Where Has the Time Gone?

Whoa, guys.

Just... whoa.

It's been a while. For those of you who follow me on tumblr (geeky-jez), you know that I have still been around online, but mostly in reblogging rather than generating my own content. I got swallowed up by my own life for the past year or so. Since our last visit:

• I finished my cosplay project, but had to cut it back to just finishing the helmet, due to getting flooded with more hours at work.
• I was promoted twice (with only a few weeks between promotions) into two full time positions and began managing my store.
• I got a second job as an artist working at an up and coming game development studio in town.
• I have had all of my free time sucked into staffing problems, training new people, dealing with some complete assholes, and getting generally depressed that my retail day job was taking me away from being able to do many of the things I love.

And then, in the first week of March:

• We found out that one family member is going through a cancer scare and had her roommates move out on her with no notice and without paying their last month's rent.
• Another family member collapsed, had to be rushed to the hospital, was showing signs of dementia, and had us panicking about his well being.
• A friend got beaten up by their partner (who is thankfully now an 'ex'.)
• I got a severe stomach flu that kept me from eating any proper food for a full week (and even then, it took me about a week after I could eat again to be able to not get nauseated by the smallest amount of food).
• I was still having to manage my store via phone while heavily medicated on drugs that made me either sleep or start slipping into a dreamy stupor of slowed mental ability any time I was forced to stay awake.
• I had a break down where I realized that I had to put in my two week's notice at work - not only to handle the possibility of having to leave town to help my family, but also because I feel I need to re-evaluate my priorities. Realize that I am the type of person who hates to give up in anything, even if I am miserable with stress, so walking away from a job is terrifying in it's own right.

All of which happened between Monday the 4th and Sunday the 10th.

March also brought us news of the attempted suicide of a friend. 

Understandably, I feel a bit overwhelmed.

It's scary to walk away from a job, but at the same time it feels oddly liberating. I am finally getting the opportunity to rediscover what I actually like to do with my time. It has only been a recent change (my time only became my own again on the 24th) - but the promise of having control over my day again is enticing. I hope to re-approach the commission work that I had to close down due to lack of time - and I hope to restart this aspect of my life from the perspective of a businesswoman as well as an artist. While the stability of having someone else hand me a paycheck is alluring, I also dream about being able to control my own fate more and overwhelm myself with work that I find stimulating and enjoyable.

I will put together that tutorial on the Skyrim helmet - which turned out to be freakin' awesome, if I do say so myself. And I will commit to being more diligent about pursuing my passions (even if I do have to wander back into a day job to pay the bills).

Allonzy- Alonzo!

Creating the Dovahkiin

Realistically, this is my first cosplay.

I've dressed up before to go to conventions or nerdy gatherings: I wore my best Browncoatesque Western/Chinese hodgepodge to the premiere of Serenity, with the Chinese character for Serenity painted on my cheek. I threw together a pretty impressive closet Steampunk for a trip to Gen Con last summer that I didn't think would happen. I even went to SDCC in a costume for one of the days... though it wasn't one I was particularly proud of or would have picked for myself.

But this is my first time actually picking a fandom I am passionate about and constructing a costume that replicates it's source material to the best of my ability.

I am not a total n00b when it comes to fabrication and costume work. I have a pretty extensive background in theatre (though I haven't been in that world for many years now) and have a fairly wide variety of experience in arts and crafts. Still, I've never faked armor. Or prop weapons. Or done any work with wonderflex, friendly plastic, or many of the other materials that cosplay costumers use.

Also, I'm generally pretty strapped for cash.

This will be a journey into frugal cosplay. I have a passion for fabrication and look forward to pushing myself into recreating as much of this costume as possible while also pinching my pennies. I don't have a workshop or a garage that's cleared of stuff. I don't have a workbench or many tools (unless I dig through the spider-and-dust-coated-pit that is my basement). But I do have creativity and an intense level of satisfaction when I can macgyver something together rather than purchase it pre-made.

Coming Soon: Chapter 1 - The Helmet

12.03.06

I honestly don't know how I feel about this video.

Many times when I'm recording something, I jot down some thoughts ahead of time and I start to record as if it were a performance - the words are mine, the thoughts are mine, and I'm not stiffly reading from a script, but I try to stay brief and concise and animated. It makes it easier to edit and creates a better end product. To watch the raw footage, you'd often see me repeating myself frequently, going back to do another take of whatever point I'd last said, because I want to make sure it looked and sounded right.

This is not one of those videos.

Recording this kind of got away from me. I was not really in control. I started out with a vague sense that I wanted to talk about my feelings - that I needed to get something off of my chest. I had been looking back through footage of a deceased friend and was overcome with emotion while talking about it. I stopped thinking about the fact that I was making a video. I just started talking.

This is probably one of the most honest and intimate moments I've ever recorded... and that scares me a little.

I edited it, thinking I would cut a lot of it out. When the final cut was made, I wondered if I'd even post it. I posted it, not sure if I was going to promote it at all - maybe it could sit in obscurity in my Youtube channel and only the occasional stranger would notice it.

I've obviously changed my mind and decided to share it.

Still not sure how I feel about it, though.

10 Years Later

It's time to talk about something that's not fun. It's not amusing and it's not for entertainment. However, given the situation, I really feel like I need to write this down.

Today is the 10th of September, 2011. I don't need to tell you what event has it's 10 year anniversary tomorrow. For the past week, maybe longer, I have heard talk of 9/11 crop up in virtually every outlet I have for news. I won't lie; for the most part, I've been ignoring it. Part of me feels guilty about it, but part of me is completely jaded about the whole thing.

Me only months before 9/11.

Consider this: I was fourteen years and a few months old when it happened. I was old enough to understand the gravity of what was happening and yet young enough to have my formative years bombarded by the post-9/11 culture of the United States. I traveled A LOT as a kid (flying back and fourth between parents) and watched what had been a fairly enjoyable and exciting activity for me turn into one full of anxiety, suspicion, and high security. I grew up in a country where there was an intensified fear, suspicion and even hatred of the "other" - even though the terms that defined the "other" varied somewhat from time to time. People talk about how the United States came together after 9/11 and that is certainly true in the people to volenteered time, money and resources into helping their fellow man. But that's not the America I really ever got exposed to. I never saw any of that behavior (even though I know in retrospect it was happening throughout the nation). I watched the news very often as a teen, so I grew up with the stories of the latest threats and crimes, not the kindness in people's hearts. I felt the intense potential for coming together, like people desperately wanting to cling to each other into one giant national hug. But within months, that just seemed to slip away. The desire to feel some sort of resolution, to have something positive come out of the event, went unfulfilled for me. Instead, I just watched the country go back to the same in-fighting and pointing fingers that it has always done. To my young mind, it seemed that nothing had changed in the way we treated one another, just the way in which we wrapped ourselves in the flag and declared that those who disagreed with us must want to hurt America- be they our countrymen or not. I also had a family friend who is a close relative of John Walker Lindh... which, as you can probably imagine, gave me a fairly unique perspective on the "American Taliban" who was absolutely demonized into a two dimensional cartoon villain by most of the news reports I saw. (Note: I am not making a judgement here about what he did or the degree to which he deserved punishment, etc. I only bring it up because I grew up with a very real reminder that the "enemy" is a real human being and it's easy to forget that the real world is a very complicated place if you just listen to what you're told in the media.)

I couldn't help but feel jaded about the whole situation, as this anniversary approaches. I didn't want to hear news stories of people re-informing us about something that we haven't allowed ourselves to ever forget. Combine that with the fact that I thoroughly disagree with the direction our country has taken in reacting to the attacks, and I end up seeing 9/11 as just the beginning in a huge senseless tragedy.

And then I watched this absolutely stunning video about 9/11.

I think the simplicity of it is what really struck me. After all the talk about 9/11 and what it means, what changes it has or hasn't made in this country, the religious prejudice that has come out of it and whether or not it is justified, etc. etc. etc.

But to simply see it all again left me with no other option than to write this. It took me back to that morning, to waking up and going downstairs and seeing the second tower fall. It took me back to that feeling of absolute helplessness and confusion as I tried to process what had just happened, wanting desperately to watch the news but instead being shuffled off to school with no understanding of who or why or how, just that so many people had just died in a grotesque and completely random way. It took me back to being a young teen who realized that life is completely taken for granted: that I could have my life snuffed out in an instant and that it could have nothing to do with what I do with my life or how I choose to treat people. Being alive, I realized, was completely out of my control. Outside of suicide, living or dying was not something I could choose or control and I could be the most altruistic human being on Earth and still be killed in a completely random and senseless way. All those people had died, hadn't they? None of them had done anything to deserve it. Any ideas that I had about a world that was structured or purposefully fated was destroyed. Any faith that I tried to convince myself I had in anything beyond the great capacity for human goodness and evil pretty much vanished in the process of trying to understand and cope with what had happened. I will never not feel sorry, so intensely sorry, about those who died that day and the damage that was done. 9/11 is not something that is frequently on my mind, but I can't deny that it has had a huge effect on who I have become.

Photo from my trip to Ground Zero some years ago.

Deep breaths everyone. Thank you for letting me have that moment. I promise things will be more lighthearted shortly.

*giggle*

It's been one of those days. Which is why I'd like to end it with this:

Also, there is a bottle of bacon flavored syrup in my house. Not maple syrup with bacon flavor, but pure bacon syrup, made for cocktails and lattes. I really don't know what to make of this, but I think a shot of it is in my future.

Unscheduled Detour

Just wanted to take a moment to say the following:

Life is hectic, stressful, and exhausting and can often feel like an endless list of things you need to do followed by an equally long list of obstacles - and it is wonderful, all the same. I think we often get so bogged down in our day to day struggles that we don't necessarily take the time to breathe and think about the good things that we have as opposed to the good things we want but can't yet acquire. Even simple things - like having a job, even if it is not the job that you want, or having a place of your own even if it's a little shabby around the edges.

It brings me back to something I was thinking about the other night - where I currently work, I get to do a lot of people watching and many of the people I see are tweens and young teenagers. I know that at that age, you never want to be told that you are still a child because it feels like it completely dismisses you as an intelligent being able to make your own decisions and rationalize about a situation. In simpler terms, it makes it sound like the adults around you think you're stupid. But many times, when adults tell you that you're still a child or that you shouldn't want to grow up too fast, it's not meant as an insult. It's simply because we can look back at ourselves at that age and recognize that we were not nearly as grown up as we thought we were - and we feel as if we can never go back to the way we felt as children. We can't go back to a time where we can lay out in the grass and feel the sun on our faces and not have to fight the urge to think about the bills we have to pay or the errands we have to run or that jerk in accounting.

I was always told that I was very mature for my age as a young teen (and to a certain extent, I agree). Even as I generally avoided the social dramas that seemed so important to many of my peers that I recognized as fleeting moments of overreaction, I still look back at myself in retrospect and think of how much I have changed in such a short amount of time. I wonder if I'll feel the same way in the next few years...

In any case, this was more of a free-flowing entry and is not really sticking to the theme of geekery, but I felt an urge to write it down. Even as I sit here, exhausted from a long day and thinking about all the work I'm going to have to do on my day off tomorrow, I'm glad that I can make a place in my mind to quietly think about the craziness of my life and how I would hate to miss a minute of it, good or bad.

42: Life and all that other stuff.

Just a short and personal post this time. I promise, I'll get back into analyzing news tidbits or ranting about the culture of gaming soon.

<insert clever segue here> Get it? Segue sounds like Segway. Dammit. Nevermind.

Things are looking up for me, though I'm a little tentative in saying so. I've started putting in a new round of applications and my fiance's position at his new job promises to be very stable. I'm trapped in the Midwestern heat wave at the moment, which is fairly irritating. It means I don't leave the house unless I absolutely have to and we all know what that can lead to.

Working out while the weather is oppressively warm requires and extra level of motivation that I've been trying to muster up. Even in my air conditioned home, the stuffiness and humidity is inescapable.

Also, total non sequitur here: I've been watching a lot of Star Trek: Voyager since it showed up on Netflix. For those of you who don't know, I watched that show religiously since the day it aired. I would be amazed if there was a single episode that I haven't seen, but I know that there are many that I don't remember. Considering that I was in elementary school when the series began, it's understandable that my memory may be a little foggy on the details. Still, watching that show is like chicken soup for my soul. When I'm in a bad mood or when I'm sick, all I really want to do is curl up with some tea and watch Voyager. I like spending some fictional time with Harry Kim, the 'red shirt' who would never die (except that one time) and the Doctor who was probably one of my favorite characters of all time. While I have a lot of love for Next Gen (and I plan on watching all of Deep Space Nine eventually), Voyager is my own personal favorite.

Who can resist Janeway and her Gibson Girl hair?

Curvy Geek - def. Uncertain

I will thoroughly admit this now - I am not certain what I want this blog to become. I feel the stirrings of change and feel the need to document it, which is not surprising considering that I am

1) in my early twenties, struggling between doing what I love and doing what is necessary to pay the bills

-and-

2) desperately missing the thrill I used to feel when putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as I suppose is most appropriate here.)

I expect that this blog will be filled with a sprinkling of reviews, a dash of things-that-inspire-me, a sprig of health and fitness, a pinch of journaling and a whole heaping dose of personal musings. This blog is a lot like myself - full of lots of concepts and ideas, but not really able to put a definite finger on any simple categorical definition.

Unless that definition is simply "Odd"

That being said, a little bit about myself:
As of this posting, I am just barely 24 years old. I have a part time job as a Standardized Test Evaluator (and great googly moogly I wish I could post about some of the wacky shit these kids come up with... darn confidentiality) and am trying to make a livable wage off of freelance graphic design and illustration. I'm a fairly healthy adult, but not slim enough to keep the occasional jerk from feeling free to shout insults about my weight at me (yay, maturity!).

I used to do a lot of creative writing when I was younger - had a whole series of books going with a list of people at school who'd line up to read them. Then, one day, I simply couldn't continue. I told myself at the time that it was stress mixed in with a healthy dose of teenage depression that squashed my creativity like a blind worm trying to cross a highway, but in retrospect have come to realize that I was also running out of ideas. While the books were a great achievement for my age, they weren't the most inspiring pieces of literature and there's only so far that I could stretch the concepts I was working with before I began to feel dissatisfied with the quality of my work.

Not that completely halting my writing for the better part of 5 years was satisfying either. Guess my subconscious didn't really think ahead in that respect.

I recently graduated college with a BA in Psychology. It's a field that fascinates me, but I keep wavering about whether or not it was a good choice. On the one hand, it's a good general degree that I can apply to a number of fields as far as careers go. On the other hand, it's a field that I can't really get work in unless I go to grad school. Not only am I not in the right financial place in my life to afford grad school without loans that I can't afford or asking more from my parents than I am comfortable with, but frankly I got very burned out in college. The last few months of my senior year were a mess - my grades were good, but I had a horrible time trying to balance the stress of paying bills, going to work, going to class, going through an emergency surgery, struggling with my landlords, and supporting my fiance as he desperately searched for work in this terrible economy. Once I graduated, I was done with school for a while.

The funny thing is, while I don't want to go back to school at this point in my life, I do miss the structure that it gave me. I was always a high achiever in school - academics came easily to me (ignoring the higher-level math courses) and I think a good amount of my self esteem depended upon school as the ruler to judge my value against. Without that... it's gotten a little harder to feel like a good productive person. Looking for work at a time when jobs are hard to come by has made it harder to feel positive about the things I am doing with my life.

But rather than wander down the road of existential crisis, let's end this post here. I hope I can post things that are useful, entertaining and possibly inspirational. Assuming I do so, then maybe even one day I can get an actual audience to speak to. It's an odd feeling to speak to everyone and no one at the same time as I post this, knowing that the chances of anyone reading it may be slim.

Be good, be happy, and try not to freak out all the time.

Jez