I love all the people who invented Photoshop. I've never been a pretty good painter - well, I never really gave it a shot... Anyway, with Photoshop, I can turn my own photography into "paintings" and create my imaginative worlds. Now that I figured out the program a little (still have a lot to learn!!!!), I feel like I'm alive again. I can give my imagination life!

So, I really feel like I have to give credit for this to one person especially, who very unselfishly passes on the photoshop knowledge - that's Erica.

Anyway, here's some of the work I did today. I know I said, in one of my former blogs, how I am sad that "natural photography" (and by natural I don't mean photography of nature!I mean classical analogue photography) is sort of not "in" at the moment. But what I did here, I do not consider photography at all....what people call it is "conceptual photography". I just call it "collage", a manipulation, playing around with the possibilities of manipulation...I call it my digital darkroom.

CHANGE

Life is mysterious, unpredictable, and yet, all the life's paths, or some at least, come together at a certain point. Always.

Professor Frank Newman gave me a great tip - to read MJ Ryan's book "This Year I Will...", which offers just the kind of insights into my problems that I need. Two blogs ago, I wrote about how I need change and I can't carry it out because of certain obstacles I also mentioned. I even said the obstacles are not lame excuses not to get down to it. But then I came across this thought in Ryan's book:
One of the tricks about change is that we have to figure out how to do it in the midst of everything else.

Easier said than done, right? NO! Now, THAT's an excuse right there! Here one has to focus on the "figuring it out - part" and work on that (not for ages though. :-) However, just like discovering who you really are, figuring out how to make a change is a process. How to go about that? Making a list of possibilities would seem like a good idea and then seeing how probable things are and then just go for it!

Another thing happened last weekend. After all week of feeling unstimulated and unmotivated, I met a friend from Paris, whom I haven't seen in ages. I was drinking coffee in Maribor, suddenly I had to pee. Someone was in the toilet, and I waited for ages for this, probably, woman to finish peeing. She peed and peed for so long I started giggling. In the end there was a sigh of relief and then the door opened and she came out. We glanced at each other as all women do when they pass on the peeing facilities to another. Then she was about to turn to wash her hands...our eyes stuck out - hey! we know each other. It took a second to place the familiar face into that "drawer" in the brain, which is labeled with "knowing people". haha. To meet a friend in the toilet....Of course the plans I had in Maribor changed, we went to a bar and had a few beers, a few laughs and talked and talked - mostly about life and finding yourself. Of course, I knew who I was before the conversation with her, but this was the first time someone asked how I'm getting along with myself. And for the first time, I knew what to answer. What a good feeling. To be able to answer that you are pretty much sure about who you are and what you want out of life. (I need to say that for me, that is a life-lasting process) If you don't grab life, life will grab you. We all know that, but we should say or hear it every day, all the time.

So, I've had a good week's start. Feeling all stimulated and enthusiastic about the numerous possibilities.

WISH YOU ALL A GREAT WEEK!

The Dreaming

The Dreaming

We dream our lives, and live our sleep's extremes.
The one is to the other not as real.
We fabricate our future in our dreams.

The present moment isn't what it seems.
Experience is only what we feel.
Our lives are dreamt. In sleep we live extremes.

The past is prologue, as the Bard proclaims.
It made us what we are. let's turn the deal
by fabricating future in our dreams.

Our night will wake to day from sound of screams.
but so our day will yearn for night to heal.
We dream our days, and live our night's extremes.

The future enters us in bits and gleams.
In order that its brightness may reveal
how we can learn to make it in our dreams.

The past is history's. The present, schemes
of chance or temporality can steal.
We dreamt out lives, and lived our sleep's extremes.
We'll fabricate our future in our dreams.

Donald Harington

Today is one of those days...my life seems to be nothing but "one of those days" lately. Utterly bored! Not that there's nothing to do, because there is plenty of work. But that's all there is. Just work, and no motivation, no fun at all. Boring, crazy, dumb people (I hate myself for using the expression "dumb", but I am THAT DESPERATE right now!!!!) that are driving me absolutely crazy and a town - or shall I say the whole country - of NOTHING exciting at all to offer. Of course there are exciting and beautiful places all around me, but I am sick and tired of exploring them by myself.
Change is URGENT! I would have changed my whole life a long while ago, but there are some things that need to be wrapped up here first. And this is no lame excuse for not getting on my butt and do it! It's one of those truths, where one can't afford, financially, to move and get the hell out of here to start all over again! Well, until that happens, I am meeting some cool new friends. Salman Rushdie and his Midnight's children, Chinua Achebe, the Brontee sisters, and other great thinkers. I just wish I could jump into their literary worlds until I could move somewhere and meet real new people. Now I still have to walk through town and meet bitter, evil, ignorant and SUPERFICIAL faces and maybe even listen to them spreading their superficiality into the streets and minds of other people. ..Ah, I wish I was totally immune to them! I wish nothing they say would reach my ears and my thoughts. I wish I didn't have to confront the superficiality and stupidity. I guess no one can ever "escape" from that no matter where in the world they go. Well, at lest, one meets different kind of stupidity....
Whatever there is...my mind is on the road....

haha. Anyway, photography is going very well, apart from not having a camera at the moment. :-) All of them died on me. I guess that's good, too. For some reason, whatever it may be. I've been thinking about what photography even means nowadays. It's changed completely, that's for sure. I was in two photography workshops in the past two weeks. Tomo Jesenicnik, a professional Nikon photographer, was my mentor. Well, he is one of the ol' school photographers, who won't really manipulate a photograph. This is out of the question in his photo-philosophy. He was immediately one of my best friends as he said that:-) Sometimes as I browse through photographers' web sites, I feel anxiety. A lot of photographs seem almost like commercial posters - packed with information, manipulated....

ah, all is well, but photography isn't as "natural" as it used to be.

It's time for a nap. Exhaustion is pressing heavily on my eyelids.

ta ta