Underburgh

It's been years since I posted on LJ! Gadzooks!

Recent happenings:

Moved again back in October; still in New Jersey, just a somewhat larger place. Two bedroom, so one room is both my office and a guest room, the other is our actual sleeping room.

After four years surviving as a freelance commission artist, a desire to transition to pursuing different forms of art (namely, a webcomic) had me seeking another means of making survival dollars until I could establish the comic more thoroughly. That, and I figured getting out of the apartment on the regular would help ease my increasing social anxieties. I found employment at a cute little family owned War of the Worlds themed coffee shop. After a few months of working there, they're giving me full-time level hours. I'm a barista, baby!

The web comic in question lives here: http://tedthedemon.com/ I'm still playing catch-up with the commission work load I had committed to prior to shifting focus, though, so it currently updates biweekly. Once I'm caught up, I hope for weekly - and then, if I am ever able to make enough dollar comic-ing to cease barista-ing, my ultimate goal would be a pace of 3x weekly updates.

My art blog has moved since I last penned direction to its presence on the internets here, and it now lives: http://czartedition.tumblr.com/

We have two cats now! In December, Jonneh and I adopted a second fuzzchild, a little cream-orange tabby named Sigrun. She and Helo get along fabulously, and Sigrun purrs near constantly. A perfect animal.

Lastly, Jonneh and I are engaged. He asked me to marry him on January 2nd, at a They Might Be Giants concert in Brooklyn.

So, that's my life! 26 years old and surviving. Stressed and tired most of the time, but I can do this. I can make it. If anyone else still uses this site, I hope you are well. :)

Livejournal! I kind of miss you. The days of writing in journals did a pretty sight more for my eloquence than the snippy medium of twitter manages. Also I wish I had the ability to use more than one of my first five user icons, dang. If more of my friends still haunted Livejournal I would consider shelling out for a paid account again.

My life settled into something ordinary and non-dramatic. Most days I only really wake up, eat and drink coffee, settle in to stream, make art all day, go back to sleep. Rinse and repeat. I morphed into a dull adult creature somewhere along the way, albeit one with an unusual job. There's not a lot to me beyond the plethora of drawings and paintings I schedule in each week but I think I am mostly happy. Jonneh and I have a very stable, chill relationship and living with him has been healthy for my peace of mind. I finally managed to escape the sense of isolation in New Jersey by getting to know a few more localish folks, that sort of thing.

I wound up here because I was reminiscing with some friends regarding roleplays past, and LJ was, once upon a now rather distant time, a great medium to participate in such adventures.

My fandom fixations at present are the Dresden Files and Person of Interest. I look forward to the continuation of both later this year. Now and then I still try to poke at a comic I myself am working on, and if I managed to eventually save up enough monetary buffer, perhaps I will start to set aside more time for that.

Still need to get to the doctor about a painful plantars wart that has lurked on my left foot since February or so, as well as thyroid things. Whoops. I'll make it happen for reals soon.

Recently my love affair with beer has also intensified, I tend to drink one or two a night. Straight up drinking so many carbohydrates is likely counter productive to my otherwise healthier eating, so I should probably stop that. >_>

Eyup. I should organize some reference files for stream tomorrow and sleep, I suppose.

To put something cheery on my LJ - for anyone who still reads this, I've been updating my art blog pretty regularly lately! Was on a one-huge-post-per-month kick, but then I decided I should poke it in smaller batches every 2 or 3 days instead.


Recent 5 hour painting as a teaser. Art yes good.

You can find my art blog by clicking here.

My favorite part of technology continues to be the ability to browse the internet while using the toilet. I am a creature of simple pleasures.

Also, the people here are awesome. I like having friends to hang out with at least three times a week! (Anime Mondays, casual Magic playing every other Wednesday and Rock Band the opposing Wednesdays, Magic drafts Fridays.) Sometimes more. In Pittsburgh I was accustomed to seeing people other than my partner maybe one day a week. Sometimes less. The area is pretty, I love our apartment, and Jon is really happy with his new job. Moving here was such a great idea. :) I enjoy being a real person again.

It occurs to me I haven't shared the more recent incarnation of my portfolio site here: http://anyarose.net/

I'm in such a curious mood tonight. The present finds me slowly typing out this entry on my touchscreen Asus tablet while sitting nude in bed beside my softly snoring boyfriend.

I could not sleep so, a couple hours ago as I lay curled against his back, my mind led me on a vivid walk-through of my life from around the age of five to present. In a level of detail I had not stopped to recall for ages, I rewalked the halls of my elementary school, handled a tarantula at an assembly, sculpted a rather colorful tiger laying across a rock as a ten year old, climbed through brambles near the fence at a playground's edge, snuggled with past girlfriends, hiked up mountains, plowed through barely edible cafeteria food, practiced quads in the band room with a friend, sat in the bleachers drawing, took the podium to debate for the first time, idly played with a past boyfriend's goatee, bowled at my first furry meet, stood briefly petrified after my parents left me at college freshman year, danced in the mud, constructed a toilet from leaves, painted late into the night, made friends, spontaneously began to visit my current city of residence, dug parking spaces in the snow with my bare hands, survived art school, passings and emotional upheaval... all that and more; the extraordinarily fluid and bizarre run-on sentence that comprises a life.

Eventually I elected to fetch this computer and ink some commission work, and ultimately spent time reading about abandoned mining towns.

It all seemed appropriate for revisiting this journal again. Life is utterly bizarre. If a few years ago someone were to tell me I would be living in Pittsburgh, supporting myself as a freelance artist, it would baffle me. A few years ago I did not know the few people I see regularly now. I met a handful of folks who initially drew me to this city years prior, but even my companions here somehow shifted over the past year.

Ramblings. I suppose I will continue working now! I spend the vast majority of my life drawing, anymore.

I keep forgetting to LiveJournal.

I adopted a kitty on October 18. His name is Helo. He's a little tuxedo cat, probably around four years old. I might post pictures here later. ♥ He was formerly living on the streets of Cleveland. He's been doing well and is much healthier than when he first arrived at my house. All of his flea allergy scabs are now gone, and with antibiotics his various infections have cleared up as well.

I continue to make art freelance for a living. Another new thing in my life is my new computer, an Asus Eee Slate EP121. It's a full fledged Tablet PC that runs Windows 7. I can draw directly on the screen, so it essentially also functions as a Cintiq. I absolutely ADORE painting on it.

Lastly, my bff kuroseishin convinced me to read Homestuck, and around 5000 PAGES LATER I am finally caught up with the most recent update. I am now extremely enamored and entertained by this comic... er, game/animation/novel/thing. X3 NEW FANDOM GET.

Life is strange but looking up~

I've had more than one experience worthy of that title, but just yesterday I was reminded of this one.

A winter's night spent at a friend's house when the power was out and we were all trapped there. The time spent with said friends proved an excellent adventure. Afterward, my partner and I stayed in their guest bedroom and slept with our clothing at our feet in order to keep it warm for the morning. Instead of drifting off straight away we wound up having a hilarious and intriguing conversation spanning several hours, which literally started with the topic of dog peen and wound up diverting to the merits of various styles of argumentation, philosophy, how ridiculous it is when people attempt to apply critical theories to written works that existed before the theories in question did, language, various personal moralities and so on. It was at once playful and stimulating, and rarely do I ever experience conversations that satisfying anymore. Hell, rarely had I ever at all before meeting him. The whole thing was conducted in the nude with me laying atop him for warmth, and whenever he would shift off on a particularly frustrating tangent I would simply silence him with either kisses or threats of cannibalism. XD He said I was so much fun and I felt the same toward him, and never in my life had I been so content than in moments such as those.

Amy: You know when sometimes you meet someone so beautiful and then you actually talk to them and five minutes later they're as dull as a brick? Then there's other people, when you meet them you think, "Not bad. They're okay." And then you get to know them and... and their face just sort of becomes them. Like their personality's written all over it. And they just turn into something so beautiful.
Both: Rory's the most beautiful man I've ever met.
Amy: Please. Do it for him.
Future Amy: Ah, you. You're asking me to defy destiny, causality, the nexus of time itself, for a boy.
Amy: You're Amy. He's Rory. And oh yes, I am.

♥♥♥

Crux of the episode: An existential crisis that quite literally explores how your memories make you. The idea that the person you are now is not who you were yesterday, or a year ago, and to go back and change time would be a sort of death.

I would have made the same choice that Amy(s) ultimately did. I would rewrite time, give up who I am, for someone I cared about enough.

Beautiful.

TAKE OFF YOUR CLOTHES.