|
|
Feb. 16th, 2007 @ 10:46 am
|
|---|
|
|
Feb. 7th, 2007 @ 08:48 pm
|
|---|
|
FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY MADE SIMPLE:
I suspect that soon I will get my hair cut very short again. I seem to be in that state of mind. Sometimes I think it's a way of doing violence to myself without actual damage, like a substitute activity for the amputation of an unwanted limb.
|
|
15 December
18 December
9 January
16 January
23 January
5 February
14 February
17 March
9 April
27 April
All the worst bits of my life seem to clump up around this time of year. (I guess April is actually a moderately long way off, still, but those days were particularly bad, and I'm dreading the anniversaries of them.) It's cold, it's dark, and people are eternally disappointing. I spent most of this morning in an utterly wretched state, remembering things I wish I could forget.
The afternoon was better, and I did some surprisingly successful experiments in photo-etching. Talking to people in the class about various things they're working on also cheered me up a bit. It's somehow both flattering and depressing to discover that certain parties are so impressed or annoyed by the things I'm doing that they decide I should have my hand cut off and replaced by a hook or clamp, as a sort of handicap. Heh. I think it says a lot about my past couple of years that an afternoon full of threats of dismemberment is a great improvement.
It occurs to me that it would probably be a useful exercise to try and make note of any particularly good days I have, so that I can remember those, instead of endlessly re-living the bad ones. Good days from the past are useless for this purpose, because too many of them revolved around people who were later responsible for the bad days, but if I start now, maybe I can accumulate a few.
( Here is a photo-etch test )
|
|
|
|
There are the days when I'm too miserable and apathetic to want to type anything, and then there are the days when I've been going nonstop for sixteen hours and I'm too exhausted and starving to want to type anything. Today was of the latter variety, and I did a lot of stuff and made some decent progress on a linoleum cut and a piece of sculpture homework. But whichever way it works out, the result is that I don't have a damned thing to say.
Maybe I'm done keeping a journal for a while. I started posting things online because of Jeremy, and then continued because I found it useful in various ways. For a while, I think it made my life more interesting, because I felt a certain obligation to go out and do stuff that would be worth writing about. But school just keeps on being school, and I don't do anything interesting, and I'm sick of the endless repetitions of how tired and frustrated and hungry I always am. I still have nightmares about Jeremy, whether I'm writing them down or not, so it doesn't particularly seem to be any good as therapy.
On the other hand, I've had these sorts of slumps before, where nothing seemed worth remembering or talking about, and where I just wanted to go into hiding. Maybe eventually I'll do something interesting again, and want to post about it.
In the meantime, I will mentally fill in all my future days with ditto marks.
Ditto.
Ditto.
Ditto.
|
|
In the last two weeks I've gone to four different galleries, which is probably more than I've been to in the whole previous year. I'm kind of overwhelmed by the sheer saturation of it right now, and I haven't been keeping up with typing journal entries because I've been too tired and depressed. Also, I suspect I'm embarrassed to write reviews or even just reactions, because they will inevitably turn out to be art-sniveling, and I'm not yet comfortable thinking of myself as a person who's capable of producing that stuff.
But I am that kind of person, no matter how much my damned family and so-called friends will make fun of me for it. And I'm going to need to have something to refer back to, later in the semester when I have to write papers and things. So I'm going to try to at least do brief summaries of the things I've seen so far.
( Notes poorly and hastily written )
I ended up liking the Wurm exhibit enough that it cheered me up even though I was tired and grouchy and starving. Maybe in the next week I'll get my routine settled enough that I can be less tired, and therefore less grouchy. We shall see.State of Mind:  overdosed on art |
|
An insanely addictive time-waster: Google Image Labeler. There goes the rest of my afternoon.
|
|
All over town today: up Capitol Hill and down again, to school, a two-hour time-killing circuit of downtown, back to school, another hour and a half in the sculpture lab, and finally home. I spent an awfully long time painstakingly removing clay from a plaster casting, and about halfway through I realized it wasn't even mine. It seemed like it might be bad to leave it half-done, so I finished it and then did my own. On mine the clay came off easily, in almost a single slab. Tomorrow I'll have to ask the teacher why the one was easy to remove and the other was impossibly difficult.
( Bottles and lumps )
Presumably tomorrow we're also going to be removing the plastic bottles from around the plaster they're filled with. It will be interesting to see how that works out.
In the course of my travels today, I wandered into a store selling fly-fishing equipment. It turns out that such places have wire in a glorious array of colors. I bought a small spool of brilliant chartreuse, and have plans to do some small fiddly things with it.
My feet are astoundingly tired. I think I probably walked about eight miles today.State of Mind:  exhausted |
|
My Contemporary Art History class is evidently going to involve visiting a lot of galleries. That could be interesting, and if nothing else, walking around town is generally nicer than sitting in a classroom looking at slides and failing to stay awake. Today we went to one of the many galleries in Pioneer Square. From there it was convenient to continue on to Uwajimaya and get some bottles for use in my sculpture assignment. I got some fish too, while I was at it, and made spicy tuna rolls.
Some of my beads came today, too. Now I have yellow jade for Venus, azurite-malachite for Earth, and some kind of jasper (leopard, I think) for Mars. This silly bead project has turned into kind of an ongoing expensive obsession. I really would like to make the solar system necklace work, though, because I think I can do a better version of it than some of the other ones I've seen. Admittedly, those others did include a few that were meant to be fun projects for gradeschool students to work on, but still.
I still need to find the right kind of small tumbled hematite chips, for use in the asteroid belt, and something small for Pluto. Poor no-longer-a-real-planet Pluto.State of Mind: obsessed with BEADS |
|
On the way into school, an obnoxious lady tried to hand me some kind of propaganda postcard, probably to do with Jesus.
I ate a burrito from Taco del Mar for lunch.
I spent a fair amount of time web-surfing in the writing center, which was freezing cold.
On the way home, somebody asked me for directions, and then a few blocks later, I was addressed thusly: "Hey, Darth Vader, you got a dollar for the bus?"
Hee hee.State of Mind:  seven o'clock and all's well |
|
I would have had my first class this afternoon, only the school decided to close at 2:00 because of the weather. The people who had spent all morning fighting ice and traffic to get there were fairly upset about that. It was no particular trouble for me, I just walked back home and made some tea and burnt my finger taking a pizza out of the oven.
My experiments with the very small glass spheres seem to be working. I think the next step is to do a panel in a bigger size, maybe using foamcore. I've been shut down for tonight by the stupid burn on my finger, which insists on being kept on ice, but maybe by tomorrow I'll have the use of my hand again.
|
|
It is very strange to fly out of Pittsburgh in warm rain (with some fog) and land in Seattle with snow on the ground. Everything is all wrong way around.
Even the vaguely thuggish-looking dude in the giant pants with his hoodie-hood pulled over his baseball cap says "Thank you" to the bus driver.
Walking into my apartment, I am immediately struck by how intensely bright the lighting is, and how it looks clean to the point of being sterile. I must have done some vacuuming before I left.
I've been sorting through a month's worth of mail which arrived while I was gone, and it's full of wonderful Christmas cards and presents and such. Hooray! It's always kind of sad and lonely to arrive back here after being around people for a while, but in spite of that I'm all warm and fuzzy because of my backlog of nice postal things.
Also in the mail is my grade report for this semester. I got a D- in my propaganda class. That's a D-Minus. A DEEEEE FUCKING MINUS, WOOOOO. I am simultaneously pissed off and slightly proud of myself. My cumulative GPA has taken a serious dive. Fuck graphic design.
I am not remotely ready to go back to school. Tough luck, sucker.
|
|
Meeting with caterers was very reassuring. It seems possible that this silly wedding may turn out to have some fun bits after all. (They're friends of ours, who used to work with Jack Spade, and they kick ass. It's really a relief to just ditch all pretense of fairy-tale romance, and say things like "Yes, and can there be a plastic flamingo-shaped cocktail pick stuck in the pastry-wrapped Vienna wieners?" AND MAYBE THERE WILL BE. You never know.)
It looks like registering with Amazon is probably going to be the most workable thing. I made a start, but was promptly overwhelmed at the sheer number of amazingly ugly drinking glasses there are in the world. I also discovered that Amazon sells sheets of 18-gauge copper (expensively!) but doesn't provide a handy button for adding them to your Wedding Registry. So it goes.State of Mind:  wahhhhhh |
|
Toast is home now, and looking remarkably lively considering what she's been through. The worst bit was a couple of nights ago, when the vet told us that she had stopped breathing at about 2:30 in the morning, that they had gotten her revived and her heart rate was back up, but that she would need a blood transfusion. That part was bad.
After all that, though, she rallied, and recovered so fast that she surprised everyone at the clinic. She's due for a follow-up exam in another week, and we have to give her antibiotics twice a day for the next month (which the Professor and Jack Spade will be stuck with, since I'll be back in school), but she's acting a lot like her old self. In the right mood, she'll sit on your lap and purr, but mostly she seems to be just as cranky as ever. It's pretty miraculous.
Some of the relatives have been very anxious to explain to me why it's vitally necessary that I register for wedding gifts. Tonight the Professor and I went to a number of stores to see if there was anything we would want to register for. The problem is that neither of us ever actually shop in the kind of stores you register in, and the idea of having tasteful matching bed sheets and window treatments is entirely foreign to my nature. I'm not really sure what to do. After staring for some while at an imposing wall of neatly folded towels, we agreed that it would simplify things considerably if we could register at McMaster-Carr instead.
Tomorrow we have a meeting with caterers.State of Mind:  perplexed |
|
Vigil
|
Jan. 5th, 2007 @ 10:46 pm
|
|---|
|
There have been complications following Toast's surgery. We were up until three or so last night, with phone calls from the vet. This afternoon we went to the clinic to visit her, and she seemed more alert than I might have expected, but they say she's still on pretty shaky ground. So everything is still all horrible suspense, while we wait to see if she improves over the next twenty-four hours or if she gets worse again.
So I'm upset, and tired, and losing track of whatever it was that I was supposed to be working on, during my last week in town.
|
|
The Zombie Gnome
Distressed (With Vest)
The Thing from the Asylum
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Also, there were many small hexagons.
|
|
Toast has been sick. She started seeming a bit lethargic last Thursday, and looked like something hurt—she didn't seem to want to move around much. So Jack Spade called up the vet to make an appointment for her, but because it was coming up on a holiday weekend, nothing was available until Tuesday. However, by Saturday she had stopped eating and was even refusing to drink water, which is always a bad sign. Many phone calls were made, and we found an emergency animal clinic we could take her to. So they hooked her up with an IV to get some fluids into her, and took an X-ray, and said they wanted to keep her there overnight. So we left her there, hoping that once she was re-hydrated, she might start to recover from whatever had made her sick.
We would call them every so often and check in, to ask if the vet had looked at her to find out what was wrong, but kept getting the receptionist, who said that all the emergency staff were busy, and that Toast was the same as she had been. It's expensive to keep a cat at the place, so after two nights of that Jack Spade and the Professor went back and brought her home. We still didn't know what was wrong with her.
Since then we've been giving her medicine twice a day, and droppers full of water, and also droppers full of revolting "food slurry." This afternoon we took her to the regular vet, and she finally got a proper examination. It turns out she has a stone in her gallbladder, blocking her bile duct. The surgeon is supposed to be in tomorrow, and presumably they can take the stone out. Normally this would be a pretty straightforward operation, but nearly a week has gone by, so they tell us there's some chance she may have permanent liver damage.
I'm worried about our poor cat. I want her to get better, and go back to being cranky and purring and unpredictable, to cover me with hair and swat at Otis and leap on the Professor's ankles when he's not expecting it. And I'm really angry at the first clinic, for not getting around to finding out what was wrong with her sooner. I suppose this is unreasonable. Everyone needs a day off sometimes, and I should be glad they were there at all, since the fluids they put into her are no doubt the only reason she's still alive to be diagnosed. But I'm angry all the same, and sad, and wishing we could have somehow made things work out differently.State of Mind:  worried |
|
Yeah, well, with the one notable exception, 2006 pretty much completely sucked. Here's hoping 2007 is better.
|
|
Tim arrived this afternoon. We've made tiramisu, and it tastes just like the real thing. Amazing.
I never suspected that the Professor knew how to play Mortal Kombat, but in fact he can make Raiden teleport and shoot lightning in a most convincing fashion.State of Mind:  wooo tired |
|