Sketches

Earlier today on Twitter, the hashtag #ialwayswantedtobea was trending. So, I tweeted: "#Ialwayswantedtobea cartoonist when I was a little kid. Used to really love drawing." And that's true, drawing was my first love, going all the way back to my elementary school days when my friends and I drew Pokemon all the time. I kept up drawing for quite a few years, planning to be a cartoonist when I grew up. But after my freshman year in high school, I started picking up other interests (music, theater, girls) and I put my drawing talents to the side.

Coincidentally, I found some old cartoons of mine while I was cleaning my room today. They were sketches of some characters I planned on making my first comic out of. There were no dates on any of them, but I remember coming up with them sometime in my 7th grade year at Arcadia Valley. Take a look!

They're very anime, that's what I was into at the time. There was a sixth character, a girl named Sami, but I can't seem to find her original sketch, which sucks because she was probably my favorite to draw (she had interesting clothes!). The comic was supposed to center around Terry's life as a high schooler, and his various escapades with his best friend Josh, his twin sister Sherri, and eventually Sami (she was a new kid at school and slowly befriends Terry's friends). Derrick was the class bully, who especially liked picking on Terry and Josh. Kenneth was an older kid who hung out with Derrick, but wasn't really the bullying type. He had more a laissez-faire personality.

Writing about these characters makes me miss them. Maybe I'll revive the comic this summer. Until then, I'll try to find some more of my old sketches of these characters. I think I still have the first strip somewhere...

Tattoo

The other day I was playing my guitar and singing some Golf Course Kamikaze songs (my local band started by my two younger brothers, my friend Henry, and I) when I had a revelation. One of our songs is called "King of Me," and as I was singing it, I realized that the title is eight letters long--just enough to be tattooed across my knuckles! That would make such a bad-ass tattoo! I thought. But as I looked down at the backs of my hands to visualize the tat, I also realized that it would look pretty weak on my scrawny little hands. So, I tossed the idea around and came up with this: placing it across the top of my back, just under my shoulders, and extending the phrase to You are not the king of me, completing a lyric from the song.

I haven't decided whether or not to actually get the tattoo. I'm an indecisive person, so getting something that permanent has never been too appealing to me. But now that I have an idea of something meaningful, something I'd actually want to stick with (King of Me is one of the first songs I ever wrote, a song I still love playing to this day, and I always want to remember the first band I was ever in), I'll consider getting the tattoo someday.

About this dream I had...

I had a sad dream last night. I wish it had been real. Well, not the part where I got a ticket for parking handicap, but the part that led me to Chase. I took my ticket (for some reason it was a small metal placard with my misdemeanor written on it) to the motor vehicle office in Ironton to get it processed, and while I was sitting at a table waiting for my turn (it was a small two-person table, and I vaguely remember a homeless-looking guy sitting across from me, but he didn't say or do much of anything) Chase happened to walk in. He came up to me with something in his hand. It was a piece of paper, a small comic he had made, and I can't remember exactly what the comic looked like, I do remember it being very funny and very amusing. But somehow it looked familiar to me. Then I realized it was based off a rough cartoon I drew in our Statistics class our senior year of high school, one I thought I threw away or something. Chase said he found my cartoon while digging through his old drawings and liked it so much he decided to draw his own rendition of it, adding more details and his own Chase Lindley cartoon flourish. I told him his version was really good, and tried to awkwardly cover for my cartoon's poor quality by saying I had to draw it quickly and discreetly so Mrs. Spitzmiller wouldn't catch me. But Chase was still cool, he said he knew what that was like, haha.

After we both laughed at that, we both fell silent. I was still sitting in my chair at the table while Chase was standing over it. Neither of us were looking at the other, avoiding eye contact like two kids who had fought each other over something stupid and realized they need to apologize to the other, but can't figure out how. Okay, so that's a very specific analogy, but that's exactly how the moment in my dream felt to me.

Chase broke the silence first. He said something about how our cartoons were really cool when we worked together, and how much fun he remembered having when we drew them. I told him I was thinking the same thing. That's when Chase asked if I wanted to draw some cartoons with him sometime. I said yeah. And we didn't have to draw the whole time, we could play video games, make a funny video, ride bikes, whatever. And I said I'd love to. I looked up at Chase and noticed he was carrying something else under the papers. I was shocked when I saw my favorite sock hat, the dark gray one with two black bands around it, a fat one and a thin one; I had lost it a long time ago and thought I'd never see it again. Chase told me he found it and thought I might be looking for it. I told him I was glad to have it back.

I remember Chase and I eventually leaving the motor vehicle office, but the rest of the dream gets kind of fuzzy after that. It didn't relate much to my encounter with Chase, anyway. When I woke up and realized the whole thing was a dream, I felt sorrow wash over me. I really wish that dream had been real, even the parking ticket part. I've known for a long time that I miss talking to Chase, and being close friends with him like were our senior year. After we graduated, our relationship somehow came to be defined by arguments on Twitter and Facebook. Reflecting on those arguments, I realized they mostly centered around our increasingly diverging ideologies--me, a growing atheist and Chase, a growing Christian--and they were mostly instigated by me. In retrospect, it's not hard for me to see that debates about the existence of God and the legitimacy of evolution were stupid and not worth the bad blood between us now.

I miss Chase. I miss the good times we had our senior year. To me, the dream I had last night is a representation of my longing for that friendship. I guess I could just text him or something. Kind of afraid of how awkward it might be. Sigh... whatever.

I'm Free

Today during Footloose practice our choreographer Dawn taught the cast the dance for the song "I'm Free." It's a hard rock number that closes Act 1 with Ren convincing Bomont's teenagers to throw a party and fight to repeal the town's law against dancing. Our cast was getting the steps, but after our second run-through of the full song, our director Chuck wanted to see more acting in it. He didn't want to see a bunch of lifeless kids going through dance moves and singing empty words, which is pretty much what we were giving him. To help the cast find motivation for the song, Chuck asked us what we would think if he took away some of our freedoms. "Brittany, I'm taking away your driver's license," he said. "Ian, no staying up later than 10:00. Jimmy, no more music. What does that make you want to do? Rebel."

So I started thinking about that. He's right, I thought. I would want to rebel if those things were taken from me. But why? Then it dawned on me, if someone did take away my guitar, my saxophone, my iPod, my whole music collection, they still would not take the music out of me. And that's what the song is about. It's a declaration, a challenge to address the conflict between oppression and the innate desire for freedom. In the context of the play, it is where Ren and the kids finally say, "I'm sick of these rules! I'm not ashamed of having fun! I'm done obeying Reverend Shaw's laws--I'm free!" That is what Chuck wanted to see on our faces in this song. We ran the song one more time after his speech, and he told us we had much more emotion in it than our previous runs.

I left practice feeling confident about the song, but I started thinking about how it applies to real life. ...But then I sat here staring at my computer for an hour and this blog never got finished. I don't remember where I wanted to go with this paragraph, and I probably should have wrapped the blog up right there, but oh well. I'm tired of starting at this blog as just a draft. I guess I forget that these blogs don't have to be perfect, it's not like I have a job on the line if I write a mediocre update.

An Observation on the Usage of Twitter

I've been using Twitter for barely a year now, and I'm hooked. I've found it's a great social networking alternative to Facebook. This is partially because a much smaller amount of my friends use Twitter than Facebook, and us tweetfolk understand the level of honesty you can use when there are fewer eyes watching you. My non-Twitter friends don't get it. They look at it and they see Facebook limited to nothing but status updates--no games, no pictures, no apps, nothing. Just saying whatever is on your mind. That simplicity, however, is what I fell in love with Twitter for. The 140-character updates do not limit thoughts and expressions. Rather, they remove the clutter of Facebook, giving the mind room for sharing its thoughts with whosoever happens to be listening. In effect, it creates a giant conversation among its users. A conversation anyone can join in at any time, from anywhere.*

But interesting things happen when flocks of people engage in running conversations through typewritten words on a computer screen. One social dynamic I've noticed in my Twitter experience is something I like to call the nameless response. Because each tweet goes out to all of a user's followers, they grant a person the freedom to speak honestly and openly to someone without having to address them. Simply put, if you don't say the person's name, you can say whatever you like about them.

At first, I used to condemn such tweeting, thinking that if you have a problem with someone, you should say it to their username, or don't say it at all. You might as well be gossiping about that person right in front of them. Besides, if you won't openly address someone over a website, why post something intended for them at all? As I said earlier, Twitter is like a giant, open-ended conversation; how then can anyone carry on the conversation if its participants are so vague nobody knows whom they are talking to or what they are are talking about? To some extent, I still maintain this conviction (see An Ode to 'You'). However, I'm beginning to see the value in the nameless response. Think about it: you can say anything, to anyone, and so long as you don't say their name, you can get away with it? Well, that sounds just sly enough to be totally worth it!

In fact, let's take a look at these nameless responses in action:

Last night on Twitter, in the advent of the trending hashtag #standforequality, which was intended to raise awareness and rally support for gay rights (particularly surrounding a bill in Uganda meant to criminalize homosexuality, I later found out), my friends and I executed a very interesting discussion about the topic. Not interesting in the subject matter, per se, but interesting in that nobody directly addressed anyone throughout the entirety of the conversation. It started when this was tweeted**: Oh, that's right! I forgot that Jesus advocated hate. It must have been someone else that showed love to the world. #sarcasm, harsh words no doubt a reply to the previous tweet*** and re-tweet of: #standforequality? #icantdothat. Not for gays.

Thus, the conversation had been initiated. Further contributions included very bitter #sarcasm, quoted Bible verses, reminders that Jesus loves everyone, confessions from the tweeters opposed to homosexuality that their sins eat at them more than anything else, a Tumblr post, and my own hippie-ish calls for human fellowship. All that, and the only time anyone directly mentioned someone was when a certain Grey's Anatomy enthusiast directed her friend to the 3:30 mark of this video.

But the fascinating thing about this conversation is that, despite the highly controversial and even personal subject matter, the fiery debate was kept to a minimum. Everyone was very honest in their opinions, but at the same time nobody was reduced to petty bickering and caps-lock shouting matches. That was when I realized the value of the nameless response. When you leave out the person's name, it removes the discomfort of actually confronting them, thus giving you the freedom to be as open with them as you desire. Granted, I don't really think anyone's opinions changed much after the conversation anyway, but I'd rather have that than have both sides hacked off and even more resistant to resolving their conflicts with each other.

All this being said, I still can't fully condone namelessly addressing someone you have a problem with. For one, it ruins a good conversation if all its participants are too coy to actually speak to each other, rather than simply at each other (and oh, do I hate coy, shallow, vague, and watery tweets). But also, it is better if people face each other and settle their differences, instead of letting indirect jibes boil the bad blood between them. I have known that there is a proper time and place for confronting issues head-on. But I realize now there is an appropriate time for indirectly addressing disputes, too. The wisdom is knowing which method is best for every new situation.

*For a more extensive (and much more well-written) discussion on the appeal of Twitter, read Roger Ebert's blog post about it, linked here.

**Since this blog is viewable at anyone's disposal, I chose to withhold the names (and usernames) of the relevant parties out of respect for their personal privacy.

***Several tweets preceding "#standforequality? #icantdothat. Not for gays" may have also incited the first response, but I feel like that one was the more likely trigger, especially after it was re-tweeted.

Window

Nose pressed against the glass,

hoping to get a closer view.

But still, the glass is there. I have not

fists strong enough to shatter it.

So I sit

on my side of the glass,

and peer into a world of friends,

neighbors, families--

a world I want to see myself in.

But I see myself only

in the reflection of the glass.

friend

Un common,

(yet life
love
de(f)a(i)th
makes)

u(s
a)me.