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Process of Nekomata

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Daniel Arsham + Hajime Sorayama

@danielarsham

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”

A Small Guide to Journaling by Eintsein

Some recent illustrations inspired by my personal life! Enjoy! 

tell me why this budgetless gay youtube series made for fun by a group of friends has the best editing and writing of anything i’ve watched in a year.

2. On a scale of 1-5, how afraid of the dark are you?

3. The person you would never want to meet?

4. What is your favorite word?

5. If you were a type of tree, what would you be?

6. When you looked in the mirror this morning what was the first thing you thought?

7. What shirt are you wearing?

8. What do you label yourself as?

9. Bright room or dark room?

10. What were you doing at midnight last night?

11. Favorite age you’ve been so far?

12. Who told you they loved you last?

13. Your worst enemy?

14. What is your current desktop picture?

15. Do you like someone?

16. The last song you listened to?

17. You can press a button that will make any one person explode. Who would you blow up?

18. Who would you really like to just punch in the face?

19. If anyone could be your slave for a day, who would it be and what would they have to do?

20. What is your best physical attribute? (showing said attribute is optional)

21. If you were the opposite sex for one day, what would you look like and what would you do?

22. Do you have a secret talent? If yes, what is it?

23. What is one unique thing you’re afraid of?

24. You can only have one kind of sandwich. Every sandwich ingredient known to humankind is at your disposal.

25. You just found $100! How are you going to spend it?

26. You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere in the world, but you have to leave immediately. Where are you going to go?

27. An angel appears out of Heaven and offers you a lifetime supply of the alcoholic beverage of your choice. “Be brand-specific” it says. Man! What are you gonna say about that? Even if you don’t drink booze there’s something you can figure out… so what’s it gonna be?

28. You discover a beautiful island upon which you may build your own society. You make the rules. What is the first rule you put into place? 

29. What is your favorite expletive?

30. Your house is on fire, holy shit! You have just enough time to run in there and grab ONE inanimate object. Don’t worry, your loved ones and pets have already made it out safely. So what’s the one thing you’re going to save from that blazing inferno?

31. You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?

32. You got kicked out of the country for being a time-traveling heathen who sleeps with celebrities and has super-powers. But check out this cool shit… you can move to anywhere else in the world!

33. The Celestial Gates Of Beyond have opened, much to your surprise because you didn’t think such a thing existed. Death appears. As it turns out, Death is actually a pretty cool entity, and happens to be in a fantastic mood. Death offers to return the friend/family-member/person/etc. of your choice to the living world. Who will you bring back?

34. What was your last dream about?

35. Are you a good….[insert anything you’d like here]?

36. Have you ever been admitted to the hospital?

37. Have you ever built a snowman?

38. What is the color of your socks?

39. What type of music do you like?

40. Do you prefer sunrises or sunsets?

41. What is your favorite milkshake flavor?

42. What football team do you support? (I will answer in terms of American football as well as soccer)

43. Do you have any scars?

44. What do you want to be when you graduate?

45. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

46. Are you reliable?

47. If you could ask your future self one question, what would it be?

48. Do you hold grudges?

49. If you could breed two animals together to defy the laws of nature, what new animal would you create?

50. What is the most unusual conversation you’ve ever had?

51. Are you a good liar?

52. How long could you go without talking?

53. What has been you worst haircut/style?

54. Have you ever baked your own cake?

55. Can you do any accents other than your own?

56. What do you like on your toast?

57. What is the last thing you drew a picture of?

58. What would be you dream car?

59. Do you sing in the shower? Or do anything unusual in the shower? Explain.

60. Do you believe in aliens?

61. Do you often read your horoscope?

62. What is your favorite letter of the alphabet?

63. Which is cooler: dinosaurs or dragons?

64. What do you think about babies?

a banger is something goes hard (some times unnecessarily) can invoke deep emotions. can fizzle out after some time has passed. 

As the raging California wildfires encroached upon Roland Handel’s home, he had to make a split-second decision — try to force his dog Odin into the car, or leave him behind.

Odin is one of two great Pyrenees who take turns guarding the family’s eight goats from coyotes and mountain lions, and he was on duty the night the fires broke out.

“I had my 14-year-old daughter and we had to get out,” Handel said between sobs.

So he opened the gates so the animals could flee, then drove off with his daughter, their three other dogs and two cats all packed into the family car.

“By the time we were going down the road, you could hear the twisting metal of transmission towers falling and propane tanks exploding,” he said. “I’ll never forget it.”

He returned the next day, circumventing roadblocks to get there.

He discovered that his home and everything else on his property was completely destroyed.

Except for Odin, who was there waiting for him — with all eight goats.

The dogs paw pads were burnt and his bright white fur was singed orange. 

“He looked small and he was limping. He was lying down a lot. He was clearly exhausted.”

A group of deer had gathered with Odin and the goats, Handel said, perhaps also taking advantage of the brave pooch’s protection. The deer scattered when Handel approached.

He believes the dog led the other animals to a clearing at the center of a high outcropping of rocks to avoid contact with the flames.

“Its amazing he’s in such good spirits. He doesn’t show signs of being traumatized at all. He’s just really happy,” Handel said.

“He’ll make a full recovery. He’s going to be back with his goats.”

Handel is now raising money on YouCaring to rebuild the animals’ barn and water supply before winter. 

We had one named Blue when I was little who was scratched by a cat when he was a puppy. He never once attacked a cat in his life, however, and was terrified of kittens despite being well over 90 pounds.

He used to prop me up when I was a toddler and knock me over if I got too close to the pond, where I easily could have drowned.

One of the baby lambs died one year, and he dug it up from where we buried it and took it into the barn and cuddled with it all night, trying to warm it back to life.

As a young dog, he used to run off into traffic- it was so bad that he was fitted with a shock collar and invisible fence until he learned to stop. To his dying day, he was frightened to death of white yarn.

His pa Jo was seventeen years old when he died- which is damned ancient for that breed. His back legs were locked up at the joints and he had terrible arthritis, but if he caught so much as a whiff of a bear he’d be hauling ass out into the woods as fast as he could hop. 

Sometimes, people would come to the farm and mistake them for bears, but neither of them ever jumped or bit when they got yelled at. Jo used to roll his eyes at people if they were too busy to pet him.