The Life of a Very Distraught Cornmuffin.

Yes, it's been about twelve weeks since I last wrote in my blog.

Since that time, I've...

-Finished all my classes (YES.)

-Gotten an art area scholarship to boot (YES!)

-Started knitting like mad

-And taken up contra dancing.

Now for more about the last two.

I'm using the humongous amount of spare time I have nowadays to work on projects that I might have deemed too darn tough to attempt while attending my classes, which took up most of my time anyway (sometimes I'd get home around 11:00 at night...not fun when you're in class starting at 8:00 in the AM).

So now I'm currently working on a pair of socks for my father-- I figure it'll be a joint Father's Day/birthday gift. They've been the socks from HELL, I kid you not. I kept getting the sizing off, despite checking my gauge. Which meant that I was knitting sasquatch socks. Needless to say, I've frogged it OVER and OVER again and now I think I've finally hit the right size.

Pictures will come when I finish. I finally decided to buy my camera a new USB cord after spending months looking high and low for my old one...which...disappeared? Unfortunately, I decided to be cheap and got one for a dollar off ebay. So now it takes around 30 minutes to load all my pictures. Which really cuts into my battery time.

Oh yeah, and contra dancing.

A friend from my Spanish 2002 class asked me if I'd like to go to the last contra dancing she'd be attending before heading off to Spain. I agreed, despite having not even the slightest clue what contra dancing would be.

Well, from 7:30-11:00 pm last Saturday I contra danced.

It involves alot of swinging, running around, and partner switching, all done to bluegrass and Irish jigs.

You get very sweaty. So does everyone else.

There's a caller who tells you the moves during the songs (played by a live band!), until later in the song when he stops telling you what to do, which is mildly stressful.

But I...actually really enjoyed myself.

I think I'll be going back!

You can read more about it here.

Hand-spinning, knitting, gardening, contra dancing...

I'm basically one small step away from joining a drum circle, and upon joining a drum circle I will pretty much be a true bonafide crazy hippie lady.

Pretty sad, eh?

Anyway, hope all of you are having as much fun as I am. Here's to hoping for more frequent postings in the near future.

-Cat

Since I last posted an entry.

Yes, blogger guilt has set in and I feel like making contact with the rest of humanity again, while I still have a wee bit of free time. Because, you know, free time is scarce nowadays.

Which is one of the reasons why I'm seriously thinking about taking only 12 credits next semester. When you find that your art classes are cutting into the time you'd normally spend working on art, you know there's something wrong.

One class I wish I had more time to devote to was my photography class. Who'd've thunk that it would take roughly TWO HOURS to develop TWO PHOTOS, which by the way, I'm still not happy with because there's bits of DUST SPECKS on the images?

I swore, I blasted my negatives with that special canned air crap over and over again and they looked sparkling clean...hm. I think next time I go in there I'll spray some air in the machine thingy itself.

Oh, and to develop negatives it also takes like two hours as well...at least when I do it.

Yep, pretty much all my other classes are lack-luster. 3-D can get interesting, but I never seem to have the time to really do all that I want to do on my projects. Sociology is a lot like the psychology classes I've taken before-- interesting material, but it requires a lot of plugging away. Also, we have to do group discussions and vote for best and worst papers every single time we write article summaries. Spanish is alot of work as usual, but at least my current spanish teacher is somewhat merciful when grading. Environmental science is probably as interesting as a college-level science class is going to get. But it's suddenly hit me that I need to 6 hours of volunteer work in an environment-related field and I pretty much have only two more months to go before it's finals time.

On a happier note, I submitted a piece that I did for my 2-D class into the student exhibition. The one with a 200 dollar cash prize. Doubt I'm winner material-- the piece is only 14"x14" and somewhat of a minimalist design-- but it's still pretty snazzy, and it'll be fun if I make it in the show, at least.

( Hope it's gallery qualityCollapse )

Well, my goal is to blog at least once every two weeks, and to post more images of finished objects as well. I find the writing actually helps me to express thoughts more fluently in general, and, well, finished objects should have a visual component instead of just "oh my gosh I made this really cool ___ and I wish you could see it!".

Also, maybe if I blog more I could update on my actual personal life and thoughts and musings in general, instead of just boring work and college.

Sigh.

-Cat

I have to submit a piece of my work for the Junior Review starting this Feb.

Basically, 1) I spend cash on making it gallery-ready. 2) I mount it on the wall for everyone to see. 3)All the art professors comment on my work of "art" and give the comments to my adviser, and 4) My adviser then gives me the comments.

I showed my adviser a couple of my pieces Wednesday, namely, a drawing I did of the inside of a cathedral in my Drawing II class I took back in like...Fall '05...

A painting/drawing/mixed media/whatever of a tree filled with stuff I like that I made in my 2-D Design class last semester.

A few of my smaller paintings from my Colour Theory class I took in Spring '07.

This fern picture I did out of cut up paper I made for 2-D. Very perfect looking, but not quite "moi" enough.

And my masterpiece *drum roll*...the grossest pizza box ever known to man that I made in my 2-D class.

I so need to post pics of that.

Anyway, he REALLY liked the fern picture (damn.), but he liked my cathedral sketch as well, and that was something I planned on matting and framing anyway. I think I'll choose that one.

Although the pizza box rocked.

...

Blech. School makes me boring.

Yep, just go and read something more interesting now. Sorry for wasting your time.
-Cat

School started monday.

I have a really odd schedule.

MON: 9:00 AM-- Advanced Spanish. After that, photography, spanning two hours. I then have a break starting at 12:10, then off to environmental science at 1:25. Next class is 3-D Design, which ends at 5:20. Then comes Sociology at 5:30, and that doesn't end 'till 8:20.

Monday is not an easy day for me.

Today's Wednesday.

Wednesday should be easier, because I don't have my three hour long night class, Sociology.

Friday should be even easier, because I don't have my 3-D class on that day. But I will have Spanish and photo lab to work on.

...

Tuesday and Thursday are my recovery days.

*yawns*

I think I'll give this entry the tag "most boring entry EVAR".

Hopefully I'll be able to give a better, more in-depth entry with a bit of humour tossed in when I'm not so tired and don't have a class starting at 9:05 to be looking forward to.

Ah, I remember the days when I used to celebrate the fact that art students only had to take one math class. BUT I HAVE TO TAKE TWO UPPER LEVEL LANGUAGE CLASSES. NOT EVERY MAJOR HAS TO DO THIS.

I actually think I'd rather take two math classes than two Spanish classes. That's saying alot, you know.

Yeah, Spanish is my next class.

I guess I should do some studying now.

*stall stall stall stall stall....*

Later.

-Cat

Okay.

One of the things I got for Christmas was a $15 dollar iTunes gift card.

So what, right?

Well...I tend to be a cd buying kind of person.

So I need you to suggest some bands that are completely out there, and that I wouldn't be very likely to buy a whole cd of.

Good examples: a) some obscure band belonging to an obscure genre that I would never have dreamed of giving a try. Weird foreign bands would fall into this category. b) Bands that have one REALLY GREAT SONG, but that's pretty much it. c) Bands/songs that can pretty much be found only as music downloads. You know, EPs, singles, vinyl only stuff that managed to make it onto a music compilation.

Bad example: "Ooh, there's this one really great post-punk/dream pop/art-punk/etc. band that you should really check out!"

Now, if you know any bands like that...GO AHEAD AND SUGGEST 'EM! But I'll probably end up just going on amazon and buying the whole darn album instead of downloading one token song. Unless, of course, all the other songs are crap compared to that.

Right now I plan on downloading some stuff by:

-Dick Dale

-Balkan Beat Box

-Taraf de Haidouks

-Gogol Bordello

-The Trashmen

-The Legendary Shack Shakers

-Slim Cessna's Auto Club




Save this cd mix before it becomes some mutant gypsy/surf rock/alt. country bastard.

Hey guys,
Just doing my best to give a quick blog-update of the going-ons in my life. Hm. I've been knitting and Christmas-shopping like mad.

I have a shawl that needs to be done by tomorrow morning, so I can ship it to my grandmother. I'm currently on the 25th pattern repeat...I should be somewhere around the 30th pattern repeat, but earlier this afternoon my sister Mary was hollering to me about not helping her outside with the animals (I am SO not going to go there)...and I started yapping back at her. I ended up royalling screwing up in the middle of a row. To this moment I'm still not sure if I was doing a double yarn-over drop-stitch in the middle of a row where I was supposed to be DROPPING the previous yarn-overs, or vice-versa.

For those of you who are absolutely clueless to what that was all about, just picture a great bloody mess of loops in the middle of a half-knitted shawl.

Knitting has taught me to be both a very proficient curser and prayer. I'd imagine having similar results by sailing the seven seas and running out of liquor and citrus fruits.

Overall, I've been doing my best at keeping myself busy and not slipping into an emotional lull. This past term was extremely difficult for me, and I'm having trouble shaking off that emotional emptiness that seemed to pervade all my studious efforts. I really hope I can get better before next term; if not I might seriously consider a visit to the counselor. Not that I'm going through anything serious, but I am going through a bought that's affecting my work skills in particular. Normally I can just devote myself to my work no matter how good or bad I've felt in the past.

ANYWAY...back to something more cheerful?

Overall, my goals for finishing my hand-made gifts before Christmas seem to be reasonable, I most of the gifts for Mom, Pop, my sisters, my brothers, my grandparents, and some of my other relatives. A post solely devoted to pictures of my completed projects is definitely something I want to do; of course, it'd have to be friends-only-- I don't want any peekers! Not that I've been so great at knitting only when no one's around, but I've done my best to keep my finished work under covers.

AND.

Over the past few months or so, I've really gotten into eastern-european stop-motion films. Czech stuff in particular. I first saw "The Mascot" by Vadislas Starevitch as a short that came with the DVD version I rented of Vampyr- Der Traum des Allan Grey...which, by the way, I highly suggest for those of you who like German Expressionistic flicks. The plot is incredibly confusing, but the cinematography is just gorgeous.

Oh yes, The Mascot. I've searched around youtube for a decent quality version of it, but the only one I could find with what appears to be the original soundtrack is this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-m…

Unfortunately, it's just the "Devil's Ball" part of the short. You can find much longer versions on youtube, but with some sort of modern music as a backround that I find kinda distracting.

Pretty cool, eh? Maybe an influence to Tim Burton? Especially that devil...

Vadislas Starevitch was actually Polish (not Czech), but he seems to have been pretty influential to other stop-motion animators.

You can find a lot more info on him (and a lot of other cool people) at http://www.darkstrider.net, in the "Masters" section of the site.

And the video clips are great there, too.

If any of you would like me to, I'll be sure to post some more stop-motion stuff I've found in future posts. But right now I'm beat, and I've got work to do. Later.

-Cat

That's what one clueless grocery store in NY was selling for the Jewish holiday.


It really just doesn't get any funnier. Or ironic. Or completely un-kosher.

Seriously, how can you live in NY and be that completely unaware of the traditional Jewish do's and don'ts?

HAHAHAHAH

-Caty

Yeah, this has been one helluvah term for me.

But it's finally over.

Hopefully next one won't be as bad...I really don't think I could put up with two more years of this kind of crap. Seriously, I'm worn out.

....


PARTAY!

Anyway, now that it's all over with for the time being, I'll try and get my blogging act back together. I feel like so much has been happening and I haven't written a word about any of it...so, hopefully you'll be seeing my posts a little more frequently now?

-Cat

Hello there,
Well, so far, I've been recovering from what I hope will be the last oral surgery operation I'll ever have. Four wisdom teeth removed, along with what I'm hoping will be a cyst (at the moment they're just calling it a "lesion").

My left side is really bothering me. See, I didn't have a second molar on that side (???), so my wisdom tooth just sprouted up in its stead. Unfortunately, it came through crooked. Not only was it completely useless-- I couldn't bite on it-- but it also formed a pocket of lord-knows-what deep down in the recess (or should I say abcess) of my gums/jaw.

I now have a gaping hole in the back of my mouth that is just BEGGING my tongue to poke through it.

I'm trying to keep my tongue from being naughty.

The stitches are a completely different story though; at this point I'm considering them fair game.

This past Thursday was the day I had it. I actually did pretty darn well. Kinda out of it, but alright. On the way home I kept making strange hand gestures in the car to my mother; somehow she managed to figure out that it meant that I had to pee. When I got home I peed, then fell back to sleep again. When I woke up I had some yogurt to drink, and I went down to the kitchen and took my pain killers. I went to the bathroom (again), and I though I was going to the sofa to take a nap...

But I was then awakened by my mother, and my whole family was standing around me. Turned out I didn't get to the couch-- I just passed out on the kitchen floor.

When the doctor called to check up my mother told him the whole thing, and he said that due to the fact that I hadn't really eaten anything since the night before, I was probably pretty dehydrated. Also, because of my height and weight, the dose was probably a little too much for me to handle all at once. He said to take one half of the pill, and wait about 15-20 minutes for the other half.

The whole weekend was spent recuperating, catching up on homework, and knitting (I'm so in Christmas gift mode already!). My family's been really good and understanding of it all; my brothers and sisters have been taking up the brunt of the animal work I'd normally be doing, and my mother has been supplying me with some very good easy-chew foods to eat.

I STILL can't really chew anything yet; I find this very irritating.

Monday I did a sort of half-day. I skipped all my morning classes and when to just my 2-D Design and Mythology classes. I'm glad I opted to do that too, because I think I started to get kinda infecty on my left side; that morning it was throbbing and more swollen than normal.

Tomorrow I'm going in for a check-up, and hopefully a.) They'll remove these darn stitches, and b.) They'll tell me that the "lesion" in my jaw was actually just a cyst that will never ever come back. Keep your fingers crossed!

-Caty

UFO SIGHTING IN HAITI.

Go ahead; claim it's all a hoax. Me? As someone who is familiar with the Haitian culture, I firmly believe that Haiti is a very likely candidate for an alien landing.

I bet aliens speak Creole. And voudou? Move over scientology; it's le Bon Diei who's gonna rule when aliens come to finally pick the chosen people up.

I'm laughing on the inside, by the by.

-Caty