I'm cranky.

So -- next Monday is Helen Keller's 121st birthday, and so, to celebrate, I want to put up some stuff in Zazzle store with a few juicy quotes from her on rights and activism, with cartoon illustrations. The one I've wanted to do for nearly a year now is this:

"... our old ideas are up a tree ... traditions are scurrying away before the advance of their everlasting enemy, the questioning mind..." The New York Call, October 17, 1913.

Folks who were with me for last year's National Art Making Month (August) might remember how I was puzzling out how to illustrate "old ideas" in a visual way, as they scamper up into the branches of a tree while hounds with question-mark spots are close at their heels. Some ideas I worked with was old men whose heads and faces were personified thought balloons, or personified books with tattered covers, and the words for outdated ideas ("bigotry", "NIMBY", etc.) on their covers.

And then, late last night, the idea came to me: skeletons -- maybe "monster" skeletons (human bodies with bird skulls, maybe) -- dressed in rags. Y/Y?

So I want to start practicing drawing that. But the light in my office has burned out, and it's cloudy, so I don't really have strong natural light, and I slept poorly, and I'm just teetering on the verge of a migraine, and ... and...

Even though I'm happy that I have a good idea, I'm cranky because I don't have the energy to play with it right now. And I want to play! Now! But it's not coming out well, and...

I'm cranky.

Oh, well, the UPS driver was just here... maybe he brought me my new book... I will go check. That might cheer me up.

[ETA: It was not my book, but my apron... which is, yes, long enough to cover my entire front in case there is a surprise!doorbell when I'm not wearing any pants. ... So that's good. Crossposting to LJ failed, last time. I shall try again]

I've lived with myself -- and quite intimately -- for 47 years, now, and I still surprise me.

Last evening, I wrote (under a locked post):

(Quote)
And this is why even good rom-coms are like psychological Chinese Restaurant food: make me feel all happy and rosy while I'm watching them, but leave me depressed and lonely an hour later... Especially when the hero is a creative/artistic outcast, such as Danny Kaye so often played [Did he play a performer / actor in every one of his movies?],* because that's the character type I most often identify with, myself...
(Unquote)

And, almost as soon as I wrote that, I realized that all those years in my late teens and early twenties (when I was venturing out of my parents' world, and still in contact with other people on a daily basis), I'd been mistaken. Back in the day, when I was watching those sentimental love stories, I was taking it at face value that I was being entranced by the idea of such an artist type falling in love with me -- and it wasn't until I wrote it out, in a half-sleep state, that instead of wishing for the hero, I was identifying with the hero.

Oh, Subconscious, you tricksy rascal! Twenty years later than I could have actually used that knowledge... Why I oughta ...!

---

*Checks -- maybe not Every, but close:

Buzzy Bellow / Edwin Dingle (1945) -- Nightclub entertainer / "bookworm" (geek); Walter Mitty (1947) -- a writer of pulp fiction; Hobart Frisbee (1948)-- A music professor[ Georgi (1949) -- a song/dance man for a medicine show; Jack Martin (1951) -- a caberet entertainer; Hans Christian Andersen (1952) -- writer, again; Jerry Morgan (1954) -- vaudville vantriloquist; Hubert Hawkins (1955) -- ex-carnival dancer turned minstrel, turned jester. ...And so forth. His full filmography is here (I'm hungry, and tired of typing)