Philistine or a Bohemian?

Before I launch into my philosophical musings of this past week (I’ve been jotting down some things in my limited spare time).. first, a HOORAY!

I am now playing with her hair (in photoshop.. to decide what I want to do there):

Her feetsie details are coming in…

Here I show off those sexy pecs I was talking about!

Annnnnnnnnnd her face still needs matching up (sighs)

Ok…Am I a Philistine or a Bohemian…

phil·is·tine

Show Spelled Pronunciation[fil-uh-steen, -stahyn, fi-lis-tin, -teen] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation

–noun

1.	(sometimes initial capital letter) a person who is lacking in or hostile or smugly indifferent to cultural values, intellectual pursuits, aesthetic refinement, etc., or is contentedly commonplace in ideas and tastes.

Bo·he·mi·an

Show Spelled Pronunciation[boh-hee-mee-uhn] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation

–noun

2.	(usually lowercase) a person, as an artist or writer, who lives and acts free of regard for conventional rules and practices.

In my family I am sooooomewhat of a black sheep with this sculpting for “collectible collectors”. And I gladly rebel against the concept that art should be refined and make a statement about society. And yet I *do* feel that my art ought to invoke some feeling of what’s being expressed. It’s an interesting conundrum. I think my past posts show enough about me that any reader would get that I’m not a conformist. Yet I also have a major disdain for intellectualism taken to the point of judging others by such measure.

My family has artists and art teachers who’ve taught and sold works of great acclaim – and it’s all very stylized. Obviously I’m attempting to do the opposite: and investing great great time in trying to achieve the realism. Realism is synonymous with conformity to the fine art world and it’s greatly frowned upon.

I was raised with all the cultural input my family could provide. Classical music, art, world culture exposure where ever possible. The works. I wanted riding lessons. I even wanted gymnastics as a 2^nd choice. I got violin. I hated the violin. I think the only violin piece I’ve ever wanted to play was ala Charlie Daniels (“Devil went down to Georgia”). Instead I was bombarded with Paganini nightmares and Strauss waltzes that I just wasn’t into at that age (I started at 4 and went until I was 13 years old with the Suzuki method).

Anyhow, the importance of “culture” and “music” training was big in my family so I went along with it. Frankly I just wanted to do horsie things and nothing else. I never practiced. It was a constant hour of torture to go into lessons each week and be confronted by my lack of practicing/improving. My teacher was a Quaker and I’m not sure if it was that or just her very direct/honest manner in general but I definitely got the impression she knew I could do better and wasn’t impressed by my fibbing along with no practice and weekly struggle to get through the painful sessions. The girl before me was the talk of the town. This is incredibly important to the whole point of my musings here… see, my teacher would uphold this gal’s example to me and point out how much SHE would practice every day for hours whilst I floundered along not improving much at all each week. One day I was feeling contrite actually and asked if this girl (who was maybe 7 years older than me and started after me but progressed to levels far above me in a few short years).. I asked anyhow if she would practice if she had a broken arm. Remember my sassing there distinctly b/c that’s how annoying it all was to me.

Righto. So aside from that gal being the star of our statewide Suzuki group.. was her mother. I distinctly remember how “stuffy” her mother was. That’s about all I got as an impression at my tender age. Just sort of “watch out for the uptight mom”. She yelled at us sometimes after concerts for making her kid look bad. She was a bit of a culture fanatic. Hence my point. Her daughter cracked in her teens and had her boyfriend kill the mom. Sincerely. Google searches can tell you the rest of the story:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Aparo%22+%22Beyond+Obsession%22&btnG=Search

There was a book (which I’ve read) and a movie (haven’t seen it) about that poor kid (Karin Aparo) who my violin teacher used to point out to me as an icon of the dream student.

Damn glad I’m not a dream student, eh? ;)

I felt similarly in marketing.. sometimes people are a leeeeeeeeetttle too uptight about appearances imo.

Perhaps it’s the Libra in me (needing balance). Perhaps I am just a tad bit too plebian.. I just don’t fit the Bohemian mold.

I was reminded of this whole cultural disdain I have at times when I was listening to a book on tape in the studio, a lecture series. 14 Classes about music history. The professor was droning on about the need for music listeners to “develop their ear”. LIKE HELL I say! It behooves the artist, composer and performer to bring out their artistic expression in a way that “does it” for people. That grips them and gets their attention and makes them forget things and feel what the piece is bringing to the table.

I have just never bought into this with my own art. Some very cultured members of my family have lamented that some of my more realistic horse sculptures aren’t as full of character as my childhood drawings. Well certainly. My childhood drawings were filled with technical exaggerations and often were drawn from memory (so I remembered saddlebreds for instance as having knee action that nearly touched their chins and thus drew this). ;) It’s an interesting musing to find the artist within ones self that still HAS expression within the bounds of realism.

When I go to the Kentucky Horse Park the only point of interest to me is really their art museum. I adore looking at some of the realist art that might be called “low brow” art I suppose. But to me there are certain works out there that just stop you in your tracks and take your breath away. If you are an animal person, you just recognize that the artist “felt” that animal’s presence.

That is what I aim for. Perhaps I should describe myself as a pragmatic corporealist. :D

I was driving along the other day and heard “The Devil went down to Georgia” and thought of how I’d still really wish I could play that. ;)

Public Service Msgs.. lol!

I just posted this over on a UDBB (dressage bb) thread about accidental replies to all.. figured it would be a fun post to throw here too (and since I've been mostly working on wee detaily things (painting and sculpting wise). I'm going to go dig out some links and share em below as well though. First the PS msg:

Be careful also if you have "send to all" privileges...

When I worked in marketing after the first company lay off someone had left a note pad with lined paper that said "Sh*t List" on the top of each sheet. I laminated a couple from the pad and we used to hold it up to folks with a sharpe and joke around about who ought to go on it. Crude humor but the "laminated s*** list" had a little fan club I guess. Lots of bitterness of course after a 30% layoff so I'm sure you can imagine we needed our dark humor props.

Anyhow, I also used to never leave my desk for lunch. I just was that kind of employee I suppose. Anyhow one day the marketing crew and someone from another office were volleying emails back and forth about meeting somewhere in between for lunch (place was a lot quieter and lonely after the first big wave of layoffs). When one gal I hadn't seen in a while heard I was going she replied "OH! So Morgen has taken me off her laminated s*** list" (note that she DID use the asterisks - and of course she meant it in the context that this was because I never came along to lunches). Since this was a literal object and not a figurative euphemism I found it rather funny, not snarky. In fact anyone who knew this gal couldn't have found it snarky - she was just not snarky. So the email volley goes back and forth some more - we were very entertained that she remembered this plastic imfamous object and thus kept referring to it and how, yes, she was cleaned off of it.

Then my coworker, hit the letter "a" by accident in the sender box.

Outlook did it's awesome "find close match" feature from her contacts list and replaced "a" with "all".

And it went out to the whole company. HR. Board of Directors. Select recipients in the CEOs family. Persons we even in investor relations only knew of as person "x".

... I got a call from a giggling Bioinformatics VP who said "gee, am I on your laminated s*** list too?"... that's when I knew it happened.

All.

I ran over to her desk and found my coworker on the floor crying until an HR person came upstairs laughing and told us to relax, it was damn lucky we had all decided conservatively to not actually swear outright and use the asterisks.

But wow was that a blunder. I still laugh though thinking about the stupid thing. I bet I have it tucked away somewhere.

Ok, lessee. I've been making great use of a Bob Langrish poster book and other great big high res pics of legs in my dear Hazel's position of late. I also have been really trying to pin down the exact muscling where the pectorals tie into the sternum. I don't have any great links of that - the Langrish photos of Iberian and Friesian horses have been the best help there.. I want horses who are really throwing their shoulders forward so that the pecs are big and meaty and straining back with a big groove to that tie-in point (since horses don't really have a collar bone set up like humans - which allows them a lot more movement forward and inward some too).

Anywho, so here are some links of fun at any rate. :)
http://slawik.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=73283 (not nearly enough forward but you get the gist I hope of what I was saying above)
http://www.menorcahorses.com/photos/displayimage.php?album=39&pos=3 (also not much lift up/fling forward but nice for other reasons)
http://www.terrimiller.com/gallery/gallery.php?galleryid=1093&photoid=TipTop7DAD-5466 (here I think I was just admiring his beefiosity! lol!)
http://good-times.webshots.com/album/562037082ZscAMN?start=24 (and a whole album of skijoring which I think ought to be a more commonly shown performance sport for showers!) :D

Hope everyone is getting some reprieves from the weather - we are right now! It was 50 degrees warmer than it was last week - woohoo!!! :)

The Meaning of Life... Monty Python style!

First off, lets just have a shameless plug for some items I'm selling in case anyone is interested: http://www.modelhorsesalespages.com/sales/searchlist.asp 6 resins left there (sculpted by other artists) And on to .. The Meaning of Life... I always think of this quote and giggle when I'm painting tiny tiny details:

Dr. Livingstone: Ah… I think I'd… better come clean with you about this. It's, um… it's… not a virus, I'm afraid. You see, a virus is what we doctors call "very, very small". So small, it could not possibly have made off with the whole leg. What we're looking here for is, I think — and this is no more than an educated guess, I'd like to make thathuge, razor-sharp teeth about eleven feet long, and of the genus felis horribilis — what we doctors, in fact, call a tiger. clear — is some multicellular life form with stripes,

Really I mostly think of the man as he describes "very very small.. So small, it could not possibly have made off with the whole leg. "

Anyhow. At the moment in the studio I've been absorbed in painting something with details that are very very small (and that could not have possibly made off with a whole leg).

"Painting" involves acrylics, pencils, smudging tools and a lot of patience to make roany hairs and blended white details. Today I've moved on to the more grand scale (well not microscopic at least) oil paint layers which will add highlighting now and thus can step away for a few days whilst that dries and share these pics. :)

Tada! (I'm really having a lot of fun here)

Happy Holidays!!! :)

Madness and mayhem took over this month and in the past week especially I've been completely overwhelmed. Anyhow, I thought I'd quickly post something at any rate. I'm dying to get back into the studio...

This is a super cool HUGE book (probably still some floating around at Sam's Clubs across the country).. It's 2 feet tall! Great big high resolution pictures though. Very helpful.. now to find a way to keep it in the studio..


And this is a really awesome tool - a contour matching doohickey. (Ok, obviously I've forgotten the real name). Wouldn't work so well for clay I imagine.. it scratched Hazel a bit when I did this section (no worries though). Basically you press it up against one side then flip it over and hold it up to the other. You can also just trace the contour onto a piece of paper and then compare the two that way. Hopefully the pic here will explain it better...

Good times!

Anywho, I didn't get to see all of my family still but Christmas wound up being fairly nice all the same. One half of my family decided to meet at a restaurant in between all of us... Chinese.. and it was pretty packed in there to my surprise. It was nice not having to rush around cooking/cleaning/shuffling etc.. Cheaper probably too for everyone. Wondering if that will become a tradition now that we're all so distantly located.

Anyhow, so that's my Christmas update. Looking forward very much to a highly productive '08. I am already getting a lot more aggressive about my goals for this coming year.

Hope all is well with everyone!

Almost OT cute horse to share...

Cute blog to share here: http://matadorpony.blogspot.com/

Check out the Shower and Shave video, post; http://matadorpony.blogspot.com/2007/11/shower-and-shave.html – hysterical dubbing :)

I confess, I was looking at his face more than the hat.. his owner calls him a “Fauxriesian Cart Pony” (he’s a Friesian x TB) and you can find many more of her anecdotes through the years about him on the UDBB: http://www.ultimatedressage.com/forums/ ) I confess… I’ve become mostly a lurker there, the conversations tend to get far too involved to join in for my limited time.

My focus hasn’t just been on the head. I’ve done a lot of little tweaks and tinkers with other parts of late. Nothing worth sharing in pics just yet. It all sort of comes together in the end but tweaking is sometimes hard to pick out until the final picture comes together. For the few people who begged me not to change the nostril – don’t worry! :D That’s one spot on the head I like. I’m just trying to find that tricky balance now btwn frog eyes and balloon head – a tad more here, a tad less there kinds of things. I don’t want her to look like she sucks on lemons in other words (narrow dry face). And conversely, a lot of draft crosses have very bloated/undetailed faces – clunky heads they’re sometimes called.. I don’t want that either.

Farrier gave me a tutorial on eventer shoes yesterday. I’m trying to decide if I want to bevel the bottoms all around like they have. I won’t be doing calks though. I thought a lot about this and have decided that she’s too generic to any activity and the little nubs are so easy to simply stick on should someone want them. My focus on the feet still has been getting the right kind of shape (round in front, almost triangular behind).

That’s about all I have to mention at the moment. :)

Just another quickie of the head...

If you click on it you can REALLY see in large detail how rough she still really is. The mane and forelock especially but probably you'll be able to see it in other places.

I'm not taking these just to amuse myself. What I do is flip it in photoshop to help speed up detailing the other side to match. Measuring can only do so much. Like I said waaaay waay back in my 'Ambiturner' post, I am challenged when I try to do things in the opposite direction in strange ways, some things I can flip flop with ease, other things I can't. Some shapes for example I can do in either direction easily, other shapes.. well.. I sit there biting my tongue, furrowing my brow and really struggling to flip. Dane bramage I tell ya! :)

Details begun...

I was think about how I am probably one of the few sculptors who really leave some big aspects for last. I've noticed that others really like to put the "character" into things like the face first. I think the only horse sculpture I've really done that with was Godiva. My focus on head shapes tends to be mostly just basic measurements.. but I tend to leave things like the size of jaw, shape of eyes, muzzle etc pretty bland until I'm happy with the overall horse proportions. It's primarily how I tend to measure (the jaw depth does screw me up some - like in this case and in Flitwick's and Duke's cases IIRC). Mostly though it's just what I lump into "detail" work. I think a lot of it also has to do with how I envision something in progress. I personally know the finally "look" of the character I'm going for. I think that's the best way to explain it really.

Anyhow, the bottom line is I've started what I think of as "feminizing" her face by drastically reducing the beef of the jaw. I've spent a good deal of time in the past couple of days really studying the amount of emphasis I want to place on certain facial features. I've completely rounded down the eye orbits in many ways but probably will want to fiddle with them some more (I don't want a surprised or 'big eyed' look - I also don't want a sleepy draft look that even some hunters over fences can sometimes have - I want a focused look.. that has been a tad tricky to even find great refs for).

Righto, so my fingers are numb and cold so I'll shut up now. :D Here are a coupla links I snagged off of the COTH forum about draft crosses since I was having fun surfing and actually remembered to save them for this post. :)

http://pets.webshots.com/album/122797833BDhpqY?start=12

http://www.draftymanor.com/mo/070324/

http://www.draftymanor.com/adirondack/060212/

http://www.draftymanor.com/thistle/060212/

http://www.chronicleforums.com/Forum/showthread.php?t=124281&page=4

Most are too heavy or are pony crosses so they don't apply much here excepting to show delightful all around horses and some details. Too many thoughts to log down here though. Sorry!

The 4x6" square world...

I primarily have friends who’ve are in the medical fields as physicians, scientists, programmers or engineers. I worked for 8 years at a genomics company and started in the labs. A little over half way through my employment there I’d reached a pretty clear ceiling and also really felt that additional promotions/growth in my position (my final lab position was running a data analysis group and assisting launching others across the company to monitor each areas’ throughput). So I eventually was dealing more with the VPs and dept heads – promotions were only aiming in the corporate politics direction – which is not me. So I moved into marketing. Because I obviously prefer my artistic side to being a corporate groupie. :)

I took a lot of flack for going into that position. The gal who worked in it before me was just plain flaky. Nice, but it was not considered a brainy job given her precedent. Still, my brain was starting to hurt from the lack of common sense in the sciences which should’ve been clear and straightforward, iow; despite the data in the lab politics and personalities played a big role. So rather than continually fight the strange politics that shouldn’t have even been present in genetic data production, I just walked away in the only way I could and keep my only bone (stock options) and made a massive lateral career shift.

I was also being talked about behind my back mind you. People assumed you can only rise up in the levels if you’re sleeping with someone. Take my word for it; I wasn’t. Still, it got REALLY old to hear these rumors and get the cold shoulders for no apparent reason.

My favorite was also when people assumed I was rich when our stocks peaked. Sadly, I didn’t get a lot of options as I wasn’t there quite that early in the start-up, I had an ok #, but when I started I was at entry-level employee and they didn’t give them stocks. The people who thought I had at least a million (some scientists and higher degree folks there from the get go did get a million or two from the stock peak -> it wasn’t an insane assumption), anyhow, those people were really fun to be around.. if you can imagine. Meow! Morgen the rich ho. That’s how they saw me. You can imagine how I finally just said “to hell with this” and made a drastic lateral move to maintaining the web site and advertising.

I have a secret (well the man who hired me to the dept knows this but few others). I only took 2 classes in college that were remotely related to this new career -> electives in web page design and graphic layout. I was hired on the basis that I would “grow into it” and I faced a pretty steep learning curve to jump right into producing all the corporate materials.

When I got the position I got a hold of a 700 pg HTML book to refresh my memory (hell, to learn half the stuff). I also got a copy of the web site and sat down and studied every tag on the site. It took a few weeks for me to “get” how the site worked because I was a) so damn rusty (it had been a few years I believe), and b) the site was designed by that flaky girl (copied from another company I later found out) and had multi-tiered subset framing.. believe me, I can’t even think of an example of this bad design because it’s just not done, it was ridiculous and a great lesson in figuring out how something extremely backwards works via desconstruction. Anyhow, I also bought some other webmaster books and a ton of CGI/Perl books and really gave myself an education. The hardest part in the end turned out to be learning the language of the other side: the preparing printed media side of the job (prepress graphics).

To that end, I owe a lot of thanks to the printing companies we worked with who gave me plenty of tips and tricks and just overall talked me through layout specs. We also got to tour a goodly # of woo-ing company’s facilities.. This gave me a greater understanding of things like why color separation happens and what those interesting boxes to the side of uncut printed materials are there for.

The hardest part was that there were definite red-herrings in the way. For far too long I struggled to understand why my color chart reference guide had only 4-5digit #s and the publishing companies guides had the typical pantone guides the rest of the world uses had 6 (see www.pantone.com to understand what these are. You’ve probably seen these somewhere. Anyhow, I would ask for “real” guides but was always given the “they cost too much” crap. I did a layout of a really neat newsletter issue that was supposed to be in light spring tones & dark blue. When the proof came over it was all blue – we thought this was what’s called a “blue line”. No. That’s the freaking color the stupid CHART I had was… and what we told the printer to print it in. The newsletter of course looked ridiculous. And I was still in my probationary period and sweating it out badly. After a few very painful first months like this I found out this mysterious color chart was actually a bar-code label color chart from a scientific company.. it had nothing whatsoever to do with the printing business. I just happened to see it in one of the dept head’s offices and asked what it was. I was sooooo supremely miffed at this moronic misleading by these marketing and advertising specialists. There were lots of little incidents like this. It’s a great illustration though of how the transition went. Basically I was sort of treated with extreme condescension: “you aren’t experienced in this field so we’ll humor you”. The tone sometimes was unbelievable.

Marketing departments really ARE like the Dilbert cartoons portray. Sincerely and for true. Many aren’t I’m sure, but I have to say that often they seem to have a serious lack of substance behind the image.

At least I wasn’t finding myself on the receiving end of snide looks for being assumed to be sleeping with anyone anymore… lol! Now I was just a company misfit all around. ;) Fine by me really. I still hung with the engineers and talked with the programmers all day on the phone (there wasn’t too much thinking to the bulk of the work so talking/music/anything was a must). But I wasn’t privy to the daily grind gossip anymore as much, except when it needed to come up in internal moving and shaking (I at least was an “in” for the lab people to get changes made to improve life around the place now that I occasionally had the exec ears to bring things up to).

Anyhow, the 4x6” square. This will truly illustrate the scenario of what life was like for me struggling to not screw up the ads I made (thus saving thousands in having to hire outside ad firms to design each). The simplest part of ad design is the shape specifications. You have the full size, (the size to which all color goes to with some extra mm for “bleed” where the page is cropped). You then have the magazine’s “trim” size to which there are no guarantees things won’t be cropped off at (so don’t go too close to that either or it’ll be at page’s edge). Then the space within… and in this company the CEO was always trying to fill it with the most amount of text possible. Insane stuff. Ads for a PhD head needed to include a preference for those who had hobbies along the lines of “philately” (the study of stamps – I believe that one made it to print). Really inane micromanagement to this stuff. I was once given the wrong specs and wound up with an ad that was far smaller than the page – it resulted in an award for it’s notability… because it stood out… because it looked idiotic… Thus I was pretty sensitive about double checking specs after that when they were handed to me (I’m sure you can imagine).

So one day as I’m dreading how I’ll have to fit a 500word essay into a ¼ page ad, I call the manager who handed me the post-it with the “specs” and ask,

Me: this 4x6 ad – is it horizontal or vertical?

Answer: “It’s square”…

Me: “No, 4x6 is a rectangle; did we buy space that is horizontal or vertically placed on the page, this magazine has both types of 4x6 ads”.

Answer again, “It’s square. LOOK! If you don’t know how to do your job I can’t help you!”.

Anyone read Abbott's Flatland? Try living it... lol!

It was a lot like that every day. I was surrounded by people I could not relate to on any level. And you wonder now why I find this current impoverished life to be so utopic? (I’m sure readers here don’t really). ;) They thought my horse-obsession & my mare was rather plebeian. I frankly thought they were a bunch of dolts in nice clothes with overinflated egos and income.

Harsh? No seriously; here’s another quick anecdote. We had a trade show booth to design. I made a quickie mock up in photoshop and printed it out on a sheet of paper and cut it up to make a little scale model of the booth. We then had a meeting with the director. Have you ever seen Spinal Tap? How about Zoolander? Well the director took one look at it and said “No, it needs to be MUCH MUCH bigger than this”. I kid you not. We were nearly in tears trying to explain “scale model” concept to him for 10minutes (complete with me drawing some little people to stand next to it. I believe he made at least 6 figures. It’s dumbfounding to see this stuff daily. The humor of it eventually escapes you as it numbs your mind.

I don’t have a total contempt for corporate types. I know there are LOTS of places that aren’t straight out of a comedy sketch. Probably the majority (I hope). I wish I was of the mind to remember code well enough to program entirely – that at least tends to be in basic languages that don’t change nearly so much. In the course of my career in that venue I spent the majority of my spare time learning every program I could and a keeping up with developments. When I started there (in the lab) we were working in Unix codes and when I left there the internet and programming was spitting out new languages & code types every few months. Eventually it became clear that only the quickest minds were competitive in the web development market – php & cold fusion for example was still newish & was showing up on most job skill requirements (I’d just gotten a chance to dabble in them but wouldn’t have called myself proficient). Now I believe (4 years later) those are rather standard expectation or even obsolete. It really is a dog-eat-dog field. I so very much hope I don’t need to go back to it. The continuous “improvement” aspect becomes a tad annoying as most of the new/latest/greatest tools are really plain old redundant. I’m also not much of a technophile. I don’t like to constantly toss “obsolete” when it works just fine thank you!

So today I was reminded of that life when I saw a 7’ x 7’ rectangular sketch my [engineer – told you I liked their common sense!] boyfriend had quickly drawn out. I glanced at it and teased him about it. He totally got the joke without missing a beat.

Ahhhhhhh how I love common sense and the life I live today! :D After my "Black Hole" post and as a general thank you to the awesome people who wrote me fun things, I just had to say that and reflect on how ridiculous my former life used to be. ;-)

Bunny ears. New/more sincere pics...

New gallery HERE

My title says one of the things that's immediately apparent to me right off the bat. Fwiw I don't think I mentioned that I finally got a new tail made up (ok, obviously it's really rough still of course). There's a Bosco in there for comparison (I need to speak with the caster before I think much more about the base/peg arrangement.. I don't want to find out something alarming later after I've spent time detailing her feetsies). I have started addressing the left side details/matching up now. Much measuring to do. Someone found a minor incongruity and this has prompted me to really remeasure (you can never do this enough) as I start matching up right and left side things. Then onto the more fun detail accentuations. :D

Life in a vacuum..

http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/screen/heic0211a.jpg

(above) Fun black hole image from NASAs public domain archive

vac·u·um /ˈvækyum, -yuəm, -yəm/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[vak-yoom, -yoo-uhm, -yuhm] From dictionary.com:

1.	a space entirely devoid of matter.

2.	an enclosed space from which matter, esp. air, has been partially removed so that the matter or gas remaining in the space exerts less pressure than the atmosphere (opposed to plenum).

3.	the state or degree of exhaustion in such an enclosed space.

Huh. SO that’s why one gets stir crazy (definition3)..

Despite being very busy all the time my primary sources of human interaction tend to be with my man in the evening and the occasional human who calls on the phone or stops by the barn. It’s a weird state to exist in. I’ve done a lot of customer service face to face in my lifetime (and of similar sorts in other fields – same principal of “serving”)… so to exist entirely through electronic communication primarily is sometimes really sucks the life out of ya!

Yesterday I was SERIOUSLY in a funk. Fortunately it was pretty clearly a hormonal peak. Fortunately for me also, my man could see I was utterly sapped and he took me out for a very nice (and costly – yikes!) Japanese Hibachi dinner. I didn’t really want to. I sorta had stopped feeling human what with all the poop that never ends and the coldness that creeps deep into your bones.. hay in my hair. epoxy under the nails. Just a robotic machine drifting from the same thing to the same thing. At times like those I guess it’s important to get out but honestly – sometimes you also feel completely inadequate to be social. It was a great idea to go somewhere where the chefs just throw food at you (literally) and entertain & interact but don’t expect witty conversation. ;) I highly recommend it to anyone who’s a little drained.

Working in a vacuum can be so deadly to the creative spirit too. I suffered from it a good deal at the end of my career as a web designer/webmaster. A few layoffs had removed most of my coworkers and the ones who remained were, uhm, not marketing savvy creative thinkers – or even familiar with the processes of producing materials. So there was no one to bounce ideas off of. Working at home listening to gawdawful TV shows, books on tape, or the crickets btwn my ears ;) is actually a step up from hearing nothing but the common rhetoric thrown around in cube farm industries.. still, I am mighty grateful for those who email me from time to time and send input – even unsolicited. You (a) brighten my day greatly! And (b) are a continuous source of hope that there are indeed continual happy customers out there. I love my human boarders (owners of the horses – haha – to think I could have more humans in this little apartment!) for this same reason. I don’t see them much but when I do, they are always full of happy feedback and gratitude. It really yanks me out of the black hole.

Most motivational speakers, theological preachers (of any denomination) and other inspiring sources place "being grateful" as one of life's most fundamental moving forces. It sometimes comes across as hokey sounding but man is it the truth.

So for today’s thoughts, may I suggest anyone starting to get sucked into winter blahs or holiday funk consider thinking of all those who ever say even the slightest kind/appreciative words. It really helps to reflect on things we’re grateful for like this. It’s a necessity really. Today (and I try to remember it every day but often get lax) I am extremely grateful for my wonderful customers who prevent the black hole vacuum from sucking me in. Tx guys!!!