Okay so this week, I'm going to paint you a picture of my inhibition, but right now what I wanted to do was address the nature of this week's discussion. I hope that I don't sound facetious, but shouldn't we already know by now that material possessions don't make you happy, and that your worldview is vastly different depending on where you come from? I hope those concepts are very clear to people, and if they are, then why discuss them? A conversation like that doesn't really push anyone's mind to their limits of thinking, it just holds them in place over the things they already know.

Osama's point about nature was interesting however. I always feel more comfortable barefoot, or in the forest, and I bet most people would if they slowed their lives down and paid more real attention to Earth. This planet is our mother, and being close to nature is the most natural thing a person can do; for millions (billions?) of years of evolution, every creature has lived in nature. Now we have separated ourselves from it and our worlds are on fire. Of course you function better in nature, it's in your blood, it's in your subconscious, your instincts will cause you to feel peaceful and at ease if you allow them to.

Osama also made a good point about being connected to the universe. Isn't it weird to think how everything is essentially made up of the same stuff? I mean, (pretty much) everything is just made of protons and neutrons and electrons reacting in different ways and arranged in different orders. That's why when you die, your body returns to Earth and you become assimilated and there is no trace of you ever having been anywhere. That's beautiful to me.

So, um yeah I bought a harp on Saturday. I definitely can barely play it, but learning hasn't been that hard so far, and i finally got it nice and in tune yesterday, so it sounds really good. I figure it's pretty much just a piano with no hammers or keys, and since I can play okay piano, I can probably become at least as good at harp, but maybe better too, because I can take it more places than a piano.

Oh yeah, tying this in to class, we discussed doing original and new things. I haven't ever seen anyone else with a harp in their hands, so that clearly makes it at least partly original. Also I've never ever played, held, or looked at a harp before Saturday. Unless I was a harpist in a past life or something, but that doesn't count does it?

The value of things, especially art, is a concept which troubles me a lot. Why is any thing, even a non-creative thing, important? Because we make them important, anything that is valued is only valued because someone said it was so. This is something which bothers me and I'm sure it bothers other artists too, because obviously we all want someone to look at something we made and say "this is good, this is something people want to see," but sometimes it seems like people's choices are really arbitrary.

But how do you move your work from your desk, to someone else's bookshelf, wall, whatever? You do it yourself.



Maybe you are very smart and already know what this is. Or maybe you are still very smart, but also don't know what this is, and that's okay too. This is a zine, and I know you might think "oh, like magazine" except it actually came from shortening "fanzine" but that's a different topic (history) and not very many zines have to do with being fans any more.

Rather, they have to do with things like politics and art and environmental issues. Some of them are about local music scenes, so I guess I lied about the fan thing. But this is still a different topic, the real point is a zine is a self-published piece of art. This is the second one I've printed, and right now I only have five copies. My first one ran 21 copies which I gave out to various people over the course of a couple of weeks. It wasn't that good, it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't amazing either. Neither is this one, but it's better. The actual creation of the original pages took about three weeks, because I made more than I wanted to include, so I could throw away the bits that were just "pretty good". I won't show you what's in it, you have to ask me very nicely in person and I will give you your very own.

If you feel disappointed that I used something I'd been working on for a while, instead of making something totally new just for Creative Being, then don't worry because so do I, and I'll probably just do something else this week anyway.