creativity

Mandala Magic

June 16, 2016 118 Comments

So, mother is in hospital, and this means I am running about, crazily doing all the things I have no time to do when she is at home. I do not know if she will be returning, but I have created a self contained annex in case she does as her children have shown no signs of ceasing the usual poor behaviour and attacks. It is much safer to put a locked door between me and them, meaning that she will have to live in another part of the house.

In the meantime, I have taken delivery of another pile of materials to move onto the next phase of Sheep in Wolfe’s clothing, which will set the section up for future additions in the same style. As I said, I am extremely bored with Wolfe, so I am starting a new collection, which is antique inspired, whilst I await the next muse, or muses, to appear. The plan is to expand the Short Misadventures section with people from the public volunteering to muse for new pieces, which should be interesting. I will need youtube videos, personal bios and possibly an interview with these people, but beyond that it can be fairly superficial. This will be next year or so, after I have completed the artwork and books for Wolfe, and kicked off the Ballantine collection of antique stuff. Plenty of time for a press release and more extensive campaign to advertise the opportunity of having your name on a piece of artwork/story etc.

Tonight, as part of my finale grouping for the basic Wolfe collection, I have been researching Mandalas. Wolfe probably likes mandalas. If some big hairy guy made one for him, he would probably become extremely excited and say how far-out and marvellous it was. Since it is me, he will say absolutely nothing, which has become extremely boring. I have learned from my research so far, that I do not like mandalas. I do not like foot jewellery, I do not like knitted bikinis, I do not like hippy artwork, I do not like anything about this scene at all. But Wolfe probably respects Mandalas, so I will make him a mandala and call it Dipshit Hippy Crap. This is entirely in keeping with the rest of the collection and I am sure I will enjoy it slightly more with the perversity of putting work into something I have no interest in at all.

Trying to sort yet another 900 balls of wool is extremely tiring when you have to grade it into shades in your studio, knowing full well that you won’t see much of it for months as you are busy on other things. The more arty the collection becomes, the more impractical and stupid you feel doing it, but in terms of development, the more you do, the more you want to do, so on a personal basis, it is still worthwhile.

Am very much off writing the blog at the moment, as I am too worried about my mother and since I am anxious, I like to combine eating badly with sewing. I hope to have the book finished soon, but I will probably put a new artwork on the cover, so it may be delayed depending on what feels right.

The game will also still go ahead, but I have to get through the next few weeks the best I can, which means a lot of anxious sewing and planning for potential disaster in the form of yet more personal attacks from the family. I also have to think about income streams, so things are a bit up in the air.

creativity, health, motivation

The ego and creativity

June 7, 2016 No Comments

The ego and creativity – Wolfe’s kiss farewell

Today I had an extremely offensive conversation with one particular friend. He has some very strange ideas about creativity, so I am going to address these ideas very slowly, in a format that he is very welcome to absorb in a space where he cannot commit an assault.

There is a chasm of difference between developing an idea, and developing a marketing strategy. We can see from our television channels that shooting for the lowest possible denominator in the hope of viewing figures is not the way to achieve quality. We can also see from many arthouse movies that self indulgence does not always produce something that you would want to watch.

My friend, who makes arty movies which he does not bother to market, likes to prevent me from speaking at all by attacking me verbally whenever I try to explain to him that he has his priorities a little confused, making it impossible for me, as an extremely patient and understanding friend, never mind anyone else to work with him.

Today, it was a possible sit com that became impossible to even conceptualise, because he imagines that finding a marketing person that will make the magic exposure problem go away is more important than developing a product. This means that you cannot even develop your idea sufficiently to make it worthwhile, never mind discuss it to the point that you get any actual work done.

I have previously tried giving him simple open ended tasks to complete alone, with the idea that if he is left to complete something himself, I will not be at physical risk, and he will gain the satisfaction of moving a project on a stage. Even this has resulted in such a strong stress response that it is not possible to get anything done, and so two projects so far have had to be abandoned. He then likes to tell me what he thinks I asked him to do, which is nothing to do with what I actually said, because he was not listening in the first place.

Now this problem is caused by stress. In particular a fragile and super-stressed ego, so today I tried using myself, and then Wolfe, as an example of how other people work. In my case, as money is not an issue at present, I like to spend one third of my time on the piece of work, and two thirds of the time allocated on marketing the piece of work, whether this is over a month, a year, five years really does not matter as long as I have the time and space. Therefore there is a fairly consistent flow. For someone like Wolfe, for whom money is very important, he spends maybe 5 minutes out of an hour doing the work, and 55 minutes out of the hour telling the world that he has done the work. This can be done by passive or direct means, but whether you believe him to be a loudmouth Yank or not, he is certainly more successful, in a very niche market, than anyone else.

You cannot market a product that cannot exist due to temperament. In order to market thin air, you have to be a convincing person with a track record of actually achieving what you set out to achieve. Your cheaply made arthouse movie can do this for you, if you actually bother to develop your skill to the level where you are presenting something watchable. In order to do this, you have to consider the wider public rather than trying to sell yourself to a ‘marketing person’ who probably doesn’t exist.

700 people a month look at my artwork on the website. I maybe tweet it twice a month to achieve that, the rest of the hits coming from the relatively unrelated blog. This is a good use of time, develops my writing ability and expression, and gives me time to dream up more complicated versions of my work. I picked up a lot of information from Wolfe in this respect. Worrying about what people think of you, or failing to promote yourself is not useful to you. Insulting your friends by preventing them from helping you and telling them repeatedly that their views are irrelevant whilst they try to give you the information that you need is also not useful to you, as they will simply stop trying at all.

A master of an art is not an egotist, too frightened to input feedback. Very much like a British academic, they will listen to the most obscure information related to their interest area in an effort to improve quality, improve audience figures, expand their area of interest.

In my case, since my work is usually produced when I am wounded in some way, annoying me is what usually gets you a piece of work in the first place, which is why Wolfe was such an excellent candidate. He lacks understanding or respect for other people, however, which is why it is now more interesting to me to find some fresh meat.

I cannot help my friend with the knot he has tied himself into. I am just not putting myself in that position again, which means conversation is now likely to be severely limited. If I acted towards him the way he behaved this morning, I would now be in hospital. The great pity is that I doubt a single word I said went in, and so nothing will change.

If you are a creative person, bear in mind what I have said. Even if you do not like your work, it is important to either bin it or promote it to allow others to feed back to you. Otherwise you could find your passion drained by circumstance, and unless your spark is as self-healing as mine, you could end up bitter, hostile and unable to access your own genius.

Thank you David, for being careless, rude and a bit sexist and stupid. Without you, none of this would have been possible.

The post The ego and creativity – Wolfe’s kiss farewell appeared first on Ina Disguise – Author.

creativity, motivation

Tired of the dislikes, Wolfe.

June 5, 2016 No Comments

It has been nearly ten years, since my mother’s stroke, a month before my father died. I have reached the end of my productive adult life as a female, in terms of having a career or having a child before it is too late (not physically, I am unlikely to trust anyone enough to procreate before the time is up, given my slow burn mentality.)

I frequently cry about this, I pretty much started crying as soon as I saw Wolfe. Not for the obvious reasons, just the polar opposite, confident male version of me. These are not all good qualities, given the errors in plain sight etc. He makes me feel very battered.

I did wonder, for a long time, whether there was envy involved in my interest in him. I also wondered why, as someone considered very knowledgeable by even my drinking buddies, I would seek what would be considered to the untrained eye a ‘himbo.’ These people would not understand as I do, the amount of time and commitment Wolfe has had to put in to make his extensive knowledge of natural health look superficial and effortless to the jaded European passing interest eye.

I have been horribly bullied since childhood. I wondered, as a child, why I got on better with my teachers than I did with my own family. I remember at ten or so, having to leave the room because my sisters were shrill, inane, and extremely nasty.

Last week I tried to notify one of them of my mother’s impending operation. Her response was that this was not good enough for her. She only really sees things in terms affecting her. The fact that she had already had a letter explaining the operation had escaped her, because apparently my ability to write frightens her. Were I to describe a summer’s day, she would find it weird and patronising.

So, as you can tell, I am not dealing with brains of Britain. My mother used to tell me I would have to look after them after she was gone. I thought this was very odd, given that I was a small child, and they were ten and sixteen years older, and consistently nasty. Now I am less surprised. My mother, herself pretty unpleasant until her stroke, was identifying the stronger party.

Being strong sucks, however. You get dumped on, everyone expects you to cope on your own, and they think it is quite alright to attack you over and over again. I am a bit fed up, to say the least. I have had to say to her, in all seriousness, that either I have to now demonstrate some form of parental discipline, or she will have to go into care as I am not safe from my own siblings, who have proved themselves to be greedy, dishonest, extremely nasty and extremely ruthless in their pursuit of role playing power points and financial entitlement.

I did not take care of their parents for reasons of power-mongering, but this is what they have always been so scared of, and which is now a horribly self-fulfilling prophecy, and the only way out of it, it seems, is for my mother to live elsewhere in case they want to visit. (in my brother’s case, the visits are now every five months, so this seems like an expensive waste) I am not sure that I see a way out, other than our moving so far away that they cannot visit at all, and this would be complicated by my mother’s progressing illness, leaving us open to further legal attacks from her own children.

So there we have it, the opposite of a go-getting, driven, confident and rather slutty male, is a shy, harried, equally loquacious but somewhat different female that gave her life away for a family who neither deserved nor appreciated it. I have distracted myself from misery, by investing myself in amusing my opposite, who remains unamused.

I do realise that part of the reason that Wolfe hates everything is to let me know he has seen it so that I can take it down, and I also realise that I am insufficiently worthy of note to really affect him at all, but it still pisses me off that I could not even manage to get a sensible conversation out of him in the first place. He spotted me, and then apparently made several incorrect assumptions, based on erroneous ideas about worth, purpose and interest.

I just wanted one thing to go right. I wanted one thing to be appreciated and used appropriately, and I wanted to make something of a life that had already been taken away.

You could say that something else was created, but whether it is worthwhile beyond comforting a few thousand other emotionally scarred people, I don’t know. At least it got me writing in the first place, I guess.

It is unlikely that my family will notice that they have messed up until they have lost everything. It makes me very sad that other people cannot even let my mother die the ways she wants to, and that I am becoming less committed to fighting them. Being strong sucks, and being kind sucks even more.

creativity, motivation

Amos Yee and David Wolfe

June 4, 2016 8 Comments

Sorry I have not updated in a few days – I have been catching up with the backdrop for Wolfish, working on finishing some work under my own name, mother has been super – ill and even I thought she was dying of old age, rather than her persistent infection becoming even more persistent. It just goes to show, you must fight even when it seems utterly hopeless. She is now recovering from a particularly virulent UTI in hospital whilst I take a rest from being me from a few days.

Yesterday I discovered the story of Amos Yee, a charming yet precocious 17 year old in Singapore, who has turned performance art into protest and is facing many charges and years in jail for simply speaking his mind via his blog and youtube channel As a formerly spritely 17 year old myself, I recognise the spunk, but I have to say he is exceptionally brave to be putting himself at risk to change his country’s culture in this particular way.

Compare his efforts to the genius Seo Taiji, sometimes referred to as the South Korean president of culture for his efforts to develop his country’s cultural life via his music career and influence, and you can see that Amos has some hope of achieving his goal of encouraging free speech in Singapore, but his methods are scarily brave, and I see from some of the comments on his videos, that even his followers are terrified by the risks he is running. His parents, too, have been frightened of the repercussions, resorting to reporting him themselves.

Singapore has an appallingly repressed culture. The birth rate is low, due to men being encouraged to be ‘too polite’ to girls, and the economy is geared towards commerce at the exclusion of freedom, meaning that there are an awful lot of shopping malls but not much in the way of freedom of expression. I would encourage you to watch Amos and listen carefully to what he has to say. Although I question his need to ‘destroy David Icke,’ I remember only too well the clarity of thought and limited scope of action involved in being 17, and I hope, for this reason, he wins his personal battle with the jackboot of capitalism. Witness for yourself the future for countries indulging business over people. It ain’t pretty.

I see that David has caught my video. I hope he hasn’t missed hating me too much. (he still does, boohiss) I am working on the book, and will be a bit nearer publication in a few days. I will have to spend some more quality time researching Peru.

Kisses,

Ina

creativity

Describing Yourself

May 24, 2016 No Comments

Getting your ideas across is a complex process, especially when you have an incoherent concept that you are in the process of rendering coherent.

I have only made any effort to go public at all because I (and even this sentence is a struggle to write) felt I had touched on something that Wolfe either did not understand, or had made a life choice not to understand, and for some intangible reason it was very important to make sure I made as many efforts as possible to get it across to him. Not so much a matter of getting my claws in, as opening a door for him and letting him do whatever he wants with it. In addition, there is a smattering of potentially valuable knowledge scattered throughout if one chooses to pick it up. Most of my feedback has indicated that people take the emotional hit, and depart satisfied without really examining why they feel better, but this is a sign of success as far as I am concerned.

I am in the process of widening the net, in terms of publicising Ina Disguise, in preparation for the completion of Best Adventure Ever. I see that for many sites, the blog posts themselves are too personal, too opinionated, and do not contain as many pictures as they should. Everything has to have a kind of reader’s digest uniformity, for many sharing sites, and I stick out like a sore thumb, as per usual. My lizard self tells me that I should edit, rewrite and add pictures to fit in with this ethos and get my work out, and my actual self tells me I would be losing my USP. As an advanced reader, headlines and pictures actually put me off, when reading, but I see that this is another example of my being out of touch.

Somebody very kindly interfered with my Alexa ranking, and has replaced my keywords with ones which are less to do with me, and more to do with getting me more hits. Thank you to whoever it was, as they have rendered the website much more attractive to search engines etc and have increased the value of the website by quite a chunk. I am not sure what the intention was, but I got a nice surprise when I saw that it had been done and why.

I am quite happy to write articles separately from the blog, I have managed to get quite a bit of material down now, so it is not a huge hardship, but I think it is best for the blog to be the blog, for good or ill. Journalistic stuff is really for a separate section, so perhaps I should insert an invisible page and stick them there. I will let you know how this process goes, but so far the products page has raced up the leaderboard overnight due to the large pictures, so I surmise from this that large pictures are what people are responding to. In the meantime, I am going to get the blog up on youtube as it is, before I start editing if this is necessary.

So now I have the problem of describing my work again.
What is Ina Disguise all about?

Joining the dots in terms of your intellect, your emotional state and your ability to convey your ideas is not something that is really encouraged in Western society. There are many good reasons for this, the main one being that you can trap yourself if you do not keep these things separate, and things like your magnum opus being abandoned for several years because of being stupidly in love with a stranger happen. A bit like choking on a smoothie when you have had bad family news.

If you can manage to pull it off, however, it leads to far more engaging and arguably important work. You are only as good as your level of passion, and your need for connection and engagement. Expressing a rather primitive interruption of this flow has been a major feature of the work so far on the Sheep in Wolf’s clothing project.

On the plus side, it meant that taking something traditionally used for another purpose – I made rather advanced textural pieces in two dimensions prior to this unfortunate episode, as can be seen with Saxophone, and On the Beach, but it was clear to me that two dimensions just were not enough to satisfy my visual communications in relation to Wolfe. This has led to a kind of naive sculpture which also means I have strayed into the realm of interior decor and fashion, which has been rather fruitful in terms of encouragement from appropriate interest groups. I also quite like the fact that there is no real reference point. This makes me challenge myself more, since I am the explorer in my current creative field.

In terms of the books, I notice that although I have written at some speed, spilling whatever I have to say out as it comes to me, that I have approached them in the same way one approaches a philosophy essay. There are several possible readings you can make of the same book, and you get a consistent number of points each way. Superficially, they are just rather entertaining cartoon stories, but you can pull different things from them depending on how you read them. So I think we can safely say I picked on the right muse on this occasion. Time will tell if a decent reviewer picks up on any of it, since I am still very lazy with marketing. We are at the point where I need to put a week or two into expanding the audience however, so this is what I am doing as I work on the next collection whilst listening to programming lessons.

Describing what you do is immensely important to your creative work. A good bullshitter is often far more successful than a moribund master of the arts. Finding a more mercurial person to devote themselves to the bullshit side of things is, therefore, invaluable for most creators. Twisty often likes to tell me that I need an agent, but Twisty is himself the world’s worst for not promoting his work, so I think perhaps he needs one more than I do.

To conclude, any spare time that you have left when creating needs to be spent on exploring the world of marketing, especially if you want to keep your overall costs down. I am fortunate that the magazines devoted to the rich and famous came to me, but not everyone is that lucky. Be shameless. Be positive, and do not allow your own cringing to grind you down.

creativity

A creative post

May 22, 2016 No Comments

I cannot move in the studio at the moment, as four Victorian bannisters that I have been working on for about three months are sitting there, dominating the workspace and sitting on wool boxes that I cannot open as a result.

The enlightenment project is also taking up a lot of messy space and money, as it is another resin related project. This is likely to continue for weeks to come.

It is amazingly annoying, not being able to move around your own studio. Amazingly annoying, and amazingly messy when the reason for it is dripping chemical pus all over the floor.

Tomorrow I will spend about two hours sanding off some of the resin that I have added today. This is annoying also, since it costs around £40 per litre, and cheaper casting resin will not do. The enlightenment project involves an awful lot of resin, so it is taking a very long time.

Meanwhile, in my bedroom, which I half-heartedly attempted to declutter last night, I have half a dozen boxes of shades of green, as I am working on a coral reef for Wolfish, and a large selection of leaves and butterflies for another piece or two. Folie a Versailles, meanwhile, languishes elsewhere as it is too big to put anywhere unless I am actually working on it. It is too hot to work on during the summer, so I have to wait until the weather gets colder.

Wolfish himself is staring at me, with his so far dead eyes from the other side of the room. The cats enjoy cuddling him, since he is bigger than them, but until I make up my mind whether to stuff him and how many friends I plan to make for him he has nowhere to go, as his tank is in the box room awaiting tiles and paint.

What’s the time Mr Wolfe? is keeping company with Perfect Posterior elsewhere in the room, as I have a little job to do on both of these. I still have a computer to finish also, so I will probably put that together today, in the computer room, alongside the other computers I have completed in the last couple of months.

In the meantime, Kira is starting to invade me a little, since my economics posts this week. She is still back at last year so far, but I suspect that it is coming up for time to finish the book. I have a good idea what is coming for the next one now, so it is probably time to finish this one. I also feel a bit more like going through my depressingly abandoned academic notes, so you can probably look forward to more careless fact dropping in the next book.

Feeling slightly better today, although my mother apparently thinks we are at a grand ball on a so-far unnamed Scottish island. This side of things is very tiring, so I try to avoid talking or thinking about it.

For those readers who wonder why I am talking about all these things in one post, this is how you have to learn to pace yourself. Life is messy. Probably the most important thing I learned, from all the things I learned in the course of my intensive exploration of life, is that it is perfectly fine to do 30 things slowly, and you get a much better result than doing one thing fast. You only learn to have the confidence to put things aside by doing it. Yes, you will finish the job later, and it will be much better, so do not be afraid.

creativity

Ina Disguise Q and A

May 22, 2016 No Comments

I have had some challengers this week, although they do not choose to actually discuss anything, I am going to answer their fascinating questions anyway.

Objectification

There are many videos on this available on Youtube. The questioner asked me about this blog post, or rather made an attempt to say I was talking nonsense without actually reading it all the way through:

Social Conditioning is a bitch, ain’t it?

The questioner was a young American goth, who did not realise that even questioning it meant that his masculinity was a bit shaky.

I am not the kind of chick that has ever really required feminism. As I have previously mentioned, I was so obsessed with work that the question of my out-working the guys never arose. The mistake people make with objectification is mistaking it for seriousness. Whilst some uses of young men and women, in particular, are a bit OTT, we are past the point at which it becomes some subliminal form of making you feel bad. Everyone is aware what it is for. Please now watch the entire video below.

As you can see, objectification is here reduced to a matter of levity. Men like looking at women. Women are not to be encouraged to look at men in a societal set-up that favours them, since women are to be rendered dependent on them, hence our young man’s objection to my statement. The recent growth in male stripping etc indicates that America is developing a system of dual intimidation rather than relaxing gender roles as Europe has made some effort to do. This is for commercial reasons. They have also introduced a new concept of ‘ugly sex,’ which is what everybody else has been doing for years.

I do not come from a culture in which this is particularly relevant. I will do a post at some point on Scottish flirting, which I am sure will enlighten poor confused Wolfe no end.

When I say that men like to be objectified, they enjoy the humour and attention involved. I do not mean they necessarily like being treated as toys any more than a relatively serious woman does. In some cases, entire careers have been set up purely to get the kind of attention they crave in the case of men who really do like being treated as toys.

A great many men have openly commended Best Romance Ever which is a book very much centred on Kira’s peculiar anti-objectification of Sam. She maintains distance to achieve intimacy, in a way. This tells me that men are a lot more flexible than many women give them credit for, although the cover does indicate that it is a unisex book.

2. Conservatism

Some tiresome American Ayn Rand fan tells me that conservatism is about personal responsibility. No, conservatism is about having a life so easy that you cannot imagine it all falling apart and needing any help. The idea of something happening to you is unthinkable, and you refuse to imagine it. You do not care about other people in society, whether they live or die, or whether they ever get the chance to thrive. There’s no two ways about it, there is nothing moral about conservatism, American or British. Society is about the survival of all, not how much you have managed to get for yourself.

Ayn Rand was a darkly humorous psychotic narcissist who had the naive American media around her little finger. This doesn’t make you look very smart. Why not buy another gun and shoot some poor people, and cut out all the middle men? What do you mean no? Are you afraid you might be put into a private prison and subjected to capital labour for the rest of your life along with the massive proportion of your population you choose to incarcerate? Land of liberty, my fat ass. Land of free speech, spending your time and money suing each other for saying what you think. No thank you, America.

3. Brexit

America does not want us to leave the EU, because they are waiting for the EU to sign TTIP and TISA. This is a good argument for leaving. Cameron does not want us to leave the EU, because there is a fat job waiting for him if he keeps us in it. He is also waiting for the EU to sign us up to TTIP, as he knows perfectly well if we choose to leave, he will be doing it, and then he will have even bigger riots on his hands as we all object to TTIP. You can look forward to yet another spurious war to distract us.

It depends really on who you trust less, the faceless people in Europe, or the absolute scum the English voted into government. Leaving the single market on the promise of finding new markets outside seems like a spurious argument on one hand, on the other, will Britain get the chance to leave ever again? I do not trust either side of the argument, going by the people making the arguments, so it is important to examine the facts. In the absence of hang-ups about immigration, there is still something to be said for exit.

Having said this, I would have preferred the European experiment to have worked, but the fact Europe is even prepared to entertain TTIP or anything like it makes me think we would be better off without it. It is far easier to stop a small machine than a large one, as I have discussed in previous posts.

4. Twisty

Someone asked after Twisty. We are on an off period at the moment, as I am avoiding confronting an issue neither of us can do anything about. This is not a romantic issue, Twisty is an old friend who is very helpful, or very hateful, depending on mood. He will be annoyed that I referred to him as a finisher, but I will explain this in a different creativity post. To make up for this, here is Twisty’s film, much acclaimed and which, like his others, is all his own work.

creativity

Hypocrisy

May 20, 2016 1 Comment

Hypocrisy

It is amazing how hurt and confused you get when somebody steals your book. I was not terribly bothered when Best Scandal Ever was pirated, as they were giving it away and I appreciated the distribution, but last night I found out someone has been selling Best Romance Ever on Amazon.
I have no idea how much money they have made from it, I do not imagine that it is much, but the fact they put a hideous cover on it and had the audacity to put it up there annoys me intensely. It is a bit like handing out leaflets for something you believe in, only for a mugger to come along, take your leaflets and then stand next to you selling them.
The only reason that there is money involved with Amazon purchases, is because Amazon won’t let me put the books on there free of charge. I have a policy of not charging for the best…ever books because they were intended for one person, and that person happens to have no respect for giving things like books away. (you would understand if you knew the lengthy story, but it is not something I care to go into here) In any case, since I do not really publicise them, they do not move on Amazon, so I rarely check it.
To add to this mystery, someone who clearly knows me put themselves on Amazon as ‘Little Minx,’ and reviewed both books. Anyone meeting me in person would drop the little part, so I am not sure who this could be. The person knows me well enough to remember my birthday, and even my closest friends would know that my birthday is something I usually try to avoid, so I am more confused than ever.
The good thing is that there is not likely to be money involved. The great thing about starting out with a bunch of free books, is that you take the whole thing for what it is – a hobby, until someone either tells you that you are too good to be giving away books, or you have amassed sufficient readers and books to make it worthwhile to sell them at all. Money kind of sullies everything, in terms of fun, so I think given that we have now had four bestselling authors try to claim the book, (turned out to be a software error causing their angst from other books) another book has been pirated, and now someone has actually tried to steal Best Romance ever, I am rather glad I chose this slow and lazy route. I am learning not to hit the roof when something stressful happens, because nobody else is all that bothered.
Anyway, you can see why someone who put a lot of work and money into marketing would absolutely freak out if something like this would happen. That is not to say that us paupers take it much better. If it is your book, it is your book.
On a lighter note, I now know what stumbleupon is for. It doesn’t tell you much on the site, but basically it is a kind of swapsite for websites that want to expand, so there are a lot of people who sit and click through tons of them in order to add theirs. It adds a lot of traffic, but most of that traffic is utterly useless. I am also in the process of adding myself to a few other sites from the ‘shameless’ post. This takes a long time to get up and running, so do not think that it is something you can do in one day. Try two a day or so, as the form filling and information adding gets really boring. Then you wonder how you could possibly have ignored all the fiddly bits that they ask for and not kept a record of all your website addresses. Such a waste of time. Sigh.

business, creativity, health

Self Imposed Aging

May 17, 2016 No Comments

Self imposed aging

I read an article this morning with a title along the lines of ‘Millennials have the key to future business development, as only they have an idea how to innovate for future customers.’ It was not much catchier than this, but I am a bit unwilling to bother finding the link. These are the same millennials who graduated at the same time as me, who were denounced as incapable of knowing when to agree to make other people a cup of tea or do the photocopying rather than impressing everyone with their vast knowledge of nothing.

Personally, since at a whopping ten years older than them I was discounted entirely as a colleague, and was asked by Rothschild’s why I would even want to work with such people, I have limited experience of them, but I do not think they have exclusive knowledge that anyone else fails to grasp.

One of the things the article touched on was our unwillingness to think like children as we get older. We lose our curiosity about the world, and prefer to develop intensive knowledge streams. Well duh, you can’t follow every path, otherwise everyone would look a whole lot more like me, and a lot less like someone with a mortgage and children. At some point you have to use the principle of opportunity cost to decide what you want out of life.

Having said this, there is no reason why you cannot devote some of your time to being aware of what you are turning down. I, for example, cannot be bothered getting a smartphone in order to know all about apps, instagram or snapchat. I detest mobile phones, and had to be forced twice by an employer to accept one. I do not see why I should be forced to be on the end of a connective string all the time, and I do think that there is value in maintaining your hand/eye coordination in the form of physically making 3 dimensional objects. In the same way that a great chef creates something with colour, texture, flavour, overall design, an artist balances much the same principles with whatever medium they use. I happen to be very good at 3d modelling, so I dabbled a bit with that online in the course of messing about, and as it turns out this is what I should probably be concentrating on if I want to make any money.

So, instead of playing computer games, all someone older than a Millennial has to do to maintain their current managerial and innovative capacity is learn a few computing science skills, app development, programming, game design etc. It is not a hard overall concept to get your teeth into, everything works pretty much like your average, common or garden tree. Millennials are not the only people to have seen a tree. Whilst I do not see the value in endless photo sharing apps, so I am unlikely to come up with the next billion dollar format, I can just about manage to figure out how to take my ideas to a new generation, thanks all the same.

I had a friend years ago who despite being younger than me, said that I did not act the way a 32 year old (at the time) woman should act. This is understandable, since my life has consisted of creative focus on seemingly random dudes, percolated with appalling long term relationships with people I shouldn’t have bothered either trusting or wasting time with. On the other hand, who made the rules on how a 32 year old woman should act? Do they hand out slippers and a cardigan on your 30th? My family tend to peak very late in life, so I have always had my peak to look forward to, maybe this is making the difference?

At this point in my life, I notice that even one bad meal makes a difference to how I look, so I am aware that I am getting older, but apart from the now screaming urgency in terms of having a child, I do not feel in the slightest bit older in terms of my curiosity. Am I really that unusual?

It certainly seems so, since most of my male friends seem to have settled into a disgruntled state of dissatisfaction with their lot and a kind of grumpy complacency that means they actually need to be shaken into thinking about changing anything. It is most dispiriting.

Maybe my obsessive focus on work has helped me avoid this. The lengthy concentration on a task, to the point where you are thinking you might get finished in the next five years or so, rather than constantly looking back and thinking things were better when you were 28. They weren’t better at all. Men aren’t really worth bothering with before 35 or so, and you have to actually save money to get anything done when you are that age because there is always someone waiting to charge you for learning the things you later find out are available free. You have more patience when you are older too, so the driven quality that seems to be admirable calms down to a more steadfast and skillful plod. That is a good thing, not something that should be undervalued or maligned.

Perhaps I am lucky that my life has gone in a different direction to the one I actually worked for. Perhaps a career and a family would have made me miserable, old and defensive. Perhaps the people that seem so happy are hiding behind the thought that they did what was expected of them, and now don’t have to think at all. This seems to me to be like a slow death. Maybe being lonely and trapped at home is actually freedom, from conventional worry, loss of self and inflexible aging.

I can say for certain that deciding to effectively marry myself to a person that I do not know was the best decision I ever made in terms of endless self-doubt, so perhaps it is a case of making a decision outwith reality to prevent the crippling stiffness of age. I can say with equal certainty that willingness to learn and change is a major factor in the aging process.

If you do not tweak the product, the product becomes obsolete, which is as relevant to yourself as it is to any product.

creativity, motivation

Are you agreeing to be a nobody?

May 15, 2016 2 Comments

Are you agreeing to be a nobody?

The good thing about having a temper is that you get things cleared up now and again. I tend to have a long fuse and nuclear sized blast, personally, which means that my relationships go through a lot of interruptions, unless I am in a particularly unusual situation. Wolfe may be surprised to learn that I have actually been quite subdued in my response to our various misunderstandings and mishaps, since it is usually unclear whether he is doing it himself, or delegating it to a minion.

If you have a look at the welcome page, you will see that Ina Disguise is a lengthy response to a rather rude, arrogant and complacent individual, who felt quite safe to assume that it was OK to insult a stranger. Your staff reflect you.

The fact that this stranger had already devoted a lot of time to something relatively important was entirely meaningless, and as a side product it wasted a lot of my emotional energy and time. This is not his fault, however, that much I do agree with. I come from a fairly narcissistic family, so I am used to the ‘what do you mean I upset her, it is her fault for being upset’ response.

So I was left with a pile of emotional rubble, no family, nobody to look up to, which is out of character anyway as I am not in the habit of investing emotionally in fame whores. People choose fame for a variety of reasons, and until I came across Wolfe, I did not have much respect for any of them. There are several reasons for his particular love of being well known. Pretty girls, money and providing people with health information, probably in that order.

So I was left with a number of alternatives:

I choose to accept that I do not deserve any common courtesy and am a nobody.
I choose to believe that I did something wrong by bothering to do a lot of intense academic work with the intention of offering it to a stranger who probably does not deserve it.
I choose to believe that I did something wrong by trying to give somebody a present.
I choose to believe Wolfe, my friend in London, or in fact Aldous, that I am way too ugly to be seen by anybody, and that women like me should crawl under a stone and die.
I choose to accept that by belief in any alternative hypothesis means that there is something wrong with me, and the evidence points to my having some sort of disorder, despite there being far less talented individuals out there promoting inferior values and work.
I rebel against a life history of being suppressed and do what the hell I feel like doing for a change.

It took several months to figure out the best course of action. I settled on Ina Disguise. There are a number of branches to the project, seen or unseen. The main theme is, that I refuse to accept that I am either one of thousands of ‘fans,’ (there are many aspects of his work that I utterly hate, and I do wish that he had a completely different life, so I do not think that this is relevant at all) or sufficiently inferior to the rest of the human race that I am not entitled to say what I feel, when I feel like saying it. In the unlikely event that he does any more than check in now and again and read everything at once, which is what he has been doing since I made initial contact with him, then it is his look out. He certainly didn’t care about upsetting me.

It would have been extremely unhealthy of me to agree to be a nothing, in order to do nothing, feel unhappy, and agree to be less than I actually am. I have, in many respects met my match, and it is likely that I will spend the rest of my life alone as a result, presenting a further range of responses. My personal choice is to enjoy the work and ignore everything else, and it benefits at least two people, never mind the thousands that have been entertained by my work so far. I am astonished at the number of young people and men, in particular, who have been touched by my alternative take on love, life and work.

Whatever your approach to life, next time you self-evaluate, think about what I have just said. Are you agreeing to be less than you are? Are you agreeing to be second rate, in order to please someone that did not really know or like you in the first place? Do you accept that everyone else is always right, and you are always wrong? If the answer is yes, then you are the equivalent of a battered partner. You are agreeing to be life’s punchbag. Just say no.

« Previous 1 … 27 28 29 30 Next »