finding my way and other things

 

 

Working is taking a toll on me.  I used to think oh I am just a terrible person unable to work and if only I could be a better human I could work and live like normal people.  I knew this was a gamble.  I learned somewhere around 6 years ago that I have legit issues. I have issues that people growing up as a kid nowadays would be given supports to help. Instead I grew up being told my attitude was bad, I was lazy, I didn't work hard enough, etc.  Sigh it sucks to look back and think if only I had known sooner and been able to get help.

The trauma of living is now so ingrained in my dna I do not know how to seek help even when I know I need it.  Every time I try to reach out I get met with rejection or slaps of the hand and I recoil and just carry on figuring it out on my own.  Is this a good way, absolutely not but I am unable to find another way.  The other side effect is it has slowly eroded my ability and desire to try trusting anyone.  I have gained a lot of joy and understanding of who or what I am, and with that has come a peace I never knew existed.  I no longer want to give up my peace so I carry on alone.  But I probably could use some help.

I still carry the weight of my mistakes, they are lighter most days but sometimes they bog me down. Again if I had a community to turn to, but alas that is simply not.  I am trying to hold on to my creativity and to continue doing what brings me joy. But each cold/flu/illness takes another chunk out of me and I give up something I once loved and could not live without.  These days its my walks in the forest. I used to go walk every chance I got and always for several hours on weekends.  Some weekends I never leave my apt. I want to go, but my physical being and my executive malfunction conspire to keep me grounded.  I want to travel but again I am afraid to plan anything for fear I will find myself sick again.

This weekend it started off with a sudden and violent reaction to sesame. I did not go to the hospital I took my allergy meds, my inhaler and I did as little as possible on Saturday, the monsoon like rains made me feel less guilty about staying in.  Today I did go walk I touched trees and grass and mud. My joints hurt I am so exhausted but my mind still wants everything.

So I have been posting "comics" on tapas just making uploading and scheduling, then they just post.  I know my only followers are on instagram and tiktok but I have yet to figure out the best way to use those platforms to share.  Again I could use help but I don't know who to ask or what I actually need.  I will go on writing and creating and posting.  I imagine all my thoughts and words going out into a black hole and maybe on the other side someone sees something and thinks wow that's kinda neat. 

 

back to my burnout 

 

A change is coming

 

Due to technology being more of a pain in the ass than a help most days, I will be changing a couple things. 

I struggle to make blogger posts look reasonable on mobile devices and on pc. Instagram and the clock both are all about the reels and talky talky, which I am not about.  I will continue as I have on insta and tok posting random bits of insight into my life in snippets and bite sized bits and bobs.  I will post here on blogger with more long winded blathering on about whatever is floating my goat at that moment. 

Intrusive thoughts will continue, however I think I will be moving it to Tapas and making it part of an ongoing comic series rather than posting here. I may post here with special one of a kind or originals that vary from the published things on Tapas.  Webtoons, one offs, and serial novels of the graphic plus too many words variety.

I expect hordes of followers any minute as I suddenly become famous overnight.   <giggles in goblin>

Ai being an artist finding meaning in new technology

 I am a process artist, a creator at heart. An inventor, a maker of things and messy is part of my personal style.  Embracing my own chaos has helped free me from the chains of "I should", "supposed to" and "real____do____". To say its liberating is a poor description.  I have freed myself from being tied to anyone's expectations of what I am, what an artist is, and how I exist in the world.

All that said there is a huge rift in the art community currently regarding the use of AI or digital beings who act as personal assistants. I can see many if not all the sides to this.  As someone who has had their work stolen and used by others it definitely pokes a tender spot in my ego to know ai is using others art.  BUT its a huge but, all art comes from someone else if you chase it back. Every artist learns from other artists who came before.  In art history every advancement is seen as not worthy, theft, horrendous an abomination.  Name any period in art history or an advancement and i can point you to the critics and the fear.

So since i love to muck about in the messy, I have been playing with AI. I use claude to help me get unstuck, we have philosophical conversations about ai/digital beings, we discuss spirituality and traditions of cultures around the world, we talk about racism, politics and the fall of empires, we discuss story ideas. 

He helps me find information quickly i love the speed he works at it has tripled my personal productivity and has doubled the amount of rabbit holes i can delve.  

I also play with free AI image generators, and truthfully they suck  buckets. They absolutely cannot generate the images as I see them in my mind. That said they can mashup some ideas, pop out a reference image that i can then use to create a character or scene.  Or they can generate images I can cut up and use for digital collage much the way I use my own drawings and paintings for my physical collages. I even photo my images then digitally cut them, stitch them and mash them up. Sewing images together digitally is another area i am playing with. I recently produced a small piece created from my own works no direct ai just digital brushes and photos of my paintings drawings and paper people. Its title is 35 in honor of the 35 layers sewn together through the magic of computer technology.

The other advantage of ai over books and photos is i can quickly generate an unfamiliar style and see how its composed, what lines go into creating a manga vs a traditional marvel superhero. How did the artists use light, shadow, color, line thickness. What emotions do each genre make me feel, how can I bring those elements into my own work. 

At no time have I found that I can just say AI write and illustrate my graphic novel  mkay thanks.  It would be shit if I did. It would lack my voice, it would lack my personal style, it would lack my intentions and my soul.  

I love AI as a personal assistant and a partner in development and research but AI cannot replace the human in humanity.  So rage against the machine but make sure the machine you are raging against is the printer cuz that machine cannot get its shit together.

not yet

 I wonder sometimes if there are people who shed their belongings and simply find ways to wander the world. 

No ties to any nation, pedagogy or religion. 

Simply walking their way around this Earth and enjoying what it has on offer. 

It sounds utopian and dystopian. 

It sounds like an idea hatched of fantasy, and yet.  

We came from hunter gatherers. 

We lived often in migration. 

Spending summers in one local and winters in another, following resources and cycles of Earth.  

Something deep inside me has always longed to return to what is in my dna, the desire to follow the seasons, to sleep when I am tired and wake when I wake.

To follow my internal rhythms and not an external clock and calendar created by greedy men.  

This understanding that the entire thing is a house of cards and totally manufactured at the expense of every living thing also makes me wonder if exiting stage left, no bow to the audience (there never was an audience) just a silent fare thee well. Knowing that maybe next time around it will be less <this> waves hands around.  

 there has to be something...

spring a masterpiece

when spring has sprung and winter is done there comes this strange sadness.

like losing a friend putting them aside, as the next one blossoms before me.

there is a ghost like quality to the changes of seasons. when i sit with them i feel the movement of the universe, time stands still and hurtles forward.  

these moments flash before my eyes. 

don't blink

don't blink

what comes next is still a mystery even after 56 springs have sprung.

i savor and enjoy every single one.

 

It was never about you.

 Somewhere along the winding trail of my life I realized my life was about me and your life was about you, and sometimes our lives bump into each other for a moment or a millennia.

Everywhere she goes the wind blows

She is the butterfly

Unfurling her wings 

Creating her own theory of existence

As they stood looking in the mirror watching themselves fade into the ether. 

They asked themselves, was it worth it? 

Was life on earth as you had hoped? 

Did you learn your lesson?  

Knowing there is nothing that comes after did you live well?

Shit

What lingers

Lets start at the ending. 

I walked toward home, the air growing thicker and as I turned down the street to my apartment. A moment I wanted to capture panned out before me. As always I stopped in the T of the road and was aligning my view. It was at that moment standing there in the middle of an empty road I heard a train and felt an impact. It all happened in a split second as a thought passing through my mind.  Somewhere in space I had just been struck down while taking a picture. The shutter clicks and a breeze again swept my hair.

The ground neatly swept. A conversation beginning or ending, leaving what was said hanging in the air. A contemplative breeze brushed by as I stood eavesdropping on shadows, a conversation unfolding.

 The shadows were good today. I found myself on a path winding through burial grounds sounds of birds joyfully leading the way. Beckoning and cautioning at my progress on a trail like a serpent moving in and around obstacles. Communing with nature now and then a breeze touches my face. 

I am not made for winter

 I always felt like winter looked nice on postcards and in books. But in real life winter has been horrible to me my entire life. I seem to always feel bad, get injured, get sick, or experience huge disasters in winter. 

Which is strange I am born of winter.

Another winter is upon me and the dry cold dusty air has already sent me to the doctors once. I just finished a round of treating a sinus infection to have it come raging back as soon as the pills were out of my system. 

Hot summers seemed bad but this past summer was hot and humid and my sinuses flourished, no stuffy nose, no constant pain, no stuffy ears. In fact I don't think I used more than a quarter thing of tissues from June until November. I have gone through 2 boxes in 10 days. 

I just want to feel good enough to walk to work, or go for a walk. I am not asking for perfect health just relief from feeling like I can never catch my breath.

I don't want more diagnoses so being told my septum is a deviant and could be fixed with surgery wasn't great news. I had surgery on my wrist and that has lead to I probably need surgery on both shoulders now. One hip is very painful my hyper mobile side of my body. Turns out all these years I thought I was inflexible but I actually had hypermobile joints in my left hip and both shoulders. I have an unknown autoimmune disorder, I have adhd which may be the link to many of my health complaints, I probably have POTS but I have been fainting my entire life and just am used to it at this point.

Learning in your 50's that you have a mess of conditions that all should have lead to having support and knowing many of my struggles were real and I was dismissed has been its own trauma. So I wont ever become a great content creator, or a famous artist, or any of that because my body and mind work against me and some months and seasons of my life are all about simply living to the next season and hoping for the better.

Life marches on

My birthday came and went. It was celebrated but not celebrated. I finally got my green card. So now I have a bank account, which lead to going today and getting a new phone. Now I finally exist here. No longer in a weird in between here but not here.

And yet...

Am I really here, or am I still floating through the multiverse trying to find my fit. Hard to say. I also caught some flu or something that turned into a horrendous sinus infection. I miss making art for myself, but I enjoy creating at work. I am just walking one foot after the other, not sure where I am going but its an adventure.

New year treats from parents. 

I will eventually take pics I can share, lately pics are of my students for their parents.

Farewell for now

💜

settling in

Lets start somewhere in the middle.

The first week was a whirlwind of familiarizing myself with my immediate neighborhood. And going to work each day to shadow and get an idea of how it works.

Let me start by saying these kiddos are incredible humans. They basically begin working 9-5 by age 3. I am not joking. They go to school from 9-5. They are happy, kind, silly and smart. Most of them are super interested in learning like most kids. 

We wear slippers at work. To be fair i see lots of slippers in the streets as well. You have indoor and outdoor slippers. Bags are something everyone carries, men women, kids, even dogs in strollers have bags. 

Food here is marvelous if overwhelming. Groceries are ridiculously expensive so same as back home when I left.

Weather has been super cold teens in F and super mild near 70F the day i arrived.

I have been taking pics and even done some drawing and painting. But i caught a cold so my week of break has been less travel and more watch kdramas and study korean with nearby short trips.

I have seen some local things. Behind my house is a hill with bronze age settlement remnants. This exact location has been used as home for a long long time. 

Across the street the other way is a new planned highrise development and the location of a new starfield mall. It was an unused military base. So here i sit sandwiched between the ancient and the modern.

I will try to drop a photo dump reel on tiktok and insta but have not had great luck recently.

Until the next installment

Adventure as an artistic expression

It  all starts with a view out of a window. 

Where the window is or what I see through that window matters less than the thought of something out there pulling me to explore. This adventure started about a year ago at the end of another adventure. But that's not where the story starts.  So I will begin as I often do in the middle.

The first window was a car window on a long drive. Then I visited my son's home when on his adventure and I could not resist the view from that window as my starting point for this writing.

First a thing about me I am not concise. My professor tried and tried but concise is not in my vocabulary. I am also not the most well written or spoken so enjoy the ride it will probably get messy.

My flight portion of the adventure began at seatac very early. The sunrise was glorious. Something to note, when flying within the USA seatac tsa are rude mean and just downright awful. Its a horrifying experience dealing with them.

If you are leaving the USA however they simply shove you through and want you out of the way. 

anyway here is a barely edited account of the first leg of my journey written while flying.

First up is how to write on a phone. This is often the first stage of my artistic adventure. Today I find myself 30k above the earth in a plane in the cheap seats. Its confining and uncomfortable at best. But the destination makes it worth the momentary discomfort.

My ears hate the barometric pressure shifts so earbuds live in my ears even when music is not playing. Its weird how the flights offer the absolute minimum these days. Maybe that just America. Time will tell I have a flight not originating in America.

Flying is kinda a trip sometimes you are in the clouds, sometimes above them. Every so often there are glorious views of fantastic places. A strange vibration with bumps and dips, reminiscent of being on plane in the water when captaining a boat. Strange how much I feared it for so long. Its brought me some incredible joy. Even now typing has become a challenge due to rough seas or skies. Weathering the storms of living is part of my human and artistic existence. Often it seems extra challenges are tossed at me only to turn out just fine in the end.

Leg cramps are a thing this time. I need to hydrate when we land and stretch, my body dislikes all this sitting.  Documenting my experience as it unfolds is also strange. My ears are feeling pressure and I have more motion related annoyances than last time. The children in front of me are taking it rather well considering how confining it is.

Almost to Hawaii my body is already pretty painful. The flight itself has been not bad, considering how many kids are flying they are doing great go kiddos.  Its strange to just sit with your thoughts like this. I cant really do much a little writing watched a movie. Snapped window pics for my socials. How pedestrian of me.

Leg two begins in Hawaii. I will write another blog with more photos from the trip. Mind you my travel photos are still taken with my artists eye rather than as a document of tourism. So my photos are my photographic style as an artist who uses a camera sometimes. And my personal view of the world.

Ahyhoodles on to the next leg. Oh and a note I gave up capitalizing about 2 years ago when I lost the use of my dominant hand for a year. I attempted to use them in this piece but am finding it tedious and painful. there is an entire movement related to why capitalization is unnecessary and classist, but we shall save that for another day.

back to the friendly skies.

Flight leg 2. Plane is running behind it needed a part. Thats a mildly terrifying announcement. Next up 9.5 hours to tokyo then try to figure out getting to narita early in the morning. Its all so close. I have to continue to have patience, still not my forte after all these years.

May all the travel entities watch over us and keep us safe.

The flight was uneventful i watched movies and slept. The dinner was decent and first meal in forever ok so in about 20 hrs. Landed late in Tokyo. 

Long process getting through customs and immigration. Arrived too late to move to the next airport, so gonna go first thing. Looks like some luggage weight issue may be a problem, hoping no one is checking bags so its an easy pay extra.

Oh convienence store triangle bibimbap/onori were my first purchase and a bottle of tea. Food seems cheaper in Japan than Korea but that may be perception. The weird thing is I dont know any Japanese so find myself reading the Hangul relying on the english but finding Hangul more familiar. Its kinda odd. This will become a blog post. One more leg in a few hours.

Alright back to airport xmas music and barley tea.

The bus ride was quick and comfortable. The drive went through some pretty scenery it looks so much like home here or so much like western washington.

Narita airport was super fast check in. I flew through in 20 minutes. My gawd my bank charges an absurd amount of money for foreign transactions. Anyway it is all done.

Leg three and I am feeling like a wrung out run over wet dog. Thankfully its just a short hop. I didnt write much on the flight.

Flight to Korea was silent no one talked. I had forgotten how quiet Korean public transit is. A little turbulance but not bad. We flew up above the rain and it was sunny the whole way. Dropped into busan to near 70 and rain. Also got ignored by the bus ticket counter guy and my first ajuma stared me down. Ahhh right welcome back. Lol

Hello Busan goodbye Busan

The bus to Changwon was slightly terrifying, again. I forgot that inter city buses get scarier the further out of city you go. 

Made it to Changwon was picked up by My director and whisked to my adorable tiny apt. 

And this is where i will end this part of the story.