reading on the plane.
it's come up in conversations.
i've been thinking about it.


and i've decided i want more red in my life.

my friend the auror

i hadn't given much thought to what to be for halloween (y'know, grad school and all....) but a friend at church suggested i go as harry potter, which sounded easy enough for me.  i've already got the glasses and the scarf, although i decided i'd try to follow the look from the fourth movie, since his hair was longer then.
by the stream behind the institute building i found a branch that i fashioned into an excellent wand and, after raiding my roommate's closet for a maroon and gold tie, i was more or less set.

drawing that scar was trickier than it should have been, and when cassidy pointed out it was on the wrong side i confidently denied such while thinking in my head, "dang it, she's right...."

meanwhile, a half dozen states away, kristin was making herself into a really incredible tonks.

this just amazed me.
seriously dang awesome.
but she wanted the picture to feel a little less... "kitcheny", as she put it.  i had to agree, it had a definite muggle feel about it...
so i sent her a few suggestions on how to improve it, along with a few examples.
after some back and forth critiquing, she produced this:

yeah.  that's my friend.