I Think Not

Green eggs and Sam. 23. More idiot than artist.

[sammieham]

The life of an artist often seems glorified. Their sorrows are plastered across stories and canvases encompassing their handiworks. Our history books and our glorification of these artists worship their sufferings as a benefit to their creations.

No one told young artist me, the one so passionate about creating both with art and writing, that those hardships lifted high upon pedestals are a war for an artist. I’ve fought so hard through my hardships and lost what feels like all my creativity. All my passion seems to have been drained from me. I’ve found joy in my sport and a few other things, but I miss the youth I had with creativity. I miss being able to have confidence in my art and proudly call myself an artist. Am I even an artist anymore when the best I’ve done is five drawing in two years? Am I even an artist when the best I’ve done is one short story in almost four years?

Why have we glorified the artist life in the light of their tribulations? Absolutely these painful experiences can seep into works and make such beautiful creations to the point of moving the world. Absolutely art IS a means of expressing the hard times and emotions and it is healthy to utilize it in such a way.

I wish I could tell young me that sometimes the hard moments will be what separates me from Art. And for a long time at that. I wish I could tell myself that finding joy again, feeling peace again, is what brings a creative drive back into me. THAT is what I should glorify. That is what we should also be teaching. The life of an artist weighed down by society — the life of an artist burdened with the exhaustion of heartbreak living in survival mode, doing anything possible to keep a head above water, is not the only thing for us. We’re meant for love and joy. We’re meant to plaster that across canvases and history.

Slowly crawling back to art, even it being one sketch a month, has been my sign of healing. I’m playing sailor, I’m playing kindness, I’ve walked through a massive trial, and I’m unexpectedly here finding joy that takes me further than anything I’d dreamed of. And art isn’t a constant, but it still flows from my mind through my hands.

[sammieham]

Recently I have been living out some weird AU of The Raven Cycle. 

I swore off befriending marines, I really have. The men in particular. I want nothing to do with them. I think they are often annoying, immature, and full of themselves. Hence, my reasons for avoiding marines. 

I live in a very marine populated town, so I have no choice but to interact with them or see them from time to time, especially at my job. It’s a rather unique job that happens to attract marines. Anway, a group has managed to befriend me. They more of adopted me and I was like “is this really happening?” “oh, this is happening.” 

 So here I’ve been, lying to parents about hanging out with a literal group of boys. sneaking around to go on little adventures with them. They call each other by their last names and have gifted me a new name. I kid you not. There is indeed a classic car involved. there’s a mechanic, a sad boy, a boy with anger issues. tattoos. A boy with tarot cards, who is the one that’s actually the mechanic as well. There’s me with the eccentric clothes and feminism and snarky responses. Very Blue-esk. They’ve literally invited me to a ball and had schemed up a plan to have me go if either my parents or work got in the way of my going to the ball with the lot of them. 

Yeah. I am living out some weird TRC AU. 

[sammieham]

Hello I’d like to say that it’s been just over a year and I am now engaged to the tarot card owner/ mechanic marine.

[sammieham]

As someone who has been watching Say Yes To the Dress re-runs on Hulu for the past two weeks I have to say that the most in love brides have the most simply wonderful reasons to be in love.

“They memorized my favorite X.”

“They made remembering life easy.”

“Lover saw me at my worst and still considered me as the best.”

“Lover makes life easier.”

“The mundane was made magical with lover.”

“I was with lover at their worst and I couldn’t imagine someone more perfect.”

“I can’t imagine a life worth enjoying and tackling without lover.”

“While I am my own whole, complete person lover makes it easier to feel complete.”

“I can sleep with lover around.”

“I can breath.”

I can, I can, I can. I can face nothing and everything with them.

It’s always something simply explained. That through the nothing and everything the other person is there. The other person, beaten down or raised up as they are, is cherished. They they make it worth memorizing the little moments of nights out to eat, a flower plucked from a blossoming bush, rain a little less cold and a little more beautiful. It’s always something meaningless to the rest of the world, but the entire world to those few people.

Or it’s always something so big it’s like those two were the only ones built to go through it. And because they were built to go through it they were able to have each other.

[sammieham]

While being thrown into the gut wrenching pit of reality, I had the chance to go see Barbie. I thought to myself before, during, and after the movie that being afab, being feminine, being a woman is heartbreaking in the face of the real world. 

I work in a masculine dominated field. As do most people. A regular day might consist of being poked fun at for not working out, for not being able to remember one silly line from a random movie, not being able to draw back more than 52 pounds. An average day for me is my skills as a technician being questioned by grown men who know nothing about their own equipment or being the main manager and leading bow technician that day and being thought of as “just the pretty receptionist.” That was actually said to my face as I was working on their equipment. 

All of that to say on the day I went to watch Barbie I had gone to my workplace, which I typically chalk up to “going to the range” since my archery range is there. I had my favorite outfit on, accented with my highlighter pink doc martens. While I did shoot bad due to feeling physically like shit (props to my internal war upon my uterus coming early) I still shot better than the men there. One in particular isn’t a bad customer. He’s actually one that sees me as a technician and equal to my male co-workers despite only being 20, a chick, and solely a target archer. When I took my leave I said, “I’m off to see the Barbie movie!” I was practically jumping I was so excited. This is a movie I have been looking forward to since the announcement. The pure joy and excitement was pouring out of me. I felt it in the way my eyes got a bit bigger and my smile a bit brighter. 

The customer said to me, “I didn’t see you as a Barbie person.” 

And I think the point of the movie was made there. That no matter who we are, Barbie is for us. No matter how we dress, no matter our line of work, no matter what we fight for and believe, Barbie is for us. You don’t have to look a certain way or be a certain age. You don’t have to be anything but someone who wants to love Barbie and use her as a reflection of who you are and/or want to be. 

I try so hard to be seen as some sort of equal to my male co-workers at the shop. I want to be respected and to be seen as more than some decoration to help the men go to other men to work on manly things. I want to be the one feminine person representing women on the range so little girls won’t be afraid to join in on a sport that offers so much community when the doors are opened to you. I want to be a safe haven for the women and girls looking for a potential comfort in an otherwise masculine dominated place. I want to be a bit like the Barbie of the shop. Equal respect received and a representation of women in a masculine world. 

when someone sees me as a doll they don’t see me as someone equal to the others in knowledge or skill in the field. It’s true I don’t have some skills or knowledge, but that’s the same with them. When someone sees me as equal to the others they tend to forget that I’m just a girl who used to play with dolls and likes the color pink. It would be amazing if both could happen. That I’m just a chick who used to play with dolls, likes pink, and can make archery equipment get bullet holes in paper.

And I loved Barbie for saying you can be an equal and you can be a doll. I loved it for every joke, every truth, and every pinch to the heart. I loved it for saying we are all not equal in personality, awards, strengths, and opinions, but we can receive equal respect.

[sammieham]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Back to my bs

[jules-hoard-of-stuff-deactivate]

PSA for Across the Spiderverse:

Do NOT see the new Spiderverse movie if you have any form of epileptic condition or conditions affected by bright lights and rapidly changing colors.

I will not be spoiling the plot or anything happening in it, but it is important that people know, because ohhh my god the AMOUNT of flashing lights and rapidly changing colors from beginning to end was so rampant that even I, a non-epileptic autistic person, got a severe headache and wild overstimulation. They do not give a warning in theaters at all that this movie is NOT epileptic friendly from the literal beginning with the beginning credits - which is so, so sad!

This is a beautifully made film, it's wonderful, it's amazing, but unfortunately, it's not a good time for anyone super affected by bright flashing lights in rapid succession, especially those seizure prone.

I wanted to put this out there BECAUSE there are no theater warnings. Idk if anyone else has put it out there, but it is SUPER IMPORTANT!!!

I wish you all a lovely day and hope they eventually have a remaster that will be much more friendly to epileptic and other people affected by bright, flashing lights.

[haikyuupaladin]

[plaintext: Do NOT see the new Spiderverse movie if you have any form of epileptic condition or conditions affected by bright lights and rapidly changing colors. /end plaintext]

[sammieham]

I miss writing. I miss pouring my soul out into a void of white screens and lined paper. I miss when I would dip my quill in my bottles of black ink and bleed out word after word of endless love and passion. My soul belonged to worlds it would never see.  

The simple joys of creating a world someone else might fall in love with, perhaps more so than I did. I crave it as much as I miss it, yet the weight of the real world and its lack of heart bears down on my falling shoulders. It stains beneath my eyes. As my feet drag me home at the end of every day, I pray my next step won’t be as painful as the last, and that I can stay awake long enough to finish the rest of that day’s lackluster chores. 

[cinnamonsly]

stop the peace & keep the violence

[sammieham]

ace/allo

At the end of the day we are still human, whether we developed what society says makes us human or not. When timecards are punched out and the sky turns from day to dusk, we delve back into our little dance. We toe around our needs and our lack of. We find a waltz that suits us both, and I think that is what makes us human. We try. we communicate. we do our best to not cross the lines of comfort while still trying to accommodate the wants of the other.    

No one has a guide laid out for those who are so allo it’s alien, and for those who are ace beyond exceptions. There is no representation to show us how to be, so we make up the rules and the games as we go. We are in charge. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s a backtrack and more communication than the day before. And sometimes all we can do is watch the sunset and bid each other goodnight with a gentle kiss on the forehead.  

[firstfullmoon]

Jonathan Wells, “April Morning”

[missmrah]

Still processing my feelings on The Dreamer Trilogy, but Adam’s dreamt motorcycle definitely has to count for something and obviously I am more than happy to use it as an excuse for practice drawings xx

[battlecrazed-axe-mage]

Don't get me wrong, I love the dreamy fairytale-ness of the Ghibli movie version of Howl's Moving Castle, but the book. The book. Sophie, first off, being so incredibly set on being the boring un-gifted un-adventuresome eldest daughter (as is right and fitting for an eldest daughter to be) that she doesn't notice she's working magic, like, constantly? And when a witch shows up like "hey girlie you are fully working SO much magic that I'm feeling threatened, so like I'm gonna put you in the old lady dimension ciao," she's like well. That was weird. Anyway I guess I better go find something to do as an old lady. And she reasons that this famously evil sorcerer who eats young girls' hearts is probably safe for her now cause like. She's old. What's he gonna do to me. And proceeds to bully her way into becoming his cleaning lady. And Howl, known flaky whimsical fuckboy extraordinaire, is like sure okay I guess that works for me. And just as well because it turns out he's also a fucking bottom who kinda digs this strong stubborn lady who's steamrolled her way into his life, kinda weird that she's disguised as an old woman but w/e he's not gonna question her life choices and like it's not actually a problem for him, and by the time Sophie's figured out that oh crap oh shit she's actually kinda into this flighty asshole, what am I gonna do, he'd never return my feelings in a hundred years, Howl's basically accepted that they're mostly married. And also how can you top "my extremely powerful and slightly fey wizard is just a Welsh grad student who wandered into a portal one day" for a character concept. You can't. It's the perfect book really

[rainbowdoom32]

I actually think the changes are really interesting. The book develops this world that is based entirely on common tropes in European Folklore. The whole order of birth bit for example. So many aspects of the story are based on the reader having familiarity with this rich history of story telling in order to recognize all the rules and systems of this world and to be surprised and delighted everytime we see them twisted or tricked.

But Ghibili was adapting this story for a Japanese audience with an entirely different set of folklore stories. So instead we get this sort of merging of the two folk histories to create a story that has that same familiar feel for both a Japanese and a European/American audience.

[be-queer-do-arson]

Aftg is such a trip because like. The timing is objectively off. It's better that way. It's badly written but actually no it's not. Here's a whole new sport. We lied, its just lacrosse in a silly hat. Trauma galore. By all known laws of book tropes, the main couple should be toxic as hell. They're too cagey and paranoid and possessive not to be. But the main couple, not caring about trope law, creates the healthiest relationship ever written anyways. It's problematic as fuck. It's the best series ever. It's completely unrecommendable. It's gay, but not how you think it'll be in the first book. You'll hate it the first time you read it. Six months later you'll have a whole blog for it.

Aftg isn't a book, it's a fucking experience.

[sammieham]

Saw her dancing in the square in December. It’s February now, and I’ve yet to forget her.

[sammieham]

It’s not often I get to paint skateboards.

It’s not often I return feelings enough to paint someone’s skateboard for them.

He says, “this is my love for you,” and kisses me.

I don’t say anything to him, and haven’t said anything, but the silence when he needs it is mine for him. The tea on cold nights is mine for him. Painting this skateboard is mine for him.

We all have different ways of showing that we care and that we love. What comes of it is art.

[the-evil-clergyman]

Illustrations from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Willy Pogany (1941)

[sammieham]