Moping, Tori Amos and Death (by sarah)

Post is not about suicide honest!

I am sitting here moping around in a hello kitty onsie listening to Tori Amos and reading a graphic novel called Death written by Neil Gaiman. I have lots of stuff that needs doing but it is the weekend and I have already done a huge chunk of domestic stuff this morning.

I am trying to frame my thoughts, to prepare them for some comic book art later today. I haven't worked on the comic since Monday and I need to work on Cuddly Science as it now has a second booking. The issue is I am feeling very nervous about all of it - about my own capabilities and talents.

Alaric normally boys me up with this sort of thing but he has gone to London today and I am missing him and am also feeling strangely alarmed that I have been with him for over a third of my life. I wrote this and I think I may end up constructing him a poem out of it at some point - I posted the first bit on twitter and then when I put it on Facebook it grew - he liked it which was a relief :)

I don't like my men to be beefcake - oh no I like them to be nut roast.
I also like my coffee like I like my men - white, sweet and tall preferably with caramel but I'll put up with vanilla, decaf but not weak
Must also have dodgy dress style and be able to be cast as an elf in LoTR
Add in the brain power and the essential we must be FRIENDS and I think it's a good job I found Alaric Blagrave Snell-Pym
Next month is 10 yrs of marriage, I've been with him for over a 1/3rd of my life - this morning I felt this was an insane fact - now feeling lonely as he's gone to the big smoke and the girls are playing on their own and the cats have gone out

I am annoyed with myself and project jumping - true I get the projects finished but it takes longer than other people as I'll focus on one thing for six weeks and then jump to another project. They tend to be the same projects that I flit between but it means instead of getting a finished thing and then moving on, I get three things all finished at the same time.

This is not the best tactic for several reasons - firstly there is only so much of my stuff everyone is interested in and I need to give each one a far chance and not over load people and what I do is kind of the worst of both worlds. What I should do with my varied focus and projects is do a bit of each, each day or week to keep the skills honned or to just learn the skills do the project and then move on to the next thing. What I actually do is spend 6 weeks on something, the first week or so being me remembering what it is I was doing with the project/cleaning the rust of my skills.

And at the same time of course I can't actually focus on what I want to for those 6 weeks as there are workshops, performances, stuff I've promised to people, kids and animals and health problems.

Alaric doesn't see my way of working as a problem but I also get incredibly distracted once I am in the 'zone' with a project and start to resent time not spent on it. He says this is just how my brain works.

I am also being mentally hungry at the moment - I want new things and everything seems to just be combinations and reiterations of what's gone before (yes I know its the combinations that make things new, it's just the way I feel at the moment). This goes for books, films and music - I found Tori has produced a whole new lot of music since last I looked hence the morning marathon!

At the same time I feel incapable of learning at the moment - my mind just flits away or I forget what I was doing, like the first half of the instructions etc... this happens if I don't get to focus on a project, it's like my mind can't hold anything else - I obsess about a project but only for a limited amount of time. I think that is why things like NaNoWriMo appeals to me so much - they fit in with how I'm happiest working and so far I've gone back repeatedly to the same project but that means my life has to worked out on an annul basic and not weekly/monthly etc... and EVERYTHING is long term :/

I'm feeling elated and panicky about performances and fear that I'll stop coming up with ideas.

It's kind of bizar. Also I seem to have lost the ability to sing in front of anyone :/ Just thinking about it makes my throat clam up - my solution to this is that I am dam well going to start singing again - some way, some how. I fear it will affect the way I do my performances as well so I have been making myself practice the guitar and have attempted to learn the Let It Go song from Frozen - it seems to kind of be helping.

And...

One blog post without a focus - I love Tori's music and I love Neil's work and this entire thread of thought was sparked by 'oh look I'm reading him and listening to her and they are at the British Library together today looking at comic books - ooo comic books wasn't I doing something with that... or was it a song I was supposed to be recording?'

Now I am off to spray the chickens as one of them is being naughty and pecking the others :/

A Special Kind of Stupid (by sarah)

So I have basically failed my course due to a stupid stupid mistake. After being so proud of not submitting right at the deadline, it turns out I submitted the wrong file - W00t go me - and of course UWE is really strict about deadlines so I can't just submit the correct file now. It was the last piece of course work for the module as well.

Issues were three fold 1) I had made a file naming system to nest all my UWE stuff which unfortunately meant that the file names where really similar and next to each other, b) I am dyslexic so my brain saw it as the correct file, c) I had little Mary on my lap snugging whilst I was trying to submit.

It is completely my fault but at the same time I feel that if I had been able to just submit old school and had a sheath of paper in at the office, the mistakes here and the issues with the files I had with the previous lot of course work, would not have been issues. Electronic submission is great especially for distance learners etc... but for me it means there are more potential mistakes to make.

So it looks like I am on for a resit and being very angry with myself. It is such a typically me thing to do - like ending up on the train to the wrong city or getting lost in a one road village. How is it that I produce prize winning work and have a zillion ideas and understand stuff that others think is too complex and yet I leave the house with my jumper inside out?

If I didn't know the damage it would do, I'd be banging my head on the brick wall right now!

GRRRRRRRRRRR - I am an IDIOT!

On the other hand I am now comparing some events at The Cheltenham Poetry Festival and I drew / wrote / created this and lot of other stuff last night.

Sometimes I hate being a Jack (by sarah)

Jack of all trades... master of none.

Over the last two weeks I have been booked for four festivals and half a dozen workshops, I have submitted articles about science, created a little hand drawn poetry book, created a new raft of upcycling projects, been asked to perform, knitted a sparkly bag, and have started work on the art for a comic book I wrote about about 4 yrs ago. I have also written poems, flash fictions, posts on gardening and taken photos of things, harvested potatoes and sold a few boxes of hens eggs and so on.

As great and as wonderful as all this is, I ran out of money last Wednesday as I hadn't noticed it was half way through March and I had not checked if invoices had been paid etc.... I was 40p short for my lunch - they were lovely and let me off. It has also resulted in another booking which is always a good thing but...

I do a hell of a lot of stuff but it is so diffused! If I could focus on one of these things, I would get a profile for that thing but I can't - so for the festivals I am being a performer, events manager, photographer, craft and/or writing or science workshop leader and the writing and craft look the same. I have pictures of kidneys next to pastel rabbits upstairs next too abstracts, I have poems about war and politics and kids books and on and on and on and sometimes I can't think for it all.

It is fun and wonderful to be able to do all this stuff and in some cases to be able to mash it all together and come out with something that is amazing but... I am not brilliant at any of it. I am ok or good at it all (except the guitar playing and singing which I am naff at but do anyway). I know I have moaned about this all before but sometimes it feels like I will never achieve anything because I am doing everything.

The solution is obvious and one that just is not viable for me. I can't give up things because they are not just activities that I do but they are aspects of me. I know some people love the fact I do all of this stuff and it appears in blog posts like this one. But most people are interested in only one aspect of what I do and all the other stuff is annoying noise, risking them being turned away or not seeing the stuff they find relevant.

It is one of the reasons I've ended up with so many blogs - trying to split it out for other people. The issue is really that I don't have a brand or thing to be know for other than say - being the person who can pull some solution out of the hat for an event in crisis etc... That isn't actually that useful a trait as obvious the event will not be telling people they where in crisis so it only works if I've saved the bacon for them in the past and they need something again.

These musings coincide with a confidence crash - last week I was all like - hell! I am MASTER of ALL, but this week I am attempting to remember how to draw characters and am struggling. I know I am capable but I'm not happy with the pictures I've been working on for my college project - and I am also working on the comic book and really want both pieces of work to be fantastic. But I can't even stick to one style of drawing :/ I am surrounded by how to draw books which I am flitting through, drawing bits and bobs. I have an idea of what my projects need to look like and no one else seems to draw in that way but I need to see how to shift the bodies I've designed around, how to map the features to different positions and expressions and it is an incredible amount of work

IF... I had spent all the time since my GCSE's working on my art skills then perhaps I would be of a level I would feel happy about (rather than wondering if I can get the computer to map textures for me and taking swaths of fabric the 'move' in the right way).

I also got the marks back for my science writing and got a good/ok mark and am so angry with myself as there was stupid stuff like - I cut the excess 250 words from a 3000 word assignment and the feed back was that that stuff should have been in there - and then I find out that there is a 10% buffer meaning that I didn't have to cut those words at all and I spent a DAY on that. Missing simple things like that and not having had the time to get it in for a check before submission are stupidnesses and just so typical of me ( *coughs tax returns ).

But at the same time I can see that it is finally all starting to fuse together and be something. All the art, craft, science, environmentalism, music, writing - it is a dirty snow ball that is causing a career avalanche. Part of the issue is I am trying to up my game again - I seem to be doing this every two years at the moment. And the dam goal posts keep shifting - like I thought I would have "made it" poetically when I had performed at the Cheltenham Lit Festival but I've done that and there are other things I have my sights set on now. The fact I once thought there was a "made it" line you could cross makes me laugh now as it just isn't that way - once I thought completing my degree was "making it".

And so the goals keep shifting - I think the main issue for me at the moment is the pain, it is a low level but is niggling away but I can do things so I am trying to ignore it. Muscle fatigue has been interesting this week including not being able to get myself out of bed but again it has been alot worse - however I am avoiding going to the Drs as last 2 times I've been this close to completing post grad stuff, I have gone in with what I thought was minor things, only to end up with stays in hospital and no completion. Also the stronger pain killers stop me thinking and that is the last thing I want at the moment.

I think I just need to remember that ADHD is the Polymath Dream.

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair (by alaric)

I took it upon myself to translate the following into Lojban:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I decided I wanted to aim for an idiomatic Lojban translation, rather than a word-for-word translation of the English (which would probably result in quite clumsy Lojban). However, this was a challenge, as it would mean making up new good-sounding idioms for things that I either didn't know, or hadn't actually developed as idioms in Lojban yet!

Here's what I came up with. There's plenty of problems with it, which I'll explain below, in the hope that jbopre will read this and suggest improvements. However, even if you don't know Lojban, please read on; I think you might find the breakdown of it (I give literal English translations of it) interesting:

.i .u'e re lo barda tuple ku se stuzi le cantu'a
.i cpana le canre fa lo se porpi be lo flira
noi .iiru'e lo du'u ke'a frumu ku
     .e lo du'u ke'a tolpluka turni cisma ku
   nibyti'i lo du'u lo zbasu ku pu te smuni
      le se cinmo poi lu'e ke'a za'o renvi
           zi'e poi fu lu'e ke'a xraci'a fi le na jmive
.ije rakci'a fi le zbepi
     fe lu ga'isai mi'e la'oi .ozymandyus.
           .i mi turni lo turni
           .i .a'onaidai ko catlu tu'a mi doi tsali li'u
.i zo'e bi'unai po'o renvi
.i lo .o'ebe'udai pinta canre ku po'o diklo le barda se daspo

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Exams and Nature and Crazy Ideas (by sarah)

Today I had my exam or timed assessment for college - we could take a sheet of notes and the case study in with us. I had extra time for breaks due to the ME and separated pelvis and a nice chair to sit in, but the dyslexia stuff (due to me not getting stuff sorted (or paid for) in time) was not taken into consideration - so there was no easy writting extra time nor use of a computer which will impact my results.

The break time was needed as my stupid arm decided to go into spasm about half an hour in, the break time allowed me to massarge it and get it sort of ok to continue writing. After each break I could write again and the stretching was needed in order for me to not be in stupid amounts of pain at the end. I had also taken pain killers and stuff to help me through.

That over I began to reflect on the day and the course etc... I had arrived early and went and sat down by the campus lake and watched the birds and took some photos on what I keep thinking of as a PDA but is actually a tablet computer. It was lovely and carming and I took some accidental arty shots and looking at the birds it reminded me of the 100 birds in 100 days challenge I did last year and I suddenly thought - ooo I could do a flower one!

So that is what I have decided to do!

Starting today!

I'll be posting them over on Orange Monster.