visualizing progress

A few years ago, not long after I decided to get serious about tapering off valium, after a couple of months I had reduced from around 50 x 2 mg tablets a week to 29 x 2 mg tablets. That number stuck in my mind because, as I was walking home from the chemist that day, I passed a house with a big '29' on it. 

Now I'm down to 5 x 2 mg a week, and I still pass that same house on my journey to and from the chemist. It makes me think about how far I've come. Then, the other day I had the idea of counting the houses off and seeing, in terms of my walk down that street, the corresponding progress made on my taper. It was encouraging because no. 5 is right near the end (or beginning) of the street. For all intents and purposes, it's basically the end. It's just a few steps until the end. So that's where I'm at. It sometimes seems like this taper drags on forever and I'll never get through it. It still really affects me. I encourage myself that I've made a lot of progress, but I still feel like I have a way to go. Seeing it visually like this really helps me to grasp that, it's not just wishful thinking - I am actually at or near the end. It's a fact. 

Then today I had the idea of counting the other way - after passing the no 29, counting upwards and getting a sense of the progress I made between when I started and when I reached 29. It gave me a sense of the progress I've made since the beginning. It puts in terms of a distance walked. An interesting thing is that the final number on that street (at least on that side) is 47, which represents around when I started my taper - around 47 x 2 mg a week. So that road is, funnily enough, a real representation of my taper. I started at the start of the road and now I'm basically at the end. 

working with flooring

I like lino cut printing because it's an easy process, with no messy chemicals, but it has unlimited potential. It's a good example of how limitations can produce creative results. You have to do simple designs because you can't really carve a complex design into lino, but that gives lino cut prints that special look they have. 

heavy

you went into a gesture drawing frenzy and 

broke my skin

and I fell out

bbt

I watched an interview of the cast of Big Bang Theory and Jim Parsons talked about how he often asks Mayim Bialik what Sheldon's lines mean, because she's much closer, in terms of academic achievement, to Sheldon than Jim Parsons is. 

completion

Some things may or may not be done with malice or negligently, but there's no coming back from them. A small thing or a big thing can presage an irrevocable and permanent change, and no explanation is relevant or necessary. 

re

One of the keys to overcoming depression and anxiety is learning not to react. It's hard to learn. It's not the sort of thing you can achieve by trying to do it. It's more like, as you make progress, you realize that that's what you're doing. 

apprehension

My favorite play is Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Before watching it I didn't realize how much I actually knew about the witch trials. Or maybe I didn't know it. There's that phenomenon where, when you encounter profound truths, you feel like you already knew them. You know - yes, that's true - because you already knew it, or at least it resonated with what you already knew and adds stuff you didn't. 

making tradition

When the young Harold Bloom took the manuscript of The Anxiety of Influence to show his colleagues, they told him absolutely not to publish it. Whatever it was, it wasn't literary criticism - it wasn't the work of a respectable scholar. But he did publish it, and it's one of the greatest works of literary criticism of the twentieth century. 

enigma

What keeps me watching Riverdale, even more than the story, is the use of color. The different colors and lighting always have a meaning - every color in every scene. It's like a constant puzzle to be savored throughout every episode. 

destinatum

The best topics are the ones where you can keep learning indefinitely, but you never get to a point where you know all the answers, because, at that point, the topic holds no interest. 

goodness

I have no sense of what is good and what is not good poetry. I know some things that I like in good poetry. It's such a clear thing to the experts. Like it's almost universally acknowledged that Wordsworth had a good decade but outside that his poetry was poor. I guess I could study it and get a sense of the difference, but just reading the poems, I don't see it. 

arte

In the tradition of some of my art heroes, I've started making postcards. I'm going to make hundreds of them. So now I do digital art and postcards. I'm also starting to experiment with different kinds of printmaking. Digital art, postcards, then....canvases? clothes? art journals? we'll see

frisson

I saw a painting by Glenn Brown where he fuzed the figure of a person - the whole body - with a face, and you could see both very clearly in the image and they complemented each other. 

vvvv⋀⋀⋀vvv

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. 

the morality of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

Some modern art is worthless trash....like Richard Prince blowing up other people's instagram images and framing them, and Marcel Duchamp's infamous urinal. The problem with works like that, I think, is that they involve no creativity. They are not 'made things'. They are 'found things'. It wouldn't be so bad if there was some meaningful editing or adjustment - some augmentation - of the found things, but there isn't. 

Still, it's very lucrative. Richard Prince's blown up instagram images sell for around $100,000.00 each. 

impresszt

My art looks different to me, because I made it. Sometimes when something really comes together in a way that pleasantly surprises me, I think - wow, that's great - but then it doesn't get much of a response from people. Other times - not very often, actually - I'll have an idea and I will execute that idea, and it becomes a bit laborious, dotting all the eyes and crossing the tees, but people really like it.