The Caitlan Blog

Valentine Postcards (Tutorial)

2012-02-01T23:03:00.000-08:00

I made some valentines from a sheet of thickish clear styrene, and it was harder than I thought it would be. I used spraypaint, and x-acto knife, scissors, deco tape, and a fine tipped sharpie.

The styrene has a layer of plastic protecting it, so I cut away the parts I wanted to spray paint white. This was the hard step. The part with plastic on will stay clear, and the part without will be white. My design had a lot of tiny scallops and the plastic film was clingy but not adhesive, and couldn't see the tiny clear pieces.

Then I spray painted the styrene with two coats of white spray paint. This picture was between coats.

When I peeled off the plastic, the cards looked great. They were impossible to cut apart with the x-acto (it only scored the styrene), so I used scissors, which was kind of hard since I didn't want to snap the plastic by bending it too far.

I was going to do a second layer of spray paint, in red, but the cans were in a cage at blick and no one opened it for me when I lurked near it for a while. So, I put lacy red deco tape from daiso on them, as an accent.

I addressed them on the non spray painted side, and wrote little love notes on the back of the stamps since they'll show through.

Here is a finished front.

One of them is going to Italy, and I am a little worried about that one holding up, but my flexing and scratching tests made me think these will still look great after their trip through the mail.

2/1/12 Resolution Post

2012-02-01T09:09:00.000-08:00

January- Nutrition: I did not finish my January resolution! I tried three of five new recipes. Trader Joe's didn't have any spinach, and then I didn't really want to try Black Bean Brownies in case they took all day and came out gross. But, I managed the part of my resolution wherein I took supplements and (mostly) didn't miss meals. This is the postcard I sent to Hershey, PA for the postmaster to postmark and remail. I sent it as a line drawing and was going to paint it if I succeeded in my resolution, but I need more colors in my January so I painted it anyway.

Next up: February- Yoga. I had a hard time drawing this since classic yoga postures look generic to me and I didn't have a model to make it fresh. I drew a pretty fair imaginary half moon pose- the toes are planted in the actual posture, but it looks more like a moon to have them pointed. It is going to Half Moon Bay, CA, for its postmark. I think this is the only postmark I'm sending off for this year that will be from a town I've visited. HMB is pretty, like everything on the 1, and I believe it does not have a craft store or art store.

I managed several minutes of yoga this morning by running a hulu beginner's yoga video in the background while I got ready for my passport photo. Putting on nice clothes and doing simple makeup took a long time since I'm not used to it any more.

One week down

2012-01-20T23:13:00.000-08:00

So far I do not like working for the USPS. This comes as a surprise, because I am very good at enjoying things and I love the USPS. But the Hayward main post office is not like a club for philatelists and deltiologists (that's postcards) and artists who are together manifesting a mail art renaissance. It is much more like everyone is pushing carts around in a big hurry all day.

I am the youngest person there, and am one of five custodians. I sincerely and wholeheartedly expected to enjoy my stewardship of the Hayward USPS premises. I do not know why I spent the entire week counting minutes and clicks (the post office is on 24 hour time and each hour is marked in hundredths. I like thinking about clicks elapsed but minutes remaining, to make it seem faster. my arithmetic is improving a bit) until I could go and sit in traffic.

I like sweeping, and I like mopping, and I like wiping things down. I like not having any customers and I like wearing the polish off my boots. I like having coworkers. I have been trying to work out what I don't like, and I guess it is that I feel insecure and like I have no one to talk to. Everyone is busy, and no one is new, and no one is young. I don't want to go into some of the offices I am supposed to police because the doors are closed and I don't want to bother anyone.

January Resolution Update

2012-01-15T18:27:00.000-08:00

My January resolution was to focus on nutrition. I'm halfway through January, and have made half of the recipes I planned to try. But, I have not been buying the groceries that make me feel energetic, light, and healthy, like nutritional yeast and coconut oil and couscous.

I gave blood the other day and my iron is high (this was a nice surprise, since I have had trouble keeping it up in the past) but so is my blood pressure. I am not going to worry about that since I didn't do any prep like skipping caffeine or calming down. Still, it is a good call for proper stewardship of my body.

I was sooo excited when this arrived.

It's my resolution postcard arrived from Hershey, PA. Every month I am going to make a postcard representing my resolution, and mail it to the postmaster of a town with a relevant name, so he or she can mail it back to me with their local postmark.

The only reason for this is it gives me something fun to do at the start of the month to kick off the resolution, then it gives me something to look forward to for two weeks, and then when it arrives it reminds me to stick to my resolution.

This resolution is too gradual and easy for the short timeline of a month of focus, so I am changing it a bit. I will still make the remaining healthy recipes, but I will also eat a little bit of protein every morning and pack myself good & balanced bentos for work. I got my bento book out of my storage unit, and I am excited!

New Artistamps

2012-01-15T17:04:00.000-08:00

Artistamps are little works that mimic postage stamps. Sometimes they are issued for a nation of the artist's own design. This little set are experiments that explore US postage, informed by the USPS.

The top left is from a stamp collecting catalog. I carefully cut out the printed perforation and the printed subject. Now they are a pair of frames, to suggest that anything they frame is a forever stamp. The top right is made from a business reply envelope. I like that the security houndstooth suggests perforations as well as the barcode that makes zazzle stamps (custom printed legal postage) usable. I love that barcode- if custom stamps didn't have a horrendous barcode I would have purchased hundreds by now. As for the rest of the artistamps, the blue ones are from a stamp I carved to plant as a letterbox. The mammoth is drawn on a gutter (blank square from the corner of a sheet of stamps) that is partly machine perforated and finished off with my hand perforations. The tin man is drawn on the back of a USPS forever stamp.

I am pretty excited about the tin man stamp. As far as I know, I have just invented using legal postage as a base for imaginary postage. On an envelope the artistamp becomes a secret, but a clear postcard displays both the legal and the fictional postage.

Here are both sides of the stamp, and here is the extremely awesome Kansas Statehood commemorative stamp. I just want to use these for everything. The colors are so fresh and bold.

These are for a swap, so I packaged them up safe in a glassine envelope taped to a clear postcard.

Portholes for the Sub

2012-01-02T17:47:00.000-08:00

Today I worked a little on my car. I thought the next step was a second coat of gold, so I didn't want to spend the money until I found work. And then I got a gift certificate from Blick for Christmas. But I didn't spend anything after all, because when I was evaluating the car today I decided the next step was some portholes fashioned after the stained glass rose windows you get in cathedrals, and ended up making them with things I had on hand.

The silver one is sharpie, and the copper one is vinyl. I had never used a French curve before and it was easy to get the hang of.

Getting the copper one onto the glass was super hard. I started at the left corner and everything got all broken and tangled. I put it right but it's still wrinkly. I am afraid they just look like designs rather than like windows, because there is no light streaming through them. They look very much like windows from inside.

I must have spent ten hours of my life just thinking of names for this thing. I think there might not be anything to call it. Some things are like that. I know it's a super-terra, but it has been since Nissan made the blank. (That is what plain action figures are called before you paint them, and I invented calling cars that before they get art on them, because I have the hang of words.) And of course I've got to name it myself. Maybe this is why, against probability, boats have all got the worst name.

2012 Resolutions

2011-12-30T15:48:00.000-08:00

This year I am setting monthly resolutions. I read that this is a good way to get a lot done. I'll use some months to set new practices in place that in theory will continue past their designated month. Other months are self contained. Last year I did my resolutions faithfully until May. A net gain, and also a failure. To keep on track this year, so that my last 7 monthly goals get a chance, I am doing something kind of finicky with mail, called remailing:

At the 1st of a new month, I will sit down with my resolution and write it and draw it on the front of a postcard. Then on the back of the postcard I will put my own address, and draw a little calendar of the month. Then I will put this postcard into an envelope and address that to the postmaster of a US town with a relevant name. From what I've read, this will get the postcards postmarked with that town's name. I am not sure this is correct, because letters posted in my town get the postmark of the mail sorting center, not the town, but I am willing to try it. And every day I will yearn for the postcard to turn up, and that will keep me on track to completing my goal. When it does turn up, I can record my daily progress on the calendar I've drawn.

January: Learn to cook new healthy foods. Focus on having very balanced nutrition.
Hershey, PA

February: Practice yoga every day. Learn about yoga resources or theory.
Half Moon Bay, CA

March: Go on an adventure.
Globe, AZ

April: TBD
Truth or Consequences, NM

May: Wake up at sunrise, because it is sunrise.
Morning Sun, IA

June: Take time to meditate every day. Do not learn any more meditation theory.
Bliss, NY

July: Swim! Swim until I am worn out, until I can't get out of the pool without using the ladder.
Neversink, NY

August: Spend 40 hours on my current artwork. (track hours)
Paint Lick, KY

September: Be a better global citizen. Conserve resources, share wealth, pay attention to what is happening to everyone.
Blue Earth, NM

October: Take ice skating lessons.
Snowflake, AZ

November: Practice cello 20 hours.
Stringtown, OK

December: Submit JET app.
Satsuma, AL

This method does not seem to promise the wonderful cumulative effect of working on something consistently for a year.

2011-12-05T05:10:00.001-08:00

One of the job boards I check is the one the unemployment office referred me to, caljobs. I lost my caljobs password, and I forgot my security question answers.^ I know I haven't forgotten my first car or the job I wanted when I was a kid, so maybe I am capitalizing differently. I feel like it's rude for the unemployment job board to ask about my dream job. Anyway, the website was down tonight so I felt free to hang out on the swap bot website.

I haven't looked at who is sending to me in the Christmas Card and a Teabag Swap but I thought they might be international since I haven't gotten anything and domestic mail is the quickest (On swap bot the swaps are a round robin or random or something- you don't exchange things with a partner). I sent three cards to the US, one to Finland, and one to the UK. I planned not to look at my senders, so as to be surprised, but I am glad I looked because now I can anticipate mail from the US, Spain, Thailand, Australia, and the Czech Republic.

I was reading my senders' profiles, not for any reason, and two of them stated really strongly that they don't accept unwrapped tea bags. I read all the profiles of the folks I sent unwrapped tea bags to, and none prohibited unwrapped bags so everything is fine, but I feel bad because I have changed my perspective re the appropriateness of unwrapped tea bags. Factory wrapped is the way to send tea to strangers. I was just so excited to share the seasonal Trader Joe's Candy Cane Decaf Green Tea. It is so good. It tastes a little bit like a candy cane and not really like green tea. I guess I don't know what it tastes like. It is my favorite flavored tea, and last year I never stocked up and I had to hoard my last box for months and when I had used it up I didn't throw away the box until I moved. I just kept the box in my cupboard-- it has a narwhal on it whose horn has an ornament tied on with string-- and when offering tea to guests I would point it out.

I have a new project in mind and pretty international stamps will help it lots. The project is a stamp collecting album dollhouse book, made from a dozen oil paintings. The stamps will fill picture frames and so on. I have got as far as ripping the pages out of a book and drawing bricks on the spine and back cover.

^Okay, I figured it out. I made a super hard password to spite the uber demanding password requirements. So, that will show caljobs. Like, it said my password had to include characters from 3 sets, but wouldn't accept my password until I added a character from a fourth set. It was at the limits of my password generating abilities, and people who are a lot less computer literate than I are relying on this service.

"Vintage" Birdcage ATCs

2011-11-29T15:50:00.001-08:00

These are some Artist Trading Cards I made for a swap-bot swap. I like doing ATCs, they are like an assigned sketch topic but fun.

2012 Planner

2011-11-29T14:23:00.001-08:00

I've made a planner for next year. This is the front. For an epigraph I put in some Latin.

It's made from a National Geographic book called Hawaii. I picked it for the gold embossing on teal, but I was reading snippets as I cut it apart and they were very interesting, and mostly about sharks.

I left centimeter wide strips of the original pages and glued printer paper in between them. These pages feel nice to turn through. I want to have it heavily, heavily illustrated but I am out of practice so the illustrations so far are a bit timid. You can see they do not fill up the space allotted them.

My hope is that through a year of filling it up with goals and adventures it will become a little time capsule of 2012.

Harry Potter Christmas Ornaments

2011-11-29T14:11:00.001-08:00

I joined a craft swap to exchange handmade Harry Potter Christmas ornaments, and once I got started I thought of a family we've known forever who are big HP fans and I made a few nice ornaments for them as well.

The snitch has wings of cut paper and I haven't invented how to send it through the mail without destroying them, especially because the gold ball is solid epoxy resin and comparatively heavy. I invented the gold, it is from mixing an acrylic color called Interference Orange (translucent white with glimmer that flashes orange/green) with Burnt Umber (dark brown). I hoped it would turn out light shiny brown, and instead it made a perfect candy bronze. There are heaps of mixable acrylic mediums that I've just steered away from because I don't feel I have time to learn to control them, but this small success is encouraging.

I signed up for the swap hoping my partner would want a little Weasley Sweater, and she didn't seem to, so I made one anyway for our friends the Tersignis. Both sweaters I have knit have been this scale, although I have knit several swaths of fabric meant to be sweater fronts.

It's so rewarding to make things that a ton of talented people have already designed, I can just sit down and turn them out and they're charming. I noticed the same thing when I made my TARDIS, which still no one in VT has visited. I hope they are all snowed in.

Christmas Cards!

2011-11-21T21:15:00.001-08:00

I meant to send my Christmas cards out on Saturday but the Post Office was closed and I only had Liberty Bell stamps, which are a bit grave really. So I had my cards for an extra day, and I made them extra good.

I drew simple messages and hid them under the postage.

I used my dip pen to put some festive illustrations on the backs of the envelopes.

I had to free up my double pointed needles to cast on a tiny sweater ornament, so I finally finished up these socks from last year and they're on their way to my Nana.

I found an advent calendar for a dollar at Trader Joe's, so I put a couple dollars' postage on it and sent it on its way, heavily inked in silver.

a new word

2011-11-16T09:04:00.001-08:00

a new word catches my eye. I perk up, sound it out. pulchritudinous. I want to collect it, but it's so ugly. I expect the writer hasn't selected it for its clarity. Maybe I will just find out, doesn't mean I'll use it. pulchritudinous. I can spell it, at least.
It means having beauty, from the latin pulchritudo. Oh, latin, you are no good at this.

Letterboxing in Golden Gate Park

2011-11-15T13:16:00.001-08:00

I had a really nice day of letterboxing in Golden Gate Park. First we found the Tribute to the Japan Earthquake series, and then we found the Stow Lake Microbox series. We had to hunt pretty thoroughly for the Andy Goldsworthy sculpture outside the De Young that was the starting point of the Tribute clue. The De Young is my favorite art museum. It was closed today but there is loads to look at in the Garden of Enchantment.

The Tribute Letterboxes are sited around the tea garden, although none are inside. Admission to the Hagiwara Tea Garden is free for three hours a week-- 9 to 10am M/W/F-- and neither of us had ever been so it was a treat. There were water features, bridges (wooden and stone), pagodas^ and sculpted gates. I amused myself by picking out bits of the Japanese text on the plaques everywhere and trying to take pictures from from anywhere but the prescribed vantage points.

This bridge seems unusual, you can climb either side like a ladder, and it's very high up.

After we finished the Tribute series, we went to nearby Stow Lake. These were super well carved and cleverly hidden. In the end we'd made nearly two circuits of the lake, all on a generous paved path.

I am excited to exhaust the rest of the Park's letterboxes over a number of daytrips and then spend a day carving on-site and planting a box and devising a clue.

A Visit to Daiso

2011-11-14T20:43:00.001-08:00

In the past I've made a trip across the bay just to go to Ichiban Kan and Daiso, two dollar stores in SF Japan town. I happened to be nearby today so I stopped in to look at the bento supplies. I'm being extra double frugal until I find work, so it felt weird to buy anything. However, I knew exactly what supplies I'm lacking and put back a bunch of cute, cheap things that weren't as useful. I bought a bit of food and some bento gear, and spent less than my budget. I still feel like $19 gone from my no longer periodically replenished savings is a bit of a tragedy.

So, I am cheering myself up by replying to job postings. False! I am cheering myself up by a game I invented wherein I stop spending money entirely until I read all the Japanese info on the packages of the stuff I bought. Things from the Japan Town dollar stores are very thoroughly packaged. With this game I am getting more value from my purchases, by learning, and also taking a break from buying things. I threw away some of the packaging already, so there are five interesting looking pieces to read. This is from a little panda bear that is small enough to ride in a bento and dispense dry seasonings.

Bentos for Nick

2011-11-09T20:44:00.000-08:00

Penguins with Salmon-filled Mountains

After years of wishing for quail eggs, I found some in a mexican market in Fruitvale. I made them into penguins. I think the one with a nori nose looks more streamlined and classic but Nick liked the one with a carrot nose. I was worried that they'd be finicky to handle because they are so small but they are hardly any trouble and taste extra good. They are $1.19 for 10, and each one is 1/4 the size of a chicken egg. So they are not quite a frugal choice. In terms of calories it's like getting a dozen chicken eggs for $5.70, but it's really worthwhile in terms of teeny tiny penguins, pandas, and chickens.

Pasta and Fruit

Pinwheel apple slices are only a bit harder to cut than checkerboard, and much prettier I think. I kind of ruined my first try by melting caramel onto their undersides. Now I know that caramel doesn't stick to the whites of apples. I felt so clever, buying two pieces of caramel from the bulk bins (you just put your quarter in a little metal box, which is really an elegant solution to folks who want to snack on candy in the supermarket). Oh, well. I made the container for the marinara sauce by folding foil around a heart shaped cookie cutter. I based the panda on this one, but it didn't turn out very adorable.

I don't send my special dollar store boxes when I pack bentos for other people because we'd all feel bad if I didn't get them back, but they also don't hold enough for Nick. Hardly anyone could take worse care of my bento boxes than I do. I have two and I've bought about 10. Even though I have everything I need for bento, I want to get more at the dollar store, Ichiban Kan, when I go to SF next week. What if they have a penguin mayonnaise container whose beak is a little spoon? What if they have bento boxes big enough for a grown up lady and covered in bunnies?

2011-11-02T22:08:00.000-07:00

If you have a Christmas with no money, by no means should you tell your children they are missing out and give them cash. You should ideally pass down something from your family, and do it with sparkle and pomp and gravitas, or if you haven't got that in you you could make them something cunning with your special skills, something wooden or a bit of fiction starring them. And if you haven't got children that can appreciate that sort of gift, giving such gifts to them is a start.
Am I going to be so utterly drained by life that I can't coax a stable of unicorns from a few sheets of printer paper, when it counts?

2011-11-02T12:37:00.000-07:00

I packed a bento for the first time in months, and I've lost the knack. I just put together cut up foods that probably could be eaten together. There are salami wraps, cranberries, avocado, and clementine on a bed of celery.

This bento box is from Urban Outfitters in Ohio, and it has a way bigger capacity than the child sized ones I like to get at the SF Japantown dollar store.

I don't have anywhere to be anymore, so I'll just take this on whichever errands I do tomorrow, and maybe I will see someplace nice to sit awhile and eat.

I bought some chicken soup with animal shape noodles, and I was going to heat it and put it in my thermos and go for a walk to the water and eat my hot soup. That way I'd get a bit of exercise and check the seal and heat retention of my off brand thermos without getting too far from home. But instead I opened a can of the soup my mom buys, which is tastier and more expensive, and now I feel like my whole plan is ruined. Eat soup without animals? I'm not nearly hungry enough to resort to that. So it's just sitting in the microwave.

VT Lettersheet Journal

2011-10-31T12:36:00.000-07:00

The last page of my lettersheet journal arrived today. Each page is finished and complete in a way that my usual journaling can't match. They're dated by hand and by postmark. Only one has a drawing but three have images from hand carved stamps. The pages are information rich and layered.

I consider this a successful incarnation, and it suggested loads of improvements for the next one. I need to design the pages to be bound together rather than binding them as an afterthought. Sealing the lettersheets with a gluestick was a mistake. I should draw a lot more, since drawings break up text nicely. And someday I want to start using topical historic stamps. For example, I could get a set of National Park Stamps, and use them over the years as I visit the parks. For the ones that are shy of the letter rate, I could add postage with stamps commemorating that state's statehood or local fauna.

If there is a way to mail a letter from LAX, the Delta counter hadn't heard of it. So, I left my letter on the ledge of a marble planter in the hopes that someone would mail it. I was excited to think of how long it might live in a glove compartment or luggage and what an exotic domestic postmark it might have when it arrived.

It turned out it spent no time at all in a glove compartment as it was postmarked the following day from Santa Ana, CA- 40 miles from where I dropped it. Thank you, anonymous stranger! I can't yet see the shape of the letter dropping project this suggests.

Six Hundred and Sixty Kanji Lessons

2011-10-25T16:29:00.000-07:00

I have been coveting a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of fire in Japanese for years, but when I sat down to order one for my birthday, I realized I'd prefer Order of the Phoenix. It is extremely far above my reading level, so there is no hope of reading it without first translating it bit by bit. of the ~100 kanji (counting repeats) on the first page, I can recognize 42 (a lot of repeats), but not in compound words or anything. Also, a lot of the superscript pronunciations are unfamiliar because I excused myself from learning all the pronunciations of a character and only learned 1. how to write it, 2. what it means in English, and 3. how to pronounce it as a standalone Japanese word.

So I spent last night on nciku.com looking up the first page of kanji by using my mouse as a stylus and I now have a page of translated kanji to refer to when I go back through with my dictionary. This harry potter book is two volumes, 1300 pages together, and my goal is to finish the first volume. I'm sure at that point I will be ready to set this aside and read something else.

Lettersheet Journal

2011-10-09T15:22:00.000-07:00

For my upcoming birthday trip to Vermont I'm going to make a mailed lettersheet journal. Before I go I'll make lettersheets (letters folded up and mailed without envelopes) because that way the postmarks and everything are preserved on the reverse of the letter. I am going through loads of states because that's the cheapest way to fly, and my two hour layovers will give me a chance to hunt down mailboxes and get postmarks from Michigan and Los Angeles. Then, because I am a novice traveler and am flying into the wrong airport, I am going through loads of states via bus or something once I get to the East Coast, and that will provide more postmarks. While I am in Vermont we are going letterboxing, so I'll stamp the letters with those as well, on the outside fronts if they are small enough.

I think it's okay that this is a journal to myself, a collaboration with the post offices of a half dozen states and VT's letterboxers.

ill!

2011-09-18T18:45:00.000-07:00

I was feeling guilty for sleeping all day (from 11am to 6pm), until I realized that a well person couldn't do that anyway. Maaaybe I should have bought Dayquil instead of Nyquil, but it was a frightening orange color, and the mint Nyquil was bad enough. Now I am missing the dinner my house is having to welcome the person who is taking over my room. I am going to do laundry and return library books like a champion. (a champion sews her socks together and returns more than a hundred library books at once).

cleaning

2011-09-11T14:25:00.000-07:00

I like deep cleaning the house. Much nicer than the daily pick up I have to do to keep my shambles livable. My housemates very gently asked if I might help them clean up the common spaces and I agreed even though that's the most difficult way to clean, for me. Xiaona likes to do things together as a group. It's hard for me to listen to the ongoing negotiations about what to do with an empty ketchup bottle or whether corners need to be wiped down. Since we do this so infrequently and none of us have compatible standards the exercise in domestic hygiene takes eons. But I was firm with myself that since I've neglected my patience and let it whither away, I would enjoy this opportunity to develop it. And then, at the agreed upon start time, no one was about and I locked myself in the bathroom and cleaned it. A while later my housemate knocked on the bathroom and I opened the door in my cleaning rags and gloves. He thought I had been in my room and was looking about for something to clean. He joked as he walked away, "somebody tell me what to doooo!" I was locked back into the bathroom by then so it was easy not to say, "find something dirty and wipe it or wash it." Then I wore myself out cleaning under the clawfoot bathtub.

Letterbox for Disneyland

2011-09-03T19:14:00.000-07:00

I made a little letterbox that fastens to steel with strong magnets, because one of my friends might go to Disneyland soon. If she does, and if she wants to bother planting this, I might recarve the stamp. I made it a tiny, tiny logbook too.

Big Sur Topo Map

2011-09-03T19:10:00.000-07:00

I went to Big Sur for the first time two weeks ago.

It is exactly the kind of nature I like, unrelenting beauty. Pescadero was really nice, but there was nowhere to stand and survey it so it all felt like a jumble of greenery to me. I was surprised when I looked at my pictures that it had been so pretty. Anyway, I went to Ventana Camp on a two night backpacking trip. We stayed at the same camp both days, because I needed to rest my back. It was really nice not to have to break camp and hike, even though I like doing that, because it gave me a chance to work on my art in the woods.

I made a letterbox for Big Sur and it didn't quite turn out. I noticed most of the stamps I find are off white, so they must not be the pink colored speedy carve that I use. So I bought some speedy cut, even though I heard it is terrible to work with. And, it was terrible to work with. I took it real slow, and got something I was happy with (Casey would disagree, because I wouldn't stop saying how disappointed I was), and then for no reason in the world it fell apart in half. So I trimmed it up and planted it anyway. Casey said I shouldn't plant something I was unhappy with, but I reasoned that I would be really excited to find this stamp, so I should plant it.

This is the impression I took before it fell apart.

Library

2011-08-26T21:03:00.000-07:00

I was discussing Alzheimer's with a friend and I said I wouldn't be frightened of Alzheimer's because I could live in a perfect, sun filled room, with a rocking chair and a grey cat and shelf upon shelf of my favorite books, which I could read as though they were new to me. That is not strictly true, I am sure, but I have held the comforting image of this library close to my heart this week amongst unusual stressors. I like the idea of cultivating a library around myself like a broken in shoe, a lifelong friend (in the form of a musical instrument), or a garden. So, I've started. I have several sketchbooks and journals, as well as dozens of books I love. Here are some of the threads I am considering working in as series or one offs.

Hollow books to hold my kits and supplies:
-stationary and stamps
-hand sewing
-office supplies
-bookbinding
-letterboxing
-earthquake preparedness
-drawing; pen and ink
like the idea of thick book spines on display, concealing my personal things. A possible iteration of this concept is a bedroom with no personal effects stored in drawers, because they are stored in bookcases in books.

Extant documents bound for permanence and accessibility:
-syllabi, readings, and selected coursework from my undergraduate classes
-a year's worth of grocery receipts or other receipts
-Japanese notes
-letterboxing stamps and journal entries

Altered books:
-Annotated, illustrated, overflowing dictionary
-a book about wyoming I made ages ago

Copyright Ethics

2011-08-16T03:16:00.000-07:00

I am getting pretty good at stamp carving because my fine motor skills and aesthetic judgement are very developed but I went letterboxing today and one of the stamps was just cunningly executed and I want to get to that level. It was the Valencia Post stamp in Aptos. The print lines were consistent, the depth of the removed portion was very consistent and the cuts were shallow. Also the logbook had loads of entries so I know the stamp was used plenty but it wasn't worn out. So I looked online for more advanced stamp carving techniques and found a page with good content and ethics I disagree with.

I know I am a little on the permissive side when it comes to copyrighted works. But I feel like noncommercial use of transferring digital images to handiwork- embroidery, stampcarving, drawing, and so on- is incredibly innocuous and a legitimate use of the images. I use copying constantly in my sketchbook and I don't see how else I could develop. I usually don't make fan art but now that I have I don't feel that the Doctor Who franchise is diminished by it in the slightest.

TARDIS Letterbook

2011-08-14T23:01:00.000-07:00

My second letterbook is a TARDIS. It's going to Vermont with Casey to live in his school library. This is the second in my series of letterbooks.

Here is the book open, with dalek, Tom Baker scarf, and TARDIS. The bottom half of the letterbook is blank pages I glued in to use as a logbook.

I already stamped them all into my personal logbook, like I stamp everything I make, but if I make it to the TARDIS at Marlboro I shall stamp them all again.

This project was time consuming because there was so much to carve out from the book and so many small details, but it was easy because I didn't have to plan out any designs since I cribbed everything from the Whoniverse.

External frame backpack

2011-08-06T18:19:00.000-07:00

Today I ordered hardware from Strapworks for my external frame pack. I got aluminum hardware that's coated in a color called "candy orange liqueur" and silver grey webbing. I am super glad I got specialty stuff instead of trying to make do with what the fabric store had. Oh, I hope it's as beautiful as I am expecting. It will look real nice with the blue and brown of the upholstery fabric I'm using.

This is the detachable day bag. It's all done except for the straps. It took ages because the fabric really does fray a lot so I went around the edge and hemmed it first. Also I am sewing by hand partly on principle and partly because I don't have access to a machine. A machine would be magically fast, but it's nice to have the project unfold over the course of days because I won't make mistakes.

I cut the fabric for the main bag and I am going to start hemming it today. It looks too small but I think it's too big. I am aiming for it to be about the size of my torso, but in my imagination I have this giant torso that's 5" longer and 18" bigger around than in reality, which is where I will be using my pack, so I'll have to cut it down. Maybe.

Update: Everything is sewn! I belatedly realized I'll need grommets for the drawstring closure, but Strapworks doesn't sell them so I don't have to feel bad that I already ordered my hardware.

Clothes

2011-08-06T16:39:00.000-07:00

The Dharma Trading Co website has a great tutorial for an American Flag inspired tee shirt.

I think it's too cute and I would love to have a sundress like that. I cleared out my closet today in preparation for my move this fall, and I saw lots of nice clothes I forgot about. I've been about the same size for years now and I like going thrifting, so I have a lot of clothes. I feel like there is no reason for me ever to look less than put together, because I have all these pieces and I have a good eye. But I only look extra nice every once in a while. Maybe it's because I'm not my best in the morning, which is when I dress.

External frame backpack

2011-08-05T04:02:00.000-07:00

I went backpacking with a borrowed pack last month. The trip was great and the pack was great, but it felt wrong to be in the wilderness relying on equipment I wasn't familiar with. I didn't know how the straps worked together or what gear went on the outside. And I need a lot of time to work things out, so I didn't really get the hang of it during the three days I had the pack.

I decided to build a pack. If I were going to do this really properly I would buy a pack and take it apart and put it together to get a handle on the construction, but on accident I thought about how good upholstery tweed would look in a 1940s rucksack silhouette and it was settled. The only thing is, I am the littlest bit stubborn so if this pack isn't comfortable I will still take it to the ends of the earth because I am so attached to it.

The frame is some crutches. I was excited to find them because I don't know where to get aluminum pipes. So far they are a little difficult to work with. The molded plastic is attached really permanently. And I thought I might preserve the height adjustable portion, but I accidentally broke one of the tubes while I was flexing it.

I wanted wool tweed but at the fabric store the synthetic tweed upholstery felt fuzzy, like it would pick up dirt amazingly on the trail. So I got something crisp. It was lucky I picked a geometric pattern because it made cutting straight lines easy- I don't have a good work surface for projects this large.

Living with roommates

2011-08-05T03:04:00.000-07:00

My house is quietest in the late afternoon and early evening, so I moved my main phase of sleep to 6pm. I am the only person who has to be up in the morning, so I am being flexible. That is why I wasn't mad when at 1:21am an extended revenge/torture movie with uncharacteristically slow and dull dialogue woke me up. I just put on music and made my dinner. And, now I don't have to feel bad about setting alarms in quarter hour increments from 5:45 on, even though realistically I am never going to get up before 6:30. Yesterday, nothing woke me in the middle of the night so I slept for 11 hours.

Submarine

2011-08-01T17:23:00.000-07:00

The submarine is coming along. I finished modding the original dashboard, and I need to carve out space for the rest of the control panel. I used the one shot enamel I used for the body to outline all the indicators. Once Casey helped me get the dashboard cover off it was easy. I had a super hard time keeping a steady hand, however. It was hard to decide how much to modify these. I sort of wanted to make everything seriffed by covering part of the white numbers, but that was too hard. I don't want to lose day and night visibility.

I have not quite figured out how to incorporate the rest of the control panel. I want a clock, a thermometer, and a compass. I have the clock and the thermometer. The compass has to be a sphere, like on a boat, so I can read it from a side view.

If I can find a good price for a pretty altimeter I will get one of those as well.

letterboxing

2011-07-20T00:29:00.000-07:00

Today was a very good day for my new hobby, letterboxing, and a very bad day for my other projects. Letterboxing is when you take a personal stamp (one you've carved or one you love) and a journal and go out in the world with a clue to the location of a box with a journal and a stamp in it, and when you find it you stamp each journal with the other's stamp. The clue is usually very concrete, like a suggestion to go to a particular intersection and look under a bench. At work I described letterboxing to my coworker and she got really excited and she found a clue online for a nearby letterbox. We went straight to it-- without even getting stamps and journals-- after work and it was really neat.

Then I went home and started working on a letterbox of my own to plant on campus. I carved a pretty good stamp for it. Then I made a simple logbook- only one signature of pages. Every step took double long because I was filming in case I want to make a video about letterbox installation, which I do.

When I was mostly done with the letterbox, I carved another stamp. This is my stamp, the stamp that I stamp into logbooks of letterboxes that I visit.

It is a giraffe.

An olden times dutch painter I like, Hieronymus Bosch, has a great painting of a giraffe that doesn't look at all like a real giraffe (he'd never seen one) but all the essential giraffe parts are represented. Also he is a terrific painter. On the right is a sketch I did from his painting, which I then sketched onto a carving block and carved. I took a picture of both together because I was impressed at my consistency. The size is even similar, and the differences are mainly things I changed deliberately. So I guess my hands are getting really well trained.

When I was done cleaning up my stamp I made a little hardbound notebook. In the past I have been drawn to graceful, spare simplicity in bookbinding. It's satisfying because everything lines up just right and the knots are perfect and the weaving of ends is clever. But, you have to do a really perfect job so it takes a long time. To make my new letterboxing journal I smeared a lot of glue over everything and used card tabs to reinforce the binding and when my first set of endpapers got stuck I glued more endpapers over them. It's drying under some bricks right now and when it's ready I will go out into the world with it. Making all this took my entire evening but I am satisfied.

grumping

2011-07-12T18:51:00.000-07:00

I try to enjoy the parade of my moods as they pass by, and today's mood was "grumpy." First I woke up two hours late, despite going to bed five hours early yesterday. I woke up exhausted so I called in sick. Then I fought entropy in my household and friendships, in between drinking four cups of caffeine tea. I took one or two showers. I don't have any towels right now so I couldn't tell. (Usually, if my towel is wet it means I took a shower.)

I clean every day and my room never gets clean because it is too full, so I got rid of some things and put other things away really good. My doorknob got oily and I have no idea how, and I didn't clean it and then later it wasn't oily. Then I studied a bit and took a nap. I sleep with the window open so my room doesn't get stuffy, and after an hour I woke up to the sound of my housemates talking baby talk to our cat really loudly in the driveway, outside my window. Oh I was so grumpy at that. I GET IT YOU GUYS YOUR TEN YEAR OLD CAT IS A BABY AND THAT'S WHY IT CAN'T READ WORDS YOU SPELL OUT ALOUD IN BABY TALK.

So I flounced to the store, the bank, and the other store. At the first store I forgot to give the cashier my tote until the end. At the bank my cashier was aggressively fake friendly without the friendliness. It was kind of interesting but I still didn't like it. And the calculator provided for us to play with in line had super sensitive keys so it said my next paycheck would be near four million dollars, but it actually won't because my employer knows how to work a calculator.

Then at the last store I said a cuss, out loud, without checking the environment for children (I did afterward and there were none) and I don't remember why but I think it is because the soda aisle looked really long to walk down, but it wasn't that long actually. I was embarrassed standing in line because I had like two quarts of crisco, two pounds of cheese, a lot of top ramen, and a big box of coke. I know no one is judging anyone else, but I like to play "grocery store detective" in long lines so I assume other people are as well. THAT'S WHY I LOOK LIKE I HAVE THE DISEASE "EXHAUSTION," BECAUSE MY DINNER IS ALWAYS INSTANT NOODLES AND CHEESE IN CRISCO. I HAVE THE DISEASE, "GOURMAND." When I told the checker about my reusable tote bag she ignored me (the safeway express lane counter is very high so she couldn't see me holding it out) because she was busy with another cashier. I stomped my foot and rolled my eyes and head, like a rude pony, because I guess I thought I had the right to, as I was invisible. But the guy in front of me in line noticed and helped me out by interrupting the cashiers to tell them about my bag. Then I felt grateful but embarrassed.

Then a man who was parked next to my car was too shy to pull out in one go, and took a year to get out of my (pedestrian) way while I was weighed down by all my oils and sweeteners and I wanted to tell him he was alllllllll clear but I knew I had a grumpy face on and probably a grumpy voice so I left him to his own devices.

A Terrible Saturday

2011-07-09T11:06:00.000-07:00

I spent all week looking forward to Saturday. As Saturdays go, this one is a big disappointment. I didn't disable my alarm so I woke up at 5:30. Then I had some tea and burned a cd and packed up my laundry and put money on my laundry card. Then I went to the laundry place at Kresge and it was closed. So I went to the Kresge East laundry room and the grad student laundry room and they were closed. So I spent a boring hour filling the hex nuts on my car with putty (at home I can't work on the left side of my car because it's not allowed in the driveway). Also I tried to scratch the enamel off my car with my nail and I could. So now I have to buy primer and it has to be the same brand because of compatibility and there aren't any distributors in town so it will be like two weeks before I am driving a presentable car. While I was on campus I checked the Porter laundry room, which my maintenance card didn't open. So then I came home to my stripped bed and moderate untidiness. I had been looking forward to this wide open weekend for weeks. Laundry and working on my car were my only special two goals of today, and I got thwarted. Now I just have my dumb goals that I hate.

Dumb Goals That I Hate For Saturday July 9th
[ ] wash dishes
[ ] take out trash
[ ] wash bathroom
[ ] latin
[ ] transcribe dmv manual
[ ] sort clothes for free box
[ ] pay overdue parking ticket
[ ] find out why my car smells moldy and stop it
[ ] sort books to go back to library
[ ] read
[ ] library for french books
[ ] configure my external hard drive or whatever

It's difficult because this isn't scheduled to be an idle day, and yet everything so far has been too difficult.

1shot enamel

2011-07-06T18:51:00.000-07:00

I know people use a sprayer to paint cars. I don't have space where spraying would work, and I am very good with a brush. I used all my tricks and wiles. And that paint was like, "Yeah, I'm metallic gold. You're getting brushstrokes." And I was like, "Noooooooooo." It's a thin, quick drying oil based paint that has amazing pigmentation and a tendency to drip. I put it on in sections, starting at the bottom with horizontal strokes that I blended vertically into the next horizontal stroke. At the end of each vertical stroke I reduced pressure a lot and feathered the brush across the drying paint. I didn't get a picture because I had to come inside to calm down.

Later:
Okay, I calmed down.

Now that I know I'll have brushstrokes I guess I will have to use them somehow to mimic metal surfaces. I could use scumbling to mimic burnishing. I guess I could learn more about faux finishes in metal.

Polymaths

2011-07-05T15:38:00.000-07:00

I spent a bit of contemplative time in the woods this weekend feeling down that other people are better than me am in their fields. To cheer myself up, I told myself that everyone is good at something and no one is good at everything. For example (I told myself), I am good at ignoring mosquito bites and keeping track of the trail map, and choosing trailmates who can read a map. It didn't really help. Then I realized that I only need to get really good at one thing- being a polymath. I don't need to be like a special famous one, just a regular polymath such as any philomath might become. I mean, maybe I don't have the specialest brain, but I have lots of advantages da Vinci and them didn't, such as the works of da Vinci and them, electricity, standardized spelling and so on. So when I got home, after a hot bath and a good night's sleep, I sat down to invent and to learn taxonomy and then Latin and when and how everything was invented, and then I calmed down.

Night-thirst

2011-07-01T22:41:00.000-07:00

I made two pint glasses of water before my nap this evening. Then I woke up thirsty two times. I thought I was drinking from the same glass but when I woke up properly I saw that I was exactly! the same amount thirsty both times.

So am I always the same amount thirsty? Is everyone? Neat.

Internet

2011-06-29T18:30:00.000-07:00

I heard that Prince doesn't want to distribute his music on the internet because the internet is just a fad. Everyone scoffed at this, because the internet is exciting magic that lets you learn anything and contact anyone and buy anything from anywhere and also it is mostly free. But suppose it is indeed a fad, and my cohort's kids think nothing could be duller than fingertyping and eyescanning an internet page? I already know everything, they could say, and what I don't know I am happy to learn by slow and careful observation and tracking. I already have more than enough belongings to take care of, they could say, and by the way do you need anything? I suppose in my generation each family and school district acquired internet across a range of years, but I remember well when I had a computer cut off from everyone else's, and liked it. It had a program under the start menu that let me practice using a mouse pointer by clicking on one of five bright colored, numbered polygons. At nine years old I could barely type* but the idea of anyone unable to use a mouse, and yet able to learn to use a mouse, was absurd to me. Incidentally, I was fairly obsessed with whether each person I met could type, and how fast, and how they learned, and how long it took, until I learned properly, through practice, at about 12.

*I knew where the keys were, by a mnemonic that went: qwehrtieopp and azduhfuhguhhuhjaykayel and mom,mom,caitlanvandewalle,dad,nick,matthew/mark,period, but for the life of me I couldn't route my fingers to their destinations in a timely manner.

Submarine

2011-06-25T13:27:00.000-07:00

I decided to make my car into a fake submarine- a superterra with Jules Verne/Victorian era submarine styling. My Dad had an art car when I was a kid, and I have always kind of wanted to make one. I am sooooo super happy I waited until I got an art degree under my belt though, because my follow through and motor skills have developed a lot. I am starting small, with the internal accouterments- a ship's log for my maintenance records, binding my DMV manual in leather, temperature and depth gauges on the dashboard- and I am very pleasantly surprised that I have failed at all of this sort of thing so many times already that I'm around the corner and can easily throw together successful pieces on my first try.

Here is the first example. I sat down to make a cd label (for my whale song/Pirates of the Caribbean mixtape), which I have never done before, and a couple minutes later I had a totally reasonable one.

I printed a model of the Nautilus on a partially used cd label page I found at school, then since the resolution was real bad I inked it.

I bet I moved a ton of stuff this week.

2011-06-05T12:31:00.000-07:00

Physically, I wore myself out very thoroughly this week.
Monday: Mom said I couldn't carry the boxes of her new expedit bookcase in from the car, because together they weigh 150 lbs. So I did. And I knocked off her mailbox, but I put it back. Anyway then we had to spend like 2 hours putting that nonsense together, and I wore out my wrist screwing a thousand things together with an allen wrench. Then I put a small but heavy dresser/desk into my car and took it out- both times with help. Then I brought a small bookcase to school and installed it.

Tuesday: Ferried books to my "office" from the library

Wednesday: Returned all of my filming equipment to Media Services on the bus because parking is a headache. The tripod and flash camera were easy, and the light kit was very hard. It's a hard sided case with a lot of bulbs, cords, three tripods, those metal boxes that shield the bulbs and have barn doors attached, and the rest of the accessories are pretty light.

Thursday: Installed my brick barbell and bricks. Pushed an anvil and section of tree trunk across the metal shop (I had help for part of the way). Carried and dragged 45 books (with assistance) up the hill from the library to the art department.

Friday: moved my whole installation-with bookcases now full- to put carpet under it, then moved it back. Someone put the anvil back where it belongs but I didn't feel up to pushing it back where I needed it for my installation.

Saturday: Slept, nursed purported hangover symptoms that were more probably from lack of sleep and exertion.

Sunday: moved all of my furniture to one side of my room, polished the floor, moved it to the other side, polished the floor.

Monday: Moved all sculptures and installations (2 carloads) home from school.

Minimum Wage Project

2011-06-02T19:21:00.000-07:00

So I have heard fifty and sixty thousand dollars tossed around as starting salaries that new grads unrealistically expect to earn. I was thinking it might be interesting to try my hardest for six months or a year to earn that through making the CA minimum wage, which is $8/hour. I was thinking I could get hired at Taco Bell, McDonalds, Burger King, and Jack in the Box. But I guess it would be impossible because that is a bit over 120 hours per week, and even though that seems like it might be doable on my end for a few weeks, employees don't have input into which hours they work so coordinating that across companies would be impossible.

I went in to Taco Bell today to pick up an application and I ended up buying a meal because it was $2.63 and I was like, how can there be a meal for $2.63? Anyway, the man helping me, Matthew, was really confused, and rang me up wrong a couple times and couldn't fix it because only someone with a manager's card can make changes. So his shift leader, whose nametag said Anggie, sent him to the back and rang me up. And I felt terrible. I hoped he was high because if his current state was a fair representation of the toolkit life has provided him with he should not be left to fend for himself at a job. So that made me mad. I had time to read the English portion of the whole 6 page application while I waited for my meal, which was a carryout order because I felt sick and there was a strong astringent smell in the restaurant. Then I went next door to McDonalds- I felt a bit bad because I had a bag from their competitor, but at least I was otherwise well put together- and asked for an application, but I have to apply online.

Anyway, my dinner was tasty and I'm glad my project is logistically impossible because I did not like it in that Taco Bell and my reserves are really diminished. But I was excited for a while because reading the application made me realize the project would pretty much conduct itself once I set it in motion. Here are some highlights:
Listed under "PHYSICAL DEMANDS" is:
"communicating, tasting/smelling, tolerating extreme cold, tolerating noise."
Listed under "Mental/Emotional Aspects of the Team Member position" is:
"Percent of total job that is repetitive: 50"
and under "Education" it instructs me to,
"PLEASE LIST ALL JOB-RELATED ORGANIZATIONS, CLUBS, OR ACTIVITIES YOU ARE/WERE INVOLVED IN AT SCHOOL, EXCEPT THOSE THAT INDICATE RACE, RELIGION, COLOR, NATIONAL ORIGIN, ANCESTRY, SEX, OR AGE." Okay. I have never seen a poster for a student group that didn't include one of those explicitly, except coed intramural teams.

I guess I will keep thinking about how exactly this endurance peice should play out.

On Chambermaiding

2011-05-28T21:29:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting in my filthy bedroom reading Tiger Beatdown's commentary* on the We Are All Chambermaids slogan at the French rallies in support of the woman who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of attempted rape. Flavia wrote that the slogan isn't real solidarity since it erases the different levels of vulnerability that women experience across the class and power spectrum. And I thought, I would like a maid.

I graduate in two weeks and whenever I am not doing school stuff I am sleeping, and at this point I can't wash my dishes or my housemates will realize I have 30 dishes hoarded in my room. And I needed my bookcases for an installation I'm doing on campus, so I just piled everything in the corner. And I can't take two steps with all of this dumb lighting equipment everywhere. So, I would like to be reciprocal maids with someone. I could clean her place when I am bored and she was busy, and hopefully our finals would be at different times so we could both have a clean room all the time. This won'tt do a thing for women who are maids for a job, but I think it is a good way for me to not clean up after myself without being awful about it.

I have worked as a maid for four months or so at the hostel, and it was okay. It was nice because it isn't rich people who stay there. A lot of the regulars don't have permanent housing so I kind of liked making sure at least the bathroom was dehaired for them. Anyway, now I have to get dressed up Stepford wives style because a friend is coming over to watch me clean.

*here is the link, but on my computer each word is a separate line.

Brick Barbell for Metal Fab

2011-05-26T12:20:00.000-07:00

I weigh all the weight!

Home Project Metal Fab

2011-05-25T23:33:00.000-07:00

Our final project for Metal Fabrication is on the subject of home. I am remaking the metal book (formerly a purchased photo album) of homes of loved ones from my piece last quarter, What I Would Save In a Fire.

This is my house where I live now- ground down plasma cut sheet metal

I couldn't buy embroidery floss today because I forgot where the sewing store is and the art store only had big packs that included a lot of colors I don't need, so I used paint to plan out where I can anchor the colors.

This is my whole little book before I sanded it- the discoloration is from heat from the plasma cutter.

Here it is sanded, cleaned with denatured alcohol, and coated with clear spraypaint.

Metal Fab: Metal Notebook

2011-05-20T20:52:00.000-07:00

This notebook is a birthday present for my little brother. It's made from 18 gauge mild steel.

The inside is filled with fancy graph papers (hex, polar, crosses, one point perspective) I printed off incompetech.com. I cold bent the hinge with a hammer and pliers. The hinge pin is a piece of rod that I built up on the ends with weld. The N is written in weld and then ground flat, and I also ground off the sharp edges all around. The graph paper part took a bit more than an hour and the metal part took two and a half hours.

Why Reagonomics and Keynesian Economics Failed

2011-05-20T14:37:00.000-07:00

HC 106.8 S28 1987

It is because people hoard surpluses instead of reinvesting them. Okay, this book showed me what happens when tables are translated directly into paragraphs. It is boring and harder (for me) to follow. So I guess I should be glad that most books use tables.

New Video Skills!

2011-05-19T19:34:00.000-07:00

Fall quarter, I wrote

I am having an extremely hard time thinking like a filmmaker. My professor told us to think of it as sculpting in light and time. My strong inclination is to point the camera at something I like and not move it except to replace the dv tape every hour. I am comfortable with the camera as a tool for recording but not as a tool for point of view or explanation or composition.

But today that switch was flipped and I can do it now, I can make videos. I'd been trying all week to hit my vimeo upload limit of 500mb, which is 20 of my videos. I didn't reach my target, but I did force myself to think in terms of videos all week, and tonight I made this:

Then I made a video diary about how much i liked it but it turned out bad so I made a second one and then I watched them both at once and they synced up in content, sentence by sentence, but not in phrasing, so I recorded them (that is called 2-channel video) and then I spliced together:

1. webcam video diary #1

2. webcam video diary #2

3. laptop display of video diaries, captured with camcorder

4. camcorder video I recorded during video diary #2

I'm excited not because either of these are good but because my brain works in a new way all of a sudden after months of trying.

Math Feelings!

2011-05-14T10:36:00.001-07:00

In April my housemate had to add some numbers so I showed her how I can do it in my head --I had been doing drills for a week or so-- and she said that was stupid and could I find my calculator. So I started crying. Not crying like something bad happened right then, but crying like something was painfully, permanently wrong. That showed me that I need to make it a priority to work out my math issues, so I am.

I'm considering buying a simple K-12 set of workbooks and working on it every day- preferably in public like in a cafe, the library, or at the bus stop. While researching these, I found out that some systems are meant to be long spiraled, and I got chills. They did that on purpose? I thought I had to learn absolute value, variables, and so on over the course of 8 years because the standards were sloppily implemented across grades. By the way, the thing about chills wasn't hyperbole- I am still trembling and my hands are white.

That project is a big commitment of time and money, so I decided to start smaller and work my way through a couple of books that I have on hand, Stats and Algebra I and II.

This whole math aptitude and feelings thing has been in the works for rather a while, as evidenced by this video I made last year:

In fact there is a seven minute version of this that is much better, but it is trapped on my external hard drive that is configured for macs.

Food

2011-05-13T13:34:00.000-07:00

Voltaire was quite right that eating is a hassle when you don't like it. I have been eating intermittently for a few days (I suppose I am ill) and I am pretty hungry. I had lunch yesterday but I am ready for some more food. But I haven't felt like shopping and I don't keep much around usually so I've just got grains and condiments. Maybe a can of fish. I tried to make a list of foods I like, but it looked like what toddlers eat and also, none of it sounded good.

I have things to do today, and I sort of feel like I will need a nap if I don't have some lunch, so I looked on allrecipes.com, which admittedly was a long shot.

I should probably just make some rice, but it would be hot, and wet. Well, being a little hungry for a few days isn't anything to worry about.

An Annotated Course List

2011-05-13T12:02:00.000-07:00

Frosh:

Power and Representation: Where we were supposed to learn about privilege while we learned to write properly. Our theme was The Personal Is Political. I took our syllabus very seriously and when I had missed three classes, which was past the maximum for passing, I went to my professor in tears and she was like, "What?"

Intro to Linguistics: Studying X-rays of the mouth, learning a new truly phonetic alphabet- I had fun, but studying for this class had a lot of memorization.

Intro to Acting: I loved this. We would all just exercise our limbs, faces, and voices for like half an hour and then watch stuff. Our professor was too much, our TA was awesome, and my classmates were mostly theater students, too young to hide how impressed they were by themselves. And everyone was so pretty.

Space Age Solar System: My professor was an Australian man who would find a new stick every class to use as a pointer. He was beyond excited about German, Russian, and American engineering, and I got my Qualitative requirement met with this class that had one equation. Instead of a book we had online resources, which I printed out at 5x4 and made into a tiny book.

Intro to Microeconomics: Giant auditorium up a steep hill. My professor was engaging but the material wasn't. I think I didn't buy the book, or something.

Sovereignty and Intervention: My only Political Science class. Everyone in this class was super aware of, like, everything that happened internationally, and the things that led up to everything that happened internationally, and most people seemed to know who the heads of all the countries were and what kind of government they had and I could not catch up in two months.

2D Foundation: Our TA hated her job because it wasn't grad school in Pasadena, and I made pretty good works but I don't have a 2D background. Still, I was only outclassed by a few students.

The Stars: My professor was a nice British lady who would tell us neat stories about life as an astronomer. I learned kind of a lot about physics but it was so improbable that I forgot it.

Contemporary Architecture: This class taught me how to write and talk about art for the first time. My professor would never complete a sentence or a thought so there was no way to organize my notes as I went except to really listen for the terms that resonated for me and try and get them written next to the correct architect, artist, or (usually) critic.

Soph:

Statistics: We ate a lot of cookies in this class. My book never arrived from Amazon so I bought one full price 2/3 of the way into the term and I got a calculator at the end of the term. Surprisingly, I did indeed learn statistics.

Intro Visual Arts: I think this was my only big lecture class in Art. It was art of the twentieth century, and just touched on the biggest names of the American movements. Still, the book from this class is one of my favorites, great photographs and blurbs that I actually know the story around.

Intro Macroeconomics: iclickers. Couldn't understand my TA. My favorite part by far was applying our simple charts to things happening in the news, a skill I have unfortunately lost.

3D Foundation: Everyone in this class was so cool. The first legit piece of art I made in school was a briefcase that imitated Duchamp's ready mades.

Economic Justice (W): I don't even know what I was supposed to do in this class. It was like upper division primary school. In retrospect, I was confused by the writing expectations. In art history you write as though your reader has heard of what you are writing about. In Economic Justice you write as though there isn't anything at all, like intro to philosophy probably is.

Art of Africa/ Oceania/Americas: This was the most satisfying incarnation of the What Is Art theme that we have to address endlessly. To us, calling a painting or a sculpture Not Art is rude, because art is elevated, but to "elevate," as art, works that people from other cultures produce for practical reasons, costuming, or worship is not polite but rather a holdover from our colonial inheritance. I really liked that. We also couldn't pass this class without getting 100% on a world map quiz of the places we were studying. I liked that too.

Intro to Drawing for the Major: I am glad I learned to draw because it is so useful in communicating ideas.

Overview of the Universe: I have taken a few Astro classes for non majors and this one was no fun. There were a few exciting days where we learned about spectra or copernicus, but in between there was notes, notes, notes. And of course, in a non major class that is difficult because the class isn't a prereq; it's not leading up to anything.

Issues and Problems in American Society: This was my one sociology class, which I completely loved and was somehow very bad at. I felt like I had to watch for sloppiness in the info and graphs we were presented with-- since I agreed with the broad points and wanted everything I learned to be usably vetted-- and of course people find what they're looking for. It was a freshman class, and I got a C.

Junior:

Intro to Electronic Intermedia: This class is the only reason I learned how simple it is to do even quite impressive electronics things if you use tutorials and can spend a while learning about your components from the ground up. But, since we devoted ourselves to getting sensors and leds to work, our actual sculptures were not at all in line with our skills. Something about having to conceal wires in a way that viewers can use them without assistance and without breaking anything, and in a way that is removable when things need fixing, led us to rely heavily on cardboard and gaffer's tape.

Intro to Painting (Acrylic): I was very unambitious in this class.

Intro to Computer Science (NP): My friends in the Computer Science department assured me that this was going to be absurdly easy- it's not Computer Engineering, after all. I didn't believe them, but I was astonished at how out of my depth I was. As in, the first day of class I thought the professor was asking rhetorical questions that we would learn during the course but then people raised their hands and answered correctly. As in, in the computer lab I could not log on, even with a monitor's help, to do the assignments.

Victorian America: Pretty much every day of this class was fascinating. We learned about Victorian American society through the visual art of the period. We learned about the spread of photography and the first moving films, the architecture, politics, and galleries of the World's Columbian Exhibition, conventions of portraiture and the social constraints- racial, gender based, financial, and class based- on painters and sculptors of the time. And on the first day I thought I wouldn't like the professor because he spoke so calmly and repeated a lot of words.

Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora: I don't know how but I was totally outclassed here, which is what I call it when everyone is just producing all of this great stuff with no help. I passed this class because I admitted I needed the professor to hold my hand and I told her my huge vague topic and she teased a thesis out, or maybe she gave it to me. The critics we read were so smart and it was amazing to feel myself developing a vocabulary for understanding totally important artists I'd never heard of.

Independent Study: Sculpting with Light: I loved my professor for this, and I think he graded me a bit leniently. I had forgotten I did this class at the same time as two difficult art history classes, which explains why I didn't produce as much as I would expect in a self directed course. Still, my midterm and final pieces were really solid.

Special Topics- Anything Goes: This is one of the two best classes I ever took. My professor expected so much of us, and yet when we were like, "No. That hurts our feelings." she dialed it back. But, she had revealed what she actually expected which I try to use as a benchmark even now. Basically, working as though each piece has to be gallery ready the day before it is due, and then spending that day making it perfect. I know this was an incredible class because seriously every person produced awesome and interesting work.

Public Art II: I don't know what it was about this class but I had a terrible time with deadlines, cooperating, getting the reading done on time. Partly I was taken aback at the scope and daring of he projects we read about and the works the 2D artists produced, while also feeling let down at the things people produced that my professor loved.

Imagining Utopia: This 3 unit writing class was lovely. It was like I imagine small college to be. We sat outside on the hottest days, we read loads of fiction books, and our professor said we could all have As because he knew we would produce great things in collaboration, and we did. Our final papers were so nakedly true and optimistic. And, this class was like a no minute walk from my apartment.

Senior:

Digital Video: I worked so hard in this class, and the things I produced were so poor, but now I have a passing familiarity with the techniques, rules, and resources of video work. My stuff was as boring as the early film stuff, where the camera is set up and runs on and on in a single shot, without taking advantage of the medium. But now I can organize and put together a simple video to document my sculptures and performance pieces. I love this because it's

Metal Sculpture: I made good art and I found out metal is wonderfully intuitive but physically unpleasant- the smells, sounds, and temperature of the metal shop take a lot out of me.

History of Clothing and Costuming: This class was pretty fun and easy.

Intermediate Oil Painting (NP): I got better at painting, and learned to paint in oils.

Special Topics- Intimate Body/Public Body: I loved my classmates and prof. Usually I do fiber art and textile work at home because I don't need studio space for it, but it was great to bring that part of my work to class because it meant I got feedback and had to push pieces to the point that they were ready for critique and showing.

Art and Power in Participatory Culture: My teacher for this was a genius, and very engaged in the subject. By the end of the term I could sit down and turn out a good essay in a few hours since I had the hang of it. However, there was no chance I was going to finish all the reading- I am a good reader but this was the kind of thing I had to read with a dictionary at hand, and there was so much of it. I figured that it would be as cheap to buy a kindle for the pdfs as it would be to print them, but instead I just printed the ones we talked about a lot in class.

Metal Fabrication: I've made my first ambitious metal piece, with everything measured and jigged and clamped- my brick barbell. I've also made two pieces that just came together for me with hammering and welding- the chastity belt and necklace.

Senior Studio- Intermedia: Intermedia is the best discipline. Everyone has different backgrounds (printmaking, metal, community studies, woodworking, design, painting) and we are all making whatever we want. And we're seniors and it shows. It is awesome to have a class where the assignments are to make progress on your project and write about it.

Brick Barbell for Metal Fab

2011-05-12T11:37:00.000-07:00

Our assignment was to create a tool for the new revolution- an object in direct response to an object in our daily lives, that recontextualizes it.

So:

The model that my family provided is that ladies are very, very strong, and men are strong also but they defer to ladies for heavy things, and children are strong but the world is not built to their scale. I internalized the lesson that someday, if I ate my dinners, I too would be Big and Strong. But the broader world was not in line with this model and as I became a full grown lady many people carried on expecting me to have the strength that I ascribe to kids.

I made this brick barbell to carry around places. . This way if anyone has anything to carry or push that is comparable in weight to twelve bricks (I haven't weighed it properly but I think it weighs half as much as I do), they will know straight away that I can help. And if I am carrying groceries or laundry plus twelve bricks,

1. obviously I really like carrying things that are heavy to me

2. if they insist on helping me I will still have my brick barbell to carry.

I wrote up several little examples from my life of times I did not successfully project competence (most aren't about physical strength) and wrapped them around other bricks, which I will display with the barbell.

Mother's Day 2011

2011-05-09T00:25:00.000-07:00

I think a nice thing to do when you are an out of town guest of someone you love, is to leave little love notes all over.

My mom was a very good finder though, and found two of them while I was still there. The first one she found was in the mailbox, and I really don't understand why she would look in the mailbox on Sunday. I was very discreet, except when she saw me looking at the cards in my hand, impressed with my own drawings, and I said, "Look over there.* Don't look. Did you look? It's nothing. It's not for you." Yeah, I didn't have to get away with anything when I lived at home, because I didn't do anything.

*people do better with something you ask them to do than something you ask them to not do.

Eating Contest

2011-05-08T23:53:00.000-07:00

I haven't been up to Oakland in months, and I am so glad I made the time to go up for Mother's Day. Honestly I have to cram 3 days worth of work into tomorrow evening to get ready for crits, but I can deal with that.

I went to my dad's gratitude party, picked up my car registration from my old house, took Mom to SF (where she took me to lunch), and had a unilaterally cathartic visit with my ex bf. The only major thing I didn't manage was quality time with my brother. We went on a gas can adventure, he told me about his video game, I teased him a medium amount about computer stuff*, but we didn't really have as much bonding as I hoped. Although, now that I think about it, we had an eating contest at the buffet Sweet Tomatoes. He challenged me to one, and because he had already eaten rather a lot that day, I accepted. 20/20 hindsight.

But it was fun because I trash talked for about two hours. I am usually not a great trash talker but I was in the zone. I must have said, "This is how a WINNER does it," (for things like selecting a tray and going back to get the fork I forgot) two dozen times. And I ate both my bowls of soup at the same time, which admittedly took kind of a long time. Mom and Nick agreed that I had made a very good effort, but their congratulations were spoiled because after he won he went and got ice cream, while I discreetly tried to invent sitting that didn't hurt my stomach. But when he pestered Mom for the mints in her purse from dinner the night before, like a champion I declared that "I see your purse-mint, and raise you a second purse mint!" but no one was watching so I put mine away.

*His favorite thing ever is computer workings, so since his computer is all messed up and mine is just fine I had a fun time teasing him, ie "Do you think it's the CDD/DVD rom drive? Well, did you check? I heard one time it could be that."

Swedish Horses

2011-05-07T17:58:00.000-07:00

I was thinking of doing a series of in oil of Dala Horses. I started one:
And today I spent a bit of time arranging Mom's horses, and taking terrible pictures (I don't really know how to use the school camcorder as a still camera)

I dunno, I'm kind of tired of this project already. The beautiful blanks on wikipedia have my 3d heart itching to try designing them.

Chastity Belt for Metal Fab

2011-04-29T21:17:00.000-07:00

good, right? I hammered the heck out of 16 gauge sheet metal and it fit well. My professor was ill when this was due and we had an extra work period so I remade it into something more like my imagined belt but completely unwearable. I remade the toothed but realistically sized vulva into an opulent exploration that was seriously dangerously spiky. I displayed it hung up, even though that showed the shoddy craftsmanship I indulged in when I remade the piece. And then, because I am a SHOWOFF I totally wore this for like two minutes.

it's mean. Not like me; I use my words.

I guess everyone liked its weirdness in crit. The assignment was to attack or defend, and we collectively nerded out defaulting to the middle ages. The crotch part is detachable (a paper and fabric construction with a substrate that's a flexed piece of rod that wedges into the belt without room for me) and the belt is totally comfortable. It is weird to have metal on my body but my waist doesn't notice the weight and I made it roomy.

ETA: Oh yeah, theory: I think a lot about the twin burdens of appealing to the male gaze and cultivating modesty to court its supposed advantages, so the theoretical wearer of this piece accepts responsibility for moderating the lust of others (aside from the wearer) but stops well short of normalizing this absurd responsibility.

I completely respect people who have a different opinion on the issue of modesty but I must say that I have a concurrent piece where I go to the beach every day and I had a week straight of dealing with drunk older men who I had to treat rudely (completely against my inclination) because they could not be respectful when I wear a swimsuit or shorts. And I don't mean elaborate respect, which I certainly would not insist on from elders, but a baseline respect of not following me or talking about my chest.

Realistically, if I wanted to wear a chastity belt around town it would not have the intended effect because strange men would be thrilled to have something to ask me about.

SF Field Trip

2011-04-29T20:30:00.000-07:00

My class went to the MoMA and YBCA. I go to the MoMA for school once or twice a quarter. I get that it is a great collection and it rotates a lot but actually I do not go to galleries under my own power except Oakland Art Murmur so it would be nice to go to contemporary shows. But! The show they have on right now is ridiculous, like a retrospective extravaganza of all the famousest artists they've got.

I spent the day being scolded about taking pictures. Pictures are allowed at YBCA- but not at the Song Dong show! And they are allowed at the MoMA, but not at the Muybridge show(nature and sequential photos, like Yosemite and that running horse.) So when I was finally allowed to take pictures, at the retrospective with seriously every famous artist whatsoever, I on accident took a flash photo of a Matisse painting, which is super bad for oil paintings. I had the flash on "forced off" but I wasn't capturing the color so I turned to "simple mode" and the flash totally went off. I was so embarrassed.

And I found an artist I didn't know, Joseph Cornell, who did art in the 1930s that is like today's shadowboxes and found altered collages. This is his pink palace:

And I visited the Maxwell Ernst piece- the numerous family- that I did my final paper on last term for the painting class I didn't pass.

It is still captivating.

Anyway I took a lot of pictures of the Song Dong installation Waste Not before the attendant noticed, but I won't post them because I am sure there was a reason photography is forbidden. It's a powerful piece about family and fear and China and grieving- the artist assisted his mother, Zhou Xiangyuan, in installing the things she collected over decades to keep her family from ever going without.

Extra Large Potato

2011-04-29T20:21:00.000-07:00

The only single potatoes Safeway had were Extra Large. This one took me two days to cook (I took breaks). I tried to bake it but after two hours I turned the oven off by accident because it was so late and I was tired. Then I crushed it up and tried to microwave it, but at that point I had scrounged alternate dinner and tired of my potato adventure so I put it in the fridge so it could think about what it did. The next day I fried it as hash browns. I decided to just put butter on until it couldn't soak up any more. I won't tell you how many tablespoons that is because it is appalling. But I will in case you want to try.
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three.

Hoards

2011-04-29T12:45:00.001-07:00

I don't approve of watching shows about hoarding as impetus to clean. But it's a beautiful spring day that I have dedicated to errands and I am not cleaning. So I am doing something against my ethics and being a voyeur. I understand that the people on the show are adults and competent to decide whether to be on television but it doesn't sit right. My bedroom drifts gently toward entropy but it's never more than a few hours' hard work from tidiness, so the kinship I feel with the folks featured on hoarders is imagined. I don't know why scaring myself with houses filled with trash whose owners will go to great lengths to protect their collections are more useful for motivating me than is thinking about how efficient my routines can be when everything is put away by type, or let myself enjoy stewardship of my things. No, it has to be,

"Whenever there's mold or mildew or whatever, you want to wear a mask. Or at least I do. {the professional cleaner has tied perhaps three paper towels around her mouth and chin} I'm gonna put up a little humidifier {mold should be starved of moisture, also I think that is an air freshener because it is so tiny}, to make it a little more palatable {I have a visceral response to considering mold as palatable}." Hoarders, Linda/Steven

I saw the Song Dong piece about his mother's long term hoard -which she started after being subject to strict rationing in China- which accelerated after her husband's death. The installation is lovingly executed and while it is uncomfortable, it seems like her feelings are carefully respected and protected from outsiders when compared to the US television about hoarding.

Women's Surf Clinic

2011-04-22T21:38:00.001-07:00

I went surfing for the first time today and I had a great time but I didn't like it as much as I expected. I was in the UCSC Women's Surf Clinic and everyone was super nice and supportive. And they made it super easy- they gave us gigantic floaty boards and told us when to turn, when to paddle, and when to stand, and most of the time they literally pushed our boards to help us go fast enough. So that was all great. Plus they told us it was a good day in terms of light crowds and small waves, and I couldn't tell otherwise. Certainly I have seen it more crowded on nice days.

So, they had us all wear school wetsuits, and there was no way they were going to let me go out without one. I am glad I tried something new because now I can really appreciate not having to wear a wetsuit, which I have been enjoying all day. At the end of the day we compared notes and most of us were wearing a wetsuit that was too big or too small. Mine fit, but it was awful anyway. They told us the sizes correspond to dress sizes and I looked on the chart and my height and weight matched my dress size, so that was easy. Then I put it on and it was seriously the worst episode of Having To Wear Pants I have endured in years. I looked around once I got it on, and everyone was in swimsuits so I thought we could take it off so I did, but in fact no one had gotten theirs on yet because wetsuits are tricky.

Then we vanned down to the beach and got our surfboards. There were thinner and thicker ones, and I was determined to get a thick one. I thought it was cool because in a mixed group I probably wouldn't have. But, I was second to last and there was only one thick board left. In retrospect the other girl might have weighed as much as me because she was taller, but I was so focused on I AM BIG I NEED THE BIGGEST, and since our instructor told other people they didn't need a big board I guess she thought I had a point. So then I had to carry it a hundred yards and it was waterlogged and the other girl got to carry a lighter board so that was fair.

Before going out our other instructor had us all practice doing pushups on our board, so that when waves break while we are out the wave can go between us and the boards. I did all the pushups I can do (6) while we were on shore. Then we had to practice our standing up.

My favorite part of the day was bobbing out to the little waves. I just glided over everything. Even though we didn't use our legs at all for this part, it was like ten times easier than swimming. I liked turning, for which you tilt the nose way out of the water and kick. It was exactly like riding a horse, but cold. I was like, how is this happening? Because I was barely away from the shore but could turn and look at the town, just like the one time we went on the ocean in Beginning Rowing. I decided that when I get a board I will come out and lounge in my swimsuit, maybe eat snacks and journal. It was really nice.

While I waited for a turn, I tried to figure out wetsuits. I understand wearing one if it is the early morning before the sun is up properly. I understand wearing one if you are out for hours and don't rest on the beach at all. I thought maybe the reason everyone was wearing one is because guys don't have proper fat, but most of the adult guys out there were pretty big. I heard most of my group say they were cold. I have never been less cold in the water, which felt disconcerting instead of good. But I wasn't too warm, even though I was exerting myself, although I feel like if the sun was out I would have been.

The actual surfing part happened too fast, and was over too fast, for me to get the hang of it. But because they made it so simple, I managed to stay on nearly every time. Exercising in a new way made me super happy and when we got back to campus I was so excited that I hopped in the pool. It felt amazing for like three seconds, to be in water sans wetsuit, and then I started swimming and realized I was really worn out. I had to use a kickboard because I didn't have my goggles and my eyes are sensitive, and after soft lenses absorb chlorine you have to toss them. At 500m I was in a good rhythm, and I told myself I would do a slow 1000m, but by 850 I was all done.

The pool is so much less interesting than the ocean, but very safe. I think I could pass right out and be fine. It made me really want an Otterbox and waterproof headphones, because I could lap swim so long if I had something to listen to, but I've looked at lots of products and reviews and I don't think there is a really durable one or headphones that aren't a huge hassle during turns.

Runners

2011-04-22T14:40:00.000-07:00

I exercised so good today!I am quite robust but some combination of my feet, pelvis, back, and knees usually hurts so i have to be careful. Running is not something I'd consider, but I do read two running blogs and sometimes check the runners they link to. I noticed that when they describe things that they relish about the experience of running, they exclusively use words that are bad in other contexts, like "pain," "bruising," "cried," and "died."

The small selection of running blogs I have read are mostly slender people running for weight loss, with a few medium people running for weight loss. Two of the runners talk about their fat and weight in negative terms, but those are the exception- most talk about their fat and bodies abusively. Running a lot takes a toll on anyone's body, and I think that they like something painful because they don't like their bodies. I don't think most runners feel this way, and I don't know if most people who run for weight loss feel this way.

How I spent two days trying to buy photos

2011-04-17T13:47:00.000-07:00

I saved $35 by not having glasses, braces, yellowed teeth, or acne. (although if I had those things I could also save $35 by being okay with it.) I don't expect the retoucher to work for free but it doesn't seem fair. To get all dressed up and made up and wait in a long line and sort out a borrowed robe as best you can and have your picture professionally taken and then still have to lie to your family about how perfect you look, and pay for the privilege.

Then at checkout, I had to opt out of paying $9 or $54 more for something I didn't order.

And okay, I know that $150 is not more than $150 (the threshold for free shipping) but it still annoyed me, so I didn't order anything. I'll have to transfer my mom's money back to her and she can order what she wants.

How to dress for a space theme party

2011-04-08T00:30:00.000-07:00

So I guess a lot of people aren't sure what to wear for my friend's space birthday party, which is astonishing because space is a wonderfully open theme. If you find out about it last minute you can just wear a lot of silver or, failing that, black- adapt coverage to your space climate. Wrist cuffs and giant odd shaped colors look like campy sci fi. Also space has all the jobs earth has, except adapted for space, like a farmer probably needs a lot of lightbulbs and a miner needs a breathing tank and a prison guard needs a bobbly silver gun. Or if you have something you like, for example libraries or gold, you can be from a planet of it. Or you can dress up as a character from a space show, but I wouldn't recommend it because people who don't watch the show won't get it, and people who do watch the show will notice how different your costume is from canon. Dressing up as a character is better if you do it somewhere people will appreciate it.

Anyway the party is tomorrow and so far my costume is a (literal) box of (figurative) crap that I have to glue together and paint silver, but I am going to be a Space Mechanic.

Heart Necklace

2011-04-06T18:13:00.000-07:00

In metal fabrication I welded this heart necklace from 16 gauge sheet metal. The techniques I used are: cold bending, cutting with the guillotine and beverly shears, welding, and hammering.

Smug Superiority: Dissipated

2011-04-05T16:04:00.000-07:00

I was reading about special products you can buy to hang your pictures. The Michael's website Erin links to says, "Each frame includes artwork, or simply remove and replace with your own photo."

And I was all, "I'm so glad I have original art in my life, even if I had to make it myself." I was smug. And then I looked at my walls. I truly do enjoy my art everyday but it is displayed extremely poorly. I have one little corner that's decent and the rest looks like this:

Yeah, apparently sometimes I would rather hang paintings on top of other paintings than find more tacks.

Honestly I think 22 paintings is too many to display properly in a medium size bedroom, but I could at least give it a try.

New & Ongoing: Research as Performance piece.

2011-04-01T13:04:00.000-07:00

For my 10 credit self directed senior project I am exploring the relationship between consumption and security, or consumption and satiety. One portion of this project is in the form of gorging myself on the Econ section of my school library. I decided to start by counting the books. The first thing I found out was that I am not going to read them in order because the first thousand are Business Planning By County from 1968 on. I liked getting familiar with the scope of the collection but at 2,100 volumes I got tired and went to ask the research librarian:

Librarian: Can I help you with something?

Me: Yes, I was wondering how many books are in the HC section? I tried counting them but it was too hard.

Librarian: Sure, I can find that out for you.

Me: I think there are about 11,000.

Librarian: That's not far off. 10,092 separate titles, although it doesn't show the number of volumes.

And he said I was the most interesting question of the day.

Right.

2011-03-25T21:55:00.000-07:00

An Am I Drunk? checklist

[X] bought an olde english

[X] stopped working (pretext: taking a break)

[X] needed to stop drinking for nausea reasons

[X] texted ex boyfriend (omg he texted back we are besties!)

[X] drained a 7.5% 24oz beer

[X] checked percentage printed on can two times before typing that line

[X] wait, I just drooled on my blanket on purpose to remove excess saliva from my mouth.

[ ] typos

[ ] asking ex if he thinks we should totally get back together because I totally love him

[X] also I just realized this is not how a checklist works.

Detergent Shopping!

2011-03-25T20:49:00.000-07:00

I have never bought detergent, nor been in the detergent aisle, until tonight. You see, I read on a mommy blog that you should halve the recommended amount and then use a bit less each time until you find an amount that doesn't clean your clothes, and then go back up one notch. I hardly need any, so the bottle I took from my parents lasted and lasted. Then a couple months ago it spilled all over my trunk. Today I was all set to launder without detergent but the Kresge laundry room was closed for Cesar Chavez Day, which I treated as a sign to buy some freaking detergent. But I quickly found an 8 dollar bottle that seemed practically immune to trunk disasters and stinking up my car. It says it can wash 25 loads, so I guess that will last 100 loads and I won't need to deal with the detergent aisle for two or three years, so I took a lot of pictures* to remember it.

*this is 1/4 of them.

Gray Days at the Beach

2011-03-16T15:09:00.000-07:00

On days like this I like to pretend I am in Sweden.

It hasn't been cold lately, just gray.

Painting Recap

2011-03-13T01:19:00.000-08:00

So anyway, I bombed intermediate oil painting this term. I immediately didn't like (or dislike) my professor, and after the first 4 weeks I stopped trying to like her. I was hip deep in theory in my other two classes, and couldn't come close to any sort of theory for my paintings. No one was holding my loved ones hostage to keep me from thinking of concepts and then painting them, but I also wasn't supported the amount that I apparently need. I had a very hard time talking to my professor the few times that I tried. She understandably mistook the things I detachedly produced for things I was interested in, and guided me by referring me to still life painters of centuries past.

Open studios was yesterday, so anything I produce now is for me and not for display or critique, and suddenly it matters to me to take advantage of the huge heated room- with a sink i am allowed to use for oil paint runoff, an easel and good light- that is open all day and night. When I unlocked the room I was pleased to see that everything was the way we had it set up for Open Studios. It meant my classmates had not produced anything for 30 hours, because they were working for a grade or recognition rather than working in a futile attempt to satiate their all- consuming need to paint. Or maybe they were still sleeping/recovering from the all nighters prior to Open Studios. Or maybe they have studios at home so they can paint all! the! time!

Anyway I painted. And it was pretty good. I covered my first painting, a unicorn, with a swedish horse. It is for my mom to put on her wall. I asked her what she wanted a painting of, and she said "trees". I liked learning that swedish horses are the color that cadmium red light is right out of the tube (the photo hides it though). I liked covering that ugly unicorn. Once I covered the 24x36 canvas with the first layer I was super annoyed that I had to wait for it to dry. So I set the heater to run for five hours. I immediately recanted, but the dial only goes one way. And since I left all my stuff everywhere, if anyone comes in before it turns off it will be obvious that I am a waster.

My individual critique is next Wednesday I believe. I intend to produce as much work between now and then as I did otherwise this term.

2011-03-11T02:46:00.000-08:00

these are my paintings for intermediate oil painting. It's kind of an ongoing question of what is or isn't art, and I was surprised to find as I walked into the studio with my artist statement that none of my pieces were art; that is, none come from a spark, provide a means to explore a concept, or satisfied me creatively. That is probably why this process was so draining. the problems I solve along the way when I sculpt are really interesting to me. There are questions of weight balance, scale, viewer engagement. And the materials! trying to get clay and feathers, or water and glass, or cloth and metal to integrate is fantastic because the trial runs suggest new ideas and options.

okay, everyone I know who likes my art likes my paintings. It's frustrating, because for one thing I don!
't like paintings in general or in particular so I don't understand what they are liking. And more than that, I know what goes on in my head while I paint ("how long has it been? am I done? my neck hurts. is light blue like white? yes. how long has it been? does this look like the picture? yes.") and what goes on in my head when I sculpt (oh my god oh my god oh my god, how am I doing this? oh my god I will eat 10 pounds of grapes and not come out of my cocoon until I am done. no, bacon is better. and I will call it baconalia. okay, I won't tell anyone the title. webcam? liveblog. time component? ) and I am taken aback that my closest friends can't see the difference between work produced in those two states of mind, or that they would prefer the slogging kind.

Sea Cave

2011-03-10T15:06:00.000-08:00

I love all the caves I have been to. The limestone ones, the wet one on campus, the touristy ones in idaho... but while most caves are like damp mausolea, sea caves are alive and noisy. There is a sea cave that I love at the beach near my house, that is only accessible by walking on sand every few months. Usually at low tide it has been completely filled in by sand. I know, because I have looked for it every day this year. But yesterday I took a chance (barely) by swimming through the chest-deep, gentle waves to the cave.
The thing I was concerned about is that even small waves crash around a lot in that inlet, so if bigger waves started up they would trap me. But there are handholds in the rocks, so if I could make my way slowly out of the inlet I would be fine. I am not even close to strong enough to make headway against big waves.
I have loved this cave since I met it a year and a half ago with my friend Max, but this is the first time I heard it "sing". It was the same as the sound old boats make in movies, which I have not heard in person. But it's kind of creaky and howly.
There is plenty of dryish sand toward the back of the cave, which is how I managed pictures- I brought my cell phone in an elaborately wound garbage bag and lurked in the back of the cave untying it. I have always felt scared to use the entrance on the left, because the waves soak it and it is so dark and there might be glass or anything. Maybe I can find a pair of cheap watershoes, because half of what I'm scared of is stepping on dangerous things.

Days like yesterday and today (I touched a lot of sea anenomes and found a craggy blowhole and wandered in the surf for an hour) make me wonder how I lived away from the sea for so many years, and how I expect to move away from it after I graduate. It's not difficult to feel connected to nature that's so immediate and engaging. Anyway, today the waves were medium, and I didn't want to swim in them because I was at the beach alone, as usual, also it was overcast. I am sure when the weather warms up more of my friends will want to go. But honestly the (barely) cold water is worth it.

Resolution Check In

2011-03-02T04:52:00.000-08:00

At New Year's I was very smug about resolutions, and when people told me they don't make them because it's not realistic to keep them all year, I said that mine were things that have immediate benefits so if I give them up early on I'm still better off than not making them. And when I heard people say they didn't need Jan 1 to make a goal and could set and work toward goals any time I was a bit galled. I mean, I set goals as the need arises but a fresh year has intoxicating potential. A year is long enough to do anything, whereas my regular goals are either "before I die" type things or things I can accomplish in one quarter of school. And starting a yearlong process on the first of January is so convenient. If you lapse in tracking the days you just have to look up what day of the year it is, plus the months are already numbered.

But here I am revising my behavior chart for March and trying to figure out who stuck to these goals for two whole months. It's too soon to tell but maybe using a notebook with enough blank pages to finish the year was practical and not just symbolic. I mean, I am not at all strict with myself so there isn't a single resolution I haven't broken, but I am still doing them. But ugh, I was really close on two of them. On January second I slept in past the morning (it's a pretty generous resolution but I have to actively manage my sleep to keep it correlated to day and night) and on February 9th I didn't go to the ocean.

One of my friends told me I have to think of a cute name for March because I always have cute names for months, and she is right. In Dressember I wore only dresses, in Tanuary I went swimming (or at least in the water) every day, in Fastuary I managed 6 and then 2 days on liquids, and now it is March and I stopped using money with slaveholders on it. I didn't think of a name for it yet, because March doesn't have a lot of syllables to swap out while staying recognizable, although it has got hominyms. So far the cutest thing I have thought of is March of Dimes And Anything With Lincoln On It. I am also working my way through an Algebra textbook, but I think I can work that into Apralgebra. Maybe I shouldn't call it that, because just the thought of Apralgebra is making my eyes well up with tears.

(I was in Algebra for a long time, like the decade from 2001 and 2007.)

The only real choice is to be pleased right now.

2011-02-25T13:27:00.001-08:00

My Disney weekend plans got cancelled, about as cancelled as they could possibly be without at least a local apocalypse. As in, if any of the reasons for the cancellation were fixed, it would still be cancelled unless three other reasons were also fixed. I am a bit disappointed, but I have plenty to do in town. I have an art show to go to and maybe be in tonight, a paper due at midnight, and open studios in one week.

I found in my browser tabs a video of glassblowing that I was saving, and I watched it. And it seems like nothing could be as perfect and immediate and zen as glassblowing. And I need to at least take a glassblowing class but preferably become a glass blower. It's such a siren call. I have worked with glass before and loved it, but that was dry cold glass. I want to blow an hourglass; a whole series of hourglasses whose titles are the exact time they take to run.

OurGlass of Cockington from Danny Cooke on Vimeo.

So I took a step back. All I have to do today, and indeed this weekend, is make art, talk about art, look at art, read about art, and write about art. Also I am going to the beach. In my entire adolescence I would have died of happiness to have the weekend I am about to have, and here it is, waiting for me, and all I can do is think about trying new things that I don't have the studio for. So, I am going to get my art out of my car, leave it with my artist statement where my roommate can find it, dress for the beach, have a short swim, buy an hourglass, and get started on my paper, then go to Fiery Femmes of February.

Are We Not Endotherms?

2011-02-18T14:04:00.001-08:00

Today I did a sketch of a performance piece, "Are We Not Endotherms?" Basically the piece is meant to remind people that living near the ocean is a great gift, and the water is no colder on a cold day than on a warm one. When I do the actual piece I will have someone with me as timekeeper and to watch that if I go under I come back up. I paid the meter for 21 minutes and came back when it had 8 left.

Secondhand Still Life

2011-02-17T13:44:00.000-08:00

Working from the cover art of the book Decartes' Bones. In progress.

I have to totally redo the open book. The skull is off but I am happy with it the way it is. Here is my reference material:

A bit personal! A bit melancholic!

2011-02-16T22:22:00.000-08:00

So there's this boy? And it's beyond over. I am not even sure if he is alive because he has not answered my last two phone calls and he likes to do very risky things. But I think he is alive, because in the past whenever this happens he has been alive. And I think that someday in the not too distant future I will again be welcome in the carefully tended, overflowing mausoleum that is his life. (It's not a mausoleum of death. It's a mausoleum of stasis.) So right now I was looking at a painting I made of him last year, and thinking it is not quite decent to have it up in my room because it is a bare torso and we are distant.

So I was taking it down, when I saw the other one I have up, which I made in color from a sketch I made (this is forbidden because it doesn't turn out) while he recovered from something- it looks like an abstraction and no one can tell what it is, but to me it looks so tender. And I can absolutely not bear to take it down tonight. It's not as though I even see it; I have a lot of my paintings all over everything.

Protein

2011-02-15T12:40:00.001-08:00

For about a week I have been playing a game called Getting Enough Protein. I asked the USDA website and it wants me to get a bit more than 50 grams of protein every day. It is a challenge. If I don't meet my target during the day, I drink a protein shake after dinner. I tried to make a protein bomb by putting protein powder in soy milk but it was undrinkable so I just put it in water. Today I spent all morning eating and drinking protein, and I have had 33 grams. I tried to start my day with eggs (12g in two) but they were ghastly so I threw them away and had cottage cheese (14g) and black tea with soy milk (3.5g). Then for lunch I had salad with a tin of sardines on top (12g). And now I am having more black tea with soy milk. And I feel pretty good.

What I Would Save In A Fire (in progress)

2011-02-15T11:13:00.001-08:00

Sitting in my parent's attic surrounded by junk I kept asking myself "weould I save this in a fire?" and the answer was no to all of it. The clothes in the attic that I spared in previous cullings are special only because of who owned them before me. There is a maternity dress that my mother wore when she was pregnant with me, but in twenty three years the medallions have bled their color onto the surrounding lace, and the collar has become dated. There is a shoulder padded white suit covered in fabric flowers that my step grandmother gave me (or maybe my grandad sent it to me after she left him?) that for some reason I wore to highschool graduation. There are the wonderful curtains my Nana made for our last house- victorian old world monkeys for our victorian parlor. My brother's impossibly tiny shirt covered in 15 year old food stains. And I cut them all up and am sewing them together into What I Would Save In A Fire.

Field Trip: Cream From the Top

2011-02-11T11:10:00.000-08:00

I went on a really interesting field trip yesterday. We saw Cream from the Top, which was a show of recent mfa grads.

There was a little environment made of colored tape, and a video camera put everything on a monitor in the environment and projected elsewhere in the gallery. The artist is Aleksander Bohnak. I liked that it was chaotic and colorful.
Weirdly, I could not find the name label for these amazing unmilled wood strip boats. This is a picture I took from underneath.
The iron details were really nice.
My favorite thing was called Family Camp at dusk, and it was a lot of oozy figures on a grassy hill that were really tender and funny. The artist who made it is Brynda Glazier, and it was her only piece in the show.
Other things I liked but didn't get pictures of were Mara Baldwin's disarticulated bed sheets, where she cut the pattern out of a sheet leaving the rest intact, and the pattern in a little pile, and Dana Hemenway's video installation that was just artificial rocks. After a while, it got very funny to see how many kinds of artificial rocks there are. They were mostly the landscaping kind, but also the ones at Disneyland.

Fastuary is over!

2011-02-09T11:28:00.000-08:00

Fastuary is over! The rule was if it got in the way of my real obligations it was over, and it did. I had two crits back to back yesterday, which are three hour sessions of looking at 20 student's art including my own, and talking about it really in depth. The second round of crits was performance pieces, so I had to perform something for everyone.

I woke up early and spent every minute of my day prepping and double checking. I paid to park on campus so I would be able to carry my props and sculpture and canvases and materials for my seminar class easily. And my whole day consisted of repairing the mistakes I made. My phone was a main prop for my second piece, and I made it to campus without it and had to go home. I was still on time to my painting crit, but I expected to have an hour to flesh out a piece that I'm excited about that is very unfinished, and i didn't.

Oh, it doesn't take an hour to get home and back by car. But when my first choice remote lot was completely full, I chose to drive the mile across campus to the other lot instead of driving back to the base and up the other side of campus. That mile took me 17 minutes. There are 13 stopsigns, which I knew, and two of them are tended at busy times by students in safety yellow gloves, and there were two delivery trucks on the main road which brought us down to one lane to share, and a bit of road construction that did the same, but at least that one had a guy with a slow/stop sign. I finally parked in the far lot, found I didn't have my phone, drove home, got it, drove back, parked, got on the shuttle (the art department is a long walk from East Remote) and found it was the wrong shuttle, but it got me to class eventually.

The whole time (in between reassuring myself that i had everything under control) I was telling myself that -of course- it was a horrible day because I had two crits. But, in class I realized that 3 other people are also taking both classes, and all three of them kept it together just fine. So between my second and third crit, I decided to get something hot to eat, which in the short term was an oily mistake but by the time I got home I was feeling good.

Tablespoon Painting

2011-01-29T14:35:00.000-08:00

I have a wonderfully pitted and crumpled tablespoon that I have been wanting to paint for a couple of weeks. Painting something that looks totally different if I move my head part of an inch seemed impossible, but once I got it mostly defined I just kept working wet on wet until I was pretty happy with it. It's 10x15 and took three hours. While I was painting it the grey I mixed looked very purple, but actually it looks pretty much spot on. My professor said it is hard to paint reflective stuff and I would have to forget everything I've learned about physics and light, which I totally did without even trying. Maybe I am a painter in my soul.

Rowing

2011-01-28T10:30:00.000-08:00

Today at rowing I stayed in the harbor but went right out to the mouth. I am glad we aren't going on the open ocean (the Monterey Bay is not nearly as protected as the San Francisco Bay) until the end of the quarter because rowing over there was exhausting compared to rowing in the back of the harbor, where there is barely a current and I am the main thing moving my boat. For some reason I decided to row without using my legs for a few minutes. I thought I could control the boat better if I wasn't sliding around, and I also thought I could exercise my arms. Anyway, I wore myself right out and still had to row to the mouth of the harbor and back. I was not sore and my muscles felt fine, but I was rowing really sloppily because I had just used all my energy. Like, I would fail to switch an oar from feathering position (skimming) to digging in, but only on one side, so I would do a proper row on one side and get turned in the water. I could only keep myself from doing this a few times before I would do it again. The part of the harbor near the ocean is wider so I thought it would be a good time to learn to left row and right row. That is where, just by pulling harder on one oar during a stroke, you turn a bit. It is better than turning by dropping an oar in, which is what I do, because dropping an oar slows you way down. But, it was not a good time to learn those. About half the time my stroke would turn me the opposite of what I intended, because I veered left all the time.

Sometimes I surprise myself with how slowly or quickly I catch on to things, and just now I figured out why when I was messing around with my little dumbbells* and doing crunches with them on my chest yesterday they seemed as easy as regular crunches. It is because rowing uses my stomach muscles, but it uses them very gently so far compared to how it uses my arms and back, which ache for days.

*I am figuring out a performance piece about strength for early feb, and so far it looks like I have to cast fake weights in plaster even though I would strongly prefer to use real ones.

Beach days!

2011-01-27T15:37:00.000-08:00

Last Tuesday I skipped my second class and went to the beach. Today I skipped my first class and went to the beach, and I felt shy to go to my second class in case I drew attention or reprimand for missing tuesday. But I went, and walking the mile to the bus stop with my laptop case I reflected on how compact one of my friends managed to be when I saw him last. His pants and jacket pockets held everything he needed, and although we were carrying comparable weight mine was hanging off me in a little bag. I try very hard not to over pack- I emptied the mail out of my laptop bag twice today- and yet there I was on my commute to the bus stop, happy that I had stashed a packet of non aspirin in my pants pocket because my pelvis injury was flaring from the asymmetrical load, my furry jacket slipping out of my sweaty hands continually.

Anyway the beach was gorgeous both days.

I almost made a twitter!

2011-01-25T21:09:00.000-08:00

My memory for names and details isn't as good as I'd like it to be, and while I love having the internet as my external memory, I am trying to store a bit more information in my meatself. So for a while I have been pasting things I find online into sticky notes on my desktop, so that I would look at them every day until I could remember them and then delete them. But it was getting cluttered, so I decided to export them to my external memory via twitter and then just look at them sometimes.

I went to twitter. I read some of the latest tweets that scroll by on the main page, and I read my sticky notes. And it was all inane. So I spread out all the notes I hadn't memorized, and took a screen capture and saved it. I made sticky notes for a couple of very overused (sometimes by me) quotes just so I could put a name to them, but when someone tweets quotes without explanation it seems like they are promoting them.

San Jose Mercury News

2011-01-23T20:54:00.000-08:00

For my class The Intimate Body, The Public Body I have been thinking. I don't know what to do for my next project but I have some threads I have been thinking about, like how I my body is the only thing that's actually mine, and why don't I use it relentlessly to back up my ideals, rather than rather intermittently? So I decided for a few days to evaluate the things I do in the physical world and see how they match up with the things I imagine I value. I was reading a newspaper because my house mate subscribes to the San Jose Mercury News, and I enjoyed having the physical paper all spread out around me on her bed. And I read a lot of articles, and their span of subjects was a lot different than the corners of the internet I like. And now I know that Yemen has a president, and I know his name also, and I know that Yemen is facing a water shortage, and that reminded me that Cyprus has a water shortage, and so I decided to stop using so much water. So I forbade myself from taking hot showers because I think that I won't linger that way, and I will use a bit less water. And then Yemen can have it. I haven't figured out that last part yet. I tried to figure it out in the shower, where I usually have good brainstorms, but I was too busy trying to figure out why I was shaving so poorly. I thought I was shaving off the tops of my goosebumps, but it could also have been my shaking hands. It was pretty cold. And I didn't have to waste water by running it until it heated up, which is what I usually do. When I got in I burst out laughing because I couldn't believe how much I hated it.

I went to the MoMA

2011-01-15T03:08:00.001-08:00

and it was okay. Actually the first hour and a half I had an okay time. I took notes, searched for my favorite painting (not on display) and picked a painting to write about. As I walked and walked, I felt like the MoMA is the worst museum- so tired. After a while nearly everything I saw made me go, "that's not art." because it was just so dead. Good art should be flown around the country for fanatics to cuddle with it and tell it their dreams. We should burn it to keep warm, choking on the oil fumes, fighting for the ones with toxic vermilion. If it must be imprisoned, can't it feel the warmth of the sun? At the very least we should be able to take notes about it in pen. (they didn't confiscate my pen, but they had me put it away and gave me a golf pencil. I was happy to see it fall out of my bag and roll away on the BART ride home)

I eavesdropped on a middle school tour that progressed through the exhibits exactly as fast as I did, and it was inane. I started to feel very bummed that I have to take a painting class when it's not my medium at all. A museum is a library where you can't touch a single book. There actually was a great installation called the shadow$hop where you could touch everything and buy it, but it was closed all morning so I didn't go in. Why didn't I go in? Am I that cowed?

When my class met up and we discussed how we liked everything, I perked up. It was interesting to engage with the art that way. The monitors interrupted us several times actually with instructions, but I didn't hear the specifics. That museum is so aggressively regulated. At one point I strongly wanted to make a flash mob and take off our pants, because it would hurt David Park's Bathers not at all, and yet it is forbidden. I was too timid to propose it. I got my pants part way off (I had a skirt over them, but if everyone wanted to do my idea I would have taken that off as well) but I put them right back.

two Lao Tzu inspired postcards

2011-01-15T02:42:00.000-08:00

The line between obscure and obvious* is tricky, so I don't know if this is clever. I prefer to imagine that it is, but looking at it I think it was one of those pieces that you don't have to make because there's nothing to them.

It's (obviously?) an illustration of the part of the Tao Teh Ching that says that a cup is useful because of what's not there. Because writing is the same way- the negative space is exactly as necessary as the ink. I don't think this is integral to getting it, but that is the character (in Japanese but hopefully in Chinese, because the Tao Teh Ching is in Chinese) for bowl, plate, or dish.

How's this for clever: I used an online translator to find the word for bowl, then looked in the index of my Japanese book, couldn't find it, repeated the process with the word "cup," then looked through every page one by one until I found the character I needed, at which point I realized I had already learned it.

*words which, distressingly, don't share a root.

Japantown Trip

2011-01-14T00:07:00.000-08:00

I have been wanting to go to Japan town to check out the current selection of dollar store bento supplies, but a whole trip across the bridge just for that seemed excessive and exhausting. Today I was in SF for something else, and I walked from Yerba Buena to Japan town in the hopes that the dollar stores would still be open. It was a longish walk by my standards as I had spent the day on my feet at the museum, but I kept up a refrain of "cheap! plastic! crap!" in my head as I walked to keep me going. When I got to Japan town I found the stores open, but with a very sparse bento selection. Perhaps bento is going out of fashion, leaving me behind for I am going to continue eating like a child who can't stand their foods touching.

Anyway there wasn't as much selection as I am used to, but I got a two tier bento, a replacement for the two yellow bento boxes I have let rot, some chopsticks, and some silicone food cups.

On the right is everything I bought, and on the left is its packaging.
I spent the BART ride home husking everything, and mulling over what use I could put the plastic to. I will use the plastic carrying bags once more, to line my room's trash can, and one of the plastic wrappers was plain and crisp enough to hold a card or something. The rest I tossed. I wish I had taken a picture of the package that warned me to dispose of my product according to my local government, and the one that reminded me to follow the disposal regulations of my municipality, but I am too tired.

Jan 1 2011 resolution post

2011-01-02T17:15:00.000-08:00

I got sand in my bed because i can't feel my feet so i didn't know they were sandy. I resolved to go swimming every day of 2011. I resolved this while I was already in the frigid water. I don't know if it was literally frigid because I don't know what frigid means. It was about as cold as usual I think, but I wasn't warmed by the sun or by vigorous swimming. Anyway, I had my glasses on instead of my contacts and the waves were really big, so I only went in up to my waist. But, I haven't broken the resolution yet; there's still time. I went to the school pool but of course it was closed. But the drive was great. The speed limit wasn't one for me and those roads.

On the radio there was a song called sexy chick. well the radio clean version is called that. It is about David Guetta not being able to describe someone's sexiness.

She's nothing like a girl you've ever seen before

nothing you can compare to your neighborhood.

as you can see it's a song that is really improved by censoring.

spider

2010-12-30T14:06:00.000-08:00

I may have killed a spider. The other day I saw two medium big spiders in the bathroom, and they made me real nervous. Then they were gone, and no one knew where. Then right now I saw a medium big spider in the other bathroom, in the tub. I saw it after I had reached in to the tub to fan out my sketchbook that is drying after being left in the rain. The bathtub is white and showed the details of the spider. It had what looked like two truncated curled front legs. But, I counted the legs on that side and there were 4. So the front things were something else, and I was scared of them. What if they were for biting me? Why was it in the bathtub? Was it stuck? Should I free it? Maybe I could rinse it away instead. But to do that I would need to get my sketchbook out of the bathtub and that would be getting close to the spider. I didn't want to smash it because I might need a spider for a resin project I might do. So I got hairspray that I bought to use as fixative for charcoal drawings, but stopped using because the scent was so strong. I thought about what I was going to do. I knew it was wrong for me to do something I think is wrong, but I looked at its mouthparts and I sprayed it and sprayed it. And it crawled away pretty slowly. Even if it wasn't getting poisoned that much hairspray should stiffen it. I was surprised it could crawl so far. The spray was choking me but I have sprayed it on my own head before (but with the windows open) so I knew I would be fine. Then I stopped spraying it and it went back to sitting still. Then I waited a bit, fussed with the top of the bottle which was coming apart, and sprayed it with a little test spray to see if it was dead. It wasn't, but this time instead of crawling it just drew in its legs. I am going to go check on it. It was upside down, curled up. The face legs were still huge. I took a picture with a shaking hand. I was somewhat surprised that I managed to get it in the frame. I guess I am a late in life arachnophobe, unless this is a one-off.

Update:

This morning I went in to look at him, and he was still curled up but flipped back over. I kicked the side of the tub to see if he moved, but he didn't and I relaxed. Then right now I wanted to get a good look at his mouth parts so I got two microscope slides and tried to scoop him up onto one using the other. Well, he reanimated and tried to drag himself with a couple of his legs so I made a loud two part noise- the first part was fear or surprise, and the second disgust- and left him. Now I feel incompetent for not being able to kill a spider yet keep it intact, guilty for making something spend so much of its life blind and poisoned, and a little scared. Well, my skin is. I'm tingly all down my legs and back and the back of my arms.

blue and orange herringbone socks

2010-12-28T04:12:00.001-08:00

modeled by the recipient, Dad.

I learned two color knitting and it was easy. And I memorized a pattern:

AABBAA...

AABBAB...

BBAABB...

BBAABA...

It took me about 7 hours to learn. I might not be a very good memorizer. After I got the hang of the pattern it only took me 10 hours to knit the rest. I finished by Christmas morning, which I then slept through. I had imagined I would have two pairs done in time to mail one to my nana for Christmas. Well, her pair are coming a long a lot faster and her area is pretty cold in Spring.

fortune cookie fortunes

2010-12-28T04:00:00.000-08:00

I don't eat chinese food but I found these fortunes in my mom's house and she said I could have them. When I lived at home and my family got chinese food they would let me have a cookie and the fortunes were a different kind, just predictions about luck, and I prefer these. There's something that feels authentic to me about a platitude on a bit of paper that I found on the tv stand that got there via a cookie, my family members, a delivery person, and before that I don't know but presumably a print shop and a restaurant.

New Dress

2010-12-26T08:28:00.001-08:00

I kind of know that at some point someone has paid full price for most of the wonderful things thrift stores are stuffed with, but it wasn't me. And yet, on Christmas Eve I bought myself a dress at a discount retail store, Ross Dress for Less. I hung it over the rail of my bed to take a picture, and now it is off-gassing a sickly sweet smell. How novel.

I tried it on for something to do while I waited for my brother to finish selecting gifts, and it suited me very nicely. But, I already have a sleeveless party dress with a sash that I don't wear because it's not warm and it's fancy; I don't need two.

I reasoned that I should put the dress back because I will only be young enough to wear a frothy pink dress for like 2 more years, and there is no way I would get twenty five dollars of use out of a fancy dress in 2 years, and that made me sad because I want to go to a lot of parties and look glamorous. So I convinced myself that I would wear it just absolutely all the time and parties could take me or leave me. But I think if I wear it just one day a week until I am too old it will have been worth it.

Standing in Christmas Eve line, I had time to reconsider and I went to put it back, and then I changed my mind again and joined what I thought was the end of the line. Two girls made really indistinct sounds to each other but I worked out that they meant to be in line but were just standing far away from the rest of the line. So I apologized, and they were gracious and asked me if I was an elf. I was very pleased they could tell because by my standards my costume was a little half hearted. Anyway, on my second try at the line I made it to a cashier, who was extremely friendly and efficient.

And then it was done! I had paid basically full price for a dress!

Trader Joe's Candy Cane Green Tea

2010-12-23T23:44:00.000-08:00

I visited my mom and wanted some tea, and I found Candy Cane decaf green tea. As soon as I opened it I started to covet this narwhal.
I made a plan to come over after they put the box in the recycling so I could scavenge the narwhal, but it wasn't a very solid plan because all I know is my mom and brother don't drink very much tea.

So the next time I came over I asked if I could have a couple of bags of it, and mom sent the whole box home with me.

The tea is good. It tastes like nothing with an aftertaste of mint, and it smells amazing, like candy.

Herringbone Socks Progress Pics

2010-12-19T01:48:00.000-08:00

I am knitting some socks for my dad as a christmas gift. I knit him some solid blue acrylic socks a few years ago and he took very good care of them and wore them out instead of losing them, so I felt it was time to knit him a pair of nice wool (wool needs a bit of washing attention or it will shrink) complicated socks. The free pattern I chose was knitty's Red Herring sock, which was on big needles (by sock standards, that is- I just don't love anyone, including myself, enough to make them socks on smaller than size 3 needles.) I spent perhaps 8 hours over the course of 3 weeks knitting the first 5 inches of the sock. Every other row is easy, 2 stitches in each color all the way around, but the other rows were so hard for me. The chart is 12 stitches wide over 72 stitches and I had to recheck it every 6 stitches. I was thinking about ending the stranded colorwork part early, because it was quite tedious and you have to knit love into handknit things or they are no good.

Then I went to my brother's hockey game, and I brought the sock because my Christmas deadline is looming. I accidentally left the pattern in my car, so I had to use the knitting as it's own pattern. The chart is only 4 rows long but I could not memorize it or see any pattern to it. (it goes A BB AA B A BB AA B which was much too complicated for me to remember)

So what I did is count 4 rows back and knit the same colors as that row for 12 stitches, then repeat that order for the next 60 stitches- the rest of the round. That was tricky because 4 rows back in knitting is hard to keep track of, but I realized that it also has to be opposite color of the pattern 2 rows So then I only had to look back 2 rows, and I knit two rounds counting in my head,
"opposite, opposite, opposite, opppoooosssiiiite, opposite, opposite, opposite, opposite..." Then I realized how the pattern works! I have no explanation for how long this took me to work out, except that I have not knit in a few years and my major prizes ingenuity not decoding. So, here is how to knit herringbone pattern:

-rows need to be a multiple of 4 and columns a multiple of 12-
1: 2 stitches of the main yarn, 2 stitches of the contrasting yarn, all the way
around.
2: start with the same color as the previous row. One stitch in that color, then:
2CC, 2MC, 2Mixed; start with the color that contrasts with the most recent 2 stitches, repeat.
3: there have to be 2 stitches of the same color vertically so it's time to switch
to the contrasting color as the start of the round. 2CC, 2MC around.
4: start with the same color as the prior row. One stitch in that color, then
2/2/1/1/2/2/1 around, and each unit has to be opposite the previous one.

I am very relieved that I learned this pattern because I also bought the yarn to knit my Nana a pair and now I will be able to in time. It's okay that it's not in time for Christmas, because that side of the family gathers on Epiphany, which is January 6th. Presumably she would still love me if I knit her striped socks, but we are good at similar but separate handicrafts so I know she can tell the difference between a beginner sock and an intermediate sock and I am very glad to be able to send her an intermediate sock.

adoption

2010-12-18T13:00:00.001-08:00

This summer I read for days accounts of birth mothers and analysis of the process and system, and it seems bad. I know only a few adopted people but all of them have told me they were very happy to be adopted, so I feel a bit conflicted. But adopting someone's baby instead of 1. adopting an orphan or 2. using the same money to make the same child comfortable but without including them in your day to day life seems bad. My bloglines whatever got transfered to merchant circle and now it's way different? So I have been browsing blogs looking for new feeds and I found one called rageagainsttheminivan and the blog author had a guest poster, Jennie, who writes at www.thestearnsweeklynews.blogspot.com, and wrote about her "6 children" 2 biological, 3 pending adoption, and one that she didn't adopt at all but just loves. And- I feel bad for writing this, but- feels entitled to. She wrote, "That day we faithfully began praying, and that week our daughter's birth mom conceived... When we were matched and heard about our birth mom we were ecstatic. She was 14 and had been in and out of the foster care system. " Wow. I don't believe praying makes things happen in strangers' lives but this woman does and she writes that "her daughter's" (not her daughter's) "14 year old birth mom concieved". 14 year olds are very much children, maybe not in terms of how clever they are or how much say they need regarding their life circumstances, but they should be protected as much as other children are. And it sounds very much like this girl was not. Then Jennie writes that,
"instead we got a call that the birth mom had changed her mind and wanted to parent, so she ran away. What I want you to know is that we mourned the loss of our daughter. I mourned as I had never mourned before. I didn't matter that our DNA wasn't the same. She was our child. We had prayed for her since before her conception." and then,
"We have forgiven the birth mom for the pain she's caused, and we realize that she was in a lot of pain, too. We still pray for our daughter", and I feel like, you are "forgiving" someone who is not culpable. Partly because of her extreme youth, and also because what she did wrong is not realize (maybe not acknowledge?) that she wanted to parent her baby.

Presents from the Past

2010-12-16T17:50:00.000-08:00

I am going through everything I have left at my family home. It is surprisingly easy. I haven't used the things in so long they don't quite feel like mine, so I feel like I am sorting through several caches of trash and presents from my past. Some of the presents from the attic were: 2 umbrellas (plus 2 that I don't feel attached to so I was happy to bring them down to be up for grabs), more than a hundred good books, meditation cds, a bellydance cd, my grandmother's wool and fur coat, a half dozen mostly empty sketchbooks, two frisbees, a curling iron, a hand crank emergency flashlight, pens, an address book, a pretty good knife, luggages, and a pair of orange tint ski goggles that I am going to use in the evening to help me produce melatonin.
The presents from the trailer were: my "keeper" textbooks and assigned books, a curling iron, straightening iron, and blow dryer, hangers, a shoe rack, a cheap chest of drawers, acrylic paint additives, a bit of clothing, a purse made from a license plate, and some nice yarn.

I feel weird about bringing all this home to santa cruz. It will fit fine if I get a bookshelf or two, but I have never had all my things in one house since I moved out. What if there is a fire or flood? Then I won't have any backups of anything. I won't have any clothes and I won't have an umbrella and I won't have any books. At the same time, though, it will be nice to know that if something isn't there it isn't anywhere.
I hope no one gets me one single thing that needs storing for Christmas. I haven't got any material needs. My grandma understands, and sent me food and socks for my birthday which was lovely. I told my parents I don't want anything but I think my mom thought I was wrong. So I am going to ask for an oil change and trader joe's gift cards for when I run out of money which might be soon.

When you grow up, your heart dies.

2010-12-13T20:11:00.000-08:00

Which is why when I went to take a shower and saw this:

I said a curse and pouted before coming around to the excitement of a surprise christmas tree.