Painted Morning

A few days ago I had an unusual morning.

Startlingly different from many of the others surrounding it.  First of all, I was already on my way to full consciousness when my alarm finally pushed me off the edge into wakefulness.  More of a brotherly nudge than a prankster's shove.  Second of all, the morning seemed brighter.  More light seemed to emanate from the high windows of our cozy basement apartment.  I thought I might be running late, that the morning had slipped away from me and darkling dawn had rushed into day without my consent.

I had worn long sleeves to bed and for the first time in weeks didn't have a chill, maybe I was just unaccustomed to waking up with good blood circulation.  But as I sat up and stretched and yawned I realized it was more than a mere change in pace or renewed health or vigor that made this morning stand out.

God was with me this morning.

Now, I suppose this should happen every morning every day.  I'd like to pretend my life is that perfect.  But to be honest, those few bleary-eyed mornings when I do remember to begin my day with prayer, that prayer too often resembles the exhausted half-baked thoughts and unfinished ramblings of someone still treading water in slumber, not quite ready to leave the REM pool.

 But today, it seems He came to me.

This has happened a few times before, and it startles me every time.  I often find that if we want God we have to meet him halfway.  But perhaps on occasion He gives us a break and puts forth some extra effort on our behalf. 

There was nothing particularly spiritually urgent about it.  No heavenly call, no voice from the sky, no eleventh commandment that I'm aware of.  Just a vague feeling of closeness.


I think sometimes God just misses us.

And so he paints a day just for us. Or at least a morning.


My morning had a fresh chill to it.  Not biting, but a gentle nibble to remind you you're awake.  A sky painted from a Robert Frost poem.  Clouds overhead keeping the cool sheen of the last night's rain slick on the ground.  Darkened cement trying in vain to dry to a brighter shade of gray. A dampened world for dampened souls.  That muffled hush clouds seem to give the air.  Somehow our thoughts speak more clearly, louder in contrast to the quieted world.

Writers live for days like these.  I praise God for quieting the world for my mornings.

S

Get It Out There

A good friend of mine inadvertently gave me some really good advice.  He was talking about his own music career but I took it to heart as a writer, a hat I haven't been able to wear much lately. 

I'll admit it people.  I've fallen off the wagon.

Geez, a month?  What's wrong with me?

Well, exactly what my good friend was talking about when he posted an explanation on facebook about his recordings.  They were great songs, but admittedly not the best quality recordings.  Certainly not professional studio-grade.  But I still enjoyed them.  I raved about them, I saw through the fuzzy recording and saw the potential for great, moving pieces of music.

My buddy relayed some advice he had received from another musician.  Just start recording.  Get your stuff out there.  You're not going to be great right off the bat.  No one is.  Get over it.  Get used to being imperfect, especially in front of your audience. 

Just put it out there.

Sounds easy enough, right?  But how many of us have little side projects or dreams we keep pocketed until we can find that imaginary "free time" we need to polish up and really become impressive?  It's not like I forgot about this blog.  In fact, I had some friends ask about it, a high school buddy gave me a shout out and let me know he enjoyed reading.  I even had drafts ready.  Right now there are about six or seven unfinished posts I've started since my last post.

I just never could get them polished.  I never thought they'd be good enough.  I needed more time, better wording, illustrations would really make it pop.  The excuses go on.  Point is, I wanted the impossible.

I wanted them to be perfect.

I've had some posts I'm really proud of.  I've posted others that you can't find anymore, forever deleted out of shame.  I'm still working on this and not everything I write is going to be "studio-quality."

There's a kids book I'd like to do someday when I feel more like a good writer.  An idea I've had growing and morphing in my imagination for over ten years now.  I sent a few sample chapters to some trusted editor friends.  One got back to me with his review.  It was brutally honest, exactly what I knew I could expect from him.  And after rereading it through his eyes, I realized even more of my own foibles as an amateur author.

Elitist intellectual tone.
Alliteration happy.
Poor sense of suspense.
Confusing narrative.
No fluidity in the story.
No connection to (presumably juvenile) reader.

And that was just the prologue.

But I needed to hear it.  I knew he wouldn't pull any punches.  I see my flaws for what they are.  And I'm better for it.  Granted, I haven't touched the book since, but that's mostly because of my schedule constraints.  Although I'll admit, all the condensed criticism was a lot to stomach at once. 

My point?

Don't let perfectionism paralyze you.

Take a leaf from the book of Mrs. Frizzle. Just put it out there.  That's what my rock star friend is doing.  And that's what I'm going to do.  If my posts seem to ramble, tell me.  If an illustration would really accentuate a point, I probably already know.  Leave comments, tell me how to write better.  This blog began as a way to chronicle our lives as newlyweds, but its more than just a cutesy scrapbook.  This is personal.  This is our lives.  A window into our marriage, our careers, our struggles to work out our bug(g)s and be better for each other and for the world.

I'm back, people!



What are you holding back until you can polish and perfect it?



S

Who is IG-88?

I think it's no secret that I'm a closet comic book geek.  I've grown up knowing more about the random backstories of myriad supervillians and the hierarchies of heroes in spandex than I care to say.  I get goosebumps watching the Avengers.  Not so deep down, I'm still a ten-year-old oggling his Saturday morning cartoons.  B. loves on LOTR from time to time, but her knowledge pales in comparison to the extensive Silmarillion research I know certain members of my extended family have done.

We all have our obsessions growing up, some of them stick with us, other fall by the wayside.  I was an avid videogamer until one spring turned my fancy to love... or at least cute girls.  We often outgrow our childhood fantasies and pastimes. But sometimes holding on to the heroes of your youth can be the best thing for you.

I have one question for you folks:


Who is IG-88?


No peeking, no cheating, no googling.  Do you know who he is?


Didn't think so.


Well, I did, I'm ashamed to say.  And it landed me my first paid gig as an illustrator.

IG-88 is a particularly cylindrical fellow in the lineup of bounty hunters employed by Darth Vader to track down Han Solo and thereby lead the Empire straight to young Luke Skywalker. 

That's right people, we're gonna talk Star Wars for a sec.


I have many fond memories of watching Star Wars as a kid.  Often it served as background ambience to set the mood for my vast Lego mythologies spread across the basement carpet.  Many a summer afternoon was spent in the cool shelter of the dark, theater-like basement.  We owned the entire Star Wars trilogy on vhs back when it was still in its unadulterated form - no frivolous CGI plugins and extra characters so George Lucas could beat his chest and tastelessly flash his obvious zillions to the innocent public.  Sorry, tangential rant over.  I loved the characters, I knew the plots, I knew all the important lines and I knew when it was time to put my legos down and enjoy a lightsaber battle and when it was ok to focus on my latest plastic architectural masterpiece and let Han and Leia make out in peace.

But my devotion to the franchise is dwarfed by that of my brothers'.  Logan has played (and soundly beaten) nearly every video game made or designed by Lucasarts, Inc.  Adam somehow obtained thorough knowledge of every character, including the superfluous military leaders in the Empire who one by one get force-choked out of command.  Seriously, who remembers who Grand Moff Tarkin is?

Well, sadly I do.  Because you see I not only lived with these Jedi Masters, I roomed with them, listened to them, and was slowly but surely indoctrinated by them as their unwitting and unwilling padawan.  That is until the triumphant day when Adam coerced us into playing Star Wars trivial pursuit one rainy day and the apprentice truly became the master.  I beat him.  More than once in fact. An arbitrary victory, I know, but aren't all childhood squabbles?   Even as I type this I feel a strange swelling mixture of pride and shame. Their fascination with a galaxy far far away soaked in. 

And apparently some of it stayed there, because when the man who has now employed me talked about his idea about a Star Wars kids book about IG-88, my prior knowledge of the mischievous droid was what clinched the job for me.  Thank you Adam.  Thank you Logan.  Your brainwashing has done some good after all. 


Here's to all the geeks and nerds who wear their passions on their sleeves.  Go ahead and love what you love, you never know when you might find a kindred spirit and make something great.


May the force be with you,


S


p.s. - I'll post pages from the book when its finished in a few months.

Tru(ancy) Dat!

Hooky.

The game I never really got to play until I went to college.

B. and I skipped class yesterday.  We had (and still have) tons of homework, midterms crashing down upon us, stress and busywork and class loads burying us and our marriage, pummeling us as a couple from every angle.  Our days consist of meager morsels of food snatched between classes now that cooking have just become an inefficient use of our time.  I leave before she's awake.  She gets home long after dark.  We're struggling to cope.

But not yesterday.  Yesterday we just said screw it and left town.

We didn't go far.  Just an hour's drive north to see B.'s sister and her family visiting.  Their grandpa, an aunt and a few cousins joined us all for dinner. One cousin got some well-earned and well-meant ribbing about his recent truancy issues.  We could only shake our heads.  He'll graduate high school, go to college, and maybe one day he too will skip class like us, just to preserve some semblance of sanity.

We were asked about how our lives were going, why we didn't visit more often.  All we could tell them was that we had to skip class just to come that night.  I'm not complaining here.  We're both employed, we both go to good schools, our credit cards and student loans are manageable, we are in relatively good health.  I should be grateful and I am.  I guess my question is:

When do we get our lives back?

When will I go through a week and not worry about paying all the bills?
When will the universe let us start saving again?
When will we get a weekend together, homework-free?

I know this is the "career" chapter of our lives (it has to be, neither of us has time for each other, let alone a kid), but come on, people.  There has to be some light at the end of this tunnel.  There's got to be a job at the end of these long years of classes and training and portfolio-building.  Because that job has to pay for B.'s tunnel-end light: grad school.  Make that ONLY grad school.  No more juggling full-time work and 12-15 credits a semester.  No more insulting busywork, no more sadist chemistry professors who take pleasure in squashing the souls of students.  No more getting caught in the crossfire of med school hopefuls and the premed classes that are only used as deterrents. 

Okay, ranting done.  But seriously, she's going into zoology, ok?  Not med school.  Leave my wife alone and lets move on through stupid chem and be done with it.

Back to truancy. I don't like that our life has become a choice of what to miss out on.  I either miss out on the early years of my marriage, career-building job opportunities, important learning moments in school, deep and important spiritual and personal growth at church, or time with family.



We're all truant on something.


I missed out on most of the dinner conversation last night, but I'm not too upset. I'm used to snatching opportunistic mouthfuls whenever I get the chance.  Plus the reason for my absence from the dinner table came in the form of my adorable 2 year old niece. I took her out when she got antsy (about 3-4 times in the same meal) and we found things to marvel at in the parking lot next to a mall.  We picked flowers and put them in her hair, we picked more for her mom and for her great aunt.  We looked for red cars among the crowd of parked vehicles, we spun on the grass until we plopped down and stared up at the clouds.  I needed that.  Probably more than she did.

We've missed her, but we've also been missing out on her.  We try to be a stable presence in the lives of our nieces and nephew, but with them living so far away and our attention so often and thoroughly diverted elsewhere it's hard to keep up with them and how fast their childhood is slipping away. 

Yesterday was good.  Yesterday was needed.  It was a reminder to stop for a moment, let some people down, abandon some posts, be truant for a moment, and breathe.

Nothing's changed on the homework front.  We're still buried.  We're still behind.  We still jump straight from work to homework like miserable amphibians.  But I was reminded yesterday that I'm not just a paycheck.  I'm not just a taxpayer, a bill payer, an employee, a student, a grade, a number. 

I'm the uncle who found the purple flower to put in my niece's hair.

Maybe my cousin's ahead of the curve.  Sometimes school can wait.  Because life sure won't.


What are you missing out on?


S

The Kid in You.

I got a new job a few weeks ago.

Correction, I got another job a few weeks ago.

I was lucky enough to keep my old job for security as this new position tries me on.  I split my hours between my old job and this new job doing graphic design for a life science museum.

I get to spend a lot of time in the hidden parts of a museum, the off-the-map here there be monsters void that dazzles any child's imagination.  What goes on at a school at night?  What happens in the museum after hours? What on earth goes on in a teachers' lounge?

The place has been closed for months for renovations (a whole building got added last year) and now that the opening is impending, they're hiring to get ready.  So, in addition to helping design exciting works of art like pamphlets and visitors guides - wheeee! - I spend a lot of time in the basement surrounded by creepy taxidermy.  Shelves of shriveled shrews and cataloged cobras. Gigantic jars of jellyfish, flasks of fish, squishy squids in slimy solutions. Drawers of desiccated dung beetles.  Such is all I have for company for 10 hours a week until we get to move into the new offices.  An uncharted, unknown underground railroad of the animal kingdom preserved for zoological study.  This is what the museum doesn't display.

My wife would love it.

Like a kid on Christmas morning.


B. and I decided a long time ago that it was best we met when and where we did.  Had we met any later, we wouldn't have started dating.  Any earlier, we wouldn't have been ready for each other.

In short, she beat up kids like me in high school.


I often wonder what it would be like to meet her as a high schooler ,as a thirteen-year-old, as a third-grader.  Where is the kid in her?

It's there, in the basement of the museum.

As a kid, she asked Santa for a microscope.  She treasured her Harry Potter along with the rest of us, but she also cherished her Encyclopedia of Mammals.

As a kid, my wife was a nerd.

She still is today, and it's so hot.

There are still aspects of my own childhood that survived the gauntlet of adolescence.  I still have juvenile tendencies that annoy her, perplex her and even at times endear myself to her.  I major in doodling.  I have websites of cartooning.  I study concept art for motion pictures and video games.

To the untrained eye, one would think I never grew up.  Where's the kid in me?

He's hunched over a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, eyes glued to Saturday morning cartoons.

If/when we have our own kid, I have a feeling our inner kids will come out to play a lot more.  I'll sit and watch looney tunes with my kiddo while B. sleeps in.  She'll subtly slip in science-y educational birthday presents into the mix over the years.  We'll take our kid to museums, both art and science. Three kids wondering at the world on the greatest field trips ever.

I still see the kid in her.  As she tells me excitedly about the just plain coolness of nature, I catch glimpses of that elementary school nerd saving up for a lab coat to go with her microscope.  She sees the kid in me anytime we go see an action movie/cartoon/anything that should be too juvenile for a taxpaying adult.  We let each other geek out, and each time we do, it helps us travel back in time to our days as singular souls searching for each other.

Where's the kid in you?

What is he like?


S