I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished a lot in the past few weeks, hence no blog posts. I have gotten to this point and I feel like I should speak to my audience a little before things go on.
After much self-doubt and wondering about my future I have finally registered for Fall classes. Starting on August 22, 2006 I will have class every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I have 2 courses in my major (Software Information Systems), 1 course in my minor (Philosophy), 1 course that relates to my major (in the computer engineering department) and 1 course that has nothing to do with my official courses of study, yet (Ceramics). After having a very rough spring semester I am happy to be registered and I am looking forward to an eventful semester. One thing I am considering for fall is an addition of a minor. After a lot of debating with myself, my friends, family and my hair stylist, I am considering an addition of a Studio Art minor in the field of Ceramics to my overall degree program. I am discovering that it takes a lot of things for me to be a complete person.
On the topic of me being a “complete person”, I have been working on my personal website a bit and trying to organize all of my personal webspaces. I have now learned that I am a little too complicated when it comes to my web presence to be able to have a unified web space, but I am going to try it anyway. I have always had individual websites for each of my interests and parts of self, but now I am seeking to make things a little more unified. I don’t think I will ever have just a single website (at least not without a lot of explaining to some people about my darker side ;-). My current goal is to condense (or at least cross link) as much of my web presence as possible. One of the ideas I have had is for a modular system that would let me intergrate the relavant pieces of content into each of my webspaces, but that seems a bit redundant.
The current state of my hobbies hasn’t changed much. For ceramics I mostly throw, fire, glaze, fire and then show off my work. I have been working on making my own glazes some, ive come up with a few interesting colors, but the work on glazes is very challenging. I’m looking forward to spending time in the glaze studio at UNCC this semester to have more time and resources to experiment with. Other hobbies have taken a back seat to ceramics. This is a bit concerning to me, and as a result I have started listing all of my hobbies and am preparing to reactivate a few of my favorites.
In other news, I am now sleeping at night and am being awake during the day. This change should make getting up and going to class each day a lot easier.
My work on GITI has recently been resumed and I am planning to have the education module fully audited and overhauled by the start of the semester.
If anyone can think of anything I missed, send me an email, and I will post an ammendment.
A New Blog
On June 7, 2006 I opened a new blog on my ceramics website. I failed to originally mention it here, consider this your announcement.
The blog is of a more technical nature and is located at http://www.claymentality.net/blog.
The new blog will contain the more technical aspects of my ceramic work, but I intend to still post my more generally relavant posts to this blog and practice the rule of “when in doubt, cross-post”.
Moments of Artistic Passion
In the past few weeks I have had to do a lot of seeking in myself to find a way to pull myself out of a fog I had been in since about the middle of spring. During the past two weeks I have reached my absolute lowest points, looking forward to very little, snapping at everyone and basicly making everyone else suffer because of my bad moods.
Now, for the point of this entry. During the past several days things have been improving. My hardest challenge currently is deciding which of my abandoned projects I wish to return to first, there are quite a few to select from. I can get more serious about ceramics, I can continue the upgrades to GITI, spend more time with the canvas to further explore painting, I can work on one of my numerous websites that I have abandoned or one of many other activities.
There is a point where going from not wanting to do anything, and then wanting to do things but finding that there are a lot of options sometimes becomes overwhelming. I have abandoned a lot of things that I would really like to do. I guess im just going to have to approach it slowly and find ways to ease myself back into it.
A New Accomplishment
Last night I completed a variety of throws, including two of an unusual height. The pieces were at 9.5 and 10.5 inches when they were removed from the wheel. After trimming one was at 10 inches and the other was just below 9 inches. These are my first throws to be above 8 inches in my home studio.
It was a lot of fun doing these throws, there is no feeling like having your arm down in a spinning ceramic work that reaches up to above your elbow. The final pulls were a bit scary because of the height and the perception of a very fragile accomplishment.
9″ Vase
Its been a while…..
Its been several weeks since I have touched my blogs. Where have I been? What was I doing? What were my feelings while I was doing it? I don’t have a fucking clue. I have been mostly ignoring any concept of outward expression lately, in favor of a more silent and closed life. I have been busy with things here or there, but mostly I have been working on my hobbies, talking to friends and helping family. I made a decision in August 2004 that I was going to keep this blog updated and not let it go stale, and I intend to stick to that. I want to start keeping a more active journal of my life, in two forms, public and private. I have tried numerous times to keep an active journal, but paper journals don’t seem to work, and I haven’t taken the time to make GITI’s journal utility not suck and keeping a journal in Word just seems so pointless.
Well…the bar is open (im back to blogging)
First Earthenware Glaze Tests Complete
On Tuesday evening my new electronic balance (Ohaus CS2000) arrived, the final piece of the puzzle for making glazes. I began with 5 simple recipies, of which I used 4 and then made my own 6th.
RT: June 01, 2006
No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.- Aristotle
RT: Becoming
If becoming who you want to be means that you have to give up everything you love, then it probably isn’t who you want to be.
Untitled
The heart is a swirling mass of conflicting emotions. Flowing between self-preservation, caring for people who are special in our lives and the decision proccess that often falls between those two places. One must find the proper balance between the two to have a happy life. Humans are socially dynamic, which creates a situation where it isn’t always possible to maintain the same people throughout one’s life. Friends often pull apart because of a social distance that is formed when the friends begin to develop independant (im starting to hate that word) interests and begin to grow in personality in different directions. Friendships are as fragile as the weakest personality in them. When that weakness is added to something like a loss of trust in a friendship, then the friendship will likely hang in uncertainty until the friendship quietly vanishes, or things improve and the friendship rebuilds itself. I find myself presently at this uncertainty, and wish I had a bit of guidance. As I think of what form such guidance might take I realize all of the offers I have had from my network of friends asking me to talk to them when I have problems. This situation I believe is beyond the abilities of that network, I think at the moment the only thing that will help me is having a strong conversation with the friend and determining where things stand. It is never easy losing friends, it is much more noble to rebuild and not let differences ruin what has been so good for so long. It now occurs to me now that perhaps the problem is not with the friendship, but with the “rules of interaction”. Since we have changed, perhaps the friendship has to change as well to accept the new dynamic.
Removing Myself From Life
I sit here in my room crying as I look back on the past few months of my life. In just a few weeks I have managed to alienate myself from my friends, exclude myself from family events and almost entirely ignore my academic responsibilities. It is a lonely feeling when you realize there is no one left to turn to because of mistakes you have made, not because you aren’t liked. Several months ago I think I began to lose my connection to reality and float off into my own world isolated from any other people. I have developed a infamously short temper, one which everyone who knows me tries to walk on egg shells to avoid. Lately that temper has not been set off by anger, but by hurt. In the proccess my temper hurts others, and I feel even worse in the end.
Yesterday I made a policy to myself to stop hating myself and to try to find the better qualities of myself and let them shine. Today I tried to use those qualities, only to find myself rejected by my friends in the attempt. I guess they thought I wanted something, or somehow wasn’t sincere in my attempts. It makes me happy to do things for people and to share things I have done with people, but if that gets thrown in my face, then where do I get my happiness?
One of the most burdening of my traits is being gay. I used to be able to talk to my friends about things in that area that bothered me, but my high school friends have been gone for a long time, and my other friends either don’t care, or I am not comfortable enough talking to them. My family has been intentionally left out of things because I rely on them for everything in my life, and because of this, I feel that I can’t really tell them the truth without risking everything in my life. I have become so closed off that my family hasn’t even seen things like my ceramics website, or any of my academic work. In my life I am missing someone who loves me, and someone who cares about things I do. It seems like everyone in my life that I care about either doesn’t care about me, or is already too emotionally damaged themselves to be able to care about me unselfishly. Some people care about me because im useful, reliable or can be used as a shoulder to cry on. Another problem I have had in the past is people being too busy to have someone in their lives with such high emotional needs as I have. Sometimes I feel like I should come with a warning sticker “WARNING – High Maintainance Friend”.
I get sick of all of the fights between myself and my friends, the constant depressed feeling, feeling like I am overly emotional and feeling like I want to kill myself. Tonight I am actually feeling ok, between an encouraging phone call from a friend and expressing things that are bothering me through this entry, I am feeling better. Tonight I avoided the fights by pulling out of the situation and reflecting inward for answers to my problems, I wasn’t depressed because I was too busy looking for happy thoughts, my spare emotions are on this page, and finally I didn’t feel like I wanted to kill myself, not sure why that is, but I guess I found a reason to live.