12.29.2005

My imaginary world

Well, my vacation from school is coming to a close. Just one more week (I know, I know; I’m a spoiled brat). Of course just when I get all inspired and energetic to start painting again and build up some work before classes start, the woodshop is closed all week. So I can’t get in and build stretchers. It’s like being all dressed up with nowhere to go.

But I have been working at the restaurant a lot and making a little money, so there’s that. I had a good time at my dad’s and stepmom’s for xmas. I took my (step)niece out one day for fun activities. We did Putt-Putt and went to the mall to play arcade games and visit the pet store. They had a pen of baby goats. Did you know that baby goats hop from place to place? They do not walk or trot. I did not know this, and it filled me with glee to see them boinging back and forth and twitching their little tail nubs.

I also took lots of photos of her, my niece, posed in various situations. I decided that I’m going to try painting realism for a while once classes start back again. All this time I’ve been like, “Oh I’m definitely going to do abstracts, I love abstract, my personality suits it more, blah blah blah.” But gradually I have realized that maybe the ideas I really care about and want to get across would be expressed better realistically.

For example, my idea for my niece, M, is to paint her going about her life and doing various things both kid-appropriate (like painting her nails or playing on the swings) and also adult-oriented (like grocery shopping or pumping gas). But it’ll be this weird made-up world in which the only person with her is this human-sized anime-styled caroony protector thing. Something very cutesy and bright. And it’ll always be just the two of them, making their way through the world, with no adults or other people around to help them.

The idea is, when you first look at them there’s this element of humor and ridiculousness, like this kid with her crazy cartoony friend playing Putt-Putt together. But when you look at them as a series, you realize that they’re raising each other, and you wonder where all the adults are, and whether this is all in the girl’s mind, like her imaginary world, or whether this is all taking place in her memories and she’s actually grown up now, or whether she’s crazy, etc. I like juxtapositions, so I like the idea of it working on both a comical and a darker level.

So anyway, I took a bunch of photos of M in various poses. She was such a trooper. She’s eleven, and she just got braces, and was very excited when I told her that I needed to make her look a little younger so I wouldn’t be including them in the painting. She was less excited when I told her that I wouldn’t be including her new boobs either. But she was great at the posing. She’s such a ham. I’m sure she was embarassed when I made her pose with a pink feather boa in the middle of Target on the day after Christmas ( I mean, I was embarassed, and it was my idea), but the great thing about kids is that they don’t get all hung up on dignity or pride or whatever. They just play along. I wish I were still that carefree.

supine @ 11.11 pm |

12.24.2005

Happy Hollydays

Greetings from southwest Georgia! I am typing to you from my dad’s and stepmom’s house. We are post-enormous dinner, in the middle of our second viewing of A Christmas Story. I love that Randy. Especially the “mommy’s little piggy!” scene. That’s the best.

Hope everyone has a lovely holiday weekend and you all get excellent presents.

supine @ 11.12 pm |

12.22.2005

Hey, I do have a maternal instinct!

Um, is it wrong that every day when I drive home from a shift at the restaurant, and inevitably have to stop short at this one red light that ALWAYS trips me up, I instinctually shoot my right arm out, across the passenger seat?

Would your answer change if I admitted that the only thing in the passenger seat was my styrofoam tray of free buffet food (one free tray of food per shift!)?

Just wondering.

supine @ 7.53 pm |

12.19.2005

Junior high redux

You guys really need to start watching Project Runway.

I am back in Savannah. My English friend C came and went this weekend, and we had a lovely time. We spent all Saturday downtown in DC, at the Hirshhorn and then watching Sex and the City DVDs at a friend’s apartment while we killed time before going out for Ethiopian and beers/dancing with a big group of people. It was friends from high school and college and two past jobs, and not everybody knew everyone else so it was just a crazy hodgepodge of conversations going on. It was great to see C again; even though it had been three years it was like no time had gone by. She said I even looked the same, which I have to take issue with, but other than that, peachy.

So I came back to Sav yesterday afternoon, and then at night went to our restaurant’s Xmas party, held at the house (well, really the yard and pool-table-shed) of two of our managers. Can I just say something? I think my current favorite word might be cockblock. It is succinct, catchy, and manages to encapsulate a pretty complicated sociological phenomenon. Plus it rhymes. Plus it’s funny to say.

And, yes. My work party was basically a series of cockblockings going on. From the guy I have a crush on (M) to the guy I made out with (BRIEFLY) last weekend, to the guy who is living in some alternate reality in which we are more than friends (J), it was a night of cockblockings.

I…just don’t have the energy to recount it all. Suffice it to say that at the end of the night, makeout guy secretly convinced J to not get a ride home with me because he was trying to “hook up with me,” so when I found J to tell him I was leaving, he got all nudge-nudge-wink-wink “oh it’s okay, I can find a ride home with someone else,” and I realized instantly that if I left the party alone with makeout boy, the entire party would think that we were having some big affair. So I had to seriously beg J to come along too, so that it looked like a girl giving two guys rides home, and not a girl driving off for fornication.

Makeout boy pouted in the backseat all the way home, and even more so when I dropped him off first. But oh well! I couldn’t have it getting back to M that I have this whole side thing going on, could I? I am trying to look at the long-term possibilities here. Give up one fun night of making out, possibly get to be with a guy I actually like in the future. See how clever? I am wily.

supine @ 7.37 pm |

12.15.2005

Even Jimmy Smits will do, in a pinch. (And without that damn ponytail.)

Is there something wrong with me that in the first two episodes of this year’s Project Runway, I have liked the losing outfits more than the winning ones? Am I hopelessly uncool and/or uncouth? Because honestly, with that Barbie-outfit project last night, I sort of liked Raimundo’s and hated both Nick’s and Santino’s (also, whenever I see that guy’s name in print I automatically think “The Great Santini!” Shut up, I am a dork).

I will stipulate that Raimundo’s design was not technically a good design for Barbie, but I sort of wanted to wear it myself. And then in the judging they all ripped him apart for designing something bag-ladyish and matronly. What kind of weird alternate reality am I living in?

Or was it just because I had a crush on him? Awww, he was so sweet and his hair was all funky and seriously, SUCH a pretty face. I told my roommate M that I had a crush on him and also one on John Leguizamo from ER and she just stared at me for a minute and then declared that I obviously have a fetish for “small, pretty, ghetto-accented Hispanic men.”

It’s so true! Raimundo, if you’re reading this and you’re not actually gay as I strongly suspect you might be, call me!

supine @ 10.19 am |

12.13.2005

I kind of wish I were Karen on Will and Grace

I’m a big ho-bag. Saturday night I made out with someone in my car outside his house, and it was neither J nor M, although it was someone else I work with. That’s all the details you get.

So now I’m in Maryland, getting some use out of my winter coat for the first time yet this year. I’m here for a week - just enough time to meet various friends for various meals and therefore gain 3-5 pounds. Just in time for holiday photos! Also enough time to hang out with my mom and get in various small fights and potentially one large one, if our average “fight:time spent together” ratio still holds true.

Right now I’m hanging out in my old bedroom, flipping through some art texts and watching Fear. It is such a bad movie.

One supercool thing is that this Friday my friend C is coming down from NY to stay here for the weekend. She is British; I met her when I lived in London for a year after college. She was a fashion student who now interns with some architectural firm in NY (I don’t know how that happened). I haven’t seen here since I came back from London, which was just over three years ago, and we’ve kept in scatty email touch since but we were great friends when we were together, so it’ll be amazing to see her again. She’s never seen DC so we are going to go see museums on Saturday and then go out with a group of my friends that night and do it up right.

On a side note, I heard the funniest line ever on an old Will and Grace recently. It was Jack saying to Karen something like: “Oh Karen. Somewhere beneath those big breasts beats a heart as big as those breasts!” Hee!

supine @ 4.23 pm |

12.9.2005

And then I said that he said that SHE was all, blah blah blah

You guys, I have a big fat crush on this guy at work. He is a server and he has the same name as my former-best-friend-slash-crush-turned-asshole from the studio, which is problematic. (It is, coincidentally, also my dad’s name, but let’s just not focus on that part, shall we?) I don’t know him very well because he’s one of the quieter, more reserved, less flirty guys there. Which is part of the appeal. You know us girls, we always want the ONE GUY who doesn’t poke us in the stomach when he passes by with a tray of drinks, or whatever. Just as an example.

So, I haven’t had any hugely illuminating conversations with him, but he seems like a good guy. A non-player, if you will. He’s not really my type physically, which I take to be a good thing, because obviously I need to stop falling for the same Hot But Jerky Guy. He’s half Thai and has longish hair (which I NEVER used to like) and black dorky glasses, which is cute. And sideburns, which, okay, I ALWAYS like. And green eyes. Okay, forget what I said earlier. He’s totally adorable.

The twist is that his good friend, co-server, and downstairs neighbor has a crush on me. I have hung out with this guy a few times, always in a group so that people don’t talk (because our restaurant is just a small junior high), and it’s fairly obvious. He’s all schmoopy and doormatty to me. I am scrupulously polite and cool to him, so that neither he nor anyone else will ever be able to claim that I gave him any inclination to go for it, all the while liking his best friend. I’m like a politician, covering my tracks!

(Flashback to ex-best-friend-slash-crush: Why is it that the chillier you are to a guy, the more he wants to have your children, but when you are friendly and jokey with him, he sees it as an invitation to screw royally with your head? Damn that guy!)

So yes, weirdly, the chillier I am to this other server at work, the more he basically drapes himself across puddles I am about to step over. It came to a head last night at work. I had heard conflicting stories about the one I like (who I will call M), vis a vis his girlfriend status. So I got my girlfriend, who is the bartender, to do some recon work for me. At the end of the night, she had good news - he said that they’re “not really together anymore.” Score!

But also, hilariously, in the same night the one who likes me (who I’ll call J) had gone to her to get some dirt on ME. Like a French farce, yes? So he asked her to be honest with him and tell him if he had any chance with me. She told him no. Then he asked if I liked someone else, and she said yes but refused all his annoying attempts to learn who. Finally he started guessing, and pretty quickly he guessed M, and then she tried to deny it but she was blushing so he knew she was busted. At that point (so she related later to me), he was like, “Oh, I’m totally going to hook them up! This is great! This will totally work!”

Which, okay, WEIRD that he would be so into getting M and me together, but the bartender’s theory is that he “likes me in a giving, selfless way, and wants me to be happy.” I would never be so selfless with my own crush, but if that’s what happening, then cool.

Furthermore, could this all have unfolded better? I am thrilled. Because now J will certainly tell M that I like him, but it will have come out without me looking like I had any sort of hand in it at all. It will just, *poof*, come out in the open, and I will be all floating above the gossip and madness. I love it. It will look so organic. Am so grateful to my bartender friend for A)shutting down M’s hopes before it gets anywhere, and B)"letting it slip” who I like without me having to do any work myself. Life is sweet.

Happy Friday, tigers. When I write to you again it will be from Maryland (Land of Mary).

supine @ 1.23 pm |

12.7.2005

Hoecake? Biscuit? Bueller?

On Sunday I leave to go home to Maryland for a week, and I can’t wait. I have been working so much at the restaurant lately that I feel like my whole life is that place. I smell like grease all the time and I see visions of hoecakes and biscuits when I sleep. Hopefully I will be moved up to server soon and then I can just dream about, like, sweet tea or something. At least it’ll be mad bucks. I have been there for four months now so I don’t think I’ll be waiting too much longer.

As far as my evil professor and the C that will not die goes, I checked the class schedule online and saw that that class is not even offered next term. Thus making me officially screwed, as far as progressing in the program. So I went to see my graduate advisor today, and related the whole story to her, and she was incensed and thinks that I absolutely should not let it go. She gave me the number of the school’s ombudsman (the referee for conflict resolution) and advised me to get him to help me draft one final email to the professor, asking for clarification on how on earth my points can add to a B but my grade still a C. And that if I get an unsatisfactory reply from that, she advised me to go ahead and lodge a formal grade appeal with the dean of the fine arts school.

This terrifies me, but she seems to feel that I have an excellent case and that doing this won’t be me shooting myself in the foot for future interactions within my department, as I had feared. So I am definitely going to go for it. I mean, it’s $2600 per class. Damn, y’all. If the advisor, a very demure Southern-accented girl, thinks I should be “banging on doors” about this, then hell yeah I’m going for it. Ombudsman, here I come.

(Ha ha, that’s a funny word. Ombudsman.)

supine @ 7.38 pm |

12.4.2005

I’m a peach!

I still haven’t received a reply to the email I sent my professor. Actually, I got an autoresponse saying she was travelling all month and would have limited email access. So I guess I could get a reply at any time. Hate that this is weighing over my otherwise lovely break. Haaaate.

But a funny thing happened today…I was at my favorite coffee shop, taking notes from an art theory book and drinking bubble tea (have you guys tried this? It was my first time and I really liked it) and a friend from home called. She asked if I was in DC yet and I answered “No, I’m still home.” And I realized what I had said, that I thought of Savannah as my home, and then I realized that I’ve lived here for six months now. Six months!

Six months since I have set foot in my old office, or my old apartment, or even my old neighborhood Indian takeout place. (Of course I had tried to go back to that last one when I was in DC in August, but had forgotten that it was closed on Sundays.) That’s a pretty long time, I think.

It’s really flown by for me. I remember how the first week I got here I slept on an air mattress before I got around to buying a real mattress from a guy who had advertised it in the local paper. And when I walked to the park and saw a man walk past with a huge pet snake draped around his shoulders. And then I bought my bike and rode it around downtown, stopping every 50 feet or so to check my map or to freak out because I was scared about riding it right alongside traffic, especially on the bigger roads (you know, both of them).

And now I know all the streets downtown. I know which are one-way, which I like driving on and which I like biking on. I have bars I frequent and bars I avoid. I know which pizza place makes delicious pizza and which makes cheap, late-night pizza. I have a Georgia driver’s license. I know secret places to park when I go to the library or to stop by at work and check my schedule. Best of all, I have school friends and work friends, from two separate jobs. I run into people I know everywhere.

You guys, I’m like a total Georgia peach now. It makes me feel really good that I moved here on my own and got this whole new life going. I love my new southern life!

supine @ 12.30 pm |

12.1.2005

Did you ever imagine art school would be this stressful?

I am loving that Coffeemate flavored creamer right now. The local grocery store had the special “holiday flavors” on sale so I got Chocolate Mint. My roommate is partial to the Creme Brulee one so I sometimes sneak shots of hers, for some variety (shhh). They are delish. Next I want to try Amaretto.

I didn’t mention this before, but I am in this weird grade battle/discussion with one of my professors right now. It is a pretty big deal - she had told me to rework two paintings in the last few days of school so that it would boost my grade from a C to a B. I worked on them all weekend, and when I showed her on the final day she said they were much improved, but when I checked my grade online a few days later there had been no change. I emailed her and THEN she suddenly said that there was “no visible improvement made” to either. Which, to my mind, is insane; how can you work on something for hours and not change it at all? So this morning I responded to her email with that whole argument laid out. It was pretty much my only chance for any reconsideration on her part, so I had two friends proof it before I sent it.

The big deal with it is, if I get a C I would have to retake the class. And as of right now, my grade LITERALLY is a 79%. Like, any increase in grade on either of those paintings I resubmitted will push it into a B. So it’s really weighing on me lately, because having to retake it would be A) a bummer in and of itself, and B) expensive as all holy hell. I keep checking my email to see whether she’s responded, but each time I do I am terrified of actually seeing it sitting there. When it finally comes I might need my roommate to open it and read it to me, because I am weak.

Hilariously (or not), I am getting As in my other two classes. What kind of a grade report is two As and a C? That would obviously indicate something weird with that one professor, right? It’s not like I only painted well on Tuesdays and Thursdays but sucked on Mondays and Wednesdays. Ah, screw it. I’ve sent the email, there’s no use worrying about it now. Please send me hopeful ESP waves in the hopes that this professor has a heart deep down after all.

supine @ 8.19 pm |
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