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Anthony Alvarado

Anthony Alvarado

Monthly Archives: February 2015

The Sorrows & Joys of daydreams

28 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by Alvarado in writing

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day jobs, daydreams, dreams, hedonic adaptation, writing

daydreaming-200x300

What does it feel like to get published? I don’t really know. I mean I have been published by small press places before, but I haven’t had a book published by a big boy publishing house. What does it feel like? I’m ’bout to find out in just a month, when D.I.Y. Magic launches on April 7th.

What’s weird is I still, in my mind, self identify as an “aspiring-writer”. I guess when you spend years in one mode it is hard to change. (I had a rich Aunt who had survived the Great Depression, even though she was loaded she hoarded food in her pantry: onions, beans, oats, etc.) For many years I dreamed of writing a book that would land me an agent and a big name publisher. I dreamed of being able to support myself with my writing and quit my day job. But now that has happened it still feels like a dream! It is hard to believe, even though it’s been about a year since I signed my book deal with Penguin Random House.

penguin

!

I haven’t gone to a day job in a year, I’ve just been writing. Sure, it has been fucking amazing. No doubt. But what’s also surprising is how easy it is to get accustomed to this. To just think of it as a job which has it’s struggles, it’s pitfalls, it’s ups and downs. Which is human nature. They say that people who win the lottery experience just a few months of joy and then go right back to their normal baseline of emotions. How sad is that?! No matter how fortunate we might be, we get used to it and take it for granted after a little while. It’s called hedonic adaptation.

I often think about this same thing in the context of life itself. How good it is to be alive, how lucky we are! And how easy it is to forget that feeling, and think the world is boring because you are used to it. When that happens we stop daydreaming because we think we know what to expect. That creates a rut, because you get what you expect. I’ll tell you a secret—you must nourish your daydreams because they are the soil from which the future grows.

I was telling a friend the other day— in my wildest daydreams about the writing life this is about as far as I ever got: quitting my dumb day job and getting a book published. I have no idea what happens next because I have outpaced my wildest dreams. All I know now is: I got to keep dreaming.

Daydreaming_Gentleman

Check out what DIY Magic’s featured artists are up to!

23 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by Alvarado in Uncategorized

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artists

Into D.I.Y. Magic? You should dig what the contributing artists are up to! It’s inspiring and humbling to share pages with these guys. A lot of the artists in D.I.Y. Magic have comics out that you probably need to feast your eyes upon! The art in D.I.Y. Magic was curated by Jason Leivian who is also the man at the helm of Floating World Comics.

Artists featured in D.I.Y. Magic

(in order of appearance)

Lala Albert

Tommi Musturi

Ines Estrada

Frederic Coche

Farel Dalrymple (I highly recommend reading & re-reading his inter-dimensional masterpiece: The Wrenchies BTW)

Christian Defilippo

Jason Mclean & Billy Young

Jennifer Parks

Kevin Hooyman (this website is a lot of fun to get lost in)

Amy Kuttab

Aidan Koch

Jason Traeger

Nick D’Auria

Jesse Moynihan

Dunja Jankovic

Maureen Gubia (melt your eye-brain!)

Ron Rege Jr.

Conor Stechschulte

Edie Fake

Luke Ramsey

Austin English

Ian MacEwan

Panayiotiz Terzis

Julia Gforer (I’d recommend you check out Julia’s Black is the Color, but it’s sold out right now. $75 on Amazon ack!)

Pete Toms

Malachi Ward

Pippi Zornoza

What I learned from 21 days of meditation

21 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by Alvarado in meditation

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21 days, meditation, practice, sitting, zen

2014-12-11-meditate-thumb

Today was the 21st day since I’ve made it a practice to start my day with meditation. I feel like I’ve made some progress. I’ve built up from about five minutes to going for 10 minutes. I have learned a lot from the practice, but obviously I am also now aware of what a novice I am at meditation. I plan to keep this up because while it takes just a short time to make this daily ritual a part of life, the benefits radiate out to so many areas of life: emotional, mental, relaxation, clarity, focus, awareness. It is well worth the effort. If you want to make meditation a part of your daily routine I recommend you stick with it for a few weeks in a row so you can get into it.

(The benefits of meditation are subtle: it’s not going to fix all of life’s problems . . . but it makes life’s problems seem like less of a big deal. And that’s pretty cool.)

What I learned: it’s really not about any specific moment that happens while you are meditating. It is about the ongoing, long-term, practice, and how that affects you as a person.

When I look back at the first week of meditation, I wasn’t getting much from the practice. It mostly felt like a hassle, a chore. It takes staying with something a little while to see why you want to stay with it.

Here are my posts on the past 21 days of meditation:

Days 1-6  : Off to a rough start!

Days 8-9 : feeling grounded

Day 10 : Legs up the wall pose

Day 11 : be chill

Day 12: This stuff works!

Day 13: gifts of the practice

Day 14: now it’s a habit

Days 15 & 16: Science & Meditation

Days 19: Practical benefits of the practice

Day 21: what I learned.

I plan to continue this practice. My style of learning about something is to be the eternal dilettante, always the beginner, never the expert, always trying new things. If meditation is something you are interested in check back here from time to time, I plan to post interesting and easy to use meditation techniques, such as different mudras, breathing practices, and styles of meditation (Tibetan vs. Zen for example) as I learn more myself.

Namaste!

356px-Om.svg

The benefits of a meditation practice

19 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by Alvarado in Uncategorized

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letting go, meditation, zen

Day 19

I realized the practical benefits of having a daily meditation practice today in a surprising way. I had a conflict with someone, where I thought perhaps they weren’t being totally fair. I ended up having a brief disagreement with this person: someone I respect, and afterwords realized that I had gone into the situation in the wrong way. The specifics aren’t important here. What I realized, thinking about it later in the day is that normally I would have probably gotten more annoyed and ended up holding a grudge. Instead I was able to admit where I had made a mistake, apologize and move on.

It wasn’t until hours later in the day when I realized: normally I would probably still be stewing about my supposed grievance right now.  A short temper and a knack for holding on to my side of a disagreement are things that I’ve often struggled with. But today it felt easy for me to step away from how I usually would react to a disagreement. Instead I had been able to let go of it easily and without losing my temper. It feels powerful to realize that stuff bothers you only when you let it.  I realized that practicing this is a part of what you are doing when you just sit for awhile each day: watching ideas, emotions, etc. as they pass you by. Because while you’re sitting there it is definitely not always easy, and small, sometimes petty annoyances are surprisingly noticeable. As I learned quickly in my first few days of meditation, you notice your back is stiff, an itch on your nose, a loud noise outside etc.

But the whole time you are practicing the very practical and useful art of just letting go. Is it any surprise that practicing that day by day translates into an ability to be at peace in daily life? It makes perfect sense when you think about it. But it was also surprising to realize that in just a couple short weeks of meditation that practice was already impacting my personality in a positive way.

Why I’m observing Lent (even though I’m not Catholic)

18 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by Alvarado in Uncategorized

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burger, fat tuesday, lent

(I am taking a break from blogging about Zen meditation today to blog about Lent.)

The quiet neighborhood bar where I was enjoying a nice bourbon & branch last night suddenly became over-run by drunk bro-dudes wearing plastic beads. Oh yeah, Mardi Gras. French for Fat Tuesday. Of course the origin of Fat Tuesday was that it was the day before 40 days of lean. That’s why it is traditional to go crazy on Mardi Gras, and eat donuts, drink and party etc. The idea being you are supposed to be getting it out of your system before 40 days of clean living. Plus the indulgence of something decadent is that much more enjoyable when you plan on giving it up for awhile. Since I’m giving up meat and alcohol I ate this ridiculous hamburger for lunch on Fat Tuesday. (Yup, it’s the same size as that tallboy.)

burger

There was a whole lot of people out last night, ready to get tanked. They were all keen on observing the let’s get trashed half of the equation, but I had to wonder how many, if any, of the people there were planning on giving something up for Lent? I think that says a lot about our culture: we have taken the “indulge yourself” philosophy of this holiday to heart, but largely seem to ignore the rest!

So I have vowed to give up alcohol and red meat for the next 40 days. I’m not Catholic, but I don’t have to be to recognize that exercising a bit of restraint for an extended length of time is not only healthy, but probably good for the soul. Giving up booze is the classic. But it could be anything that you personally feel like you may over-indulge in from time to time. Be it sweets, giant hamburgers,  TV, or Twitter or Facebook (there’s an idea!). So I encourage you to ask yourself: what might I be better off without for the next 40 days?

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