Musings For A Darkened Room

So those of you who have actually seen me over the last month know I have been down and out due to a severe foot injury. For those of you who saw me late last week you know I got the soft cast off and was actually getting around pretty well, but as of today that is no more. I’m sure many of you were startled by the sonic boom on Friday that followed Atlantis’ return into Earth’s atmosphere. Unfortunately I haven’t been up much on current events lately and was unaware that it was returning in our area, and in turn was terrified that something serious happened in my neighborhood. I jumped to my feet and rushed to the living room to make sure that my parents were ok, and in doing so managed to bring back a small amount of pain to my foot. Most of Friday I had some slight pain in my foot, but was still able to walk without much difficulty.

Friday night we spent some time with Jorge and Nohemi just playing board games and eating pizza. It was the best Misty and I could do since we have been broke these past few weeks with me being off and since I have not yet got disability.

Saturday, there was really no major change in the status of my pain. My foot still hurt slightly, but it was nothing compared to what I had been experiencing over the last few weeks. Since I was due to return to work on Monday I decided I should try and drive since I hadn’t attempted this feat since my foot problems had started. It was mostly successful, the only real pain I experienced was when having to hold the brake for long periods, and it wasn’t pain as much as it was discomfort. I considered the experience overall a success and only feared sitting in rush hour traffic on the 91 where I would be on and off the brake for the majority of the drive. It wasn’t until late Saturday evening that I started to get concerned. The pain in my foot continued to worsen and my stretches didn’t seem to be helping. I stayed off of it for the majority of the night thinking that perhaps the drive and activities of the day had just irritated the injury and it would pass.

Sadly, as of the morning I am nearly back where I was two weeks ago. Nearly crippled by the pain in my heel and having extreme difficulty walking. Tonight has been the worst with not only the little bit of walking around the house I have had to do hurting, but also my stretches causing me sever discomfort. I am due to return to work in just under 6 hours, but I don’t think that is going to happen. It’s now 1:37 a.m. and I am awake with my foot throbbing and nothing working to stop the pain. I doubt anything short of a miracle is going to make this better by tomorrow, so I will most likely need to get back in to see the Podiatrist and see what the heck is going on…

So you’re probably wondering what someone does stuck at home for three weeks unable to drive, walk, or go to work…Well, you spend a lot of time on the Internet, play a lot of computer games, and do a lot of graphics design work. Then, when your wife is put on medical leave for her pregnancy, she tortures you by watching the worst shows on television that suck you in even though they are horrible.

As mentioned in my last entry I spent my first week off doing a lot of work for the band We Are The Arsenal. Their design work was basically what I worked on during my 30 minutes or so my foot wasn’t being iced. I created their album artwork and myspace background, and also did some logo concepts. They are using the album/myspace artwork, but unfortunately the logo concepts fell by the wayside and they will be using their existing logo.

The second week I actually had the soft cast on which helped with the swelling a lot which gave me some longer freedoms in front of the computer. I did a few tweaks on the Deadboy Productions website, and revamped my Myspace page. The background you see currently on my Myspace was designed by myself. The image was “borrowed” from another graphics site, and the raven on a branch in the background is a Photoshop brush, but the overall layout and color scheme was all done by me. I also did some heavy music downloads over the week and my playlist now caps out at 5,612 thanks to artists like Lacuna Coil, Emilie Autumn, Betty Curse, and a handful of other goth bands and goth albums. I also spent quite a few hours battling Deidrianna’s forces in the PC classic Jagged Alliance 2. In between all that was a lot of sleeping and random internet browsing.

I ended that week celebrating with friends Jorge’s 27 birthday. This was the first chance I had really got to actually leave the house. I did pretty well considering I was still on crutches and in the soft cast. The only downside was that floor at King Buffet wasn’t exactly the cleanest and some food/water that had been spilled earlier didn’t mix well with one of my crutches and I wound up falling at one point on my way back to the table. I landed directly on my hurt foot and caused myself some serious pain. Fortunately the pain was short lived and I was able to enjoy the rest of the night in only minor pain. I was also happy to find out that night that much like myself, Jorge’s music collecting is very diverse. I’ve been surrounded by so many narrow minded “music enthusiasts” over the years that seeing such a broad range of music on his MP3 player was nice.

I spent the rest of the weekend just relaxing since I knew I was due to return to the doctor on Monday to get the cast removed and hopefully walk again. Monday rolled around and sure enough, I got the cast off, and I could walk…sorta.

The doctor switched me from the soft cast to using Mineral Ice with an Ace bandage. Though this gave me the ability to walk again, I was still a bit shaky. The doctor and I both decided that it would be best for me to take the week off to recover and focus on my stretches. So alas I have spent the last week home as well.

Earlier this week Misty was also taken off work. She is now 4 months pregnant with the twins and her back and sciatica have been giving her some serious problems so the doctor felt it would be best to have her stay home since her job required her to be on her feet and lift things all day. The one nice thing was that we got to see Pirates finally. I took a day out of the house to go see it. I really enjoyed it, I thought Keira Knightly’s performance was incredible. She was sleek, sexy, and by far the strongest performance. I really liked the film, but hate that they left it open for a fourth film. Don’t get me wrong, I would see a fourth film. However, I would only watch it if it featured all of the original Cast Members.

With Misty being off we also got to spend some quality time together which has been enjoyable, but in turn I have had to watch some of the worst television known to man. First she stumbled across a show on Fuse called Pants Off Dance Off. I’ve added a clip from the show that I found on YouTube below. This isn’t from any of the episodes we watched, but it at least gives an idea…

Pants Off Dance Off is basically an amature strip tease in front of a music video of the dancers choice. The contestants are then judged by “real” exotic dancers, Honey and Precious and I guess they win cash or something for shaking their asses the best. The show is hosted by wannabe pop star Willa Ford and basically trashy, weird, and ugly people from all of the US shake their asses and take off their clothes in hopes of being the top “Pancer“.

The next awful show that Misty stumbled upon is MTV’s My Super Sweet 16. A show where MTV let’s spoiled little rich Diva 16 year olds showcase their overdone Sweet 16 parties for the world to see. The episode we watched was I guess a reunion for the season and it showed all of the girls and their parties. By the end of the show I wanted to blow up the room that these spoiled little bitches were all sitting in. They were the most spoiled, ungrateful, bitches I have ever seen. Not to mention a few of them were G H E T T O! They pissed and moaned to get their parents to spend THOUSANDS if not MILLIONS on these giant Sweet 16 parties where they invite like 100-200 friends to. (Because all girls at 16 have at least 100-200 friends right?) All of the girls for the most part aren’t anybody big, but one of the girls was a football players daughter and the other was Eazy-E’s Daughter. If you click on that link you can watch her whole episode at MTV.com. She was probably the worst of all of them. To the point she was such a Diva that she almost didn’t show up to her own party because her stylist tried to screw her over for being such a bitch. Another horrible show thanks to the powers that be at MTV. I don’t even know why they call themselves MTV anymore. They should just change it to RTV for “Reality Television” since I never see music.

Finally the icing on the cake was a BBC America Reveals feature called, Love Me, Love My Doll a documentary on a group of men who have fallen in love
with their life-size dolls, called “Real Dolls.” Real Dolls are lifelike, built-to-order silicon women built here in California. The dolls have real hair, tongues, teeth, the whole 9…The show explored these guys and their lives with these dolls that have for the most part taken over their need for organic living and breathing women. This was by far the freakiest, yet intriguing things I have ever seen. It’s amazing how into these dolls these men are and how real they think their relationships with these synthetic are. Though BIZARRE as all hell, I would actually recommend watching it just because it is an insight to something totally out there. It aired for the first time last night on BBC America, and will air again on July 15 at 4 p.m., but if you have satellite like me it will most likely air at 1 p.m.

I also completed some concept work for We Are The Arsenal’s myspace contact table, but regretfully they weren’t quite what they were looking for. They liked the work, but felt that the war theme was too obvious and they wanted the theme to be much more subtle. I started some work on some new concepts tonight, that will hopefully better fit their needs. But here is a sample of the work that was rejected. The first one is my personal favorite.

This past week has been pure hell for me. Something other than my gout attacked my right foot and I have been off of work and off of my feet since this past Tuesday. I go to the foot doctor tomorrow to hopefully determine what is going on. Thought this week has been a painful and long one, I have to be thankful for a few things that it has brought me:

1. I was able to focus on my Web Design and Graphics Design work.
2. I got to feel my babies move for the first time.
3. I realized that I have strongly strayed off of my spiritual path.

I find these three experiences to be quite important since each seem to represent a different aspect of my life that I have been longing for. This week I have been completely removed from the day to day that I have been living since I returned to school last November. I was confined to my room or bed 99% of the time completely separated from work, school, and the like.

Web Design/Graphics Design is my dream job, and the reason I went back to school. I have been slaving through the basic GE classes and general art classes just waiting for those final few classes that will give me what I need to make a serious career out of my web work. This week I not only was given a lead to a potential freelance job, but also had the opportunity to learn some new skills on my own.

A friend from High School contacted me in hopes that I could create a Myspace page, album art, and internet banners for his band We Are The Arsenal. I gladly obliged and completed and incredible concept for the album and the Myspace that the band was quite fond of. If all goes well it will be the first paid composition created under the name Nevermore Graphics. The project forced me to use a strong creative process as well as learn some new skills.

The concept of their forthcoming album, “They Worshiped The Trees” is the apocalypse, but rather than focus on the death and destruction of apocalyptic war they wanted to capture poetry and beauty in it. I managed to capture just that, by combining a sunset lit nuke test, a hill featuring a lone tree, and an image from an old article circa WWII featuring an adult and two small children in gas masks. Below is the final concept of the work:

The process forced me to learn some new techniques including black and white colorization in Photoshop as well as creating realistic shadows. The final product is perhaps one of my best graphics projects ever, and the fact that the band was happy made it that much better.

As I also mentioned I got the opportunity to feel my babies move for the first time. Up until now the most I had experienced was feeling the hard lump in Misty’s stomach that basically told us where the babies were, but the other night one or both of the babies actually moved across her stomach and I was able to feel the whole thing. Feeling your babies move for the first time is by far one of the most surreal experiences ever. It is that final piece of the puzzle that reiterates that you are going to be a parent. Had I not been home this week with this foot problem I never would have experienced this since I would have been at school. For those of you who don’t know, Misty and I are expecting twins that are due this December.

Finally, what I think really sums up this whole experience and this week is the realization that I have severely strayed from my spiritual path. I was able to catch some TV this week since I had to spend a lot of time in bed due to my foot swelling so bad and I caught some Charmed as well as some good shows on the supernatural and what not and it really got me thinking about how much I have lacked in my spiritual focus.

I’ve spent some time the past few nights just reading on the internet about paganism again. I really need to get focused again and make it a part of my life. Perhaps it was what was calling out to me this week and it was what got me back on the right path.

About an hour ago I finally got the chance to sit down and listen to the CD my friend Russell burned me. He had the chance to get a copy of Louise Hubner’s Seduction Through Witchcraft a while back and gave me a copy. While the whole thing is VERY Hollywood with a lot of reverb and psychedelic ambiance, it has some interesting information in it and some intriguing insights and spells.

With my focus in my spirituality rejuvenated I am currently searching the net to see if there are any local groups in our area that Misty and I may be able to get involved in that could help keep me on my path. If you know of any pagan groups in the Riverside Area let me know!

This week has really been a reality check for me. I’m not sure how much longer I will be off work and school from this, but I hope that regardless of how long I plan to do something with this new energy that has been sent in my direction and can hopefully focus more on the work I truly enjoy, my wife and my babies, and my spiritual path as a pagan.