five words, and a restart to blogging
via daemonwise , I have five words neatly chosen to help reintroduce myself to the world, to blogging, and to various new and old friends. taking them in somewhat chronological order, giving a bit of background and history for each.
fresno (sorry...)
no apologies necessary. fresno is the start, really. I was born there, child of a fifties-style mother and father from a long line of blue-collar mixed-euro christians. my ancestors arrived on the east coast a very long time ago, and we've been slowly expanding the family westward ever since. prolific and stubborn, good folk for the most part, salt of the earth, etc etc. my grandparents were the ones that eventually moved to CA from OK, though not with the actual dustbowlers, thus putting both branches into a slightly better standard of living than some. all members graduated from high school, which is telling in a county with the highest non graduation rate in the country.
thus was our start in life, my father mother and I, then shortly after my brother. not the black sheep, but the quiet introvert, the geek, the nerd, and the naive one. my mother is convinced I will always be her little girl. I tried very hard for a long time to fit her perceptions, then later other peoples. first college, then later getting out of fresno itself greatly assisted in the evolution of me-as-I-now-am. I know I have very little in common with most of the family and the city in general, and am hoping to convince the rest of the family to move out so I don't have to visit them there anymore. not that I hate the city. but it needs more help than any one person could ever give, and I flinch to see the life far too many people are stuck in. my parents divorced and remarried to nice steps with too many worrisome side members, my grandparents have all passed but one, and the new generation needs me but the elders probably wouldn't like what I'd teach so I keep my mouth shut most of the time.
animation
animation got me out. the cartoon love was always there from the start. my mom could always get me to sit still with cartoons, and I learned to wake up in the wee hours of the morning in the summer (5:30 with no alarm clock, how did I do it?) to watch transformers, gi joe, silverhawks, spiderman and his amazing friends... whatever was on, whatever I could find. which wasn't much, we never had cable when I was living with mom.
in high school I got to attend the california state summer school for the arts. I participated in the animation program because it sounded like fun, and discovered that not only was this something I enjoyed doing, but gosh, I could maybe do this for a living?! neato! drawing still isn't considered a professional medium for the most part. but that's a rant for another time.
I focused on traditional animation in college, taking lots of life drawing and just generally having a good time. unfortunately I blew several years bouncing around and probably should've just ran away to los angeles. by the time I finally got my BA from CSU Northridge, Shrek had arrived along with several other films in 3d. see, Toy Story had been out for years, had a sequel and all... but somehow it seemed like Pixar was just a fluke. people didn't think the medium was really the Next Big Thing yet. Antz came out from Dreamworks, but didn't make the big bucks.
then 2001 hit. multiple big releases that summer, show off the latest and the greatest in computer tech animation. and late that year and early in the next, they laid off entire studios worth of traditional 2d animators.
I graduated in may 2002. it took me 7 years, but I finally got my BA just in time to become completely obsolete.
so yeah. tried several times with Dreamworks but couldn't nab a PA position, finally got in with Sanyo Fisher as a marketing assistant and discovered the wonderful world of 2d digital design.
I have since then picked up skills in Flash, which I fully intend to utilize to its fullest in compiling all the little bits of stuff I've got lying around here. I promise I'll get more art up. I promise I'll get those sketches turn into something worthy of a viewership. :)
classical music
classical music was one of my other early loves. music in general is in my bones, I can't go without it for too long. my brain usually has an audio track running in the background, usually stuck on one song playing a chorus over and over. but the stuff that I don't mind looping is usually the oldest, canon in d, hungarian rhapsody... some I even played long ago on the piano. maybe one of these days I'll take that up again, but I'll probably just try and pick up the guitar I've got hiding in a closet.
music keeps me sane I think, especially in these days of working the banking life.
quiet
I've always liked the quiet. I can be noisy, and sometimes enjoy loud stuff. I like lots of loud music now, thanks to Mr B. but overall, my introverted nature will create an inner quiet if I've got too much outer input and that's when I tend to stare off into the distance and sort of shut down. not a great habit, day-dreamer that I am I can lose a lot of time that way. but other times it helps when I need to escape a stressful situation. then again, missing half a conversation because your mouth and ears are on autopilot and not actually registering a person is talking to you tends to be off-putting. apologies if I've done it to anyone here, though it would be more of an IRL thing. ;)
I relish the quiet these days more because so much of my day is making myself interact with people when it doesn't feel natural. when I left Sanyo it was a relief, we had moved to Santa Barbara and the drive finally ended up being too costly due to gas prices that year. I almost immediately picked up a temp job though so I didn't get much down time to recover. the temp job was in a small office as an admin, and I thought it might be a good quiet position to settle us in for awhile. little did I know, five years later I'm still working for the company (well, the purchaser of the company now) and in processing, which I swore originally I would never do. the stress it cause people in the first office was ridiculous. the stress it causes people in my current office is still kinda wacky though in a different way.
so quiet I like, and quiet I've become, essentially keeping my head down in a way, limiting myself in a way I never really intended to. I need to get out of the quiet though. I need to scream and yell and be free in a way I've not let myself experience before. so I think I'm maybe finally in a place and time in my life where the quiet will not be the only volume setting I have, if not quite meant in a literal voice type of way.
change
change is hard, change is exciting, change is what I crave and fear and dream of and then all to often deny myself. but all things change over time. the hope is that it will be a good thing. we're moving to a new apartment again, the latest in a line of temporary dwellings. but the new experiences there will lead to a bright future. I'm determined. time to flip my dynamic, rearrange my habits and consume my passions again with a vigor I've not felt in ...far too long, I think.
I seem to have hijacked the meme for my own purposes a bit there. :)
since this is a restart, I'll open it up and make this an open post, and go ahead and invite you to pass the meme along. who would like five words? they may be a bit random, but I'll try and make them relevant.
fresno (sorry...)
no apologies necessary. fresno is the start, really. I was born there, child of a fifties-style mother and father from a long line of blue-collar mixed-euro christians. my ancestors arrived on the east coast a very long time ago, and we've been slowly expanding the family westward ever since. prolific and stubborn, good folk for the most part, salt of the earth, etc etc. my grandparents were the ones that eventually moved to CA from OK, though not with the actual dustbowlers, thus putting both branches into a slightly better standard of living than some. all members graduated from high school, which is telling in a county with the highest non graduation rate in the country.
thus was our start in life, my father mother and I, then shortly after my brother. not the black sheep, but the quiet introvert, the geek, the nerd, and the naive one. my mother is convinced I will always be her little girl. I tried very hard for a long time to fit her perceptions, then later other peoples. first college, then later getting out of fresno itself greatly assisted in the evolution of me-as-I-now-am. I know I have very little in common with most of the family and the city in general, and am hoping to convince the rest of the family to move out so I don't have to visit them there anymore. not that I hate the city. but it needs more help than any one person could ever give, and I flinch to see the life far too many people are stuck in. my parents divorced and remarried to nice steps with too many worrisome side members, my grandparents have all passed but one, and the new generation needs me but the elders probably wouldn't like what I'd teach so I keep my mouth shut most of the time.
animation
animation got me out. the cartoon love was always there from the start. my mom could always get me to sit still with cartoons, and I learned to wake up in the wee hours of the morning in the summer (5:30 with no alarm clock, how did I do it?) to watch transformers, gi joe, silverhawks, spiderman and his amazing friends... whatever was on, whatever I could find. which wasn't much, we never had cable when I was living with mom.
in high school I got to attend the california state summer school for the arts. I participated in the animation program because it sounded like fun, and discovered that not only was this something I enjoyed doing, but gosh, I could maybe do this for a living?! neato! drawing still isn't considered a professional medium for the most part. but that's a rant for another time.
I focused on traditional animation in college, taking lots of life drawing and just generally having a good time. unfortunately I blew several years bouncing around and probably should've just ran away to los angeles. by the time I finally got my BA from CSU Northridge, Shrek had arrived along with several other films in 3d. see, Toy Story had been out for years, had a sequel and all... but somehow it seemed like Pixar was just a fluke. people didn't think the medium was really the Next Big Thing yet. Antz came out from Dreamworks, but didn't make the big bucks.
then 2001 hit. multiple big releases that summer, show off the latest and the greatest in computer tech animation. and late that year and early in the next, they laid off entire studios worth of traditional 2d animators.
I graduated in may 2002. it took me 7 years, but I finally got my BA just in time to become completely obsolete.
so yeah. tried several times with Dreamworks but couldn't nab a PA position, finally got in with Sanyo Fisher as a marketing assistant and discovered the wonderful world of 2d digital design.
I have since then picked up skills in Flash, which I fully intend to utilize to its fullest in compiling all the little bits of stuff I've got lying around here. I promise I'll get more art up. I promise I'll get those sketches turn into something worthy of a viewership. :)
classical music
classical music was one of my other early loves. music in general is in my bones, I can't go without it for too long. my brain usually has an audio track running in the background, usually stuck on one song playing a chorus over and over. but the stuff that I don't mind looping is usually the oldest, canon in d, hungarian rhapsody... some I even played long ago on the piano. maybe one of these days I'll take that up again, but I'll probably just try and pick up the guitar I've got hiding in a closet.
music keeps me sane I think, especially in these days of working the banking life.
quiet
I've always liked the quiet. I can be noisy, and sometimes enjoy loud stuff. I like lots of loud music now, thanks to Mr B. but overall, my introverted nature will create an inner quiet if I've got too much outer input and that's when I tend to stare off into the distance and sort of shut down. not a great habit, day-dreamer that I am I can lose a lot of time that way. but other times it helps when I need to escape a stressful situation. then again, missing half a conversation because your mouth and ears are on autopilot and not actually registering a person is talking to you tends to be off-putting. apologies if I've done it to anyone here, though it would be more of an IRL thing. ;)
I relish the quiet these days more because so much of my day is making myself interact with people when it doesn't feel natural. when I left Sanyo it was a relief, we had moved to Santa Barbara and the drive finally ended up being too costly due to gas prices that year. I almost immediately picked up a temp job though so I didn't get much down time to recover. the temp job was in a small office as an admin, and I thought it might be a good quiet position to settle us in for awhile. little did I know, five years later I'm still working for the company (well, the purchaser of the company now) and in processing, which I swore originally I would never do. the stress it cause people in the first office was ridiculous. the stress it causes people in my current office is still kinda wacky though in a different way.
so quiet I like, and quiet I've become, essentially keeping my head down in a way, limiting myself in a way I never really intended to. I need to get out of the quiet though. I need to scream and yell and be free in a way I've not let myself experience before. so I think I'm maybe finally in a place and time in my life where the quiet will not be the only volume setting I have, if not quite meant in a literal voice type of way.
change
change is hard, change is exciting, change is what I crave and fear and dream of and then all to often deny myself. but all things change over time. the hope is that it will be a good thing. we're moving to a new apartment again, the latest in a line of temporary dwellings. but the new experiences there will lead to a bright future. I'm determined. time to flip my dynamic, rearrange my habits and consume my passions again with a vigor I've not felt in ...far too long, I think.
I seem to have hijacked the meme for my own purposes a bit there. :)
since this is a restart, I'll open it up and make this an open post, and go ahead and invite you to pass the meme along. who would like five words? they may be a bit random, but I'll try and make them relevant.