okay... thanks mom

After seeing all the work it entailed, I decided a while ago that I probably wouldn't do scrapbooking. Ever.  I'm too self-critical and changeable, and I thought I'd always be making a page and then hating it and ripping it out. I told myself it was cheesy.

But when I started flipping through our family scrapbooks the other day, looking for a picture to draw for illustration class, I ended up sitting on the floor for like an hour and a half. 

 I never looked nice as a baby.

 Odd bonding between enemies over the automatic cat litter box.

 Bowling league. I thought that headband-scarf (the kind you tied round your head with little strings - remember?) made me the hottest thing on the planet.

 Sewing gone wrong.

 Childhood triumphs.

Grandpas.

Actually, scrapbooks are great.
Mom? I'm about to say your favorite words:

You were right and I was wrong.

THE DOWNSIDES OF BEING AN ART STUDENT

DOWNSIDE: Early in your studies, the work is extremely tedious.   Presumably, projects where we actually have to use some, you know, creativity will come along.  But right now it's "make a perfect cross-section of two colors using the (perfect) 7-step value scale you did two weeks ago and have probably lost by now, you disorganized kid, you." After figuring out what on earth a cross-section of two colors is supposed to be, you actually have to paint the thing.  Basically, it was making different shades of a color match the values of a white to black grayscale.  Did that explanation actually help at all? I'm feeling doubtful.

Tip I wish I'd known 1:
When dealing with color value projects, holding your laptop precariously above your desk and using photobooth's black and white effect will save your life.   It is extremely difficult - at least, for me - to tell when you've got a yellow and a purple at the same value level.  Black and white pictures solve that problem.
The downside of using this handy tip is that it makes it clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that half your paint squares are wrong.  Which leads to the second downside.

The end result of that mess up there.  Some of it is still wrong, but I don't care. 

DOWNSIDE: Apathy.  When you, for example, use photobooth to photograph your project, you will find that at least half of it is wrong, and apathy sets in.  For a while, the desire to fix things, for perfection, will drive re-do's.  But, at a certain point, you stop caring.  Breaking into the not-caring zone is a bit of a relief, but it's also not entirely positive.

DOWNSIDE:  Even if you, by some miracle, retain your drive to attain perfection, you can never have it.  At least, not when you're working with cheap-o acrylic paint. See photo above.

DOWNSIDE:  I know that each major or field of study has it's own tricky bits.  But I think I can safely claim that art has the most potential for technical mishaps.  Meticulous execution and spotless presentation are required - in projects involving paint.  Paint.  And tape that pulls bits of paper off the surface of your illustration board after you've finished the project.

DOWNSIDE:  Your clothes get ruined.  You are never clean again.  I found paint behind my ear the other day.

DOWNSIDE:  You ingest things you should not.

Do you see the danger here?  It's unspeakably easy for your preoccupied brain to allow your hand to put a nice, painty brush into your tea cup.  Also, I tend to hold things in my mouth.  Using the old choppers to hold onto a pen is alright, but when you're sticking paintbrushes in there, things can get unpleasant very, very quickly. And grown-up paint isn't non-toxic.  If I'm dead tomorrow, Mom, this is why.  I tremble to think of the day when I start using turpentine.

DOWNSIDE:  You have to hear people rave about art that's about "the process" and "kinetic energy" and "a return to child-like enjoyment of mark-making".  If someone says to you, "oh, we should go to this show, it's all about the process of kinetic mark-making," run.  I mean, unless you like giant pages of scribbles or prints made by scraping things across wood.  Personally, I loathe that sort of art.  I think it's ridiculous.  I DON'T CARE about the artist's process.  I wasn't there when he made the silly thing.  Why does his process matter to me?  It's a cop-out, really.  Nobody judges a film or book by the process they didn't see and weren't a part of - they look at the results.   As you can see, this makes me get a little bit worked up.

But, I can't really just leave it like this.  As exhausted and grouchy as I may be now, I still have to admit that there are upsides.

UPSIDES OF BEING AN ART STUDENT:

UPSIDE:  You get to say you're an art student.  Even if you're to be the most boring, technical web-design person on earth, while in school you get to say you're studying art.  Which definitely ups your cool factor.

UPSIDE: You can wear weird things.  This can make up for the inconvenience of ruined clothes.  So far, my jacket, sweatshirt, black v-neck, polka-dot pajama pants and white tank top have been irreparably splattered, smeared, or spotted with paint.  But, because I can shrug and look embarrassed and say "I'm an art student" if anyone mentions it, it doesn't matter.  Though, I think the tank top is a goner.  It's got a big smear of red-violet which, now that it has dried, looks like a giant stab wound.

UPSIDE: You get to listen to your ipod in class.

UPSIDE:  I'm beginning to feel like a problem-solving god.  That's what you do, really.  Solve problems.  For example, every week for 2-D design, I have to represent the same item (one of my high-tops, to be precise) in a new way that corresponds with the things we're studying.  "How do I represent my shoe?" is a fairly simple problem I have to solve every week.  It sounds silly, but knowing I can get down to business and do a project is empowering. I feel like I can tackle almost anything.  Except taxes and flat tires.

UPSIDE: The people are weird.  Marvelously entertaining.  And you have to wonder how they decided to study ceramics or blacksmithing.

UPSDE:  You get to buy stuff at Art Outfitters (a wondrous place) instead of Textbook Brokers.

UPSIDE: In spite of the frustration, long hours (3:30 am is the current record for agonizingly late bedtimes), weeping and gnashing of teeth, it's pretty fun.

So I guess the ecstasy balances out the agony, in the end.
Bad joke.

happy birthday to me.

I'm 21 now.  Big surprise, I feel the same.

Behold:

 Yes.  That's what you think it is.  A magnificent, if petite cookie decorated by professional cookie decorator me (as a sort of birthday gift to myself) in honor of towel day.  Sadly, it did not make it to the 25th.  I ate it in an airport in Houston, because keeping it un-smashed on the plane was just too hard.  And I can't not eat cookies.

These trees are everywhere here in old Ar-Kansas. They were much lovelier in real life than they look here.  If only I wanted to learn how to use cameras.  I'm sorry to say that lenses and f-stops do no interest me in the least.

This is our first Arkansas spring.  Lovely, so far.  I think I like seasons very much.  

A lot of things are swirling around in my head right now, good and bad.  I want to whine and blather, but have decided to consider the pear trees instead.  

My sister is going to be a movie star or something.  

This is her formal dress and - can you believe this? - my mom sewed it.  In these rather crummy pics, she was trying it on for the first time.  You should have seen it when it was finished and pressed.

How classy is this kid?  16, and she wants a dress like this. The formal has a hollywood theme, and Cee decided she wanted to do a sort of Audrey Hepburn dress.  She drew a picture and they found a pattern that matched.  The white part is actually the top of dress E from the pattern, the black is dress C. Mom figured out how to mix the two together.  You should see it up close - it looks like a piece of couture.  The lining is incredible.  I am so in awe of her sweet sewing skills.  She's made some awesome halloween costumes for us - but this goes way, way beyond my Annie dress and Cee's Sandy suit.

I'm wickedly excited to see what my sister is like in about five years.  She's about a million times classier and smarter than I was at her age.  Darn cool is she.  Cooler shall she become.  (I wrote that in a Yoda voice, by the way.  I'm sort of appalled that "Yoda" doesn't bother my spell check, but "Beatles" does.)
I'm lucky to be her sister.  Plus, if she becomes a movie star, I can be a hanger-on in her entourage and attain one of my old career dreams.  Yessss.

well, I don't like your tie.

I'm kind of insane for the Beatles right now. (If an imaginary reader gets the reference in the title, they win a prize! So! I offer lots of non-existant prizes to non-existant readers, don't I?)
Recently, I've found myself listening to them more and more.  And playing them pitifully on my dear ukulele.  (By the way, in a recent issue of Time, they had an article about how a big ukulele renaissance is taking place right now.  People are buying them in droves because it makes them feel good when they play. Also, it makes them super cool.  I am so ahead of the times! Har har! Bad pun!)
I'm reading this massive biography of the group by Bob Spitz. I feel like I'm going to get into one of my obsessive reading cycles.  A year or two ago I read every Audrey Hepburn biography in the San Diego County Library system.  Every one.  It was the same story every time, but I still read them all.  For a while, I also read books exclusively on parakeets.  My gosh, I'm insane or something.
But, anyways.
The Beatles are fantastic.  It's just weird.  How are they that great.  How?  I just don't get it.  Magic. What would today's music be like if we hadn't had them?
Sigh, sigh.  I'm wandering all over the place, and should probably delete all this.  Oh well.

In other news, mom went out and measured the thickness of the snow outside.  Six inches.  This is our third batch of snow.  I'm beginning to feel suspicious of all the people who told us it snowed only one day here -"Barely enough to whiten the ground! Ha-ha!"  Those people also said the summers only got into the 90's.  I'm probably exaggerating, but I think we had a month of days over 100 degrees.  I'm not complaining (hey, I got three days of work and school this week - I'm not complaining AT ALL), just pointing out the discrepancies here.

So, how did I spend this snow day?  Not going outside, that's for sure!
No, I spent the day becoming painfully aware of how unmusical I am.  I decided, all fired up from this Beatlemania thing I'm going through, to write a song.   Here's how the day panned out:

Writing easy, almost asinine lyrics ("you" rhymed with "do" at least twice, etc.): 1 hour
Figuring out chords: 4 hours (no joke.)
Recording: 2 hours
Total: 7 hours, for one idiotic song.

I don't think I'm going to be the next Lennon-McCartney.
But, hey, I enjoyed myself.  And I've got a pathetic little song to show for the day.

That's all that's going on with me at the moment.  I'm doing good.

Goodnight, dear void.

ow my brain is escaping out my ear

When I was reading along in Descartes and came to the bit about how he can't really tell if he's awake or asleep and immediately thought "Inception!" I knew it was time to take a break.

What a nasty school semester it has been. Truly, truly unpleasant.  The only thing I felt even a teensy bit of satisfaction with was the title to one of my many, many essays.   He Loved Big Brother: W.H. Auden's "The Unknown Citizen".  I didn't actually talk about 1984, but I thought the teacher would get it.  But how pathetic is that?  That right there was the only thing I felt even remotely okay with.  Out of all the work I did.  Ugh.

I've got two more finals - horrid, horrid French and philosophy (hence Descartes).   At least I'm being forced to read important things for philosophy - it isn't just textbook.  The downside of this is that we are reading, like, Thomas Aquinas.  Which, just so you know, is murder.  It's not unintelligible - but it's so hard to plow through.   I really have to focus - my mind starts wandering and I find that I'm reading along and thinking about how I will furnish dream house.  Not retaining a thing.

 Anyways, I'm trying to cheer myself up now.  So, here are some happy things.

Oh!  Oh! If you're a Narnia fan you should know that you can get every single book, unabridged, read by magnificent people like Jeremy Northam, on itunes for - wait for it, wait for it - NINE DOLLARS.  It's fantastic.  You can bet that has cheered me.  The Narnia books were my absolute favorite books ever when I was younger.  Heck, they're some of my favorite books now.  They're a mix of all the things I love.  Harry Potter is like that too.  Magic and crazy boarding school and super close best friends and Christmas holidays at the Burrow.  It's perfect too - but less perfect than the Narnia books.  To me, at least.

Please pretend these look like the originals. Please.

I know I blather about them all the time, but those Pomplamoose people really are great.  Funny and cheerful.  Listening to cheery music is helping me right now.  Lady Danville and Buddy Holly are very cheering too. Cheery.  How many times can I say cheery?

I think this: 

Actually looks more like her, especially the hair and eyebrows. Chin is too long. But I can't get her entire head right at all.  I didn't even try with Jack Conte's head.  I can't help being a bit depressed that my drawing skills are about on a level with the average four year old's.

But back to happy things.

I'm getting used to this new laptop - whenever I try to mess with the old one, I scroll with two fingers and the page goes shooting off into nowhere, look for the close x in the left hand corner of the frame, and press alt when I mean to press command. Translation: I'm too cool for you, PC.

Hot chocolate.  We bought baby marshmallows the other day, and I put five in my cup and grin. 

Blog people.  I love the blogs I follow.  I almost never go on facebook anymore, but check my dashboard every day without fail.  Whenever I used to hear about blogs I never imagined they could be so interesting and fun to read.  I know - what a silly little idiot, right?

Welcome, my brethren, to the Natural State

A couple of weeks ago, my family piled into the car and drove about three hours to a little town called Mountain View.

One of the joys of living in an apartment is that we can do this stuff, drive off on the weekends whenever we feel like it.  But anyways, we drove to Mountain View for what we thought would be a small local festival with  maybe a couple of hundred people in attendance.
We were rather surprised to find that around 50,000 people pay a visit to this event every year.
Apparently, the Bean Fest and Outhouse Races are a bigger deal than we'd thought.
Yes, you read that right.  The Mountain View Bean Fest and Outhouse Races.  It. Was. Awesome.

This gentleman kindly posed for a picture, bless him.

This guy had no choice.

The races were, without doubt the high point of the event.  Two outhouses ran at a time, with two pushers and a driver.  It actually looked pretty hard. There were multiple divisions, too.  Altogether a magnificent afternoon.  My face hurt I smiled so much. It was absolutely worth the drive.

postscript

From Atonement, by Ian McEwan. Some freakishly good writing, in my opinion.

"Was everyone else really as alive as she was?  For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was valuable to herself the way Briony was?  Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony?  Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it... Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman?  If the answer was yes, then the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone else's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.  One could drown in irrelevance.  But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had.  This was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely.  For, though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts like hers.  She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn't really feel it."

best moving job thus far:

Burning old checkbooks.  A highly enjoyable task.  Our living room has never been heated so well.  Quite cheery.

Read by...

Ugh.  I think my least favorite Austen character is Anne Elliot's horrid sister Mary.  I despise her.
I'm going through an Austen phase, re-reading all the books (except for the only one on my book list, bad person that I am) and I'm enjoying them terribly.  I've always said I didn't like Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion as much as, say Emma, but they were so lovely.  I actually listened to them on audiobooks from the library - read by Nadia May.  Since we've been taking moments to acknowledge the greatness of people these days, let's take a moment  for the great audiobook readers of the world.






A long moment. They deserve it.






Prunella Scales for Emma and Nadia May for all the rest of the Austen books.  Nadia May for Till We Have Faces. Wonderful, wonderful Nigel Lambert for Dog Friday (the best book on tape ever, possibly) and There's a Viking in My Bed.   When I was a kid, my family swore eternal devotion to Jim Weiss, reader of The Cat of Bubastes,who also reads a set of endearingly oddball short stories (in which he sang as well. If I recall correctly, one song ran, "Snow white, Rose Red joy was sure to follow from the life they led.  Rose Red, Snow White something-something-else will find delight!").  Geoffrey Howard for his exceptional, suitably scary Out of the Silent Planet.  Whoever reads the version of The Screwtape Letters my library has on tape.  I worshiped Kate Maberly (still do, as a matter of fact) for Catherine, Called Birdy.  Listened to it almost every day for a year or two. The tapes are so worn that, every once in a while, her voice suddenly pitches down about three octaves.  I expected Jeremy Northam's read of The Silver Chair to be excellent and, big surprise! it was. Tim Curry is fabulous, and Daniel Handler reads excellently.  Listening to the author is usually a let down, but Lemony Snicket and Bill Bryson are both delightful readers. I could go on and on and on about good books on tape.  Or, audiobooks, I ought to call them.  But in my head they're still books on tape.  I'm a 90's kid.

Let me end by saying I LOVE AUDIOBOOKS.  I am a huge geek about them, and I don't care who knows it.  They make car trips ten thousand, and house cleaning a hundred thousand times more enjoyable.

Okay, last thing.  On the way to Disneyland last week, we stopped at Starbucks for breakfast (because we are the stopping kind.  We believe in gum and snack runs.)  And, right next to the Starbucks was an old Hollywood video, turned into a sale bookstore.  So what did we do? What would any sane person do?  Go in, of course. I love cheap books.
But, the point of this very long tangent is that, while in this shop I found this:

A little teensy book on tape!  You plug headphones in on the side! And only one dollar.  The audio quality isn't the best, but it's still pretty sweet.  And the absurdity of a line on the other side of it which reads "Written and read by the author" doesn't even annoy me.  I love audiobooks.  I'd like to go back to that book shop too.  Good stuff.  I got Ibsen and a huge book of Hercule Poirot mysteries for a dollar each.  Also, there's something pleasantly absurd about pouring over shelves of books with a giant Nicole Kidman head looking down at you.

How to write a British Lit essay, AIA* Format

*Amateur Idler Association

Shut bedroom door.

Take off your new shoes because, even though you adore them so much it's difficult to abandon them even when you go to bed, they are not the most comfortable essay-writing footwear.

Perform a short dance before removal.

Clear desk/clean room.

Make playlist of all sappy soundtrack songs you own.

Begin hunting for quotes/sources.  Kill many trees with excessive Post-it note usage.

Ask Shakespeare bust for advice on formatting. 

Receive no answer. 

Spend an entire day writing a ridiculous outline.

Wish to be outside instead.

Actually begin actual writing. Actually finally for realz. 

Force Long-suffering mother to read excessively rough draft and say, "Great, sweetie... what is it?"

Weep, because this is the well-meaning response traditionally given to cruddy poems and hideous artwork, but never before a paper.

Console yourself with ukulele and remind yourself that they are hiring at Wal Mart.

Buy a Starbucks and find yourself completely roused from your apathy.

Write again.

Fall madly in love with Easy Bib.

Finish.  

Turn in, with much fear and trembling, to teacher.  

Wait for grade.

Pray.