Mud

I was totally thrown by this project. My mind was stuck on the idea of how different we experienced things as a kid (per my conversation with Beth before class). All I kept thinking about was when I was a kid and me and this girl down the street used to make mud pies. She had this giant sandbox with a big truck bed hatch on poles over it. We would dig to the dirt underneath and put the dirt and some water in these little baking tins her mom had given us to use in the sandbox. Then we would find bugs, the bigger the better. We would put the big ones in the middle and sprinkle the little bugs on top. When we had baked them, sometimes in the sun on top of the truck shell but in the oven if it wouldn't harden fast enough, we would then present them to her dad. He would prentend to eat them, was most complimentary when their was a big bug, and once we even got him to eat the head off a cricket.

Maybe that experience has effected my baking abilities because I can't make cookies to save my life. From scratch, from fancy expensive tubs kid's peddle for school fundraisers, from the 'dumby-proof' pre-packaged individually scooped refridgerated stuff -- all hockey pucks. So I scooped up some dirt out of my side yard and molded it with my bare hands, like I did back then when getting dirty was great and what kids did, and I baked it. Another hockey puck. Ahhh, just like homemade!

Smacked Senseless

So I missed class today due to being called into work, but stopped by Beth's office and chatted a bit about the senses. Oh, the irony. I am notorious among my friends for missunderstanding things due to hereditary bad hearing and just today received this in an email from my cousin because it made her think of me.

It would be nice if my lack of hearing heightened my other senses (perhaps it has my sense of smell -- I do gag overly easily), but for the most part, no. Just today I didn't seem to notice a large floor-to-ceiling window next to the door in the IT computer lab until I smacked it with my face. Maybe it's about observation more than anything. We often choose when to use our senses much like we choose when to use common sense. Mine will likely kick in within the next few weeks with the coming of fall when the smells, colors, and even sounds are able to reach through the indifferent fog and strike me unawares. Like a plate-glass window. Only more enjoyable.

Different Rules

When it comes to creativity, I write. I think, I have ideas, I can see things and sometimes make things but art in the sense that most people think of it -- drawing, painting and such, is something I have done very little with since high school. And when I have done it, it's been pencil drawing. Precise and painstaking and basically always feels just short of perfect so I stopped. I've done little painting, creatively anyway. I have a hard time doing things that seem so permanent, that I can't immediately erase mistakes on and fix. And I'm usually very slow in the process, which is another reason why I stopped bothering.

So when the director of my church's youth group asked me to paint a very large background of a swamp (why a swamp, I don't know) I was really unsure. And with 2 weeks to do it, even more weary. Did I say it was large? Yeah, 4 - 8 ft. x 4 ft. panels. But it's done and not too bad.

So, for me, the broken rules are premanence & scale.

Remembering the Memorable

This class was very interesting. Things stood out to me for entirely different reasons. Alex's project on orphan awareness wasa very effective, and would have been even without his own personal story but knowing the backstory to what drives someone's desire to make changes always has a greater impact on me. I don't know his name, but the boy with the scrapbook who looks a bit like a young Corey Feldman (perhaps it's the hair) had an effect on me. I found the conversation itself interesting from the beginning because he said he was irritated by all the talk and had wanted to just get to the project, yet his basis for what he had brought was about getting to know people deeper and he even said that the main way of doing so is through conversation. And talking about what he had brought in was really at the core of his 'project'. I honestly didn't care so much about seeing the book as I did about hearing what made it important to him and the background as to why.

Too Many Options

Anytime I hear a discussion on the advancement of technology and options in society, I think about the "good old days". Yes, that makes me one of those old farts that sits on the porch reminiscing. But what I think about when doing so is what technology has not just changed, but has begun to erradicate from the world that I grew up with. And if I'm sitting on my porch, I can literally look across the street and see one of them -- the building where I worked creating ads for small specialty papers that had to let me and several others go in a large-scale downsize due to the rapid decrease in sales of printed papers. Having done a research paper on the effects of the web on newspapers and on-line reading, Kindles, Nooks, etc. on book production, this was what I saw in may head:  a casket with a body made of newspaper and a head made from a book. So that's what I made.

The book is Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The body is made from one of the papers I once designed ads for.