Sleeplessness

Well hello world...

This seems to be a theme with me. Once again midnight, lying in bed, unable to sleep. Sometimes I really just can't turn my brain off.

So I promised myself that I would start writing at least 300 words of my story every day this year. Not happening yet... If only it was easier to translate feelings and emotions into words. I bought myself a couple nice clean journals the other day. One is to collect character sketches, descriptions, and ideas. The other is to write down my story  once it's been finished. Hopefully that will inspire me to get working.

Part of the problem us that I am working though. Which I am very grateful for by the way. (Have I mentioned I really love my job?)

Sometimes I feel just like I'm swimming in circles. Always having the same problems and needs and always promising myself the same thing. What I really need to do is to stop procrastinating and thinking so much and just get to work.

One thing I gave been thinking about a lot lately though is people and our dependence on each other.  I'm thinking about doing a full post on it sometime. We'll see.

Anyhow here goes yet again another sleep attempt.

Another post hopefully upcoming-Sherlock Holmes Game of Shadows movie review.

Love and Hugs!

What

Imagine...

Imagine being able to completely accept who we are, to never experience moments of despair that we will never be what we believe we 'ought' to be.  To never torment ourselves with accusations of why we are not thinner, more attractive, more popular, more witty, more successful, more...anything but who we are.  Imagine being able to be oblivious of ourselves, to just live, taking on challenges and experiencing failures with equal aplomb.  Imagine having unmitigated presence - when we walk into a room, we are noticed simply because we are radiating something that everyone craves.  Contentment.  Acceptance.  Peace.

Imagine being able to move forward to embrace life and everything it has to offer, leaving our 'idealised' images behind to watch us do what we believed we never could without 'changing'.  Imagine leaping and bounding into the world to embrace both success and failure knowing that these experiences are just part of our unique experience of being alive, with none of it defining who we are. 

Imagine that we would make some wonderful discoveries, that we would be surprised to find that we would no longer be interested in focussing on how others perceive us or wasting our time and energy on dressing to impress - rather we would choose to wear what we like.  Our choice of garments would not define us, but complement us.  We would only buy what we needed, no longer feeling subjected to the painful and costly addiction of 'want'.  We would never look at a clever marketing campaign and believe that lasting contentment could be found by spending two weeks at an exclusive beach house on the coast of Bali.  We would no longer be possessed by our possessions.   Rather those things would merely be part of our lives to perform a function, not to represent who we wanted others to believe we were. 

Unlike the photo above of the poor rhino trying to become a unicorn, we would know ourselves and accept ourselves just as we are, being simultaneously aware of both our strengths and weaknesses.  We would know that so long as we refuse to accept ourselves just as we are, we will not be able to fully enjoy life, or even know what we like or do not like with any certainty.  We will have ripped down the image taped to the walls of our minds of who we are not and replaced it with an image of who we are, an honest, true, beautiful image of us in all our wonder.

Each and every one of us are utterly unique with our own set of towering strengths and humbling weaknesses, and this uniqueness makes us amazing, and interesting, and special.  We are much more spectacular and complex than anything we could ever imagine we ought to be.  When we rip away the image we have been holding in our mind's eye of who we should be and replace it with who we really are, we stop the cycle of torture, accusations, blame and self-hate against the wonderful person huddling deep inside of us that just wants to live.

Imagine a life unmarred by the manipulations of magazines, advertisements and gossip columns - a life uncomplicated by the continual uncertainty the media doles out to us.  Imagine living a life without constant and unnecessary material hunger, a life that allows us to find true fulfillment just by being the astounding individual each one of us already is.  That life is right there, a mere heartbeat away, reaching out to us from behind the glass wall we have imprisoned it behind...

Imagine letting go of the person you are not.  Imagine that the real you is free...

Just imagine...

My Song

Still sick… it kind of sucks, I'm almost never sick for this long. But I *have* to be better by tomorrow because I'm working.

I know I've mentioned this before but I just have to say it again.

I LOVE NICKEL CREEK

I can go for months without listening to them once but then I just get this random craving and I have to go and listen to every single one of their songs several times.

Chris Thile is right up there with Thom Yorke in my opinion. Actually it was listening to Radiohead that made me want to look Nickel Creek up again. They once did a cover of Radiohead's Morning Bell and it's pretty awesome.

I am a huge music person. I would shrivel up and die if I didn't have music. Music speaks to my heart and soul and mind. That sounds corny but I really can't think of a way to explain what good music does to me.

I have my favorites-Radiohead, Wilco, Modest Mouse, Muse, A Fine Frenzy, Keane, Arcade Fire, Blue October- and many many others. And I love them all. They all have their own special meanings, favorite lines, best songs.

Radiohead is probably my top favorite followed closely by Muse. But Nickel Creek is my band. I love every one of their songs  so much. They all mean things to me and the beauty of them satisfies my musical cravings. No other band brings tears to my eyes with their music the way they do.

The title of my blog is from my favorite song, Hanging By a Thread. This song is my song.

I'm going to give up rambling and trying to put my confused feelings into words now and just enjoy the music.

Much love,
Shay

New Years Resolutions

Today is the first Monday of the new year. A great day to get up, take charge, and conquer the world right?
Wrong!
Apparently it's a great day to wake up with a killer headache and an upset stomach...

Oh well... I've been consoling myself with no food, lots of coffee and Advil, Christmas letters, and The Apocalypse War. I may even get some writing done today!

So it's 2012 now. It didn't really hit me till I was sitting in Church listening to the sermon. New Years has never really meant that much to me till now. But you know what? It's a clean slate! A new year is like a blank sheet of paper and now I need to decide what to write on it.

I'm twenty, I have a job, fantastic friends, a great Church, and my family. So what are my goals for this year? What am I going to do with myself? I hardly even thought about making resolutions till yesterday but then I came up with a whole bunch.

Basically it comes down to this. Last year was pretty good. Actually the best year I've ever had. So, now I'm going to make this year the best I've ever had! This may sound silly or cliche but I'm going to be a better person this year.

Anyways, here are my 2012 resolutions.

1. Start a savings account with a certain percentage of every paycheck orig into it. Now that I've finally got a job I can really start saving for my future.

2. Read my Bible every day. This was my only resolution last year and I've kept it. I'm in the middle of Jeremiah now.

3. No regrets. I may not be able to keep this one completely but I know I can do better.

4. Be healthier. Drink more water specifically...

5. Finish my book. And start research on the next one I have planned.

I think that's it for now... But it's a good start. :-)

Happy New Years everyone!

Premediation

The condition of the photographic image has been worrying me. So much so that I wrote on twitter on January 1st 2012: ‘In a world where anyone can make an image: Refuse.’

I have been noting the proliferation of commercial images and more, the way that software programmes have taken on a professionalisation of the generation of images. And the public through the lesser programmes, with their lesser tendency to professionalisation is generating near professional images - Another way of saying this is that the public is beginning to know  what the hidden tropes of image making are.

A trope is of course not hidden, it’s there for all to see. It’s the cliche in action, the tendency towards order in a sea of chaos. Where we, the one hundred thousand monkeys, press the keys of the typewriters a sufficient number of times to imitate something that was once considered great.

A hidden trope is the mechanics behind the magicians art. It’s the quotidian gestures that put together seem to be magical. Saying that, there are of course photographers and cinematographers, who transcend the tricks and tropes of the form - but only a few.

So if we know how to generate impossibly beautiful images and saturate the world with them, do we then risk desensitising ourselves to the beauty of the image?

Of course we do, so then we re-invent the form again and again - and this reinvention takes the form of the opposite tendencies to create new tropes and tricks to create something new. The cinematographer or photographer who realises this eternal round of invention and reinvention innovates and creates the new form first.

'Remediation' is the word used to describe how an incoming media form is met with the thinking of the paradigm conditions by the prior media form - but what word would describe the atrophying of the medium just before the introduction of the new medium" Premediation? And is one of the conditions necessary for the formulation of the new medium its rendition as cliched by overuse?

A Kind of Wonder

In the last century the iconic image was more prolific due to the lower level of production of images generally. Now the tsunami of images and the fact that the nature of the iconic has been identified and therefore disempowered by both its own ubiquity and the ubiquity of the image in general, renders the newly iconic almost impossible to produce.

Cartier-Bressons ‘definitive moment’, that moment that identifies the essential image that characterises the moment that is available to the photographer had she or he the technique to capture it, and Conrad Hall’s confusingly titled ‘photographic moment’, given that he was a cinematographer, are available for all to achieve as technique has been quantised, digitaised and made ready for popular use via an availability through the 'professionalisation' of software. Naturally, when software developers could increase functionality in software, they did and this lead to the software outputting the semblance of the professional with the person addressing the software having very little professionalism - as professionalism is much more that 'the look of a thing'. Training in higher educational institutions took on the need to familiarise their student with 'the look of the qualitative' and utilised these software solutions so that an apparently ‘more professional’ trainee might be produced for the job market place. Equally trainees met this new level of training with enthusiasm and mass technique and mass aspiration to be the single producer of the iconic rose to meet the challenge. But as the Italians rightly say:  'Pochi sono chiamati, ancora rispondere a molte' - Meaning:


‘Few are called, yet many answer’.


Conrad Hall maintained that each still frame in a shot should have photographic quality (approaching Cartier's Definitive Moment in certain senses) but mainly in compositional quality, so that between the beginning frame of a shot and its end frame, all frames in between as the cameras eye roams across the scene should have the highest compositional quality, as well as the ‘correct’ play of light and subject activity. Hall was saying that even when the cameras eye roams across what could be called abstract compositions, because the subject cannot always be in frame, if the camera when behind a post for instance then the image produced should be like that of an abstract painter, perfect in all of its attributes.It should follow that the ubiquity and availability of high quality equipment and training to a high skill level makes available to all, this level of awareness of the construction of the image.

If the craft cannot be applied whilst in the act of capture - it’s ok as new functionalities of composition are available in programmes that fix reality. Take 'After Effects' for instance, there’s not much that cannot be rearranged in this programme when aligned and data exchanged with Photoshop, so that what was not achieved in the craft act can be genrated in ‘post’. Post meaning: the situation when one has time to think and dwell on construction of all the elements so that they appear to have been produced in the act of capture. This is of course both tautological and impossible.

But the world calls us to act when acts are necessary and craft acts need be realised when that moment calls. Post construction of the iconic is false as it is pre-conceived and post-conceived - realised from a position of understanding ubiquity and cliche, yet without the discriminative ability that stops its production. It speaks of what once was iconic and tries to duplicate what others have done before and in its replication in a  plastic medium and renders images non-iconic from lack of application of the taste that would be the very thing in the moment of capture that resisted cliche.

But post analysis is simply that and it is a form of dull and stultifying practice which renders its compositions also dull and that itself stultifies the production of the sense in us that is a response to the observation of the iconic. A kind of wonder.

The ready ability to respond to the world at the moment when the world produces the circumstances for the production of the iconic comes from continuous practice and a conscious awareness and the desire to stand on the verge of excitement at the possibility of its production. This excitement to visit this moment through the medium of realisation is what any craftsperson can utilise to elevate their practice to art.

The Tipping Point

Two hundred thousand years ago, in a land none of us would recognise, ancient modern humans emerged and began to roam the planet Earth, leaving behind hauntingly beautiful cave paintings tens of thousands of years old.  Paintings we still do not understand.  Sadly they shed no clear light on the lives of our oldest ancestors, we do not know how they really lived, what they truly believed, or if they were even trying to tell us something with their paintings - deemed by most experts to be nothing more than abstract art.  Perhaps one day we will find a key to decipher their paintings, but until then, their distant lives continue to remain a shadowy mystery to us, their descendants.

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Giving Thanks at a ridiculous hour…

So much for getting a good nights sleep tonight… :P I'm hoping to go Good Friday shopping on Friday, possibly staying up all night Thursday night so I wanted to sleep well tonight. Not working out so well right now.

So… I thought I'd wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving!

Also, here's my list of things that I'm thankful for.

1. Calms… I took four. Hopefully they'll help me get to sleep.
2. This touchpad which enables me to do this post.
3. My family of course.
4. My fantastic, fantabulous, wonderful friends. Benny, Katy, Daniel, Wes, Nathan, Caleb, Bethany, Beka, Juli, Scott, Suzy-I love you guys!
5. My amazing job!
6. My Church
7. Portland
8. Turkey
9. Coffee :P
10. Christmas music :D

Ok, I'm going to try sleeping again. :P

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Gave up...

I sort of gave up. :P

Today I not only watched White Christmas, I also set up my Pandora Christmas stations.

So.... I can spread the cheating here are some pictures. I hope they make you as excited as they made me!

Merry Early Christmas everyone!!!

♥♥♥

Shay

I can't wait…

Ultimate Christmas Wishlist

Daniel from The Anonymous Antagonist was reminding me that I had not done my Ultimate Christmas Wishlist yet, so.... Here goes! (By the way, if I haven't said so already... You should really go visit his blog! It's awesome!)

$100 American Eagle gift card. Is that lame? :P

Nebulous Kingdom's 2012 Calender

An iheartfink dress

A pretty camera.......

A pretty computer............

A pretty car......................

Clinique :P

Dominion

And.... that's all I can think of right now. :P

At the moment I'm enjoying a cup of hot chocolate. The first cup of the season. It's SO GOOD!

Now! I am off to go work on my book some more. :)

Shay ♥

Disposable Life

I have a confession to make.  I used to be different...quite a bit different to the person I am today.  What makes writing this blog so powerful for me personally is that every day I am forced to remember the person I used to be, the choices I made and the beliefs I upheld, even when others shared good reasons with me to choose and believe otherwise.  It is very hard to write this post, because no one likes to be seen in a bad light, but I believe the grief I feel in sharing how I used to be is less important than the message of this post.  So I will do this, I will share how I used to be, and what happened to change me, and why I cannot ever return to the person I used to be. 

Six years ago...
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Creating Prosperity - How To Imagine Your Desires to Be True

Limitation As a Means of Learning To Be Free

In anything you do you impose a set of limits upon yourself. Those limits define what you are trying to do.

Driving a car you are limited to a car and the road you are on unless you are driving off road. By doing the act of driving you restrict yourself to being in a car. However, you also free yourself so that you can get from one place to another quickly... assuming you are using roads and the roads are relatively clear.

In the act of creating roads, we create limits. We define or divide the countryside into parcels. Those same limits help us to define places, and they help us to move between them.

Imagine creating a series of roads so that you could go easily from one place to another and in the process learn what was in between each place. Imagine then that once you knew the lay of the land you could get rid of the roads and go to each place by walking, flying or teleporting. You and the land would no longer be encumbered with roads, but because you used the roads to explore, you now know where you can go, and even better, those places serve as a jumping of point for further exploration.

We Are The 99%

 

'These protestors, who are actually few in number, have contributed nothing.  They're parasites.  They're pure, genuine parasites.  Many of them are bored, trust-funded kids, obsessed with being something, being somebody.  Meaningless lives, they want to matter.'  

Rush Limbaugh

Everything we know about our history - everything man has recorded up until this present moment - all of it has taken six thousand years.  Every single one of those years were based on greed.  Every one of those years functioned under the mandate of a priviledged few controlling entire nations.  The entire history of man has been centered on the tenets of greed, corruption and destruction; every century rife with its own particular injustices, cruelties and murder.

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Fashion Loves

One place I would love to own a dress from is Shabby Apple. They've got so many adorable designs!

After Class

Overboard





Syncopation



Boogie Woogie



V.P.




Beauty Mark

I can't believe I don't own a black dress yet....

But I think my favorite at the moment is the Extra Credit dress. SO CUTE!!!





Extra Credit

Midnight

Impossibly, something absolutely perfect happened yesterday night whist watching Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’.

For years film and video has been trying to be self-reflexive, to truly encode the fact of the making in relation to the audience. This is about how the subject, the makers and the audience are bound together in a group agreement to suspend disbelief about the act of watching a fiction of some kind, about how the cleverer works encoded this into the subject matter to reveal some deeper truth when you are in the depths of immersion in the fiction of the piece.

In the middle of the film Gil Peters goes back in time and meets Salvador Dali, Man Ray and Louis Bunuel.

Gil: I'm Gil, nice to meet you. It's a pretty name.
Bunuel responds:  A man in love with a woman from a different era. I see a photograph!
Man Ray: I see a film!
Gil: I see an insurmountable problem!

At that exact moment the projector in the cinema turned off and the safety lights came up and I was amazed that Woody Allen had arranged for thousands of cinemas across the globe to do this in every performance of the film. We sat for a moment and I mused on the nature of going to see films and engaging in fictions and what immersion and suspension of disbelief means.

A voice emitted from the projection box that ‘we’ll get the film on as soon as possible’. How amazing that Woody had issued dialogue for the cinemas to speak. Then the sound came up to let us back into the film gently, then the image, then the lights went down. What orchestration. I got back into the film.

Later I went to the box office and they told me that the electricity in the small city where I live had gone off at that exact moment.

You couldn’t have planned it...

Got a job!!!

So finally, after two years of looking, I have got a job. It's at Things Remembered and it still seems strange to me...

But I've worked two days so far. Well, I've trained for two days. I really love it so far. My position is engraver which means I work the engraving machines and put the messages on the jewelry and boxes and watches and whatever else.

So far in my training I've learned to use the machines, engrave on metal, engrave on plastic, and engrave pens. I've also learned how to engrave on different shapes like hearts and stars. But it's a lot of fun and I really like my manager and the assistant manager.

But yeah, that's about my only update at the moment...

After talking to Daniel from The Anonymous Antagonist, (Which you should totally check out because I think he writes one of the best blogs in existence!) I'm thinking about writing a short story and posting it here. I think it would help my inspiration and motivation a lot if I actually finished something. Maybe then I would be able to get farther on my main story...

Oh! Also this Friday I'm putting together a costume dance as a fundraiser for my Church's school. I'm making Benny and I gypsy costumes for it. Hopefully I'll get them done in time... :P Actually not hopefully! I know I'll get them done in time. So there!

:P I'll try and get pictures of them on Friday.

And now... Because it is Tuesday!!!

Oh my gosh I love this song and video so much!!! :D It's kind of like our house. :D Except that we live on the corner of our street.

Have a fantastic week all!

I finally finished Clannad After Story the day before yesterday. I don't think I have ever seen a tv show series that moved me the way this one did. I was literally sobbing through all of the last five episodes. Well, actually through most of the second half.  But the ending wasn't sad, it was beautiful. That may sound weird when talking about an anime series but... It really was.

And the music for it is lovely.  :)

I don't want to give anything away, but if you do watch it and get to a certain point and want to stop... Don't! Go all the way through to the end. :)





Anyways, I really loved that show and recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind crying a little. Or a lot as in my case...

I have a longer post coming soon hopefully. :)

Love!
Shay

Apocalyptia?

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."  

The Sign of the Four

At the beginning of this year, the media began reporting on the phenomenon of mass animal deaths that were occuring almost simultaneously all over the world.  Frightening to read, the articles and photos strongly resembled the tension building scenes from a typical Hollywood apocalyptic blockbuster - the scenes that occur right before the destruction of the planet unfolds on an epic scale. 

In countries all around the world hundreds to thousands of dead birds fell out of their skies, for no obvious reason.  Reports poured in daily of thousands to millions of dead fish washing up onto beaches in both hemispheres.  And there was more to come - mysterious livestock deaths would occur in the hundreds and whales dead of starvation would wash ashore in waters far from their natural habitat.  During the most bountiful season, inexplicably starving animals would attack humans as food and sharks would attack swimmers in unprecendented numbers.  This was bad.  Really bad.  And we weren't sitting in a comfortable cinema chair with popcorn in one hand and a Coke in the other, this was happening for real.

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