Ups and Downs

I should be asleep right now.  Well, at least, I should be in bed.  But I'm not.  I'm not tired.  And I feel kinda sick.  Probably because my day has consisted of little more than sleeping and eating a bunch of spicy Mexican food.  Plus, I've got this weird bump on my forehead that my neuroses are slowly convincing me is an early warning sign of cancer.  It's like my dad always said, "Getting old's a... what the heck is that on your forehead?"

I was feeling a lot more inspired last night from the Bansky book than I am now.  I think it's probably easier to put off the rigors of conforming to society and not care what people think about you and your work when you're an internationally-known street artist.  Plus, I didn't have to work this morning, so I didn't have that stuck feeling like I'm not doing anything meaningful with my time.  Nights before my days off are like that.  I have all these hopes for what the next day will look like and how productive I'm going to be, and then I either sit around and do nothing with it or I actually do get off my butt and go someplace, but it's only to Petsmart so I can buy $70 worth of new stuff for my fish tank.

I didn't finish my Groupon application today like I said I wanted/was going to.  Part of the reason is because they changed the submission content and I have to redo part of my application.  But mostly it's because I didn't work on it.  I didn't feel like it.  I just kinda wanted to be sad today.  I'm not really sure why.  I think it has to do with feeling like I should've done more with my life by now than I have and that I shouldn't be stuck where I am, struggling along with a bunch of debt and a crap retail job.

I also didn't get anything done with the side projects I wanted to finish/get started.  Yesterday I mentioned toying with the idea of quitting this because I felt like I was out of material, but that was only part of it.  I've been looking at a few different ways to make some extra money and thought to put together some ideas this week to have ready to roll out/act on by tomorrow.  One idea is to sell pretty much everything I own.  I have a lot of really cool stuff (t-shirts, CD's, books, movies, old N64/SNES games, etc.) that I hardly ever wear/use anymore and I just keep it with me because of some messed up sense of sentimentality I have that never lets me get rid of anything.  One of my goals in life is to get rich enough to buy all this stuff back whenever I have the kind of disposable income that can afford to blow money on things I don't really need (and the space to store it all), so it would behoove me to go ahead and get started whittling away at all the "accumulation" I seem to have gathered over the years.  And if I can make a couple dollars off of it in the process, why not?  I've got cool stuff.  I don't think it's crazy that other people would want to buy it.  Especially if I let it go pretty cheap.

Another idea I had was to start hand-making journals out of different, un-journal-y materials.  I need to work out the logistics of how to get decent paper in appropriate sizes that I can use for the interior folios, but I'd really like to experiment with binding covers made out of found objects (cereal boxes, for instance) and different types of materials that you wouldn't normally see used for notebooks.  I've also been thinking about selling some of my artwork and getting in the groove of painting new stuff to sell, but all I can think to do is rip off Ashleigh Brilliant quotes and I hear he gets kinda pissed about that.

On a lighter note, I got the Batarang money clip my mom ordered for me today, so that's fun.  I'm having to work really hard to resist the urge to throw it at stuff and see if it'll stick.  Maybe it won't be so hard if I actually put money in it.  But I doubt it.

I'm gonna try to lay down again and see if I can sleep.  Hopefully I'll stop burping deluxe tomatilla sauce long enough to fall back asleep for the fifteenth time today.  Sorry I wasn't more energetic today.  Maybe somebody will poop in the bathroom at work again and I'll have something more up-beat to post about tomorrow.  Goodnight, all.  Thanks for all the birthday well-wishes.

P.S. if you actually know of something I own that you want, go ahead and make me an offer on it.  At this point, the only thing I won't be selling is my computer and my bed.  Everything else is fair game, assuming the right offer is made.

P.P.S. if you have an idea for a handmade journal, let me know.  I'm going to try find a couple more things to use for covers before putting together samples, but if you run across something and think, "Hey, maybe that would be cool," just tell me and I'll see what I can do.  Anything will work, really.