WANA — bemol Ardiente — The Rather Earnest Painter

I have been spending time today thinking about a logo. It's not that I need a logo, but when I was building my website on Squarespace they offered to make one for me. It's rather simple and not quite the perfect fit, but it's there and it works. So, I thought that I'd revisit the years I spent studying design/art and play with a logo for myself.

It's brought me to think about what I'm trying to do with the website and this new direction I'm trying to take – writing and art. I revisited the notes that I took originally and I saw that I was supposed to be painting again. I've known this and I've intended to do it. But, I haven't actually done it. Alas, there are only so many hours in a week. But, I do need to make it a point to work this in. I can add it to the After Hours Sprints I do with an online community - WANA Tribes. We spend 40 minutes at a time in uninterrupted work. The idea is that maybe we can't dedicate half a day to something, but we can fit in 40 minutes. I generally use those minutes to write, but I can alternate writing and painting.

I visited a list of words (a Word Cloud) that I wrote at Kristen Lamb's recommendation. (She's the creator of WANA Tribes and she teaches branding, blogging, writing etc.) The words are supposed to describe me and my brand. The logo I created with Squarespace includes a cat, but I tried to incorporate a drawing of one of my own cats. It's not working for the logo, but I'm going to keep it because I like it. (Ideas for painting!) Other ideas from my Word Cloud are books, painting, mysteries, Agatha Christie (I adore Agatha Christie to an almost unhealthy level.) Cats are definitely in there as well. How could they not be? They are 50% of my life.

I have a color palette chosen already. Really what I need for the logo is something to enhance my name in Caslon typeface. I have started with a grid and a circle. As I said, I tried switching the circle out with a cat face - didn't work. I'm thinking of trying pages turning; this could represent writing, reading or painting – the three things I'm trying to promote.

All in all the project is making me think about my website, think about my brand, think about what my goals are and it's a way of pushing me forward. When I come up with what I think is a usable idea for the logo, I can enlist my graphic artist friend to help me from there. But, I don't want to outsource this experience. It's important to what I'm doing with my art and with my life. Going into it, I had no idea this project would have such an impact.

Last week I posted a note for a group that I hang out with (WANATribes). I had had kind of a bad week with family and with myself and I wrote that something just didn't feel right. Like, I don't normally go to work with mismatched shoes on. I threw away my prescription for Stupid Pills, so I wasn't sure what to make of this new, incompetent-yet-rather-amusing Earnie Painter. I did the most logical thing I could do, and that was to visit my doctor. Because, don't you visit the doctor when you're stupid?

My suspicion was confirmed that I was anemic, though not terribly so. The issue is, the iron level has gradually been going down. I had been trying to counter the effects with coffee, but it didn't really help. I was more alert, but I was an alert idiot. Slightly more aware of the mistakes I had made in retrospect and abundantly more reactive to them.

So, armed with this knowledge I doubled down on my efforts to eat leafy vegetables and I began taking iron pills. (Along with vitamin C because my niece is a nutritionist and told me that it would help me absorb the iron.) It's not that I don't eat beef, because I do. It's not that my beef is fast food, because it's not. Hamburgers upset my tummy so I don't eat them, but I'm down with some steak. And, adding greens to my diet actually meant increasing the greens, because I already eat them. I just added spinach to my salad mix. I am to be retested soon.

I think I'm feeling better already. Monday was a little rough because I was dealing with things that I had done last week. Plus, I still get dizzy when I eat first thing in the morning, so some of my reactions were a little out of proportion to what I had actually done. Among the things I did was to write in the time for an online workshop that I took on Monday, and I neglect to note the time zone indicated, which means that I showed up an hour late. At first I thought that the person leading the class was just chatting before it got started, but then I was thinking, "Wow, she's really serious about this chat." I looked around and saw my mistake and lost it just a little bit. I was tired, but mostly I was tired of dealing with things that somebody else was doing to me — that somebody else being myself. At my job I have clients from Atlanta to Anchorage, so time zones are a big part of my life. There was really no excuse for that, except that I was under the influence of stupid when I put it on my calendar. There's been a bit of clean-up lately.

But, I do have more energy and I have gone several days without wearing mismatched shoes. I feel a bit of tightness at the top of my head, like on the scalp, and my head hurts a little bit. There is a ringing in my ear, which might mean that I'm still anemic, from what I've read. We'll see. But, I was wondering why my head was hurting, and why the tingling.

There is still the question of whether or not I'm still anemic. And, either way, one has to ask why I was in the first place. But, for the moment I'm glad to be able to trust myself a little bit more.