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I don’t like it when I have a whole dayplan of Stuff To Do in my head for at least five days ahead. Not when my motivation is: to get out of here.

…If I wake up at six(thirty) and take the dog out and eat breakfast, and look through the suburb photos, and write some of the text. Start doing sketches. Take long overdue books to library. Go to school. Lecture? maybe not. Food. Make terrain model. Draw. Ballet class at seven. (Oh remember the repair sewing to pointe shoes!) Make list for foodthings for the party. Look for recipes for the punch. (and then there will be two of my friends and two of K’s and we’ve done all this food and that’s because i have no friends and no one in the world wants to come…) I wish I don’t have to go to school on Sunday to do the urban planning stuff. I want to go to yoga…

I come home from school and it’s so dark outside and I’m too tired to draw or paint. Today like yesterday. I’d forgotten how this is.

needed wanted:
envelopes, thicker coloured paper, gold paint, printer ink, drawing ink (of some colour), stuff to make wings of, transfer-on-paper letters, spangles, new paintbrushes

Tuesdays are free days, packed with miles long To Do-lists. My baby (Onni the dog) is here for the week. He wakes me up early in the morning and takes me out, then falls asleep for the rest of the day while I avoid work. Dreaming of adventures makes his paws and nose twitch. Maybe he is chasing after rabbits, or shoes (like the flip flop he gnawed on the most of last night), my cityliving dog.

p.s. finnish fashion cuteness: sohjo, deliriusmonkey, chocho-bags, miun, and street fashion-pics from hel-looks

So what if-
We paint the kitchen wall green like in the movie. Make golden frames. Put up all the art. If I get the photo paper. The sofa to the dining room. And a bigger desk. And I will steal the kitchen table when I paint. (Because some days I am afraid I steal your breathing space.)

Sometimes I forget last winter and my walks on ice. I forget the simple difficulty of mornings. Sometimes I forget two months ago. Sometimes I forget what I know; That it’s all about Sunday mornings watching movies. That there is nothing that I really need right now that isn’t here.

why is it easier to stay up too late than fall asleep in time or even, hmm, wake up too early. why do i cut classes on first week of school (not lectures, mind you, something left for next week). and why do i have this thirteen year old living inside me that stunts all my adult-like behaviour.

happiness is: five hour naps. my own bed. new books (sabrina ward harrison, contemporary illustration). free mornings (time and more time). strawberries and soy-yoghurt. third cup of coffee. indian ink drawings (why haven’t i done this in years?) stories writing themselves.

art challenge!

it is your job as designers to turn the ordinary into extraordinary. there is no design assignment too small; they are equally important, whatever the scale. if your input doesn’t bring any added value, reconsider.

I write three pages of notes on my town planning lecture then tire and drift into sleep. I pick the Parapluies de Cherbourg for my movie/book analysis, surprised no one’s taken it, that people don’t know it. School is this bizarre place, it sucks you into a frenzy “what studio, are you taking it? should i take it? what if i did that course. and that.” All my school stuff is still in a box in the attic. All CAD uninstalled, waiting for a new computerhome.

I come home, crawl in my bed, wonder whatever happened to summer, those two comic books and the writing project with K. The contributions to webzines, sending out samples and things. Things. And I am almost certain that if I blink my eyes, it will be winter, just like that, and spring and …

But I got on the swedish course.

other: September inspiration links. Joy’s pictures from Hyper Island, Karlskrona.

Memory prints. (weird shared genetics.) Small ears, nonexistent baby armhair, smooth skin. Soft blond hair like no one has. Nose crooked to the left. (I wonder what you make notes of.)

A week of sitting on the stairs of the old fire station, looking for sunny spots, drinking endless cups of coffee. Time is something that happens far away. There is only this, and board games, bad jokes and cigarette breaks which are more of an alone-thing for me. I steal moments to spend on my favourite place and write a bit everyday.

First night we almost yell at each other, but somehow that feels more true than anything after. Some night I sit down on the sofa and he wraps his arm around me, a caress on my back. And we kiss, and kiss.

Home everything is how I left it, only neater and smaller. New old chairs for the kitchen, at last. A postcard from Beijing. A broken oven door and a flatmate away for a week. Real life still seems very far away..

rainboots, sketchbook, sweaters(2), sleeping bag, flashlight, fork, knife, kettle…

Camping and drawing for a week, back next sunday!

In the circus, of course, everyone knows the show must make money in order to continue, but it’s the circus, not the money, that provides the livelihood. I mean that they don’t keep the circus going in order to make money; they make money in order to keep the circus going. An artist might see it this way: there’s a difference between painting in order to make money and making money in order to paint. -DQ

It’s a funny shift in thinking, deciding to take only the courses you perceive to be useful and that interest you. Sure it should be like this all along? Listen everyone bitch and moan for having to go on a camp for a week to measure and draw old buildings. Because they have to. You don’t have to. You choose to do so, you like drawing.

It’s freeing to quit thinking about degrees and start thinking about learning as a personal process. Taking responsibility and stopping whining. It’s also scary as hell.