Wow... Leelee... Wow...

It has been well over a year since I have had mind to post. I am bad. But I take comfort in the fact that I only have four followers and my absence probably hasn't scarred anyone for life. Anyhow, I am going to try and get back in the swing of things.  A lot has happened in my life in this year + that I have been away. This blog is supposed to be about me taking risks and crafting my arts.

The one thing that I have mentioned in the blog was the possibility of a boy. That possibility has come and faded.  We went on a date, which was fine and as awkward as expected,but afterwards his life got really chaotic and I decided to give him his space. I have been looking for another connection, but I have not found any luck. Looking for love online is hard. I showed my family my profile the other day and they laughed at me. They say that I am being to demanding and that I am wrong with being honest about not giving out my number. I am shy. I don't want to give some stranger off the internet my phone number so that we can text when it is just as easy for them to message me on the site. This may have something to do with my inate shyness, or just may  be that I watch way too much ID tv ( I try my best to live a life that  ensures that I do not end up on that channel). I also say on my profile that I only want to talk to people who have the decency to read my entire profile. My family got on me for that too.  I don't know, but maybe I am wrong and scaring people away. Who knows. Maybe luck will be on my side and I will have the good fortune to meet somebody, like in person. Whatevs-

The biggest thing that has happened since my last post is probably my new job as a teacher in my state's great capital of Lansing. I am now an elementary teacher at an online school in Lansing. It was tough getting my first teaching job. I really wasn't as prepared as I thought I was when I graduated. I actually spent a lot of my first year of teaching anticipating my firing. I did not know what I was doing. I had experience in the sense that I had done my internship and I did a very good job, but my placement was in a very different type of classroom. That aside, teaching online is so different. So adjusting to my first year and adjusting to teaching online was very taxing for me. Thanks to my mentors and my boss I made it through my first year and guess what...was invited back. I am so much more comfortable now. Comfortable enough that I moved to Lansing instead of driving for an  hour to get to work each morning. This is also my first time living on my own. So that is also kind of a big thing.

So in terms of writing and crafting. I have done very little up until this point. NO writing.  I have made a little progress on the crafting front. I am making a little progress on my drawing skills and I have started a new craft: Polymer Clay charms! I have always loved working with clay. My high school ceramics class showed me how fun that could be. Naturally, I cannot afford to buy a kiln and pottery wheel. This is why polymer clay works for me.  You cook it in the oven. I am still fairly new and I haven't made anything really extraordinary yet. But I know what I am doing at least. I am still lacking in a few materials  to be able to do things right. I need some chalk pastels. and a magnifying lamp . The charms need to be kinda small and my eyes don't seem to want to do that. A silicone baking mat would be nice too. I have also decided to take my knitting and crocheting skills by the horns and join a knitting group full of beautiful old ladies that can help me. I have only been to one meeting so far, and there were only two ladies there, but I think it will help and it will get me out of the house.

One other venture is that I have started a Youtube channel. It is about my current boyfriend. The Sims 3.  Leeleeislove is my username if you are interested.  I love this game and although I have both a mediocore mic and recording software, I aim going for it. Check it out if that is your thing.  Anyway, that is it for today. I will be back soon.

Look at me. I am messing up already. I have not written a thing since my last post. I haven't forgotten, but I find it impossible to do any writing at my house. I don't know why but I cannot focus there.  What I was planning to do was go to a cafe on my free days and write there. But when I go to a cafe I feel bad about it unless I buy stuff and I am kinda a cafe snob. I am Very picky about where I want to sit and write. My biggest peramitirs are wifi and comfortable seats In Kalamazoo it is hard to find a place like that which has a menu I can afford at the moment. So I have not been going and I have not been writing. Frankly, I have been going through some things. I have been struggling with finding a job and living on very meager wages. Due to lack of good foods I am anemic .Also, I am finding that the place where I went to school isn't really the place where I want to be anymore. It is all very draining and not productive to writing. Go yeah... That is my excuse and I sticking to it.  I will try to maybe come up with something soon. At the very least, some digital art, which I am kinda getting into.

Car Ride

Genre: Realistic Non- Fiction

“Mama? Why is your car bleeding?” 

“ I told you to  stay in the car, Char.” 

“ I want to help.”

I don't respond. In all honesty I don't know how to respond. The child is in her bathing suit, which was not wearing  when we got into the car at the motel an hour ago. She is wearing one cowboy boot  and one flip flop. Her  hair is in one braid, just like I put it this morning , and the other in a loose high pigtail of her own invention. I approach the five year old , take her under her arms and lift. It is clear that I am not amused but somehow she always seems to be smiling when I do this to her. I put her in the car.

“ Child. The car is not bleeding. Cars do not have blood. You can’t help.  I am not even sure that I can help.  I need you to stay in the car, put your clothes back on, and be patient so I can get us out of here.”  She watches me closely as I talk. her brown eyes looked on my face, concentrating. I smile. She is as beautiful, in all her craziness, as the day i had her. She smiles back.  She nods her head.  “ Good. Stay in the  car.”  I set her in her seat in the car  and close her in and walk back to the front of my old green pontiac sunfire, and looked down as a liquid in the most obnoxious color leaks from the bottom. I don't know what made me think that I could take a roadtrip in this car. I have owned it since i was 16, and it has been around my parents house since the beginning of time, but I wanted Charlotte to see the ocean for her birthday, and to meet her grandma before she died.

I shake my head and look to my phone and think. We were in Maryland...maybe they were one of those  states that considered this sort of thing and emergency. it appears  that it is my only choice so I dial 911. I tell them that i was driving around their crazy highways and my car stopped moving. I give them the mile marker and breath a sigh of relief as they tell me that I am right.  They are sending someone right away.

When I get in the car my child is dressed again, and has her face plastered to the driver’s side  back window and is watching the cars whiz by.

“ Mama! I feel like I am in a spaceship! “  I chuckle and roll my eyes. I lean my head back on the seat and take a deep breath, hoping that whatever is wrong with the car wont be too expensive.  

“ You know...” I say without moving my head. “ I rubbed my butt all over that  window  yesterday...” A smile creeps over my lips.

“ You did not! Ewwww! “

“Why don't you come sit up here with me until the people get here.”

“ What people? Is Martin dead? “”

Martin is what the child has named my car. She said that it looked like a boy and that she liked the name Martin and it stuck. I shake my head.

“ I don't think so. “ I take her hand and kiss it as she climbs and sits next to me in the passenger seat. I run my hands  through the  dark brown pigtail , and she wrinkles her nose.

“ Are we in Washington D.C. yet? “  I looked at the at strange spread of highway there were in , surrounded by large hills and trees.

“Yup. The president lives in that tree over there. “ I say casually, smiling as she tired  of my playing in her hair, and took my hand and hugged it her small chest, my senses meeting with the beating of her heart.  She looks up at me and smiles, showing of that gaps from the tooth she had lost the other morning  in their small apartment trying to run to the bathroom .

“ mama? Are we close?”

I smile and look her, I lean forward and kiss her nose . What a question?  I know I am answering the question in a way she is not meaning to connect it with with, but I tell her anyway.

“ Yes, baby. So close. “

I am Back! ish...probably...

There are only four of you so I am really not too concerned , but I obviously have not been here in quite a while. I have not been writing. I have not been drawing. I have not been moving anything up to medium. I have been graduating from college, looking for work, playing a lot of The Sims 3 and working a job that I hate. This may be in vain, but I am going to make an attempt to come back. If nothing else, for the writing. I am going to try to post some writing here at least once a week. I want to get back into the creative mode and just write, something , anything without worrying about it being excellent and apart of some project. I just want to write.

When I was in fifth grade I told myself that writing was the best thing to love, because no matter what I did with my life I could write. The side of my brain that wants me out of poverty is wishing I had a childhood passion for science or math.  As a whole it can;t be helped. I am a creative person and with all the creative things swimming through my head that I can't do ( dance and music), writing is something that I can do. I will try to make an aggressive attempt to write something frequently. I am starting with a goal of twice a week, but hopefully with a bit of refreshing I can get up to a piece per day. And keeping in tune with the theme of this blog I will be experimenting with different genres and such. Of course if I  paint/ draw or do anything special it will be put up as well. SO that  is that. Hopefully, I am back and just in case three out of the four of you are wondering, Mel-Cat has still not started her blog. Boooooooooo!

A low day
pressure is high
and with every thought
a tear.

Pain in the head
right behind the eyes
like a fire
Set by fear.

No want of food.
No food to want.
No voice to ask.
NO ears to hear.

No hands to hold
One place to be
broken, alone, desperate
no ears to hear.

It's like I stranded in the ocean
nothing to do but wait...or sink.

Shading and the Boy

Hello, Hello. This post is way way way way way overdue. Boy do I have a lot to cover...I have been so busy. I have been working two jobs and moving. It has just been a mess. But I still have been trying to find time to pursue my new things. I just have lost the time to write about it. It;s not like it is a big deal. I have no substantial reason  to assume that really anyone is reading this blog. I am not spectacular...yet. However, I did say once a week and I would like to try to stick to it. I regret that I do not have anything to show you, by scanner is buried in my boxes. :(.  I will put the pictures up as soon as I can. Hmmm... what to talk about first....

My art. That Is going pretty well, i think. I have moved past profiles and  I can now do 3/4th view to some extent, and I have been working on some new hairstyles and things like that. This was all taught by internet tutorials.  My main problem right now is consistency. I cannot consistently draw in the 3/4th view, and my noses and eyes change from drawing to drawing. I wish the tutorials online wee more detailed. I keep having to go from using actual technique to just winging it and that throws off the proportions or makes the head shape weird. I also cannot get the shading. No matter how many tutorials  I watch, I can’t do it. Anyone out there have any suggestions?  I do feel like I am getting better though. I find the boys and bodies are still difficult for me.  I have also found that short hair is easier for me to figure out.

My writing progress has not improved, not even a little bit. I have no time. I feel like with the current semester coming up  it is only going to get worse. I have come up with a new book idea that is pretty awesome. It is in the steampunk category. I plan to be more prepared before I start this one. This is going to be a lot of reading. I should have read more before starting my current project.

And last but not least, my newest new thing is* drumroll* * pigs flying*  dating. I took it upon myself to join a couple of dating sites. I am so new to dating  and so open about that, it  appears to have scared people away.  All except for one, but we will get to him later.  At first it was epic fail.  All the men I thought would be a good match for me were either too shallow or too impatient.  They all wanted me to give them i numer so that we could text and I was just not comfortable doing that. After i told them that they usually disappeared into cyberspace.  I am not going to give these people my number. I am the type of person that needs to build more of  relationship first. That is just the way I roll. For the most part it has been a frustrating experience.

And then there was Gil. Me and Gil started out talking in the same ways as the aforementioned losers. I sent him a message and he responded with thoughtful questions and patience. That pattern repeated between us for awhile. Then it got to  the point where the site had become so irritating to me that I couldn’t bother to get on, not even for gil. So we exchanged MSN addressed and have talked pretty regularly on that for just about a month now. We say a little something to one another almost everyday. It is not always severely profound but Gil always seems to make me feel a little bit better about what I am doing, and I enjoy the stories he tells about his grandmother.

    A little about Gil:

1. He is from my hometown, which is awesome because it puts him both close and far away from me at the same time. It is a very comfortable distance for my first dating anything ever.
2. He lives with and takes care of his grandmother. Which I think pushes him way above the normal sweetness level.
3. He helps run a freaking awesome podcast. It is legit. It is about gaming and most of the time I don’t know what they are talking about but I am very impressed.
4. He is an excellent writer. he is always sending me links to his articles and they are well written and legit.
5. When I tell him his stuff is awesome he responds with cartoon and comic that are cute and funny. He is modest.
6. We both don't like scary stuff or spicy food.

Anyway, we have agreed to a skype thing in the the near future and that is very exciting. I am going to stop talking about Gil now. I did ask Gil if it was okay to talk about him so I don't wanna make this too awkward for him to read.

That’s all I got people. I think that I and going to try and paint something so look out for that. ^_^ Till next time.

The Profile of a Cupcake

Hello All. Here I am continuing my journey to be purposeful and daring in my life. The goal here is to blog about once a week, but I am a busy kid so don't hold me to it too seriously. Anyway,I have done some stuff this week, and unfortunately very little of it has been writing. Every time I look at my story I get tired. I don't know. Maybe it is just poor timing, maybe I have just been lacking inspiration. Maybe it is hard for me to continue to work on a book that I am pretty sure is going to go nowhere. Lately I have been trying to do other things to inspire me.  One thing I have been doing is reading. I have joined a book club. I hope that reading other people stuff will help me to be more creative in my own. Another thing that I have been doing is making a purposeful effort to get inspired by music. I have taken to listening to film scores, or other music without words, and when that doesn’t work I have found folk pop to be very good too. Mel-Cat has been rocking this group called The Civil Wars that she scooped off of Veronica Roth’s blog. If you don’t know who that is, I would check her out. She is the writer of the Divergent  book series. It is good. Anyway, I am really fond of the The Civil Wars station on Pandora.  I have started to find songs that make me feel  good and smart and just make me feel like writing.  I recommend it. It  gives good images, unfortunate for me only a few have been relevant to my current stories.

Anyway, lets talk about things that went well this week. Number one: My Art. I have decided to seek instruction for my drawing instead of drawing the same ugly stuff over and over and hoping that someday I will randomly, magically  improve. I went online and started looking at tutorials and pictures  and  doing what works. I just wish now that I hadn’t wasted so much of my sketchbook doing the other stuff.  I started with profiles. I am currently practicing that and I have some to show you. ^_^

Another thing I have moved up on is my knitting. I have taken on the task of those double  pointed needles that you use to make tubes. They are not as intense as they seem. I haven’t actually made anything at all yet, just done some practice and sure enough there was a tube. I was pumped.  Also, I stepped things up on the baking front. I have started to get bored with the boxed cupcake mixes and started to liven them up . This month I made chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter butter-cream. The only thing that I really innovated here was the butter-cream. I got the recipe off the net and when I  was done I tasted it and it tasted just like sugar. So I vamped up the portion of peanut butter and they were perfect. Hardcore perfect. I took sexy pictures of them on my phone. I have to think of something to do next time. I am running out of cheap ideas. Baking is an expensive hobby.

Anyway. Stay tuned folks. I hope to actually get some writing done this week. I have orientation for my new summer job and I know from last year that I will have a lot of down time. I will bring my computer and try to write then. That’s all I got people. I will catch you next week.