Emo Post begins at the ***
If Scooby-Do wants to improve his love life, does he read self-relp books?
I have another photo for you.
Two books I finished this weekend.
The one in the center is about my recent trip to visit family and a museum down in West Virginia. The covers, inside and out, are chipboard that I made collages on (used pictures and words from travel brochures and magazines I gathered on the trip). The guts of the book are photos and postcards.
The bottom book was a bit more complicated. Covers are chipboard that I glued decorative paper onto (I made the blue and black marbleized paper on the outside as well). The innards (shown at right) is watercolor paper with marker illustrations. The first half of the book is comprised of reference sheets of each of my comic strips characters. The second half is of cartoons of said characters.
***The trip to WV has made me realize how much I miss my family. We are pretty close knit and keep in touch but the distance does weigh on you after a while. It's not like I can go to a weekend gathering on the spur of the moment. It takes me eight hours to drive one way from PA to WV and it's around 450 miles. If that doesn't sound like much, you're either a trucker or you've never been on a drive like that. It's exhausting. So I miss out on graduations, birthday parties, funerals, everything. On the other side of the coin, no one comes up here for my birthday, no one drives up for my big events. That's one of the reasons I didn't go to my college graduation - who the hell would be there to celebrate it with me? Dad and Dave. Woo. I see them every weekend.
A while back, a co-worker asked me what I'd do if I won the lottery. I told her that I'd go home. I would quit my job and be outta here in a heartbeat. I would move back to WV, buy a little house, and start a charity. I'd help out my family, too. (Well some of them. Not all. Shit, I have over 40 cousins alone - that doesn't count aunts, uncles and the cousin's kids.) I have never really developed a connection to this place. I have friends here but they're no replacement for family. (Ok. I can name three that are pretty close... but still, three??) I have always felt as if I'm an outsider looking in on a world that doesn't accept me. I'm just tolerated, put up with, so as to maintain peace. Back in the woods, people don't care. I could show up in a POS car that is seven colors and has the floors rusted out and be welcomed just as if I showed up in a Ferrari. I told you all about how I got to hang out with two kids I went to school with back in WV, right? It was as if those 20 years had never passed. Yeah, we all grew up and did "adult things", but we still laughed at our bad jokes and carried on like twerps. My clothes, my car, none of that mattered. And, honestly, none of that matters to me either. I guess that is why I am an outsider - I don't care about all that shit that everyone else does. I care about the people who care about me.
I suppose I should start buying lottery tickets more regularly. And, it's a fun way to donate to charities (a lot of the PA Lottery money goes to support the elderly and education, and it's a tax write off).
I have another photo for you.
Two books I finished this weekend.
The one in the center is about my recent trip to visit family and a museum down in West Virginia. The covers, inside and out, are chipboard that I made collages on (used pictures and words from travel brochures and magazines I gathered on the trip). The guts of the book are photos and postcards.
The bottom book was a bit more complicated. Covers are chipboard that I glued decorative paper onto (I made the blue and black marbleized paper on the outside as well). The innards (shown at right) is watercolor paper with marker illustrations. The first half of the book is comprised of reference sheets of each of my comic strips characters. The second half is of cartoons of said characters.
***The trip to WV has made me realize how much I miss my family. We are pretty close knit and keep in touch but the distance does weigh on you after a while. It's not like I can go to a weekend gathering on the spur of the moment. It takes me eight hours to drive one way from PA to WV and it's around 450 miles. If that doesn't sound like much, you're either a trucker or you've never been on a drive like that. It's exhausting. So I miss out on graduations, birthday parties, funerals, everything. On the other side of the coin, no one comes up here for my birthday, no one drives up for my big events. That's one of the reasons I didn't go to my college graduation - who the hell would be there to celebrate it with me? Dad and Dave. Woo. I see them every weekend.
A while back, a co-worker asked me what I'd do if I won the lottery. I told her that I'd go home. I would quit my job and be outta here in a heartbeat. I would move back to WV, buy a little house, and start a charity. I'd help out my family, too. (Well some of them. Not all. Shit, I have over 40 cousins alone - that doesn't count aunts, uncles and the cousin's kids.) I have never really developed a connection to this place. I have friends here but they're no replacement for family. (Ok. I can name three that are pretty close... but still, three??) I have always felt as if I'm an outsider looking in on a world that doesn't accept me. I'm just tolerated, put up with, so as to maintain peace. Back in the woods, people don't care. I could show up in a POS car that is seven colors and has the floors rusted out and be welcomed just as if I showed up in a Ferrari. I told you all about how I got to hang out with two kids I went to school with back in WV, right? It was as if those 20 years had never passed. Yeah, we all grew up and did "adult things", but we still laughed at our bad jokes and carried on like twerps. My clothes, my car, none of that mattered. And, honestly, none of that matters to me either. I guess that is why I am an outsider - I don't care about all that shit that everyone else does. I care about the people who care about me.
I suppose I should start buying lottery tickets more regularly. And, it's a fun way to donate to charities (a lot of the PA Lottery money goes to support the elderly and education, and it's a tax write off).