unicorn orgy

Re-invigorated my excitement for creative PROJECTS as a whole. The last few months I’ve been so focused on improving tiny dissected pieces of story-creation (plot, dialogue, panel layout, shot choices, anatomy, value/color), I’ve kind of gotten wrapped up in each small area of focus and forgotten how much the whole shebang is amazing and thrilling and everything I ever wanted.

That sounds hippy-dippy and I don’t give a fuck. 

At the same time, I keep thinking, oh my god my stuff is awful I need to learn how to draw, stat!

This is all great, that weird mix of disgust and excitement is the drive that pushes me to improve, except for the part where now is the time for finishing the projects I’ve been working on, not sketching until my eyes bleed and starting new projects like I really really want to.

Timing, people, timing. Creative muses have none of it.

Also I hate that I have to sleep. Have I ever mentioned that? I feel like I have.

To savor. At first, at the very beginning. The hesitant pause of being an outsider. I view the landscape starkly, summarily, with an eye towards the big picture, the dramatic sweeps, the way it nestles itself into the other larger landscape of what I find familiar.

As an outsider, I see gaping flaws so perfectly obvious to me it seems unjust and cruel that they have not yet been fixed. I see things in black and white.

When an elderly man won’t let me carry my own suitcase, even though I am a powerlifter and he is bent double. I am female-bodied. He has a code to keep, and my feelings about it do not matter.

When my landlord tells me that he’s not racist, but stay away from black kids ages 15-20 because they will all mug me. In the first ten minutes I’ve known him. He sees what he knows and knows what he sees and cannot find any systemic flaws in this arrangement.

More, when my landlord apologizes for the fact that I will occasionally view sex workers from my window. He has probably never thought for one single moment what that life would be like. And manners prevent him from assuming that I would have a view less conservative than this.

When my block is on the frayed edges between condemned meth-houses and the meticulous historic preservation rearview mirror. Spending money on the poor, or on the elimination of the systems that keep them there, is too difficult and the rewards too small. This architecture is where we keep our souls, anyway. The buildings, at least, do not talk back to us.

When people say ‘sir’ and saying ‘ma’am’ as though they are tokens of power. Gender rearing its head in every god-damned conversation. It’s how you pause a sentence politely.

Already the judgements I’ve made are slipping away. After a certain time immersed in water, you forget that there was even a word for it. The nuanced details of specific people in specific situations replace the over-arching two-dimensional picture.

And that’s why things are the way they are. I am coming to learn this. That is why inner change is the hardest thing, perhaps the most impossible thing. A violent rearrangement would be costlier, sure, in human life, but it would be infinitely more probable than expecting a community, any community, to fix itself.

Is this the kind of ‘culture shock’ that other people experience when they move somewhere new? Or am I just always easily irritated by, like, everything?

while I’m here….

Big Goals:

• Marathon in 2012.
• Triathlon in 2013.

Lifting Goals:

• 1.2 x bodyweight squat.
• 8 pull-ups in a set.
• Bring my deadlift up to novice….which will be like 1.2 x bodyweight.
• Learn more Olympic lifts! They look like so much fun…
• no injuries!

Health!

My lifts are at the end of the novice-lifter range and about to move into the intermediate range. I’m measuring off of Rippetoe and Kilgore, because. That’s who you measure off of.

Bench Press- Solidly in the intermediate zone! My upper body strength is totally off the charts. Yessss. I blame my obsessive pull-up work.

Shoulder Press- intermediate again. Fuck yeah, strong upper body!

Deadlift- I just learned these. I had been doing all kinds of other backwork, though, so even at the introductory weights this shit is easy. And boring. I’d much rather do good-mornings, or Pendlay rows. So, at the weight I’m lifting, I am in the un-trained range. :(

Power Clean- eeee I love these! But I need a coach before I move up, because this lift is damn technical and I don’t want to hurt myself. That said, I am a novice and will probably remain a novice until I figure out a way to make sure my form is good.

Squat- I fucking love the squat. I am, like, an evangelical squatter. Having been drunk and squatted my partner, I know that probably I can squat more than I usually do in the gym. But I don’t have a squat rack in my gym, (my gym is shit,) so I am still technically in the novice range. I used to clean the weight to get it up to my shoulders, and then do some sort of weird shoulder-press to get it behind my neck. And then roll of shame to get it off, like a boss. Now I put the bench press rest up to the top, and rack up from there. It takes a fair bit of wiggling to get out, though, so my weight-progress has had to compensate for that.

I’m back to running with a vengeance. Average of 9 miles per week, forcing myself to take it slow so’s I don’t injure myself again. Hell, I even added in swimming to complement the running, and I hate swimming.

I’m writing all this because now is the time to start tracking calories and make sure I’m eating good. Proper macros, less beer, more vitamins. Etc. But I can’t throw off this association I have, that calorie-counting = disordered eating. I know that it’s technically unrelated, but I have this image of people judging me and worrying about me and persuading themselves I am unhealthy, if I start measuring my food and tracking it in a quest to be healthier.

Is there any good way to just track macros? I think I could be comfortable with tracking at that level, and probably my macros are a touch off anyway. My guess is that they’re still skewed towards distance running, when they won’t need to be for another month or two until I get back to ~20 miles a week.

Hm hm.

Probably I will decide that calorie-tracking is just too much work, and I’ll put it off until my lifts start plateauing! :D yaaaay.

lyffe

I got into grad school, they’re giving me fat stacks, and tomorrow I’m going to Costa Rica.

I’m reading some Locas stories by Los Bros Hernandez. They are the shit! Pulpy and Tank-Girlish, irreverent and witty. If you like Golden Age comics but hate all the sexism/racism/never-ending-goody-two-shoes, get on over to Los Bros. ¿Que no?

Also, at work, my boss called a meeting and then said ‘surprise’ and took us out for cupcakes instead. :O

AND my baby brother is on leave, so we’re gonna smoke hookah and hang out until obscene hours, since I’ll be out of the country for the rest of the time he’s around. I can’t wait. I’ve missed his dumb ass.

Life is made of win right now, tumblr. Fucking win.

I am STILL working on my next tattoo design. Each one takes longer than the last, probably because I have to balance the new with the old, reconcile their shapes with each other as well as my own. WHATEVER.

Right now I’m rereading Jun Matsui’s 2006 book of tattoo work, Hari.

Dude’s amazing, he places ink on the body with a fucking deep understanding of motion/stillness/scale/wonder.

A taste.

I ran 13 miles in 121 minutes just now.

I have salt deposits on my face. It’s really cool.

So, the biggest things I’ve noticed since starting to train hard for this marathon are:

• I don’t have any sweet tooth at all. Soda, candy, baked goods- they sound totally gross. Ew, actually, thinking about pastries kind of makes me nauseous.
• Thinking about pasta, however, gives me a boner.
• I can take the biggest hits haha you know I jest. Drugs are bad, mmkay.
• My butt is made of steel, and I think my BMI has dropped. No way to test that though.
• No more side stitches. At the beginning I’d have to run through them like every time, which sucked, but now they’re really rare.
• I can summon lesser demons. Got that power once I hit mile 11, actually. Pretty sweet.