Knocking on doors

I just want *something*.  That special something other than what I have exactly at hand. I can almost see it from the corner of my eye, but it’s feeling like a peripheral delusion at the moment.

If I ever just stopped to look around and see that everything I ever needed was right here, right now, I would never really get anywhere. I sure as hell wouldn’t be in London.
I constantly fight myself with ‘what to do with my life’, and it’s silly really, because what I’m doing with my life *is* simply searching. I know deep down what I want and I’m chasing it. I know it doesn’t happen overnight.

Sometimes it feels like the harder I search though, the tighter everything gets, the more locked and sealed all the ‘windows’ are – like some over complicated sailing knot called The Fisherman’s Eye (don’t run off to Wikipedia now, I made that up). But it seems the harder I try the less I get there.

But where is there?

I’ve been a graphic designer since 2004. And I’ve been fighting for it, for just as long.
Fighting to find the perfect job, the perfect ideas, against the digital world (as many of you know) and fighting myself on occasion too.

There is something in all this uplift and confrontation – all this bitching and moaning (that I am currently pursuing quite well), that actually makes me *feel* alive.

Known fact. It is harder than it looks… Commitment.
A commitment to working on my life and to sticking with something when the going gets rough in this new place.
C O M M I T M E N T. Bah… How boring.  Doesn’t commitment mean same old, same old? Here it comes… BOREDOM.
Bang.

So what am I afraid of? I fear boredom, of not having anything to do, of finding myself at a loss, of being lost within myself, of disconnecting, of losing drive and soul for it all. Although I know it wont happen like that.
So far the fighting and finding – is far to strong-winded and ‘loved up’ to let anything stand in the way.

Which draws me to a quote that’s sort of moved me this week, from a book called The Artist’s Way.

“We say we are scared by failure, but what frightens us more is the possibility of success.”
- Julia Cameron

I can be a little terrified of the critics who will tell me I don’t fit the ideal. Of the big time professional agencies and the creative director of ‘X’ company that receives my folio and just doesn’t get back. Especially here in a city of many closed doors. Well, I no longer want to be afraid.

So you out there requesting applications, when you get to work in the morning, coffee in hard and morning traffic on your mind, check your inbox with a little love.

The rest of you,  …cross your fingers for me?

Half full or half empty?

They say a glass seen as half full exemplifies an optimistic view of things. Life, travel, money or what ever you want to pour from.
…Yet a glass viewed as half empty is a reflection of a pessimistic perspective.
I do often see things half empty here, especially in such a foreign environment with unfamiliar surroundings or difficult situations, but I guess that’s normal – anywhere.

Things can seem so much further out of reach and so much more is at stake though when there is nothing familiar to keep you moving along for the rest of your journey. It can all feel completely half empty when you’re alone to start something new.

But yesterday is now a past-tense representation of my life, I have learnt a great deal in moving forward and each day naturally grows upwards and stronger, shaping my own reality as it seems.

Today my glass is half full. and I won’t let my spirit be broken anymore.
My enlightened perspective now is that I have nothing to lose, and everything to gain.
Perspective is my new fuel for originality. We look at the same world, and see something else, our own worlds blossoming into a new life as a result of what we see, what we do and what we are looking for.
Here comes tomorrow.

Images thanks to compfight.

Somethings Missing

With thanks to AIGA

Words in Golden Silence

When I read a newspaper, listen to the radio or overhear what people are saying in a cafe as I walk by, I often feel an aversion, even disappointment sometimes at the same words written and spoken over and over-

at the same time expressions, phrases and metaphors repeated. And the worst is, when I listen to myself I have to admit that I can endlessly repeat the same things. They’re so horribly frayed and threadbare, these words, worn down by constant use.

Do they still have any meaning?

Naturally, words have a function; people act on them, they laugh, they cry, they go left or right, the waiter brings the coffee or tea. But thats not what I want to ask.

The question is, are they still expressions of thoughts? Or only effective sounds that drive people in one direction or the other.
I don’t know if its the same language spoken in a different tone, accent or what have you. But it lets you listen a little closer I guess.

Ampersand Deluxe Carrying Case

Ampersand Deluxe Carrying Case. Of couse.
I <3 this!

Thanks to The Ampersand Blog for the link

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After quitting…

This week, at thirty five minutes after two o’clock, I changed my life with a firecracker-like initiation of hopeful ambition. I did what some unwaveringly warned me against, what, I even doubted, I’d ever have the nerve to do. I staked my life in a risk; I just quit my job, without even a solitary prospect of another position of employment, and… I’m going after my dreams.
Just like that, I gambled any security of my well-being, granting my former company four weeks’ notice, and leaving myself fourteen brief days or so to arrange a ‘real life’ move to London.

Today, I breathe in and out, in the same way as I did as a kid riding my bike without holding on to handlebars, the biting teeth of gravel and stone gliding beneath me, waiting for me to fall, and still, the delicate consciousness of the wind lacing through my hair, the blood pulsing past my ears, my heart hammering with adrenaline.

I arrived here, to this moment now, through a burning longing for a life more gratifying than this; an audacious new year’s resolution, and on the grounds that I have wanted to move time and again, to take the risk. I would be but a fraud to advise a life of risk, if I was not courageous enough to lay it all on the line myself.

The moments become surreal, I feel as if I drift, in a suspension of sleep, on the verge of awakening, to see with tired eyes that life has the same familiar rhythm, as it did before. My eyes are open though, and I’m about to leave behind all I’ve ever kept, all I’ve ever known, thus far.

I know now, that I must let go, to grab something else, and I’m taking my first piece of this immense, ruthless, beautiful world. I’m grabbing my life by the horns, danger and all, no matter what becomes of it.

Goodbye sanctuary, goodbye Melbourne days and nights.
Hello, escapade.

A Better Project

The Better Project is something I stumbled across neatly whilst surfing my vast array of blog listings and links and clicks or what have you. But this is one neat little project worth another mention.

The Better Project harnesses a sort of  collaborative power of teh interwebs to help make anything better. Litterally anything.

It takes just a few minutes to set up your own project for instance, invite others and start sharing and discussing ideas around topics and interests you care about and want to see change towards. ..Such as coffee…Becuase I had a *nasty* one on the weekend.

But all bad coffees aside, thinking about the way this works though, it could become a good platform for companies and programs or  places to generate feedback and actually listen to the audience at home…or for something/someone new to fill a space where so much is collectively missing.

Anyway, enough babble… have a look.

The Better Project.

The rhythm of change

Every year, right around this time, I develop a warm feeling of excited anticipation.

I wake up in the morning and the air smells like possibility,
the sun on my face feels like a rhythm that my life is about to change.
As I wait for the change to start happening,
I always find myself dreaming of what it might be:
a new job, a house change,
winning the big bucks possibly?
Usually, the change is almost always more like realising that it’s time to do the laundry and suddenly hitting the jackpot with clothes I’d forgotten about completely. Regardless, this feeling always surprises me, and I treasure it each year, whatever form it choses to take.

It’s sort of like a reminder that I am not yet at all jaded by life,
that I still believe in great impossible things such as moving my whole entire self to a different country or becoming something I’m not yet.
I cling to this part of myself like a child who knows the Tooth Fairy isn’t *really* real, and yet refuses to admit it.
Perhaps this is my version of refusing to achieve maturity.

But hey, if that feeling of pure joy and eagerness disappears, all that’s left of autumn is the air getting cooler and the grey mornings getting darker, then how boring is that?

I don’t think I will ever quite stop dreaming about the changes, the could be’s and the will be’s… which is why this time the impossible rhythm is really quite something.
It might be enough to take my heart and soul, my ideas and my life to another level above laundry baskets and hidden socks to an unknown mystery.
But I wont know till I get there.

London here we come.

The Big Picture

Not too long ago, I found myself traipsing around the Andreas Gursky exhibition in Melbourne.
I was with a friend who was uttering issues about work, life and love. Today. In all though, my friend is under fire for not being able to find the balance between discussions and independent action. A prisoner of the capacity to compromise a little at a time shall we say? Aren’t we all. Moving along now.
So while sinking into Gursky’s photos, which are tremendous images of humanity’s simultaneous isolation and communal sharing of experiences, we we’re trying not to talk too much about the work and other nefarious issues, but instead talking about the photos, because we both feel it utterly necessary to live a life inspired (some prefer to say distracted) by art-slash-design–slash-photography.
Naturally.
So, as we stand in front of an oversized landscape of an apartment building, (The Montparnasse, Paris ’93) which shows more than a hundred windows, each different, bold, beautiful and intrinsically unique.
He made a frivolous comment about the poor guy who had the lilac and burgundy blinds, and how much he must hate living there.
I thought quietly for a moment, gazing into the windows that filled my mind before me and turned around promptly to the sound of an oddly quiet voice that could coat the most prophetic announcements.
“It might look bad from where he’s standing, but it works so beautifully as part of the whole.”
A young boy about the age I started appreciating design and art in a bigger scope was standing closely behind us. Starring amusingly at the giant print, analysing more than any adult in the room could ever have imagined.
Instantly, the fundamental point in my mind emerges.
He was right. The entire exhibition exemplified a deliberation of fine detail, infrastructure and how each and every unit, person or colour became a pawn within an entire landscape.
Which now had us asking; How does everything we do fit into the whole world view? How does the dynamic change when we take the long view? Or the outside perspective? And if you change your blinds (or job for instance…), do you need or even want to think about the surrounding picture? …What comes next?

The Montparnasse, Paris

Maybe Gusky was onto something afterall.

The million dollar homepage

So its been around for a while now, but I’m still mildly amused by this, and did find this draft hiding neatly away under the rug of my wordpress dashboard.
So here it is. One million bright ideas….

Take one college-bound student with an overdrawn bank account and one intense 20-minute brainstorming session on how to raise money to pay for school, and what do you get?

A million-dollar idea that’s had people everywhere slapping their foreheads and muttering “Why didn’t I think of that?” ever since.
With only one month to go before he was to begin classes at a three-year university course, -and no money in his bank account this kid was determined to find a way to avoid student debt.

The home page holds a million pixels arranged in a 1000×1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks.

The lucky buyers of these pixel blocks supplied tiny images, a URL and a slogan to appear when hovering over the link. The aim of the site was to sell all of the pixels in the image, and pretty much brought in a million dollars of income for the creator.

The Million Dollar Homepage was launched is still alive and successfully raised $1 million by selling ad space for $1 per pixel. It is actually amusing to look at…in a hideous and hilarious sort of way…mainly due to the fact the kid made a worthy buck or two from it.

Stupidly simple. The enterpranuer in me is yelling: “why didn’t I think of that?” right about now.

$1 a pixel anyone?

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