Although I love science and scientific illustration and data representation, I am not a scientist. So, I took a different approach to this one. The data is entirely intuitive, the graph simply a representation for how I felt at the moment I made it. The desires are arbitrary... they are the ones that are most noted by me on a daily basis... but they are not in any way all-encompassing. Lastly, the graph itself is an artistic creation, an acrylic painting. As I don't feel my desires scientifically I chose to represent them non-scientifically.

Here's the whole painting:



I'm not happy with the color, etc. on this. I scanned it in and the scanner doesn't seem to like things like color or texture, and so it isn't coming across as warmly as it does in real life. I hope to take some photos in daylight to replace these.

The whole of the graph shows, at center, the heart exploding with desire from a shotgun blast. This is the way I see desire beginning in all of us, a violent, explosive palpitation of the heart that shoots outward to our various circles of concern.

I broke out my desires into 5 centers: Fun, Sex, Creation, Warmth/Comfort, Relationships

The first, Fun, was almost an afterthought. This is the desire just to enjoy yourself.



Each desire center holds 2 thermometers. The blue one shows the amount of desire I'm feeling in that center currently, while the red one shows how much of that center I'm getting in my life right now. Knowing how much your getting of your desire is important, I think, as the relationship between what you've got to how much you want changes the dynamic of the desire considerably. I'm not getting huge amounts of fun in my life right now, but I'm getting enough that the desire hasn't risen too high above what I've actually got.

Sex, however, is a different story.



For various reasons, my sex life is pretty much non-existent. I have no access to another person/people to help calm the desires of simply touching skin to skin, let alone anything more... intimate. Painting the image above is the most sexual thing I've done in a very, very long time. This, of course, is an example of the lack of a desire's target actually increasing the desire. I lowered the desire thermometer a couple of notches as a reaction to this inflation.




The desire to create is pretty much central to my life right now, and for the last couple of months my ability to create has matched my desire to create. From knitting to embroidery to painting, I've been able to make things pretty much on a daily basis, and my desire to create has also helped me to keep going through the difficult times during the process (even this painting had several slump moments that I had to plow through).




The desire for warmth and comfort is actually stronger than I've depicted here. Basically my apartment, a warm, comfortable, safe place, was so hard won in the last part of last year, that I've become a little complacent while at the same time nearly panicked with the desire to have a comfortable pay check so that I'm not living month to month. Sometimes when you have a desire but a limit on how you can act on getting that desire, you shuffle that desire energy to a separate desire center. I think some of this is pushed off into my desire to create, which is why the desire thermometer is so low here.



The relationship graph basically represents all of the non-sexual desire for human contact. Time with friends, family, my kids, even just banter with folks across the store counters I visit each day. I have some of this non-sexual intercourse in my life, but not nearly enough. I desire quality time spent with other people, and I am spending a great deal of time alone.

So this image I've created is just a snapshot of my life right now, and even as I was making it I found it changed here and there. I think that, for many folks, graphing their desires is a learning experience. I don't feel that I learned much that was new, but the snapshot is a good reminder of how my wants are distributed and what I'd like to change. Stuff to think about, anyway.