intensity

For having "slept" about 3 hours during the past 48, I feel pretty okay. I really needed this kind of weekend, in fact. Friday I went home in a Mood and took a long and very satisfying nap. Yesterday at approximately 11:30 a.m. I was up at the northern end of Mie with eight other people, spread out between two apartments, beginning the 24-Hour-Comic challenge. 24 pages, one day to plot them out, draw them up, and put them all together. It's the kind of thing I would find myself doing in Riley Hall the weekend before a critique, the kind of thing I have been doing entirely not-enough of after getting my fake art degree that represents more of an afterthought to my English thesis than a double-major. Some ruminations along those lines were contributing to Friday's mood.

Yesterday, though, all the external constraints of my undergraduate studio work were gone - this project was almost entirely self-directed and wouldn't be held up for critique against standards that are only right for passing a specific class. The varied and loose-knit group of misfits was there, gathered by our common interest and encouraging each other by our mere presence, at times - didn't matter that the person sitting next to me was playing old-school Sonic on her DSLite at two in the morning, the important thing is she was staying awake with the rest of us, though all the sensible circuitry in everyone's brain was telling them to have a goddamn nap already.

I made the mistake of laying down on a folded-up futon in the corner for oh-but-10-minutes. It was horrendously difficult to drag myself back over to the table where my story lay barely coherent up through page 14. I felt every junky munchie-snack I had eaten since waking up, actually every pseudo-food I had fed myself in the past week, and all the effects thereof. My head was fried. Then the endorphins kicked in and I was wired until six, just like this time last year. Crash for a couple hours, force down a banana and some cereal, head off to work morning shift at the library and then try not to nod off during a 90-minute lecture. Okay this morning was a little different, but still, same admixture of relief and relentless energy-drain alternately spurring you into the day with ambition or exhaustion, toward another accomplishment or just the achievement of making it home to your bed before you do a faceplant & pass out.

Probably thanks to four years of kinesthetic learning, I did not go kerplunk but instead carried on with normal waking hours and waking-hour activities up until now, bedtime. Along with the inevitable muscle complaints from stiff and scrunched drawring positions, I hope at least some of the intensity inspired by yesterday's arting marathon will remain with me when I wake up tomorrow.