Day long entry

I'd been awake maybe 30 minutes when a friend asked me how the "Keri Smithing" was going. That question plagued me the rest of the day, in every spare minute I didn't devote to actively avoiding answering: "How is this different?"

Even without freedom to browse the internet, how is my life different? It still took me four hours after getting up, if not longer, to do anything really worthwhile. Even though I am an infinite sculpture, my position is still binary. Desk or bed. How seldom I spend time, at least by my own whim, anywhere else.

On the one hand, my work is here. On the other hand, does my work have to be here?

I did take a longer-than-usual walk with Reagan today to parts of our neighborhood never explored. In between the distracting little affections he can't help but lavish upon me while we are together, I considered both the "work" and "here" aspects of my predicament.

Space is at a premium, both in our room and on my desk. If I want to shake up the deep structures of my days and habits, altering my physical situation would help. Unfortunately, I can think of no change that would be equally functional, much less more functional than my current setup.

And the "work". After all that pondering meaning and where the importance of a thing is, I gave the artistic things I'm doing a hard look. Day by day, the things I draw have no importance other than practice. This is so day by day that I said the same thing in my post yesterday. If I believe "meaning" to be how something gives back to the world, the experiences it offers to the audience, the essence that proves it to be more than the sum of its parts, then meaning is something I can't achieve right now.

In many ways, the pieces of paper I have drawn upon are empty. After I've finished one sketching exercise and moved on to the next, each previous doodle has been drained of all its usefulness. Hopefully it contributed to my skill, but if it did, that (unproven) contribution was in the doing, and the doing is in the past.

I save my old sketchbooks in case this isn't true. In case I can look back at them at some unknown point in the future and both understand my improvement as fact and glean new ideas from my own old experiences.

For all I advocate and agitate for change, even after I come across significant revelations and believe I'm implementing new policy, I look back and say, "Same as it ever was." The things that were different about today were small. Cosmetic, even, and so new who know if they'll last another day.

Some of my dream-changes about doing more even seem like they might be counterproductive, might set me back from my real goal of acquiring artistic skills. I lose sight of that sometimes.

I am the infinite sculpture
made of butterflies
and math and dust.

I am refracted light
and feedback loops
and I am the soup
du jour

You never meet me
twice the same
I never meet
myself
at all

I am
I am
the tesseract