The few bits I did somehow retain I will post here, as many websites out there have taught me, the people like pictures. Also, I harbor a morbid pride over the lean pickings of years past. The piece to the right, for example? This is the fruit of a spree, the likes of which I haven't felt in years. (Age and 9-5's put an end to the sprees pretty effectively, as it turns out.)
In September of 2007, I was but a trainee in my past Air Force life; mind, a trainee who had been in training since Dec '04, with no gaps. I had had me some motherloving training, and more was still en route. This was a shift-work schedule, and more often than not I found myself awake at 3am, high off Prismacolor markers (a fairly expensive drug even now) and whatever crap was on the television at such times. That night was inexplicably "Disney Classics"and the stained glass window from the opening of Beauty and the Beast was GORGEOUS to my glassy eyes. I put my head down and didn't come up until the credits rolled, blue marker staining my fingers and the book I'd been using as a lap-desk, and as I looked upon the finished work and let loose a breath I was unaware I'd been holding, I exhaled a little prayer that this wasn't going to look a hot mess come daylight.
(People who freehand can attest that sometimes this happens- you get so head-down in a project that you lose sight of the whole, and only hours later with fresh eyes do you notice that it's slanted, or if you turn it around and look at it through the light, the whole of it cants, the formerly perfect creation melting into a Sloth-like mess of fetal alcohol syndrome proportions.)
I do not remember the next day, but what does come to mind is the same feeling I get whenever I finish something and am not horrified and ashamed of it a few days later. It was accomplishment, and marker-evidence aside, I felt like a million bucks. I had created. Where only white paper had existed before, there was now a saint! Of something. Possibly listening to iPods. The logic didn't fare as well in the telling light of day as the art.
As I write this now, I realize that maybe it wasn't terribly expensive marker fumes that made my head swell with pride, and it's not some psychosomatic ghost I feel even now; I think the act of finishing something, and having a tangible evidence of such in my fevered little hands, especially in the time of the never-ending training-training-training-it'll-be-years-before-you're-actually-useful morass, literally got me high.
The same sense of accomplishment spikes in sporadically nowadays, be it at the gym when I've performed the ant-like task of hefting any approximation of my body weight around, or pulling an especially delectable broiler plate of chicken thighs from the oven, or even writing these little posts. I felt down when I started writing, and yet now? The crap crap crappity poo day I've had is becoming memory, and in time, the sort of memory I look at, assess the value of, and finally, toss in the trash like a doodle of a parakeet dancing the charleston for an unimpressed Wonder Woman audience. (Not kidding. I toss memories so completely I've lost whole months from my teen years. Remember, this included the success of the Macarena, the Thong Song, and other such songs of its ilk, so....)
Whoever you are, thanks for reading, and trusting me when I say it's the achievement, and not the markers, when you see me smile. :)
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