that is, unless i give grad school a try.

gone are the days of artificial stress, now begin the stresses of the real world. in a year i hope to move out of my small town to become a small fish in a big pond. i had some success here at school - got first place in the juried student competition this summer - and now i'll have to see if that translates into real success when i strike out on my own. this summer, in addition to making real plans to move out, i'll be working on art projects to start building my portfolio and get my career as a professional artist off the ground. including a comic project which i'll be bringing you more details on in the future.

and maybe i'll get this grammar thing figured out someday, too.

so i had a local coffee shop/ café/ gallery call me up and ask if i wanted to do a solo show with them to help fill a gap in their line up. naturally i said yes. today, as i was at the local frame shop/ gallery/ coffee shop getting a little framing done. i asked about buying some matt board to make labels for my show. when the owner found out i was showing at the other gallery he got this look on his face like i'd stabbed him in the back. he said i had burned bridges with him and he was no longer willing to show or sell any of my work. he said it should be a lesson to me on how to deal with galleries in the future. he liked me and was extremely hurt that i didn't ask to show with him first. i'd been a loyal customer of his in the past but had no idea he was so eager to show my work.

he should have asked.

while i can understand his desire for exclusivity, i was under the impression that that was the kind of thing that would get spelled out in a contract of some kind. not just thrown out after the mistake was made. well, the valuable lesson has been learned i guess. i wish it wasn't on such a pass/fail basis.

i get the feeling that this has less to do with the local businesses trying to play like the big dogs and more to do with small town business rivalry. one thing's for sure, i need to get out of here before i get to be as bitter as everyone else in town.

so i've been digging around my house trying to find my original concept drawing for the comic i'm working on for class. i drew the thing a year or so ago and know it must be around here somewhere but so far no luck. i have found plenty of drawings from right around the same time (as best as i can remember) just not that one. i did manage to find a wealth of old drawings that i had long since forgotten about. some i have no idea why i never finished them and others i have no idea what i was thinking. i'll keep digging around and see if i can find that original, if not i'll just start over from scratch. either way i need to get these drawings done by the end of the week or i won't have this thing done before the semester is over.

once i get all that done, expect to see a mess of old comic ideas brought back to life. but until then, go find some other filthy comics to read. (Perry Bible Fellowship is quite lovely)


procrastinators are the leaders of tomorrow.

by this time tomorrow i'll be on a plane making my way to Singapore for a much needed vacation. it'll be a week of checking out art galleries, eating real Asian food, enjoying warm weather, and doin other stuff. i'll figure that last part out once i get there.

it's my first time out of the country (really, i haven't even been to Canada yet.) it's about time i see what another part of the world is like. and hopefully some day i'll be making the kind of money where i can make trips like this more often.

anyway i'm off to the city that some guy named William Gibson called "Disneyland with a death penalty." for now i need to get back to packing, i'll catch you guys later.

back in my high school days, my freshman year i took debate. the freshman debate class included a condensed speech class. i forget which speech it was we were working on but one of my classmates came up with one that really stuck with me. her speech was about the word "love" and it's various uses and meanings. specifically it was about how that one little word gets used to describe a wide range of different emotions. for example we use the same word to describe how we feel about or favorite sandwich as we do to describe the person we wish to marry.

so recently i got to thinking about the two girls in the past who i fell in love with and just how different i felt about the two of them. the first was a kind of tingly head rush kind of feeling. the second was more of a peaceful kind of feeling. sort of like reaching contentment or something like that. will the next time be different still?

is it posable to love someone romantically and at the same time feel you might not be right for each-other? i mean i know it's easy to fall for someone who's not right for you. but can you have both feelings at the same time? just how many kinds of romantic love are there?

that classmate's speech expressed a concern that "love" is an abused word. easily thrown around without care. i defiantly agree. i've used the word before when i didn't mean it. i think that's one of the bigger mistakes i've made. i wish i had more words to describe all the emotions we throw under love's blanket. maybe we'd understand each-other better. maybe we'd make fewer mistakes. or maybe we're just idiots who can't be helped no-mater how deep our vocabulary goes.