thoughts in the key of me

But it is Friggin HUGE!

I think I am getting the hang of Illustrator…

Lookie what I did!

Learned a few more things in Adobe Illustrator. It is not a prohibitively difficult program, there is just a LOT of tools and functions to know about. While explaining it to my family, I have recently used the example that it is much like being handed a GIANT tacklebox full of thousands of little different lures and gadgets, all with their own little drawer or compartment. Some of them you use alone, others you can use together. Some do one thing and others do a bazillion things. And while none of it is super complicated or complex, there are so many different tools and so many different ways to open each drawer that it takes a while to really learn the location of each thing. And once you know where everything is, you have to try and recall which thing is best for which job. Because you can do any given job a dozen different ways, utilizing several different tools or combinations thereof. But which way is BEST or FASTEST or SMARTEST?

So I am fiddling with my tackle box at the moment. (HA! That sounded dirty! I think I coined a new euphemism!)

The other day, while said fiddling commenced, I was experimenting with some functions that allow me to do THIS:

Ooooooh Pretty. Anyone remember the Deluxe Spirograph

Man I loved that thing! Of course, true to my “out of the box” nature I found it a tad limiting about 15 minutes after I opened it on Christmas morning. . All it does is fancy snowflake-like circles? WhatEVER! I went back to my trusty old art supplies pretty quick. But Ai lets me do everything I THOUGHT that damn plastic gear-set SHOULD have done! HA HA! Of course, now I really want a spirograph again, just so my daughter can mess with it. It was kind of a cool hands-on learning tool in terms of arcs and lines and other geometry based principles. Shit. Now I need to buy one myself.

ANYHOO…

So while toying with different aspects of this tool, I accidently came up with something that looked a bit like THIS:

Wow.

(Before I go any further, I want to say that this is NOT the original, I actually deleted that one without thinking about how funny it would be as a blog post. So I don’t know what is funnier/sadder: the original version of this and the following story, or the fact that I spent several minutes hours days trying to recreate this well enough to actually do a post on it. Once you know what I did with this, you will understand why the recreation itself is probably the worst part about this whole…shenanigan.)

SO to most of you that is probably a fairly innocent looking little starburst design. (again the original was sooo much more obviously representative) But I instantly saw…a butt hole. Yup. I saw an anus. Starfish. Rosebud. Whatever distasteful euphemism you care to use. I sat there giggling about the fact that I accidentally drew a butt hole for waaaaaaay too long than is acceptable for a classy lady. HEY! No heckles from the penny gallery! I have been known to fake classy on occasion.

Moving on…

So I had drawn a butt-hole. And it was funny. But not as funny as it COULD be. I just HAD to give it cheeks. Two round peachy ellipses soon found themselves cradling this newly drawn accidental anus, which I had changed from black to a deep rosy hue, to represent a more realistic color, of course. Until that moment I had often wondered if I would ever make a sound that would count as a “chortle.” I wonder no longer. I’m a Class A chortler.

I stopped there, after I had thoroughly amused myself with getting the size and shape of the cheeks juuuuuuuuust right in relation to the butt hole. At the time I didn’t really have anyone with whom I could share this silliness that had so amused me, but I did text my BFF and simply said: “I just drew a butt.” She was unimpressed.

I deleted the whole thing and continued with my lessons for the day, occasionally chuckling to myself about “The Anus Incident” or TAI as I was calling it in my head. (OK not really, but the acronym is so much less to type) I did manage to make something kind of cool from the new tool function that had created the hilarity:

Neat huh? That was several different tools used in conjunction. Ah HA advanced techniques! Touch me! Lower. See? I’m not a complete 12 year old degenerate.

But the next few days I kept thinking about TAI. I knew I could never recreate the exact shape, since it was purely a fluke the first time. I made several attempts over the course of the next few days. (is anyone reading this finding humor in the fact that I spent days trying to draw an anus? I’m still cracking myself up as I revise this post. But then again I was always my own biggest fan.) But(t) I never could really make it happen again. I still haven’t. For the purpose of this blog, I went ahead and faked it, but(t) this anus is an impostor. (Oh GOD Tina Fey please write that into something you do. I need to hear you say that line before I die!)

Still, I wanted to show you, my loyal readers (all 4.2 of you) what I was visualizing in my head that kept making me giggle while I toyed with the cartoon anus like it was a cheap, easy date on prom night. Afterall, why should YOU be deprived of the full clarity of an illustration, when the whole reason it happened in the first place is because I am learning to use a DRAWING program? So here you go: I call it: BenDover (original, eh?)

It’s a full moon, just for you.

I was a slacker mom from the beginning. I had serious all-day sickness (they LIED when they called it “morning sickness”) for the first 27 weeks of my pregnancy. (5.5 months, people.) When I say “serious” I mean, the threat of vomiting forced me to remain horizontal and still for the majority of the day. All day. Every day.

I threw up so often, I started choosing foods based on how easily they would come back up. Crackers? No way. Bananas? Fine. Anything soft and…those foods were the least offensive the second time around.

I also developed an extreme addiction to Coke. I would sip a 44oz fountain-soda-from-a-convenience-store Coca Cola Classic all day. It was the only thing that calmed my violent eruptions into slightly less violent hurlings. I would lie there on my living room pallet, (we had no couch)with the straw bent to my lips and sort of suck constantly all day, letting a steady stream of high fructose corn syrup and carbonation trickle down my puke-irritated throat.

So the entire pregnancy started out with me lying around doing nothing for months.

Then it was summer for the last trimester. I was at my biggest and the Houston weather was at its most miserable 98+ temperatures. I spent most of those last 3 months floating in my parent’s pool. All day. Every Day.

So that was more lying around doing nothing. (Are you seeing a pattern yet?

Early on after my daughter was born, I read a great book called Confessions of a Slacker Mom. It really helped ease my guilt over my soon-to-be parenting style.

The author, Muffy Mead-Ferro (I know, you would think with a name like Muffy she would be the quintessential Soccer Mom) makes it pretty clear that she does not feel the need to compete with the Super Moms out there in terms of how many activities her kids are in or how many ways she over-achieves as a mother.

I couldn’t agree more. I feel pretty strongly that kids are an ADDITION to a family, not the CENTER of the family.

For example, I am not a particularly social person, so play dates are pretty far outside my comfort zone. Granted my daughter is quite the social butterfly, but she is still the child and I am still the mom, so I get to decide for right now how social we are. HA HA!

When she is grown up she can look back on all the fun she missed because of my hermitic tendencies and talk about it with her therapist. She needs SOMETHING to blame on me in her sessions, right?

I catch some flak for this, but watch me take it lying down. And, uh, could you hand me the remote while you are at it?

My kid will likely never have more than one activity at a time outside of school. She gets to watch television about the same amount as most adults do. She plays on the computer every day. She plays her Wii every day. And she has PB&Js more often than I care to admit, but whatever. She is happy and healthy and smart and for the most part well behaved.

I have one area of non-slack-motherhood: I exercise a strict zero-tolerance policy for disobedience. I don’t even try to curb my voice in public. I have made OTHER people’s children cry with the tone of my voice just by being close enough for them to hear me chide my own. Oh yeah. Momzilla is always just below my cool outer crust…

Hopefully one day I will have an adult human that knows how to act in every situation with grace and manners. Hopefully she will not have had a rushed and stressful childhood over-filled with lessons and practices and activities and play dates. Hopefully she will think of TV as “just there” because she gets to watch it plenty, and not as the holy grail of activities because it was so strictly limited early on. I suppose she is missing out on a few things because I am not willing to give up my entire way of life to fill her week with stuff she wont even care about in a few years, but I’m pretty convinced she won’t really suffer much.

For the most part I think kids raise themselves once they can wipe their own butts and pour their own cereal. Parents are around to teach behavior and make sure bathing happens regularly. I know I give out enough of the good stuff (the mushy love stuff) so in the end my kid will be fine. I can’t say the same for the rest of her generation, if the kids in Walmart are any indication.  Don’t you ever wish you could secretly sterilize people with monster children? Or at least say: “Please don’t plague the world with another one of your little demon spawn.” Someone call Nanny 911 for these folks!

Upon waking to the joyful sounds of Bob Marley on my cell phone alarm, I discovered I had slept all night on my arms, thereby rendering them completely useless for a good 45 seconds. I sort of slung them about pathetically a few times trying to make something happen, but they were dead from shoulder to fingertip. It was like having two heavy tubes of wet sand hanging on either side of me. I have to admit I panicked a little. One woke up faster than the other and I experienced the strange sensation of lifting one paralyzed limb up to move it with the other. The stress from the ordeal forced me to lay back down and let my heart rate return from Mach One.

Needless to say I slept a wee bit later than I meant to. Three hours later to be exact. I missed yoga…and breakfast…and morning. The child was ready for lunch by the time I was plodding down the stairs grumbling something about killing people if there was no more coffee.

Luckily for the fam there was exactly one cup left. No murders occurred at the Appleby Farmhouse today.

So…I am forcing myself to take time and really learn the super ultra mega lame-o basics in Illustrator. What could be lame about a program you described as Paint on Meth, you ask? (yes yes I can hear your dripping sarcasm) Well, today, I learned how to do…this:

I can almost hear you guys right now…

Granted, not the most exciting day of tutorials. But someone pat me on the damn back for not jumping ahead of myself FOR ONCE in my life and taking time on the PROCESS. Never mind I will do my own damn patting. No idea where your hands have been anyhow.

I not only learned how to make that damn star, I learned how to make it three different ways. Then I learned how to save that beeyotch as a symbol so that I never have to actually make it again. Brilliant.  And those spiraly swooshy thingies are made up of several pieces done in several steps. AND I made THAT into an art brush so I never have to make it again either. DOUBLE BRILLIANT.

I seem to have gotten a tad carried away with my italics button this evening…as well as my ellipses…similar to how I got a little carried away with my spiral tool and made you this pretty flower:

And it doesn’t TOTALLY suck. (see how I tied that all in there? Oh yeah, I’m delirious from the weirdness of the day.)

I promise I will have something SUPER WAY COOL next time. Maybe. Or I might just make another little dude with a jew-fro waving a flag for you. Ya never know.

I’m actually considering illustrating a dream I had last night. There was a dead man in a bathtub full of bubbles and people “viewing” him…also covered in bubbles. Yes, I am quite aware that I am deeply disturbed. But what an awesome illustration that would be, AMIRIGHT?

Most of you know that I am pretty passionate about nutrition and fitness. For those of you that are not familiar, you must not have been paying close attention (or you are a new reader in which case, WELCOME! I apologize for the rant I am about to go on.)

As I was saying, this is an area in which I can’t really be considered an expert, but I can say with confidence that I have read/researched/learned/dug into more information than the average Jill. The trouble with living in my world of conscious eaters/living, is that I often forget how many people out there are still blindly acceptant of what is known in the nutrition community as the SAD or Standard American Diet.

UGH! (seriously click on the “ugh” link)

I am BAFFLED almost daily by the ignorance (lack of knowledge, folks, it’s not meant to be an insult) that is still prevalent in our culture about food. Despite the relatively wide reaching arms of films like Super Size Me, Food, Inc., and King Corn, or books like Food Revolution, The China Study, Fast Food Nation:(P.S.-you will never eat Fast Food again if you read this) or even Skinny Bitch
(a personal favorite!) which has really moved the message of conscious eating into a more mainstream audience.

There are still people out there that have these COMPLETE and UTTER LIES drilled into their brains thanks to marketing, the FDA, (oh yeah, we don’t trust the government to GOVERN us, really, but we trust it to tell us what to eat!) and antiquated (and obsolete) research. Research, I might add that is typically done by special interest groups that will publish the parts of the results that make them look good, and squirrel away the findings that would reflect poorly upon their particular interests. (I have about 100 more links that could fall into that last sentence but I will stop with three)

A few common LIES people believe that REALLY UPSET ME:

Store bought juice is healthy.

Nope. not much better than soda in terms of sugar and calories. Not a ton of REAL nutrients, unless they have been ADDED back in artificially with synthetic chemicals. And there is a good chance there is corn syrup in that shit, which is an entire MOVIE’s worth of messed up. Treat fruit juice like dessert. Tiny portions, only occasionally. Period.

Diet Soda is better.

Nope. there has been TONS of research done on artificial sweeteners. SERIOUSLY. BAD. IDEA. In fact, because the “sweet effect” of artificial sweeteners is so much sweeter than actual sugar is, the folks that regularly drink these sodas will often crave sweets even more, and will typically consume more calories in a day than the folks that drink a regular soda. Granted, many studies that linked cancer with artificial sweeteners had the lab rats consuming the equivalent of hundreds (even thousands) of diet sodas DAILY, but personally, if it caused cancer, it caused cancer. Who gives a rats ass how much is needed? (Pun intended) I know my organically grown sweet fruit is NOT gonna cause cancer. Nuff said.

Rice is healthy because it is fat free!

GEEZE people get a clue. Look into GLYCEMIC INDEX for starters. That kind of starchy carb, so quickly broken down in the body and sent to the blood in forms of sugars, might as well be straight sugar in terms of how your body uses it. And the amount of actual nutrients you get from it (like the research funded by the rice growers will tell you!) is pretty null when compared to other grain choices like Quinoa.

Low Fat/Fat Free is healthy!

Sure, if you are choosing smoked turkey breast over thick cut applewood smoked pork belly. (look! I typed that without even gagging!) Go lower/freer in the fat content in those types of choices, sure. But Just because the PACKAGE says low/no fat, does NOT a healthy choice make. In a lot of cases, it would be better to eat a few bites of something full fat, than a full serving of the weird artificial crap they are peddling to the female population as “light.” Plus, your body NEEDS fat. Period.

I know a vegetarian/vegan/raw vegan lifestyle is not for everyone, but the things I listed above seem so far into the common sense category of Healthy Eating 101, that I can barely type this post without quivering with a mixture of incredulity and RAGE at the LYING FOOD INDUSTRY that has filled our American grocery stores.

The best eating rules are simple: Eat whole fruits and vegetables every day. Make them a HUGE part of your diet. You probably need about 3-4 times more than you already eat. Even I struggle to get enough! Eat as much of them as close to the way nature made them as possible, i.e. raw, lightly cooked, sans heavy/excessive sauces or oils.

Don’t eat white starches and grains, or refined sugars. Bread, pasta, rice, all bad in the standard form. Switch to whole grains, brown rice, wheat bread. And cut the amount of these foods you eat by half. Even the good stuff should be limited.

If you need sweet, go for the real thing and have just a little bit. Don’t think five low fat cookies are better than one butter + eggs full fat version.

Cokes and juice are like desserts. Treat them that way.

Use your BRAIN, folks! Reconnect with your food! Where does it come from? What did it look like when it was pulled from the dirt? It surely was not in that black plastic tray covered in clear plastic film and put in that colorful box in the freezer for your convenience. If so, I need to tell my parents that they are farming ALL WRONG!

Eating is how we live. There is a saying in almost every culture or spiritual discipline, all put differently, but it boils down to: “You are what you eat.” We as a society need to rethink this statement and apply it to our daily choices!

Read this carefully: You are FAT or SICK or TIRED or ANXIOUS or NOT SLEEPING WELL or IMPOTENT or DEPRESSED because of how you are treating your MACHINE. You don’t think your car will run on just anything, so why do you think your body will?

WAKE UP! It is the Age of Aquarius! We can change! We can be active and strong and live long full wonderful healthy rewarding lives! I would LOVE to help you. I would LOVE to tell you how! But you are intelligent apes capable of using tools. If you are reading this you have internet, and I linked all kinds of good stuff in this post. Take an hour of your precious time, skip playing Farmville or studying everyone else’s Facebook, invest in your OWN quality of life and educate your fat ass!

And for God’s sake, if you don’t feel the need to educate, or implement the stuff you learn, if you are happy staying fat and unhappy and tired, or if ignorance is your bliss, then don’t call those of us who have made health and nutrition a priority “self righteous” or “tree huggers.” That just pisses me off and makes me want to stuff your jowly face with a bunch of green-leafies. And that’s not nice! Don’t make me resort to  vegetable-based violence!

And remember. You have to MOVE too. But more about exercise in another rant on another day when I am tired of watching people sit around glued to their TVs/computers/etc.

I have discovered Adobe Illustrator.

I could KICK myself for not checking this out sooner.

As a child, I would sit for HOURS drawing on MS Paint. PAINT I SAY PEOPLE!!!

I was a MASTER of that program…and all its twenty-two things it could do.

Adobe Illustrator is like MSPaint…on CRYSTAL METH.

And since the adult version of ME could be described as my child version ME on CRYSTAL METH, this is a good match. This is a very good match. I ascend now into the illuminating heights of online education. Seriously who needs a graphic design degree when you can learn any and every technique of every graphics program ever made either for free or for a ridiculously low monthly fee (I’m talkin’ $9/month for one program I saw with ovr 52,000 tutorials!) This is WAY more cost effective than college.

Oh the irony if I could manage to pay off my student loan debts from the degree I will NEVER use, with income from a purely internet-learned skill set. I am positively giddy with the thought of it all.

And I am IN LOVE with Ai. My love. My sweet love where have you been all my life?

To commemorate this day, I have saved the random doodlings and experimentations I did on a single art board while watching through several basic introductory tutorials. Much like my childish doodlings in MSPaint, this is chaos embodied. But it’s pretty! And boy did I have fun fun fun till my Daddy took the Ai away…

Well not really, but Photoshop is. And as a wielder of this mighty weapon one could consider me something of a wizard. (Suddenly I have an intense desire to cover the windows with red blankets and have a Harry Potter marathon.)

The past few days have seen me feverishly finishing the photos (seriously, alliteration just FINDS me. I don’t seek it out, I swear.) I took of my sister-from-another-mister, Lexie. She is the latest addition to the Wine Girls roster.

I must say we had a BLAST with the shoot. I basically trashed her fancy minimalistic and spotless suburban bathroom (originally a very zen blue and white color scheme) with draped hangings in black and purple, and proceeded to cover every horizontal surface with makeup, candles, lingerie, wine bottles, and of course, an odd firearm or two.

Then I got her drunk. And (mostly) naked. And let her play with the makeup, the guns, the lingerie, and her own reflection.

Check out the end results at www.basic-wine-info.com

I hand  finished each and every one of those photos, adjusting for everything from color balance and brightness/contrast to airbrushing all visible skin. I even used a nifty little trick with the liquify filter to nudge a few areas in…not that the model needed any tucks, but a few bad angles courtesy of the amateur photographer called for an after-fix or two.

One of my favorite photos turned out to not really match the others. I intentionally went a little extreme with some of the effects, to sort of reflect the extremity of her expression and got exactly the feel I was going for. Alas, the wine website requires a bit more traditional look. But I can show you here! The original:

The original, as you can see is far too yellow. And I can attest to the fact that she does not in fact have jaundice. Also, the other colors in the scene don’t really pop vibrantly. I wanted overexposed porcelain white skin, intense coppery hair, vibrant purples, pinks and blues, high contrast between the skin and the black clothing…this is what I came up with:

Of course every time I look at it there are more tweaks I want to do. But it is more or less complete.

Another proud before and after moment:

Again too warm and yellowy, an unwanted side effect of the lighting (read: bathroom light bulbs and assorted household lamps minus their shades…cuz we keep it hood) we chose (had to make do with.) Also, that is a LIT cigarette and you can barely make out the smoke! I decided that would NEVER do! So I got fancy with some more photoshop tutorials:

SEE?!?!? I AM magical! I even got the smoke reversed in the reflection. HOW COOL AM I?!?

So, I will likely be fiddling with these for a while. I would like to get all of them closer to the extreme first on in this post; have a whole set of super saturated fantastical colors and high contrast images. It seems to be the look I visualize in my head when I take pictures lately. A world just a tad more extraordinarily colored than the one most people see.

Stay tuned for more photoshopping fun!

Photoshopping. The 8th wonder of the world. Or was that Reliant Stadium? Point is, I am learning to do some basic retouching these days. It’s a skill required by my current role in the Basic Wine Info website. Lookie what I did!

Hopefully most of you are going “SO WHAT? You look like that all the time!”

Flattering, but a blatant lie. No my friends, that is what I look like with makeup. In great lighting. For about three weeks out of the month. What I ACTUALLY look like…well have a gander at the before:

I really wish I knew how to do one of those “hover over switcheroo” thingies but you will have to be satisfied with scrolling up and down. See the difference? Pretty cool huh? Easy as pie. Which is delicious, by the way.

No idea how photo retouching skills come in to play in my plans to conquer the world via the stage and the pen, but who knows? You can never be TOO prepared, am I right? Now leave comments about how awesome it looks and how super cool I am.