Today was one of those days where the feeling of melancholy was just heavy. I’m sure the bland weather had alot to do with it as did the fact that today was sort of a free-day (because of the holiday), a day with no specific pressure to do anything and so consequently it was a day with alot of time for thinking. Usually I love melancholy days and today wasn’t necessarily any different and yet it was. I’ve always been the kind of person who has internal conversations but every since I’ve started blogging, my internal monologue has been going 100 miles per hour….talking to me about commiting more time to creativity…drawing, making things, taking pictures, practicing with Photoshop. Its not that the voice is overbearing, its just getting more insistent and the desire to step out and do something different is growing.

What stops me from embracing these desires is that same thing that has always stopped me…fear. I’ve always struggled with the two things that I believe are necessary to doing anything well…the need to practice and the courage to face failure. I’ve never been one to enjoy practicing or studying. I’ve also always had this irrational fear that if I were to ever step out and begin using my talents in earnest that something would happen to me and I wouldn’t be around to see the completion of whatever I had started. It can be comfortable to just stay where you are and not listen to your heart. While I’m sitting around doing nothing I can harbor the dreams that maybe buried somewhere within me is a talented artist or writer or photographer…..those dreams can be very comforting because as long as they are in my heart there is always hope…always possibility. Having the courage to attempt to make those dreams a reality brings with it the possibility of discovering that I’m not talented in those areas….or that my talents have limits that I’m too afraid to face up to. I also worry about having an inability to handle too many things at one time. I want to be a good father, a good husband, a good friend, a good employee, a good supervisor, a good Christian. Those things take time and I’m not convinced I do any of them well and the idea of adding anything else into the equation can be terrrifying.

So that’s where I’m at. I have a growing feeling of discontent with where I’m at as far as exercising my creativity and an internal voice that’s has gotten more bold since I’ve actually been listening to it lately. Its a hard place to be but also a place that is fraught with possibility. Will anything be different this time? This isn’t the first time that I’ve felt this way and at the same time blogging has opened up a door within me that it seems like I’ve been holding closed for a long time. I’m not sure what tomorrow will bring but I’m open to grow and change and see what happens. I’m on the edge and I pray that I have the courage to jump. Thanks for letting me share….Happy Monday!!!

On a related note I’m curious if any of you bloggers feel the same way about your own internal voice…..I find it very odd that I’m just constantly having these conversations with myself and mulling over things and the possibility of turning them into blog material…its fascinating and quite surprising.

I haven’t been to the website of John Van Fleet for awhile and I’d forgotten that he did this cool new update. John has done artwork for several Batman comics as well as various Star Wars and Vampire: The Masquerade projects. You may or may not like his work but the site is just too cool. Turn on your sound and wait briefly until the radio on the intro page stops making noise and then click to go on into a very fun looking site.

This could get ridiculous, but I just stumbled across this on another blog and since it was an amalgam of my last 2 posts I thought, what the heck.

Which Peanuts Character Are You?

I’ve spent many years embracing my inner nerd and learning to become proud of the geek that I am. And now my nerd factor has come into question! I was perusing SciFi Chick’s new site and came across the How Nerdy Are You? questionairre (Congrats on getting your own domain name, Angela! 🙂 ). I only scored an 18%! That ranks me in the Not Nerdy category! What gives! I read comics! I’ve been to several comic book and Star Trek conventions! I have several autographed pictures from said conventions! I have a bat-erang signed by Adam West! I own a replica of Han Solo’s blaster and Aragorn’s sword Anduril! I have Robot pics on my wall in my office and a statue of Phoenix from the X-Men on my desk! I have a Wonder Woman tattoo on my butt…..well, that part isn’t true…but I am a NERD! A GEEK! James calls me a FREAK all the time! How is it that I scored so low? Admittedly I could have been less than honest on some of the questions. A few of the questions were concerning the computer I was doing the quiz on and if I had answered using my home PC as an example my nerd score would’ve jumped up quite a bit. I thought for sure I’d be more nerdy than at least 50% of the quiz takers! SciFi Chick scored a 75%! She kicked my nerd butt! I’m pretty depressed about this whole thing. I think I’m going to go home and put on my Spiderman pj’s and watch reruns of the Super Friends…..

Here’s the link to the quiz if you want to take it. Let me know your scores so I can be more depressed. Thanks again SciFi Chick, this was fun! Check out her site and give her feedback as well, she’s the one that made this nerd-fest possible!

In all the rush of Valentine’s Day, work, and then illness I completely forgot about the fact that February 12th marked the 5 year anniversary of the passing of Charles M. Schulz, beloved creator of Peanuts. I won’t go into alot of detail on his life. This book does a far better job than I ever could imagine and was lovingly written with the help and permission of Mrs. Schulz after his death.

I grew up as a Peanuts fanatic. I loved to draw when I was young and I was always drawing pictures of Snoopy and Woodstock. My local library had several collections of Peanuts books and I frequently checked them out. For some reason I always got Peanuts, I understood why it was funny and I frequently laughed out loud at some of the strips…I still do actually. I will acknowledge that the later years of Peanuts was pretty dry, but the earlier stuff is so brilliant. Schulz seemed to have the ability to capture the essence of the fears and anxieties of children, and adults for that matter. By making these “funny” he succeeded in showing us that we are not alone with these issues. As I stated before, the earliest of these strips were the best. Fantagraphics Books started an ambitious project last year to put together every Peanuts strip in book format in chronological order. There will be 25 books in all covering 50 years of Peanuts strips. They are releasing 2 books per year. Much of the early stuff has never been collected in book format before. I’ve got the first 2 of these and they are wonderful. Charlie Brown is much more mischievious and sarcastic in these early strips and its so much fun to read the strips where specific characters were introduced for the first time and to think that they had been written years before I was born.

There are very few creators/entertainers who are real class acts and Charles M. Schulz was definitley one of them. Two days before he died I was watching a 60 minutes special about him with my parents and I mentioned that it wouldn’t surprise me if he passed away now that he was giving up something that was his life’s passion. I was very saddened by how prophetic those words were. I feel privileged to have grown up in one of the many generations who got to see Mr. Schulz’s work on a daily basis and I’m happy that Peanuts’ popularity is such that many future generations will be able to grow up with the Peanuts gang.