~mnagel

Hey! I finally got around to posting some of my older artwork! How about that? Kelalea's only been yelling at me forever to get some new stuff on here. It's far from comprehensive, but it's a start.

Things are going well. It's cold outside, but it's my birthday so who cares. Hopefully I'll get to go out to celebrate this weekend. Major projects for studio have been moved back, which is nice, and I'm really rather on top of things for a change, which is even better.

I'll try to keep posting more old stuff here soon, for right now, just be glad that I got around to getting this bit 'o buisness up. Cheers!

I'm thinking about a conversation my family once had-

My Grandmother is nearly ninety years old now, and she's a wonderful, independent woman. We try to visit her often, and sometimes she comes to our house and stays from anywhere from a few days to a couple weeks at a time. It's sometimes comical though, in conversation in my family, we'll be talking about something related to our current lives, what I'm studying, what computer woes we're all having, and out of nowhere she'll say something like " I think that they're going to have a good corn harvest this year, but I don't know about those soybean come August." It comes from nowhere, and has nothing to do with the conversation. It's really rather funny, she's trying to get in on and contribute to the conversation, and this is the only way that she knows how. She dosn't know the first thing about Facebook, typography design, picking out computers, or fixing my ever-ailing car- but she can talk about the ideal way to cultivate potatoes, how to know when the corn should come in, how to properly set mousetraps in a barn, and the best potato salad recipes.

In a way, it's much the same way I feel in my own life. I feel so removed from everything that happens around me. Almost all of my friends have moved on with life, they're out of college and on to being 'real' adults. I get along with my classmates just fine, but I'm close to very few of them to really talk about stuff. My roomates are awesome, but the more I'm around them the more I realize that I barely live in the same world that they do. They live like genuine twenty-somethings, engaged in everything that normal people do, while I mostly live in a world that dosn't even exist. Maybe it existed at one point, or maybe I simply made it up- I think I mostly imageined it into life, it only lives in the depths of my own head.

I know a world full of forests and fields, mountains and rivers. I know vast farmland punctuated by shady wooded rolling hills around lazy midwest rivers and streams. I know small rural towns and hundred year old houses. I know farmhouses, root cellars, slightly disfunctional plumbing, and how to hide or clean impossibly weird stains. I know how to hill potatoes, the ideal way to plant tomatos, that the best Sweet corn varieties are either Peaches n' cream or Honey and Cream, and that no one person needs more than one zuchinni squash plant, and that buying a packet of zuchinni seeds is basically saying that you're going to be supplying them to the entire neighborhood come time for harvest. I know how to make homemade yeast breads, and I consider bread machines to be cheating. I know how to hold a dog so that they can't get away or bite you if have to work with them in a way that could spook them, and I know how to give pills to cats. I know how to palm feed a horse, and how to walk around the back of a horse without getting kicked. In short, I know a way of life that I would desparately like to get to, but have nearly no access to right now, and I'm really not sure if I'll ever be able to get there.

In short, I know what it's like to sit on the outside of the conversation, to know little about what's being said, to wish like hell that I did, if only because it seems like I should be able to engage properly because I should, by all rights, be more like them. But if I open my mouth, all I can offer is my prediction on the corn crop.

Well, it's been awhile since my last journal entry, so I thought I'd update real quick like before the impending insanity that is finals. Basically, I'm figuring out a game plan of sorts to stick to for the next couple of weeks so that I can get life in line before Christmas break- and *hopefully* not get sick from all the stress while doing it. I should state that the vast majority of the stuff that was bothering my life in my last post has cleared up. The bedbugs ended up being not a very big problem, and a miracle happened (no, really, it's an honest to God miracle) and my teacher/friend is recovering and doing a lot better now. Other than being busy, life is actually pretty good, and it looks as though it might actually get better, knock on wood.

So, hopefully I'm going to schedule in a time to upload some more work here soon, in the meantime, everyone have a happy pre-holiday!

I know I havn't been on this board nearly long enough to validate putting up a long journal entry, but the past couple weeks have sucked so bad that I just need a venue to vent on.

1. I got sick. I'm on drugs and feeling better, but it put me way behind in stuff I needed to be doing.
2. My Adobe Illustrator program has flipped out and dosn't feel like working at the moment, causing me to be even farther behind than i should be. It's already caused me to lose one project for my job.
3.The extra exercising and dieting that I planned on doing so that I look good for the upcoming formal events I have to attend? furgettaboutit. Between shit weather and the sniffles, I've been on the couch.
4. I told my church that I have to stop leading one of the programs, and I waited until the eleventh hour to do this. As if I wasn't already going to hell.
5. One of my good friends, the second person ever to completly understand me, who I've been able to be completely honest with, is in hospice, and probably has less than 2 months left to live. And the first person? Already dead, for about a year and five months.

And to top it all off-

6. I found a live bedbug in my bed this morning.
My roomate and I had our suspicions, but I became reasonably sure that it was just spiders coming in from the cold, as the apartment is clean and both of us moved in in August with new beds. I washed out all the bedding on my bed this weekend, tore the bed apart, found no sign of bedbugs. And then I'm getting dressed this morning, look down, and there's a fucking bedbug, just hanging out on the sheets. I could just die. I called the landlord, who is calling the exterminator, but bedbugs are up there with Roaches and Fleas in the 'hard to get rid of' pest department, I'm just hoping that there arn't many and this will be (relatively) easy.


The good news- my boss just 'fixed' Illustrator for me.
the bad news- it was screwed up because my comp. has a lousy build, which can't be fixed untill at least May.
More bad news- the internet is still not working properly at my apartment.

It just keeps getting better.

Hello!

I've just started my gallery, woot! I've been doing arty things for years, been a design student for going on 5 years (finally going to graduate in the spring, yeesss!) and user Kelalea has been bothering me for years, yes YEARS to actually post some of my stuff. That and I'm the only friend who didn't have a blog, which made me difficult to spy on. So I'm finally getting to it. More to come as I get the time.

So yeah, Kelalea and I actually do know one another, I'm the former, former roomate that she's talked about on occasion, and I think that the closest thing you're going to get to a pic of me is her photo 'urgatory'- I'm the one in the wings.

What else... I'll do just about any art, I also decorate cakes. I'm a pretty good chef if I do say so myself, I love random funny things, I'm pretty much cool with everyone.