Alohomora!!!

 
This morning, I am working on some Harry Potter posters at work. I am eating a soggy turkey sandwich, a bag of chips that expired the week after Halloween, and I am drinking a lot of unfiltered water because I see pointlessness in refilling the Brita in the fridge back up and would rather just drink it from the tap. There's nothing wrong with the tap, people. It's cleaner than the bottom of that filter thing you keep scraping your water bottles along whenever you refill them.
 I'm getting a cold that has been creeping around my edges for two weeks, which means my nose is tickly and I'm looking forward to lying in bed all day on Sunday after contracting more cold from the nursery kids. I'm in a really good mood and I haven't blooged since November. I don't know why that is.

I am happy because I've gotten a hang of a program that makes my heart and color palettes in my heart sing, even if I'm only very simply making things for myself and the classes I teach. I love color. I love fonts. I love radial gradients.
I've been making lists the last couple weeks of things I love and things I am good at. I love blooging. I am good at playing the piano. And so on.
I've been thinking a lot the last couple of weeks about being good at something. What makes you good at something, besides practice? I've watched a lot of people get worse at things they practice. What makes you Good At Something? Outside attention? Skill? Are you better at it when you deserve to be good at it? What you produce being more popular than what other people produce? What you produce being different than what other people produce? What you produce being thriftier or more expensive than what other people produce? You thinking you are awesome?

It seems like people feel the need to refresh themselves with attention in their skill area at different levels. It seems like it's happening so much. It seems like there are some people who need constant gratification from strangers through their art, or just even gratification about how awesome they are, and don't necessarily become dysfunctional without it, but don't function at full capacity. I get loved ones, but I don't necessarily get the strangers thing. Maybe I do. I don't know.
I guess what I'm wondering, why don't you just do something you like to do? And, if every once in a while, something awesome happens, share it! But maybe, just let the awesome things happen on their own?

The ones who really puzzle me are the older ones--the ones who are younger I keep figuring will  learn it's not satisfying unless you yourself like it and move onto something later. But then, I think about how I feel when I am walking the eternal death march to my car from campus, and I see something beautiful, something really warm or something hard and gray and icy, and put a color and an adverb to the description of whatever beautiful thing I am seeing and it sings in my head and it makes the sides of my head by my ears tickle, and I know it's good, and usually I don't even write it down, but the roundness and juiciness of the phrase in my own mind is enough to get me to my car.

And I guess that me laughing crazily to myself about sentences I tell to myself on my walks, because I know they're good, is just like those people.