The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

suicideandmartyrdom:

Jethro, Mimille, Julia, David. Add Debbie. Add Bex and Michie. PSHS. PHSA. <3

MISS YOU GUYS SO MUCH. Obra and the whole Ibarang. What David said: never felt so much love from people I’ve known for only a few days. PHSA + PSHS powerteam, baby. 

fallingbodies:

best advice of 2010.

bugs in amber: On Writing: Haruki Murakami ›

Anonymous asked: What does it look like, the taking a risk on someone if you like them?

Well, see I think there’s usually that moment when you’re like oh god fuck what no ahh what if i am imagining everything oh shit oh god and your vision gets kind of blurry and you usually turn around or keep walking or throw your phone across the room and lie face down on your bed—that? that facedown bed lying or sad sack park bench sitting? Instead of that you hit call or send or ring the bell or keep going even though like, your eyes aren’t focused and you’re sweating and dizzy and don’t know why anyone would take you seriously as a human being but you don’t care, because you know the worst thing that could happen is you feel stupid, which is actually pretty awful and will happen again and again, but what else can you do?

Which is kind of cool I think, because you get to say implicitly basically that, Hey, I like you enough that I am willing to traverse this awful frightening confusing time OH GOD I CAN’T BREATHE, etc. And then later laugh about it and be like Hey remember when I couldn’t breathe? And they’ll be like, Ha ha yeah that was hilarious because I didn’t even like you like that. And you’ll be like, goddammit, this again? And then you blame yourself, as you should, and then you hesitate more the next time, which is fair—more sweating, less articulation. Or maybe some people get better at it as they go. Maybe they storm in with a hand on their hip or a good Lean and they don’t pace and their mouths don’t get dry and they always fall in love or they always think what the other person is thinking too and there is no like, parsing of the connotations or what have you. But whatever fuck that. BE AN IDIOT FOR PEOPLE.

…because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff… Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.

July 23, 2009. Never forget.