Pancakes

some asshat pinged it on a commission I did for a client. I’m not fuckin happy that someone tried to steal my damn art, that someone else paid to have done of THEIR character no less.

[ screenshots below from this tweet ]

For a lot of people with dysautonomic disorders (POTS included) hot environments are hell. This goes x2 if the hot environment you’re in is humid rather than dry and things such as hot showers and saunas make you dizzy or tired (nothing worse for us than humid heat).

This happens because the extra warmth makes our blood vessels dilate even more than they already inadequately do and too dilated blood vessels may make your blood pressure low or unstable, which in turn means your upper body is deprived of enough oxygen (your blood is pooling down in your feet instead of being pushed upwards thanks to more constricted blood vessels). Most worryingly, our brains are being deprived of enough oxygen.

An oxygen deprived brain, especially if deprived of it persistently through time, causes chronic fatigue and brain fog, two symptoms often misdiagnosed as depression, since you have no energy to even think, focus or have good memory (brain fog), much less to be active, experience pleasure/enjoyment, or be motivated. It can also reduce sex drive, among many other things.

…look at the photos you have left over…

…and say “yup, Scooby looks like a pelican.”

And/or is kissing the Invisible Man.

But that’s not all the magic that didn’t make it into a post!

There ol’ Scoob’s contortionist-stance-thingy, complete with non-black nose…

…this enthusiastic monstrosity… which seems to put appendages wherever it darn well pleases…

…and this transitional frame of… of…

…um… if Pac-Man grew up to be the boss from Dilbert.

It often feels like with a blog, compared to other mediums, there’s much less of a feedback loop to gauge people’s responses. See what’s meh, see when someone really cares when a thing tries to go above and beyond… anyway, looking forward to getting back to new content tomorrow!

FAT. DO Y'ALL KNOW I'M FAT!?!

There’s just

so many of these

and I think it’s incredibly funny but

I just read this bit from the artist and

This is a "plein air" painting which means I set up my easel right across the street of this Chase bank in my city and painted it like it had caught fire. The police questioned me on the spot. Three weeks later Homeland Security was knocking on the door to my home. The question they kept asking me was "Do you hate these banks?" I can honestly say yes.

But there’s a world of difference between doing what you love for you, and doing what you love for a paycheck. 

I went to undergrad for graphic design and 3-D design–art and more art, I usually say–and I loved it. You know what I didn’t love? Trying to collect my fees from clients. Trying to meet unrealistic, over-simplified or over-specific briefs from people who didn’t know what they were talking about. Coming home, having worked creatively all day, with no creative juice left for the things I wanted to do.

You know what I would tell you instead? Do something that you can be interested in, with people you like.

You don’t have to love it. Loving your work can be a lot, and it often means you have to live in your job 24/7. Some people can do that. Not everyone can, or should.  But if you can find work that’s interesting enough that it doesn’t feel tedious, and people you can enjoy spending your 9-5 with, and you can make money, that’s great! It means you can do the things you love for you.

I’m in law school now. It’s interesting work, and difficult, and I like doing it. I like how complicated it gets, and I like the stories it tells. But I don’t come home and read law journals for fun. I come home, and I sculpt, and I draw, and I paint, and I read. I do these things for me.

cleaning or wipe your bare feet

breaking off a piece of bread and handing it to someone

putting the weight of a basket on your hip or head

eating nuts or berries while hunched over close to the ground

seeing something startling just out of your line of sight and very quickly stepping or leaping on to a larger object to get a better view

cupping your hands into running water to wash your face

the unanimous protection of a baby or child in a public space where women are present

But what happens when I don’t get enough iron is that I get tired. Not normal tired, soul deep depression tired.  I want to go to sleep at 7pm instead of 11 but I can’t actually fall or stay asleep because I’m not lacking sleep, I’m lacking iron. I have no energy to do anything. Nothing interests me. Worse, I get a full on “doom is coming for me” anxiety paired with “Everything is bad and I should give up on life.”

Sleeping doesn’t fix it. Eating doesn’t fix it. Trying to pick myself up and carry on doesn’t fix it. Eating red meat helps- which is how I decided to try grabbing a bottle of iron pills to see if it would make a difference (given that in hs the doctor suspected anemia was responsible for me literally passing out in class, but it was just deficiency).

As it happens, yeah. Iron is apparently important. Even just taking one once in a while has helped me almost completely avoid that horrible state of being for almost a year. Forgot the last few weeks, and have spent days now feeling like shit for apparently no reason until my partner asked if I’d taken any iron lately. Took one yesterday, one today, will take one more tomorrow, but I’m already feeling like myself again.