Francis Ford Coppola

While working on a picture of me at four holding my baby brother in the tub, I honestly forgot how old I was. I'd just finished watching some old Christmas specials from around 1994, too, which only added to the confusion. I seriously thought I was looking at a recent photo, and I was shocked to see myself in the mirror and realise, good lord, I'm almost 20! Where have all these years gone? What happened to the '90s? It's almost 2008! And then I had my annual Mild Panic Attack about the coming new year and how my whole life will be over before I know it if I don't start paying attention. Oh, the years I've wasted, staying home and letting opportunity pass me by. I'm now at the age I used to dream about, an age of change and moving out, of boyfriends and cars and college and early fame. This is the time I've been waiting for. I can do things! And change things! And people will listen to me! But when I think of that, I get intimidated. I don't want to be a revolutionary. I want to go back to that time of limits. I want to be a kid again, if only because it would give me an excuse. This is what happens when I reminisce.

End of an era

Yesterday was so Art College I had to take a step back and try to comprehend what I was seeing. It was the last day of Sculpture, and everyone was showing off their final projects to the class. I wish every day could have been like this one--no working, no staring at a wall trying to think of something great, no hiding from my classmates, horrified at the idea that they might want to have a conversation (!) with ME (!!), no ambling from room to room and floor to floor trying to kill time--just walking around and talking about everyone else's work. For once I wasn't afraid to say what I really thought about other people's projects because there was guaranteed to be at least one person more pretentious than I was, and that was a huge load off my chest. One of the "suggestions" (art teachers don't like the word "rules") for this project was to stretch the conventional meaning of "sculpture", and my goodness did some people stretch. It was exciting to see what each person did differently; one person made a series of instructional pamphlets telling us how to make sure the oven is off, the OCD way; another tied belts around a fellow student's hands, feet, and eyes and placed him in the middle of a circle of chairs, where we were invited to sit. There was the dude who spread cedar boughs on the floor and sang a song with the lights off, the girl who sat in front of a projection of "Labyrinth" and wrote for the duration of a Perfect Circle song, the two people who set up an installation in the girl's washroom including a huge stuffed dog, a plank of pink styrofoam, a lava lamp, baby blankets, a mirror and a recording of approaching footsteps. There was the mother who put a car door and suitcases up against a wall and projected a video of her journey from Calgary to Cochrane and back. There was the girl who made a tiny replica of a tree and hung it in front of a black-and-white slide projection of the mountains, using the tree's shadow as an element. There was the graduate student who made a tiny neighbourhood out of plaster and covered it with a picture of a house that was recently torn down. There was so much variety, and for a few minutes I found myself thinking, this is what art colleges are for. Everything was experimental, and unlike anything I'd seen before. It was genuinely exciting to see what other people had created, and for once I wasn't embarrassed about what I had to contribute.

Oh, and everyone got to take home AT LEAST ONE Terry's Chocolate Orange. Score.

Blah blah blah blah blah balh balhbalhbhlahh

I'm feeling strangely euphoric right now. It's almost as if those days and weeks of no sleep and fighting with myself to just FINISH the Worst Project Ever never happened. I just want to put this whole term behind me and start again when I'm ready. I need to have some experience of doing what I like again, instead of just trudging through all the tedious stuff I have to do to finish first year. I'm pretty sure I failed at least one of my classes, but right now, that doesn't bother me very much. If I have to take it again, I'll take it again. If ACAD isn't the right place for me, I'll try someplace else. Everything seems really simple and optimistic right now. I don't want that to stop.
I'm already making my resolutions for next term: I will talk to someone on my first day of classes. I will not let myself fall into the role of crazy person who sits at the back and doesn't say a word, the one who obviously hasn't slept in days, wears the same clothes every week and always smells distinctly like hair oil and sweat. I will not undermine the value of doing an imperfect job. I am here to learn; nothing I do will be perfect. I will attend at least one event that I want to attend. I will save handouts and record my ideas. I will go to the library. I will not avoid people simply bacause I'm afraid they don't like me; if they talk to me, they're probably okay with being around me. That's all I have for now, but, you know, it's a start.

They aren't making enough soapboxes.

Tonight I managed to recycle the unrecyclable. I tore an old Pringles can into pieces, soaked them in water, and peeled off the plastic/metal/paper from either side of the cardboard. All this was done when I really should have been working on the project that's due tomorrow, but at the moment it seemed like the most important thing I could be doing and it would be heresy not to see it through to the end. I felt like I was on the edge of a revelation. Seeing that wealth of cardboard got me thinking of all the Pringles tubes that are thrown out annually, tubes made of TREES that could be put back into the system. I don't know if it was just the insomnia talking, but I suddenly felt very sad that trees aren't respected as much as they should be. Something so massive and daunting, home to an intricate community of plants and animals and part of a delicately balanced, self-regulating system that we could never possibly understand is reduced to a tube of pulp with one purpose only, to be thrown away after that purpose is fulfilled.
Over the past few days, I've been making myself crazy thinking of what each component of everything I use comes from. Fibres from cotton plants, plastic from oil, metals from the ground, adhesives from the bones of dead animals, etc. And it gets overwhelming when you think of just how little you have to do with the things you call yours. I don't know where this material was extracted, who extracted it, how many hours they worked, how much they got paid...I've never seen a field of sugarcane, a salt mine, a pulp mill, a slaughterhouse. All I know is what I see: shelves of clothing, rows of CDs, piles of fruit. It seems like things can go on like this forever, and that somehow, the world will always provide. But we know that oil is running out, that suburbs and megafarms are encroaching on well-maintained agricultural land, that entire species are being wiped out every day. I sometimes wonder if we are entering the next great extinction, a long period of chaos before the lull and eventual upsurge of new biological forms. Or if things will start to quiet down after the collapse of the American empire. I always get gloomy and apocalyptic when I think about what the dominant economy is doing to the state of the world. This make-believe concept of endless progress is driving us into the ground; even economists say it can't last. But we keep running with it, so much so that I'm afraid it won't stop until all our raw materials have run out.
I hate saying things like this, because I'm tired of hearing it myself. Words like "oil" have lost all meaning, relegated to the heap of buzzwords used by high school debate team zealots. I don't know anything about what I'm saying; I don't have any authority on the subject and I don't have the guts to do anything to change it. But some days I feel so impatient with the way things are. The world is falling apart and we still buy disposable products.

The chills, they won't go away

Have you ever listened, late at night, to what sounds like the rhythmic moaning of the wind?

Then found out it was your parents, upstairs?

HO. LEE. CRAP.

How can this be?

It's 5:01 right now and I'm not tired. At all. It's insane how quickly I've gone from Grandmother to speed freak in my sleep habits. I won't sleep for 2 days, then I'll sleep for 8 hours, then I'll stay up for another 2 days. My mindset has now shifted from "how late can I stay up before I start having trouble doing things?" to "how late can I stay up before I can NO LONGER FUNCTION?" Being an insomniac puts you in such a strange frome of mind. You start challenging yourself to little self-destructive contests, and you don't even question them because the common-sense part of your brain gave up hours ago. There's a certain threshold that you try to reach, when you give up on trying to sleep and become seduced by the notion that you can stay up forever. Right now, I feel like I'm running a marathon race..just a bit longer, just a bit longer, it's almost 6:00, you can make it! Because somehow I got it in my head that if I go to sleep now, I'll be way more tired when I wake up than if I don't go to sleep at all. How's that for logical thinking?

I'm going to go watch some infomercials. Hope your night was more restful than mine.