la casa – Ye Olde Blog Archive

Welcome to my new blogging project, Roly Poly. As I tinker with the site some more, back pages like “About” and “Links” and such will begin to fill in, but for now, being that I will constantly tinker with those things rather than using this blog for what it’s actually for (that would be writing), I thought I should put those things aside for a minute and get my feet wet.

My name is Ahniwa Ferrari, and I’m 30 years old. I am, among other things: a librarian in Olympia, WA; a husband; a step-dad to a 10-year-old; a soon-to-be papa (our due date is November 25!); a gamer; a writer/poet; a lindy-hopper; a technophile; and sometimes a musician. There are other boxes I could stuff myself in, but you get the idea.

This blog is a place for me to talk about those things that I am and that interest me, mainly libraries, fatherhood, and Olympia, but also anything else that strikes my fancy. My update schedule is, starting now, at least three times per week on a M-W-F schedule, with additional posts a possibility. We’ll see how things go.

You can find me other places on the web, if you want to, like: facebook | twitter | tumblr | goodreads. I also have an old blog dating back to 2004, and a webcomic that I did with my friend Theo (I wrote, he drew), called La Casa.

I hope that you enjoy reading and that you’ll comment every now and again so I know you’re out there.

In the grand tradition.

There once was a library lad
who wanted to graduate, bad.
He wrote every essay,
but oh what a mess, eh?
There always were more to be had.

It’s not entirely accurate because at this point the end is certainly in sight (I’ll be HOME in about a month), but there is still plenty of residual “this-will-never-end” feeling to last me for awhile.

On the upswing, things are going well with my application process, and I have a videoconference interview coming up … on my birthday. After the phone interview, this is another first for me, so it’s exciting but I’m a little nervous about it as well. Maybe one day they’ll even want to meet me.

To wrap up, I’d like to drop in part of what I wrote over at La Casa today, because sometimes even I can appreciate my own writing, and because where I stand on creating comics is also where I stand on creating any content; perhaps most topically, it’s where I stand on self-creation, on developing one’s self as a human being, as an artist (of any kind), as a friend, as a lover, and as a professional. The idea is that we create something of worth and offer it to the world; ideally, something unique that we’ve learned, through introspection and hard work, how to offer.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the kind of comic I want to create. La Casa has been a journey – no, an experiment, really. It’s been a ride. It’s been something, anyway, but a lot of times I don’t know where to go with it, and I don’t know if it’s the story that I want to tell. There are thousands of comics out there, all of them telling stories, all of them with their own worth and audience and humor, and I’m happy that ours has been one of them, but at the same time I somehow want to find a way to make our comic different. I want to find the story that will be our comic, the characters that will drive the story, the merge between art and writing that will, at the very least, be uniquely ours. I’m really not talking about popularity, just the idea that in creating content and putting it out there for people to see, one has a responsibility to make that content … worth something. To somebody.

We start with a dream, and one by one pluck down the stars to light our path.

We start with a dream …