It’s fun to have two New Years, plus my sister is in town this year!
As always, I must remind everyone about this series of schmalzy Petronas CNY ads. It’s the least that oil barons could do for the culture.
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6/22/2025
Fish and hook. As a fan of asymmetry, offset folds are exciting.
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6/23/2025
With my love of asymmetry, angled popups should have been an obvious progression, but I could never get them to work. At this point I also gave up on pairing the pop-up and the words as I raced through the exercises in the book.
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6/24/2025
Not exactly pop-ups, but I had fun exploring the splashy, bendy motif, and they played great with the big text.
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6/26/25
This stunt has an Art Deco feel to it.
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6/28/25
thank you!
This was a thank you card for the Administrative Specialists in our division.
,
Cya next time!
,
PS—Chinese New Years
The Lunar year is bit awkward. It’s nice to have a second calendar to enjoy, especially gastronomically, but these moments don’t fit great around the American workweek.
It’s a more noticeable now, since my in-laws celebrate these festivities more than my parents. Before the pandemic, we would celebrate on weekends (a 2/7 chance of happening) while squeezing in eating the appropriate foods on the proper day.
Just like celebrating birthdays!
For a few years, work from home alleviated the complexity. We could visit the in-laws and with our laptops. I worked during the day, the girl did her distance education in the evening, and we celebrated during the breaks.
Not ideal, as some Algerians once told me in Paris, an immigrant lives with their ass on two seats.
—February 2022
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PPS—Wedding Greetings
Because of the pandemic, my mother-in-law did not return to China for her nephew’s wedding. Instead, we recorded a greeting for the event.
Our first attempts included the kids, but that quickly proved impossible so they were shuffled into the bedroom to watch TV. We adults then tried to look happy (but not silly) in front of an iPad as my mother-in-law wished all the best for the happy couple.
Good lord. It still took multiple takes, several of which were ruined by laughter.
Now I know why actors earn their fortunes. Pretending is a real, difficult skill. I see why traditional cultures view frown upon this vocation. If you can fake it on stage, can you be trusted at all?
Of course, being a great actor is well rewarded in today’s modern world, a nice problem for a star! But I wonder if the traditional had it right—a professional fake must pay a heavy psychic tax.
—February 2022, and congrats to the happy couple who welcomed their first kiddo last year!
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PPPS—Dude
Tom the Dancing Bug, by Ruben Bolling
I saw this comic strip on an office door in a community college. Now that I have finally found it again, I need to put it somewhere semi-permanent.
Before wandering into the world of pop up cards, here are five last 5WP’s…until we get back into poetry again!
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3/24 Inktober 52 (2024), week 13
battling samurai with a spork
I tried a few lineweights with this Spork. The simple clean version one felt most spork-y.
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3/28 Inktober 52 (2024), week 11
japanese racoons shapeshift with nuts
A reference to the brilliant Studio Ghibli movie Pom Poko, a fun commentary on fighting our inevitable exploitation of nature. An early scene showing the development of the rural land around Tokyo is one of the sharpest satires I’ve seen on film.
I can’t remember for sure, but with the spacing so perfect, I suspect it was tweaked in the box. Nothing crazy, just a nudge here or there.
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4/3 Inktober 52 (2024), week 8
astronaut riding a space donkey
An early experiment with inverting the background and playing with colors (using the Hue-Saturation filter). One day I should start experimenting in IRL with gauche on colored paper.
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4/4 Inktober 52 (2024), week 9
always add a red balloon
The version on blank sheets was fine, but ruled binder paper felt like a relevant background for something that references a red-balloon (and as always a little extra noise can make a huge difference).
This was a reference to the architectural rendering trope adding a child with a red balloon. It gives a pop of color in the sky and a sense of playfulness to an otherwise staid image.
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3/29 Inktober 52 (2025), week 13
a flock of folded rams
With this I detoured heavily into the world of pop-up cards. We bought Paul Jackson’sCut and Fold Techniques for Pop-Up Designs for the boy’s birthday, but I stole it as soon as I saw it. There would be a few more 5WP’s, but dealing with the third dimension and the constraints of the paper sucked all my creative energy for a while.
After summer, I returned to flat paper with the ruling pen but focused on a single word at a time. I’d like to return to poetry and pop-ups (and maybe both at the same time!), but struggling with a word itself is challenge enough for now.
,
As we head into this season of year end summaries, it’s interesting to think that this post covers the first half of 2025 with my “standard” 5WP format, practicing with a brushpen on ruled binder paper, and folded pop-up cards.
The second half of the year (assuming no surprises after I draft this in late October) was dominated by the ruling pen, a month off due to illness, embracing a focus on just one word at a time, and finally pushing out some old blog drafts.
I wonder what the new year will bring? All I know is that I don’t.
It’s gentle, but dang if your arms don’t get tired! And it’s easy to crank it up if you’re feeling it.
For me, it is cultural tourism, exer-dancing with a group from the exotic orient. I guess it’s not totally foreign since I’m of Chinese descent. The music is familiar, even though I don’t understand the words to the songs. While the megalopolis Asian urban setting is strange, the faces are not.
I would prefer to hang out at the local Kung Fu gym for my exercise. But that time that has passed. I don’t have time to slip out to practice with kids who are a just a few years older than my children.
Unfortunately, Tai Chi by myself gets old after a while, but partaking in the kitschy music and oddly familiar foreign group movement with the family is a nice change of pace for a day’s exercise.
—May 2021
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PPS—Rubber Balloons
My daughter wanted helium balloons for her birthday, but we ordered a bag of regular balloons from Target.
She quickly got over her disappointment after my wife inflated a couple of them. Human air doesn’t float, but gravity makes for play. They spent a couple of hours batting them around the house. Up and down the stairs, over the dividing walls, in the bedrooms.
I hadn’t heard the boy laugh like this in a while. All over fifty cents of rubber.
It pained me to think of all the kids who can’t afford such a fleeting luxury. And I was reminded of a fellow father riding in the Vegas heat with a foil balloon for each of his kids.
—October 2021, soon after, they discovered the manual mattress pump. We had hours of fun inflating the balloons and letting them fly through the house.
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PPPS—Pac-Man
Our daughter is growing up fast. She was reading a book with snippets from American History and asked about “Pac-Man”.
We watched YouTube videos and played Scratch versions of this classic. I also explained the concept of “arcades” where people had to pay coins to play computer games, and how the value of a quarter has been debased over forty years.
This weekend I pulled out a “Pac-Man Connect and Play” that plugs into the TV. Even though they didn’t enjoy Pac-Man, the boy loved a driving game where you left oil spills to spin out the pursuer. She preferred a flying game shooting coins out of the air.
After TV time was up, we played Pac-Man in person, using deflated balloons for the smaller buttons and inflated balloons for the ones that made Pac-Man eat the ghosts.
Then we took another YouTube break for the The Go! Team’s Ms. Pac-Man music video. That led to watching more music videos, TV advertising, and discussed how TV used to be appointment viewing.
Basically, we covered the last half century of American culture in a weekend through a yellow lens.
Long ago, boardgaming was my primary form of entertainment.
I would read rules while riding the bus into downtown Houston for my corporate gig. I was trying to internalize the rules and visualize the game experience. Of course, great games stand out because they create complex dynamics that can’t be visualized in a steel tube crawling through city traffic. But what’s the alternative? Buy a game without thought?
Beyond the acquisition decision, this turned out to be was a powerful mental exercise. I was focusing on a complicated text in a variable environment, applying words to a future self. In mentally playing a game, I sat in each opponents’ chair, visualizing their competing interests—different goals leads to different actions, creating that elusive the gameplay dynamic.
Years later, I’m doing the same thing as with contracts tackling difficult situations. The stakes are a bit higher, but that’s all. People generally act according to the set up. So I try to empathize with their pressures to understand their motivations. How can I navigate this mix to discover an optimal outcome?
There might have been less frivolous ways to spend the commute, but reading boardgame rules turned out to be a solid choice.
~
Some Links
Our son prefers cooperative games, and Matt Leacock is the giant who designed Pandemic that popularized this genre. In simplifying his classic for a wider audience, he designed Forbidden Island with a board made out of tiles. This twist created a game where the board would disappear over time.
He developed the idea further with Forbidden Desert, where the tiles would shift and and move. I haven’t tried Forbidden Sky, but we just purchased Forbidden Jungle. Here, the players are required to shift the board around—while managing a bunch of grouchy aliens.
This series is a fun case study of a designer developing a simple game mechanic (tiled boards in a cooperative setting) over several iterations. All three are highly recommended.
Another week. This one goes quickly, and suddenly you’re halfway through!
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10/8
RECKLESS
It was obvious that this should be written on a background. I got plenty of sheets for that.I vaguely remember using my right hand to write this, to make it a little extra reckless.
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10/9
heavy
The one on a background was just for practice, but I liked the touch of color. Plus “sunrise” felt like a nice contrast to “heavy”.
1/4
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10/10
sweep
This was rough. I wasn’t happy with any of the early versions. But a week ago, I was reminded about the practice of taping two pencils together to test one’s lettering skills. I tried it with two flair pens, then three flair pens, then two brush pens, and which became four brush pens.
It still took a few tries to get it right. I started on the letter-sized sheets before going to the tabloids. It was sooooo fun to sweep big letters with a megaplex brush pen! But the smaller composition turned out more sweep-y on the screen.
Sometimes, more fun is not more correct.But always take that detour.
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10/11
sting
Unlike other pieces, this one was straightforward. It always takes a few tries, but it’s nice to not be tortured for every single assignment. Though S’s are always torture.
That’s what I wrote when drafting this newsletter. But the morning of the assignment, I thought of a making something with a big sloppy brush.
It was meant to be rough and quick, but with a wide open Saturday I darn sure overcomplicated it. I suspect the best version is the second shot (single barb, green text on white background), but I played a lot in the computer, including learning how to better play with masks and even the difference between 8-bit and 16-bit encoding.
Last year, I started Inktober thinking I would single-shot a piece every morning. I did that for a couple of days before architecture-school training kicked in. I’m not competitive but a well crafted work is a sign of respect. So if I’m gonna do it, I have to chase a certain level of respectability!
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10/12
SHRED
I tried a few variations on the stripes, but the most literal (figurative?) attempt was the only version that worked.
Just before uploading this piece, I realized it would read better with a grey background. Last year, I framed each piece inside of a square format (like that “sunrise” piece from January), but my wife pointed out that it was claustrophobic. But once in a while, it’s the right move.
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10/17
Drink
I changed this the morning of the upload. The first one was fine, but insufficient. For this second version, I started with some ornate flourishes that disappeared over 33 tries to get it right.
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TRUNK
I tried to mimic a car trunk, but it didn’t work. Those initial attempts led me into Roman capitals.I tried overlapping letters to fit the page; they decided to combine instead.
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ragged
Even with pieces with a crazy background, I always test the graph on a clean sheet. I like to make sure that I can do it straight.
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I just (re)watched Ponyo with the kids. I’ve always remembered it as a bit slow, but maybe I’ve slowed down. It was an absolutely a visual treat. Definitely recommend!
Last week was Flushed Away, a movie by the Wallace and Gromit studio that was way better than I expected. It’s trapped in the early 2000’s animation style, but a fun story well told!
Cya next time!
,
PS—A Divination Journey
Art and Chance In college I played with chance operations in creating art. It never led to anything spectacular, but I loved the idea of delving into randomness to spur the next move.
Glass Bead Game The Herman Hesse novel. I read it. I remember nothing, except the cover the paperback I owned.
Tai Chi The Christian fundamentalists who are scared of yoga should worry about Tai Chi too. The grand ultimate fist is a practice that also leads to eastern philosophy. The body moves the mind.
Decktet A brilliant double suited deck by PD Magnus, whose book of games included a chapter on divination. Instead of contacting the occult, this philosopher deconstructs readings as randomness interacting with the subconscious.
Tarot Once demystified, a Tarot deck is just a 5-suited pack of playing cards, an obvious game development from the standard European 4-suited decks. Not spooky.
War For a while, I played War with my daughter using a cheap tarot deck. After repeated interactions, the deck became as mundane as that copy of Operation collecting dust in the closet.
Waite-Rider I got one. Not a fan. I prefer pip decks.
Daoism It’s the cool Chinese philosophy in this individualistic age.
Confucianism Yin needs its Yang. During the pandemic I finally read the Analects and realized that this old guy also spoke to my sense of societal order, likely due to my upbringing.
I Ching Wait, Confucius was into this book? I should look into it. No surprise that Daoists dig divination, but if Confucians are studying it too, then that’s an universal text.
Yarrow Stalks Divining with yarrow stalks is the best! The half hour it takes about to determine a reading becomes a meditation on the question, calming the mind before contemplating the answer. Any other practice feels like child’s play.
Too much Tarot In spite of memorizing the I Ching, I fell out of the practice. And then I went on a Tarot deck buying spree. It was bit of pandemic mania, but it’s nice to own these lovely art pieces.
Calligraphy Now that I have a productive hobby, I’ve lost interest in divination. Life is simple—work, play with the kids, and graph when I have time. Why delve into the subconscious? I enjoy enough randomness with each stroke of the brush.
But I do need to get back into Tai Chi. Then again, I don’t need cards or coins to know that.
—September 2025
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PPS—More thoughts on divination
PD Magnus’s chapter on divination in his Decktet book pushed me past any residual Fundamentalist fear of this sort of “occult” activity. Divination is a randomly generated lens for focused self-reflection. And as an atheist now, what is there to fear?
I started with a crappy tarot deck at the bookstore which sat unused for a decade until I started playing War with my daughter (the fifth trump suit makes it much more fun than with a normal 4-suited deck). After the deck came into regular use as a game deck, I tried a few readings.
But the booklet that came with that deck was way too predictive. It’s one thing to say “love is in the air”—your brain can plumb a vague comment to find its own meaning. Totally different beast to predict “you will have problems with your lover”. Such definitive pronouncements will implant counter productive seeds. Who knows how that might manifest!
I also tried a couple readings with the Decktet. PD Magnus did a great job of using vague typologies for pronouncements, just like how I Ching also avoids the overly predictive problem (it can be a bit of a word salad at times).
I also tried a couple readings with the Decktet. PD Magnus did a great job of using vague typologies for pronouncements, just like how I Ching also avoids the overly specific (sometimes by being a world said). But I’m still wary that this is toying with fire. Not because of any supernatural stuff, but the potential for this practice to reinforce perverse subconscious feedback loops.
As such, I don’t practice readings while the kids are awake. I don’t hide the books or cards, but I don’t want them thinking that readings are to be trifled with. I doubt I would have properly handled the randomized subconscious before my 40’s.
But I also rue missing out on playing with I Ching chance operations in my undergrad art classes!
—August 2021
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PPPS—The four arts
With my recent discovery of the joy of sketching, I realized that I am pursuing the Four Arts in a 21st century way.
Qin (琴)Music I need to get on a regular practice schedule but a ukulele and banjo both got strings and make noise. Occasionally I get the timing right and you might call it music.
Qi (棋) Go I got two bookcases of boardgames. A proper scholar would focus on one game, but I like variety.
Shu (書) Calligraphy Well, I’m not writing with a brush. But I am writing a lot, tapping into my poetic side. Plus, with thirty months of as a professional hand draftsman, I’ve got great handwriting when I want to show off.
(Update: two years later, calligraphy has completely taken over my world. I now understand why the ancients took calligraphy so seriously—it’s endless practice distilled into a moment. And the brush doesn’t lie.).
Hua (畫) Painting Again, no brush. And not silk. But my motley collection of fountain pens and notebooks seem close enough.
Bonus—Divination Hard to be more Chinese than consulting the unknown with fifty sticks. But I’ll also happily check out the Tarot as well. Both have been great ways to delve into the subconscious.
And so here we are, what’s old is new again. In a new way.
I was less intense this week. It might show in the pieces, but I’m happy with the work. One big change is that I’m now working ahead, which takes a lot the pressure off the process. Next year, I’ll start working on the prompts as soon as they are announced.
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10/20
uncharted words say it all.
I wanted to write this one with the ruling pen. So I did. It’s going to take a lot of practice to get this working well. I suspect that basing the strokes on an established hand (in this case Chancery Cursive) might be the best way to get something that works consistently.
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10/21
rhinoceros is her tooth fairy
Like “uncharted”, I forced Copperplate into this composition. I hoped that a blocky Rhino would contrast nicely against the cursive. This was my first time playing with Copperplate and I’m clearly not ready for it. Fortunately the girl traced a Gyarados last year to partially salvage the composition.
After Inktober, I have at least four initiatives to pursue:
Straight Brush
Ruling Pen
Copperplate script
Gothic Script
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10/22
hop from camp to camp
I own inks that go all the way back to undergrad. Some of it ink has coagulated but is usable after mixing it up. It’s not as good as brand new ink (I bought a new bottle of india ink to verify) but raw ink works for most of my compositions.
I vaguely remember buying this white Higgins ink at Berkeley, being disappointed in its opacity, and setting it aside. I’ve used it more this week than during the quarter century that preceded it.
That $4 bottle of ink would be worth $47 if I invested it in the SP500 back in 1997, but what’s the fun in that?
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10/23
rust will find you too
I’m in the video game phase of this hobby, unlocking new toys and levels every day. The white ink from “camp“ and the “rhinoceros” copperplate became the basis of today’s composition. On the computer I also started messing with extreme crops.
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10/24
dancing thru life’s quick expedition
I expected this to be a tough composition, but I quickly landed on a simple through-line (following the word in poem). I got lucky with a couple kids’ scribbles that play well with this arrangement.
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10/25
scarecrow watches your every sock
I was inspired by Randall Slaughter to incorporate raw open lettering. Making those letters feel right is harder than it seems. Last week, I would have grinded out another ten variations to get it just right, but I don’t got it in me.
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After last week’s post, my dad asked for a photo of the tools.
Flat brushes (1″ down to 4mm) with a pointed brush
Dip pens with a variety of nibs including calligraphy, flexible, and broad edge
Pilot Parallel Pens (four 6.0mm, 3.8mm, and 1.5mm)
Leadholder, pencil, crayons, and eraser
A big collection of fountain pen inks (many more than in this photo), a new bottle of india ink, ancient inks, and a couple bottles of pen washes (for testing compositions)
Pages of templates, though I now use drafting tools for locking in layouts
Triangles, scales, rulers, and a compass
Light table
A practice notebook for quick 5WP’s to unwind after the compositions. (I use previously failed sheets for testing compositions and exploring design ideas)
Not shown—Lots of books, by Arthur Baker, David Harris, Alan Furber, and the Speedball Textbook.
However, that tool photo is deceptive. Normally it looks like this.
Have a Fun Halloween. Cya next week!
,
After finishing “uncharted” I cut loose with the ruling pen. This scan doesn’t do justice to the magic on the page that materialized as I did my usual bottom up scribing.
Let’s start with the biggest and most important numbers: 1,501 posts and 5,663 days.
Everything starts with the work. Do it. Do it again. And again.
But that’s boring, and let’s be real — I’m not banging out an analysis of “5663”.
Like many writers, I check the dashboard every few days and was pleasantly surprised to see that I had finally crossed the 100 subscriber mark on Substack!
Whoohoo! But this screenshot only tells the last 3.8% of the story. Here’s the rest of it.
I started Grizzlypear.com in June of 2008 with two readers — me and my dad. (My girlfriend, now wife, never reads my ramblings cause she gets plenty in real time.)
Thirteen years later, I still had two readers. I would occasionally try to increase visibility to no avail, aside from Facebook spamming me to pay for a boost to the most recent post.
In mid-2021, I started an industry related newsletter. Even though the effort fizzled out in a few months, the effort got me onto Mailchimp with ten more ten readers, including my mom and sister, friends and three folks I’ve never met IRL!
About a year ago, I joined Post where I met a great crowd but after they slow-walked critical features, I jumped to Notes this April along with seven fellow travelers.
For the first few months I posted daily and grew steadily. Then September got crazy so I dropped down to a weekly schedule and growth slowed. So here is how I got to 113 readers:
What do I make of it all?
I’m an early 21st century anachronism with a personal blog. I entered that scene as it was being strangled by Social Media™, but I kept my site because I loved having my own home on the internet.
However, if you wanna grow, you gotta do what Zig Ziglar advises “You can get anything you want if you help enough people get what they want.” Or if you forgo the self help business, then be “so good that they can’t ignore you” (as quipped by Steve Martin).
These fifteen years of blogging taught me that it’s OK to just enjoy a hobby. I have a great job. I don’t need an audience to serve. I’m allowed to be a dilettante, exploring the arts without the discipline or patience to become great at anything.
I might be a disappointment to Zig and Steve, but I’ve had fun archiving these meanderings (board games, business books, sourdough bread, sketches, poetry, calligraphy) for future reference.
And then Substack swooped in to distribute this work and connect into a network of creatives. Notes is a great place to keep me inspired and challenged. So here we are, with this email slamming into a hundred inboxes!
Yes, this is just number, but it’s cool — three digits of cool! After more than a decade of silence, it’s gratifying to know people want to see my next letter. And it’s nice to get feedback. (Dopamine!)
Would I be bummed if the count slides back down? Of course, I’m human. But it is just a number. If my interests go weird, I wouldn’t want to force y’all to follow along. I’ll keep writing cause this is my practice.
Blogging is a good practice. The world might not need your input, but you need your input. Writing publicly forces us to look carefully and to process the richness that surrounds us. Write what you see, and your soul comes into focus.
Do it long enough and you’ll find a few folks to accompany the journey.
Jump in! Five thousand days later, you might stumble upon a goldmine of email addresses!
It sharpens my thinking. Writing squeezes out the slop in a stray notion.
Sharing for the future. My work isn’t best-in-class, but it’s not worthless. A future reader might find threads of silver amongst the dross. That person might be me.
To get better at writing. Posting publicly hones the craft. Leveling up can be its own joy (and help with work emails and memos.)
For the company, to be part of a conversation and contribute to the zeitgeist. It’s fun to get responses and comments.
Blogging is an exercise of whispering into the hurricane. My practice is more about self improvement than broadcasting. The reception of others are a fickle shadow. The privilege is in doing work.
In the moment it isn’t easy fun like watching a video, but I find a deeper joy through all parts of the process, drafting, editing, posting. Why else would I do this for fifteen years?
I’m still trying to figure out what to do with my morning pages. Or even whether to bother.
It’s good to just blather. Get shit off my chest like the day after 10/7. Maybe it’s self therapy? And there’s always the ubiquitous Things To Do list.
But sometimes it’s a chore to hit three pages. So I just shoot for two. The first flip between the first and second pages is a great mind wipe, but I feel like I’m just burning ink and killing trees to fill up page three.
Julia Cameron says you shouldn’t package the journal for public consumption, but I’ve started roughing out blog posts some mornings. And the last couple of days I jotted some half-baked thoughts that want to be recorded somewhere.
Expectation is the thief of joy.
Not a new concept, just a variation of the Buddhist origin of suffering. My personal insight is that comparison and optimization are also expectations (against others and an idealized perfect). These are all bandits against internal peace.
With work and home being so hectic, I need to be more present with the kids. I’m trying out a new pair of personal rules. Our parents never had to wrestle against the allure of a pocket computer.
No Youtube when they’re awake!
Leave the phone upstairs (in the home office)
This also applies to life in general. I need to reduce stream of outside words being implanted into my brain. More jazz, less podcasts.
What is the difference between Craft and Connoisseurship?
Both entail a dissatisfaction with the status quo. But Connoisseurship is unhappiness with others, while Craft is the continual striving for personal improvement. Maybe that’s why I value Craft as a practice while being suspicious of Connoisseurship as a sneaky form of optimization.
Making is an act of faith.
Faith that something “good” will pop out. Or that I’ll learn something for next time.
Last week, I uploaded the letter “Z” of Alphabet Magic, pairing photos of everyday life with sketches of my hand forming the ASL manual alphabet.
Just another post, but I couldn’t let it pass without comment.
I took more art studios than architecture studios in college, but stopped drawing over the past two decades; constipated with perfection. After turning forty, I eliminated drawing from of my list of future projects (along with reading Chinese and the Guan Dao kung fu form).
Then Post came online last year. I wanted to help make the place that I wanted to see, so this alphabet series was my contribution. The winter of 2022-2023 was a magical season when quirky artists came together for a mass experiment. (Much as Substack has become a beautiful writer’s oasis).
When it became clear Post management was focused on news and opinion, I hopped over to Substack and turned the drawings into a formal series, pairing it with my contributions to Charlene Storey’s weekly thread of “everyday magic”.
Twenty-six weeks later I’ve posted half a year of hands and magic.
So what next? Well I have plenty more hands. After joining Substack, Wendy MacNaughton hosted a 30 day sketching challenge around the same time Ashlyn Ashantee got me really into fountain pens. So I kept drawing with hatching and new wacky nibs.
Next week, I’ll start the second series, with a bit more variety, still with a pop of everyday magic, but with less alliterative titles. Maybe I’ll throw in the occasional calligraphy experiment and zine (inspired by a conversation with d.w. and John Ward on Notes).
In home, school, or work, I’ve learned that projects start with promise, grind through midlife, and shutter with little fanfare. But I’ve also learned that the anticipation of triumph will eventually realized in retrospect long after the moment has faded.
As I mature, I’m slowly embracing the process. It’s a privilege to draw. It’s a privilege to do anything beyond the bare necessities. It’s a privilege to share — thanks for reading!
The results are up to the fickle gods, but we can always exhilarate in the chase.
