Old Dog

This blog has really fallen by the wayside in my scheme of things. Maybe it’s because there’s been so much going on (there hasn’t), maybe it’s because I’ve somehow become a more private person (I haven’t) or maybe it’s because it’s getting pretty badly spammed in the comments (it sure is). All I know is that I haven’t updated in months, and it leaves me wondering if there’s any real point to this thing anymore.

I will say this definitively: There’s no place for it as the self-involved collection of links and pointless musings that it had become. Too much of what’s out there is just people posting random neural firings and saying that it’s “human realism” or whatever. Some of what’s written in this vein is genuinely interesting and amusing, but the vast majority of it is just ego masturbation and I’m neither a talented enough writer nor an interesting enough person to be sure I’m not in the latter category. There are far more important things for me to focus my energies on than finding funny YouTube videos to post and far more interesting things for people to read than what I think about world affairs. So I’m going to try to turn this thing back into what it was intended to be originally, which is a self-improvement tool that I use to create public accountability for my efforts at self improvement.

That area has suffered several setbacks. The most obvious is my weight loss regimen, but I’ve also had a little bit of a dip in my GPA and I’ve felt rather overwhelmed in my work. I’m pretty sure I can blame the majority of it on grief, but I think I’ve worked through that enough to start focusing again. From now on, all I post here is going to be self-improvement related, which probably means mainly art stuff. I start a new semester next month and I’ll hopefully not have to work as much, which will mean an increase in artistic output. I want to turn this back into more of a sketchblog, and there may be other stuff I put on here, but otherwise there won’t be anymore personal stuff.

I just turned 39 on Friday, so I have less than one year to achieve my goals. This is the fortieth year I’ve been on this planet and it’s up to me to make sure it’s a memorable one. Hopefully I’ll get some encouragement in this from the people who used to read this.

…And it feels like three seconds. And it feels like three years. Every day the way it used to hurt it gets less, but new ways for it to hurt show up. I can scarcely believe that six months ago, I could have just picked up a phone and called her.

Yesterday would have been her twentieth birthday. We went out to NIU and planted a tree. It’s a red maple (they don’t make purple ones unfortunately) so it should be pretty impressive in the fall. It’s right by the lagoon on the main campus. We’ll be putting up a plaque, and maybe building a bench nearby. If you have a chance, I recommend you go out and see it. We’ll be watching it grow.

So, today’s the Monday I’m supposed to go back to school after my week long “break” and I’m as exhausted as I can ever remember being. I took on WAY too much work over the last month, and last week was when I planned to get it all caught up. I’m pretty much on track, but I’m friggin’ exhausted. I’ve been sleeping about four hours a night for the last several days with the occasional cat nap while I tried to get everything sorted and up to speed. All this has taken its toll on my physical well-being, on my mental stability and on my apartment. I really want to do a huge GTD purge like I did back when I first started this, but I’d say it’s pretty unlikely that I’d be able to do that any time soon. Ironically, now that I’m going back to school, things should settle down a bit. I’m confident I’ll make it through, but it’s damn hard. I just have to keep repeating to myself: “This is the life I’ve chosen”.

It’s been a month. Hard to believe it, but yesterday was four weeks from the day that Ryanne was killed. Subsequently, I figure it’s time I got back into posting on the blog as a return to normalcy. It would be inappropriate, however, to jump right back into putting up stupid YouTube clips and pictures of steampunk Lego creations without talking about Ry for a little bit.

I have to apologize first for the picture of us up there. It’s from my birthday about four years ago, and it’s really not a good shot of either of us, but it’s the most recent one I could find that was of just the two of us. Ryanne was going through this awkward phase where she didn’t like being photographed. Nevertheless, that kid was always up for doing what needed doing, so I guess closing her eyes was a good compromise. For my part, I was just fat.

Lately, I’ve found myself saying things like “I can’t believe she’s gone” and “It doesn’t seem real”. The truth is that I don’t feel like these words really encompass what I’m feeling in the slightest, they’re just what comes to mind. I look at what my brother and sister are going through, and I realize just how distant I was from Ryanne. It’s probably the thing that hurts me the most about this is the fact that I had just assumed that our relationship was “okay” as it was, and now I’m seeing just how wrong I was. It sounds perverse, but I envy my siblings their grief. I wish I could feel the pain the way they do, since it would mean that I had been closer to her. What I feel is mostly just a sad sense of lost opportunities, both future and past.

It really kills me how much I took for granted with her. I remember trying to bond with her geeky friends at her 18th birthday party and realizing that to them I was just another creepy adult. I would really like to believe that my backing off from Ryanne was me trying to respect her boundaries, but I think it’s a lot more a fear that she’d push me away. I really wish I could have been a bit more intrusive and just had confidence that getting into your niece’s business is what good uncles do.

Under any circumstances, we’ve become a much stronger family for this tragedy. I always considered us close, but something like this has a way of cutting through all the trivial bullshit and making me appreciate my people that much more. I really hope that we’ll be able to maintain that, as I think we’re all trying to pull as much good out of this awfulness as we can.

I miss my niece. I wish I could get her back.

This was written by my brother, Eric, Ryanne’s Dad, and delivered at her memorial by our father. I think it pretty much speaks for itself.

As much as we may all want to remember Ryanne as a saint on this sad occasion, it’s important to remember that she was a sinner just like the rest of us. It’s true that she was a wonderful daughter, a steadfast friend, and a terrific student but she was also a lover of clutter, a hoarder of writing utensils, a chronic hair dyer, and a consummate couch potato. But while she was a bit irresponsible with money and constantly accumulating things that she might not have needed, she was also passionate about causes, aware of the world, and committed to the idea of making a positive mark on society. It’s this combination of faults and virtues that made her the amazingly special person that she was.

As her father, I saw her at her very best and her very worst. When she was a little girl, I was always afraid that she would never have that many friends. As our only child, we poured all of our attention onto her and she was a dominant presence in our lives from the day she was born. Because of this I feared that her expectations of owning the spotlight would cause her to drive others away. It seemed, when she was smaller, that this would likely be the case.

I was also worried about how she would blossom when she hit adolescence. There was so much of me in her that I was certain that she would be combative, secretive, and delinquent in the way that I was during that period of my life. Amazingly, the exact opposite happened. As she entered high school my gawky, gangly little girl began to morph into a beautiful young woman on the outside and a true social animal on the inside. As time flew by, I saw her develop a huge network of friends and my concerns began to fade. At first, I wasn’t concerned with the reasons for it, I was just happy that I was wrong to worry for so long.

After having been ignorant of the reasons for a while, I began to wonder what had attracted all of these young people to her. It didn’t take much of an investigation to find the cause of her new popularity. It was her ability to listen to the almost endless stream of problems that teenagers have and provide them with sound advice that made her such a valued member of her crew. In essence, she became the staff psychologist and life counselor for just about everyone she knew. It was also clearly apparent that this was not just a tactic to increase her popularity, it was a calling to her life’s work.

I’ve said many times that on her worst day Ryanne was a better person than I was on my best and I will believe that to be the truth until I draw my final breath. While I’ve known that for quite some time, it’s only now that she’s gone that I can really and truly see it. I say this because I dedicated myself to the task of earning money as the main function of my career. Ryanne, however, chose a higher road and wanted to be able to help others. While I chose a career in fixing broken machines, Ryanne chose to fix people. It’s because of the love and compassion she had for her fellow man that allowed her to become twice the person I will ever be even though she was given less than half the time to do it. And for that, I love her even more today than ever.

While Ryanne would not have denied us our grief and sadness on this tragic day she also would’ve have been upset at the prospect of being its cause. Because of this, we must all go on and for every tear that we shed there should be laughter to offset it. As serious as she was about her causes and passions, she was not a serious person. Therefore, from this point forward, we must all try to find a way to feel our pain and express our grief but not deny ourselves the laughter and joy that she left us. As bad as we may feel and as hard as it might be to cope with our loss, we do her no honor unless we also allow ourselves to feel the joy that she brought to each of us.

I don’t know how many of you know this, but my niece, Ryanne was killed yesterday at the Northern Illinois University shooting. We’re all still in shock, which may explain why I’m blogging about it. I will want to write something real about her at some point, but right now I just had to take down that video thing I had yesterday and I didn’t want “Bitches Love Sanskrit” as my head post, ya know?

Thanks in advance for your support.

Gots to learn me some dead languages.

I was thinking about the Bene Geserit Litany Against Fear earlier:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Obviously, that’s the one from the book, not the abbreviated version from the movie (as IF). While I was on it, I thought of my own addition:

I will not run from my fear.
My fear is a gift.
It will show me the way to what is true and real in this world.
By chasing it, I will find myself.
I will learn, as I always do, that strength comes not from an absence of fear,
But from overcoming it.

This is what came up on my iGoogle widget today:

Ha ha!

Ah…

Christ I’m bored.

I logged in to Blogger to make a post on a friend’s blog, and I stumbled across the very first blog I ever made. Back in 2006, I spontaneously decided to take the money I was making from JPMorgan and take a trip to Italy in the middle of the off-season. It was my first trip back after the webernets fad really took off, so rather than send fifteen emails to the people I wanted to keep posted, I set up a blog.

While I was there, I took the opportunity to meet with some illustrators over there and compare notes. Made a couple of new friends, but for the most part it was just a “hey how are ya” and moved on. I was pretty much of the opinion that I might actually move back there, but the trip actually made me more committed to living life here. Still, it’s got some fun reading in it, if you’re into that sort of internet nostalgia thing. One odd thing is the posts made by the guy who was at the time one of my best friends. Less than a month later, we were no longer on speaking terms. Weird stuff.

http://alaninitaly.blogspot.com/