Back to School

 This week has started the last of the school I have to complete until I go out into the world and try and find my pot of gold. It's been a quick start here as if each class is trying to make every moment count like the famous candle in the wind. I've taken 3 "studio" classes that each last 3 hours a class twice a week plus homework so I'm sure to be busy. My other class tries to act as if it's an internship and lasts 2 hours once a week plus 4 hours of "volunteer" time and homework besides. So even with a light schedule I find that my days are quickly filled with things to do.

 In the mean time I wonder about what I should do after all this work is complete. I'd like to go abroad for a year or two it seems I've not yet gotten the travel bug out of me. So the best position would be a job outside the U.S. creating some sort of art so that when I come back, as I would expect to do I could find work in a better economy having gotten to see more of the world.

Or I could go for some higher degree. I wouldn't mind trying for a masters if I could figure out how much time I have left on my GI Bill and whether or not I would be a better artist after all that time.

At the same time I took my cat's cast off this week and since the muscles have atrophied and the cast caused it to lose fur on that leg it's looking mutated right now. I took the cast off myself and it took about 1/2 an hour while I tried to convince a small furry animal that I wasn't trying to eat it while I held a knife in my hand. It's gone back to ignoring me except when it's hungry and I take that as a good sign. I would have taken it to the vet but the bill of $300 to splint the leg left me gun shy for another visit.

Home? Again.

I'm back in Elko Nv, for a while. It's good to get a chance to be with family just long enough to get bored of them and then head back to college. I also get a chance to keep my computer skills from getting rusty, by doing a little configuration work and to break from being self-centered for a while. I tend to think that our best work (that is humanity's best) is done in groups. A person might become the impetus of the work, but groups are the way to go. You just need the right group.

I also think that many of our world problems come because we don't know the right way to phrase the work needed to be done. It's a problem of needing to either work together in a meaningful way or to compete on terms of benefits instead of costs. And the benefits need to be compounding benefits like creating a better product that leads to more sales and research money that then leads to a better product.

I hear that to grow to a better place that ideas need to have sex. You have to air out as many ideas as possible so that one my influence another. May the most fit survive. So my question to others is how do I make my moves so that I can get more each time I make that next move. I dunno just yet but I'm thinking of starting the worlds first socially conscious marketing team to spread good ideas to others and to make money off non-profit organizations. I dare you to beat me to it.

Neither Necessary nor Sufficient.

I was reading an article on the psychology of friendships how the form and what they mean. Basically it said we find people who reinforce our internal image of ourselves and make them our friends. Beyond the friend mark all that was required was time for people to become "best friends" and to create relationships it's easiest to befriend someone with similar experiences or outlooks.

This made me think about the mental image I have of myself and the friends I keep. Even though I think about my thoughts and feelings all the time I rarely question what image I have of myself in my head or why I want it to be a certain way.

And I came to the realization that I like to be thought of as intelligent. Smart is a similar word but hearing it applied to me doesn't quite convey how I want to be seen. And I know that I like to think of myself as more intelligent than most others. When I meet a person who sees more deeply into subjects, or when I meet people who pick up things faster than I do I try and figure out a way to best them.

It's strange that I feel so competitive around people who are quicker than me. I have a couple of people in mind when I think about the subject. And I hate to admit that their minds are better than mine. It rankles me.

But on the other hand I get bored with many concepts rather quickly. I get computers and systems usually pretty quickly and "mind blowing" concepts aren't. They're interesting. So I figured I needed to challenge myself to the most frustrating thing I could think of.

Art.

Intelligence of a certain kind is needed for it. Watching what catches on and what doesn't always make sense. Music, literature, and other creative works can be really good and still fail. Or they can be horrid and succeed. Talent may necessary for success but it's not not sufficient. And I'm trying to intuit what it is that makes something work and what makes something fail.

I can't.

I'm not sure that knowing would be beneficial but I still try.

Ending a hiatus

I started trying to write a post a day for the year but dropped off when it seemed my life wasn't doing anything worth talking about, I mean I had complaints but nobody wants to hear those and I've learned to stop unproductive behavior and focus elsewhere at least some of the time. Anyway school ends tomorrow and I'll be meeting up with an old navy buddy of mine afterwards.

We'll compare lives and decisions, I got out went to school and am almost finished he stayed in gained rank and is stationed in on the east coast. A little bit of catch up and then he'll head back to his home and I'll start off to Arizona to visit some family and friends in the area.

I think that spending time with other people is great but at the same time I don't do parties. I never really had them as a kid. As a teenager babysitting duties, and my fairly Dudley-Do-Right nature kept me from being invited to anything major, so when I go to a party or similar event I feel lost.

I went to an opening for one of my former professor's art tonight and the feel is very similar to a party. I listened to her talk about her work and then the mingling began. I feel I need a human totem for such occasions as I don't do small talk very well when I'm surrounded by even tens of people. So a friend is a good thing to have when I'm at one of these things since I'm so used to structured activities that open events are uncomfortable at best for me.

Which is strange because I love public speaking and performance work. Anyway I work best one to one. One me one you, one me one crowd. Hopefully this ends my blogging dry spell.

Building a better now

It seems that my entire life everything has been preparation work for some sort of unknown future. All of it some sort of schooling, or work towards a place where I have the skills I need to do something else something grander. I think everyone feels like this like we work hard to be at some other place than where we are now. Or at least that's what society tells us. Then after all that time, we are dropped. So much build up so much work towards a goal, and then we drop.

It feels like we are seeds falling from one of those trees with the helicopter leaves. We make ourselves to head out as far as we can, then we let go and see where the wind takes us.

But the time comes and we hit the ground and I'm thinking that part of building a better tomorrow is to be a better now. It's not a stop and smell the roses thing. I don't think that it's about always enjoying what's around us (sometimes the flowers are brambles) but rather to work as if right now is really here rather than a starting point to somewhere else. It may be that but things like cleaning up at home make things better for now and the future. I just think that part of our work should be making now a better time and let the future surprise us at least a little.

A big fear.

So I read about the second most scary condition I've ever heard about and I promptly tried to forget about it. Locked-in syndrome, where you are stuck in your own body but can't move or communicate with anything except maybe your eyes. The only reason I bring this up is I saw the movie Inception it made me think of all the things associated with dreams. And one thing I thought about is a moment that I've felt only 2 or 3 times in my life.

It's a moment between waking and dreams where your body is frozen your arms can't move, nor your legs, even when you tell them MOVE, it's as though they were covered in lead. The moment might only be a minute, but it feels like forever. The weight of your bed tells you that you are not dead but you can't move. Absolute terror.

You come back to life, to feeling and moving and it's 3 am in the morning and you feel tired as all hell but damned if you'll sleep again tonight. It's just too much.

The first worse problem I can't really say, not because I don't know, but it changes from day to day and from hour to hour. But always at number two is being trapped unable to do a thing.

The walls are bleeding.

So I'm working at the Marjorie Barrick museum right now for my class and we are making a thing of twine and staples. I'll post pics when it is done. The way that it's made there are shadows on the wall that make interesting patterns. So my teacher decided that duplicating the effect with a drawing on another wall would be a great idea.

This he left up to me and another student and we set about making some pattern on the wall using a chalk-line filled with red chalk to create the effect. If you have ever had a cat scratch yourself and seen the after-effect the color is the same and since we only did it in lines to me it looks like the beginning of a b-movie special effect. The walls want to bleed. I didn't start it out to look like that but right now it's pretty cool.

It makes me think about what other things might look good in a dose of b-movie horror effect.