F### You Motherland I Am A Grass Mud Horse

I wonder if I would have the courage to stand up to a government like China’s as Ai Weiwei has. Heck, I don’t even have the guts to spell out the word “fuck” in the title of this post so I highly doubt it.

Ai Weiwei, image courtesy Wikipedia

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry on LAST CALL WITH CARSON DALY from Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry on Vimeo.

Artist Ai Weiwei on Art and Censorship

An exclusive interview from The New Yorker

In my view, nothing demands the guarantees of freedom more than how one chooses to express his or her relationship with life. Some choose to express this relationship through song, through the pen, through spirituality, through art. There are so many choice ways to express oneself that no matter how hard oppressive forces try to oppress these expressions of life, and they will try very, very hard, they will always and ultimately fail. Freedom can never be truly or completely oppressed.

Guilt Calculus

Now that I finally made the move and mothballed Marrowish, I feel a wonderful sense of relief and freedom. Instead of feeling guilty about not posting articles regularly on two sites, I only have to feel guilty about one. That’s a quick and easy 50% reduction of guilt in my life.

Not bad.

However, because I’ve integrated all of Marrowish’s posts and what not into this site, there is now much work for me to do: fix link structures, update categories, delete unwanted posts, realign the pages, and on and on. Actually, blog maintenance and upkeep is something I enjoy and when doing it, I can lose hours and hours of my life without even noticing.

I think it’s fair to say that one reason I enjoy doing it so much is because it gives me an excuse not to write. Of course when I’m not writing when I know I should be…more guilt.

Not to mention all the hours I sink into trying to learn GIMP, the open source, Photoshop-like photo editing software I use. I don’t know what it is about photo editing software, but it kicks my butt. Which is why it is so hard for me to create decent looking banners and logos. Which is why the ones I do create tend to look like crap. Which is why I’m constantly changing them.

I find that my restless indecisiveness nicely compliments my resolute procrastination.

I don’t get much traffic here so I know all of the changes and upgrades I make mostly go unnoticed; but I’m sure at least a couple of inadvertent visitors must have noticed that I have had about 5000 different banners on this site in the past month.

The good news is, I think I’m finally getting the hang of GIMP and finally getting the site somewhat presentable so hopefully I will be spending less time monkeying around with all the maintenance and banner editing and more time writing. Which means, of course…less guilt.

Though…I have been meaning to learn more about the intricacies of search engine optimization.