A year in the making, artist Michelle Leivan has painted 100 self-portraits for her #BeingMySelfie series and is ready to unveil them all in a compelling new exhibit at Art Print Express in Fleming Place in Topeka.  The exhibit opens on Saturday March 7^th from 1 – 4pm.

RSVP on Facebook

What began last February as a simple study and a need to have a subject, eventually evolved into a collection of one hundred works in which Leivan learned that there was much more to painting yourself than you might think.

Michelle finds the selfie phenomenon fascinating as part of the social media culture and decided to create a twist on the predictable selfie. She was asking herself, what do selfies reveal about a person? What are the complex human emotions behind each selfie? How are they picked by the individual and then how is it seen by the world in which it is shared?

“I’ve learned a lot in the last year about myself, how I perceive myself and how others perceive me and my art. I guess you could say I have created one hundred shades of yellow in which I have experienced enlightenment through self-examination,” Michelle explains. “Because journeys of self-discovery open new worlds of learning, for me the key is in the brush in my hand and the door is the paint on the canvas. That world is filled with delight if you let it in.”

The series is filled with a surprising variety of emotion filled yellow faces accented with vivid color and can be seen online at MichelleLeivan.com and on Facebook. Most of the portraits were painted in a just a few hours, capturing a quick snapshot for the day. The gambit of facial expression is crucial to keeping the series relevant. Many followers of Facebook anticipated seeing the next work.  As noted by fellow artist Becky Drager when talking about the online experience, "Every time I seen a new one on Facebook, I can't believe she has come up with another surprising expression and it always makes me laugh." 

Michelle often receives similar comments on and offline about the work. “People were asking me if I was running out of faces and I worried that I the work would start to look redundant, but as I painted each piece, each showed its own personality.  Now I know I could continue painting and probably never run out of the mysteries found on a human face,” Leivan explains.

She found humor as refreshing a medium as the act of painting with each new piece, “I discovered what I really was doing was making fun of myself because I would finish one and then come up with a half a dozen or so crazy phrases to go with each of them. Then there were other days, as I continued to look at them in my studio depending on my mood that the expression would say something completely different.  It is like the secret sauce to happiness, there really is no better way to start your day then to joke about yourself.”

With social media playing an important role in the series development, Michelle decided to make the images available for public expression by creating a new site meme-a-leivan.com.  On the sister site you can choose one of her pieces and create a picture with your own witticism. “Opening up the images to be used freely has added an entire new level of engagement for the audience,” explains Michelle.  “The site brings the images off the easel to a life beyond the captivity of the wall where most paintings are expected be enjoyed.  I get excited when I see what other people create and share which adds to the fun and develops fresh facets to each painting and sharing them spreads enjoyment farther and wider.”

Michelle owns her own business, Art Print Express, teaches as an adjunct professor at Washburn University, is a wife and mother, even though her schedule is busy, she insists on setting aside an hour each morning to paint. You can experience the full spirit of her love of life and sense of humor as you see all the pieces together live on display in her business. 

The seveneightfive magazine's third annual Top City Ladies / Women Who Rock issue is filled with many amazing woman who are rockin' Topeka day-in and day-out and who know what many of us are looking for. Whether it’s helping our neighbors, providing great food, art and entertainment or carrying on traditions and community culture. And I am honored and humbled to be one of the featured ladies. To check out all of the amazing women who make our community better here is the PDF Link: seveneightfive magazine Feb-Mar 2015

I often get asked "How do you come up with so many expressions?" Well, it isn't all that difficult, just take a bunch of photos and mug it up for the camera.

All over the net right now with nearly 3 million views is a video of a girl in the back seat caught by her Dad creating a selfie or maybe many selfies and yes this is how it is really done. This video reveals all and probably better than if I filmed myself in a selfie creation session.

I want to point out that she is having a blast making fun of herself. I think this is much better than a sulking teenager in the back seat. Got to LOVE IT!

Sometimes there are things that are bigger than ourselves! One of my #BeingMySelfie paintings insisted on inviting fellow artists in the ALS Challenge.

Have you ever felt like you been constantly bombarded by negative things all day long it just seems like you can't escape? I think we all have those days. With recent news events happening here in our country and overseas some days I simply don't want to face the day.  In this piece I've covered my eyes and reacting instinctively by figuratively putting my head in the sand. I turned to my art to exercise my bad feelings.

Bad news sells that is why we hear about it all the time. It's really easy to get caught up and focus our lives on all the bad things that seem to be happening. Reality is there are lots of good things that we will ignore that happen daily.  It is just human nature to stay alert and give priority to any perceived danger around us.

I even have a crude little saying that goes hand in hand with being stuck on negativity,"Just keep stirring around in your own s***t and see where it gets you." I'm just as likely to do find myself stirring as the next person.  The good news is, we can choose to handle bad news a little differently.

When this happens I really need to pull out my resiliency tools and make my life a little happier.

There are ways you can reverse some of the effects that negatives have one you. With me as an artist it is my art but not everyone has that outlet. 

Another thing that my husband and I do to take some of the negativity out of our day is something that we call "hunt the good stuff." When we sit down to dinner and begin to talk about our day the first thing we try to do is to list 3 things that were good from the day.

It is amazing how this simple act of counting three things that make your life good for the day can completely shift your entire evening mindset to something way more positive than when you walked through the door coming home.

We are not ignoring the bad things that happen but just starting off with positive things that happened, suddenly the negative things don't seem quite as bad. The other advantage with a subtle shift to the positive you will notice that problem solving is little quicker than when you remain sitting in the muck.

If you find yourself alone with no one to share your good things with then another little helper is to listen to great music!

Simple right? Create something, seek out the good things and/or jam out for a few minutes! Exorcise the Demons uncover your eyes and Face the Day!

Just for fun...here is a song that was in my mind as I created this new #BeingMySelfie piece. So Jam On my friend!

Great White-Face the Day:

Sometimes we can be defiant and not want to live up to the expectations we set for ourselves. I started this Selfie journey last February and had a plan to paint every day. As things often happens in about 2 months in I lost my steam because life started to get in the way. You know those little daily things that come up that can create roadblocks to getting everything you need to get done in a day. I wasn’t able to live up to my goal of daily paintings. I started feeling guilty about letting myself down and not meeting my goals. That the guilt kept me from painting and I was in this cycle of beating myself up which was getting in the way of doing what I love to do which was to paint. I was vicious to myself, denying myself the pleasure all because of an artificial goal that I set up, casually and I was letting it beat me.

I decided it was time to re-evaluate my goal and asked myself “Am I making goals that are unreasonable?” The answer to that question was obviously “YES!” So I readjusted my thinking and decided to simply make a yearend rather than a daily goal and see if I could make regular steps toward that goal instead. I set the goal to have 120 self-portraits done by the first of February 2015.

This was an “Ah Ha!” moment. Suddenly I no longer had a guilt cloud hanging over my head every day because I wasn’t sitting in front of the easel and I wasn’t feeling resentful about the things life was throwing at me that I was seeing as a roadblock. I started painting again.

So today I have finished my 80^th selfie in the series. It is liberating! I am 2/3rds done with my goal in only 7 months. I still have 5 months to get the rest of my 120 paintings done. 40 paintings in 5 months, I think that is doable. Even with the additional things on my plate with the last quarter of the year looming, I know that I will have the time to make my painting goal.

I am unusually optimistic because traditionally the last quarter is especially a busy time with the holidays and activities that are coming. My mindset changed simply by not beating myself up day after day and focusing on an end state goal rather than a daily focus. The daily focus is still there, but the slate is clean each morning and I no longer focus on the past failures.

I really wanted to celebrate my 80^th piece and I wanted some input to what I was doing with my Facebook friends. So I picked 6 selfie photos and asked people to vote for their favorites with the promise that I would paint the most popular one and I would make this piece bigger than any previous painting. They picked this ornery face of determination… PERFECT for number 80!

Because painting a piece 9 times larger than my usual pieces I decided to show my progress each day. This was great fun and I enjoyed insight from friends’ comments as the piece was developed. This is one of the great things about social media. You don’t even have to leave the studio to get feedback from your friends! And it surely beats dragging a 3 foot painting to a friend’s house to start a discussion about the piece.

Here are my posts as I developed the piece.

Sometimes when I pick a picture to paint I am not completely sure what it attracting me to paint it but more often than not while painting it a title and thought comes to me. This one was stubborn the thoughts I was having were too complex. So I put it out on Facebook to find a title. There were many awesome suggestions that resonated with me but the most popular one was "Seriously!" This is not too far off from the sentiment that I found with the piece. The thought that was going through my head was "Tell me a story I can believe in!" and the tune of "Something to Believe" by Poison. But obviously that title was entirely too long.

Thank you to all of my faithful friends to help me name this new #selfie.

Here is a YouTube video from Poison, a flashback from my youth, Enjoy! :)

Last week I was invited to join in an interesting blog hop by the artist Belinda Fireman  in answering a few brief questions about my creative life and to share three other artists whom I admire... I think this is a great way to share the love!

1) What am I working on/writing?
Currently I am working on several projects. All of them art related. I have been working on a painting series called “Being My #Selfie” which explores the selfie social media phenomena with images and prose that will culminate in a show and a book next year. I am also developing a Visual Art Business Basics course which I will be teaching at Washburn University during the fall semester. Finally, I am working to grow my home based business Art Print Express which keeps me hopping.

2) How does my work/writing differ from others of its genre?
Speaking exclusively about my painting and writing, I paint people and write about them as I see them. I don’t mean that I literally see people with yellow skin, what happens is I tune into is their energy, personality and mood. Whether I am painting a subject sitting in front of me live or working from a photo that I have taken, I look beyond the obvious and reach for the secret message which can be found just under the surface.

I think that it is wrong that people think that the only good art is art that mimics reality as if we don’t already have the ability to do that through photography. There are so much more to each of us than what is skin deep that can be revealed, appreciated and understood in an expressive portrait. In addition, we rarely know what the artist was pondering while creating it. It is like coming in on the last half of a movie, missing the motivation of the characters. Throughout history, we have been missing these stories! 

3) Why do I do what I do?
My mission is to explore the depths of the human race, see beyond the superficial and emerge with insight with images and words that will delight and captivate people willing to pause and accompany me on the adventure. 

This mission permeates everything that I do in life whether it is painting, writing, teaching or helping other artists develop their product line with prints. It all involves seeing beyond the obvious and bringing meaning to our lives.

4) How does my writing/working process work?

I draw my insights not only from personal experience but from the chosen subject. What I discover is an emotional state, an attitude or a flickering thought that reveals the humanity within the person being painted. Filtered through my brush, developed with symbolic color and then described in stories each personality and secret becomes a complex narrative that stretches past what can be captured by a click of the photographers shutter or our own vivid memory.

Here are just a few artists I LOVE. I recommend checking their artwork - You will see a theme of COLOR with these ladies!

	"I am an artist who can’t choose a favorite colour, a recovering perfectionist, professional procrastinator, and a mom of twin girls and a boy. Although I’ve been an artist my (almost) whole life, I started painting again in 2009 to help heal myself physically and emotionally. I hope my art brings beauty, colour and happiness into your life." - Belinda Fireman
	"I am an artist the artist who brings you visual experiences that expand your imagination..." -  Carol McIntyre
	"Using super-saturated colors and a modern graphic look, I make the native limestone, brick, metal or animals pop with energizing life by injecting the painting with inspirational color that enhances the beauty of the object whether it is natural or man-made." - Becky Drager
	"Art really has nothing to do with talent. You can have all the talent in the world, but if not used what good is it. The drive to create has more to do with an obsessive, compulsive nature, than talent. It's something you HAVE to do. It helps if you love it." - Shelly Bedsaul

There is a short break in my Selfies because I am seizing an opportunity to give back and learn something new every day! My husband Chuck Leivan, a master trainer for the KS Army Nat'l Guard taught me a new planning technique to develop my class Visual Arts Business Basics (AR 399) at Washburn University Art Department.

This is a simple, put butcher paper up on the garage door and layout your plan. This method really helped me see the details and how they fit into the big picture.

My objective for this class is to give the students a clear understanding of the mindset, skills and actions that are involved in building a visual arts career beyond creating their art.

This has been something sitting in the back of my mind for years. The memory that keeps coming back to me was Frank Nichols, one of my art instructors at Fort Hays State University told me "What I see for you in the future is you telling people like me what to do."  At the time I thought it was a weird comment and I wasn't sure what he was talking about. Of course who understands the sage when we are 25 years old? Was he being prophetic?

When I was in college we had a similar class. Back then it was all about getting into galleries and how to take good slides. To tell you the truth, we were discouraged from thinking of art as a product. Art for arts sake was the motto of the day. I always asked myself why I was paying all of this money for a degree that wasn't intended to pay for the courses I was taking... however I saw beyond that and saw through that lie. I think the winds on that myth are shifting.

The opportunities for artists have exploded in the last few years and I have done my best to keep up with it all while building my own art  career.  As I see it, this mindset is the crux of the problem and it is a solvable problem. Building an independent art career is a viable career decision for artists today if they are willing to step beyond their comfort zone and learn simple business skills.

I'm so excited! The first session starts a month from today on Thursday August 21st! Time will tell if this is a new calling!

Accidents happen, unlike Van Gogh, my attempt at self-mutilation was completely unintentional.   I was shaping a box for a shipment and simply thinking through the problem of adjusting the box to fit. As I was scoring the cardboard, my thoughts are interrupted by a tug at my left index finger and a surprise flash of red pouring out of my hand. Knowing that I have a tendency to pass out when I cut my hands, I grabbed my finger, looked away and rushed over to the paper towel holder and wrapped the wound.

I was home alone, my husband out of town for work and my son occupied across town.  Then I began to panic – what if I pass out! Quickly I made phone calls to both, wanting someone to know my plight. First to my husband, as the phone rang I realized how stupid this call was because there would be nothing he could do… I hung up and called my son.  After leaving a desperate voice mail and disconnecting, I looked down at the blood blooming paper towel clinched in my left hand and realized I was on my own and needed to get to Med Assist immediately.

Hurrying to our vehicle, I decided to drive myself to the minor medical center. I concentrated on the task at hand, shaking and sweating I made the trip even cursing the red light that held up my progress.  With a clear trail to the facility I looked again at the now gore soaked makeshift bandage and just knew I was going to lose the end of my finger.

Walking into the center clutching my left hand, a bright eyed receptionist pleasantly asked how she could help. “I cut myself real bad,” I desperately explained. They took me back immediately to assess my finger.

As it turned out my worst fears where over blown. I was not going to lose the end of my finger and the staff at Med Assist did a fantastic job patching up my stupid self-maiming.  They spent over an hour dressing my wound and were patient and kind in my hour of desperation.  

They honored my request not to look at the wound, which is always a guaranteed moment of unconsciousness.  I still don’t have personally witnessed view of my wound; I am trying to muster up the courage to see it for myself. They told me I had cut across my nail and wouldn’t lose the entire end of my finger.  So the view in my head is much better now than the idea of what it was to begin with.

I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the people in the medical field. They do things with grace and ease that would have me blithering in the nearest corner.

In the big picture the take away for me is you may find yourself alone and in frantic pain in the twinkling of an eye.  However if you can muster up the courage to keep a cool head enough to seek the help you need you will find people who are kind and understanding that can help patch your wounds and get you on the track of recovery. -- Oh, yeah and be careful when using sharp tools especially when you are home alone.

Being My #Selfie on seveneightfive magazine! Thumb through to page 18 for insight on the artistic process and what the selfie is all about!
 

Today I had the opportunity to hang out with fellow artist Belinda Fireman and The Abundant Artist folks! We talked about what it is like to work as an artist, our motivations, where we have been and where we are going. More fun than should be legal!

For many independent artists out there thinking about creating a viable art business is both overwhelming and a headache. But did you know that everything about business is learnable and with the right knowledge you can build an art career even in Topeka, Kansas?

I attended the ArtsConnect Sustainability and Economic Impact of the Arts panel yesterday featuring guest speaker Randy Cohen, the Vice President of Research and Policy for Americans for the Arts. He unveiled the results of the year-long study on the impact of the Arts in our community. The good news is that $20 million dollars in business spending in Shawnee county alone. Now that is an impressive number! More on the event at CJonline. 

These statistics say that the Arts is a viable business in our community, it places the arts as the 7th largest employer in Topeka! How about some of that for you my artist friend?

This is fantastic news for the Arts as a whole in Topeka and proves that art careers can be built. But as I see it, we aren’t quite there yet. What I see on a daily basis is that Art isn’t seen as a business but as a hobby or a pastime for the creators.

This isn’t the truth. Since the dream inception of the NOTO Arts District a few years ago there is one thing in the planning that is lacking. That is business expertise of creators. The myth of the starving artist is still rampant in the mindset of the artists as well as the public at large. 

Starting out on your own entrepreneurial endeavor is a lonely place to be, I know this from starting my own business, ArtPrintExpress.com. I had to actively search for the answers to questions that I didn’t even know I had, but discovered along the way. There wasn’t a mentor to turn to for advice because no one else had tried my sort of business in the area before. I ended up turning to online business experts to give me guidance. With determination and perseverance (what I have renamed as Artitude) I made it work.  The road was jagged and there were and are failures but I now have a viable business model.

Not everyone has to have such a solitary road when it comes to creating an art career because there are many people in our area succeeding in building a career from their art. What I believe is artists as a group can come together to learn from and support each other to build viable art careers.

For my artist friends who are attempting the dream of making a career from their art I have a couple of questions. Would you be interested in learning what it takes to build a viable business with your art? If there was a course, what are the obstacles you are experiencing and would like to overcome?

What is the story here? Am I getting ready to tell you a shocking personal secret, a juicy piece of gossip or something completely different?  Share with me and your friends what you see in this piece or give me a story of a secret or gossip and how sharing had an impact on you or others.

Do you remember as a kid sitting in a circle and playing telephone or also called gossip?

The way it is played is the first person picked a message and it was passed as a secret from one person to the next until it ended with their neighbor. Then the neighbor announced what the secret was and then the person beginning the message announced what the message was to begin with. The two were never the same. This activity really shocked me as a kid, because the original meaning was always grossly distorted once the message made its way around our circle of friends.

It was a lesson well learned by me and I take it into consideration whenever I open my mouth or if I hear news from any source. Inevitably no matter how hard each person tries to stay true to the message it is never the same as the original source.

I believe it is not always maliciously changed, but that when we hear a message we also add to the telling our own life experience and the story gets changes simply because it went through each person as a filter.

This phenomenon happens even online. However, I think in this medium it many of the changes in the story are actually planned to meet someone’s agenda. There is much more effort involved in repeating a factoid online with a graphic or photo than there is in simply telling the story face to face. So the filter and distortion happens intentionally.

Unfortunately, we see this used with every story in the most trusted news sources as well. The integrity of our news sources has given away to agendas and the attempt to keep up with the 24/7 news cycle. I believe that caution must be used when we hear any news unless we witness it firsthand.

This makes it difficult to ever find the real truth. Then again isn’t all truth filtered through our own experiences? So do we ever know anything but the truth as we know it and our choices in what we believe?

The subtle variations of expression can say volumes about the person we are looking at. But we will never know the whole story. Expressions can also be deceptive.

As I am creating these selfies a favorite show comes to mind, “Lie to Me”, I don’t know if you were a fan so here is a short description from Wikipedia: The show isinspired by the work of Paul Ekman, the world's foremost expert on facial expressions featuring actor Tim Roth as Dr. Cal Lightman, a genius psychologist with an expertise in body language, predominantly microexpressions, and a founder of The Lightman Group, a private company that operates as an independent contractor to assist investigations of local and federal law enforcement through applied psychology.

A microexpression is a brief, involuntary facial expression shown on the face of humans according to emotions experienced. Here is a short video that explains it really well.

If you are interested the series is on Hulu.

I found the series endlessly fascinating. I suppose that my own interest in people sucked me into the show and the amazing powers of observation.

The one thing I learned from watching the show was that there are stories in every face.  In this piece do you see dread, disgust, or something completely different? Maybe I dread what just came out of my mouth and the reaction I know is coming or I’m simply disgusted that there was an unidentified bug that just flew by that could be yet another mosquito that is hovering to suck my blood and make me itch for days. Please tell me the story your see in this piece.  Just for the fun of it share this with your friends to learn what they see. 

And now for something completely different..... Here I am being a complete nut! I try to tell people that my paintings speak to me, so here's proof. Not only do they speak, they mock and taunt as well. Share the love I say!

With this selfie, I must ask do you see pain or pleasure? Am I in the middle of reacting to my stubbed toe or maybe I just heard the funniest joke and I’m about ready to shoot soda out of my nose?  

The meaning is really up to you, the viewer. What I had in mind when I painted it really doesn’t matter. It is your life experience that defines what you are seeing.

Art is one of the most subjective things in the world. A piece can mean so many things that it is really up to the viewer to define what they are seeing. There is never a right or wrong answer.

With this selfie, I would like to see the stories that you recognize in this piece rather than me telling you the story behind why I painted it… because the truth is, I really want to know what it is you see.

I am sure that every time you see this piece now you will consider both since I suggested that it could be both.

So help me out with the experiment, please take a moment and share this with your friends and see what their reaction is.

It can tell you a lot about a person, it is kinda like a laymen’s Rorschach test. 

See what is on the top of the mind of your friends and discover if they see what you see and let me know! 

It is time to get real. Is Bigotry Logical?  The ad hominem fallacy is the most revolting of all of the fallacies. Bigotry is only one guise of this style of delusion. We see it used nearly every time two political ideologies are in conflict and we see it on nearly every argument on social media. When someone is making a logical argument and then out of left field someone attempts to dismiss the argument based on a completely unrelated character trait of the person, be it real or perceived, of the person making the case.
I want to bring up just a part of a satirical argument that was in the Huffington post piece that railed against the Topeka population for their concern that the First Lady’s plan to speak at the 501 High School Graduation,  titled “If You're Worried Michelle Obama Will Outshine Your Kid at His High School Graduation, She Will.”
It was an ugly piece filled with numerous fallacies as sarcasm typically is. Meanwhile, I was seeing responses online to this piece as if it was FACT rather than a witticism. It was jaw dropping!
It is also typical of what we can find in opinion pieces these days. As they say there is always a grain of truth in jest.
The one argument that made my gut turn was “And, of course, all the parents and students who signed the petition will say, "This isn't about race." Whenever someone says, "this isn't about race," it's about race. Like OJ, or Trayvon Martin, or that black kid who just got pulled over on the freeway. You may say it's about seating and your kid's special day, and that's probably true, for the most part. But we have a sinking suspicion that if somehow, miraculously, Mitt Romney had won the election and Ann Romney wanted to speak at the commencement, it wouldn't be as much of a problem. Just a hunch. Call us crazy.”
REALLY?  I have to say again REALLY? This argument has been beat to death in the last few years… and actually has numbed us to genuine bigotry. Any consideration of “race” in an argument is illogical at its core.
To judge someone solely on their appearance is the most primitive form of group think ever created by man. I suppose it was necessary to some degree when we were cave men having to fight other tribes for our basic needs being able to identify us vs. them. But as evolved creatures, who can think beyond what we see, use fantastic technology like the internet could actually consider more than one fact at a time and move beyond these undeveloped notions.
Unfortunately, no matter how horrible and antiquated it is to use gross generalizations to go about trying to influence people, it works especially if we can charge them with negative feelings about the other guy.
I am a big believer when someone can write something that ugly and be proud enough to publish it in a national magazine or on their timeline, I always pause and consider how the words reflects back on the author of any post that chooses to demean another’s opinion by attacking a unrelated personal feature such as their race. Nonetheless, it is an emotionally charged attack on character that people seem to crave.
Funny thing about it though, it does get our blood pumping, and it is the bad, ugly news that sells whether or not it is logical. It is this kind of mindset that attempts to illustrate, despite our best efforts, not much has changed in our national consciousness in 60 years and all things considered maybe it is just humanity. We seem to want to see the worst in each other instead of celebrating the best in us. I would like to think that we would want to be better than that.
Let’s try to be a positive role model rather than a destroyer of dreams.  Opinion pieces written in this way are only created to divide and not to heal. This is only one outrageous example.
Maybe we should reconsider which news we prefer. Because when it really comes right down to it, it is the public who gets to decide what news is worth paying attention to and we have that control with our actions, the newspapers, online sites and TV programs we respond to.
I am truly grateful that the First Lady chose to change the date of her speech. Then found a way to address these young citizens without raining on the parade of their hard earned day while still celebrating the Brown vs. the Board of Education 60 year anniversary with her presence and insight. Isn’t that much better solution than sardonically debasing a bunch of kids and their entire community who only wanted their ceremony to be about the graduates’ accomplishments and not a national media circus event?

Life is like the Roulette wheel, every day is a new spin of the wheel and as you hope that your ball will land on red once again as it has for the past couple of months it is inevitable that your ball will land on the statistically equal possibility of black. Expecting that little white ball to land on a specific number, that would be too much to ask for.

The Gamblers’ Fallacy is the mindset that has made Las Vegas a destination in what is otherwise a desert waste land. It is the idea that given even odds a winning streak happens independently of the statistics. I find that this logic happens in everyday life whether you are in the casino or not. You can plan a lot of things in your life but you can’t control everything.  

I wanted to paint a painting every day and boy howdy, I was on a 50 plus day winning streak! I conscientiously scheduled my time to meet my goal all was working and I found myself in the middle of the euphoria of meeting my goal and painting every single day! What a wonderful place to be in! I was snugly wrapped in meeting my realistically unreasonable expectations that were doomed to fail.

The first day to fail to meet my daily painting was pretty awful; I started beating myself up emotionally and mentally. It was this toxic self-talk that lead to the next few days of failure. As each day passed I painted but failed to finish the painting or failed to post it. This coupled with a few other personal disappointments in one short week I found myself spiraling down a funnel of depression and lack of confidence.  I just wanted to stay in bed.

I had to snap out of this madness! I knew too what would do that is an attitude adjustment on my expectations of what I was reasonably able to do. Slowly I came to the realization that much like a gambling addiction I was really expecting the impossible for myself because it is inevitable that the roulette wheel of life was going to fall on a losing number. The only way to avoid it was to completely sequester myself from life and that wouldn’t be a way to live.

With my new expectations adjusted I am moving forward and I believe that this was a lesson that I needed to learn. I don’t know how many times I need to learn to be kinder to myself through my expectations but I suppose life will continue to beat me over the head until I have it down.

Winning streaks are great, but life with loved ones and even with the occasional unforeseen challenges that come with them is what makes life worth living. It is these ups and downs that teach us the most about what it means to be alive. The best we can expect is to keep breathing and adjust our schedule to make room for the things life throws at us.

I will be getting back to “Being My Selfie” series but I am going to post them a little less often so that I can allow myself to experience all that life has to offer, the wins and losses.

Now it is your turn, I would like to know from you is what was your most recent life’s winning streak like and how did it end?

P.S. As I was preparing today’s upload would you believe my Lenovo computer crashed again! This was the second time in my 3 months of ownership. I had gotten it back 2 weeks ago from the manufacturer repair depot. Good thing my intuition told me not to trust that machine… Office Max took care of me and I should be getting my laptop back early next week… then I have 2 weeks of trying to get everything back on it once again! Life is so much better if you don’t play Russian Roulette with your data.

Human beings are comical creatures, we will say about anything to keep from being wrong.  This is the fallacy of special pleading.  Moving the goals or expectations when it is revealed that we made a mistake is a natural. I think as children we come to this faulty logic naturally we will invent ways to cling to our old beliefs rather than changing our mind and learning through better understanding.

Here is an example of special pleading that works for the Blue’s Brothers: Jake’s List of Excuses for leaving his mystery woman at the altar.

I know we’ve all taken this position to cover-up or make ourselves feel better about the things we have done to wrong another no matter the magnitude of the error. Even if it is a tiny white lie we use to beg our case, it is still a fallacy in logic.

The worst of this is the position of “it wasn’t my fault!” when in reality it is our fault and we should be held accountable. Has humans this is one of the most difficult things to do, admit our shortcomings. I think that our fear of repercussions overtake our logic ability to learn from our mistakes.

The most contemptible of these is when through our own action or inaction we create circumstances that force another to repair our mistakes while not taking responsibility for our own role played in the state of affairs. While special pleading can seeming repair the deception, it doesn’t correct the original wrong and the situation is free to escalate just like Carrie Fisher’s character in the clip, the third party ends up in the sewer muck.

There seems to be a lot of this mindset running around in social media, best exemplified by our nation’s leadership and mimicked by our youth. Until we can stop and hold ourselves and others accountable for actions and repercussions we will not see any peace or growth in mankind. Then when we take a look at history, maybe it is simply not possible to eradicate this human instinct to plead special for our mistakes.

Just be aware, that special pleading can lead to harm to others and will not really solve the problem. I must simply ask myself to try really hard to be accountable for my own actions and hope others will do the same. I guess that is really all I can logically expect.