Never could get the hang of Thursdays.

I keep telling myself that things are going to get better once I'm finished that whole IRB/proposal process; I don't like my proposal much in its current state, but I didn't like the last one either, and that seemed fine. I just need to be able to stop worrying about other people judging me and go forward, and that's very hard when I have to fill out 17 pages about how I'm not going to be using ionizing radiation or fetal tissue in my final project.

So then, while I was putting off my real work, I did 20 or 30 pages of manga translation, and...closed the file without saving. Oh, but I did get paid for all my pre-Christmas-break hours, so that much is good.

Some mantras:

"It's only a master's paper. Not a dissertation."
"All I'm really grading you on is the research process."
"I know someone who did their master's paper in a week."

Art people, I call on you for help!

My assignment for my art of the picture book class is to tell a story using only 4-6 images. How do I do this?

Bonus question: Having very little artistic talent, these will most likely be photographs of Carrboro and environs. Knowing that, how do I do this?

If all else fails, I'll do 'I ride my bike around the city with no particular narrative intent,' but I know artists, so I ought to be able to come up with something better. Yeah, yeah, I read manga--but I'm still not a visual person in the least.

(no subject)

The thing that I have to remember is that I do much better when I consider myself as an embodied person.

All through high school, I did the 'brain in a jar' thing. By which I mean--I totally ignored my body, through a combination of being terrible at sports and not being that comfortable with myself. I never wore makeup, or did my hair, or wore a skirt, or attempted to diet, or picked out my own clothes, or did any exercise, and--it's not because I'm a Good Feminist or anything, although I'm glad that I managed not to hate my body in high school. It's that I didn't notice that I had a body.

To some degree that tendency persists, for good and bad. Good--I still almost never dislike my body, I have no urge to do ill-advised diets, and I save a lot of money on clothes and makeup. Bad--I lack the motivation to pluck my eyebrows or learn how to wear makeup, and, most significantly, I have a marked tendency to ignore the fact that my consciousness isn't some mystical external part of me, but part of my brain chemistry and my body, and my physical environment and what I do aren't disconnected from how I feel.

Sometimes it's a pain, to pay attention to that. Washing dishes is good for my mood. I hate it, you know, I absolutely detest it, but it's good for my mood. So is walking, even when it's freaking cold outside. Or it's simply that I get distracted, and can't be bothered, because I stack up a huge list of tasks for me to do. And when I'm sufficiently down, noodling around on the computer and watching CNN become the default choices, and it takes too much effort to break out of that. Other times it's a luxury I don't feel that I can allow myself--I am cheap and nomadic, and it made sense at the time to buy my pots and pans at the 100-yen store, to get a haircut every year or so, to put off buying art or curtains until I'm settled and actually have money.

I really will stop doing that once I'm settled and actually have money. ;)

So I need to remember that I'm not a brain in a jar; I must subsist on bike rides and chocolate croissants, drawing things badly, washing dishes, singing folk music in utter solitude, pretty colors, cooking, cleaning, trying to have a slightly more warm and livable living space. Not as a matter of whether I deserve it or not, but in a wholly pragmatic way because it's something that makes me function better, like food and sleep. Even when I have to force myself to stop watching CNN and do something.