July 2006 Archives

On June 7, 2006 I opened a new blog on my ceramics website. I failed to originally mention it here, consider this your announcement.

The blog is of a more technical nature and is located at http://www.claymentality.net/blog.

The new blog will contain the more technical aspects of my ceramic work, but I intend to still post my more generally relavant posts to this blog and practice the rule of "when in doubt, cross-post".

In the past few weeks I have had to do a lot of seeking in myself to find a way to pull myself out of a fog I had been in since about the middle of spring. During the past two weeks I have reached my absolute lowest points, looking forward to very little, snapping at everyone and basicly making everyone else suffer because of my bad moods.

Now, for the point of this entry. During the past several days things have been improving. My hardest challenge currently is deciding which of my abandoned projects I wish to return to first, there are quite a few to select from. I can get more serious about ceramics, I can continue the upgrades to GITI, spend more time with the canvas to further explore painting, I can work on one of my numerous websites that I have abandoned or one of many other activities.

There is a point where going from not wanting to do anything, and then wanting to do things but finding that there are a lot of options sometimes becomes overwhelming. I have abandoned a lot of things that I would really like to do. I guess im just going to have to approach it slowly and find ways to ease myself back into it.

Last night I completed a variety of throws, including two of an unusual height. The pieces were at 9.5 and 10.5 inches when they were removed from the wheel. After trimming one was at 10 inches and the other was just below 9 inches. These are my first throws to be above 8 inches in my home studio.

It was a lot of fun doing these throws, there is no feeling like having your arm down in a spinning ceramic work that reaches up to above your elbow. The final pulls were a bit scary because of the height and the perception of a very fragile accomplishment.

Its been several weeks since I have touched my blogs. Where have I been? What was I doing? What were my feelings while I was doing it? I don't have a fucking clue. I have been mostly ignoring any concept of outward expression lately, in favor of a more silent and closed life. I have been busy with things here or there, but mostly I have been working on my hobbies, talking to friends and helping family. I made a decision in August 2004 that I was going to keep this blog updated and not let it go stale, and I intend to stick to that. I want to start keeping a more active journal of my life, in two forms, public and private. I have tried numerous times to keep an active journal, but paper journals don't seem to work, and I haven't taken the time to make GITI's journal utility not suck and keeping a journal in Word just seems so pointless.

Well...the bar is open (im back to blogging)