A Whole Lotta Poems & Me.

I researched these poems and added a few lines, edited them and deleted a lot to make it my own. It took me several hours and gave it to a friend who was having a hard time dealing with his life. It descirbes who he used to be, and today I felt these words necessary again.

Edited poems by Andre Maurois, Sir Winston Churchill, Carlos Castaneda, and Helen Keller.Edited, Contributed, and Closed by Caitlin Mauger

Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things that we should forget about at once.
Perhaps someone we helped has proven ungrateful,
Someone that we believed to be a friend, has spoken ill of us,
Some regard we thought we deserved, was denied to us.
We feel such disappointment so strongly,
That we can no longer work, or even sleep.
We loose many irreplaceable hours in brooding our grievances that in a years time,
Will be forgotten by us, and everyone else.
Let us devote our lives to worthwhile feelings and actions,
To great thoughts,
Real affections,
And enduring actions for others.
Life is too short to be little.
We choose how we should live;
Courageously or in cowardice,
Honorably or dishonorably,
With purpose, or in a drift.
We decide what is important,
And what is trivial in life.
We decide what makes us significant.
It’s either what we do, or refuse to do.
We decide, we choose.
And we decide and we choose,
So our lives are formed.
We either make ourselves miserable,
Or we make ourselves strong.
The amount of work is the same.
Life is either a daring adventure,
Or nothing.
When we do the best that we can,
We never know what miracle is wrought in our life,
Or in the life of another.
Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars,
Or sailed to an uncharted land,
Or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.
In the long run, pessimist may be proven right,
But the optimist has a better time on the trip.
An attitude of quality over quantity works only if you truly believe it.
But when the preacher of these words,
Spends his time in a quality that he does not approve,
And wouldn’t mind cutting his time here,
With his friends and family, a little short,
Not only is he fooling the crowd,
He is hurting himself.
A pessimist is someone who feels bad, when he feels good.
For FEAR he will feel worse when he feels better.
An optimist, looks at an oyster and expects to find a pearl,
A pessimist looks at an oyster and expects to ptomaine poisoning.
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity,
An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Pessimists have no starters,
Optimists have no brakes.
An optimist laughs to forget,
The pessimist forgets to laugh.

Just when I was getting used to today, it became tomorrow.
Just when I had the confidence in you, I realized,
Confidence is what you have,
when you don’t really understand the situation.
I think that the life cycle is all backwards.
You should die first, to get it out of the way.
You should live twenty years in an old age home.
You should get kicked out when you become too young.
You should get a gold watch, and go to work.
You should work forty years until your young enough to enjoy retirement.
You should go to college, until your ready for highschool.
You should go to grade school, and become a little kid.
You should have to play, have no responsibilities, and become a little baby.
You should go to the womb, and spend your last nine months floating.
And you should finish off as a gleam in somebody’s eye.

Life both starts and ends with love.
And if you let no love into your life,
Your life will never start, and never end.
Yes, someday you will die, but you will realize,
You never lived to begin with.
Decide and choose.
Decide and choose which life to live, which path to take.
Wanting to die young is not a crime,
But make your youth worth living for.
Make the best of yours,
C.J.

old graphics

if you have ever kept a portfolio, you might know what I'm talking about here.

i was searching through some of my old graphics, trying to re-discover my love for them when I found this Reese Witherspoon graphic I made years ago. Honestly, it was made Sunday, June 1st, 2003, 6:14:15 AM. (for any of you who know your much older than me but don't like to realize how much older you are... you might want to skip the next line...) It shows you how bored I was my FRESHMAN year of high school. (Sorry for putting that in caps, I don't know what came over me!) Anyway, I found it... and I wanted to make this graphic again! I wish I was there again to figure out how I got to that point. I haven't made a graphic like this in so long... and making those posters for work made me realize HOW out of touch I am with my photoshop skills. I enjoy making graphics, but I'm sick of making graphics of celebrities. I want to advertise products now, which is why I had so much fun making the posters for the book.

From Freshman - Junior year of high school I had an online magazine called Watermark. My e-mailing list was over 7,000 teenagers long. They would send in requests of certain celebs and I would make it for them. It was a way of building my portfolio, talking to other graphic designers my age, and learning new tricks. However, now I find my portfolio has 400 celebrities, one book, and three movies. Boring.

I'm going to try to broaden my horizons, so if you have any ideas... comment!

Thanks,

Caitlin