Folksingers

Mel and I headed downtown tonight to see our friend's band Pholksinger Josh. They are pretty entertaining, but the guy who played before them, John Craigie was awesome. Dude is hilarious. Apparently he just drives from town to town playing music wherever he stops. I needed some relaxing folksinging experience to round out my week in Athens!

After all the drag shows we went to this week, when I looked in my wallet I was thinking "Score! I already have a whole lot of ones! I won't have to worry about getting change!" And then I realized you don't need dollar bills for folksingers, haha. But I ended up needing them all in the end, to buy that John Craigies's CD.

I spent a lot of time randomly chatting with Athens townies this week, and meeting random people downtown. I guess that's what happens when you're in Athens without classes or work. Tim, the guy with long white hair who paints buildings around town, was gave me tips today about my upcoming trip to Italy.

Tom Walker, who plays guitar downtown a lot is now my friend on MySpace, haha. And then I met this girl who bellydances, but I recognized her from a drag show. And I met her friend, who turns out is an old friend of my friend Matt... It was a weird and wonderful week of meeting people.

Tomorrow it's back to Atlanta and trying to get everything organized before we leave for Italy. I'm hoping to get some decent pictures drawn/painted while we're there, so maybe I can share them when I come back.

Creating... Meditation.

When I was younger, I really wanted to EXPRESS myself when I drew or painted. And I was always frustrated because my drawing skills are not strong enough to do that. Now, I draw and paint as a way to meditate.

When I feel so strongly about something, and I want to DO something about it, but there's nothing I CAN do: I draw. I pick some random object and focus on copying it for an hour, and it calms me down. It gives me a way to just not think about what it is that's making me anxious.

It's a new discovery that I can calm myself down like this. I can feel hurt and angry and it feels like what I really need is to go out and run 5 miles, or do something to prove to the people that hurt me that I'm worth it. But what helps the most is sitting down and making a crappy drawing of my car keys. Amazing.

(I did this car keys drawing a long time ago, and actually I'm pretty happy with it. So maybe not that crappy. But still, it's car keys, not great expressive art.)