• Last month I quit my very worthwhile, intense, interesting and secure city clinic RN job. I haven’t had so many good nights of sleep in a row for... jeez, I don’t know, probably not since I started nursing school in 1996. I don’t think all those years were a total false start—I want to stay involved with public health somehow, whether it’s volunteer work or activism or just writing about it—but I’d rather not do that again for a while.
• There’s still a sweet pretty lady and a weird dog living in my apartment. This is good. My country is still in lousy shape, and some people I love are having a bad time. This is bad. To do: not take the good or the bad for granted, keep both trees & forest in the picture.
• I’m freelancing as a computer programmer; right now I’ve got a little very-part-time work through a friend, and we’ll see how it goes. The computer stuff is something I never really did on purpose, just kind of fell into as random opportunities came up. I like it better when it’s on purpose, and it’s nice to pick up and dust off some of these weird skills I didn’t have any more use for—they’re like little robots who were patiently waiting in storage.
• Of course if someone wanted to give me some money for art, that would be very nice. I’m not ready to go out hustling as an illustrator, I don’t know how the hell people do it, but I want to take every chance I get to collaborate with people and work on things more steadily. I had fun doing a lot of drawings for someone else’s humor thing that’s being shopped around now, and it that turns into a real book deal, that’ll be great and I’ll tell you all about it.
• Still thinking vaguely about art school, although probably not soon (could be a hassle trying to go back to school at the same time as my sweetie starts her grad studies, plus I’m still not sure what my job is). A friend pushed me to go to an open house event for MFA programs, and I got to talk to some (mostly*) friendly school people about what I’d need to do if I wanted to go that route: basically, get serious and start trying to do more & different kinds of things. That’s a good plan no matter what—I haven’t really gone near paint or other media for at least 15 years, once I found out what a kick it is to do drawings and have them appear in print. (* I did get a little bit of “silly comics are not art” attitude from some of the schools, but not much. The only really obnoxious remark was that I hadn’t found my “voice” yet because I drew different stories in different styles. Wha?)
• Not being so tired all the time, and not being depressed, has deprived me of my main excuse for acting like a wallflower. Now when I go to a party I’m awake enough to notice that I also just have a big social anxiety problem. To do: work on that.
• All these reviews I’m putting on the blog lately aren’t because I’m having a compulsive episode or something, it’s just that I’d been wanting to do that for a while & saved up a lot of notes.
I’m gonna go out in the back yard and try to plant some things.