What are we doing? Where are we going? Why are we here?

I love the concept of self improvement. I love the process of learning, acquiring new skills, and challenging myself. I love following my whims hither and yon, exploring the subjects tickling my brain today and finding unexpected connections between outwardly unconnected things.

One of the creators I follow on tiktok (Trejayne) has been talking about skill trees for a while now, and the concept of utilizing a skill tree for real life is brilliant. And to be clear - none of this is about saving money. There are projects I want to make, not because it’s cheaper to make them than to commission someone else to, but because I want to make them, and understand how they were made.

I have so many projects I’m working on, waiting to start: hacking a furby, a quilt, a temperature quilt, the dollhouse, an entry for the Federal Duck Stamp competition, and someday far in the future - a replica of the Baseball Diamond from the Great Muppet Caper - it’s well past time to drag myself out of the RimWorld hole I dug for myself and spend more time working on all of this.

And then it was December... also I got married.

It’s been over six months since I last posted anything here (so much for goals). A lot has happened, and also very little has happened - as is the way things feel sometimes.

To start, a chain of events:

• Last year I completed a Data Analytics Bootcamp hosted through KU. It was great, it was overwhelming. I learned a lot, and “graduated” with 103%, despite coming out of it without a final project I could show anyone. But it was so much in so short a time, I felt like I needed to do more to flesh out and reinforce what I learned.

• I started 100 Days of Python, while I considered what to do next. This was also great, and was reinforcing a lot of key fundamentals in my programming knowledge that had been glossed over a bit during the bootcamp.

• A quarter of the way into my pythoning, EdX - the company that runs the bootcamps - contacted me about being a TA for the program. This sounded like an excellent way to do some of that reinforcement I’d been wanting to get around to. I applied, I was hired.

• It was not the reinforcement I’d been looking for. Mostly I spent my time helping students install things on their computers.

• Talking with my partner about my experiences with the bootcamps, he brought up his own trepidation about working with anyone who’d learned in one for the same reason I hadn’t applied to any jobs yet - too much too fast with no reinforcement. I took a beat, and started looking at local college programs with Analytics degree programs. I found one at a community college that looked good, applied, registered, and I’m just completing my first semester this week.

• A month ago I finally declared my “major” - Computer Science and chasing another Data Analytics Certificate. I will quite likely not finish the former, but I really only declared a major so I could sign up for classes three days earlier than I would be able to do otherwise.

• Also I got married two weeks ago. 

TLDR: Did school. Did more school. Did more more school. Got married. 

School has got me to finally update this site though, as it’s a requirement of the Data Analytics program to have an online portfolio (how convenient for me that one already existed). I still need to finish my Bigfoot project, which might get a complete overhaul for very important reasons. I also find myself wanting to do an exploration of Kansas City crime over the last 10 years because True Crime, and also convincing my mom that Seattle would actually be a safe place to live.

Art has been more of a private affair. AI and advancements and AI internet drama is provoking thoughts about the commodification of our attention that I can’t quite put into words yet. The next (insert number here) months/years are going to be interesting to say the least. I have mostly been working on my dollhouse, learning basic electrical to light it up, and lots of faux-everything techniques. Wanting to share it, that will probably be here in this blog. It doesn’t fit in with anything else and it’s not something I want to market, just share. Though truthfully I’m feeling very over marketing myself. I don’t want to be a commodity, and to keep people’s attention everything about you has to be a commodity.

I much prefer the quiet.

June June June

Tomorrow is June. In two weeks the class I’m TAing for will have concluded. I’ve turned down the next cohort - I thought I’d be busy with work (and I will be), but now I’ll also be busy with school. In two weeks is my birthday, when I reach the ripen’d age of 42. Two weeks after that is July, and the year is half over.

Time flies when you’re too busy to do anything else.

I have consistently finished 3-4 books every month, in addition to the several I’ve started and not yet completed. I think I’ve read more books this year than I have in the last several years combined. I have gone to the gym more, though not as often as I intend to - but more than I had and more is better than not at all. I’m drawing more consistently. I’m working on two separate book projects, along with every other arts and craft project that pops into my brain. This weekend I’ll be stripping broken glass from a dollhouse wall.

I feel better this year than I have in ages. Possibly lifetimes. 

That’s kind of it. That’s the post. Nothing profound. Nothing deep.

I’m alive, and I’m happy.

head in the sand

It’s May, and with May and spring and new growth and bright leaves and flowering trees comes allergies. What is my favorite season with the best skies (when the grey of an oncoming storm is lit from behind you, and the rolling clouds you see are the backdrop of the most beautiful yellow green of new leaves) is a nightmare of medications and hiding indoors depending on the daily pollen count. This year seems especially bad, though it’s the first year I’ve bothered checking the numbers so I can’t really say for sure. 

I’ve been reading a lot, and doing very little else. Which is not to say I’ve been doing a lot - just more reading than other activities. Time at a premium makes me overly ambitious; but the reality of what can be accomplished also puts me in a dissociative state. Also I’m just mentally/emotionally exhausted from two jobs. 

I’ve been listening to a lot of music from the late 80’s and early 90’s - music of my youth that’s not classified as “Classic Rock” - leaving me feeling a little old and a little sad, not that I have any grey hairs to show for it. I would love some grey hairs. Aside from the spare white eyebrow hair that pops out of nowhere when I’m especially stressed out, I have nothing.

Despite all of that, My book project is underway! I have preliminary specs in for a price estimate, and 17 percent of the pages finished. It won’t be completed for at least a year - perhaps longer. I am hoping once my class is over I can buckle down and paint a large quantity of pages before work picks up in late summer. Even after the pages are finished there will be process to set up - gold ink and spot UV and other surprises. Something beautiful and chaotic and lovely, because I can’t focus on one thing for long enough to create something that makes sense - so the only thing left to do is lean into what i can do - things that don’t have to make sense. Assuming it doesn’t go the way of that deck of cards I illustrated - complete and unprinted.

from scratch

How are my 2023 Goals?

I took a weeklong break from daily drawing for my mental health and so that I could work on some passion projects - i.e. putting together a costume for Comicon. On the drawing front - apparently drawing portraits inspires people to request portraits, and I’ve been art catfished enough that I don’t have the energy to respond at the moment. Also a few of the requests were…questionable. Now that I have a week to wait for custom fabric to arrive, I’ll be back to drawing - this month is all hands and feet which will probably also result in questionable art requests.

On the cosplay front - I never thought about making a purse by hand before, but here we are, and I’ve made a purse, which is just a black velvet cube, from scratch.

Gym going is going better than not going, but still working towards goals - but time. As far as daily coding practice, also time constraints, but TA-ing for the class is at least providing consistent exposure. As with all things in life, I’d have so much more time if I was unemployed.

What I’m Reading and What I’ve Read : 

I am waist deep in two different books and I’ve already started a third. 

Kant: A Very Short Introduction - this is good and deep and over my head. Andrew said to me once that Kant was not the place to start in philosophy, that apparently also applies to the abbreviated version. My entire reason for attempting to read Kant was a snippet of his philosophy of aesthetics I read in another book that I found interesting, and most of what I’ve gleaned, painful, from this short volume is that Kant didn’t even consider aesthetics to be important - and it’s quite likely I’m misinterpreting that as well.

How High We Go In The Dark - This may be the best book I read all year. I’m reading it in a very paced out sections, which works because each chapter is more or less a complete story, but all stories take place in the same world centered on the same sequence of events, with eventual cross pollination of characters and character families in a beautiful tapestry that starts out dark and gets less dark the further on you get.

A Forest of Kings - I picked this up following a visit to the Maya exhibit on Union Station - which was great, but really just gave enough information that I wanted to learn more, and also kind of upset that PreColumbian history wasn’t covered more in my public school education. Was the history of Europe really that necessary? Not that it was unnecessary, but it’s an ocean away, and I know so little comparatively about the history of my own continent, and my neighboring continent, because some yahoo decided European history (aka white history) was more important despite the fact that we (Americans) had a whole war to liberate ourselves from British colonial control. 

I’ve also mainlined Pandora, and Son of a Trickster. That last I’m really looking forward to finishing the series of.

What I’m Listening To:

I’m just finishing the third book in Adrien Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series. I’ve seen a lot of mediocre feedback on this third novel - Children of Memory - but I love it. Additionally I’m falling back into podcasts, Buried Bones, Trust Me, and the MLK Tapes.

What I’m Watching: 

Like everyone else in the world, I’m watching The Last of Us.

Something That Made Me Laugh:

The last month I’ve been a little stressed out and mentally crunchy. Laughter has been at a minimum. It’s something I need to keep better track up for my mental health.