the pathetic fallacy

Today it's 60 degrees out and foggy.

You know, it's one thing to say your work comes first. It's something entirely different to try and determine whether you should stay up another three hours and make this project better, or go to bed so that you can put coherent effort into the project due the next day.

I got 6 hours of sleep.

I feel extremely guilty.

"To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;/ To sleep, or run wrong, is."

- John Donne

It's almost the end of the semester. I find myself shaking my calendar and yelling, "It's almost December?!? No! Take it back!" Unfortunately, all this gets me is a mess of papers (my calendar is the repository for almost every piece of spare paper that I think has something important or fun written on it).

Let's take a look at the next few weeks, shall we? Fourteen days until finals week. In between then, I've got an advanced writing final essay due, five reflections for comp theory, two research papers, three art projects (possibly more if I learn the gum bichromate process)... Yeah, actually, that might be it. Besides, you know, work and layout spreads and the newsletter. Hey, that doesn't sound too bad. It could be way worse. Knock on wood. And I think I may only have one actual final exam (woot for writing and the arts!). So. Lots of loves to all. Hope your Thanksgivings were amaaaaaaazing. = D

it will be in the key of delicious

Today we ate turkey, and just about every imaginable fixing besides. Then I took a three-hour nap, and then I finished the first very, very rought draft of my research paper. Then I went to do more work onlines, but discovered that refworks hates you if you're not on campus. So that's a no-go. Which is frustrating, as I never have time to work on Dr. Powers' bibliography when I'm on campus. But anyway. That doesn't really matter.

Then came the snacking this afternoon and evening, and the reading of webcomics, and the eating of delicious chocolates. And that about brings us up to the present, when the blogging takes place. Happy Thankgiving, everybody.

ah, teh interwebs

I'm back at my house, where we have wireless internet. So I can connect to the internet with my computer. It's kind of exciting. And it's pretty warm here (50 when I got off the plane, after THE most stressful flights of my life), and Mom is going to make dippy sandwiches (otherwise known as beef au jou - or something spelled mildly like that) this week.

I'm pretty excited to be home. Except that, oh yeah, I need to be writing a research paper, re-writing that other paper I failed, completing bibliographic information for Dr. Powers, acquiring imagery for my digital studio project, beginning my composition theory and pedagogy paper (after completing my interview questions for the professors) and taking pinhole negatives. All in five days. Uh... right. Break. I totally know what that means. (On a side note, I'm totally with Lucy about being jealous of non-challenging academic semesters... except that I'm pretty sure Lucy has harder papers to write than me)

Is it sad that I'm excited just not to feel guilty for sleeping eight hours or more a night because it's break?

last night i learned another important lesson

namely, how to pick locks. This girl from Photo 1 (name unmentioned in case of Messiah administration) accidentally closed the cabinet with all my supplies in it, locking me out (and only Andy Bale has the key). I pretty much panicked, but she just grabbed some wire that was lying around and said, "I wonder if we can pick the lock?" So she stuck the wire in and jiggled it around and yanked on the handle for a couple minutes, and, lo and behold, the lock opened. There was much rejoicing and disbelief.

Then we went on to try and pick every other kind of lock in the place. And, to our complete and utter surprise, we can pick more than just crappy cabinet locks, although the deadbolt on the classroom next door proved to be beyond our fledgling skills. Need I say that we saved that piece of wire? If I ever again get locked out of the supply cabinets the night before a project is due, that wire is going to be my best friend.

Now, I'm sort of debating the wisdom of putting this information out on teh interwebs, but I'm also kind of sure that the Messiah administration doesn't read my blog. And it's just too funny a story to keep to myself. Because it was completely by accident that we learned how, and the girl that first picked the lock is so not the person you'd expect to be a delinquent.

today i learned an important lesson

Never ever, ever muzzle your inner critic just because your peers tell you your work is "strong." Your peers are idiots. Or lying. Take your pick. Also? If someone can't find something wrong with your work, you shouldn't listen to the positive things they have to say about your work. It's just that simple. The minute you do either of these things, your work is shot to hell. And then you end up crying all over your professor's office.

And you know what else? There is no way you can do this artist/writer thing without being miserable. If you take the time you think you need in order to be a sane person, your work suffers, and then you suffer. If you don't take the time you think you need in order to be a sane person, you suffer, and your work may suffer anyway. If you put the work first, you'll always be an unhappy and unbalanced person, but if you don't put the work first, then you make crappy work, and how is that supposed to make you happy?

I now see why the average life span of artists is 10 years less than that of engineers. Pretty much everyone with any kind of brain committs suicide in college.

"go away, and take your stupid with you"

Thank you Andrew, for that link on your blog to that one comic with the one amazing quote. I forget specifics. Pretty much my head asplode.

Today was a very sucky day. A very, very sucky day. Hopefully it will get better. Pretty much I'm just blogging because I realized it's November, so I've been officially blogging for like two years now, and I've always celebrated the blog's birthday before. So... happy birthday blog? Birthday, at least.

I miss you guys. Coming here for Christmas may not work out after all, I discovered. Or if it does work out, it will have to work out very, very sneakily. Also, I hate it when your supervisor forgets to sign your time sheet... so you get paid two weeks late.

"so, you wanna test strip?"

Today, when I came into the darkroom, there were photographic pickup lines written all over the dry-erase board. It kind of made me happy.

Things that do not make me happy: failed negatives, research papers, and group presentations.

Other things that make me happy: eight hours of sleep, pomegranage-cherry juice, house tea time, i-pod analagous devices, cold-but-not-too-cold weather, cancelled classes, seeing Shanna on the way to dinner and having a half-hour conversation and jumping up and down and yelling "pwned," parties in the darkroom, high-fives, and Gregory Snader's mythology-comic-blog (his underworld has a starbucks!).

"these turdy-facy-nasty-paty-lousy-fartical rogues"

That's my favorite line from Volpone, by Ben Jonson. Jonson, let me say, is an irritating playwright. He's long-winded, pedantic, and bitter that no one likes his plays. He spends the prologue and the epilogue talking about how people talk bad about his plays, but this is why we should like them... not, in my opinion, a very dignified thing to do. Let the play speak for itself. It's not important if some idiot accused you of taking too long to write plays, and it's not important that you miraculously penned this one in three weeks.

I had something to say, but I forget what. I managed to write my paper for today, and I think it's got the seeds of goodness in it, if I can just think of a way to wrap it up. It also needs to be a bit longer, let's be honest. It just barely makes the minimum requirement, and that's only because my modeling statement is taking up space at the top. So. We'll see. Hopefully Helen Walker will like this one.

Is anyone else panicking about grades? My end-of-semester projects are worth ridiculously much of my grade, and I'm struggling with just the week-to-week stuff, let alone spending the time that they need. Digital Studio will probably be an A-, and Advanced Writing the same. I feel like Photo II will be a C, which makes me sad, but what can you do? I already spend almost 20 hours a week in the darkroom, and I can't spare any more time than that. Med. Ren. Lit I'll be lucky to get an A-, and Composition Theory and Pedagogy's probably an A-.

Anyway. Grades are boring and sucky, and probably you don't care what I think mine will be. So. I'm gonna revise my essay before our group meeting today.

"what can the guillotine do for you?"

Hi my loves.

It's the weekend, which pleases me immensely. Also something that pleases me immensely: I turned in the two projects-of-ultimate-death-and-hatingness this week. They weren't really huge projects, but they were definitely my least favorite projects thus far in the semester. And I got assigned two projects I'm really excited about in their place. One, for Digital Studio, is a personal book. I get to write the text, make the images, choose the topic, everything. And I already have an idea/text/paper for it. For Photography II, I get to focus just on my end-of-semester project this week, and then next week I'm going to learn how to make cyanotypes and enlarge negatives digitally. Which sounds freaking amaaaazing. Excellent good.

Oh, and did I say? I got accepted to Italy. Woot. So now forms is coming out my ears. But I'm going to Italy, which is the important part.

My resolution? Not to slack off this weekend, not in the slightest. Because if I do, I'm absolutely screwed. This year is hard, because there are no classes I can slack off in. I'm taking 5 major courses. All of them are super important. All of them have huge end-of-semester projects. All of these huge end-of-semester projects have components due next week. So pretty much I need to never slack off again ever and maybe not even sleep. But I like sleep, so I'm going to resolve to get some anyway. Sound good? Sounds good to me.

The end of the semester is coming up awful fast. Did you notice? It's really close to Thanksgiving. And after Thanksgiving, the semester is practically over. AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!