I didn’t do anything today other than draw and sleep, and … well, I can’t make a post out of what I did while I was sleeping. I’m still not any good at this, really, but I’m enjoying it.
Proof of art
Tag: self-improvement
Art, again
…okay. I can draw recognizably female human faces. Good, that was worrisome. 🙂
I am sleepy so here is art
So as goofy and simplistic as they are these actually kind of represent some progress; I’m starting to draw original pictures rather than copying something that’s in front of me, and at the suggestion of drawabox.com I’ve switched to working with pens rather than pencils because they force me to stop and think before making a mark on a piece of paper. Sooner or later I will start doing little cartoon dudes with, like, bodies and shit, but I’m not quite there yet. Just faces for right now.
Weird phenomenon: I drew these five faces, and then realized they were all dudes. I mean, I suppose the monkey-thing doesn’t really have to be a dude, but in my head they were all dudes. And then I thought I ought to draw at least one girl to even things out and then panicked because apparently I have no idea how to draw women.
So, uh, I’ll work on that unexpected problem tomorrow, I guess? Sure.
Self-improvement is exhausting
I remain fully caught up on the “draw every day” project, if only because I drew two pictures tonight. I am beginning to think that the best use of my time might be to actually find some sort of art tutorial thing rather than constantly drawing from .jpg files of animated characters. I can whip up a Buttercup in a hot second but I’m not convinced that being able to draw Buttercup well is the same thing as being able to draw. I remain vaguely terrified of the idea of drawing something unique for some reason. This is, of course, not why I started this project. Fuck fear. But if I’m going to take this seriously I feel like I ought to try and find some sort of resource more useful than thinking of a kids’ TV show I like and Googling good images of the characters.
Speaking of creativity, I left work today after telling my boss that I was only coming back on Saturday if I’d managed to get some writing done in the next two days. Luckily I have nothing in particular that I need to get done tomorrow or the day after, or at least nothing that I can think of (well, okay, I could use an oil change for my car, and I have to take the boy to school both days; I don’t think either of those really count) and so I won’t have any good excuse to not get something done. Then again, I’m really good at generating excuses.
I’ll finish Fonda Lee’s Jade City tonight, so expect a glowing review in the next couple of days. It’s an early frontrunner for my favorite book of the year, I’ll tell you that. I’m considering spending February only reading books by black authors, so if you have anyone in particular you’d like to recommend, please feel free to chime in in comments and make some suggestions.
In which fear is stupid
Holy cow, that tablecloth has gotten raggedy.
I had an idle thought the other day and put it on Twitter– I wonder what kind of artist I could be if I drew something every day for a year, it said– and now suddenly I own a sketchbook.
Well, “suddenly” if agonized over the idea of spending $5 on a sketchbook for two days counts as “suddenly.” I mean, as projects go, this isn’t much of one, right? I’m not talking about full-blown landscapes or some shit, just, like, a quick sketch every day to elevate my ability to draw from not the worst artist on the planet to maybe somewhere in the top half of humanity. I’m not about to start a webcomic or anything, although I’ll admit thinking about the first Questionable Content vs. how it looks now as a perfect example of what practice can do for someone.
So I own an inexpensive, yet reasonably robust sketchbook, and I bought some new pencils, which probably wasn’t strictly necessary but hey, pencils. And all I have to do is draw something. I don’t even really have to do it every day! Just draw some shit once in a while! Like, I get to set the rules!
And I put the sketchbook down, because I found the idea terrifying, and here I am blogging about it instead of just picking up a pencil and drawing something simple and calling it a day.
It’s so weird how hard I work (we work? It’s not just me, right?) to hold myself back sometimes.
EDIT: Boom. Don’t expect me to post these too frequently, if I even continue with the project (I’d estimate no more than a 50% chance this lasts longer than a few days) but at least I did it once:
Also, I need pencils with better erasers, as you can tell from Uncle Grandpa’s incorrectly-misshapen head up there.
On schadenfreude and self-improvement
So there’s this house I drive past basically every time I have any reason to drive north, and since I live on the south side of town “heading north” happens quite a bit. It’s a shitty house. There’s mold on the siding, visible plant life growing in the gutters, the roof is rotting, and the garage is not anywhere close to plumb. I suspect I could push the thing over if I wanted to, and there have been nights on the way home where I was tempted to get out of my car and do so.
There have also been a couple of prominent Confederate battle flags flying prominently around the house for the last several years. They keep moving them; sometimes they’re on the garage, sometimes by the side door, sometimes in the windows, sometimes just flying off the back of the shitty rusted-out pickup truck that you were already picturing in their side yard even without me telling you it was there.
I have no idea who lives there, but I kind of hate them. I don’t need to see your racist bullshit every time I leave my fucking house, and at this point anyone still willing to fly one of those symbols of treason over their house is pretty clearly signaling they’re not someone I’m going to enjoy associating with at all. These people are almost certainly assholes of some stripe or another and I don’t feel bad about not liking them on reflex.
The last couple of weeks I’ve noticed the flags were gone, and sometime in the last day or two a bunch of bank auction signs have sprouted up around the house. So it looks like the bank foreclosed on whoever lived there and is trying to sell this half-decayed house to recoup some of its costs.
And my first thought upon seeing all this was Good. Fuck ’em.
I’d like to be the kind of person who doesn’t celebrate in even a minor way when people lose their homes. For all I know there are kids living there who don’t deserve to be tarred with their parents’ asshole brushes.
I bet they’ve found a way to blame black people for them losing their house, though. Which brings me back to “Fuck ’em.”
Sigh.
In which I am a ray of goddamn sunshine
At the beginning of this school year, I made myself a promise: I was going to do my damnedest to keep from yelling at kids this year. I knew from the beginning that this was not going to be a resolution that I was going to be able to keep for the entire school year; the relevant question was how long I’d go before I failed. I am, as you may have guessed, somewhat of a volatile personality. I’ve done better almost every year at keeping my cool in the face of nonsense. Some years (last year) I’ve backslid; I guarantee I’ve raised my voice to kids less frequently this year than I did last year. So, in that, I suppose it’s been a success. That said, I’ve had a few embarrassing displays even just in the past few weeks, so I’m not there just yet. Also, I keep losing sight of the fact that there’s still a full quarter of school left. Positive Man recognizes that there is still time for things to go wrong. 🙂
Here’s where I’ve failed so far this year, and where I’m going to do my best to improve substantially in what’s left of the school year: I have not been good enough in 1) emphasizing positivity in my classroom; 2) rewarding the kids who are not behavior issues; and 3) rewarding and/or simply acknowledging good choices in general. It’s very easy as an educator to get too tied up in managing pathology in the various forms that it might show up in your classroom; there have been times in this year where I’ve simply felt buried in it. Things have been getting better lately in my first/second hour block, which have been my problem children all year long– unfortunately, they’ve been slipping in my third and fourth hour block. My honors kids continue to be the living personification of why I’m a teacher.
For the rest of the school year I need to work harder at being positive, both to set an example and to give some recognition to the kids who sorely deserve it. Even when I’ve recognized positive behavior this year it’s generally been for kids where that positive behavior has been rare. That’s a good thing, mind you, but it leaves out the kids who do what they’re supposed to do every day, or even do what they’re supposed to do four days out of every five or nine days out of every ten.
I gotta do better. Time to start.
On self-improvement
About exactly a year ago I started a project: I had had a week or two where I’d kept running into Top 100 Books sorts of lists, and always when I read through them I’d read between a third and a half of the list. There were always a few stalwarts that appeared on just about everything, but the differences around the edges between, say, TIME’s list and the one on Goodreads were sorta fascinating.
I decided, using three or four different lists that I felt looked reputable, that I’d put together my own personal Top 100 Books I Want to Read or Reread list, then read my way through the whole thing. I wasn’t planning on doing it in order or anything like that, and obviously I’d be taking frequent breaks to read other stuff (frankly, I take breaks from reading Other Stuff to read books from the list) but over however long it took, I’d read all 100 of them.
I was pretty pleased with the list, which actually turned out to be 102 books long; I found a couple of others that I wanted to read after the list was “done” and decided that nobody but me cared if it was actually 100 books or not. It was a good mix of stuff I’d never read (or, in some cases, never heard of) and some things that I wanted an excuse to reread. I started book #26 today (THE CALL OF THE WILD, by Jack London, which I’ve never read) so if I stay at roughly the same pace it’ll take me four years to get through the entire list. This is my 119th book of the year– I keep track over on Facebook, for those of you who aren’t following me from over there– so I’m not exactly focusing on sticking with List Stuff.
Anyway, here’s the books, assuming I can get WordPress to display them in something resembling a readable list. Remember, everything on here was on somebody’s Top 100 list:
| 1 | 1984 | George Orwell |
| 2 | A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess |
| 3 | A Doll’s House | Henrik Ibsen |
| 4 | A Farewell to Arms | Anthony Burgess |
| 5 | Aeneid | Virgil |
| 6 | Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll |
| 7 | All the King’s Men | Robert Penn Warren |
| 8 | Animal Farm | George Orwell |
| 9 | Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy |
| 10 | Beloved | Toni Morrison |
| 11 | Blindness | Jose Saramago |
| 12 | Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Waugh |
| 13 | Catcher in the Rye | JD Salinger |
| 14 | David Copperfield | Charles Dickens |
| 15 | Deliverance | James Dickey |
| 16 | Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | Philip K. Dick |
| 17 | Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes |
| 18 | Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson |
| 19 | Dracula | Bram Stoker |
| 20 | Emma | Jane Austen |
| 21 | Fairy Tales | Hans Christian Andersen |
| 22 | Finnegan’s Wake | James Joyce |
| 23 | Frankenstein | Mary Shelley |
| 24 | Go Tell it on the Mountain | James Baldwin |
| 25 | Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell |
| 26 | Grendel | John Gardner |
| 27 | Gulliver’s Travels | Jonathan Swift |
| 28 | Hamlet | Shakespeare |
| 29 | Howards End | EM Forster |
| 30 | I, Claudius | Robert Graves |
| 31 | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte |
| 32 | Kim | Rudyard Kipling |
| 33 | LA Confidential | James Ellroy |
| 34 | Leaves of Grass | Walt Whitman |
| 35 | Little Women | Louisa May Alcott |
| 36 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov |
| 37 | Lord of the Flies | William Golding |
| 38 | Love in the Time of Cholera | Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
| 39 | Macbeth | Shakespeare |
| 40 | Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert |
| 41 | Mahabharata | Vyasa |
| 42 | Metamorphoses | Ovid |
| 43 | Middlemarch | George Eliot |
| 44 | Midnight’s Children | Salman Rushdie |
| 45 | Mrs. Dalloway | Virginia Woolf |
| 46 | Native Son | Richard Wright |
| 47 | Neuromancer | William Gibson |
| 48 | Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| 49 | Njal’s Saga | Anonymous |
| 50 | Northern Lights | Phillip Pullman |
| 51 | Nostromo | Joseph Conrad |
| 52 | Odyssey | Homer |
| 53 | On the Road | Jack Kerouac |
| 54 | One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
| 55 | One Thousand and One Nights | Anonymous |
| 56 | Pale Fire | Vladimir Nabokov |
| 57 | Pilgrim’s Progress | John Bunyan |
| 58 | Portnoy’s Complaint | Philip Roth |
| 59 | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen |
| 60 | Ramayana | Valmiki |
| 61 | Robinson Crusoe | Daniel Defoe |
| 62 | Snow Crash | Neal Stephenson |
| 63 | Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison |
| 64 | Sophie’s Choice | William Styron |
| 65 | The Adventures of Augie March | Saul Bellow |
| 66 | The Big Sleep | Raymond Chandler |
| 67 | The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
| 68 | The Call of the Wild | Jack London |
| 69 | The Executioner’s Song | Norman Mailer |
| 70 | The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck |
| 71 | The Great Gatsby | F Scott Fitzgerald |
| 72 | The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel | Francois Rabelais |
| 73 | The Lord of the Rings | JRR Tolkien |
| 74 | The Maltese Falcon | Dashiell Hammett |
| 75 | The Naked Lunch | William Burroughs |
| 76 | The Old Man and the Sea | Ernest Hemingway |
| 77 | The Picture of Dorian Grey | Oscar Wilde |
| 78 | The Plague | Albert Camus |
| 79 | The Portrait of a Lady | Henry James |
| 80 | The Satanic Verses | Salman Rushdie |
| 81 | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner |
| 82 | The Stranger | Albert Camus |
| 83 | The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway |
| 84 | The Thirty-Nine Steps | John Buchan |
| 85 | The Tin Drum | Gunter Grass |
| 86 | The Trial | Franz Kafka |
| 87 | The Way of All Flesh | Samuel Butler |
| 88 | The Wind in the Willows | Kenneth Grahame |
| 89 | The Woman in White | Wilkie Collins |
| 90 | Their Eyes were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston |
| 91 | Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe |
| 92 | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | John Le Carre |
| 93 | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee |
| 94 | Tom Jones | Henry Fielding |
| 95 | Twelfth Night | Shakespeare |
| 96 | Ubik | Philip K. Dick |
| 97 | Ulysses | James Joyce |
| 98 | Vanity Fair | William Makepeace Thackeray |
| 99 | Waiting for the Barbarians | JM Coetzee |
| 100 | War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy |
| 101 | Wise Blood | Flannery O’Connor |
| 102 | Wuthering Heights | Emily Bronte |
Hmm. That at least looked like it worked (EDIT: Mostly. It’ll do.) I started with ULYSSES, which I hated, and plan to finish with FINNEGAN’S WAKE, which I also intend to hate, but other than that I’m more or less jumping around at random. The biggest pleasant surprises so far have been Jose Saramago in general, FRANKENSTEIN, which somehow I’d never read, and THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GREY. Meanwhile, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is still my personal literary nemesis, even though I did manage to finish the sonofabitch this time, a feat I never managed when they tried to make me read it in high school. It was one of the worst grades I ever got on an English paper– I’d not finished the book, and it was painfully obvious that that was the case; I managed to get the names of a few major characters confused, so the teacher completely saw through me. A shame; I really liked him and his class, I just hate Jane Austen. I was startled at how much I liked WUTHERING HEIGHTS, though, which I was expecting to be much the same thing.
Anyway. Anything on there I should prioritize or fear? Do you guys have any long-term reading projects I should know about?
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