My Dreams Tell Me Stories

I woke up from a series of weird dreams this morning.
Most of my dreams include me having to fend off enemies with my trusty hobbit sword. Everything gets rather violent and 007 actionish. Dreaming is my way of entertaining myself during recharge mode, and I love it when I surprise myself with imaginary plots and subconscious characters. Last night part of my escapade included duelling a minion of some bad-guy-villain-or-other. He wasn't human though, instead he was a creation of Bad-Guy-Villain...and he looked strangely like a man with a giant maple leaf strapped to his back. Obviously, he had chameleon powers, because every time he weaved his way in and out of the forest that we were combating in, his entire body and clothing attire would change color. Later on in my dream, "Leaf Man" became a good guy, realizing that his former master (for some reason, Bad-Guy-Villain seemed to really be into creating non-human camouflage/chameleon followers) was in the wrong.

I can't remember if there was ever a conclusion, but after waking up, taking a horseback riding lesson, and showering, I could still picture both Leaf Man and Bad-Guy-Villain clearly in my head. (It helped that they had taken on a sort of Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Legend of Korra look in my dreamstate.) So I went ahead and drew out Leaf Man (right).

I was lazy and didn't scan these.
Instead I just snapped photos.

He's kind of unfinished. 

...For clarification, this is sort of my revised vision of the image that future Leaf Man could take on. He didn't quite look so legit in my dream...more like a guy with a giant onesy and globish facial expressions.

The other picture (left), is entitled "Chrissy".
This was a doodle that I drew up on Friday with a friend of mine. She lives in a treehouse. And we think she's pretty cool.




Copy That,
K-Minty

Updeedupdeedating

It's time to update you.

To begin, I have submitted my Doodle4Goodle entry (Argh. I hate the way that sounds. Reminds me of a preschool art contest.). My result could be interpreted as a disaster, but by now I'm rather fond of my little cartoon dewds and dewdette.

copyright KP 2013

There's that. 

Remember to vote for the finalists on May 1st, 2013. 

Second, I have been doing no writing whatsoever. Unless you decide to include my 2-page bio on GK Chesterton, I can readily assure you that I've not been plotting or penning plot for a very long stretch of timey-whimeyness. 

In theory, this is because of my big art break that I've been going through. Art shows and contests can be taxing on your wordiness. Seeing as every picture is worth a thousand words...well, I've been doodling a lot of pictures.

Putting aside my theory though---I will bluntly confess to my habit of gravitation towards poems and shorter works of fiction. I have a thing about time management that makes it really hard to manage to finish a project. 

(One reason why working under pressure works for me.)

Leaving my ideas and creations half-done and half-alive is what I do. And I guess it takes a kick in the pants to get me to actually complete stuff. 

(And here we have a great point as to why NaNoWriMo is so wonderful!) 

Third, it's the end of March. So much time is draining through my hands, and it's not even funny. There's talk of vacation trips in May, and it's really not cool that May is only a few measly weeks down the road from here. 

I am dreading April for a few reasons, and of them the least: April means hot weather. Like 90 degrees F. weather and frying asphalt burning your face up from below weather. Eeew. 

---Haha! just wait until we hit JUNE. That's when the tourists begin to shrivel up and we see little piles of ash on the sidewalks from the heat incineration. 

Finally...

I feel like I should cap this post up with some sort of evaluation of how great or terrible life is or has been. At the moment, that's a very difficult thing for me to do. "Life is a barrel of apples", they say, or "a box of chocolates" or "a confusing place". 

I guess all are true. 

So if you need me, I'll be eating my chocolate-dipped apples with a puzzled look on my face. 

Kismint

Smiling Identity

Salad Bugs, if you wish to read them. 
___

It's such a bittersweet place around here.

I can't shake the feeling that you're distracted somehow. Come to think of it, I guess I am too. I just wonder so many things that it hurts, and the circles under your eyes are really making me feel for you. If I could help, I would. And sometimes I truly think that I can say that because I have firm belief that you would do the same for me.
---At least, it's my dearest hope that you would. But who can say?
We won't go down that road. Not now, probably not never.
...But that was an unintentionally double negative and I'm really uncertain over what I meant and what came out. Uncertainty just rules the world around here. It's kind of painful sometimes.

I once told you that I didn't like it when people got mad at me, but I asked you to yell in my face earlier. Things are so shifty, and we're gliding slowly down a landslide. You just looked at me---confused, and asked me "When have I ever been mad at you?".
Good point.

Now that I think about it, I just now realize that your eyes have been green today.
And now that I that I think about it again, only now realize that the land of hot air balloons happens to be taking away both of my blue-to-gray-to-green-and-backs.
Just a few hours ago, everything was okay. But as usual, you continue to make my life more complicated, and I'm not afraid to say it. I'm also not afraid to be honest and say that I'm the one who's to blame. You aren't. You don't deserve to be. ---blamed, I mean. I don't know what else you don't deserve to be, but I only want you to see clearly. I want you to see that I'm the blind one, and I'm the once who's putting the dents in the wall and blaming them on you.

Something about your smile steals my identity.

___

K-Minty

Pictures - Volume 2

I brang you pictures.
Pause at 0:00 to view hidden photo.
The second-to-last is a collection of art fair entries. I meant to show them to you earlier. Three out of four of them placed.

Good night,
Good morning,
K-Minty

Yesterday I told someone that I left my brain in the shower. Something may or may not have been absurd about that statement.

At the Crescent Ballroom

Guess what?
I trollied myself downtown and hooked up with an Owl City concert last night.

Adam's vocals were rough and stringy, the synth tones were flat, I was squished suffocated in a knot of rampant teenagers two yards away from center stage and the poster on the wall commanded that I leave my camera in the car.

And it was perfect. :)

The crowd was made up of a lovely variety of people, some who had traveled across state lines in order to be there that night, at a no-name bar with peeling paint in the ghetto point of Phoenix. The show-up was small, and I was educated in the art of worming one's way through a mass of fellow fans in order to get nearer to the action.

It is such a...magical (for lack of a better word) thing to watch and listen to a performance done live by someone who, prior to then, you'd only watched and listened to via Google Chrome. I had a handful of moments in which I caught myself smiling, if only because "That guy really exists. He's living and breathing, no longer a bunch of pixels on my computer screen."

Owl City's tour group. (because a one-man band is kind of hard to pull off when going live) Left to right:
Steve Goold, Adam Young, Daniel Jorgensen, Breanne Duren, and Jasper Nephew

Deese people are cool. All of them. Really cool.

11:00 PM found us standing, about to go home, in a nearly-empty alley/parking lot. Their tour bus was situated in the corner, and it was my guess that most of the performers were either inside or away for the night. Lo and behold, a tall skinny dude with a beanie came rolling out from the bus, coasting on his long board. He drifted over to us, and there we beheld the fantastic Daniel Jorgensen (and fantastic isn't an understatement---the guy plays guitar, vibraphone, bass...and a little suppertime triangle on the side ;).
Awkwardly enough, I wasn't sure who he was until I got home and did a little internet research. >_> Remind me to know people's names next time I try to start conversations with them and their long boards.
We didn't talk much about the show, but I pretty much attempted to convince him that downtown Phoenix was not the ideal place to hang around at midnight, and the night life wasn't really worth sticking around for. Soon after that, a small swarm of fangirls walked on over and we took our leave.

Ah! But it was great. I can't remember every song, but these were among the ones that were sung---

Speed of Love
Umbrella Beach
I'm Coming After You
Dementia
Fireflies
Early Birdie
Sillohette
Metropolis
Sky Diver
Gold
I Hope You Think of Me
Take it All Away
Deer In the Headlights
Good Time

Encore:
Hello Seattle
Shooting Star

Awesome night. Made new friends, had my eardrums permanently damaged, and went home looking forward to next time.

Farewell, friends of the feather,
Kismint

Not At Her Greatest

It's almost tomorrow [edit: after publishing this, it is tomorrow] and I would be smart if I closed the computer screen and hit the "slumber" button on my brain. Unfortunately, I'm not smart, and I choose self-inflicted exhaustion in order to spend a few moments spewing midnight blogness into the world of the web. I have a lot of things to write about, but whenever I come to pen them down, they just sort of crumble and dissolve on the page. It's like none of my thoughts really connect and hold together. Everything is just a thin webbing with segments glued in place by illusion.

Ain't that a nice thought?

I'm really stressed right about now. 11:56 PM is not a great time to be stressed. However, make no mistake in thinking that stress is a form of insomnia for me. Oh no, on au contray, m'friend! Kismint happens to be master in the art of deep sleeping, and therefore has no trouble dropping off to dreamland in the appropriate quiet of night.
But back to the stress part.
A month or so back, I wrote about entering a Doodle 4 Google contest. Problems, of course, arise when it so happens that your's truly is also a truly terrible procrastinator. So here I iz. With...no completed doodle. Only nine days before I need to be done.

*kicks rock down the street*

Crap. I really hate feeling like I'm in a time squeeze.

---And it's not even that bad! Nine days could get me anywhere. I could be in Hong Kong in nine days. I could be a newly hired employee at Pulled-Pork & Company Incorporation in nine days. But it's the feel of time seeping away like that. And all the while, my artsy-tartsy inspiration is seeping away too.

Not to mention that my dear mum has ever-so-often expressed her great desire for me to enter and enter my very best (ASAP).

Ahhh...kick in the gut.

So here I am, kind of wanting to pound a hole in the wall because I'm irrationally panicking on the inside. Irrational stuff is dumb. I don't know why, but I'm extremely sensitive to the slightest application of any kind of pressure.

I feel pressured.

I think it might be best if I go to sleep now.

I'm meaning to write and tell more. Thank you for allowing me to vent. Feel free to throw squishy vegetables because then I won't feel bad about picking them up and throwing them (really hard) back.

Don't worry, I've got a bad arm.

K-Minty