Ow

This week has been a bit of a wash-out, so far.

I am suffering from some abdominal pain that my doctor told me three weeks ago was probably diverticulitis. We put me on two courses of two different antibiotics over the course of the next two weeks and for a while it seemed as though it worked but the gut pain is back.

The pain is nowhere near as bad as when I had my appendix out or even the level of pain from my gall bladder. On a scale of 1-10, 10 being my appendix, 8 being my gall bladder, and 1 being absolutely no pain, I'd put the spikes of pain at about a 6 with the regular pain at around a 3 or 4. Enough pain to be annoying, with spikes of pain being immobilizing for short periods of time.

This is why I haven't blogged.

It sounds silly, really. Blogging doesn't require much work; I don't really DO anything, except think and write, maybe take a couple of pictures. What's the big deal?

Well, the pain has led to a kind of mental fatigue that I'm only accustomed to equating to my depressive times. I'm not depressed. I'm grumpy, kind of angry at the doctor for not calling me back almost 24 hours after my CT scan to tell me if we need surgery or not, and a little sad that my body seems to be falling apart, but none of that is depression. It's normal. But my brain is fogged.

I hate it.

I like being creative, writing and picture taking and drawing and guitar playing and and and. More more more. But these past few days I've tuned out completely.

I'm trying to tune back in, despite the pain.

Wish me luck.

This rant has been brought to you by the letter "Diverticulitis sucks."

10,000 Hours - Art

I've been playing around lately; still doing the realistic-style drawings, the 30-second figure drawings, a drawing from RedditGetsDrawn but I've also been trying to get back in touch with just having fun with the drawing.

One of the things that has really helped is watching tutorials on YouTube for how to do anime-style drawing. It's actually helped me do hair better (not perfect, but better) and get facial proportions!

One of the things I'd like to start doing is making comic strips of some kind or another. A page a day or so, hand-drawn and fun.

The only problem with that is that I need to be able to consistently draw the same thing; draw a face over and over again with little variation.

And that is TOUGH. I can't keep a shape from one drawing to another. I have no idea if all people who are learning to draw go through this but I imagine it's not just me. Right?

This week, then, I'm going to try and practice drawing the same face from day to day, getting it to look generally the same with very little variation, getting the lines just right.

Wish me luck; this is going to be tough.

10,000 Hours - Music

I'm at a standstill. Rocksmith is fun but not successful at really teaching me much right now, or at least that's how it feels. The activities I'm doing on my keyboard are teaching me where each note is and what it sounds like but without some kind of primer I'm not actually learning how to play or read music.

I have to practice more but things keep getting in the way.

I still pick up the guitar every day and play the keyboard too. I just feel as though I've come to some kind of plateau. I'll keep going and push myself through it but right now I'm just feeling like it's all a little pointless.

I know that's just my brain and has no actual basis in reality but my brain is powerful.

I'll keep pushing myself. Once I get to the next level I'll look back at this and laugh.

Hopefully.

10,000 Hours - Art

One of the two pictures I'm showcasing today I'm proud of and the other one is this picture of a boy holding a lizard.

I was proud of the boy holding a lizard, to some small degree, and I was going to work on it more, right up until someone told me I was suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect and pointed out that my proportions were all wrong and that I did not capture the boy's shape at all well. I mean, just look at the eyes, and then those things that are supposed to be ears.

Here's the thing: His words were true. They hurt but that doesn't make them untrue. He could have said them in a less cruel way but again, he wasn't lying.

Still, I feel as though I've progressed in the last few months. Some of my pictures have come out really well.

That, and I'm proud of the lizard still. He didn't say anything about my lizard being bad. So there.

Now this page with the eye and the puppy? This page I'm proud of.

I wanted to draw a dog for fun so I pulled up pictures of bulldogs and just quickly sketched this out. The eyeball up top came later because I'm trying to work on pieces of faces but the dog was its own thing.

I'm proud of it. If I shouldn't be, I don't want to know.

What makes me more proud of it is that Lois saw it after I drew it, pointed at it, and said "Doggy!" Which means that even if it's not particularly good, it's recognizable as what it is.

I win!

Of course, this is coming from the girl who drew what can at best be called abstract art and called it "Daddy" but hey, who am I to judge her works of amazing art?

Coming Up With More

I am so unmotivated today it's not even funny.

Today's the first day I've felt like a human being in about two weeks so I'm celebrating being over The Cold From Hell that I was suffering. I feel as though I should be more energetic and happy/productive since I'm no longer sick but no. Instead I want to sit and just go "blah" all day long.

There are only two things keeping me going at the moment:

1. The fact that I don't want to disappoint Laura with absolutely nothing done around the house when she gets home from a stressful day of working on her dissertation.

2. The fact that I'm on a quest with my party over at HabitRPG and if I don't get all my to dos done for the day they'll all get whacked by the creature we're fighting. I'd feel guilty if anything happened to my party because I'm being lazy.

The second reason keeps me doing all the things I should be doing in a day but the first one gets me to go a bit above and beyond. Sure, I could let the living room keep this general messiness to it but the living room is the first room Laura steps into when she comes home; I want homecoming to be a pleasant experience for her.

Sometimes it's really hard to come up with the energy to do more.

What are some tricks that you use? What drives you to keep pushing when you feel like you're on empty?

10,000 Hours - Music and Me

My guitar playing travels apace. I continue to play Rocksmith and while it tells me I'm improving I don't see it quite as much as I feel I should be. I will continue, however, and enjoy myself with it; even though I'm not doing as well as I'd like (and Laura still prefers I practice when she's not around) I am enjoying it. Maybe that's the secret to practice, finding a way to enjoy it.

On the keyboard I'm still working at the most basic level: I'm learning to recognize on sight which key is which, and then be able to find one within a split second of being given a note. Finding the "A" key, for example, or "F#" without having to count out the keys and figuring out exactly which is which.

One of the things I'm enjoying on keyboard is actually going to Ultimate Guitar and following the chords for guitar on the piano. It's good practice at finding chords, though it tends to be one hand at a time so it's not "true" keyboard practice but it's fun and helpful.

By next week I'd like to have mastered several Rocksmith "Lessons" and have learned the basics of reading keyboard music. Just the very basics would be fine; I'm trying to take this slow and easy.

10,000 Hours - Art

I feel like I'm moving backwards in my artistic ability.

I know that's not true at all and I can see where I'm improving when I draw things but I feel like it's becoming work, and that's not what I want at all; I'm trying to learn how to draw because I want to have fun drawing. My daily exercises are starting to feel like chores, not like something fun.

I'm not entirely sure what to do about that; I need to work on it daily to keep improving but I also need it to be fun.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Rocksmith

I've been playing Rocksmith 2014 for about a week now. It says I've put in about 12 hours on it. I've bought a few downloadable content packs to add some new music to it that I knew I'd enjoy playing, like the Queen songs and System of a Down.

Thus far I feel as though I've improved more with Rocksmith than I have with all the other work I've put into playing the guitar. It's teaching me to play songs in a fun, gamified way of things. It includes both note-play and chords with a clear, easy-to-follow interface.

I'm glad I came into this game; I think it's going to cut my learning time in half.

The only thing it doesn't seem to do is teach me how to read music. I should probably supplement that aspect with some old-fashioned music books but at this point I'm spending so much time learning how to actually play, and having so much fun doing it, that I keep putting off the rest.

I don't think it's really too big of a deal to wait to learn that since in the mean time I'll be learning how to properly hit the notes, how to switch between the strings without looking, new strumming techniques, and how it should sound. Once I have all that down I can learn how to read the music and I don't think that will be too difficult since I have a history of reading music.

One of the other nice things is that I can learn bass using the same method as soon as I get an electric bass! I want to learn all the instruments I possibly can so it's a nice bonus.