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Jul. 3rd, 2010 03:18 pmLast night I lay down at 6:30 to get half an hour of shuteye, woke up at 9:30, and thought it was 1am, so I kept trying to go back to sleep. Then when I finally did regain full consciousness, I dicked around on the internet and then went back to sleep, and slept till 9am. Which means I have had too much sleep, and when that happens my body tells me so with a sinus headache. Brilliance.
So I took a sudafed, the real kind you have to show your ID to get, and while it's not helping with the pain it is helping with making me not care. Just as a warning, everything in this post is influenced by drugs. :D
I really have Nothing To Do all weekend, except for some professional obligations, and I'm working through those slowly. It's so strange to me -- not unwelcome, but strange -- to be participating in a quasi-professional literary life, reading books on request and working with others to get my own books out there. Simon, who is MY HERO, coded Nameless for reading in Apple ePub, so I'm going to try and get that up this weekend too because I know the ebook version doesn't function so well on iPads and the like. I'm giving feedback on projects, getting feedback on my own...
It's confusing a bit because when I was younger I'd read books by my favourite authors and wonder what their life was like, and now I'm getting a glimpse into it, I think. I still work a day job, and I doubt that will end anytime soon, but I also have this second job and not only am I good at it, I like it. I used to get angry with one of my art teachers who kept telling me "Why are you not better at this? It's easy"; I would think, yeah, it's easy for you, you're naturally talented at it. Sometimes now I find myself throttling back on the urge to say "Don't you get this? It's easy" and I realise that this is my talent, it's not something everyone has. It's a sort of reverse egotism -- acknowledging that I have an innate skill -- one I've honed, but one I was born with nonetheless -- helps me be less of a dick to people whose skills differ from mine, so that I can focus on actually helping and getting help in areas where I need it.
Anyway. I feel like I'm growing into the professional I want to be -- not the writer I want to be, that's a lifelong project of improvement and study, but in terms of building a network and understanding how things work amongst my artistic colleagues, I'm getting there. Slowly.
At work this week everyone kept saying, "So what are you doing for the Fourth?" which is typical small-talk but seemed to have an edge this year, like they were looking for ideas or something. It could just be that it's hot as fuck out there and we're all tired from a big project push a few weeks ago, but I also wonder if there's a kind of weariness of patriotism. Not that we don't love our country, but we are also a country of very big problems and very few solutions right now, and we so rarely give ourselves permission not to celebrate a given holiday anymore. Perhaps it's also that I am one of the few people in my peer group at work who doesn't have a spouse or child or both, so I feel no obligation to provide an experience for anyone else.
People look so relieved when I tell them gleefully that I'm doing absolutely nothing, and then they admit they've been considering it or they're having more company than they really wanted or they're hoping it rains on the Fourth so they don't have to go out and barbecue.
Holidays have been weird this year.
So I took a sudafed, the real kind you have to show your ID to get, and while it's not helping with the pain it is helping with making me not care. Just as a warning, everything in this post is influenced by drugs. :D
I really have Nothing To Do all weekend, except for some professional obligations, and I'm working through those slowly. It's so strange to me -- not unwelcome, but strange -- to be participating in a quasi-professional literary life, reading books on request and working with others to get my own books out there. Simon, who is MY HERO, coded Nameless for reading in Apple ePub, so I'm going to try and get that up this weekend too because I know the ebook version doesn't function so well on iPads and the like. I'm giving feedback on projects, getting feedback on my own...
It's confusing a bit because when I was younger I'd read books by my favourite authors and wonder what their life was like, and now I'm getting a glimpse into it, I think. I still work a day job, and I doubt that will end anytime soon, but I also have this second job and not only am I good at it, I like it. I used to get angry with one of my art teachers who kept telling me "Why are you not better at this? It's easy"; I would think, yeah, it's easy for you, you're naturally talented at it. Sometimes now I find myself throttling back on the urge to say "Don't you get this? It's easy" and I realise that this is my talent, it's not something everyone has. It's a sort of reverse egotism -- acknowledging that I have an innate skill -- one I've honed, but one I was born with nonetheless -- helps me be less of a dick to people whose skills differ from mine, so that I can focus on actually helping and getting help in areas where I need it.
Anyway. I feel like I'm growing into the professional I want to be -- not the writer I want to be, that's a lifelong project of improvement and study, but in terms of building a network and understanding how things work amongst my artistic colleagues, I'm getting there. Slowly.
At work this week everyone kept saying, "So what are you doing for the Fourth?" which is typical small-talk but seemed to have an edge this year, like they were looking for ideas or something. It could just be that it's hot as fuck out there and we're all tired from a big project push a few weeks ago, but I also wonder if there's a kind of weariness of patriotism. Not that we don't love our country, but we are also a country of very big problems and very few solutions right now, and we so rarely give ourselves permission not to celebrate a given holiday anymore. Perhaps it's also that I am one of the few people in my peer group at work who doesn't have a spouse or child or both, so I feel no obligation to provide an experience for anyone else.
People look so relieved when I tell them gleefully that I'm doing absolutely nothing, and then they admit they've been considering it or they're having more company than they really wanted or they're hoping it rains on the Fourth so they don't have to go out and barbecue.
Holidays have been weird this year.
