I turned my first piece in for my creative nonfiction workshop today. I emailed my professor yesterday worried that I had too many pages, which was a first, and that I wouldn't be able to get it together before the due date Thursday.

His response was to inform me that he too was concerned, the number of pages didn't matter, and the due date was actually Tuesday. You see we don't have class on Thursday, one of the only times not having class turned out to be a detriment.

I wrote 4 pages on Sunday and came to no point. It may not seem like a lot, but for me it was a large chunk of writing. I don't write a lot, a blog post is my most frequent style. The longest thing I've written in my life besides research papers is a mildly entertaining screenplay of a miraculous 8 pages of trite descriptions and epicly awkward dialog.

My piece is about a trip to climb Mount Baker with my dad and beyond some supposedly good descriptions I had no idea where I was taking the paper, much less where the story was taking me. I started working on it again at about 11 oclock on Monday and kept piecing it together until about 6:30. I bugged Sam to read and she did, all 11 pages of it, and confirmed my worst fears - it was rather emotionless. There were highlights she pointed out that I hadn't been to proud of before but I started to like.

It's frustrating to want so badly to do something, to reach some kind of goal and fall flat. I guess most people know that, but I'm only reminded every so often of the fact that many things, so many things, take skills that I don't have; or at least that I don't have yet.

It reminds me of sitting in the Shriver food court when Mike asked me what three skills I would want if I was granted them without any effort, without learning or practicing - to just wake up one morning and suddenly be able perform beyond expectation. I remember one of mine was writing. Michael chose cooking.

It's an interesting question and the ultimate illustration of our lazy asses. What would you do if you didn't have to actually do anything? Well, shit, I'd do any number of things, but limit it to 3 and it becomes a great philosophical debate: do you choose for the benefit of yourself or all of humanity? Do you become a neurosurgeon for the thick wallet, or to save the lives of strangers? Is it okay to be motivated by both?

When I think about that question now I wish I had chosen motivation. If I woke up having gained the skill to hone motivation into action I would have an endless ability to chase after any other thing I might want. It would be making your first wish for infinite wishes.

Brain annureisms never seemed so fun

We just watched the pilot to Eli Stone. I wish I had known about this show before tonight, because it was one of the best pilots I've seen in quite a while.

It features George Michael's Faith which I'm fairly confident will be stuck in my head for a few days. Just when I thought I might be able to power through without being reminded of the song Sam pointed out that it's in my iTunes. It's a good song too. Let me demonstrate:

Well I guess it would be nice
If I could touch your body
I know not everybody
Has got a body like you

But I've got to think twice
Before I give my heart away
And I know all the games you play
Because I play them too

The show made me feel like doing something. I like it when shows make me feel inspired or whatever. I wish I had something to write about for my first workshop piece in Creative Nonfiction, it's coming up sooner than I'd like to admit and all I have is a few paragraphs sprinkled in a notebook, every one on a different topic. My problem is that I never realize where my writing is going beforehand. I don't set out with a goal other than to write, and I'm often surprised by the insights that seem to come from those rocky outcrops in my brain.

That's not an entirely bad thing, but it does mean that I have to write through an idea in its entirety before any of it seems to make any sense, so expanding all those paragraphs into full pieces will take quite a bit of time and I'm not sure if it's worth all the work if only one of them will turn out. But then again writing isn't supposed to be easy, right? I guess nothing is. And to think this is my plan for the rest of my life... sweet.

I guess I should give up on the idea that some day I'll be "grown up" and things will come to me more easily. I grew like 5 inches last year but I think that's the extent of my physical expansion, and I don't hold out much hope for my mental expansion - that just sounds painful. Plus if my arms get any longer my coat is going to be one of those three quater sleeved baseball shirts, and as good as I looked in those when I was 15, I'm not sure I could pull that off with a wool overcoat.

It's snowing outside

Originally uploaded by sammysofa

I haven't been blogging much lately. I haven't been doing much of anything lately.

er... maybe I have, being lazy is always kind of a gray area

Samantha and I went to visit my brother Adam and his wife Kendra in Cleveland over the long weekend. Contrary to popular belief, Cleveland does not rock per say. It gets cold there, and no place that has blizzards can be said to "rock." Although Cleveland does have some fantastic things going for it.

One of which being the market where we had fantastic gryos and a decent discussion on the pronunciation of gyro. Of course the wife was there snapping pictures, and in all her glory. I'm stealing this pic from her flickr... hopefully she won't mind.

I'd just like to point out how gorgeous she is. She's asleep on the couch right now, I just snuck in to look at her. She's impressive in many respects. This picture just hints at the great work she does and her good looks.

I really like this picture. I like sitting in my chair and having her ask "Which one is better? This one... or this one... or this one... first... second?" It reminds me of being at the optometrist's office, except fun and entertaining rather than annoying. She doesn't puff my eyes with a giant air gun either.

She may sucker punch me up under the ribs sometimes, but it's still better than that damn air gun, plus I usually know when she's about to abuse me. The optometrist surprises you, Sam is pretty consistent.

Okay, I'll stop it now

The title "sorry about that last one" on the post immediately before this was meant to signify my move away for verbose self reflection. Turns out I wasn't ready to give that up, but now I am.

We got a request from Still Life, a small hipster's paradise in San Francisco. They are interested in carrying some of our items in their store and needless to say, the prospect is exciting.

Today a girl sent a message inquiring about having some artwork printed for her on tote bags or shirts and that prospect is also exciting. I sent her some info about pricing, hopefully she'll at least respond. The last time I sent anything out I never heard a peep, which made me seriously doubt our prices. Hopefully, though, those other people were just browsing, not actually interested in getting down to business which - let's all face it - costs money. It's a unfortunate evil, the spending of money.

Which brings me to my next point: I should never go out, or perhaps I should go out more often. It had been a long time since the Roberts family ventured out of Oxford and we found ourselves in Colerain with the 815 crew. By the time the trip was over I had spent way too much money, and when I got home I just kept going and spent about that much again. Some of it was for giggles, some of it business. I had an itch to buy something and scratched it so hard my bank account started bleeding. I shouldn't get urges, because I can't control myself. Maybe going out more often would keep those urges at bay, but more than likely I'd just spend more money over a longer period of time. Eh, the new surround sound system is pretty rad in the living room so I think I'll survive.

Sorry about that last one

My Creative Nonfiction class is a break from... well everything. I've never taken a class like this - one that celebrates writing in its most natural form: about oneself.

Writing is a dangerous pebble on which so many people dream of balancing. Forget about the fact that nearly all of us fall on our asses, a lot of people are "writers." Now I don't put "writers" in quotes because I am an elitest, a successful writer, or an asshole, I'm none of those although the latter could be argued. I put it in quotes because writing is such a broad craft.

I tend to roll my eyes at the prevalence of the student population, especially in High School, which declare with no uncertain terms that they "write poetry" (that time I was being elitest) but that has mostly to do with my distaste for confessional poetry. I don't like Sylvia Plath, she was whiny and had very little to say that wasn't self aggrandizing, she was enamored with suicide, with people who took their lives and essentially spent a majority of her time patting herself on the back for giving it a shot every 10 years. She died with her head in the oven, she thought he husband would come home and find her, save her, but he was held up at work and got home later than usual. She was interested in being a martyr to her own cause. Of course none of that takes away the fact that she was a great poet and had a great deal of influence on the genre.

My point is that in poetry you can write about your ex and how you cried yourself to sleep or tried to cook your head and it'll pass. It may not be good, and people might not like it, but they'll nod and say to themselves "yup, there's some poetry." But the fact that anyone can partake doesn't make it a democratizing medium, poetry is still transient and every new generation finds a new style in the mad dash to distinguish their poetry from every other amateur's. Creative Nonfiction takes what poetry started, blows it apart and the pieces scatter, anyone can pick up a piece of the genre and make it their own. You don't have to have credentials, you don't need a nod from the critics to reach out and connect with people, you don't need to attempt suicide or even cry yourself to sleep although, admittedly, all of these things would make a great narrative.

Whenever I start to write I'm constantly plagued by the fact that I'm a white, middle class, young male. The De Facto history of my people points to the fact that I'm the reason for other people's problems, they should write about me, and I should stay the villain. But this class has taken a crowbar to the notion that tragedy alone breeds good literature. I've noticed that even in the most mundane situations of the pieces I've read there is something to be gained, a knowledge that this author posses which I can't learn any other way. Sure I can experience the same idea, the same emotions, the same day under the same sun, but until I read how the sun felt on their face I retain a bias toward my own existence. It is up to them to tear down how I have experienced life and rebuild it with a piece of their understanding. In the end most succeed and I feel as if each time I am rebuilt I grow steadily upward toward a culminating human experience.

I'm easily accustomed to things. Say you took away my routine - what little routine I have - I would just work around it, create another way to go about my day. Say the ceramic coaster by my computer broke, I'd replace it with the top of a tupperware container. Say the floor was covered in clothes, I'd learn to step lightly on only the dirty ones.

So, naturally, I've become accustomed to mild weather. For as cold as it has been one day there has always been a string of decent days. Well today wasn't one of the decent days, far from it. Campus was an ice sheet, the rain froze to my windshield before the wipers could brush it aside and it was cold. Bitterly cold.

Usually I don't mind my toes being cold. I've never been out in the snow without my toes being cold. It reminds me of waking up late for school, terribly late, and hiding in my bed hoping that the blazing angelic light on the ceiling was from the mirror of ice spread across the woods behind my parent's house. My mom never forgot to wake me up, it was exhilarating to have that sudden fear that she had somehow lapsed on her motherly duties, fear that it was my fault and she had woken me, left for work and I failed to get on the bus, and then to realize that a sudden snowfall had knocked out the bus route up the big hill in front of my neighborhood.

It was cause for celebration and I was never prepared. I didn't watch the news for closings, or worship the word of the weathermen, every time I prayed for a snowday it was jinxed. I wore my pajamas inside out (when I was older and slept naked I actually wore pajamas specifically so that I could put them inside out) but nothing ever came of it. I would do my homework, sometimes hoping that like carrying an umbrella if I was prepared there would be no reason to be prepared, but nothing ever worked and snowdays were, and still are, a completely random indulgence, a gamble I would never make, but was happy to cash in on.

I lacked the religious zeal that most kids had for snowdays, the rituals seemed to work for them while I kept myself out of it. I felt bad to be responsible for the jinxing of all our snowdays so I didn't try. I didn't have a snowsuit on standby, either. Every snowday would send me scrambling through the basement, digging out snow bibs of every size, sometimes I had to settle for one that had suspenders so big they would fall off my shoulders or one from years earlier that rode up in the crotch and made sliding down an icy hill on my butt an even more jarring experience, if you know what I mean. Apparently my mom never got rid of my brother and my old snowsuits, and I always grabbed the wrong size first.

I didn't own "snow" boots, my family hiked, so we had hiking boots. There's a reason mountaineers don't wear leather boots on the glaciers: they are freezing cold, even with a pair or two of thick wooly socks. Your toes get locked into a cave in the end of your boot, the tip of a boot could keep the mud off your toes, but the cold air would leak in just the same. And once you had cold air in your boots it wouldn't come out. It just sat there, fed from the outside as you trudged through the snow, and if the snow was deep enough, and you were carelessness enough, the snow would come up over the top and work its way down into the cave and that meant trouble. Snow in the boot is the number one killer of sledding expeditions. Inevitably someone would get snow in their boots and all was lost, if one valiant sledder had to go home, even on the promise of a quick stop at base camp and a prompt return, it was over. They would never come back and once the team got to thinking about the lost comrade it seemed like hot chocolate was better than getting snow in your boot. But, to the bewilderment of most people, losing a man on Everest never meant you wouldn't try again, in the infinite wisdom of my adolescence the snow would always be there tomorrow. As far as I can remember we only had 2 consecutive snowdays my entire life.

Every snowday came about and went about pretty much this same way. Of course, at the time nothing seemed more natural. It never occurred to me that they were all the same. I mostly needed to go through the woods with my sled, meet Michael half way and try my best to keep from getting hurt while we tried to kill ourselves on a neighbor's hill, getting cold and waiting for snow to get down in my boot so I could go home and drink some hot chocolate. It didn't matter that by the time we were 17 I drove to Mike's house, or that we took along his baby nephew (mostly because the kid had a sled, and ours had vanished over the years) or that we realized walking up the hill wasn't worth the four second ride back down, the snow was never as perfect as it used to be and we were too heavy to glide along and sank down like overweight Yetis on a busted up Snoopy sled. I never thought about it, it never mattered. Instead we might lay out in the snow and talk about school, the strange idea of college, the ass on that girl in the band who sat near Mike or the strange feeling of sweating under the layers when it's cold as hell outside. Snowdays weren't about the mundane, I overlooked their rhythm, the fact that each one was identical to any other. We were out in the snow, in the woods where so much of my childhood was created so quickly, doing nothing. Who cared if snowdays meant today's obligations would collide with tomorrow's commitments? Shit, I had snow in my boot and the only thing that could fix it was hot chocolate.

They closed campus early today, but all of my classes were over anyways. Skating my way to my car the wind blew and all of a sudden I noticed that my feet were freezing cold, it felt like the black burn of frostbite. I can't seem to get them warm and I can't help but notice how cold they are. I wish I could blame the snow in my boots but there seems to be no explanation and I can't help but notice how much it bothers me.

Ice, Ice Baby

Vanilla Ice is a true hero. A new shirt in his honor.


Too cold, too cold.

I really wanted to use my Glow-in-the-Dark ink, which I haven't even cracked open even though I bought it in December. I needed a good excuse, because that stuff is really expensive, like double the price of normal ink. I don't even remember why this idea hit me, or from which direction it came, but BOOM this shirt hit me like a 9mm.

What's more perfect than having the ability to say "Turn out the lights and I'll glow!" while flipping off the lights at a party and actually glowing? I can't believe how well the glow ink works, you can see it in the picture, the lighter area over the word "glow," but if you step into a dark room with this puppy on it's really quite impressive. I held it up to a lightbulb for a few seconds and turned out the light and the shirt had enough glow to illuminate my hand inches away.

I need some more ideas for glow shirts, I glow will make a nice decorative addition to any shirt. I'm thinking of a shirt which has one design in light, and a completely different look in the dark. I'll have the pictures of the shirt glowing up as soon as I can, it's harder than you'd think.

In regards to the photoshoot

I love my wife. That may seem like a silly thing to say, but there's plenty of people who don't love their wives.

Every day she says something that makes me laugh. Sometimes it's an inward laugh, or sometimes just something she does (and she thinks I'm laughing at her) other times I laugh out loud.

But it's rare that an email makes me laugh. She sent me this today:

"In regards to the photoshoot

It's the perfect day to take pictures! I figure I can photoshop out the goose bumps."

Funny thing is, I'll totally go stand out in the cold if she wants to. If it was anyone else I would just pull the shades and pretend I wasn't home.

Sleep to dream

Some of the best ideas come from seemingly no where. I am reading Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and having a string of very odd dreams. There is seemingly no connection between the two.

Last night the last thing I remember is thinking "Oh God, don't think about that. Now I'm going to have a dream like that." I don't even remember what it was. One of those creepy, unnecessary worst case scenarios that pop in my head on a daily basis I'm sure. I think I must be a nervous person. I have never really considered myself a nervous person, but maybe I am. Damn, that makes me nervous.

And it's not that talking to customer service representatives on the phone makes me feel physically ill (I'm getting better) or that I get embarrased when the machine won't read my Credit card (which is getting worse). What bothers me is that today I heard people yelling in the basement of the Shriver Center. They sounded angry and plentiful, as if two groups of rivals had unexpectantly met outside of the bookstore. They were screaming and I immediately imagined one of the phantom voices around the corner pulling a gun. My imagination never works like the movies, he doesn't wave around this pistol and demand things, threatening bystanders and proving a point; he pulls a gun to shoot. It's not symbolic, it's destructive.

The only consolation that comes to me when I think these things is that I know they are absurd, which allows me to become a hero, waiting for the man to turn his back and then kneeing him in the face, sending his gun sliding across the linoleum. I'm comforted by the fact that, if some day someone pulls a gun, I'll have run the scenario on the silver screen of my mind so many times that I won't be stunned into inaction. I will react. Unless, of course, this person is a customer service representative, in which case I might just get nauseous. And I wonder why I have a hard time sleeping.

But, like I said, the best of ideas sometimes poke up from the strangest of places. Not sleeping very well means you've got extra time. I spent some time thinking about my strange dreams, and reading about our valiant protagonist, the Invisible Man, outrunning the dream of his grandfather. This lead me to pick out some imagery that sometimes pops into my dreams and create a new shirt design. I am proud of the results, and it became the fastest selling item we have ever listed online. I wasn't timing it, but the first of the Aegri Somnia shirts sold in under 10 minutes.

That's a gratifying feeling, not only is someone interested enough to give you money, but they just can't wait. Sure it's a little ego-centric and self aggrandizing, but there's nothing quite like it to help me fight back all the worst case scenarios that float around, bumping the sides of my skull. It helps me sleep.

MoTowne, mo money

In what appears to be the ultimate blog tradition, I will post something simply because I like it and then not make any kind of grandiose statement or verbose speeches.

Here it is, MoTowne's Etsy shop, original art I would actually like to own. It's a bargain, too.

Ægri Somnia

I dream about a large glass of water. I'm holding it with both hands; it is full and heavy. With some effort I can raise it to my mouth and peer down into the ocean held within, it is perfectly clear down to my distorted feet. They quiver and pop, pieces tear away smooth like mercury and snap back. My legs dance to an invisible rhythm as if compelled by the tides. When I drink my lips wrinkle the water and my feet tap out the offbeat. I won't ever finish this glass and I am happy.

When I lift my head above the rim my mother-in-law is there, distorted as if the world was full of swirling water. Her arm is outstretched, a tight fist draws my attention to the thumb sticking straight up and gently pulsing in the current. She speaks and the sound of her voice is crisp, clean and full of praise. "Water's a good choice. It's really good for you" she says.

When I woke up this morning all I wanted was a glass of water.

Do you have a light?

Today was our Valentine's Day celebration with Samantha's family. They came up to Oxford and we ate at Houston Woods and watched the girls play Wii.

They brought a set of iron patio furniture for us and I when I went to help unload it Sam asked if I wanted my Valentine's present. Turns out the day she "had to babysit" for her mother she was really spending the day with her dad building me a lightbox.

Which is awesome, to say the least. This thing is huge and pretty heavy. It's made of really nice wood and a plexiglass top that slides out with the removal of a few screws so you can replace the light bulbs. There are 4 two foot light UV lights and the thing even has an on/off switch.

Needless to say this is way better than my plans for making my own, which would inevitably ended in miles away from my plans and in utter frustration.Oooh. Aaahh

I'm letting a screen dry and then I'm going to test that sucker out. I'm afraid it's going to take some major experimenting to find out the exact exposure time, but after a few tries I should have it all worked out. I'm willing to put in the time because retail these puppies sell for at least 500 dollars, and one of this quality would probably be worth more.

I also printed up shirts for the Freund family, as their Valentine's presents. They all turned out really well. Emma helped with hers (the green robot) and I think she might make a nice little screen printer. Of course, she's good at everything so why am I surprised?