Copying Steve.

My friend Steve has been blogging about his self improvement projects. Well, to be fair, he has been blogging about a lot of things, blogging is one of the things he has been doing as a self-improvement project. I realize that there are many things that I should be doing also, things to keep myself from wasting away during the summer months, and things that kind of align with what he's doing. Steve is doing an out-and-out blog-every-day report-on-his-progress, but I'm not quite sure I'm ready for that. Instead, I'm just going to identify the things I'm working on and maybe you'll hear about them again, and maybe you won't. But if you want to ask me about them, that'd be fine.

Steve is learning German. I want to learn French. Coincidentally, I borrowed a book for doing just that from a different friend also named Steve. And maybe last year I had planned on doing 15 minutes of a lesson every day. I should get on doing something similar.

Steve plays the clarinet. I play the bass. Well, I play a lot of things, poorly. (Steve plays a lot of things well. Music is just sort of his thing.) I've owned an electric bass for some years now, and my friend Mike showed me some things on it about a year ago. I diddled around with it but kind of gave up because I can't do the slap-pop thing. That was foolish. I've picked it back up recently with a little more seriousness because I figured out how to play Hey by the Pixies in about 2 minutes. I've been trying to convince my friend Lizzie to cover it with me.

Steve is exercising. A few years ago....2008 to be exact, I started jogging with my friend Beth. We went about three times a week, jogging maybe 2 miles. We would finish it off with a heaping dose of Six Feet Under, and our jogs were filled with conversation to the point where it wouldn't even be at the forefront of my mind that we were exercising. People complimented me and asked me if I was losing weight. I really hate my gut and since Beth has moved away, I've really not been jogging....hardly at all. I need to get back into this. I've gone about once a month since the snow melted. Here's hoping that speaking openly about it will convince me to go more.

Steve is reading. I read a fair amount as it is, but I don't want to give that up. Right now I'm reading Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as well as You Are Not A Gadget. But you've seen my goodreads, so this isn't news to you.

Steve is blogging and sleeping. I've been blogging a little more now that the weather is nice for some reason, but my other thing is less related to copying Steve....and more related to copying Lucy Knisley, Jess Fink, Liz Prince, Erica Moen, et. al. I want to start drawing comics. I've discussed this with Corinne and Caroline, and they've done things that I drool over. I know that I just need to start drawing and struggle my way through the crap. I made a separate blog to post these, but I'm not sure that I want to open it up to a wide audience yet, so I'll just repost things here as I see fit. Here's a preview. My friend Travis has me reading Questionable Content, and I feel very mixed about it. I decided to start at the beginning, because that's what I do, and it's really interesting to see how his drawing style has progressed. But that is the one thing that bothers me about the comic -- the drawing style. It's very computer based, and it FEELS that way. I'm much more interested in comics that are hand drawn and beautiful. I had this conversation with Luke ...probably in 2008. I said that if a graphic novel was beautifully drawn, it didn't matter if the story was crap. He felt the opposite way. He also said "geeze, hire yourself a writer!"
So Questionable Content falls more on Luke's side of the argument, and maybe that's why I've read the first 82 strips in the past few days...because it's well written. Oh well, I hope my comics will document my progress as well...and, oh, did I mention the summer course I'm taking? Yeah.

I'll also be traveling a bit and working some this summer, but that's less about copying Steve.