hellomightydog

I made this for my ex-girlfriend before we broke up:



For the record, I am definitely, definitely, definitely over it. That's not what this post is about. I can look back on the whole situation with clear thoughts, ones not muddled by emotion, and I can surmise this: from now on, when I devote myself to something, I damn well better be sure in regards to it's certainty. I'm not even just talking about relationships, this also can be applied to art, business, etc. Lots of wasted effort.

I used to be a process person, but now I'm starting to think that the end result is just as important. It's funny how I'm just now (post art school) making the connection that art is an allegory for love and vice versa.

It feels selfish, somehow.

I was recently asked to recount my favorite memory of snow. Here it is, if you're interested.

Musically, my parents raised me on The Beatles and The Doors. We didn't have TV, so my first discovery of rap music occurred while riding the bus to school. The driver would often play the contemporary pop music station, B103.9. This is when I first heard of Snow. His 1993 hit "Informer" was commanding the charts. Even though I could not understand the wily Canadian's fresh rhymes, his rhythmic prowess captivated me and opened me up to a completely new genre of music.

I sometimes wonder if I'm "hurting" myself by being selective of the technologies I use. If I'm denying myspace and twitter in favor of facebook / livejournal, am I, as an artist, hurting my chances of establishing notoriety? Plenty of successful artists have censured publicity / promotion, but I am not J.D. Salinger. Especially since I am using one over the other. Also: why fight the trend? What is the benefit of fighting the current? Some kind of imaginary cool that I've invented?

A few months ago, my hard drive bit the dust. I had a lot of important things backed-up, but a few items slipped through the cracks. One of which was a graphic novel I'd been writing. I have an older copy stored on my work laptop, but since the crash, I haven't opened it, fearful of discovering what little remains of my work.

It's almost time, though. I know I'm going to open it soon, maybe even today, and thinking about it has prompted a reinvigorated interest in good writing as well as an awareness of intent. There are two things I've "discovered" that promote my interest during the intake of media. It seems obviously silly when I type them out.

1. I like it when as a viewer/reader I'm dropped in the middle of a situation and my brain has to work to figure things out. This mirrors my attraction to conceptual art (not concept art), where there is a relationship between artist and audience. A shared understanding is created when both sides contribute, which is a more valuable payoff than "look at what I have made". The most engaging art is participatory.

2. Change has to occur to prevent the work from becoming stale. Like I said, this is obvious, but I need to write it out because I don't think I've ever successfully done it. In this rule subtlety is crucial. I've had a habit of setting up problems for my characters to work against and react to, but it's always right out front in big bold letters.

I just need to keep this stuff in mind.

Today feels like a Monday because I was out of town for a few days. I went to Orlando with Tamar and saw Jon, Morgan, Justin Peterson, and Animal Collective. I did not get to see Dav or Aaron. I bought some lamps. Tonight I'm going to some city an hour south of here with Shannon, then it's off to Jacksonville to watch her zip around a rollerskate track and to meet her mom. There were a lot of places I wanted to visit this summer and I have a suspicion I'm not going to see any of them. Hmf.

EDIT: I opened the script. I only lost 2/25 pages. YES.

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Things are well except for one thing:

For 20 minutes today, I wandered around the parking garage looking for my car. I found it. Two hours later I went back and couldn't remember where it was. A girl drove me around so she could have my space. It's not embarrassing that i didn't know where my car was; It was embarrassing that I had no idea if I knew this girl or not. She talked to me with familiarity, and she looked sooooooo familiar. The big problem is that I think I know who it was, someone I've talked to and hung out with on multiple occasions.

...

This was really starting to scare me but I just checked her facebook and she totally changed her fucking hair. god damnit. LADEEZ YOUR HAIR IS HOW I KNOW ITS YOU.


I will never tell her I spent 2 minutes in her car, talking to her, not recognizing her.

I am happy.

I'm producing a lot of art. I'm listening to good music. I'm hanging out with the right people. I'm eating the right kind of food. I'm seeing the right kind of girl. I could stand to be reading the right kind of books, but not yet. In three weeks, I will be done with undergraduate school, and even if my job doesn't offer me a full-time position, it'll be nice to just come in and put in some hours and then go home and work on things at my own pace. I can practically taste this freedom.

Tallahassee folks! Tonight is the Unfair at Club Downunder. I'll have some drawings up. I'm not saying you should go just for that, but if you find yourself there, take a look?

I can't sleep and I've been writing this entry for a while. I was going to hold off for a few more weeks, but it just seems appropriate right now. As you can see in the above image I've recently lost a bunch of weight through simple diet surveillance (and then dropping the "bad" stuff, all with the help of the Weight Watchers Online program), diet change, and exercise. 35 lbs as of this week, and I'm expecting to lose a little more and then gain it back in muscle. While I look a lot better, and have been getting compliments since I started showing the slightest signs of improvement, I can't tell you how good I feel. It's a very unique feeling knowing that, right now, I am in the best shape I've ever been.

My heaviness came / comes from a lot of different places. I realized that if I wanted to change my weight, I'd have to identify what I was doing wrong and correct it.

1. No one ever told me "no". I was a pretty average looking kid, which leads me to believe that my parents did a good job of monitoring what and how often I ate. But when I hit middle school, and I lived with both of my divorced parents, I think they either wanted to let me have a little freedom or they just felt bad for me...because I started eating a lot of the wrong kind of things. Mom would let me take a pound or two of spaghetti to school for lunch. Dad would pretty much just let me eat anything. I wasn't gaining a whole lot of weight during this time; I think that maybe my metabolism was still pretty fast.

2. I developed a habit of self-medicating with food. I don't even know if I need to expand upon this, but food is definitely my vice. Last year, amidst hours of D&D and GTA4, pizza was a weekly meal. While my friends shared a few pizzas between themselves, I would often order a large specifically for myself. I hid behind the ideas that I was a vegetarian and everyone wanted meat and that thin crust pizzas were, well, thinner and therefore a large isn't really a large, but the fact was that I was consuming more calories in a meal than I deserve in an entire day.

Those are both issues of quantity, and with the help of weight watchers, was an easy thing to fix. The other problem was quality. I started to assess the value of certain foods against others, and then against things other than food entirely! What used to be "do I prefer cheese or mayo?" became "do I prefer cheese, mayo, or waking up not feeling sluggish? Or being able to see my dick when I pee?" This was an honest concern for some reason. I can't explain it.

When I saw that the diet was working, I wanted to see how it affected my endurance. So I started going to the gym again. Where before I started out being able to jog 1/20 of a mile and having to work myself up to 1/3, I now found that I could do 1/2 of a mile after being gone from the gym for a few months. I could go further, faster, and harder on an exercise bicycle.

So now I've developed good habits. Eating right. Exercising. And with the way that I feel, I would be doing a terrible thing not to convince you to do the same.

I know a bunch of you are where I was before, or worse. Read carefully: I care about you. It's easy, especially in this country, to let your health get away from you. It's expensive and difficult to live healthy, but I have to beg you to please make yourself better. A few years ago, when I still lived in Fort Myers, my Dad had a heart attack that resulted in a quintuple bypass. I stood in the doorway of his ICU room and wept as his body shuddered, struggling to hold on to life. Somehow, even this was not enough to motivate me to take care of myself. Though the motivation eventually did come and it seemingly came from out of nowhere, I'm glad it did and I don't want it to ever leave.

Please try to find this in yourself. Instead of the coke or even diet coke, drink some water. Go without the cheese and mayo on your sub next time, and the next time after that, only eat half of it. Instead of having 3 or 4 cups of pasta for dinner, have 1 and cook some broccoli, and don't put cheese on any of it. Stay away from the McRib. Stop drinking a 12-pack of beer in one night. Then, when your body begins to trust you, use it. Push the limits just so you can see how easy it is to change them. I'm not asking you to do this because I want you to look good naked or because I want to have a discussion on LJ about how your bad habits aren't that bad; I'm asking you to do this because I care about you and I want you to care about you. I'm asking you to do this so that in 20 years we can talk and you will tell me that you're alive and well and that it's good to hear from me.

Slowly but surely, I am falling behind on evvvvvvvvvvvvvvvrything. Laundry included. I believe I am on Day 7 of these pants. Not even in a row. These are my painting pants because they already have paint all over them. I'm painting today, therefor, wearing the painting pants.

So, a week or two ago a coworker sent me and another coworker an email asking if we had any good books or movies he could borrow to show his kids. So, I brought him the Rocketeer and the Princess Bride, two movies I loved when I was his kid's age. I also brought in the comic Mouse Guard, which is more or less a tale of medieval mice fighting predators such as crabs and snakes, as well as defending their community against other, treacherous mice. The art is gorgeous;



Now, this book came out somewhat recently. I never read it as a kid, but it seems like something I would've enjoyed, so I lent him the book. Today, I got the book back with a slightly worn cover and a thank you card inside.

The card reads:

Thank You!!

Dear mr. Lee,
thank you for letting me borrow the
book, Mouse Gaurd. It was a rally fun
book to read. the pictures were relly cool!
Jackson.

He almost got "really". Maybe next time. Then, there's a folded up piece of tracing paper with a note on it.

put on window.
wath it.
see what happence?

Crystal Castles are jerks!

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2008/05/05/chiptune-music-theft-continues-crystal-castles-abuses-creative-commons-license/

WTF, guys? How can I like your music now?


haha, Lee, how could you like their music before hehehehlolz

sometimes, reading for class pays off.
,gnitirw nodehportsuob tuoba nrael i
and imagine how neat it would be
eht detpoda reven dlrow eht fi
left-to-right writing style.

Last night, I talked to my personal weatherman walk_slow. He told me it was going to be very cold. He told me that it would probably be the coldest night of the year. He told me if I planned on using my heat at all this season, that last night was the night to use it.

So I did.

Or at least, I attempted to.

The heat never came on. It was freeeeeeeeeeeeezing last night! So cold! I rejoiced when I walked into my office this morning, and I cold feel the blood in my fingers begin to defrost.

But really, I'd rather have this than the muggy, muggy heat that I grew up with.

Tallahassee, I love you.

Something really strange happened last night. Chuck, Heroes, and Journeyman were all broadcast with no dialogue. Just music and background noise. My theory is that it was broadcast in surround sound, and because I don't have it, my dvr/cable box only picked up two channels. I don't know. It didn't seem to happen to anyone else, but I haven't checked with anyone locally.

Regardless, it was kind of funny to hear the background noise on Heroes. Hearing random students in Claire's high school saying "Whatever!" and "Hey bro!" It's worth hanging on to if only for the prospect of redubbing the dialogue.

Also, I think I'm going to stop watching SNL.

There is a distinct smell that my body produces, an awful smell, about once a year or so. It's such a shock when I wake up. I have no idea what the fuck it is. Maybe I smell like this ALL THE TIME and I only notice it once a year. It seems to happen under a few different conditions; I'm up late, I go to a show, I stay up drinking, etc. It hangs around too long to have come from my posterior, nor does it radiate from my armpits. Help me YAHOO ANSWERS!

Funny thing I saw last night:

One of the moderator’s in a fan-based LJ community I belong to made an entry that pretty much said,

“Hey, even though this community has nothing to do with Harry Potter, we will not be approving posts IN CASE THERE ARE POTTER SPOILERS within, until one of us finishes the book. Sorry.”

Besides the fact that all posts have to go through an approval process (which is vaguely annoying in it’s own right, but I understand why they’re doing it), this is totally fucked. Another mod stepped up and was all, “doodz, I am not reading HP. I will mod now.” Still, it’s pretty odd to me that a mod can just close up shop because someone might spoil something for them…it would seem to me that would come with the territory.

I haven't been feeling well lately, and I think it's my fault. Every morning, when i wake up, I feel reeeeeeeeeeeeeally sick. I never throw up, but it hangs around for about an hour. Your immediate thought is probably, "Lee, you are pregnant!" I am not pregnant. I am a man.

So what is causing this dawn discomfort? Well, I've been taking a lot of risks with food lately. Specifically, food that expires. I've come to believe that there is a period between the 2 or so days before the expiration date and the expiration date that food has become pseudo-spoiled. This crackhead theory I've no doubt inherited from my mother, who will throw away an entire jar of mayonnaise if it's been sitting out for longer than necessary to stick a knife in it, retrieve the mayo, and close it up and put it back in the fridge. The difference between my mother and I is a trait that I, now that I think about it, probably inherited from my father; the ability to rationalize things to myself so they work out in my favor, regardless of whether or not it's the right decision. I will detail to you, reader, Tuesday night's dinner / breakfast:

1. Grab box of Kix.
2. Grab fresh bottle of milk.
3. Milk opened waaaaaaaaaaaaay too easily. The little snap thing that is supposed to occur does not occur.
4. Look at roommate. Explain situation. He shrugs.
5. Smell milk.
6. Milk smells funny.
7. Think, "Well, the Kix are the main ingredient, and they're not spoiled."
8. Pour Kix and milk into bowl.
9. Eat, thinking, "Doesn't taste funny."
10. Go to bed.
11. Wake up at 5 am with a "tummy ache."

I think the lot of you can guess what happens next.