Kat Johnston

Tag: words

  • Nibble nibble… NOM!

    Its so cute when someone tries to be all delicate and sweet with their food… then goes ‘screw it’ and shoves it all down their throat at once as if it’s going to sneak off their plate if left too long.Its so cute when someone tries to be all delicate and sweet with their food… then goes ‘screw it’ and shoves it all down their throat at once as if it’s going to sneak off their plate if left too long.

    Today it isn’t even really so much a sketch as a few words scrawled (quite prettily though) against the page of one of my mini sketch-books. I’ve skipped a page in between – it involved more cherries. In fact, those cherries the other day were so tasty that I need to go out and get some more.

    What bought to mind this particular set of words? Probably my cat. We call Penny (she’s a lynx-point siamese cross) the Nom-nom monster… and I just love ‘nom’. Its so onomatopoeic. When it comes to cherries, I get to be a bit of a Nom-nom monster myself. I eat slow, by anyone’s standards, but cherries seem just to disappear when I have them. I’ll nibble delicately at the first few, savouring each wonderful plump, juicy fruit as the juices seep onto my tongue, spitting out the pip with much relish into a near-by empty coffee cup… and I believe that the rest are just as savoured and as slowly eaten, but I do seem to go through them oh so quickly. By my standards at least.

    I think that the pace increases closer to the middle of the bag – slow to start off with, nibbling, savouring, suckling from them every last ounce of sweet delicious taste before sampling the next… then more quicker as they seem plentiful, descending to another slow and thoughtful processing once that middle peak has been surmounted, while nudging the more unworthy cherries to be eaten first, with the pinnacle of cherryness left to the very last.

    I’ll say this about the Christmas season: I don’t want to go to the malls, or traverse the tightly bunched up crowds of mothers, screaming children, and teens with naught to do but hang out at the mall now that school is over… but a trip to the supermarket for cherries? I think I can manage that. Ok, off I go…

  • Last minute polishing… so no time to post.

    Kat Johnston – its just one of those days, and this is something quick to get it out of the way and get something posted before it passes me by.

    Ohhh, another very quick picture today: so quick in fact that I couldn’t take the time to pick up a pen and sketch it on paper, scan it in and crop it down and so forth. Instead, thank god for the wacom tablet to cut out that extra step for quick and dirty posting.

    Just in case it wasn’t obvious, the past few days have been a bit busy, and today will be no exception with some last-minute polishing of an assignment underway. Every time I get to the point of finishing big assignments, I turn to my hubby and say ‘Why? Why do I torture myself so? Why have I gone back to university time and time again? Please, for the love of god, stop me if I try it again, ok?’

    I think the fact of the matter is that I just adore learning… I really do. I can’t help but enjoy picking up these little snippets of knowledge here and there before rolling them all together to create a brilliant bigger picture. That said… I still hate assignments. With a passion. So there.

  • Childhood trauma: the gift that keeps on giving.

    Kat Johnston Sketch: Dressing up for Halloween – its popular up to a certain age… goes out of fashion… then suddenly we all want to be kids again. Yay costumes!

    Thank you to all who responded to my survey! I’ll put together some results from that and post them either later today or tomorrow, to let you know how people answered. A couple did somewhat surprise me, but I’ll go into that later. If you missed responding and still want to do so, it can still be found here.

    Today’s piccie I think needs a little disclaimer. My mother never made me dress up for Halloween or, for that matter, any other happy holiday so far as I can recall. Unless you count Christmas and wearing a Christmas-print skirt that my grandmother made me, but there wasn’t really all that much arm-twisting going on there – it was rather cute after all.

    As for those parents who aspire to dress their children (even infants) in costumes for all occasions (who said that dressing a baby as a turkey for Thanksgiving isn’t just all in good fun?), luckily we have Martha Stewart and her guests showing us how. Luckily no real turkeys were hurt in the making of that clip, but I’m not sure I can say the same for the babies. The kicker? That clip is up on youtube and that kid will have to live with the fact that he’s the turkey-baby until the end of days. I bet that gets played at his 18th. Lucky boy.

    Onto other matters (I like costumes, by the way, so long as I get to pick them out), I am still typing on an ergonomic keyboard at the moment, because my darling husband upped and killed my most prized posession ever by spilling hot chocolate all over it a couple of weeks back. Squishy II was my most beloved keyboard and he ruthlessly murdered it. I have a feeling it was a sense of jealousy – he knows that in a fire I’d probably have saved it first… then come back for him and the cats. I’ve had to use this tragic ergonomic excuse for a keyboard thing for weeks. No offence to those who actually like using these things, but it is driving me insane *sigh*. Rest in peace, Squishy II.

  • Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia – the fear of imperfect creative activity on paper.

    Kat Johnston - Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia, a fear of imperfect creative activity on paper.

    I know, it is rather a mouthful, isn’t it? A friend and I have looked high and low to find a proper term for a fear of ruining a blank page. We have found fear of blank paper (vacansopapurosophobia), fear of imperfection (atelophobia),  fear of ruin (atephobia) and fear of failure (atychiphobia), but none quite describes it perfectly.

    What am I talking about exactly? I’m talking about the fear of ruining a beautiful, pristine, blank piece of paper. The fear that so many of us seem to face as we stare down at that first intimidating page in a brand new journal or sketch-book, sitting there so full of amazing potential of what ‘could be’; that is, until we make that first stroke of a pen, the first sweep of a brush. Not one, single mistake lies between cover and cover yet: its perfect. The things that could potentially rest on those pristine sheets are the things dreams are made of – until we actually write or draw in it and stuff it all up with a misplaced squiggle or a crossed out word.

    Its easy to look at an empty sketchbook and imagine all the great things that could go on those pages. Its much harder to actually make the move to do so, and risk creating a garbled, disorganized mess; which in my case at least, is far more likely than having it turn out to be the new next best thing to Da Vinci’s journals.

    All those phobias above are just fine, well and good, however they do not capture that specific fear that we artists, writers, and other creative individuals seem to face. They are general and overarching. Am I afraid of all blank paper? No, not at all. It isn’t blank paper by itself that scares me, but the ruining of said paper by creating something unworthy of it – messing it all up. Is it a fear of failure? Well, of course… but it isn’t a fear of failure overall, it is fear of failure at this one specific task of drawing something good on paper that deserves a good drawing.

    Thus, I propose that we actually name this fear. No-one (so far as I can see) has made a good one yet, so it might as well be Lins and I who coin the term. Here are a few options, for those who like choices. Credit goes to Lins for coming up with the words from their various etymologies:

    Atepapyrophobia – a fear of ruined paper.

    • Word origins: ‘Ate‘ from Greek Ate (goddess of rash destructive deeds). ‘Papyro‘ from Middle English / from Old French papier / from Latin papȳrus, papyrus plant, papyrus paper / from Greek papūros.

    Atekanevaphobia – a fear of ruined canvas.

    • Word origins: ‘Ate‘ from Greek Ate (goddess of rash destructive deeds) ‘kaneva‘ from 1260, from Anglo-Fr. canevaz / from O.Fr. canevas / from V.L. *cannapaceus “made of hemp” / from L. cannabis / from Gk. kannabis “hemp,” a Scythian or Thracian word.

    Ateloaetorrophobia – the fear of an imperfect creation.

    • Word origins: ‘Atelo‘ from Greek ateles literally ‘without end’, meaning incomplete, inchoate, imperfect. ‘aetroro‘ from the Greek aetorrous literally meaning ‘creating’.

    Atelodemiourgiophobia – the fear of imperfect creative activity.

    • Word origins: ‘Atelo‘ from Greek ateles literally ‘without end’, meaning incomplete, inchoate, imperfect. ‘Demiourgio‘ from Greek ‘demiourgia’ literally workmanship, handicraft, meaning creative activity.

    Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia – the fear of imperfect creative activity on paper.

    • Word origins: ‘Atelo‘ from Greek ateles literally ‘without end’, meaning incomplete, inchoate, imperfect. ‘Demiourgio‘ from Greek ‘demiourgia’ literally workmanship, handicraft, meaning creative activity. ‘Papyro‘ from Middle English / from Old French papier / from Latin papȳrus, papyrus plant, papyrus paper / from Greek papūros.

    I for one think that ‘atelodemiourgiophobia’ is the better, broader, overarching term for this fear of failing in creative endeavours. After all, I have the same problem standing back and looking at a blank canvas some days, as I do looking at that brand new bound sketchbook waiting to be drawn upon. But I don’t know… Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia works too. And is far more impressive!

    The sketch that accompanies this post? Well, perhaps it is my own little theraputic way of trying to overcome this phobia. Its drawn in a sketchbook. A good one. I’m never going to create the stuff dreams are made of between those covers unless I dare to give it a go now, am I?

    Word origin credit goes to www.dictionary.com and the Greek-English Lexicon by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, hosted online at www.perseus.tufts.edu/.