Killian's Blog/Website/Whatever

Two nights ago, around 11pm, I totally lost my marbles and decided to sort through all of my clothes. A couple massive bags of shirts and dresses, two pairs of pants, five pairs of shoes, and four jackets were the casualties of my rampage. The consignment shop took nine things off my hands yesterday (and gave me a whopping $60 in store credit. I can only figure out five of the things they took, but apparently I had some super nice crap that I never wore), and I'm letting friends go through the rest before I donate the leavin's to Lifelong . I also cut up about 7 old t-shirts. Then, yesterday, I spent $20 of the $60 free dollahs on four new shirts. Today, I bought a pair of pants at Nordstrom. Only $30, though, so I feel no guilt! When I go down to the ol' hometown next week, I'll be getting my hair 'did. (Blue, naturally) It's refreshing to start over a little bit. That's sort of hard to do when you don't have a lot of money, but when sanity is on...

I daydream fairly regularly. The question is, what's the best way to get there? (or even remotely close to it? I don't need those things, duh, but they would be pretty rad. That's what dreams should be, right? Best Case Scenarios. But my heart would not be broken if I wrote some stories and books that never became popular but were well liked--dare I say loved ?--by the people who picked them up.) Grad School: the promise of deadlines one must keep, friends one might make, and piles of debt one will most certainly fall into.* Will it help me get to where I want to go? Probably. But will it be any more effective than my current strategy (in which I work in my living room and live off of savings)? That is tough to say. Of all the benefits grad school claims to bestow, the two most appealing are deadlines and networking. I am the worst networker. I mean, I don't even like going to big parties to hang out . Rubbing elbows with people who could help me up the Ladder of...

Monday somehow ended up becoming rather soft and glowy around the edges. Perhaps there's a better way to explain it, but that's the simplest. It was soft and glowy, and full of thoughts about soft, glowy things. I've been reading Salinger lately. I've loved him since I was sixteen and read Franny and Zooey *--a book that quickly became my literary equivalent of mashed potatoes and gravy (in other words, the ultimate comfort food). More than once, I've revisited it--usually in times of emotional upheaval or drastic change--and with every blissful return, I close the book with a satisfied heart. While I was in San Francisco, I went to the famous City Lights Book Store** and bought his other two books (thus completing my collection***): Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour, An Introduction and Nine Stories . Combined with some very serious bouts of recent introspection, reading these has helped me to realize that, somewhere in the past year or two, I...

Would you guys be interested in this blog becoming half written-updates and half comic-updates? Here's an example of an hourly I drew whilst bumming around Mountain View last week. Future editions will be similar in style but,  hopefully (since I have a new* SCANNER!), I will be able to clean them up in photoshop and make them look less like low-quality pictures from my phone, and more like the real deal. Thoughts? my otter ego note: this one above isn't cleaned up either--I just adjusted the brightness and contrast to make it look a wee bit less like a mobile photo. *"new" meaning: used to belong to my friend, Dan

This may come as a huge surprise to some of you*, but Mountain View, CA is not very exciting. That being said, I'm making the most of my alone time while Daniel is out conferencing. I've gone swimming a couple of times, worked out in the mini-gym, checked out a few little restaurants (sushi for lunch yesterday, a burrito today; we accidentally slept through lunch on Tuesday), discovered an awesome little Indian grocery store where I bought the foodstuffs for my dinner tonight, and I even bought a brand new paperback copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray for less than a dollar at Goodwill. I also finished re-reading Franny and Zooey , which is one of my favorite books ever written ever. In some ways, I'm getting "out of the house" more than I do in Seattle. That's likely because my apartment back home is awesome, and this hotel room is kind of dark and surprisingly non-conducive to getting real work done. There's still hope for being productive today, fortun...