It's Okay To Have Regrets

'No regrets' and other anti-regret mantras are everywhere. Every so often I read something along the lines of 'don't regret anything, because at one point it was what you wanted' and I get the sentiment, that the past is unchangeable so you should let it go, that mistakes build you and shouldn't be kept alive in some kind of shame cage at the forefront of your mind. I get it, but it bothers me too.

Me as a young child, getting ready to start regretting stuff (like trying to eat my dad's tie, possibly).

First of all there's the fact that regrets aren't always about things you wanted. Sometimes they are just things that happened, or the internalised guilt you feel from not preventing something someone else did to you. This goes hand in hand with popular rhetoric around the concept of forgiveness - ideas and mantras about how you should forgive everything because holding a grudge only hurts you. Again, I see some sense in this, but I feel that deciding not to forgive can be just as empowering in the right circumstances. Refusing to forgive doesn't have to mean you are clutching the event to your chest and thinking about it every twelve seconds.

Me regretting my life decisions at a young age.

Similarly, regretting something doesn't mean it has to haunt you and eat away at your psyche until it's only 9:12am and you're already a gibbering wreck because you broke your mum's favourite Michael Bublé mug ten years ago and the regret is too much to bear. Besides which, it's okay to remember things you regret and feel hurt. You are under no obligation to move on and become a squeaky, happy bouncy ball with no feelings or memories. I think it's important to try to deal with and cope with your regrets as best you can, but it's completely normal and human to have regrets. You might even find it is more helpful to deal with, accept, and keep a regret than to purge it. Or maybe those two options are just two different ways of describing the same thing.

I will never regret wearing these cool trousers though.

Sometimes storing a regret is the only thing that feels right. Sometimes forgiveness doesn't feel like an option. Both of those things are okay, and you do not need to be on a journey to forgiveness unless you decide to be.

Hands & Hair

I love to grow a golden vortex on my own head. I also love to hold stuff (cats, cardigan bundles, candles). Here is a celebration of my hair and hands for those reasons.

When I was little I had a natural peroxide yellow look, but it gradually darkened to a dark blonde (these scans don't quite accurately capture the colour). My hair matured. It grew up, got into emo bands, and adopted a cynical attitude to life based on all the split ends.

Nowadays I mostly enjoy wrapping it around sailors that I lure to my rock in the middle of the ocean. I force them to play Scrabble with me until they die of exhaustion or I throw them into the sea for getting more points than me.

As for my hands, I mostly use those to grip cacti and collect papercuts.

Actually, hands are a long-standing favourite body part of mine. This is largely based on the fact that they can do all the things, but also they are sort of weirdly artistic looking and I think it's easy to look at your hands and imagine you are an alien like all those stereotypical bony-fingered aliens in the movies (#NotAllAliens).

I have many more things to say about hands and hair, but for those you will have to await my extensive series of pamphlets on the subject (or my inevitable interview with Jeremy Paxman where we just stare at our hands for four minutes and then I curl his hair with a very tiny curling wand).

Who Will Buy My Sweet Digital Content?: Money, Commercialism, & Entitlement On YouTube.

YouTube's economy and community mimic many aspects of life, not least school. On YouTube, I may not be in the 'weird angsty grungers with thumb holes in their jumpers and a strong affinity for Fall Out Boy' group like I was at high school, but there are similarities. Probably on account of me maturing very slightly, but still retaining the keen interest in Jaffa Cakes that I've always had, I occupy something of a YouTube clique that I wall call the arty/silly/quirky place. With me are a mix of people who like to make fun of YouTube conventions (see jonbehere's '5 VLOGGING MISTAKES YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW YOU'RE DOING'), people who have perfected an all-encompassing silliness (see Margot Vandersmissen's 'Clumsy Crafts: Making Roadmap Bunting'), and people who are all about spreading those twinkly, arty, creative vibes (see SoSonia's 'Escape' video for SoulPancake). There's variation, but for the purposes of this post I am categorising us for analysis (or because I'm an annoying internet philosopher who must meaninglessly foster discussions on every little thing at all costs - that's my Blogging Brand™).

We are in a place of familiarity with YouTube. There are Alfie Deyes references and Dan & Phil stickers to be found everywhere. We love to joke about the inevitable collaboration between Joe Sugg and Children of Bodom. It is a fun time here. And we are smart and have some (some!) editing skills (I can make captions wiggle, for example). We can see echoes of our style in YouTubers in the tens of thousands of subscribers. I see lots of the stylings of me and my YouTube friends and acquaintances in the videos of Rosianna Halse Rojas, Lex Croucher, Lucy Moon, and Daniel J. Layton. PJ Liguori's pure, magical weird is a huge reflection of us too - especially on his second channel, PJTheKick. There are styles that seem to extend the whole way up the numbers ladder. I would posit Dodie Clark as the queen of my 'YouTube house'. Imagine if there were YouTube houses though? Just put me down as the equivalent of Ravenclaw. Magpie... beak (please don't sue me)?

Gaby Dunn recently published a piece exposing the income struggles of apparently successful YouTubers. As a person with an educational background in art and an adolescence glued to the emergence of social media (I am desperate to post a MySpace bulletin and make a Livejournal secret right now), I'm all too familiar with the endless free creative and personal content present online (anyone wanna PayPal me a quid for this blog post?), and the normalisation and expectation of that content being there for free. I love the possibility blogs and social media provide for digital content publishing, but sadly people have come to feel entitled to that content and to disassociate it from the real person who creates it.

We can gain celebrity status through our creations, but without a chain of support we struggle to be successes in a true personal and financial sense. People are talking a lot about social media's propensity for being 'fake'. My circles are filled with people who make very genuine, honest content, but I think often the veneer is not the personal lifestyle of a YouTuber so much as the apparent success. The status might be there, but the money isn't. Subscribers aren't coins. Not until I finally perfect my human to coin conversion device, at least.

I notice a lot of people complaining about the sanitisation of some YouTubers, and the lack of ease in finding YouTubers with smaller subscriber counts. There's plenty of 'it's not how it used to be' and whilst I agree that YouTube has grown into this big thing with strong, muscly arms (there's probably already fan-art of this), that doesn't mean the little guys making cutesy stop motion videos about how much they love spaghetti aren't around. They are. There are more people starting YouTube now than ever. The small creators are out there, waiting, lurking in the dark corners of the castle. YouTube unfortunately does make it hard to find smaller creators, and this would be one of my biggest criticisms of the platform. I also agree that commercialisation goes too far sometimes with big names, but at the same time I think the disgruntled sentiments towards some YouTubers is unfair. Sponsorship can be awkward, but YouTubers, and anyone creating something that people want, deserve to be compensated.

I think it's great that the internet gives us the opportunity to create and share things for free, and to connect with other people, but for digital content creators and creatives of all kinds, that can be taken advantage of. Charging for your services or creations is not tyranny, and putting a price on something you have worked on is not forcing someone to pay for something as long as they have the free choice to not buy the thing.

Personally, I'm open to sponsorships and collaborations I deem reasonably tasteful and appropriate, and I'm working on some ideas for digital and physical items I can sell alongside my free online content. I'll also sell my eyelashes for £10,000 each if you're interested. Check my info page if you want to commission me to make a hideous sculpture of Niall Horan made of Ferrero Rocher.

Related: Check out my small(ish) YouTuber recommendations, and a follow up post of recommended channels and blogs. Here's a video I made about appearances and movement, and here's a song I wrote for Dodie.

5 Goals For 2016

I guess there are some things I'd like to do sometime soon and it's quite seasonally appropriate to write a list of goals, what with the year end coming up, so here are some thoughts.

 

1. Try different ways of selling art. 

I had a pretty good time at a zine fair in November, so I'd like to try selling zines and things at some craft fairs and events, possibly. I also want to try a few different ways of selling stuff online, like selling whole journals on eBay and periodically putting new zine packages up for sale on Tumblr. I recently organised my Tumblr buy page and it feels good. Please commission me to paint dogs.

2. See more art shows.

Going on trips elsewhere always me want to do more things closer to home, and since there are lots of art events all the time, which I always enjoy, I would like to see more of them and go on some nice London outings. I have my eye on yellowbluepink at the moment.

3. Try different forms of digital creation.

I really want to make some fun, lengthier zines, and making digital zines I can do a lot of different things that I would usually do on paper. I would also like to try selling these and treating them kinda like magazines, in that I make a series of issues. I did want to try writing an ebook but I'm not too keen on the formatting and logistic issues involved - that and I don't know if all that many people are into ebooks and especially silly arty ebooks. Then there's the logistics of inserting drawings. I'm experimenting with a zine project using Google Drive's slides at the moment.

4. Use perfume more often.

I have a beautiful big bottle of YSL Opium that I've had for years. I love the scent, but for some reason I never remember to actually wear it, so I'd like to make wearing perfume a habit. I'm a smell fan - a fan of smells.

5. Keep up my current TV show consumption.

For ages I wasn't really watching anything and couldn't really get into any TV, but I seem to have fallen into a routine suddenly of trying out shows and really enjoying watching them. I'd really like that to continue, because it's so nice to follow a series along and be excited to discover what happens.

12 Good Ways To Secretly Cry

Sometimes you need to let your face leak until you feel better, but sometimes you also need to hide your disturbing moisture from other people-shaped things who fear salty liquids, so here are some useful tips for disguising your tears.

1. Hold a teddy bear in front of your face at least twenty three out of twenty four hours a day. It will absorb your tears and hold them lovingly.
2. Use a wine glass to mask your biggest tears at dinner.
3. Stand in the rain. This is a classic tactic for a reason.
4. Pretend your tears are artistic gemstones that also move for some reason (attribute this to an emerging technology no-one understands). This works well if it is fashion week (isn't it always fashion week, at least in our hearts?).
5. Have a very cute puppy beside you at all times and blame the puppy for your emotional response. Everyone will understand.
6. Tell everyone crying is your performance art. Win the Turner Prize to really convince them.
7. There must be onions nearby. Your eyes can sense them within a 2 mile radius.
8. Blame it on a mascara wand that leapt viciously into your eye.
9. Tell everyone that when you have water retention your eyes compensate by getting rid of as much fluid as they can.
10. Say you must be allergic to something nearby.
11. Say you have been overdoing it on eye exercises.
12. Position yourself under an impressive waterfall and stay there. It is your home now.

Dreaming

I have this feeling like I'm on a partition somewhere. I'm a little ghost between real life and dreams. A feeling I get a lot. Or a variation of a feeling I get a lot. A sort of weird kind of consciousness like my mind is split in two and living in different countries. Something like The Parent Trap but with two halves of my brain (which, of course, are both played by Lindsay Lohan). It's this particular kind of conscious muddiness. A pinch of 'overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of my surroundings and existence' in a big bowl of 'I want a piece of bubblegum and a huge teddy bear and to run in circles until I'm sick'. Or something like that.

I dunno, man, it's like I'm very here, but I'm also not here. I'm drifting off in some place that isn't real at the same time. Like I'm ten cloned ghosts. It's interesting. I will keep coming back to ghost metaphors because it feels ghostly somehow. Hazy. Dreamy. When I do actually dream, I have a lot of very vivid dreams. Just recently I had a dream about someone trying to kill me with a knife. Trying to get close to me, looking in through the windows. And in the same dream, Dan Howell tweeted me and I made a pun that made no sense (he loved it).

I can remember all these feelings and motions and discoveries from that one dream, under a blanket of familiar washed-out haze, and so much of that configuration of sense seems to bleed out into my waking life. There is always this wobbly, wiggly line of clarity of consciousness curving up and down. I feel like everything is a dream.

I kinda wanna be dreaming all the time. I mean, sometimes clarity of the senses is great. That way you get to really examine things and notice things. It's really nice in a natural setting or when you're up early. I think the dreamy feeling, or variations of dreamy feelings, are very comforting and pleasant. I suppose what's nice is the ebb and flow of clarity and consciousness. After all, some of the most enjoyable moments of living are those special little places between wakefulness and sleep. Those times when I lie in bed and let my unfurling imaginings lull me to sleep. Kid me would scoff, but those are pretty great.

Hunger

I am so hungry and greedy and desperate and passionate and excited and frustrated. I think about all the stuff I can do, all the creative stuff I can explore, all the little adventures I could have every day, any day, and I wanna do everything and stretch myself across the world like a big blanket.

There will always be things I haven't done though and that's fine, but I wanna do lots of things and have fun and do my best and never get caught up in agonising over things I want to do or feel like I should do. Because doing a lot of cool things is one thing, and it's a great thing to strive for, but living is more important and should be the utmost priority. The ultimate priority. And by living I mean having an enjoyable and satisfying time whilst alive, regardless of accomplishments. Because you can go on a lot of holidays and spend them racing around trying to see everything, and then get back home and need a post-holiday holiday because you exhausted trying to do what you think you 'should' do. A holiday is supposed to be all about enjoyment and doing whatever you want, but sometimes we manage to ruin designated carefree fun time by telling ourselves we have to do it this particular way. We are very silly when we do that.

My main point here is that I should be given an award for my amazing achievements such as eating a really good cheese sandwich that one time. That was good. Please give me a gold-plated trophy shaped like a sandwich for my all of my good work with sandwiches.

Really though, let's try to enjoy our lives. That's an important goal  The most important goal.

3 Favourite Korean Pop Singers

I don't like to choose favourites in music too much because there's so many things to love that it means sometimes picking favourites feels limiting, but I thought it would be nice to show some appreciation for a few of my favourite kpop group members, so I chose three of them to focus on.

Screenshot from SHINee's 'Hello' music video.

1. Onew of SHINee

I love SHINee a lot, but what I like about Onew in particular is his super smiley, happy persona and expressions. The cute-o-meter is hitting maximum. I also want to mention that I love the cute baseball style he wears in this performance of View.

Screenshot from 2NE1's 'It Hurts' music video.

2. CL of 2NE1

Every member of 2NE1 is my favourite, and I think they're such a well matched group of unique personalities and strengths, but I love CL for her tough girl attitude and her perfect sneers. It's interesting seeing the attention she's getting internationally at the moment through collaborations and her solo output. So whilst I like very sweet and cutesy boys I guess I like mischievous bad girls riding motorcycles.

Screenshot from f(x)'s 'Chu' music video.

3. Amber of f(x)

Amber is very special to me because she has that perfect 'boyish' look. It's really great to see someone with her style in a girl group like f(x). She's also one of my favourites in terms of rapping style because her rapped verses fit so well into songs and her voice has that nice earthiness to it that make them feel kinda dense.

***

I hope they all start a supergroup together some day. With Mr Blobby.

Ponytail

My ponytail is getting longer and swishier and I feel like it could become sentient and develop drastically different music tastes to me. It would probably be a good prime ministerial candidate. I suppose logically winter is the season when I should be wearing my hair down and using it as extra insulation, but I think with the extra layers I have to wear I probably tie my hair up more in winter because otherwise I feel a bit smothered. That and I don't want to get it caught in various little areas of my coat a thousand times. Nice try, hair, but you are staying in hair band prison today!

Uneditable

Here's an angsty diary entry I typed into a draft a couple of weeks ago when I was feeling a bit confused and overwhelmed.

Dear Diary,
I am sleepy. Every noise sounds like a yawn, inviting me - no, compelling me, to also yawn. And then sleep. Forever. Yep, thanks. It disturbs me that our actions are permanent. Everything I do will be a part of me forever. Every experience and decision and memory will shape my life. Memories endlessly triggered by everyday objects and events repeated ad nauseum by family and friends, because everyone I know knows me, knows parts of me and versions of me from different times. And because people and things and places hold those parts of me inside them, it reminds me, makes me realise that everything has a deep permanence. Any seemingly innocuous thing can be immortalised. The world and collective consciousness, it's all holistic. My existence in every part and piece of a moment is part of everything I have touched. There is no way to scrub out parts. I am permanent and uneditable. My existence bleeds through everything I've touched. There are no mistakes, there is nothing forgotten and no skeletons in the closet - because the skeletons are in everything, looming and laughing inside every mug of tea, soaked in the blood of everyone I've ever met and known, undead and haunting every heart.

C O L L E C T I V E  M E M O R Y /// HOLISTIC SELVES (kept alive by transferred consciousness/memory/experience)

I just want to be a simple blade of grass. 

I looked at it again after some time had passed and I started thinking about this whole concept and how maybe it can be freeing instead of scary.

I guess the only way to really deal with it is to to accept and ignore it all. Everything. Nothing matters. I am just here. I hate advising "don't think about it" as if you can control your thoughts and fixations, but to be honest I think I'm starting to understand that. Sometimes even if you can't, really, your only option is "don't think about it". And I don't think that always means repression, but honestly just knowing that certain things don't deserve your time or attention. The internet makes distraction very achievable. Googling for some puppy photos is a good distraction.

"I am permanent and uneditable" can be a statement of despair or a statement of defiance.

Outfit: Yoghurt Fashion & Winter Shorts

I've been watching too many KPOP videos (ha ha ha ha ha ha there are never too many) and as a result I am desperate to wear shorts throughout the winter (and possibly cutesy sailor outfits/things with a lot of spikes on them for no reason). I've had these denim shorts for years and they are the perfect tight fit. They look pretty good with tights, and I love wearing colourful tights, so I put on this dark purple pair to match my coat a bit, which is a colour I can best describe as the colour of forest fruits yoghurt.

I'm also wearing some sturdy walking boots, which are so good for walking through the rain or mud. Excellent adventuring boots.

I don't know where any of these clothes are from, because they were all gifted, aside from the shorts. They're from Internacionale, which doesn't even exist as a retailer any more. Second hand and gifted clothes are pretty much the best ever. Please let me come to your house and wear all your clothes.

Rain / Home

Rain is nice sometimes in cute little droplets and lines being pushed along car windows as they move. I like watching windows with ant farm lines and paths of rain travelling across them. I like rain making momentary craters in ponds and rivers. I like watching sleet come down in front of street lights at night. Yeah, there are lots of good rain experiences to have.

There is a nice sleepiness to watching the rain when the sun goes down, or after dark. Obviously it's primarily nice if you are inside in a warm place where you can watch the rain without getting rained on, but sometimes a walk through the rain is pretty great. Sometimes I like to go out in the pouring rain and get soaked through and it's like you are being DESTROYED or BORN or something. Mostly though, I don't, and it's just rain, and I watch it travel across glass, or run down drains. The rain is trying to broaden its horizons.

Rain reminds me I am home wherever I go, because I will always be in my body. I will always be below the rain, near the rain, or subject to the rain in some form. Watching it and waiting for it. Unless one day I get to do a bit of space travel, but even then the rain will still be right where I left it, or at least somewhere nearby on the big wet orb we live on.

The rain is just another part of home.

✶✵ The pictures here were taken through my grandfather's car window as we drove around Loch Lomond. ✵✶

Cosy Cardigans ☆ OASAP

✶✵ This is a sponsored post in partnership with oasap.com ✵✶

1. Longline Cable Sweater / 2. Turtle Neck Sweater / 3. Preppy Button Down Sweater / 4. High Neck Sweater / 5. Colourblocked Mohair Cardigan / 6. Heathered Longline Cardigan / 7. Open-Knit Diamond Sweater / 8. Casual Chevron Cardigan

OASAP asked me to do a round up of some of their stock items, and as it is freezy freezy ice time at the moment, and I noticed they had a considerable amount of knitwear options, I thought I would make a mini mood board with some of those and imagine how cosy it is possible to be (I'm still working on transforming myself into a blanket so that I may live a life of neverending comfort).

There are some interesting colours here. I'm kinda a person who wants to wear light and peppy colours in the winter, and I especially like the idea of wearing lots of delightful berry-ish or fruity colours, so I really like numbers one and two here, in a nice deep red and a subtle and delicate pastel somewhere between pink and lilac. I'm getting an "I am living in a bush and eating raspberries and writing celestial poetry with my squirrel friend" vibe from those colours, although that scenario is not one I'd advise in the middle of winter.

The colourblocking of number five is another nice way to stay bright and fun in the cold. I also want to focus on all the nice textures and details here - all the knit patterns and turtlenecks and marl. I think my favourite piece overall is number two, because I really the colour, the neck looks so comfy, and I think the arm zip detail is quite a fun little addition too. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go dive into a pile of jumpers and stay there until January.

Familiar Blue

I made some more paintings, this time in super bright blue, and still with lots of flowers and stars all clustered around in crowds. I'm enjoying using pure, bright, jewel colours. For most of the time recently I've used multiple colours, so it's been unexpectedly relaxing to use one colour at a time. So many methods I stray from end up feeling nice and comforting and familiar when I remember them. It's nice how things loop back like that.

I guess now that I've been trying different things for a while there is a nice variation in the kinds of things I'm familiar with, so I get to have lots of fun stuff to come back to and try out, and it all gets to feel kinda new, but pleasantly familiar at the same time. I love art! :-)

Life Is A Process

I recently read this great post on life and learning and self-expectations by Rach and oh my gosh, ugh, it gave me a serious case of the feelings. She said so many great things that I have also come to learn over the years about being alive, and the pressure of being a person and growing up and carving out your space and successes. I opine so much on being casual in my approach to life and being kind to myself as I grow and learn and screw up and change. I think about it a lot because I know I need that kind of self reflection and repeated affirmation to help me progress and monitor myself. It helps me to avoid getting down on myself and building up that wall of self-punishment and self-measurement based on the conviction that I should be everything I want to be immediately and all the time. That's not possible. That's not how life works. Regardless, I still feel sometimes, intrusively, that I am a bad person who is not trying hard enough.

It's way too easy to measure your entire being on one moment, one mistake, one bad thing. And just like a bad photo doesn't make you ugly, a bad thing doesn't make you a bad person. A goal not reached in a specific time frame doesn't mean you're a failure. Learning some basic thing that everyone else seems to already know doesn't make you stupid. Falling over doesn't mean you also die.

It's easy for me to think of myself as this static object. A person with a character sheet of attributes and achievements and cringeworthy personal facts. I often consider myself as a 'version' of me in comparison to all the dummies that came before me like shed snake skins, but I'm not just a body or a thing or a Super Smash Bros character ready to be shot into the sky by a tough Pikachu. I'm a life, and life is a process. I am a process. Besides which, when I watch the embarrassing five-year-old YouTube videos of people I like, I usually just think they're cute. I see them as ongoing processes and precious human beings with flaws, bad experiences, and questionable hairstyles dotted around their lives. I don't see them as people with puzzle piece shaped holes in them where they failed or made a bad decision. It makes sense to offer myself the same courtesy.

I want to be the right person, but sometimes I'm really scared of being the wrong person and that, ironically, gets in the way of me being a bit more like the right person.

Paintings: Wiggly & Clustered

I did a little bit of painting with a colour theme. I want to give some care and attention to each of my paints individually as there are always colours that end up being the last to be used up and I feel a bit bad for them. This vibrant green is a nice one.

I sat and made these paintings whilst watching TV and they came out just how I wanted them to. They're wiggly and clustered little compositions, but quite neat ones.

TV: Once Upon A Time

I am pretty strongly interested in fairy tales and all their mythos and enchanting, fantastical, and often downright spooky nature. Modern adaptations and reworkings of fairy tales and fairy tale tropes are more hit and miss for me. When I heard about the premise of this show (fairy tale characters cursed to live out new lives in a modern day town, unaware of their previous/true identities) I wasn't sure I would like it, but it sounded pretty interesting, so I gave it a shot. After watching the first episode, I still couldn't decide how I felt about it. I wondered if maybe it was a bit too fantasy-ish and sweet for the modern day component to really feel compelling, but I was still intrigued about what would unfurl in regard to plot and characters, so I kept watching. The second episode quickly had me fully invested.

I really like the way the parallel worlds of the fairy tale and the ordinary are explored throughout the series. We hop back between both in a fun way as the twin narratives are explored. It's a nice way to see some depth and development in the characters as they respond to events in different timelines and settings.

The cast is also pretty great. We have the adorable, sincere, and clever little boy, Henry (Jared S. Gilmore), the super earnest and sweet Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin), and her stern-yet-relatable Power Rangers villain stepmother (Lana Parilla). Oh, and Rumplestiltskin (Robert Carlyle), who employs the most delightfully greasy and cunning demeanour. He's very fun.

Anyway, I have a strong urge to go eat a questionable apple. See ya.