Loitering

Unfortunately, I am not ready to go to bed yet. Hopefully the next 13 minutes of typing will wear me out enough that I will be able to leave my computer satisfied.

Another day without drawing. Getting up late didn't help, and going out with friends probably didn't help. Although I don't believe in it, I feel as though the feng shui of my monitor being gone is throwing me off. Pieces of my workspace are in different places, and the voids have been filled with office odds and ends (primarily paper related). The new piles of books, notebooks and scratch paper, previously confined to temporary (since moving) luggage, do an utterly poor job of being the dimension of construct I am used to seeing in my peripheral vision.

Despite that persistent discomfort, I've made strides in solving my other problems. A new decree is posted in my brain: NO NEW BOOKMARKS (and work on dismantling the old ones!). My new system is kin to that I conceived in Georgia, the one that put hundreds of post it notes on my wall. The new system, however, has a lower threshold for note-taking. I'm still doing post its, especially for quotations, but they are reserved for more fully formed story ideas. "Fully" meaning the note contains plot points instead of thematic gestures.

The new system involves me jotting down extremely short thematic synopses from web pages I would otherwise bookmark. Even if I'm not exactly "in the mood", I read as much as I can and answer to myself the lesson to be gained from the text. It's crude, to say the least, but in my crisis of information overload I learned the questions I should be asking each time I want to save a page: What do I want to get out of this? What can I learn from this?

I take my notes on these things in a scratchbook; years ago I bound a dozen four-sheet signatures together with blue thread, the papers ranging from cardstock to misprints to leftover specialty paper. It has no cover, the binding is exposed, and many pages are soiled by toner and text. I made it to sketch full of drawings, but now I sketch there with words (but leave open spaces for doodles).

I wish you were a book.

Note: this is not a rhetorical comment to the internet, but a specific, unrealistic suggestion to the amazing bloggers whose posts I read.

Today was spring cleaning on my computer as I re-sorted blog feeds, downloaded some new Firefox extensions, and learned how to properly use Quicksilver.

Another part of the project was pondering what to do with my thousands of bookmarks. I'm not exaggerating, I count 3733 bookmarks between Firefox and del.ico.us, without factoring in the 227 images ready to be saved to my folder of 4593 images, and I'm trying to be the keeper of a lot of information.

Hi, my name is Annie, and I'm a digital packrat.

I make no excuses for the thousands of images, and feel fully justified in keeping that collection alive. It's the stacks of bookmarks that weigh on my mind. That number is not fixed, mind you, but increases at a rate of 20 or 30 at least once a week.

Part of the trouble lies in the name. "Bookmark". The digital tags are named for something physical, and truly I wish they were physical in nature. Although I am part of a generation that was raised closely with computers and the Internet, I still have mental blocks that prevent me from approaching information on a screen the same way I approach information on paper.

When I am confronted with handfuls of tabs (currently 21 spread out over two windows), or dozens of unread blog posts (currently 52, plus 30 backlogged from new feeds I'm checking out), it is exceedingly difficult for me to focus on one article and give it my attention for as much time as it takes to read. Although the process of reading doesn't stop when I've read all the words. To truly comprehend all I want to understand, I need at least 20% more time to integrate what I have learned, all the new thoughts, into my brain. The thoughts imparted to the aether by a painstaking blog author deserve to be given time to take root in fertile ground, ground that I am willing to offer. Unfortunately, the desire to reduce my unread posts to zero, or move to the next part of my day (or check my email one more time) breathes down my neck, and reduces all the ideas I want to touch to bookmarks. Or, even worse, busywork.

My pipedream solution to all this is to somehow manifest all the posts I want to read, re-read, and mull over into analog form. It's not simply the desire to possess the information, but to have it cooled into a solid state so I can reference and return to the ideas, the knowledge, the wisdom. True, nothing put onto the internet ever truly disappears, but every moment I am on a computer my attention is pulled in dozens of directions, to other applications, to other windows, to other tabs, to other links. A book, however, a book pulls you in only two directions, and two that do not contradict each other at that: onward and inward.

Magazines, to a minor degree, and newspapers, to a greater degree, work to fracture and distract concentration through entry points and jump tags and cleverly disguised advertisements. Some books, especially modern nonfiction, employ similar features, but a book, being alone with a glue and paper tome, is the closest we can get to communing with pure ideas.

I don't know if I'll ever get over this feeling. More than likely I'll adapt, I'll pick a half-worthy solution and make it work for me. I'll move on. I'll survive.

But, and I hope you take this as a compliment, I'm still going to wish you were a book.

blogging from bed

Reagan borrowed From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas L. Friedman from his recruiter earlier this week and it is thoroughly blowing my mind. I'm only about 50 pages into it so I can't give you a quality blurb due to lack of exposure and lack of time to synthesize... but wow.

So far I've gotten full history on Thomas Friedman and selective history on the Middle East since the 1880s. Obviously, the book primarily deals with Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon. I've only just broached Friedman's time in Beirut, but his descriptions of the city in the 1980s are revelatory to me. I feel myself, my understanding, my significance, grow smaller page by page. My hunger for knowledge, my thirst for wisdom, however, grow.

All this comes on the heels of my completing Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii, a book that has been pending far too long.

In my recent glut of drawing, my reading, writing, and thinking have been lacking a bit. Both books I've favored with my attention today have stimulated my imagination and my thinking-glands. I'm still too aware of my ignorance to say much about it.

These thoughts on themes of progress, displacement, society over savagery, and multitudes more haven't yet matured into conclusions. If what I'm doing is study, I'm studying in a vacuum, and in such a state it's difficult to solidify thoughts, questions, and theories into solid blocks or foundations.

I need a kiln!

Company this weekend will be nice.

Just... burned.

A page of doodles done at the Marine recruiting office in Azusa

Is it possible to be burned numb?

In the scheme of things, it's not any big deal, but right now it's exhaustingly difficult to deal with.

After four hours of last minute paperwork (lots of taking down names, numbers, and addresses, sometimes multiple times) on a Sunday night, the last questionnaire Reagan works through with the Marine recruiter throws up a couple red flags.

They were filling out forms and initialing boxes for R to be screened and tested tomorrow at a facility in downtown LA. I was along for the ride, to get my feet wet. I need to become comfortable with spending time with Marines, especially with the personal inflection of my husband intending to become one.

Four hours--until midnight--with plans for R to be picked up at 4am tomorrow morning and be poked, prodded, and questioned by doctors. At the 11th hour (well, closer to the 12th), he finds out that he would need to lie to doctors or present letters and waivers, or risk being rejected from the Marine Corps. This on top of a day being apart (he worked a full shift), and I'm about ready to crash.

Nothing like being on the last leg of a run, and finding out you have two more laps to go (and we're not even halfway to boot camp yet). No telling how long it will take to work out this new batch of kinks. Should things fall through and him be rejected from serving in the armed forces, prepare for every mention of this part of our life to be scoured from this blog.

Can you tell?

Drawing is allllll I want to do these days.

So it's all I do most days.

I'm not complaining.




A mixture of humans with animal parts and animals with human parts is something that's been showing up over the past couple days. It may be related to me trying to mix in more unreferenced sketches.

I think the hybrids are style that will be with me for many days, if not weeks or months. I like the thought of this.

Isolating

After staying up till the wee hours of the morning talking with me, Reagan was up really early today and had a long day. He went to bed over an hour ago, and I'm still awake.

Sure, on his working days I'd rather be awake while he's sleeping and sleep while he's gone, but on this rare occasion of him having three days off in a row, it'd be nice to be on the same schedule.

Also about isolation, I haven't been talking with my friends lately. It's not easy to feel or talk about, and even less easy to understand. The majority of people I used to interact with have fallen by the wayside in my life, and I, assumedly, in theirs.

I don't know if it's the reliance on the internet that's done this to us. It seems plausible that the lack of physically seeing each other is roadblock number one, being intensely busy with our own lives is roadblock number two, and how easy it is to IM being roadblock number three. Meaning it's so easy that it doesn't take effort, so effort is not put in, and when there is no effort exerted, nothing really happens.

On so many fronts, nobody is taking responsibility for the relationship. Bummer.

And I'm in that "nobody". My life, small as it is, is incredibly consuming. I can't spend enough time drawing. I can't spend enough time with my husband. And therefore I don't spend enough time with other people. This isolation I feel, and the occasional loneliness that comes with it, is largely self-inflicted.

Was I someone else, the question I'd ask of this person waxing poetic about her isolation is, "are you bragging or complaining?"

Part of my brain is very focused on answers and conclusions. It likes to add an "ergo" statement to every other thought and fact. So much so that it is occasionally difficult to break out of that and simply acknowledge a statement for what it is. I forget to enjoy mysteries and open ended journeys of thought.

Isolation and my current social state (or lack thereof) are things I need to keep thinking of in an open ended way. Not necessarily resigning myself to stay in this place, but not rushing through and trying to change or fix it immediately.

These are the things I think about.

The scalpel of my introspection has dulled over the last months, but all this thinking and examining of my mental landscape (and how it changes) is doing well to refine it again.

May Day

Thursday we're going to San Diego to have our car worked on, so who knows when we'll be back. Don't know if I'll get much done when I'm not in my "work space". :(



I made myself a delightful little dessert/snack of walnuts and cinnamon/sugar. Except partway through I got sick of the taste. :X



There's a good chance that I'm going to be on my own for over two months near the end of the year. I've been preoccupied wondering what I'm going to do to occupy myself. :S