Dear Friends,



I have a quandary.



Life is fabulously good.  This is true.  I work part-time teaching young children circus arts and helping them gain coordination and confidence in their bodies and abilities.  It is a great job.  I make things (new comics are up at my Flickr site, come and see!) almost every day, or anyway I try to.  But I need something more to do with my time.  The circus gig is extremely part-time, and there are just too many hours in the day for me to stay sane.  



Options I have considered and/or pursued:

- getting a second job (also for income reasons)

- starting a shop on Etsy (selling handmade journals and original art, possibly also comics)

- illustration and graphic design work (I am doing this on the side, but the work is far from regular)



Things I want to do, but don't really know how to go about it:

- be an artist



I'm not kidding on this one.  Making stuff isn't enough.  I want to sell it, or show it to someone, or I don't know, advertise my existence as a person who makes things.  I want to meet people, particularly other artists.  I'm thinking of turning this journal and my Flickr site into a more professional artist's blog and collection of my work (respectively).  I made a blog, but it seems silly to switch to a different journal-like site when I already have this one, and when I know people on this one.  When I finish Olo, which I swear on a stack of bibles I will do, I want to know how to get it published. 



So, friends, what shall I do?  Those of you who make things, and the lucky few of you who make things for a living--how do you pull it off?  More importantly, what did you do before you were able to do it?  

 Super late, but here are (some of) my feelings on Seattle's Seafair and the Blue Angels, who shook our building to its roots for two weeks when they were practicing: 

 



I don't know if I agree 100%, but the sentiment resonates with me.  

I ran across this quote on my way through New Mexico and Arizona.  I meant to post it then; here it is now.  



"Well - I made you take the time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.



Then when I paint a red hill, because a red hill has no particular association for you like the flower has, you say it is too bad that I don't always paint flowers. A flower touches almost everyone's heart. A red hill doesn't touch everyone's heart as it touches mine and I supposed there is no reason why it should. The red hill is a piece of the badlands where even the grass is gone. Badlands roll away outside my door - hill after hill - red hills of apparently the same sort of earth that you mix with oil to make paint. All the earth colors of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands. The light Naples yellow through the ochres - orange and red and purple earth - even the soft earth greens.



You have no associations with those hills - our waste land - I think our most beautiful country. You must not have seen it, so you want me to always to paint flowers...."



-- Georgia O'Keeffe in Exhibition Catalogue, An American Place, 1939





Seattle is very beautiful.  There are fruit trees on every block, and rosemary grows like a tree rather than a bush.  I clipped some new growth from the plant at Erica's house and put it in water--four days later it is already sending out little white fingers into the water.  When it gets bigger we'll be able to plant it in a pot.  I miss the red dirt, though.  I'll go back someday.  



Life is pretty okay.  The apartment is really great, more than big enough for the two of us.  We cook and bake and read.  Money is very, very tight and I am looking for a second job (or third, if you count extremely sporadic graphic design 'gigs').  



That's all for now, I guess.  

Wednesday was the hottest in Seattle's recorded history!  Therefore:







We (Erica, Alex, Carey, Ben, Nick and I) went swimming in Lake Washington.  It was incredibly satisfying and exactly what everyone needed, even though we were sweaty again ten minutes later.