Conclusion of Daily Little Things

As is probably Obvious, To YOU,
a) i am TYPING WEird, and
b) I stopped doing daily-thing recaps at the end of the month about halfway through the year, because I just didn't have the time.

I thought I might do a superupdate, but I don't think that's necessary. Instead I'll just post a few of the best highlights.

And then I think I'll retire this project from le blog officially. I still plan to keep writing on my calendar (it's the closest thing to a journal I've been able to keep consistently--two straight years now), but y'all probably don't care about every little thing, and it's tiring to write them all out.

By the way, it's 2014. I could tell before looking at the clock because I heard a ton of fireworks going off. I'm alone at my apartment.
-insert joke about being single here-
I'm going to "schedule" this post for the past so that it still shows up with 2013 stuff. Haha.

Anyway, here's a few highlights from my days this year since August, when I stopped cataloging them for you guys.

September 7: duck "swag"
September 18: wasting time
September 25: character creation
September 28: swimming in the rain

October 5: cold front!
October 9: blanket in the morning
October 10: swinging at night
October 14: waterfall down the steps
October 24: socks and owl city

November 6: Just the right temperature for jeans
November 14: Owl City replied (to my Q&A tweet)
November 16: alfredo with mushrooms
November 19: stayed at library until almost dark
November 28: burning college mail

December 8: peanut brittle
December 11: skateboarding in a skirt
December 16: writing okay poetry
December 28: drawing on the beach, dancing with judah

Well, there you go, dudes.
 My calendar this year was neat because I made it myself by decopaging printed pictures and a few non-printed papers to a car booklet with 12 convenient spreads.

2014's calendar is the official Homestuck calendar from What Pumpkin. Super rad art. 

My Sketchbook

I'm just gonna dump a bunch of stuff here from my latest sketchbook. This one has been especially fun because instead of just sticking to pencil, pen, and sometimes marker drawings, I've used paint, magazines, modpodge, leaves, bean juice, etc, and a lot more creativity.
I drew and colored on both sides of the pages. I opened up and drew where I was instead of going in order. I colored the outside of the book. When I made a food-painting I didn't like, I washed the page off in the sink. I ditched the idea that my sketchbook is sacred and must be in pristine condition, and I let myself go creatively, less afraid of the consequences. I branched out into art that wasn't "pretty" or "my usual style." I got silly. I got creative. I got weird.
And I like it.

A lot of the "being hard on it for creativity's sake" was inspired by Keri's Smith's Wreck This Journal, a book that my roommate purchased and is still in the process of destroying. I haven't gone to the extremes that the journal suggests (throwing the book out a second story window, for example, or running your car over it), but it made me realize that if a book gets beat up, it just adds another dimension to whatever is inside. Mistakes and accidents can be made into more art. If your marker bleeds through onto the next page, don't skip it: make it into something.

Anyway, without further ado, here's a few of my favorite things from this sketchbook.

Character sketches

More character sketches

The cover.

contour drawings (don't lift your pencil, don't look as you draw)

watercolor and white crayon.

magazine with added watercolor, inspired by Tip of the Iceberg by Owl City

a collection

the stuff you never really draw because it's boring

My dad's not a phone!! This magazine ad made me think of that, I had to.

FREAKIN BAGELSSSSS

copying from a comic book for style exposure

materials were at the library for bookmarks, but I was thinking a little bigger...

a rare drawing from my actual life

hand turkey needs a hand

Drawing/typography in church. I really like how this turned out.

idk

two pages of tries to get all the spacing right.

i noticed that runway models looked dead in the eyes, and they were positioned in convenient swarm-tiers.

acrylic to the left, large ripped leaf to the right.

patrons of Chipotle.

selfies

more collage

emotive portrait

self explanatory, filling a whole page

more typography

found leaves

both hands are mine but w/e

Even though there are probably 20 some odd pages that are still blank here and there (I don't know, since I didn't do them in order), I think I'm going to start a new sketchbook for the sake of the new year and all. It seems fitting.

Currently

Currently Reading
I'm not reading anything in particular. Now that I don't have to study whenever I go to the library, I can just pick up whatever comics and manga look interesting and dive in. It's nice. No, I'm not reading "real" books right now. What are you gonna do?

Currently Writing
Lately I've written a spattering of dumb poetry. What I've been wanting to write is blog posts. And I haven't been. Because tumblr. But now I'm cutting back on that. I need to write and draw more.

Currently Listening To
Owl City, like always.

The past couple months I've had a thing for Adam Young, but I'm putting that on hold right now, because as much as I from my limited knowlege think the two of us could get along and hang out for like, life, I don't have the pleasure of knowing the man personally (...yet???), so I don't need my imagination running away with those ideas. From experience, I speak. Results can be disastrous.
Nevertheless, my roommates are all sick of hearing Owl City. They've told me. Yet I cannot stop. One of those things I just can't seem to get tired of.

Paramore. If I was a more musical type person, I would be the lead singer of a punk band. When I am alone I like to belt out some strong girly vocals. Once Peggy heard me from outside and downstairs.
oops? Sorry, neighbors...


Twenty One Pilots is a band that my roommates told me about that was supposedly obscure. I bought the album because it was one of iTunes' most downloaded for the year or something along those lines. It was 8 dollars, so I was like...

I think it's kind of hilarious when people think nobody knows about something. I've thought it about things. I was wrong. That's usually the case. If you know about it, there are many people like you. Anyway, the music didn't catch my attention the first time. It's one of those things that grows on you. Lyrically, I liked it, but rap, especially "white rap" is not my genre. Twenty one pilots is pretty ok though.

Currently Watching
I started an interesting anime called Kyoukai no Kanata, and I'm still in the middle of Attack on Titan, but I'm taking a break from TV now because I don't want to waste my break and I need to create more.
I saw The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug on Saturday, and Frozen on Sunday. Both of them just made me want to make stuff and use my imagination more. In different ways. The Hobbit made me want to work out and be a cool hero in my head.

Frozen made me want to collaborate with Disney one day. Just be involved in the making of movies I guess. Going to the movies in the theatre really inspires me. I should do it more often.

Currently Arting
I still haven't made a post of my recent multimedia sketchbook... Or my shoes! Maybe I should do that tomorrow. Remind me? I'll go into more detail there.
I'm trying out a wacom intuos tablet! It's really fun and I definitely want to get one of my own. Here's something I "inked" and colored this evening:

That young man is Pace and he stars in Fledge Fighters which I have probably mentioned on this blog before. Good news in that area! Before, I didn't really have a direction for the story to go, you know, a plot, or a setting that "felt" right. Now thanks to a 3 AM idea rush, I have both of those things and I'm probably going to do some more background work before starting over (since I only got 6 panels in before school took over my life this year).

Current Mood
Bah Humbug. I don't really get Christmas this year, because the restaurant I work at is open on Christmas. I get to work from 9:30 to 6:00. What fun. I won't get to go home to my family until like 8 at night. The next day we're shipping off to the coast for my cousin's wedding. Which is gonna be great, because I am looking forward to long walks on the beach with my favorite person in the world (me) and hanging out in the cool house I went on a retreat in once. Christmas is just going to be... sorta passed over. I'm not much of a holiday person anyway, except that they're an excuse to take the day off.
Not if you work where I work! -tries not to grumble for five years-

Pinpricks

PINPRICKS
 
I imagine that God, on high in His infinite splendor
lifts the fabric square of space to His eye and squints.
There, slipping in and out of focus, are the stars:
pinpricks
in the universe.

I am on a dock, feet hanging above the water
and I lift my eyes to squint at the vast canopy of space.
There, giant, fiery, but far away, are the stars:
pinpricks
in the universe.

I am at least a hundred times smaller than God
so why am I allowed to share a metaphor, squinting at
(give me grace to see more often through Your eyes)
pinpricks
in the universe?

Where WAS I?

Hello, blogreaders, loyal followers, my minions. For once I am sitting with my computer with some time on my hands and no school I should be doing with it. Yeah, that's right. The end of the semester is finally here. My review sheet for my only remaining final is all filled out, and I feel pretty good.

I've hardly blogged at all, and I have indeed missed it. I've been spending a lot of time over on tumblr, and while I occasionally make posts about my personal life, I just don't feel as much freedom to do it there. People on tumblr care more about funny posts and pretty pictures, and I like those things too. There are just certain places for certain things in people's lives, I guess. Just like I'll rarely make a blog post for a 3 sentence thought, I won't ramble on in detail about my life hardly anywhere but here.

I haven't had a lot to write about. I only got 25k on NaNoWriMo this year but I'm okay with that because I was working a job as well as 12 credit hours of college classes. And at least I wrote something, even if it ended up being a mishmash of journaling and freewriting.

I've gotten more into Owl City again. I mean, it's not like my like of it ever left, but I never bothered to get into Adam Young as a person or a musician, I just listened to the music a lot. Now I listen to the music a lot AND keep up with the fans on tumblr, participate in the twitter Q&A's, want to draw pictures based off of like every song and well... daydream a lot. Why can't I know Adam personally? I think we would get along swimmingly.

...I'm okay.

What else? I've been making a lot of art. A lot of my doodles end up on instagram, if you care to follow at mangapasta. I'm probably also going to make a megapost of what I've been working on in my sketchbook. I could make individual posts. Then it would look like I've been blogging more. But maybe that's not fair...

It's been cold for the past week or so here in Austin. Almost nobody spends time outside and it's hilarious to see people all bundled up. I like the cold and don't get cold as easily as my roommates, so it's giving me hope that when/if I move more north, I will survive.

Have I mentioned this? The current plan is to move to Portland Oregon for at least a year, probably in 2015. I hope to eventually do housesitting jobs so I can live all over the nation, and pare my possessions down so that they all fit in say, a Honda Fit or something. Swap out a futon or a bedroll sort of thing for my comfy mattress, own just a few dishes, and of course I'd keep my art stuff. I already don't have a lot of stuff I don't use, but I bet I could cut down on it more. I could probably contribute all but my favorite manga volumes to a library, for example.

I wonder how much cutting down I'd need to do on clothing. I'd need enough to account for multiple types of weather, and stuff that was simple enough that people wouldn't care how many times I wore it. Maybe it would mean getting rid of some T-shirts. I do have a lot of those. I have just the right amount of pants already (4 skinny jeans, 1 pair of corduroys, and 1 pair of thin pants for layering etc.) I have a good amount of shorts too. I could use more skirts, though. This girl can always use more skirts. Preferably just over knee length, twirly, and patterned with designs and colors that I like. Probably only need one, two dresses, tops. Short (above the knee) dresses pretty much count as shirts though. I PROBABLY don't need so many sweatshirts and jackets. Then again if I move up north long sleeves will be more commonly found on my arms.

I just feel like I have too much stuff all the time. I always want to get rid of some of it, but then I use most of it. I just have this stubborn minimalism streak in me that conflicts a lot with the artist in me that has a zillion hobbies, but I want to satisfy them both?????

STOP TALKING ABOUT YOUR DREAMS, CLAIRE, you yell at me, WE WANT GOSSIP. WHAT ABOUT YOUR APARTMENT LIFE????
Mainly my struggles with apartment life involve dishes. I've become almost as guilty at the others at this, but dishes get left in the sink even when the dishwasher is empty and ready to receive. And me and Emma are usually the ones to clean it when it gets to the point of topple-potential. Or inability to use the sink. I seriously want to try putting most of the dishes in storage and having specific dishes for each person, so that we have to wash our own when we want to use them. To see if it works, you know?
When it comes to general mess it's mostly not mine, so that can be frustrating. But in my room most of the mess is mine and not emma's, because I throw my laundry on the floor.

I'm really happy that after Thursday I won't have to get up at six fifteen in the dang morning. I am nOT a morning person, and my 9 AM class this semester has only had the pleasure of my wakefulness because I am a good student and try really, really hard. Yet still today I literally fell asleep sitting with my chin resting on my hand. It was probably only a minute or so, but it was definitely at least the second if not third time I drifted off despite every effort not to.
Today, I skimmed a book about sleep and definitely show signs of being sleep deprived, but I knew that anyway.

I start feeling tired around 1 AM usually, so I'd like to be able to sleep until at LEAST 9 if not 11.
Next semester I have a 9 AM class again, but at least Emma's in that class too and she will already be driving. If I don't have to take the bus, it won't take nearly as long to get there.

TWIG had some massive error and we're having to start the site sort of over from scratch. Fun times. We all lost a lot of work. If you're a young writer looking for a forum community, try twigwriters.com. We could definitely use new members and content right about now. 

UMMMMM there's probably much more to update y'all on but you're probably remembering by now that I'm not good at sticking to a theme when blogging. "why did I ever miss her blog posts," you're thinking. "Plus now that gifs work on blogger, we'll never see the end of them."
(I'll try to do better. But the gifs may not stop)

Pros and Cons of being at home.

I mean at home at home. In my parents' house.

Good:
Much food. That I'm not buying.
Time with family. Hugs, building stuff. Teasing everyone and arguing for fun
Driving the 15-passenger van again. Just for funsies. I'd ask to inherit ol' Buster if it wasn't such a gas guzzler.
Can use printer for important school

Uhhhh:
Like where do I sleep? Couch or couch?
Thanks for doing my laundry I hope I get all my underwear back
Going to work is an hour driving instead of four minutes walking
Brought schoolwork and did hardly any

Traffic Signals

Over a week ago (on a saturday, I believe), we were running low on groceries, so I thought I'd go out for lunch. It was two days after halloween and I trekked to walmart to check out discounted wigs (did not purchase any). After that I went to Chipotle and ordered my usual: Vegetarian burrito with pretty much everything except a couple of the salsas (I feel like mixing them all would be a bad idea somehow). Yummmy.
Burrito clenched in hand, I walked home thinking nice things, listening to Owl City, and daydreaming. But then, when I was nearly there, I saw in the shade of a tree by the intersection, a homeless guy with a shopping cart. Immediately the thought came to the forefront of my mind: Give that man your burrito.

BUT I WAS LOOKING FORWARD TO IT I GOT IT FOR ME NOOOOOOOO

I knew it was God, but I tried to weasel out of it. After all, I had purchased a burrito with the intent of eating it. It was vegetarian, what if he wanted meat? I did have food at home, but not much... if I just kept debating it until I got past... and I did. Oops, too late I guess. If God really wanted me to give my lunch away, I thought briefly, then the crosswalk signal wouldn't change or something. But this light, unlike others in the city of Austin, was reliable and always moved on a certain cycle.
And it didn't change.
sigh.
I turned around all friendlylike and presented the paper bag. "Would you like a burrito?" I asked. He thanked me multiple times and even said "ooh, it's a big one."
Of course I had to wait through the whole traffic cycle again before it changed to "walk" and I went home to eat plain leftover pasta with frozen vegetables.

I guess the point of this is that God indeed does physically intervene in our world, and also that I am not a perfect generous human being. I have a long way to go and need the grace of God (and sometimes some shoves) to get there.

So tired these days

Having a 9AM class twice a week means I have to get on a bus at 7 (the bus that leaves at 8 would not quite make it on time). This means that twice a week I have to get up at 6:15.

I don't even start getting tired until 11PM or so most days, and I think my ideal sleep schedule is from 1-11. (This never happens except on Fridays and sometimes saturdays).

Even on days when I don't have to go to school, I have work starting late morning and have to do school and get ready before that. Or I have church at 9ish. Anyway, the point is that like most teenagers, I severely lack sleep. I find it hard to stay awake in my 9AM class most days, and I frequently fall asleep on the bus (both on the way there and the way back).

No matter how tired I am, I'm usually able to force myself out of bed, to shine my phone in my face until my brain is stimulated enough, etc.
Last night I went to bed at around 1:30 AM. I was tired for sure. I had an alarm set for 7 so that I could get a good start on my day. 5 and a half hours isn't a lot at all, but I survived on 5 with some help from caffeine yesterday and have done similar things many times.
But today was the tiredest I've ever been.

My alarm went off at 7. Immediately I decided I was still too tired to function. I did some quick determining in my head that I could afford to sleep until 8:30... And then I lapsed back into unconsciousness briefly until the determination to set an alarm woke me just enough to accomplish the task. I was also parched, so I took a couple sips of water from my bedside cup and turned onto my back.

I fell asleep before I could even swallow. I woke (again, just barely) to the feeling of water trickling down my cheek. I allowed it to descend into my throat and promptly fell asleep again.


SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGH.

To apologize

I could make a ton of excuses and apologies as to why I haven't been blogging but you've heard them all before: school, work, the balance of the two. I don't think I'm letting anyone down except myself, because honestly nobody really reads my blog regularly except emma and I live with her now so she knows what goes down. The sad part is that this part in my life will be a big old blank when I read back through my life history.

And it really is kind of a blank. My creative output is very low right now. I'm taking a lot in and putting a lot out (though it all feels like busywork) and it's kind of too much and the free time I have gets sucked away watching anime and browsing tumblr.

I know I should be more proactive. I should be spending my time drawing pictures rather than looking at them. I should be writing instead of scrolling endlessly past stuff that is sometimes interesting.

I know.

I think school and work at the same time is just too much for me to handle. I'm doing it but I don't feel like myself, you know? Me is the person who needs time to be vacant, me is the one who rambles on about stuff normal people don't think about, me is staying up until 4 AM reorganizing my room and sleeping until 11 even if I went to bed at midnight. Me is the person who really wants to make comics.

I won't say my blog is officially on hiatus, but it effectively is. I never seem to have the time. And I'll think of things I want to blog and forget them or even write them down but never follow through. I feel so full in the head, so mechanical and sort of dead creatively if that makes any sense because my brain is stuffed with being a responsible and well-balanced adult.

I know grades don't define you but I don't know HOW to not do well. I do as little studying as I think I can get away with and it still eats all my time because what I think of as "getting by" is knowing it all and I'm getting b's and c's on my government tests and I don't care but at the same time it's not as freeing as I thought it would be to break my 4.0, I still want to do as well as possible and I think nobody's really going to care about how well I did in college so long as I finish but I'm such a perfectionist and I know these things CAN affect your future in a terrible goal oriented way and I know life goes on even if you're a failure but the problem is I don't want to be a failure and anything below close-to-perfection feels like failing and I do not want to work in foodservice for the rest of my life.

It just stinks because I also don't want to starve and I'm not sure how to make art pay the bills.
I have a potential small job that I could possibly get but I doubt it's actually going to happen because I'm already so pressed for time that I haven't even finished the book I'm supposed to read before an interview and time is going by so fast and I don't think I can commit to something else even if it's just 8 hours a week. I'm super stressed and trying to cram in the government studying because I'm trying to free up november because I'm a stubborn soul and I want to do nanowrimo despite all this.

not only is my creative life a wreck but my spiritual life feels crummy too. I've completely lost the reading-my-bible habit and I always forget to pray and I don't know what to do and I feel so lost and swamped and I try to pray when I remember but then it always feels like I'm not getting through or something like my prayers aren't good enough or maybe I'm just not listening good enough because I know God hears me and I know He loves me and I KNOW all these things but I just can't feel it and that sounds really lame to me because thinking is much more important than feeling to me but despite all that I want to feel SOMETHING. I don't want to feel stagnant and I know it takes effort on my end and that if I ask/seek/knock etc He'll answer and I can see Him moving in the lives of my friends and stuff but I feel so trapped

just

I'm stuck in this dumb thing called "the real world" and sometimes I wonder how important it is to do all these things you're supposed to do and I'm stuck in my head and my responsibilities and I hardly have time to sleep or daydream

I can't leave those things behind

call them childish but my imagination is important to me and I don't just want to creatively solve problems and I don't want to just creatively write school papers, I want to make up stories that have absolutely no point, I want to make up stories with a very good point, I want to doodle and I want to draw to a purpose and I need space and I need time and right now I have very little of that

like I have literal space okay in general I get my alone time and sharing a room is not that bad, that's not the issue, I need mind space. I need less stuff in my head but like what can I cut out?

Can't cut work because work pays the bills.
Can't cut school because I've made a commitment to finish, my parents have paid for the semester and after this there's only one more to go and I know I can and should get that closure
Don't want to cut tumblr because that's where I keep tabs on what the community I'm interested in is up to, I get amusing and interesting and pretty things.
Don't want to cut anime because it's super cute and I don't actually get that much time to watch it in the first place and I'm in the middle of like 3 ones I really like right now.

I guess the solution would be to just cut down on the time I do tumblr. 30 minutes a day maybe. It might give me an hour or more each day
doesn't seem like a lot since it takes me almost an hour to do a lot of things that might take 30 minutes for some people

I find myself taking my time with things because I feel like I'll go crazier than I am if I don't

but hey maybe I'll get more than 6 hours of sleep a night sometimes

it stinks because I'm never ready to go to bed at 10 or 11 yet most days I have to be up at 6ish or 7ish or 8ish at the latest. It's currently 2 am and I'm considering sleep

I'm not made to work this way ok

also in final notes it is fall and I love fall a whole lot
I'm strongly considering moving to Portland Oregon in a couple years or something it's just sort of a dream I'm entertaining

still don't like coffee
excited for halloween this year because i'm on my own and candy+costumes+the color scheme+silly bats and cartoon ghosts = yes
also cheap wigs after halloween
and striped tights are more readily available I did indeed purchase some

sigh

still doing the one-thing-a-day stuff but in my current blogging position you might not see another one until december and maybe I'll do a mega catchup post who knows

see you noodles later

ios 7 Review

This review is for ios 7 on the iPhone 4.

Everything has a new design: most things that used to look similar to real objects: calculator, notes, are now plain white and helvetica (along with most everything else), perfect for slipping an albino alpaca into a hipster's hands unnoticed.

 

The calendar has decided it's not important that days be separated by lines, since we all knew the week runs together between weekends anyway. It's simply reflecting the state of america's soul.

Many things that were once shiny and modern are now flat and only vaguely metallic if you squint. Messages bubbles. Icons. We go from a shiny tech loving society to a hipster-minimalist pseudo representation of our culture.

The lock screen has a completely new look. And by completely I mean the basic elements are still there, but now the text shows up on the picture instead of black bars, once again making it hipster friendly and more customizeable.

Additionally, if music is playing, the controls show up on the lock screen without a double-click. However the album art is small with a strange amount of space around it, reminding us of emptiness in our souls. This is apparent in the music app itself, as well.

Music most notably has itunes radio, which is pretty much pandora without the ads, because apple can afford to do that and because they love putting other companies out of business.

Safari has now combined the search and address bars so that we can finally stop feeling stupid when our query about salmon saliva returns no results. Also the tab switcher looks like a card index now instead of a flat preview of each page, in a desperate throwback to old library systems, trying to draw in the grannies and granddads to the newest mass technology. Can't forget the old people when you take over the world.

The clock/timer app has the same functionality with a newish design, of course, but its real shining feature is that the clock on the icon now shows the correct time. It's sort of addicting to watch that tiny second hand move around and around, ignoring the fact that there are other obligations to attend to. Now if only the weather app would display the correct number of degrees right on the icon... At least it doesn't lie to us that it's always a sunny 72 anymore.

The weather app underwent a redesign, and while it's tempting to say it is much improved, it really does the exact same things the old one did and the interior does not match the new feel of ios7.
It just feels too detailed, like effort was actually put into the backgrounds and stuff.

Additionally, the average citizen's negligence to assign pictures to their contacts (or the crummy phone-camera quality of said photos) must have influenced the decision to make callers' photos tiny and contained, rather than full screen and friendly. It is depressing and uncalled for.

When dismissing apps, one can preview them fullscreen and flick them away. Perfect for getting distracted again while trying to conserve battery power.

Oh look! Twitter!

All in all ios7 is beautiful, simple, practical, and drains my battery a bit faster.