Melted Glass

So, I thought I’d write about yesterday’s effort. The photo above was the original motive I used.

I had this idea to produce an enamel effect of the photo. As this enameller explained, what was need was to create an effect of melting glass and stark contrasts of metal oxides.

The work started out fine, but eventually just got away from me. I think I will have to start out with objects with simple geometric forms.

Half-Hearted

Made another half-hearted attempt to tackle the mountains of paperwork on my desk and the floor beside my desk and inside of the cupboard next to my desk. Not today...

Two-tone Toni

Two-tone Toni was one of my fellow classmates at the university I attended in southern Ontario. He was an immigrant from Lebanon. He was over six-feet tall and he wore roller skates the whole day through. This was at a time when inline skaters hadn’t even been conceived. Toni would skate throughout the university campus, engineering faculty buildings, up-and-down stairs, even along the rows of the auditorium.

Toni’s hair was died two tones of red in a bizarre Iroquois cut, or punk cut. This trend, like the roller skates, was well before its time. Toni was a young Iggy Pop, with middle-eastern flair.

Toni’s looks and lifestyle rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Yet, he wouldn’t back down a bit. I asked him what his parents thought of his haircut. I presumed he wore his hair like that as an act of rebellion. He paused for a moment, as if considering whether he would honour me with an answer. Then he quietly, seriously, told me that his father was the one who had cut and died his hair. His father was a hairdresser.

That conversation gave me more insight into Toni than all our previous encounters. He told me there was a scheme to his madness. He knew he was different than the majority of staid conservative southern Ontarian engineering students; he just wanted them to know as well.

Our university program was a co-op program. We alternated every four months between a study semester and a work semester. At the end of every study semester, companies, large and small, would come to interview students for next work semester. It was a madhouse of back-to-back interviews, if you were lucky to get interviews, or a sad scramble to cough up even one interview if things went wrong. The competition was fierce for the jobs available. Some students didn’t find job, and were pitied by all.

When it came to the first round of interviews, most of my fellow students predicted that Toni would be included in the unemployed group. They stated their prediction with glee. Finally, two-tone Toni would be taken down a notch or two.

On the first day of the interview rounds, we all gathered together at the campus centre. Most of the fellows were looking nervous and uncomfortable in their polyester suits. In walks Toni. Chic urban look: Armani suit, silk tie, short haircut. One tone of hair. He looks as if he just stepped out of a GQ magazine. Everyone stopped talking and starred.

When asked whom he was interviewing with, Toni mentioned a top engineering company in Montreal. One of those choice positions, usually given to more senior students. Tone went in to the interview and grabbed the job right from under everyone else’s feet.

Two-tone Toni taught us the importance of living your life according to your terms. He also taught us about choosing your fights and how do go on the offensive.

Rhythm Of My Days

I’ve been calling people, researching various sites, and working out financial details the last few days. Such activities tend to sap my energy. I’ve only been unemployed twice before for short periods of time. Yet, each time, I did fall into a dark hole.

Now that I am older and wiser (yeah sure), I am hoping to be more Zen about the circumstances. I woke up this morning and realised that I am succeeding only on the surface. Deep down there is a beast brewing.

Time to stop running and go slow. Time to find a quiet corner to sit and contemplate the rhythm of my days. Time to pay notice to the changing of the seasons. To do things I normally don’t have time to do.

White Noise

Yesterday, I watched a very interesting presentation (here). It is interesting from many sides, but I will wait a little to see whether the advice that Merlin Mann gives in the presentation takes root, before I enthusiastically praise his method for making life more simple.

Aside from his advice on how to deal with the continual flow of incoming email, I felt many of his points apply to uses of other technologies or media. What he said made me reflect upon my blogging and the large range of associated activities that I participate in with the blogging community.

As some of you might know, I started blogging initially as an experiment. Then I thought it would be a nice way to allow friends and family to get a glimpse into my day-to-day life. Something made difficult by the fact all of my siblings and relatives and many of my friends are scattered across the world.

I have a serious aversion of serial letters of any sort. I hate repeating news in emails. I’m not one to chew the chat (or whatever the expression is). So, blogging is godsend. I can write about whatever is on my mind, without feeling as if I’m wasting my friends’ time: if they aren’t interested in what I’m saying in certain posts, they can skip over them. The plus side is that what I write is honest, current, and a true reflection on my humble existence.

What I hadn’t expected was very few of my family (hi, sis!) and very few of my friends (a handful) read my blog regularly. The fact is, as far as sitemeter tells me, most of the readers of this blog, have gotten to “know” me through other blogs or the blogging community.

I talked to Charlotte about this on our first rendezvous in Berlin. Her experience has been similar to mine. And this made me think that part of blogging is writing, of course, but also becoming a more active member of the blogging community. In the last months, I have been trying to make more of a conscientious effort to leave comments on other people’s posts and monitor whether people are reading my posts.

The problem is (and this is where I make a swift return to Mann’s presentation) I have been creating a bit of white noise with all the “ becoming more active” in the community. I have become so distracted with what people are writing, the comments of those bloggers’ readers on their blogs, who is doing what with whom, that my attention has been somewhat drawn away from the real task at hand: writing.

This distraction has to stop; in the same way that Merlin Mann says our ineffectual practices in (not) coping with our ever-filling inbox has to stop. There has to be a sensible way to create an empty inbox (i.e., reduce my preoccupation with the blogging community) and free my mind for the more important task at hand.

I feel as though I got a gentle slap in the face. It’s time to figure out how to be a more efficient, good member of the blogsphere, and, more importantly, a better blogger.

Writing Ways

Ronni of the Time Goes By blog recently wrote an interesting article about how her writing has changed in the years since she started her blog. Apparently, it has changed in diverse, subtle, and unforeseeable ways. When I read the article, I was a good part fascinated and a small part envious of her experiences.

Even though she spent a lifetime writing for others (she worked in television), she’s discovered her own personal writing voice through blogging. What a delight that must be?

In contrast, I’ve spent my lifetime jumping from one language to another: mastering none, unlearning a few along the way. My first spoken language was Spanish, at six I learnt English, late teens French, and the last twenty-five years I lived and worked in German. Sound exotic, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not.

I may speak German fluently, but, sadly, grammatically incorrect. My command of English diminishes from year-to-year. I now speak a miserable French. I only understand, but no longer speak Spanish. I love all of these languages, but neither speak or write any of them well.

Yes, it is interesting to learn, through language, the nuances, the humour, and the pre-occupations of another culture. It is fascinating to always be challenged, never feel complacent. It can be ridiculously rewarding bridging friendships with people you normally would never meet unless you move to another country.

The problem is, language is so much more than a means of communication. It is an essential part of our identity. It is our voice. Who you are, what you think, what you dream, are all expressed through language. I sometimes wonder if I can’t speak or write in a language proficiently, will I bit-by-bit lose my identity?

When Ronni writes, “… omitting unnecessary adjectives, figures of speech, excessive verbiage we use in speech - my writing got sharper, more focused and clearer.” I yearn to say the same. Yet, I am reduced to accepting the suggestions from the WinWord grammar and spell check program and looking up the definition of words in a dictionary every five minutes or so. Where do I go from here? I’d like to write in my post #1000 or #2000 my writing has become clearer, it’s up to me to figure out how to do this!

Plodding Away

I’m reworking a children’s story I wrote about ten years ago. It’s about a mischievous boy, Elroy, from the marvellous, mystical land of Hei-apshi being adopted into Nancy and Bill Ordinary’s household at 21^st Elm Street, in Middletown, Ontario.

I’ve just gone through the first read, possibly since I wrote it, and I delight in the story. What a surprise this is!

I’ve started collecting material to make up some collages to illustrate the story. Reading “The Monstrous Memoirs of a Mighty McFearless”, by Ahmet Zappa made me realise that the world of children’s books and children’s book illustration has completely opened up over the years. I can not draw, but I do enjoy photography and creating digital collages, so maybe that will just be enough.

More and more, technology is affordable, approachable, and can be used to support creative effort. I’m not saying that my new digital camera, stock.xchng, and Photoshop, will make a great children’s book illustrator out of me, but it will enable me to produce a children’s book, which is economically affordable.

This way, the gods willing, I can read my stories later on to my grandchildren. What could be more wonderful than that?

Note: for other very useful tools see flickr and Picasa

The art of writing

Writing my blogs, reading other serious bloggers has made me very curious to know why people write, when and how.

Over the last two years, I’ve written my blog or in my journal regularly: often, over prolonged periods of time, even daily. I don’t believe I ever wrote with such constancy during my adult life.

Which is paradoxical, considering that my command of the English language continues to deteriorate exponentially each year I live in Germany. Unfortunately, I do not know any English-speaking persons in my day-to-day life, and thus, when I speak or write in English, I do it poorly.

Even though I have not rewritten with any constancy the years before writing my blogs, I’ve always written: various children’s stories, an outline for a novel, three computer game scripts and a rather long family journal. Each of these projects was written over finite intense periods of time.

Other than the family journal, none of the other documents have been published in the form they were intended. Sometimes this saddens me, most time not. I thought if I studied about the art of writing and reflected upon the importance of writing in my life, maybe I could find a way to join past and current projects.

Presently, I’m working through three very interesting books:

If You Want To Write, A Book about Art Independence and Spirit, Brenda Ueland (1938)
Journal of a solitude, by May Sarton (1973)
One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty (1983)

What is wonderful about each book is that, for each author, life is writing and writing is about life. There is no distinction between the two. They also do not presume to give instruction. They just describe very well how creative living or writing is a long journey, consisting of ever varying landscapes.

The fact that they do not give me lists of things to do, or formal instruction about steps to take in order to be published, has helped me to free my spirit and find ways to transform old projects into new ones.

I’ve decided to rework the children’s stories and illustrate them with collages. I started transcribing (into my computer) my journal entries of the year’s sabbatical I took nearly twenty years ago. I thought I would take the entries from the time before leaving my engineering job at a large German corporation (sounds like Seamens but is spelt different), the year sailing from Scotland to Venezuela, as well as the time afterwards (i.e. before I relocated to Luebeck) and incorporate the personal journal into an interactive, multimedia Internet journal. I’ve also decided to reinvest time and money in selling my game script to Sony again.

What amazes me is how quiet reflection, slow study, and giving myself time to ponder, can create such a shift in perspective. All of that hectic, frantic, I’ve-gotta-decide-now is quite useless, isn’t it?

Wishful Thinking

Wishful thinking. Shopping spree. Momentarily transforming yourself into an impulsive daredevil. Not my thing. Many succumb. But not me. Except for books, music, pens, papers, art supplies, a gossip magazine, and a present for thee.