I love little notebooks

This is my first full week of school and I am most excited about my notebooks I bought for this semester. They are little. They all fit inside my purse and they dont flip around, there are no spirals to catch on things and unwind at the end and they will not weigh me down on shoulder or in spirit.

And in not being quite as excited for actual classes as the rest of the people seem to be, I am holding on tight to my little notebooks. I have reverence for these little notebooks and hope to write nicely and well considered thoughts in them.

I love little notebooks.

Possibilité

I am having that feeling again. The one that there are endless possibilities. But in a good way, not in an overwhelmed way. Maybe it is because I have started to cook and cooking is a way of testing possibilites in a low risk way, the very worst that happens is a ruined meal and a few laughs about it now or in a couple of days.

or maybe it is New York doing this to me, afterall, aside from all the horrors of the city, it has this way about it, this encouragement of all things, like a parent who lets you do anything you want- and you are free to eat candy until you are sick, wear a ridiclous outfit or make something of yourself. your choice.

We Have Been Shot

{I am so sick of looking at myself in that dress, in those terrible pictures}, I said to a friend on Friday afternoon.

Then that evening we learned that I probably would never see those wedding pictures again. The company that we hired to take our wedding photographs was involved in a several year long scam, taking peoples money and not producing photos or the albums that they promised.

We called the phone number of the company and it was disconnected, then we called the photographer (who we always got a creepy feeling from) and he was trying to build a scam on top of the scam, trying to get money from us to fix his supposedly broken harddrive where our wedding pictures lived, but then offering to give us the pictures for free, how sweet.

We had seen the wedding pictures online a few months ago and we pretty much hated them. If I had a lot more money we would have hired a better company, but I was so beat by the whole wedding process and the fact the the florist could not get me peonies that I just thought these people would do.

To make ourselves feel better after this debacle we took our gift certificate to Lumas, a photography gallery, and went down to Soho and bought the most beautiful piece in there. It is a circular print, that is in a circular mat and is a sepia toned landscape that just took our breath away as the bubble wrap was peeled away from it.

We carried it down the street together and we felt a little less broken.

I Think Therefore I Am

There is not one correct way to write an essay, or cook a meal or knit a sweater. There are several correct ways. This limitless quality of creating or producing things can be exhilarating (I often felt this way about painting, because if feels like there are no rules), however it can also be overwhelming and lead to an unstructured mess that makes no sense, or tastes terrible or has three arms.

What I realized today is that, in school, when learning new things, people often want a pat answer and attempting to unearth the true ambiguity of a concept is unproductive and not what anyone wants to hear. What needs to be done is to learn what people think about things and learn to speak their language. I am feeling lately like I have thought about things to the point that deconstructs them into a meaningless mess, but I am thinking too much about the wrong things.

Sometimes you just have to accept a concept or a theory for what it is, learn the crap out of it and move on and even though the temptation for infinite questioning is standing over you and breathing down your neck, you must ignore it, especially if you want your PHD someday.

{for I saw that to know is a greater perfection than to doubt-Descartes}

What Art is For

I am finding it hard to find a place in my life and an explanation for all things art and science. Because for every single concept or organization that purports to fuse them into oneness, I still maintain that they are so damn different that sometimes my head spins and strains and hurts to reconcile the two, while my heart reaches out for both beyond reason.

Recently, I was at a funeral and someone I used to know asked me what I did and I told them. She was working as a party planner and she said {wow it makes my job seem so shallow} and I said to her {dont feel that way, because ultimately all anybody wants to do is go to a party} and it awakened the feeling in me that so many seemingly frivolous things are just there, not to cure illness or put food in mouths, but to make life a little nicer and that is in itself a very important function.

So, In honor of the new year and my new outlook, I am posting something that I heard on the radio the other day. It is a list that the artist Mary Frank put together in her journal about what art is for:

to comfort the dead and to awaken the living.

to feel the power of color and shape and to fill an unspoken hunger for community

to give courage use the heart to risk and never be afraid of tenderness or the absurd.

The Lightness and the Sweetness

I am re-posting an old post of mine that I keep thinking about and that is relevant again:

The smell of evergreen embraces me as I walk down the sidewalk where they sell the cut trees in the city, we know they are dead now but somehow they still hold a little piece of some impossible hope. A hope that is unique in each one of us. A hope that burns out come January and is forgotten entirely by bleak February. Sometimes I think that Christmas in the city is unbearable, people shopping shopping shopping, dropping money all over the place for things that no one really needs.

But it is the mood that people get in to that is really so fantastic. For Christmas this year I want to take a little piece of Christmas spirit, the lightness and sweetness, and capture it in a paper coffee cup and sit it beside my bed and sip it slowly throughout the dry and leafless winter.

The Grass Is No Greener

So tonight it was solved, and its over for now. I was telling my brother all the reasons why I am miserable in my current position and we discussed how I always want to do something other than what I am doing, no matter what I am doing. He said that its a problem of imagination that I have. What? I thought?

He said that it is easier to imagine yourself 180º from where you are than say, 3º from where you are. In other words it is hard to make your current situation into what you want it to be than it is to imagine a total overhaul being exactly what you need.

done and done. I am off to do some homework.