A few days ago I wrote about Impostor Syndrome and how it’s affected me. Shortly after I found a video of this talk from Denise Paolucci at dreamwidth.org about it. Two things from it stuck out for me, and I decided to expand on them more, from my point of view. I’m going to do them separately so that I can give them each the attention they deserve.
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better disqus-ion
just to note, today I set up the Disqus commenting system on here. So if you want to leave a message, that should make things a bit easier.
(sorry, not all philosophy and thoughtful things, sometimes just a tech update.)
Impostor.
The psychological experience of believing that one’s accomplishments came about not through genuine ability, but as a result of having been lucky, having worked harder than others, or having manipulated other people’s impressions, has been labeled the impostor phenomenon.
Thank you, Wikipedia.
Working on my art and on myself.
Lately, I decided to work on my art skills. I obtained a book (later purchased for me by my fiancée Emma) called You Can Draw in 30 Days
. I’m on the twenty-third day and I think it’s going well. I know some very talented artists who are giving advice from time to time.
I also realized that I will not be them, or any of the artists I appreciate, without practice and sending time working on it. So this is also part of doing that. It’s something I’ve wanted to do and I finally took the time to do it.
To keep myself accountable, I posted them first to my my DeviantArt account, then to my Facebook. Every day. To make sure I did it.
And I’m going to keep on doing it. And then more drawing and books about it, like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
, and a few others.
I’m also reading a book called Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
which is teaching me more about myself, and what I need to do. I’ve lived in the fear of failure, of being seen as not good enough, in the place called Imposter Syndrome for a long time. This book, and actually trying, is helping.
I should do a post about Imposter Syndrome and what it’s been for me. Maybe that’ll be the next one.
Resume update!
So I figured I’d mention that my resume has been updated, looking a bit spiffier, thanks to the assistance of the Reverend Doctor Barbara Ewton of The First Congregational Church of Verona, who my dearest Emma lives with, helps and who is giving us a lot of help in the wedding preparations! It’s down to one page, the fonts are updated (Segoe UI), and it’s really looking much better. I probably need to update the infographic that I’ve had going with my resume, as well, to make it a bit more punchy.
I hadn’t really thought about it in quite a while, but it really needed a revamp. Next step is to put it up on the job sites, get a push on my visibility.
Dinner and meditations
This is today. July 17, 2013. My dearest lady, my fiancee, Emma, sent me some money for two purposes. The obvious and easy one is: get food at a local restaurant that is really pretty great, Dragonfish.
Recent activity summary for my current state of advancement
- Spending some time at Codecademy getting my JavaScript skills back up to par
- Attending the Start Next Quarter seminar, in the hopes of returning to school
- finding out there how much my math skills have devolved over the past decades, and how much I need to do to get them back in order
- poking at Photoshop, to try to work out the pen tool some more (it’s a very weird tool)
- trying to get a couple of things in order to handle some of the school return issues
So it’s been kind of a busy few days, but they bode well for my personal and professional advancement. Hope things are going well for you.
Dinnertime!
So the people I live with have been having a tough kind of few days. I decided to make dinner, and looked around the house for what we had. Thankfully, we had stuff from a Costco run recently, so I just asked for someone to please get me some mozzarella cheese, and boom it appeared.
So I thawed three of the very large chicken breasts we got from Costco (the house brand), then got out one of the larger pans. Put some sauce in the bottom, put the chicken in. Put some sauce on top, then sliced up some of the mozzarella cheese (not a lot, and not very thick), and put it on top. Then some more sauce on top of the mozzarella, and sprinkled it with basil and oregano, and baked for about 25 minutes. The cheese got soft, the chicken got done (you’d probably want to cook longer if you used the chicken frozen, but I think that might mess things up a bit), and it went over well. Served it over noodles, a little bread on the side.
There were leftovers (my housemates couldn’t finish the chicken breasts, which are very very large, to be honest), so they have food for tomorrow.
This is how I spent my evening, cooking. It’s terribly calming, in a way, when you have to consider what you’re doing and how to do it, and focus on it.
Dinnertime!
So the people I live with have been having a tough kind of few days. I decided to make dinner, and looked around the house for what we had. Thankfully, we had stuff from a Costco run recently, so I just asked for someone to please get me some mozzarella cheese, and boom it appeared.
So I thawed three of the very large chicken breasts we got from Costco (the house brand), then got out one of the larger pans. Put some sauce in the bottom, put the chicken in. Put some sauce on top, then sliced up some of the mozzarella cheese (not a lot, and not very thick), and put it on top. Then some more sauce on top of the mozzarella, and sprinkled it with basil and oregano, and baked for about 25 minutes. The cheese got soft, the chicken got done (you’d probably want to cook longer if you used the chicken frozen, but I think that might mess things up a bit), and it went over well. Served it over noodles, a little bread on the side.
There were leftovers (my housemates couldn’t finish the chicken breasts, which are very very large, to be honest), so they have food for tomorrow.
This is how I spent my evening, cooking. It’s terribly calming, in a way, when you have to consider what you’re doing and how to do it, and focus on it.
Tonight's outing.
Tonight, I headed to the Seattle Photoshop User Group Meetup where they were discussing Lightroom and things to do with it. We got some tutoring and discussion from Colin Smith, who runs Photoshop Cafe (as of this writing there’s some issue with it, and Google’s blocking it, but it’s a fine, solid place), which was pretty interesting.
There were some technical issues, and apparently some comprehension issues (people apparently not hearing each other very well on both sides), but it was a pretty solid night of tutorials and showing how things work, and how the Adobe ecosystem works as well.
So yeh, that was good.