Stuff I did today: Mostly, more cleaning the studio. My desk is almost empty of everything that isn’t either for work or a tchotchke. The pile of papers that had accumulated on it now lives in an expanding file. My coffee table is similarly empty, though there’s some small piles of things that HAD been on it that I haven’t decided exactly where their place is yet. And the rat’s nest of cables in the bottom of the studio closet is more neatly piled up in two baskets, one for USB cables, one for other kinds of cables.
I also finally ran the vacuum for the first time in… too damn long. I think it’s been a few months since I was really able to do it, what with all the Kickstarter stuff in the studio, then the piles of stuff that kinda accreted along with that and winter gloom.
Right now I have MORE packing material on the floor than I did this morning; this is because I finally got tired of not having a trash can this past weekend and ordered one off of Amazon. It got here today and is now lurking next to the kitchen counter; I’m hoping that this will make it a lot harder for me to end up with four big bags of trash hanging out around there. Hopefully it will be a lot easier to just take the damn bag out when it’s full and hump it to the dumpster out back, than when it’s a bag lying on the floor with a few things that never quite made it inside around it.
It has helped that the sun’s been out the past couple of days, but I’m really feeling like that sun lamp I bought has definitely been a change for the better in me. Even when the sun doesn’t come out I feel like I have more energy than I did a couple of weeks ago.
Also I got a tiny amount of work on the next page of Rita done. The bottom tier is finished, and I’m still going back and forth over how much of the top tier needs to be thrown out and redone from scratch, if any – it’s been in progress too damn long and it’s hard to tell any more. I still haven’t really gotten my work habits back yet; those went downhill in the middle of summer, not winter – though winter depression certainly made things worse. I would love to resume regular work on Rita soon, as well as other stuff that’s been hanging!
I’m debating if I want to break down the boxes the sunlamp and the trash can came in when I finish writing this. If I do, then my studio will feel sooooo much closer to being CLEAN again. Modulo the pile of Miscellaneous beneath the drawing table and upon it, but honestly I can deal with having that around and still feel like the place is usably neat.
Also, here are a couple pages from an old notebook that was hiding in the closet amongst the cables.
I’m looking at the change in my handwriting from the first scan to the second one and just going, what the fuck? What happened to “spaces”? And then I looked at the dates. 1982. Yeah. Um. A year after those first pages, my father was dead. There’s another trip after the second one I excerpted, in 1985, which means the trip to Florida was probably in ’84. I didn’t know depression could do that to your handwriting. (It’s also worth noting that the earlier pages were written with a wooden pencil clearly in need of sharpening, while the later one was in mechanical pencil. But still. Nospacesbetweenanyofthewords.Whatthefuckyoupoorkidlosingyourdadsurefuckedyouupbutgood,huh?)