I’ll be singer-songwritering tomorrow night. Carpenter’s Cellar. (8:30. Downtown Greenville. Corner of Main and East Court.) Crowd warming will be handled by the lovely and talented Lanna Coates doing the writer-reading thing.

It’s just plain NARSTY outside right now. Ew.

In other news, Blambot has all sorts of comic-related goodness, like a few free fonts, some fantastic fonts for sale, and these nifty dialouge balloons and sound effects eps sets. Handy.

Plastic Kid updates.

Today I consumed my body weight in carbs. I feel NO GUILT.

Huskily Yours,
Shua

I had no idea that Moby was so indie.

The sunrise here was beautiful. Pinks and oranges and light blue. I only know because I was still awake. You should go find a bible and read Psalm 25. Make it a great day.

Only not really. But in yet another attempt to further simplify anything having to do with my life, welcome to the new home of my mostly-daily writing. (That’s “blogging” for all you kids who aren’t in the know). So… change your bookmarks, etc. etc. blah, blah, blah. The RSS isn’t behaving yet. Apologies to those of you who subscribe. Please be patient. Also, a few of the early archives are floating adrift somewhere in the interweb. I’ll try to find them soon. And please, don’t mourn the seemingly tragic passing of YourCreativityDollarsAtWork. I have future plans for the name… plans that may or may not involve photography.

After all, I own the www. (No, not the whole thing, silly.)

…Jeremy Fish and his illustration portfolio called Silly Pink Bunnies. It’s ridiculously awesome. Anyone who can combine bunnies and the hand of rock… well I just have to give him some link respect.

I designed and launched two tiny sites today… a new splashpage of MP3s for iHateMyMarriage.com this morning (a series we just finished up at New Spring CC) and a super simple links page for a few of my DotComrades during lunch. Enjoy.

As per Stevan’s request, here’s the current contents of my Daily bookmarks folder. I have about 10 other folders of various bookmarks, too… but that’s because i’m a big dork and I spend too much time loving/hating the internet.

Blogger (Doi.)
Absenter (Beautiful.)
Basecamp (Useful.)
TaDa List (Ditto.)
Google News (Customizable news.)
CNN (Regular news.)
k10k newsfeed (All links, no fluff.)
Yewknee (Typically random links.)
Newstoday (Whiny, but occasionally useful.)
Seth Godin (Marketing guru.)
Tom Peters (Businessing guru.)

We like formulas. Formulas work. Even those of us, myself included, who despise all things mathematical and mourn the wasted hours of our educational careers spent wondering what two trains who couldn’t maintain speed and weren’t even in the same city had to do with us… even we like a good formula.

After all, formulas resolve. There is finitude. There is an end. And with endings there is often that ever-elusive goal of clarity. But that’s the thing about clarity and resolution… they presuppose a world that has endings.

I long for a good ending. A work day complete or a nicely wrapped-up movie plotline or a big, drum-roll-on-the-steering-wheel, Phil Collins-esque finish to a perfectly crafted pop song. A destination to attain to. But those things are our creations; the things we make always play nice with our set of expectations. We are the selfish center of our world, so of course our creations cater to us. However, the things that matter, namely the other people who we’re sharing air and space with, do not resolve. We do not provide clarity. We are not finite and we do not end. We are the anti-formula. That’s what makes life interesting. It’s also what makes life very hard sometimes.

I suppose my desire for clarity and resolution is mainly a trust issue. Better put, wanting things to have a neat, tidy ending stems from a worldview where, if I don’t get my way or don’t have all the facts, I do not trust that everything is still ok. I miss trusting. I certainly pay lip service to it, but I doubt it comes as natural to me as not trusting does. I hate that my worldview is shaped more by being a part of a generation brought up on 3 minute pop songs than on being a part of humanity, with all its wonderful and horrible unresolving tension and journey.

In keeping with the theme, I have no resolution to all of this.

I have a bookmarks folder called “daily.” It’s fairly self-explanitory in nature. Absenter is in that folder. I just plain DIG Naz’s photos, writing, and general sensibilities. I say that to set up two things:

1. He redesigned. Go check it out.

2. He had a bad bike accident two weeks ago. You can read all about it here. If you don’t mind photographic representation of who wins when it’s head versus asphalt, you can see all the grisly details here. He’s self-employed, uninsured (ouch), and has close to $10,000 in hospital bills now (big ouch). If you’re interested in helping out, you can PayPal money to work(at)weightshift(dot)net.

In other news, Lanna and I spent some of the 75-and-blue-skies afternoon in search of photo-worthy destinations. Every single time we go out shooting, we can’t seem to escape the inevitable confrontation with someone who’s wondering what we’re doing. I’m not talking about gentle curiousity or artistic appreciation… this is typically more of the stressed, scared, ALWAYS caucasian, “What are you doin’ takin’ pictures near my land, boy?” flavor of confrontation. (And no, we weren’t trespassing.) I mean honestly, do two twenty-somethings armed with cameras pose that much of a threat to you? You’ve never actually stopped to appreciate the beautiful things around you, but you’re going to get all Spanish Inquisition on us when we try to?

So I can break dance and DEFY GRAVITY. Absolutely amazing.

I was bored, had a few work-related things to do, and, as you most likely know by now, still don’t have a car. So my trusty Giant and I decided to head to the office. 4 miles. It’s only 4 miles. Granted, a rambunctiously rolling hills variety of mileage, but still… only 4.

And so, as I sit here at my desk, comsuming large quantities of water while dodging that annoying post-out-of-shape-ride cough, I mourn the loss of my childhood… when I wasn’t a complete and total wuss.

I’m still a Safari user, but for those of you who have embraced the equally wonderful Firefox browser, here’s a treat. Some sites, like this one for instance, open links in a new window and, for some Firefox users, that is somewhere between mildly annoying and wildly rage-inducing. Here’s your Firefox hack to force such links to open in a new tab.

There are still PIRATES? As in there is apparently still a PIRATE PROBLEM in some areas of the world? I blame Johnny Depp.

Most of what I would call defining moments of my life came about as a result of less than stellar circumstances. Heartbreak is, of course, the most prevalent catalyst for such things… but it’s been years since my last one, and my heart has been stitched up quite nicely in the mean time. But even the less glamorous stuff of life, sometimes tragic, often simply unsettling, has the potential to shift us and the way we see the world.

Maybe a heartfelt conversation with a friend moved me to slightly change my view on a situation, prompting a slight worldview tilt. Or perhaps it was college heartbreak #2 or #3 that moved me two degrees shy of the course I was on… a minimal change at the time, more than likely too small too see in the middle of emotional fallout. But five years later, how different am I because of those seemingly insignificant changes? And how much more so when something massive puts a milemarker in my life?

I’m consistently amazed that the things that weighed so heavy on me when I was IN them have proven to be the defining moments of my life. Be encouraged… when your ego takes a hit, it’s often in the service of building your faith.

A variety of things lately have led me to begin using the term Email Voice in reference to the way that we are often “heard” by those on the receiving end of our verbiage. If Email Voice was enjoying a killer senior year, it would be voted Most Likely To Make Your Co-workers Think “What Did You MEAN By That?” Email Voice is what comes out, despite our best attempts to “say” what we actually mean (or think we mean) via email, or IM, or blogging, or [insert alternate web-based variety of communique here].

It makes me think of all those statistics you hear about how important body language is to communication… or how many context clues we get from what we can see and hear versus what we glean from sitting under fluorescent lights in cubicles looking at groups of pixels on dusty screens, which form words, which form sentences, and so forth and so on. I can’t remember any of the percentages off-hand, but i’m sure they are impressive, as are most widely-quoted (though most likely slightly misleading) statistics.

I want less Email Voice and more face time. I don’t want to “talk to” people on a daily basis… I want to TALK to them and be able to look at their eyes and actually share some space. So that’s why I blog.

Because my capacity for hypocrisy is amazing.

Signs of life have given way to posting again… Casey’s 3 month writing sabbatical is over, much to the joy of all her adoring fans. And internet stalkers.

Huh? Exactly. And all in under 2 minutes. Just go listen to Cameron’s latest audio post. I dare you not to laugh.

It was what I like to call a 50/50 crowd tonight… 50% into it and 50% wondering what the oddly acoustic noise was, drifting to their itchy ears from a corner-esque direction, interrupting their conversations. That being said, being background muzak is not without its share of highlights…

New songs were, in fact, unleashed on the unaware public. They will all stick around for awhile (the songs, although most likely not the public) albeit in the typical ever-changing form. I figure if I don’t record them, then every song has the potential to keep evolving into something better. The muse descended and all freestyling and off-the-cuff singing went well and, for the most part, rhymed. However, singing without the aid of amplification via microphone is no good… no good at all. (Unless I am busking for change in a downtown area… because busking as a hobby is enjoyable. However, busking for your dinner is not so much enjoyable, so don’t become a destitute street musician, mmm k?)

Moving on, there was a devastatingly cute blond girl there tonight, sitting under a window, fully engaged in conversation and completely unaware that I existed or that I was SO-SINGER-SONGWRITER-ING near her. Not that I care, or have reason to care, but this sad story further cements my status as a non-rock-star and reinforces the fact that I have no capacity to be a sex symbol. It’s really quite damaging to my fragile ego… but I suppose I can soldier on, despite the circumstances.

At some point, someone who was present for the aforementioned gig will read this. They will begin to replay the night in their heads desperately trying to infer from their limited recollection of the evening who the aforementioned devastatingly cute blond girl was… perhaps to some avail. If so, I stand by this post. She was/is devastatingly cute and if no one has told her lately, then I am happy to be the bearer of such rightfully communicated news.