Kay Neilsen

I recently found out about an illustrator by the name of Kay Neilsen. He was active from the 10s through the 50s and is well known for his fairy tale illustrations. I just got a book of his work and am eager to share, so here ya go:



it's tough to see them & all their detail on the web. i do enjoy his use of white space and bottom-heavy layouts.

this is my cat ricky. i remember distinctly the night we sat down as a family and decided ricky's name. my brother wanted to name him frankenstein. but i think i started crying so we didn't name him frankenstein. why i chose the name ricky i have ABSOLUTELY no idea. which frustrates me now. but maybe it was just to prove to my future self that you don't have to find meaning in everything.

ricky is now 15 years old. i got him back in the summer of '91. he's in pretty good shape give his age. he's not running around after squirrels anymore, but he can still get up onto my bed. but in all those 15 years this cat has never once been affectionate. he's been cute plenty of times and he'll let you pet him (operative word there is 'let') but he's not a snuggler. and he doesn't like to be picked up. and he is most definitely not a lapcat.

either way, he's always been my grumpy little furball. and now i've got to make some tough choices. when i move to seattle, do i try to bring him with me? as of right now, i'm considering moving in w/ meg and she has a wonderful little cat by the name of sushi. but ricky is old and i hear that sush is a fighter. sushi will kick the living shit out of ricky if i tried to bring him with. not to mention ricky trying to adapt to new and much smaller surroundings. so do i leave him here? he and my grandmother are good company for one another while my mom's at work. but things have changed around here. ricky tossed his kibbles the other night and he's been 'marking' the house. (he used to be an indoor/outdoor cat so he got all that territorial shit out of him while he was outside. but a bad run-in with a gopher left him with a mangled foot and as a permanently indoor cat). my mom can't deal with all this mess and she's not going to. so ricky has been relegated to living in the garage. i feel incredibly sorry for him. but i understand my mom's anger too. he's been doing it a lot. so can i just leave him here? trapped in a garage indefinitely? i don't know what to do...

we feel fine = i feel exhilarated

once again, jonathan harris is amazing. (well, jonathan and his collaborator sepandar kamvar). go check out wefeelfine.org. my favorite forms of "organization" are the mobs and the murmurs. (that will make sense when you check out the site). i just leave the murmurs window open and occasionally check in on the world's 'mood'. (ps: i absolutely love the warm charcoal/black that they use for the background color. hurm... maybe for my own website...)

from the cold sunlight that's reflected off the moon

i wore a sweater & drank some hot tea this afternoon. i haven't felt this much "in my element" in a long time. this was also the first time in a LONG time that i had two days off in a row. i was actually productive! i feel like i *need* two days off, for my own. saturdays (even if they don't take place on an actual saturday) are for selfish endeavors. but it's sunday (irregardless if it actually is sunday) that is productive. that's the day you wake up feeling refreshed and on top of things.

Everyone's afraid of their own lives
If you could be anything you want
I bet you'd be disappointed, am I right? -mm

i am a procrastinator by nature (or probably more from nurture but whatev). and i've been terrible lately. most days i get off work at 5 with a notebook full of things to do burning in my pocket. but after i make dinner and sit down, i never get back up. i worry about myself. i know that i'm tired, but is that really what's keeping me from starting all these really important things (like a genuine job search)? i worry that the real reason is that i'm scared. i'm afraid to put my portfolio out there. i'm afraid to hear rejection. now if i were you, sitting there reading this, i would be saying "buck up kiddo" under my breath. there is no room for these excuses. but seriously, i think that's what's preventing me from getting up out of my chair and redoing the portfolio/getting my site together/sending out packages n' whatnot.

but the tide is changing. while last month i was content with this comfortable lack of responsibility, now i just feel like i'm stalling. and i can feel the urge to move on, to get on w/ my life. brad tells me, "this part is life too." but it doesn't feel that way. this life feels like a holding cell. i needed the "break" (if working 50+ hours a week is a break) but now i'm ready to move onto the next chapter.

"John Milton was a failure. In writing Paradise Lost his aim was to 'justify the ways of God to men.' Inevitably he fell short and wrote only a monumental poem. Beethoven, whose music was conceived to transcend fate, was a failure. As was Socrates, whose ambition was to make people happy by making them reasonable and just. The surest, noblest way to fail is to set one's standards titanically high.

The flip side of that proposition also seems true. The surest way to succeed is to keep one's striving low. Many people, by external standards, will be 'successes.' They will own homes, eat in better restaurants, dress well and, in some instances, perform socially useful work. Yet fewer people are putting themselves on the line, making as much of their minds and talents as they might. Frequently success is what people settle for when they can't think of something noble enough to be worth failing at." -Laurence Shames

now i'm not in any way comparing myself to Milton or Socrates but the point is there. right now, in this life, i'm doing fine. but i'm striving *real* low. i'm not doing what i love. i'm not where i think i want to be. i need to put myself on the line.

awake

this is not worthy of the first post in many months, but eh...
just humorous or something of note?