Verdi

Inspector Verdi reporting for duty

Teeny, the house calico and I were enjoying a warm, sunny October morning one day last week. Teeny watched the world go by and I was drawing. We heard a series of frantic meows. Teeny bolted for the end of the deck. I tried to get her in the house. I knew what was coming. And I knew it wasn't leaving.

I went out to retrieve my art supplies after securing Teeny in the house. And there it was. A starved kitty with every bone in it's body showing prowling around the porch. Boldly winding itself around my legs, it said hello in that way that you know the cat means business. I sat back down and that is when it decided to see what I was about. First thing it did was grab at my project for inspection.

Eyes the color of copper patina and as full of homesick longing as anything that I have ever seen in my life, it looks me in the eyes and I was a goner. A lot of cats won't hypnotize you. They are in life for their benefit and don't really care if you want them or not. Then there are these cats. The cats that adopt you. The eyes are stunning. And as I said, the color of weathered copper. So I named it Verdigris. Verdi for short.

You know once you name something that it is going to stick around. How can you NOT name a feral cat that believes it has the authority and expertise to inspect your human work? I picked it up and it immediately wanted snuggles and kisses. And then walked all over my sketch books. Knowing that without work, taking on the responsibility of another cat was the least logical thing I could do I went inside. Ignored it for about 6 hours. It just sat there mewing. And mewing.

That was 6 days ago. When it was still there at night, I fed it, got some blankets and sat with it over night. I had my comfy outdoor chair, good blanket and one of the warmest October nights that I can remember. And it slept with me all night. Comforted and relaxed I was able to inspect in the morning and determined that it was a she. So the gender neutral name was perfect. And we call her Verdi. She is the product of a tortoise shell and grey domestic union.  All grey except for a brown patch on the right side of her nose, she is the lankiest thing I have seen in a long while. All leg and tail, 8.5 inches of whip like tail. Rather than the pink paw pads most cats have, Verdi has chocolate brown feet. Skinny little face  and the posture she holds looks like every Egyptian cat art piece you've ever seen.

As Teeny is not the sharing kind, getting permission to bring Verdi in was problematic. For two days she ignored me, hissed or just looked at me like I had broken her hard little heart. I was the vile betrayer and she was the innocent princess. So Verdi and I spent several nights on the porch. Several days too, I tried to do some drawing while we were out but all I accomplished was a lot of kitty kisses. When she wasn't asleep she was eating. And she ate a lot.

Within 48 hours she no longer showed every bone. In the last couple of days the patch of missing fur above her eye has begun to grow back. And her scraped chin is healing nicely. She will have one permanent mark, a torn nictitating membrane in her left eye. She rolled around the porch with a fat little bloated belly until she found a good place to pee and got used to peeing.

getting all the snuggles, rubs and scritches

During her first days on the porch with me I learned that she is scared of Chickadees, Squirrels, Mourning Doves, leaves blowing across the deck and all of the dogs that go by except for the rotund Jack Russel Terrier. So she also has a nick name, Scareddy Verdi. She really hates the pug. It took two days to teach her "No table" so that she won't get onto food prep surfaces. Though she still had a problem with taking food out of your hands. Even with her belly further rounded from being gorged on her own delicious wet meal.

She also has learned to turn on and off my apps, sping my Tardis wallpaper faster, and can scroll my pages I am viewing. From the start she was a face grabber. When she really wants attention she takes your chin in both front paws and stares you down until you boop her. I've even had her in the car. On the coldest night this week the windchill took us down to about 43 degrees. Too cold for the porch and too cloudy to see the meteor shower, we headed to the car.

I figure that if she gets used to the car that I can take her with me on adventures like I did my Manx, Spock. She is starting life out as smart as Spock and as trusting. It took her 10 minutes to settle down and not freak out about being in the car. And it was a peaceful, overly warm night. In the morning, as she wound herself through out the tent of blankets that I had made, trying to wake me up, I discovered a mistake.

She was a he. Apparently, Verdi was so malnourished that his balls hadn't dropped until the 4th day with a steady diet of solid foods. When we got out of the car for a morning of drawing on the porch, she wanted to play and roam. She He knocked one of my books onto the deck and bolted. I found him down the hill and called him back up. He looked at me, stood and stretched, meowed and then turned away. He trotted into the deep woods in the swampy area where the cranes had been nesting. And I figured that was it for the little guy. I don't mind telling you that I was already attached and spent the afternoon fighting tears. But he is feral born and probably wanted to be feral forever. By 11 that night it was time for bed.

When I went to bed I realized that I had left my pillows out in the car. When  I went to retrieve them there he was. Sitting on the porch waiting for service. So I fed him and tried to get him to snuggle in the comfy deck chair. He would have none of it. I thought that this would be the end of Verdi because we aren't allowed indoor/outdoor cats in our park. As he prowled around the porch I noticed another cat. At first I thought that it was him. But this one was too big. Then I realized it was mamma Tortie cat. And that really was all for him. Mamma came up onto the porch looking to finish his scraps if there were any. There weren't. Verdi noticed her and didn't seen too terribly interested in hanging out. He kept bouncing around as if moving would keep him safe. Mamma went to the house door and sat for a while. I picked up Verdi and he settled down. Eventually Mamma left.

In the morning Verdi took off again. I didn't feed him. I didn't sit on the porch with him. I stayed in and did some chores. So later when he was really hungry he came looking. Yesterday when I got back from my first day of work he was on the porch. Waiting. I fed him, scooped him up when he was done and boom.... he is inside. And I think that he is okay with that. Yesterday he slept belly up and feet in the air on me while we watched movies. The TV fascinated him. He can't quite figure out where all of the people. He pestered Teeny. And Teeny seems to be relatively okay so long as he doesn't touch her and no one who smells like Verdi touches her. I managed to keep them separated after the initial dust up. He's peeing in his own litter box, slept with me until I tossed and turned too much and in general has tackled all of her toys that sit unused in the middle of the floor.

It is raining today. The first steady solid rain. And I think he is glad that he is inside. He bolted passed me and headed right for Teeny's room. He is under the bed and I can not fish him out. He will be out when he is hungry. And then it will be dark in the house and he will hang out with me.


My roommate says that I needed a cat. Something mine to take care of which was relational and nothing to do with the disappointing humans. 2016 has been rough for losing people. And the last 2 have been rough for dealing with nasty people. So I guess, even though logic says that this is a silly thing to do, I have a cat named Verdi. Which between snuggles with him and working on my book project I don't have a lot of time to think of anything else. and that has eased up on my depression issues too. 

Product Promotion & Blogging: I Want to be Jenny Lawson

I have mixed feelings about this issue.

On the one hand, everyone who writes wants to make money doing what they love to do in addition to what therapeutic value the endeavor provides. Wouldn't we all love to be Wil Wheaton or Jenny Lawson famous in the blogosphere? Sure we would. Bloggers with Anxiety & Depression issues, myself included, would love it if we could sit through our episodes of self loathing, self doubt and defeatist rumination and come out with a following and products. We have bills to pay but not necessarily the proper level of inner strength to deal with people in the flesh. So getting paid to write is a goal for most. Getting paid to stay home and do art without dealing with the general public would be awesome too.

Now the positives, anxiety relief benefits aside, of staying home and getting paid to write and make art are petty awesome. For one, you get to take your own Number One Reliever that you hand out to your friends who suffer: do something for you, something creative that makes you feel good. Even if no one buys it/likes it/understands it. Creativity built the world. If you don't dream it you can't make it. Everything starts in the mind. As we who suffer well know, for better or worse, it starts with the mind.

For two, you get to stay home and engage in a mental health practice of Avoiding Negativity, the Number Two thing we like to tell our suffering friends. Stay home or or hang out in a coffee shop. Oh hey, if you are lucky, your city has WiFi at the beach or some parks so you can be out in the sun. Unless you are a Vampire and will explode in the UV light. Regular folk who like to be outside can write in peace in their favorite park. Hey, if it isn't your favorite now, it will be when you find out you can blog from there. Writing in the comfort of your home space insulates you from the mass of negative people flinging their emotional poop like underwear at a strip club. You don't have to be the third party to a family feud of dystopian drama. There are no coworkers spewing bullshit and complaining about every little thing you and management do, justified or not. And, random triggers don't get pulled.

The third benefit of staying home and writing, besides the potential income?  It's the one we hate to recommend because it was the catch phrase and go to answer for all of our mental health issues in the 80s and 90s. Blogging is cathartic like journaling. Blogging, especially for lifestyle bloggers, is journaling. Imagine it! Getting paid to write your journal! How cool would that be?

Yes the fantasy is real.

And then reality sets in.

First your internal editor tells you that no one wants to know what you think about anything. What kind of cache do you have? You aren't Wil Wheaton with a pool of fans to draw to your blog. And you aren't Jenny Lawson with a truly unique and quirky pull... the pull of bizarre links: bad taxidermy, dressed taxidermy, Beyonce the Chicken. Once your internal editor whips out its comments that Pen is bloodier than a Viking broad ax or Roman sword. And you are done before you start.

Second, your editor has convinced you that your creative expression is worthless. So you end up not doing it.

Third, you might be able to avoid flesh and blood people by staying home. But the second you hit publish you wear a target for all the mean people hiding behind avatars and fake names who are just waiting to unleash their vitriol. You are vulnerable to attack from people you don't know; vulnerable to counterpoint opinions. Blogging looks private. And it is...

Right up until you hit publish.

Fourth, your journal is public. Your journey through the treacherous land of your own head is open to the kind of scrutiny you never dreamed possible. So while you are working out your issues, finding insight and hoping that in publishing your thoughts that someone else with a similar situation finds relief or support, there is someone out there who will take your intent and twist it. Your words and thoughts are public and subject to sharing across a range of media. It is also subject to being copied and pasted into an email and sent to people out of context of the greater body of work.

Publish or Perish! That was the motivating catchphrase for newspapers and journalists in the early history of Print. In the modern world... Publish and Perish is just as likely. The internet can be a wonderful place to meet new people, find deeper avenues of learning with all the experts at hand and grow beyond yourself. As with all things, there is a dark side to the internet. The dark side is where trolls go to stagnate their minds and exercise and build angry hearts, vitriolic voices, and arsenals of equally ignorant and irresponsible  ideologies.

In my case, all of the benefits of blogging have legitimately helped me. And I am still finding new information about the Anxiety and Depression that has plagued me for better than a decade. For those reasons I continue to blog. Even though I have found I am not immune to the dark side. But I am not Wil Wheaton and Jenny Lawson famous. I don't make money doing this as much as I would love to. And right now, that is okay. Wil still has people telling him to "Shut up Wesley" as if they can kill him with that single blow. Though, death by a thousand cuts is a real thing. So maybe that is why the trolls gang up on him. Which sucks because he has some really valuable things to say and is a constant encouragement to make things that make you happy. Jenny doesn't get trolled as much. But then her head does a really good job of that without added help. I look at those two examples and review my own personal experience with an anonymous (to the net) troll and wonder why do I do it?

Because benefits.
That shit in our heads needs to come out. And since the medical and psychiatric world doesn't know how PTSD happens and why it is so hard to cure along with the other mental issues, it is up to us. We have to find our own answers. And if we care about making the world better, we have to share what we learn with others. I didn't mention the fifth benefit of blogging. And that is finding encouragement. Your mental health professional will tell you to join a support group, go out and volunteer because helping others is the best help you can give yourself. But really... if you live in a small area surrounded by nose to the grind stone people who don't get it, how is being around them helpful? How do you go out and support others when the thought of going out is the source of your issue? So blogging, lets us find the people we need who need us. If we all share what works for us, someone who is desperate will find more options than they could have come up with on their own. That is why we are here.

That is why I am here. Fun and therapy.

I firmly believe that is why Wil and Jenny are here.

With the growing waves of hate and the boldness of internet trolls, we need to find each other and support each other. I have mixed feelings about blogging for profit. Nothing I love that turns into a job makes me happy. I think as much as I need money to survive as a single girl that I actually loathe the stuff. I am much more concerned with my spirit than my physical comfort. And I care about other people's spirit more than I care about money. So while I may never get famous or make money doing this, I have no problem supporting people who do. And I do not have a problem sharing resources. If I find a tool that I think will help, I will share it. Even if it is my own personal issues and insights, painful past experiences. Call it oversharing. But I know that support groups help. When you find the right support.

Adult coloring books are all the craze right now. And there are a lot of them. TV show themes building on the TV show themed books we had as kids, art of other cultures, famous artworks re-interpreted at your hands, obligatory cats, birds, dogs, horses, butterflies and 60s & 70s patterns abound. The 80s argyle and chunky color blocks should be showing up any month now. There are even promotional coloring books for cities, states and festival tourism. Hey where are the colorbooks representing the countries of the world? A whole book on India would take a life time to color with all the zen-tangled bedazzlement going on. But of all the books out there, I haven't seen anything that has encouragement in it beyond the benefit of mindful coloring.

Today Jenny Lawson announced her new book is available for pre-order. "You are Here" is a visual journey through a profoundly difficult period of depression and anxiety during a promotional book tour. Jenny, literally worked through her episode. With depression that deep and that strong many people collapse while they are doing what the world tells them to do. "Suck it up, Buttercup." In her own way, Jenny found a path through that dark wood. Along the way she showed the internet her doodles. Her doodles have become a book. As far as I am concerned it is a must have book.

What ever thoughts Jenny battled, the things that let her come out of each skirmish, are incorporated into the work. While you color you have a prompt for your own exploration of Things You Can't Put a Finger on  but Are There or a mantra to get through the Thing You Know is There but Don't Like to Look At. I am hoping that the leviathan grabbing the sailing ship is in the book. She shared that the day that it was done. It was a day that I was drowning in my own blood, blood spilled by my Internal Editor's sword pen. And it helped. A LOT!

I have mixed feelings about ME making money doing things that I love. Part of it is my guilt fueled anxiety. Part of it is my parochial upbringing. Part of it is my own sense of justice and social growth. I have, however, absolutely NO qualms about helping other people make money. So go order Jenny's book. Order it for you. Order it for your friends who suffer. Order it for an emergency gift for that time when you want to comfort someone and have no idea how to do it.

And when you order her book from anyone of the fine establishments she has trade agreements with, take some time to read her blog if you haven't already.

Then, follow her on twitter.

And if you are drifting, helplessly alone in your mental health issues in a sea of people who just don't get why you can't get with it, join the rest of us under the hashtag #TheBloggessTribe.

While you are at it, follow Castle's mom, Susan Sullivan for uplifting quotes, calming mantras, unsolicited advice and a dose of gentility often lacking in media that is bound to make you feel better.

Depression lies, And it never shuts up. But we can drown that little fucker. Join us.

New Features @ Picmonkey.com

One of the things that has been on my Christmas list is the ability to do real drop shadows at Picmonkey. I've been doing it the hard way by copying the text, changing color and then sending it either forward or backward and sliding it till the shadow color peeps out. Depending on the font, it doesn't always work.

With the new options for text effects, you can really do some amazing things.

With the drop shadow and the knockout options and sliders for each set near the middle of the range you can have all kinds of dramatic effects making simple tone on tone illustrations really pop. In you use the inner shadow option with shallow settings on the sliders, almost all of them were set close to zero, it looks debossed. In the above sample the text is white on a white background with the same red chosen for each line. And just look at the range!

Do this with a range of greys and you could get a really nice liquid silver or platinum look. It sure will make things easier for the food blog to add text in the densely populated parts of pictures. Before I was using labels to mask areas where text had to go to make them readable. Now, that process will be so much easier!!

So Merry Christmas to me!

Now if only we could write on text lines and bend them instead of rigid text boxes. I'd even take a text circle, for those fun little olympic moments.

Maybe next year?

#picmonkey

Encryption Arrives

Blogger, a Google product, has finally decided that it will make life more difficult for those nefarious individuals who hijack blogs to continue to do so. Don't get me wrong. I don't know how this computer majick really works, I just play with the tools that I am given.

That is a problem. Blogging, in it's Incunabula, was for those writers who were also coders. The more blogging became a thing and the more the masses wanted in on the cache of being a blogger the more user friendly the platforms had to become. Today, most of those who blog are the pick a template, drag some widgets and gadgets and start to write kinds of bloggers. Customizing anything is going to be tricky let alone figuring out if we are EU cookie warning compliant or not. So how to do we protect ourselves from sites that clone/hack/copy our own sites? That is some thing that needed to be as cut and paste simple as, well... cut and paste.

Blogger rolled out an activation to enroll a blog in a HTTPS encryption so that no one can use our sites to send false information/redirect to other nefarious blogs and otherwise misuse the trust our readers place in us. It's about time. All this Russian sites that have been doing thing for years have done enough damage. Probably more than we will ever know.

I've been asking for this to be simple enough that I can do it without accidentally setting of a barrage from the Death Star. And now we have it. Just to let you all know, both 6° and Spilt Paint are currently encrypted to prevent further malicious use of my material overseas. I hope that doesn't affect how the site runs (I've been told that it could) and I hope that I don't lose the links to Youtube videos (which it might).

Incunabula: especially in books, is the origin or birthplace of a thing. I first came across the word in typography class. The first 50 years of the printing press' use was considered the Incunabula period for book and all printed material. It is in this first 50 year period of a thing in which the errors, bugs in the process or materials are worked out and the thing becomes widely available. I very greatly doubt that blogging will have such a long period. The odds are that in 50 years blogging will look very different than it does today and probably will not even be called blogging. Some genius will probably throw back to OS Trek and we will all be logging. 

Addition to the Blog list

It's been a long time since I have added anything to the blog list. But then, it has been a long time since I have found anything so fascinating. I did not know that Simon Pegg has a blog. Nor did I know that Simon Pegg was such a fantastic thinker and writer of his thoughts. I read one article in which he had to address some trolling that happened in one of those ridiculous clickbait articles. And I was absolutely spell bound. The footnotes (yeah, there's foot notes) were as entertaining as the main article.

Visit with Peggster. He's as entertaining as Uncle Wil.

Text is Beautiful

I have always been a font junkie. Perhaps I mentioned annoying my friends by being able to call out a font used in movie credits... while they roll... in the theater and not just at home with the DVD player? No. Oh well, forget I mentioned it. Anywayyyy.... I have seen these cool looking text clouds in a bunch of places and wondered how they happen. At one point I thought that I would make one at PicMonkey but thought better of it. For now, at least. And it turned out, I didn't have to labor to do it.

Calligraphy. Typography. What ever you want to call the alphabet in its many guises, text is beautiful. And there is a website to prove it. There are a few options and it seems like you could have endless combinations. This is what the 6° blog's cloud looks like. This is what is going on in my head, a representation of the thoughts that I have shared here. This is what we have been focusing on here in Geekdom.

And  I think that I am glad that Dr. Freud isn't here for analysis. For the most part this is a pretty positive cloud, mostly silver linings. It is evident to me from the large green "loss" the large raspberry pink "depression" and medium sized "crap" & "depression" and the smaller sap green "wrong" that there are some dark things for which the larger brilliant words provide cover or succor. Most telling is that the largest word in the bright raspberry is "stories".

Every person on the planet is a living, breathing, walking, talking story. As a writer in general and specifically as a fan of novels, movies and songs, it should not surprise me that this is the word that comes through in a sampling of my blog posts. Several things surprise me about this cloud. But I think I am just going to look at it and appreciate it for what it is for a few days then analyse the hell out of myself later.

Prompts and Misunderstanding

So you all know by now that I also blog on the Wordpress platform. Part of the Wordpress experience is the education and writing support that comes with the whole "expand your horizons" philosophy. I follow the lady over at the Daily Post and was cruising through some of the ideas for some help engaging my brain this morning. I am a little distracted and thought it would help. Nothing really jumped out at me until I ran into this prompt. I don't know if it is because I am listening to Spotify and found the Police section of my Teen Beats playlist. Or because the coffee hasn't kicked in. I am also currently being distracted by my personal Dark Hunter­™ (thank you for the term, Sherilynn Kenyon)... but I digress.

When I read the prompt, my first thought was "OMG who would let blogging take over their life?" and then I read the article. Blogging complicates things when you over share or share without permission. I thought it was talking about obsessions. And maybe that is Annimotion's fault since I was listening to that song before Sting showed up in the queue. In either case, I did get to thinking about my own interpretation of the prompt. So far, running only on a couple of cylinders, here's what I came up with.

Gnothi Seuerton Is Overrated
"Know thyself", he said. Know your self and set your course, they said. Ok. So I know myself. I know what the Kersey-Briggs model (which I will love and defend forever) says about me. I know what Numerology says about me right down to why I LOVE LOVE LOVE onions and garlic. I know what Astrology says about me and why sometimes it doesn't make any sense (the 13th sign). I know how God built me. I know what all of my tics and quirks are; where they come from, how they help, how far that help goes and where that help turns into a hindrance. I know. I know. I am the most introspective person that I know.

I am an Observer and Problem solver first. I make a lot of observations. Sometimes those observations make some straight lines from Prologue to Epilogue with few points and sometimes there are a lot of points to explore. Other times those observations wend through a mountain forest full of twisting logic, murky grey truths and faint glimmers of logic with steep drop offs into an abyss of illogic before coming out into the daylight of reality and plausibility, One of the biggest problems that I have in my interpersonal relationships is that I don't always have anywhere to go with the observational processes or conclusions.

My brain learns a lot and wants to preserve it. That is part of why I am here. To learn for me and them disseminate the information. I can hold many of these thesis in my head for a short time. But if I hold it too long it turns to mush and makes my whole body sick. It has to go somewhere. And where it goes when it can not go into art is into writing. Why?

I am a Communicator second. Art was my first medium because the language is intuitive. Writing takes longer to learn. I can chose either medium to suit my situation. Pen and paper are never far from me for convenience's sake. Art supplies come out when I have time and space to work. I have to take what happens in my head and put it somewhere either in words or pictures. When I learn something, experience something that I need to remember I need to write it down. It is a method of learning something. Not just so you can regurgitate it for a test though, that isn't real learning. That is making your production quotas (shame on the American school system). Observe. Write it down. Teach it to someone else and you have ingrained your new found knowledge deeply enough to make it part of you. I have to write.

Sometimes it is silly stuff for humor. But I have to write to keep information. When I was a kid I filled notebooks with random bits, derailed trains of thought tucked into the short stories and research papers I did for school. In the Summer I went through as many single subject notebooks as I did during the school year. There is a lot to see in the world. There are a lot of emotions to process in the internal landscape. When the Trivial pursuit game exploded on the Family Fun Night scene I started to write dedicated notebooks to my own trivia questions. Some of it I still remember even though the notebooks are long gone. I don't want to lose information because it is so easily corrupted in the mind and digitally. A hard copy, properly fact checked, is the only way to truly preserve information. repetitive study keeps it accessible.

Writing puts it somewhere that I do not have to carry every minute of every day. It is preserved without being an active and open window in my Grey Matter OS. A lot of people do not understand that. I've yet to date someone who can appreciate this. Even protecting their anonymity with code names (which, given the average boy's desire to be James Bond, should be kinda flattering) riles them. When they assume a post is about them (when it isn't) there is no end to the nagging and the crying foul. When the post is about them or an experience that I would never have had without them and they are not in the pics, named only as the generic "We", they still get all weird. This foraging trip created so much havoc because I posted about it... But I had too. First to remember where this patch is. Second to remember what I should look for. And third to be able to cherish this memory with out it tacking up active brain space.

But that isn't the only reason I write. I write to be able to communicate with myself. I need some way to sort the protective me voice, the ego me voice, the victim me voice, the healer me voice and get them all wrangled onto the same platform and function properly. I can not get anything done in the external world when they are clamoring to be pacified or appeased. It takes time. But if you don't want an absolute nutter to deal with if you are dating me, working with me, living with me or at a family reunion with me, you should let me have my writing space.

Thirdly, I am a teacher. Active or passive, one of the reasons for writing is sharing what I learn or the creative expression of observing life. And when I share these things here it is so that you guys who visit can see that the random shit is normal. EVERYONE has strange and bizarre thoughts, cock-eyed internal dialogue and fantasies about being someone/thing other than themselves. It is not normal to not wrest control of your life from the internal chaos. Not a lot of people take control or responsibility for the thoughts in their head. So it seems normal to just willy-nilly live an indiscriminate life. But there are consequences for everyone when that happens. Communication brings order to chaos.

So I know myself. I know myself really well. And in knowing myself this well there is less and less room for everyone else in the inner most inner sanctum. Do you know how hard it is for people to deal with me on a deeper level? On a daily basis? I just don't have the tolerance for a shallow existence. But I also haven't the heart to keep doing this alone. So in knowing myself, I have come to a standstill in the center of a pretzel knot of choice. And I could be sitting here a long time.

The blog has complicated things in that I am sitting here at a cross roads with too many options but absolutely nothing tugging at me in one direction or another. I can not sit in the center while life and everything swirls around me. But there is no place else to be and no one who can sit here in the calm center of the maelstrom of life without giving in to the need to DO something. ANYthing.

Programmed Guilt
When you are furiously scribbling across pages and pages of notebook paper during the school year no one really bothers you. When you do it during the Summer break people start to notice. Then worry. Then they get mad because you are "wasting time". I am not sure why this is so. I know there were a lot of Summer chores that had to get done. But they got done. When it was just dad and I rushed through chores, made our process efficient so I could get the stuff in my head out. It always made my dad mad. But I wasn't going to make money doing those chores. We never had a plan for making the garden a business. I could make money as a writing and needed to keep writing to get better. It was a long shot. But the odds on writing paying off were still better than the garden.  I could make money at art but that was a long shot to my family so keeping at that was kind of insulting that I kept at the art. And it was insulting to keep at the writing. The whole family seemed to always want me to stop because it would never pay off. I needed to learn how to work hard, to appreciate sweat.

And every time I sat down to write I had to deal with the guilt of knowing I was doing something that upset people. Every word slapped someone in the face. Every page felt like a betrayal. And every writing session was a battle. One the one hand I had to be successful in school and get good grades to appease one parent. So that meant practice. And on the other hand, it is important to be able to work hard. And that had to happen to appease the other parent. The guilt came in knowing that one or both would be disappointed. I always felt guilty because I was writing while I was trying to figure out if they were in fact correct...a.  that I would never make a living doing either. And b. that improving either skill was a colossal waste of time and resource because those skills would not translate into the job market that they figured I would enter.

What usually happened while I wrote is that the subtext of this running debate would eventually bubble up to the surface and interrupt the writing process. And I would feel so horrible about the dialog that I would quit mid-project. You can not write well when there are such battles raging in your head. I never learned then how to overcome and focus. So I would quit. And each unfinished project was another bullet point in their arguments that I should quit wasting time.

How can you when it is part of you? I resisted the pen for a few weeks after every failure. But the things in my head that needed out before I burst demanded freedom. So I wrote again. I learned to be sneaky and got caught "wasting time" less often. But I never could finish my big projects because the guilt crept in and ran all their arguments as a constant soundtrack. That is how I got to be such a music junkie. I was always trying to find the right music to drown their voices so I could finish. It takes time to write. I takes away from chore lists and interpersonal time to be sure. As it should. As does your work schedule. When work takes away from family and friends there are hard feelings. Add to that your "time wasting" and the hard feelings turn into a kind of butt hurt that guilt likes to attach too. "Look what your choices are doing to someone else.", it demands. And everything in your head is paralyzed while your social responsibility button ignites the people pleaser in you and then you're off living for someone else again. Writing is just another way to complicate your life by giving guilt a foot hold.

I blog now. Blogs are cool. Blogs are also a more compact platform for self expression, story telling, sharing information. Blogging also has an ability to generate income if you invest time learning the tricks of search engine magic. So blogging looks like a way to get around the accusation of time wasting so that you can fulfill your primary social directives. Writing is a directive. It is the fulfilling outlet for the primary impetus of being a learner and communicator. Writing is what I do because it is what I was made to do in addition to making art. The blog post is a small platform, as I said, cranking out a post and discharging excessive mental energy, closing all the open tabs that slow down your processing capacity to get through the job, social interaction and demands of house hold chores should leave you time for all the other things. It shouldn't require more of your time away from others than writing a novel. Novel writing requires periods of hermit like existence.

At least that is what I thought when I started. The blogging life gets complicated when you are around people who don't understand. A blog post can be short. But I can crank out a lot of posts when I'm on fire. It can take a lot of time. And that is just the writing. Blog maintenance for the coding impaired can be a serious time drain. I find a lot of things fascinating. I crack myself up a lot. I care about and am interested in a good many things no one else in my immediate surroundings care about. So I write. And it is getting complicated again. The people who don't understand why I write don't read my writing. So it is an auto-accuse thing. I am wasting time, again. I am taking myself away from people who want my attention when they want my attention for however long they want it.

Blogging complicates social obligations because I do not have strong enough boundaries to reply with the need to have my own time to myself. To heal. To change gears. To remain the person that they want me to be. I need to have a lot of time to process because there is so much that I am processing. I have taken to writing while we are all in the living room with the TV on. Lately I've been getting "Are you blogging again?" as my keys clickety-clack through the onscreen drama or gore fest. It sounds antagonistic. It sounds like I need to beat back the voices in my head, echoes of things my parents and siblings and boyfriends have said.

Clone Blogs & Phishing

I've been cloned and I am mad.

I've slept on this issue. It did not impact the quality of my sleep and I am not over the issue. In fact, when I woke this morning I was more mad than ever. And being who I am I made a connection between my personal experience and a news article. Now I am more angry. In part because I do not know what I can do about it on my end. And in part because, as usual, a politician has inflated a petty issue while ignoring a significant issue. So here are some thoughts about Vladmir Putin's ban on memes in Russia and the scammers who make blogging less fun.

First of all, this made me a little angry when I read it. Our politicians in America seem to think that if they give you the stones to throw at them that you should have more self control than to use that ammunition in your arguments or to heal yourself when you are heartsick about the things that are making your life more difficult than it needs to be. If sticks, stones and words hurt and you do not want to be hurt by them then don't hand them out like candy at Halloween. It is that simple. If you want to be respected and revered then do the things that gain the respectful reverence of the masses. Stealing the common man's livelihood, sucking the life out of his soul and the soul from his desire to live isn't the way to do it. And neither is sucking the resources from the planet and hording it among the wealthiest of persons so that you can influence policy and criminalize the poverty that you created. If you are going to behave badly then you deserve to be called out on it. WE LEARN THIS IN KINDERGARTEN PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!

We also learn that instead of committing criminal acts that cause bodily harm we are supposed to find creative outlets for anger and frustration. Creative communications and artistic expression are those outlets which allow us to let the fear and frustration out so that they do not harm us while giving us a direction away from committing bodily harm. Satire is a statement of anger and frustration. Memes are an expression of satire. One such meme going around is a bit of advice from someecards. And I think it applies here. It is none of your business what other people think of you. Even if it posted publically?

 Yes. Oh I know, political campaigns spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to find out how they can get the most votes. Public opinion polls seem to make my statement null. However, there is not ONE SINGLE POLITICIAN who has EVER taken ANY of the REAL advice they get from their advisers. You guys spend waste more money than you deserve to earn trying to manipulate people to think that you are God's gift to all of mankind when you ALL need to worry about making yourselves better people who are WORTH respect. There is probably an "in Russia" joke in here somewhere. The point is, all we want is for you guys to tell the TRUTH, make HONEST laws that benefit EVERYONE, and NOT TURN US INTO PAUPERS so that you can feel eminently better about yourselves and the FALSE CLASS CASTES you created in the first place. We all want to feel valuable and nothing you guys do in office makes anyone feel better except YOU! We want to be safe, to work AND know that work means something. We want financial security first because the other kinds of security will come when that is taken care of. But when your polls and your PR people tell you how to get the votes you all stand behind the BULLY TACTICS straight out of the mobsters handbook. Why should anyone like any of you?

Mr. Putin, if you are going to act like a typical American Politician why should you be exempt from the typical American pundits pen? You built the climate in which being caught in a social media poop storm can happen. What good is it in "crying" about it? Make some changes. And for Gods Sake why would you want to BE LIKE an American politician? Can't you find a better role model? The Germans seem to have all of their needs met and a far better economy than anyone else at the moment. If you have to copy someone else's model I think that is the one that makes the most sense. Sure, it isn't a perfect system. But right now it seems everyone would rather live in Germany. (I want to live in Germany more than anywhere else right now so that statement may be heavily biased). Well, unless you want to create an economic oligarchy then by all means keep doing what you are doing. Just remember what happened to the oligarchs of the French Revolution.... when the revolutionists outnumber those in control lots of stuff goes wrong really quickly. You've seen it in your own country. Taking away rights isn't going to make you safer. It usually only deepens the resentment. And at some point, people do not mind getting their hands dirty and they forgo weapons.

We have a saying, You get more bees with honey than poop. (I know it isn't accurate. Name one metaphor that is). Being the Grand Orge of Eurasia isn't going to get you a grand spot in the people's hearts. And the people's hearts are when politicians need to be... NOT IN THEIR WALLETS!!!!!!! When you start poking at people's thoughts, their expressions and you force frustration to go inward be criminalizing it then you create a situation where implosion is guaranteed and the possible results can not be predicted. What is wrong with a little satire if it keeps people from doing harmful things? What is wrong with being nice and as fair as is possible in the world? Why can't you politicians just let sleeping dogs lie?

I think one of the things that makes me angry about the attempt to police creative expression is that the focus is on something silly like one figure being upset that a meme told the truth or twisted it and made him look bad. Again, if you are going right then there is nothing to worry about. If opinion of oneself dims then one must ask how one contributed instead of crying foul and prosecuting those who call you out on your crap. While this is a focus, very little is being done about the people who are using the internet to commit crimes. Are you aware that a large portion of the worlds scammers and phishing sites are in Russia?

I've run this blog for 7 years (in May). I am naturally creative. When I can not use words or images to process my thoughts and do not have an outlet for my creative energy things get very ugly in my life very quickly. Blogging keeps me occupied for a nominal cost where otherwise I would quite literally die of boredom. The brain stays sharp. The soul stays happy. I stay out of jail or the grave. I also blog to keep my skills as a writer sharp. One day I hope to be a paid writer. I write for the joy of it, but when my body breaks down and I can't work a physically demanding job any more I will need something that I can do to pay my bills. So this is the main blog where that happens. Where I try to keep things fun, fresh, and I work out thoughts that can go into "real" articles latter. Everything in here is mine. It is MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY!

And it has been stolen. Well, cloned is more accurate. If you go to sherola1701.blogspot.ru which should not exist because I did not open and account with Google Russia, you get a message stating that it is a phishing site. Some one in your country, while you are all pouting about how your public figures are being damaged by people's memes, has cloned my blog and is using it to commit a crime. And I do not know how to stop that from happening. So what will you do to curtail this kind of activity? Anything? My guess is probably nothing. Your country will do nothing.

My overwrought mind which had gorged itself on spy and crime dramas is pretty certain that what is happening is a state sponsored thing... like China and Korea spying on US companies using hackers. But this is probably a bunch of Russian wiz kids running these things in a network of cloned blogs and product websites with state sponsorship. The network is probably so vast that no one in the CIA would be able to associate it with the Kremlin. And yes.... that is what I think. I think that you all are a bunch of spoiled brats who take from everyone else and demand the kind of loyalty and worship of rock stars and movie stars for doing things far less beneficial than being entertained and far more egregious than tearing up a hotel room in a drunken haze. And by you all, I mean ALL. There are no such things as borders in this issue. It doesn't matter what country any of you are in. None of you are worth the chads in the voting booth. Not when you let this kind of thing happen.

And yes, You let it happen. Your resources tell those who would visit my blog.ru that they could be phished. Yet you do not take down my blog.ru !!! You can ban anything else in your domain. But you can not kill my cone blog??? I call Bullshit Mr. P. BULLSHIT!!!! Oh, cry about the bad opinion you get from a meme or a slightly disagreeable report in a news paper. But what about me? How many people are getting phished by that clone of my blog and think I am the one doing it? How many red flags are being sent up requiring investigating me when clearly I AM NOT THE ONE DOING IT? But what do I matter? I'm just a single white American female who is too poor to actually own the stereotypical 3.4 cats or her own place to live. Why should anyone care what this phishing clone is doing to my reputation? I am too poor to defend myself legally. And I am too poor in technical know how to fix this myself. So just cast me into the wind! Let KNOWN phishers keep gathering data illegally. Don't do anything about it.

But don't get mad at me either if I think this is state endorsed hacking. If Google Russia knows this is an issue and doesn't kill a clone blog what am I supposed to think?

Looking for Living Quarters & Getting Stuck

I love having a geeky/nerdy boyfriend that is just as weird about things as I am. Did I mention that while we were apartment hunting he came over to look at all I had and help me sort in my head what kinds of things we did and did not need? Oh... I might have mentioned it on the art blog because that is what it was mostly about.

If I did mention it, I apologize for mentioning again. Since I can not stop thinking about what a gift the whole experience was for me I am talking about it again and not bothering to look through the posts to see if I already wrote about it. It's a big deal.

He told me that I would most definitely be setting up shop in the living room. All the art out in the open. The odds of us having company are slim. And any one who would come over already knows there is a huge art factor on both sides of the relationship so it will surprise no one. So it doesn't matter if the living room is the studio/library. How many people get to be that close to sustenance? And how many artists get to come out of the cramped back room or out of the basement? Any way...

All my life I've been told to hide my stuff. Hide who I am. He'd rather look at banks of white cubes than tons of pretty tchotchkes like other "normal" people would. He said that it inspires him to be creative when he sees others being creative. And then there would not be a huge disconnect, me in one room him in another. I don't know how that is going to go for me.

On the one hand... I don't like an audience because I don't want a record of the mistakes. And I don't like to be interrupted when I am in the swing of things. But... I also don't like to feel like the art makes me a freak that has to hide in another room while the normal people are eating dinner..... its so Harry Potter under the stairs. Or Jo in the garret. Except that Jo was accepted by her family for being a crazy writer. I am looking forward to it. He took one look at the basement without a source for natural light and the unfinished ceiling and the cobwebs and exclaimed

"You can't work down here! What are you thinking?"

He was right. I tried. Beyond the smell of unclumped cat pee I couldn't be down there. It was dismal. And thanks to the kidney I didn't have the money to do what I wanted to do with it. But..... times and locations are changing so we shall see what comes of this.

I am excited at least to think about a future where I am able to paint where I live instead of making a hole somewhere to hide. It can only bring out the better parts of my artistic drive right?

The hard part is that I am so excited to start painting in earnest again that I am having a hard time being focused on packing.

Keep Your Fingers Crossed

Well, we are looking at a place that has been in the paper for so long one has to wonder what is wrong with the place. It's above an art market. So keep your fingers crossed. Both for the living arrangements and for a potential place to sell. At the very least, a contact to sell somewhere.



And today, I got to spread some free art love around my Facebook friends. This got a few likes and a request for use as Facebook cover image.


And I'm gonna have to do something special for all the seasons. Maybe offer up some free art at my own page on facebook. Maybe... I don't know. But progress doesn't start without putting yourself out there.

So I guess it is time to play some more.

Write here, Write now: in the moment writing prompt from Wordpress

Only out for an hour and a half and my toes are numb. It isn't an arctic paradise anymore and yet my toes are cold, curled up to the ball of each foot like a good snuggle will fix this. It won't. I can feel the pressure of sitting in the small of my back. The space that has felt normal now feels vacant... like a whole section isn't there. But there is a shearing, searing fire running down my left thigh to my knee as I sit here with the laptop, sinking slowly into a beige couch cushion that has always been of questionable support. I was only out for an hour.

I met my boyfriend at BAM. Being a little early I cruised through the calendars. We were to have coffee but he was hungry so we tried a new burger joint in the mall. I hurt in the car. My body needed to be upright in spite of the pain while in the bookstore. I hurt in the car again as I hurt now. I want to take my legs off the way my brother split my ballerina Barbie when we were kids. I sat through lunch just fine. And enjoyed the playful banter as the boyfriend and I joked about each others infirmities.

I want his smile. I want his voice to tease me because laughing helps make this pain go away. But nothing that I've found on the internet, including cats whose cute factor rivals those we have in the house, is helping me to find the laughter. My whole body is boiling right now except for those toes. The left foot is comfortably numb while the right is so cold one wrong move might shatter them as if dipped in liquid nitrogen.

Of course I am being a baby. As I am thinking of the doctor appointment tomorrow and trying to figure out how to enact my plans for the next couple of months I come to the same statement: I have to wait to see what he says. And then I get angry because my job has already been threatened. There is a lot to do and not a lot of time left to do it in. My toes are noticeably colder.

Intellect tells me to be wise and not incur more damage. Emotion is nagging me to do something to alleviate the mental stress I am experiencing in the moment. And the cold has spread up to my ankles. My brain wants to get off the hamster wheel that I am on. My body wants more pain meds. My eyes want sunshine. My muse is half sitting, propped on the stump of an idea in the dusty, cob webbed garage that houses my gifts and filing her nails in preparation for a paint job.... but I think she's just getting the sharp enough to leave marks when she hauls off and slaps me for being so immobile and inflexible.

Internal conflict normally warms me. Today, in this moment, as the war wages between wise respite and foolish activity, I am colder. It is an internal cold as independent of the external condition as black is from white. The bath tub calls. But the last time I got into the bath with such cold extremities I thought every one of my appendages would shatter like crystalized sugar.

Obviously I need to shift my focus. This writing exercise to describe the moment, to write in the here and now, is not helping.  The silence in the house is oppressive and I've no desire to listen to music. I spent an hour or so with my boyfriend today and that is all I want to focus on because it is the only thing that does not distress me. Though when I think boyfriend, I think food. I am thinking about a dessert to make. And I am thinking that I don't want to stand long enough to make it.

I am thinking of distractions and diversions to keep me entertained. My penpal sent me a new book on German history and some more Reim gear along with more Götter Speise... of the Waldmeister variety, specifically. Perhaps I will make a parfait. I think I have everything that I need to make the colorful layers of wiggly woggly gelatin. Oh but wait.....

I left the cans of fruit for such a delight in the car where they have sat frozen for two weeks. Frozen... just like my toes. And the distraction is over.

Oy.


http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/daily-prompt-now-2/

Slow Posts

Everyone having fun with weather this Winter?

I've been snowed in. Stuck in the middle of the road on a sheet of ice. I've dug myself out of feet of heavy snow just like everyone else this year. And I am laughing my ass off at all the 20 somethings out there that think this is the worst winter ever and whine about wet feet.

This is Michigan. This is what Winter was like when I was a kid. This is the way that we grew up. Wet feet. Cold feet. Shoveling. School closings. Bad roads. Roads to travel without benefit of four wheel drive. Oh the whining.

Of course we have been spoiled for the last 20 years. I've never forgotten the Winter of 78. But I have not known the adult issues of a Winter like that since my last year in Marquette. To the Yoopers this is nothing. A bit of a trial getting kids to school. But this is their normal. This kind of Winter is only fun for kids. And we suck it up and keep shoveling.

And keep shoveling.
And stand on ice to push cars stuck on ice.
And when that doesn't work..... we walk home to diminish the frustrations of a day that began with one fantastically annoying adventure after another. Only to be told that the shoveling will always be my job despite re-injuring the hamstring.

Is it Summer yet?

2014 The Year of Awesome Changes

2013 was a great year for writing here, and everywhere as a new blog has come out of my interests. I was fortunate enough to find some great new friends here and abroad. And now, it looks as if I am to embark on my second adolescence.

2014 is definitely bringing changes. And hopefully those changes will not hamper the writing, though I think that it may already have done so. Rest assured though that there is a lot happening to write about... not bored at all.

Something David Said

My cousin David is an artist and he has had quite an amazing amount of life happen to him over the years which could get a fella down. Yet he is always positive and quite productive. He said something on Facebook in the context of life that really made a lot of sense to me and encouraged me as well.... I need to get out of the idea that selling art is only for a select few.

The Liar Depression is always trying to hold you back. Sometimes it wins. Sometimes you win. I don't win very often. And one of the reasons that I don't is that I keep believing that I don't have the credentials to sell my work. I have the skill. But not the cred.

For some reason I think that matters. Nevermind that we have all been taught that it matters. And that an artist is not really an artist until he or she is in a gallery and has tons of sales. It's like writing. If you aren't making money at it then that is not who you are. I don't make money doing this. But I am a writer. The only qualification is to actually write. I am an artist. I make art. That should be enough.

It should. It isn't. And so.....
I've put David's words into a banner. Whatever you are doing that Depression wants you to stop doing that would be good for you can be substituted for the word art. Substitute. Tell your self the truth. It isn't enough to call Depression a liar if you are going to go back to your safety zone and hide. Call it a liar. AND kick it in the teeth.

Do what you like. Do what you are called to do.
Steal this if you have to.

And yes.... I am letting this bleed over so that if you want to lift it you can have a descent size to do so. Normally I hate having anything run off the page. But for you I make an exception.

*gASp! It DOES exist!

So back eons ago when Castle started I participated in everything that had to do with the show and have a nice little collection of the books that have come out with the series. Thankyouverymuch. So when I got into Sherlock and John was writing the blog I thought to myself: "Hmmm... I wonder if that is a thing."

Fangirls and boys, grab your deerstalkers... IT IS A THING.

http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/blog/26april

I've ben a bit swamped with ideas and small projects... a couple of big projects too. So I didn't go looking for it right away. Today, it showed up in my facebook feed. Whoo Hoo!

Happy Reading everyone.

Slow Restarts

Every time I take a break getting into a regular writing habit gets harder and harder. It isn't that blog-worthy things are not happening. It is that every time there is a break from writing all the things that have gotten put on the back burner come rushing forward to scream for attention. So there I am, trying to find more money while working only 3 days at my "primary" job, art projects want completing, baking wants to be done and the things that are not yet unpacked want to come out and see the light of day.

For example, I've been in this place for about 6 months. I just now unpacked the bedside lamps so I can read without the overhead light glare. The last few weeks have been like that. I've been digging into the things that the kidney issues wouldn't let me do. Could it be that I am actually on the mend again? My kidneys hurt... don't get me wrong. But I think that maybe I am now finally getting enough sleep all at once that the day is more about me as a person and not my kidneys as a part of me. Honestly, I'd muster enough energy to work and then come home and be a lump of too tired to sleep too much pain to sleep. There might be a technical term for that but I don't care to look it up.

And my brain doesn't feel so overwhelmed with everything right now. That is a good thing. Summer was kinda kicking my butt. And I couldn't kick back. So we shall see how long this round of achievement lasts.

For now, I have errands to run. And not much time today to run them. I've got a strudel thing to roll out and bake sitting in the fridge and people coming to play games later. Yes!!!!!!!!! How long did I say I was looking for people to do board games with?

Oh and the 50th Dr. Who party is dead in the water for me. I've been trying to figure out how I could get people together for 8pm somewhere that has snacks and internet. Now I realize that here it will be 2pm. And the places I looked at were booked. So I guess there is always next year?

Also working on fleshing out the first posts for a german blog, watched some foreign films which need to be posted and am back logged on photo edits. I don't know how THAT happened. Oh yeah... I had time away from the computer to take pictures.

Undershaw

I'm just a 40something kid from northern Michigan and very far removed from the politics of small foreign communities so there is little reason to listen to what I have to say. There is very little reason for me to believe that my voice matters at all. True, alone, it is nothing. Having made my disclaimer let me say that added to other voices I can change the world. And so, after years of wondering what I care enough about to which I could add my service & and apply my heart, I find a cause in Undershaw. But why?

Well, because I was once a 12 year old artsy kid that was too scared of the world to leave the house until I found Holmes as a protector.

When I was a 12 year old kid I found that I loved a good mystery, a puzzle of the non-jigsaw variety, and learned that observation is everything. First in art: you can not draw if you can not see. Second: introverts get run over in social situations because they do not see. True, some of us do not understand what we see when we see it. Mostly though we fail to see what is in front of our faces because we are too busy looking inward. Observation is survival. I learned all about observation through one of the purportedly greatest minds in history: Sherlock Holmes.

Of course like most American kids I got to Holmes through the torture of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, some Scooby Doo mysteries and sundry elementary adventures. It was my freshman year in High School that solidified Holmes as a literary hero. He had already been a larger than life legend for me as my mother recounted his exploits based on her memories of Basil Rathbone films. I was wonderfully surprised to find, through Mr. Trapp, that Holmes was really real and not just a Hollywood concoction. And for the entire reading of "The Speckled Band", which to my absolute horror was about a snake, and the biography of Conan Doyle as a means of introduction I was convinced that Holmes was real. And since it seems he is based almost solely upon Joseph Bell, a professor of Conan Doyle's, I shall maintain for myself the solidity of his person. I could not solve the Speckled Band as Mr. Trapp encouraged us to do as we read. In my defense I would have to have had encyclopedic knowledge of the animal kingdom as known in the Victorian era as it was a rare Indian breed that performed the hideous deeds. What was not, however, defendable, was my failure to recognize the human behaviors described by Conan Doyle and the Old Testament evil housed in the mind and body of Grimsby Roylance.

And that is where Holmes has made his most significant mark on me. Observe!

"You see but you do not observe."

& "There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact."

The one that gets me every time:

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."

We assume. Or we do not care. Holmes taught me a lot about observations and how to formulate theories after observations rather than before. In truth, the failure to observe one's surroundings is likely the single most self-destructive thing that we can do. Mostly we blunder through our lives recovering from missteps more than we do following some kind of a plan. Cagey criminals and ruthless relations whose motivation is to prey on the unobserving masses create a maze of life situations that, were we more observant, could be avoided.

Holmes taught me to be aware of my surroundings at all times. He taught me how to protect my poor little introverted heart from the vagaries of those ruthless individuals who would prey upon me before submitting to the favor of praying for me. When I have suffered the most is when I have laid down Holmes' rules for the sake of civility or emotional satisfaction. When I assume something can not happen I am almost always proven incorrect.

Observation and Logic can make a cruelly solitary and cold life of once vibrant individuals. And so we have Watson to remind us of our human hearts and the compassion with which facts can be disseminated. Watson is the introverts guide through Life the Universe & Everything Human. Between the two of them I think we have the best teachers of social navigation. And neither of them would exist without the writing life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The writer's life informs every word written, every word that survives the red pen before it gets to the editor. Conan Doyle's literary life was lived at Undershaw for a decade. And what a significant decade it was. Arthur Conan Doyle took on the persona of his own creation, Sherlock Holmes, and solved two mysteries that lead to over turned convictions & were helpful in establishing Britain's Court of Criminal Appeal in addition to penning most of the Holmes adventures. Undershaw has welcomed literary friends and peers such as Bram Stoker, Virginia Woolfe and J.M. Barrie of Peter Pan fame. One does not have to spend much energy imagining what vivid conversations may have taken place while Conan Doyle was in residence at Undershaw.... nor what characters future vivid Undershaw conversations might beget.

If  there is a future.

Undershaw had been slated for redevelopment until a group of passionate fans and conservationists began the fight to block demolition and rehabilitation as luxury flats. In 2012 development was halted after a heated legal battle. Now the battle to fund the preservation and restoration ensues with the Undershaw Preservation Trust at the helm. http://www.saveundershaw.com/ Various campaigns around the world have begun to find funds for the venture. The latest one to come to me was in my Facebook feed this morning. I did not hesitate to sign this petition. Though I did hesitate to donate to the ipetions page.  http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/save_undershaw/I prefer to send money directly to Undershaw. Should you chose to send a gift, here is a direct link http://www.saveundershaw.com/pledge-page.html

True, Conan Doyle lived many places in England. Some of them are now private residences, there is a Sherlock Holmes museum. The argument for not registering the home as a historical landmark due to lack of architectural interest is certainly valid. In its glory days it was not that much different than any other manse of its time. Undershaw was not supposed to be a grand architectural statement like the home of Edith Wharton here in America. Undershaw was to be Mrs. Doyle's retreat to recover from illness and a place for Conan Doyle to write. The architecture is not the thing.

The Literature is the Thing!

Wouldn't it be wonderful if the writer's residence part of Undershaw were preserved? And not because Sherlock is a cultural icon, not because Hollywood needs another monument to its ability to franchise the hell out of anything but because the Literature really is the thing. A Writer's Residency program would be a tremendous tribute to Conan Doyle. While Thomas Hardy can be credited with the birth of the detective genre, and in fact was instrumental in creating Scotland Yard, Arthur Conan Doyle is definitely its most acclaimed teacher & proponent with many acclaimed authors in England and around the world following in his footsteps.

For my own part, living in a city that takes great pride in retrieving buildings of historic significance from the jaws of Decay and Despair while promoting respectful economic growth, I am partial to the idea of usable preservation beyond simple preservation. We are too numerous a species to let things sit upon a shelf so to speak. We must use what we love and love the things that we use. Selfishly, I would love to spend some bleak, misbegotten November at Undershaw under the pretense of writing my great American novel when in fact, I would simply be letting my spirit roam free in hopes of communing with whatever energy the man left behind. If I were to get a novel out of it all the better.

The following link is another blogger's take on Undershaw.
http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2012/03/holmes-home-saving-undershaw
I would hope that one of us would have some influence on the reader's here at 6° of Geekdom and spread awareness. There are a lot of things in this world that need our attention. Saving a smallish building may not seem like much in comparison to saving the Sea, Rainforests, Organic Farms, Wetlands, Endangered Species and our Sanity. It is in the small things that we find a voice and strength to then tend the larger things. Let this be a place to wet your toes before jumping into the ocean to rescue the whales if that should seem to large a task. Small steps lead to larger ones.

Opening a New Blog? Maybe

Seriously I have to give this a lot of thought. I am a geek about a lot of things. And now that I am letting the Geek of the leash to wander through more topics I keep coming back to the question of range. Can I talk about ALLLLLL of the things that I geek out over in one blog or should I mix it up a bit? If I keep it all here do I do a separate page for different topics, specifically the Foodie items?

I ask myself these questions because I can not under state the range of my interests. And while that is a hallmark of being a geek, to have many and varied interests with a little overlap in the Venn Diagram of Life, would some really kick ass topics get lost in the broader scope of an all encompassing blog?

We are a passionate lot. Some might say wickedly zealous. And there are a good many topics which might well be better served with their own page, others even better suited to a wholenuther blog and some that just should not be handled because I only have a cursory involvement on the fringe of liking something. This blog, should everything that I am interested in be allowed a review, could quickly turn into black hole of information. No one would be able to find anything. My followers would not know what to expect. That is fine over at the Bloggess. But I am not the Queen of Randomosity™ that she is and the kind of mind chatter that makes her entertaining sounds glib or pushy when it comes out of me. And fake. Don't forget fake. I can't pull it off. I'm a bit more encyclopedic in that I like to be able to easily file, find and develop a topic with some semblance of order. Chaos is great as a means of civil protest but not so much in the sharing of interests.

I am very much on a foodie kick now that I am back in a house with a real kitchen and most all of my goodies are out of storage. I have no idea where the attachments for my stand mixer are. And I am missing a box of cake decorating supplies. But everything else is here and I am using it. And I am loving setting table again. I've got my head and stomach on a German food kick. Thank you Christine for sending me Lecker (October 2013) and the Lebkuchenherz. (among other things ;)) The idea of systemically going through the magazine like Julia and Julia is appealing. Then so is just doing a German blog. Each topic alone is worth its own blog. But do I have enough interest and material on hand, let alone the passion, to keep another blog going?

These are things that I will have to consider. And I will invite you all to join on at that blog if I get that up and going. In the mean time, I will add those articles in here as they are something that I will in fact Geek out about.

Now if you will excuse me, I have some early Reim to indulge in and a plate of Kräuter Mett Wurst to devour. Reim fans, if it has been a while since you've heard "von Fernen Sternen" I suggest you dig up a copy and give it a listen. Totally 80s. Totally awesome. Totally.

Pondering

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." -Albert Einstein

 

The voices inside our heads are merely echoes of something someone once said, to paraphrase Sting. They are illusory, most likely false and every bit as persistent as reality. If it is true that what you believe determines your life's path, then the illusions that we subscribe to are either the road MAP or the road BLOCK to our destinations. Perhaps success in life is really as simple as changing a subscription, viewpoints, ideas about what is and is not possible.

 

Whatever it is that makes us succeed in our given fields, excel in a chosen area or simply enjoy in the life that we each live must be in the illusions that we chose to accept as real versus imaginary. If the people who have brought us such fanciful and whimsical things to geek over believed the voices in my head, echoes of things that family and not so well meaning friends have said, then we would not have:
Star Trek

Doctor Who

Stargate

Star Wars

Avatar

Warehouse 13

Fringe

most of the animation that we enjoy

Hugo's world would not have given way to the vast cinematic heritage that we enjoy today. There would be no music. There would be nothing but work and sleep and what ever addiction gets a person from one day to the next. There would be nothing on the horizon but the looming Government Shut Down. Dystopia. Anarchy. Desolation.

 

There is a real crisis looming if the information circulating my Facebook feed is even one tenth accurate. And there is nothing more loathsome to contemplate than a future akin to Revolution or the Kurt Russell thriller Escape from L.A. There is hope in imagination. There is little hope in the reality that we are being shown from Congress, our President and most of the media. Who can live under the oppression of such a reality?

 

Today I went seeking imagination. If I need to develop better coping skills, expand my sphere of influence to survive the coming meltdown that our President seems determined to inflict on the rest of us then it is imagination that will see me through. Not chocolate. Not Dr. Pepper. Not the things that get the sheeple through the night. I was never one of them. And I have learned that I can not live like them. There is no reason to.

 

Imagination is everything according to Einstein. Imagination lets you chose your own illusion. It is the only freedom that is left to us. Imagination heals and feeds the soul. And that is the only thing that lives forever.

 

I have to believe it is also the thing that lets us truly withstand the trials and tribulations in the world. Faith and Imagination are close to the same thing. They both involve seeing what isn't smack in front of your face & making things happen when you can not see the outcome. Imagination made the world. Imagination made everything.

 

It all starts with God (however one defines him/her/it) asking "what if...."