Everyone’s on edge. It isn’t always your fault.
Someone flipped you off in traffic, your boss flipped out at you when you did something small that annoyed them, someone said something God-awful to you in a comment on social media, your partner blew up at you and stormed off after a stressful week.
Relax. You’re going to take it personally, but 9 times out of 10, It’s more about them than it is about you.
It’s easy to take the blame for something someone throws at you in a moment of frustration. It’s a common response to stress to project it onto other people. …
It may have been a bit of a shithole, but it was my shithole.
No Respect, I tell ya.
October 14, 2020
When I moved to New York 6 years ago, I had a notebook with 7 years worth of jokes in it that I’d been performing in Australia. None of them worked in New York. I flushed my notebook down the toilet at the Ludlow Hotel, blocked the toilet and fled as the water rose and flooded the bathroom. A worthy death for a such tired, dreadful material.
Over the following 3 years, I went out every night of the week, did 3–4 spots each night and worked up a new hour of material (ok, 35 minutes of actually decent material, 25 minutes of B and C-grade material.) …
Every morning I take the dog out for a walk for an hour or so. No earbuds, no phone, just a book under my arm, a pencil in my pocket and a poop-bag in my hand.
Some of the best creative ideas I’ve ever had have come to me in these first hours after waking, watching my French Bulldog* puppy coerce a golden retriever thrice his size to wrestle. (he always loses.)
*We think he might be a mut.
My point is, I walk home with endless marginalia scribbled in the book, along with the flyleaf covered in other ideas that might be good for ‘when I get time.’ …
A pattern from the daily rituals of the world’s greatest minds.
June 8, 2020
I just finished reading and re-reading Mason Currey’s fantastic book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. I couldn’t put it down. I highly recommend it for any artist struggling to establish a daily routine in whatever your new normal looks like.
“ Routine , in an intelligent man , is a sign of ambition , ”
~W.H. Auden, 1958 .
I went through and highlighted something I found as a very interesting correlation across 400 years of the greatest writers, artists, poets, composers and other creative minds detailed in the book.
There are a few variations, but the very clear pattern is this:
Most artists work in solitude for around 3–4 hours, usually in the morning.
Sidenote: Many of them have a daily walk somewhere in their schedule, too, but that’s a less common detail. …
April 9, 2020
When I was a kid living in my Mum’s duplex in Perth, I would get $4.49 per week from my paper route. I probably should have been saving it, but as soon as that cash hit my palm I would jump on my bike and zoom down to the corner store to blow all of it on the latest issue of MAD (Okay, it was $2.95 (cheap!), but I blew the rest on sweet, sweet candy).
It was exhilarating as a kid to discover that there was a magazine that was not only full of the best cartoons I’d ever seen but was full of funny and wildly irreverent writing. There was nothing like it. …
By Jason Chatfield
Originally Published on jasonchatfield/blog
2nd January 2013
THE DC Comic Character Green Arrow has been adapted into a popular TV series in the US simply called “Arrow”. Someone recently commented on how unique and awesome it was as a TV show, but some people have also commented on how closely it resembled a fellow DC Comic character you’ve probably never heard of called Batman.
How wrong they are!
1. Batman (Bruce Wayne) is a wealthy 30-something who disappears for years and gets super-ripped, trained in a remote, harsh environment in elite survival and fighting methods by a harsh, bearded master.
Whereas Arrow (Oliver Queen) is a wealthy 30-something who disappears for years and gets super-ripped, trained in a remote, harsh environment in elite survival and fighting methods by a harsh, bearded master.
2. Batman returns home a new man with a mission to return his home city, Gotham, for which his wealthy father he was a generous benefactor, to its former glory. …
On Fear of Missing Out Addiction.
First Published August 29, 2013
on jasonchatfield.com/blog
FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out, has to be the most insufferable of the first-world syndromes to transform my generation from hopeful, ambitious innovators into a huddled clump of simpering drones, desperately clenching their smartphones, refreshing and checking notifications for their next hit of derpamine. And I’m one of them.
(and Yes. I just officially made up a word.)
FOMO is a psychologically compulsive concern that one might miss an opportunity for social interaction, a novel experience or other satisfying event. …
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