First Day of Drawing

LOOK AT THIS CRAP.

you won't sleep for days.

I learned how to speed read a few summers ago and still clock in at about 600 wpm despite my lack of practice. I was once a towering giant at 1230 wpm, but then my brain started to internally hemorrhage from all the knowledge and I had to stop.

Once I finish a book I will document it here, along with my thoughts on it and its possible applications (should it be a psych book or something else cool).

I picked up a copy of Drawing With the Right Side of the Brain and will be drawing roughly every day. I'll be posting new pictures whenever I have a new drawing and review how the drawing process may be influencing my general thought process.

I also do a crap ton of vector graphics for the video games I build. I'll post clips from that upon the completion of a game.

This blog is for me to track my attempts at becoming a better, more capable human with access to broader and deeper streams of knowledge. Since it stands as an extension of myself it will contain a variety of swear words and stretchy metaphors. If you do not like such things then go elsewhere, as I haven't time for your shenanigans.

If at any time you want to have some chats or have a comment you'd rather send offline, feel free to email me at squamulus at gmail. I think you're lovely.

Father Son Story

This is my final for creative nonfiction. I managed to open up something I haven't hit for awhile in revising and rewriting this, and thought an exercise in heartfelt sharing might be good for everyone during finals. Further, if you have a chance to take this course with Lawrence Ypil at WashU, do it.

Father Son Story

My father gave me his story when he was thirty-seven. When I pass it to friends and strangers now I make the joke that he was “a little late.” Of course, if he had been a little earlier I wouldn’t have come to possess his story, or anything else. If the story had grown heavier sooner I wouldn’t have been summoned into existence. I imagine him dredging up that story of his, which had been buried so deep, and tossing it, as gently as an anvil can be tossed, atop my mother. A divorce, move, and six months later, when he came out to my brothers and I, we learned how to manage and wield the story he gifted to us.

He is an excellent story teller. His gestures are grand, his pauses dramatic, and his voice hushed at all the right moments. He hid himself by way of repression and exaggeration for years – leveling and sharpening edges of his narrative to avoid it catching on society’s wayward glances. It only follows that his ability to weave stories, from the mundane to the epic, has earned him the status of master craftsman.

He practiced more than anyone else.

When he gave me the story it was as smooth and small a pebble as he could make it, though my eight-year-old self described it as monolithic. I carry it lightly, now. It is not something that weighs me down. I have refashioned that pebble, that boulder into a lever and a looking glass.

Day 11 - Cracks in the Armor and a Totem Animal

The past few days have been a flurry of activity. It's not that I've been too busy to write, it's simply been the case that I've opted for doing other things and, in a few areas, ran into hitches that made it difficult for me to confront my daily writing task.

Sleep deprivation aside, dealing with that zombie horde was rather time constraining.

So allow me to explain. We're now at Day 11. I've been averaging about 3 hours of sleep per day over the past week, with some spikes in sleep duration when I managed to oversleep or pull a sleep-walk and go back to bed.

I had a rather large question about this attempt come roaring at me on Tuesday night. The days prior, and really most of this week, I've been feeling pretty good. I usually manage to get 2-3 dreams in my 6 nap cycle, and for the other ones am usually out so deeply that I feel like I've slept for hours when in reality it's only been minutes.

As per usual, the 6-10 block has been the rough one. I slept through it on Monday and Tuesday of last week - Monday due to my inability to set an alarm properly (yes, it happens), and Tuesday for what I would call the catalyst for me questioning my continuation of this experiment.

Day 7 - Bike Tires and Waffles

Yesterday was brutal.

I think I underestimated the effect of oversleeping a nap. Apparently it doesn't just set you back a bit, but pretty much back to square one. The poor part being that my square 1 came on the heels of a beautiful 8 hours of monophasic sleep. This time it came on the heels of 2 hours of sleep over a day.

So, perhaps needless to mention, I was really, reaaaally tired yesterday. My first class went fine, as I was TA'ing and thoroughly involved, but the second one nearly had me unconscious. I attempted to, in between these classes, take my nap outside at the suggestion of a friend. It felt awesome, I was in good company, and it should've been rejuvenating, but for some reason it just wasn't. I felt totally conscious during the entire sleep, despite the fact that I kept dreaming (hallucinating, maybe) that I was holding various objects in my hands and was twitching like I was chasing rabbits.