In Review

Nothing here for a while. I've been too busy...sometimes with good things, but often with work. I have been thinking a lot about what to put here, and in my head I was compiling a list all week of good things and bad things, that I'd planned to make into a post. But somehow, I cannot bring myself to write them down now, or work them into something whole and cohesive. The feeling of what I had wanted to say, combined with how I feel now, is conveyed quite well in this song, so yet another thank-you to the Beautiful Girl for it. I have already listened to it about 5 times today, it is so good:

Any fool can get into college. Only a select few can say the same about Amanda Jones.

Thankyou to J for the link to this blog, it will cheer up my working hours no end.

Also, I'm loving Some Kind of Wonderful. John Hughes is my personal God, no boys are ever as charming and no girls are ever as beautiful as he makes them.

Keith Nelson: You can't tell a book by its cover.
Watts: No, but you can tell how much it's gonna cost you.
Keith Nelson: Wow, I never knew you were so deep.
Watts: You want shallow, call Amanda Jones.

Sometimes

It's so easy sometimes to not tell people how you feel. I am trying to be open and honest with people who mean something to me.

There are definitely people I can't talk to about these things, which makes me feel awful, but as often as possible I am trying my hardest to tell people how much I care about them.

I think I would like to find a way to be honest with everyone, but it is so difficult for me to risk being hurt by people. I want to be better than that.

Goodnight money

For unimportant reasons, I was reading the Wiki page for Goodnight Moon, which is not a book I ever remember having as a child. It contained a link to an article about the little 9 year old boy who'd been left the royalties from the book (and many others written by Margaret Wise Brown). The article is one of those pleasingly clear and well-researched ones that make you genuinely interested in a topic which sounds quite boring on the surface. Thankyou Joshua Prager.

Ok, so yes, this is my third post of the day...

Today, aside from apparently being on the internet a lot, I went to get some cheap back-to-school rubbers from Smiths and came back to carve some stamps from them. I really like the bird and twig - it's two separate stamps, neither of which came out that well under the pressure of trying to line them up on an envelope.

I also bought a bigger piece of lino to carve something larger from, but I prefer working with the rubbers for now as they're a little easier to carve and more forgiving.

Time lapse

Thankyou to the wonderful Steve Alvarez for having this on your blog, it made me smile within seconds and I watched it three times through back to back:

Printing

Oh, this is such a beautiful blog. I think I want to be a printer.



We were at John Rylands last Christmas and they had a demonstration of a huge old printing press. We all got to use it to make really beautiful pictures.


I think the process is just so great, even for the simple single-picture things like in the video below:



I love this video, it's interesting even aside from the subject matter, it's really old but it has a sort of pre-powerpoint section which made me smile:



The type of letterpress that I'm really interested in is this, with all the lovely coins and furniture etc:



I really really want to work here:



Or maybe here, where they even cast their own type:

PS

For anyone who isn't cool enough to know already (where have you been?), this is a lino-cutter. In fact, this is pretty much the one I have:




These are the sorts of things you can make with one:











I am aware that the hole in my plan is my inability to draw, but I will just have to get my talented and generous friends (you know who you are) to doodle things for me to trace and cut out into a stamp.

Adventuring

So it turns out that what I really needed was a day trip. I went to Oxford today - ostensibly for work, and feel so much better for it.

It wasn't really the Oxfordness of it, as much as it was the change and the inspiration.

I went to a craft shop and got some stuff I've been wanting for a while - a lino-cutting tool and some ink. I need to spend some real time on this to get the hang of different techniques, but I did a first bit of experimentation today:






I'm not convinced the ink is right, but it will do to get started with. I really love having a new craft to get buried in, I have quite a lot of ideas about what sort of thing I want to use this for, so I'm sure I'll have more pictures on this soon.

I also got what is probably the best ring in the history of the universe:

I thought about deleting all of this, but veracity prevailed

I read the entire of Wallflower last night, and this evening I went to see Inception. I think this may all be too much for someone who already has a lot of confusing things swirling round their head.

I have been left feeling like I am on the brink of figuring something out, while simultaneously knowing that the feeling is a sham and I that do not know anything at all.

I did realise one thing today...or rather, it crystallised in my mind even though I've understood it in some way for a while...all of my confusion and feelings of uncertainty boil down to my need to control everything....It's weird that I've known that for so long, but today I had a feeling that something in my brain went Eureka. I don't really understand the feeling, but I can trace a lot of it back to a good talk with the beautiful girl recently, who is the exact opposite and exact twin of me at the same time. She is my mirror, in every sense of the word.

I need to keep working this over, but I feel like something good came together in my mind and I can put it to use.


On a more clearly positive note, I looked in the mirror tonight and realised that in spite of everything, I almost always find myself to be beautiful. I wonder if everybody feels this way? I don't think I mean this in a conceited way, I am certainly very negative about other aspects of myself, but I want to really hold on to the good feeling of almost always being able to look at my face and find it beautiful.


Here is something, more real and external - all day in work I have been singing this. It is inappropriate, but I love it so much right now, almost as much as I actually love stationary and lists:




I wonder if I should be less honest on here?

And in that moment, I swear we were infinite

I have been sort of wanting to read The Perks of Being a Wallflower for quite a while, but I thought I'd left it too late to really appreciate it. However, the beautiful girl read it recently and I ordered it from Amazon on her recommendation. It arrived yesterday, which turned out to be just in time.
I got home today with this crushed and worried feeling built up inside me. It comes from lots of things, and it's been lingering for a while, but today while walking home from work the whole mess of it started to spill out and I felt kindof out of control.
I didn't really want to indulge the feeling (as it would have been so easy to do), and lose a whole evening to turning the same stressful issues over and over again in my mind. So I ran a bath and pulled out Wallflower to try and get carried away by it.
As the beautiful girl warned me, there are places where it seems a little tough to take and unbelievable. But honestly, it's wonderful. It takes me back so clearly to those feelings I'd forgotten of learning about life for the first time. I can actually feel the infinity Charlie writes about, I had let it get so distant from me and I hate that.
I hate that I'm so far away from the honesty he has. I remember being 16 and telling a boy that I liked him, even though I knew he didn't feel the same way, just because I thought it would be worth it to give him the good feeling of knowing that somebody thought of him that way.
I would never be so open these days. I feel like all I have is a jealously guarded handful of scrounged together happiness, and I'd fight to the death before I'd consider giving any of it away.
If I was 16 now and looking at my grown-up self I'd be so unhappy.

I think I've made too many compromises and protected myself too much. I think I want to find a way back from that, to feel a moment where I would swear that I was infinite.

Bat flight experiment

This is just an experiment to try making a jumpy animation of bat flight from some warping in photoshop. I like it for a starting point. It looks a lot better than I thought I'd be able to make it.

Cartoon me

More photoshop playing. I've not been up to much else today, just trying to figure things out and making a couple of pictures for people.

My first adventures in Photoshop

I'm trying to learn Photoshop, and a friend set me a challenge so I could have a purpose to my playing. He said I had to meet a President.

It's definitely not great from a realism perspective, but I still like it. I figured out a lot of tools while doing it, my next challenge is to find out how to blend the quality of images.

Photos

No new photographs for a while, how rubbish of me. Here are a couple from Easter, when we went for a walk in some woods...I do have pictures of the people I went with, but they didn't look as good as wood and fungus:






(hmmmm, quality ruined by the enlargement, meh.)

Sweet Blue Babies

Thank you so much to Max for this recommendation. I did get this edition as well, but mine has a different cover with lovely marbled paper. It arrived in the post today.

The language of it is wonderful - so clear and honest.

This paragraph stands out to me today from Consorting with Angels

I was tired of being a woman,
tired of the spoons and the pots,
tired of my mouth and my breasts,
tired of the cosmetics and the silks.
There were still men who sat at my table,
circled around the bowl I offered up.
The bowl was filled with purple grapes
and the flies hovered in for the scent
and even my father came in with his white bone.
But I was tired of the gender of things.

Success

No more house viewings necessary, I found a great place today, with a man who is going to be in the Olympics - which must be good.

To celebrate, here is another picture of me and my lovely brother, who is being kind enough to help me move. I think we're in Amsterdam here, a year or two ago. I am the one on the right, moving faster than the speed of light.



In other news...there is no other news. But here is a link to something someone reminded me of recently. It is truly wonderful, and must be seen to be believed.

Something Happy

As an antidote to the feeling of my previous post, here is one of my all time favourite photos. It is of me and my brother, and the world's bubbliest bath:



(wonder if I can still pull off an all-bubble outfit?)

On the theme of photography, read this (thanks Simon for the link)

Growing Up is hard to do

I have about twenty million house viewings this week. I know they're all going to be the same - a small room in a not too nice part of town because that's all I can afford. But then what would I do with more anyway? Move in the imaginary boyfriend and the never-to-be-conceived kids?

I came on here to write something interesting and at a sort of distance from my real life, but nothing comes to mind. I don't really need to complain, I'm just in that sort of mood at this moment in time. I'm trying to get back into writing and struggling with it.

Last night was nice - a spur of the moment movie and takeout at a friend's house in town. That sort of thing makes life pretty good. I just feel like I'm not quite doing enough with myself at the moment.

I'll try harder.