Shakespeare's Sadness

I did not get much painting done yesterday. I was trying to get the last of the "Bad Rats" series* done, but I just could not seem to decide on a theme. I've had greed, and pride; I've had rage and general discontent, remorse--even the Vietnam war. (That was a mistake.) But I couldn't think of a damn thing for Bad Rats #8. Lust? Boring. Murder? Had it already...well, sort of. A Nosferatu-style rat silhouette climbing a flight of stairs with its big black shadow claws sticking out? Not quite art school, is it? So I worked on another greyscale painting, but that wasn't going too brilliantly either. Thoroughly uninspired. Shame on that.

I didn't even have anything interesting to eat yesterday. Just mashed potatoes and garlic bread. I had ordered some chicken to eat as well, but it had tomatoes on it. (The menu, I might point out, had mentioned no such thing.) I didn't want to risk getting heartburn, so I gave the chicken to Shakespeare. She seemed happy for about ten minutes, while she munched on the chicken, but then she returned to her depressed-rat routine, perched morosely in the corner of her cage with her nose between her forepaws. She's been doing this for almost two months now. At first, I thought she was ill, and fed her enough antibiotics to disinfect an army of rats. Nothing changed. She just kept right on sitting in her corner, eating food and getting fat as a balloon. Poor Shakespeare.

Today, I have to get a lot done, to make up for getting almost nothing done yesterday. I want to get that last Bad Rat out of the road, and make some inroads on that greyscale. That would be nice. I would be quite content if I could get one or the other done to my satisfaction. I absolutely MUST get something done today--something solid and concrete that I can be happy with. I can't be messing around wasting time, with so many deadlines looming large! I've got all my Misguided Games pictures to finish by the end of the year--I've passed the halfway mark now, but that still leaves me eighteen paintings and five sets of minor revisions to be done. I'm not too concerned with the revisions. There isn't anything major so far, and I'll be able to get them all done within a day. It's the complete pictures that are presenting difficulties. It takes time to do these things well, and time is in short supply.

Apart from the greyscale paintings, there's that last Bad Rat to be done, and the commission I mentioned some days ago. There's most of a five-minute animation, too--that's for another of my classes. I mess around with it whenever I have time, but it looks pretty dismal so far. I'm dreadful at animation--absolutely awful. And Flash hates me. And I have to draw a dog for a friend's Christmas present. And ther's another Christmas gift to be put together, too, but I can't mention it, since I know the recipient will be reading**.

To add insult to injury, my apartment's still a bloody disaster zone, as well. My loo is sparkling clean--now I've just got to hit all the other rooms. All those books and papers decorating the floor--the books are to be sent to the used bookshop, and the papers to the bin. I've also got to cash the little pile of cheques which is slowly accumulating on top of my monitor. Most people use PayPal these days, but every once in a while some soul with no regard for my laziness sends a cheque. I hate cheques. Cheques are the spawn of the devil. Not only do I have to leave my apartment to cash them, but I ALSO have to go all the way to the Money Mart (seven blocks away), because the bank (right across the street) has an annoying habit of slapping thirty-day holds on non-domestic cheques. And since all my buyers are from America, that's every single one. So I've got this little pile of cheques--$12 here, $17.50 there, a snowdrift of tiny amounts--and one day, I'm going to have to wait while some lackadaisical Money Mart employee works his way through every last one of them.

Well, I've nothing else to report today. I have to get back to work, anyway. Also, it's raining, and it's very November.

Did I mention how much I hate November?

* [Footnote added in August of 2005] - The "Bad Rats" series was one of my senior projects from art school. It involved eight digital paintings of rats getting up to no good. One of them, Bad Rats #4, which showed a rat plucking stars from the sky, sold more prints than anything else I ever did. I never fully understood why.

** [Footnote added in August of 2005] - He wasn't. The intended recipient, my boyfriend at the time, was angry with me for spending more time writing in my journal than writing to him, and boycotting accordingly. He never told me this, unfortunately, so I never got the chance to explain that I started the journal so he'd know what I was up to while we were apart.